Perfect hamartia: Romeo and Juliet's interlocking tragic flaws

Continued mulling on Romeo and Juliet since my last post has led me to a new conclusion, and maybe a less contentious one. Like I said before, R&J is dualistic, so now that I've argued for the ugly and frightening aspects of the story it's time to find something more traditionally romantic there. But I get ahead of myself.

I seized on the idea that Romeo (and Juliet; I'll get to her) is a tragic hero, following the pattern of other tragic heroes. This has certain requirements, and certain implications. As a baby English lit student, I learned that all tragic heroes, from King Oedipus onward, must have a hamartia--a tragic flaw. The hero's downfall must come from an element of the hero's personality, and for maximum effect it should be connected to whatever virtue propelled them upward in the first place.

R&J is a story with two tragic heroes. What are their fatal flaws? I went looking for Romeo's, but Juliet's came to me first. Juliet's tragic flaw, which makes her great and destroys her, is her fidelity.

She has this virtue from the start of the play. We see her first as an obedient daughter, promising to make a go of falling in love with Count Paris, since her mother asked her to, "But no more deep will I endart mine eye than your consent gives strength to make it fly." What more could the parent of a 13-year-old ask for?

Once Juliet has married Romeo* her fidelity transfers to him. Romeo immediately tests whether Juliet is more faithful to her family or her new husband by killing her cousin. In fact, while Juliet laments Tybalt's death and has strong words about what this implies about Romeo's character, she stops short of wishing Romeo any ill. When the nurse declares, "Shame come to Romeo!" Juliet recoils, and launches an epic tirade in Romeo's defense.** She makes it very clear that Romeo supersedes any other allegiance she may have had.

Juliet will take extraordinary measures to remain true to her husband, Romeo. It's treated as a heroic trait, and it's the one Lord Montague acknowledges in the final scene:

For I will raise her statue in pure gold;
That while Verona by that name is known,
There shall no figure at such rate be set
As that of true and faithful Juliet.

But, like I said, fidelity is also Juliet's tragic flaw. It is what kills her. After Romeo is banished, Juliet has an out: she could forget her one-day marriage to Romeo and marry Paris. She explicitly refuses--she will do any number of awful things, including kill herself, but betraying Romeo is not an option.

And in the end, finding Romeo dead, Juliet follows her husband into death. At the risk of belaboring the obvious, this is not mandatory. One could imagine a character enduring the same traumatic scene and allowing herself to be led away, devastated but alive, by the well-meaning Friar Laurence. One could imagine a character doing that, but not Juliet.

On the other hand, when we meet Romeo at the start of the play, fidelity is not among his virtues or his flaws. In fact, if he had Juliet's sense of devotion the play would be called Romeo and Rosaline and who knows if anything interesting would have happened? No, what Romeo has in spades is reckless passion. It's what leads him to pine after Rosaline, and what leads him to forget about her. It leads him to approach Juliet, to sneak into her garden, and to agree to marry her the next day. Romeo is the type to completely commit to whatever feels right, for as long as the emotion carries him.

And yes, this reckless passion leads to worse things than a shotgun marriage.*** Once Tybalt has killed his friend, Romeo has no sooner figured out how he feels about it than he engages Tybalt in mortal combat. Likewise, when he hears that Juliet is dead, his first impulse is to go to her and die; he forms and executes a plan with astonishing alacrity. Romeo hardly pauses enough to say, like Macbeth, "This deed I'll do before this purpose cool." Of course if he had hesitated, he could have lived, and so could several other characters. But it's not in Romeo's nature to separate feeling from doing.

With that depressing assessment, I remind myself that I opened this post by claiming I had found something romantic in all of this. Here it comes: R&J presents passion and fidelity as two halves of romantic love. Romeo and Juliet each have one without the other. (I've talked about how inconstant Act I Romeo is, but consider Juliet's first scene too. She is all duty and passive obedience, without even a thrill of anticipation about possibly falling in love with the allegedly admirable Paris.) It is only when Romeo and Juliet meet that they learn their missing aspect.

In their first exchange, Juliet presents herself as an inert painted saint; Romeo introduces passion to the image, and in doing so, to her. When they meet at her balcony, they are both overflowing with passion, but Juliet teaches Romeo fidelity (and a little about delayed gratification). When she says,

O, swear not by the moon, the inconstant moon,
That monthly changes in her circled orb,
Lest that thy love prove likewise variable.

she isn't just quibbling over metaphors. She has Romeo dead to rights. But he is willing to embrace fidelity, at least with regard to her--and she embraces passion toward him, but not before she feels it cracking the boundaries of the merely dutiful person she had been. "I am too fond," she says. "I should have been more strange."

There is a moment, once both vows and affection are exchanged, when there love is complete and nearly perfect:

And yet I wish but for the thing I have:
My bounty is as boundless as the sea,
My love as deep; the more I give to thee,
The more I have, for both are infinite.

Romeo's passion joined with Juliet's fidelity seems capable, like this blog post, of continuing forever, if only for that moment. But time proceeds, the moment passes, and the tragedy begins from that high point.  

* Not before. Recall that she arrests the sexual momentum of the balcony scene with--as Elizabethan virtue would require--a marriage ultimatum. She does not meet Romeo again until the wedding.

** Specifically, she says:

Blister'd be thy tongue
For such a wish! he was not born to shame:
Upon his brow shame is ashamed to sit;
For 'tis a throne where honour may be crown'd
Sole monarch of the universal earth.
O, what a beast was I to chide at him!
....
Shall I speak ill of him that is my husband?
Ah, poor my lord, what tongue shall smooth thy name,
When I, thy three-hours wife, have mangled it?
But, wherefore, villain, didst thou kill my cousin?
That villain cousin would have kill'd my husband:
Back, foolish tears, back to your native spring;
Your tributary drops belong to woe,
Which you, mistaking, offer up to joy.
My husband lives, that Tybalt would have slain;
And Tybalt's dead, that would have slain my husband:
All this is comfort; wherefore weep I then?

*** It's easy to feel like Juliet's defining virtue isn't a vice, except by accident, while Romeo's defining vice isn't a virtue, except by accident. That may be fair. I will point out that Romeo's recklessness might have been called courage if the story worked out differently, and without it none of the good things in the play would have happened either. And given the consequences of Juliet's choices, it would be just as fair to call her fidelity "reckless" as Romeo's passion.

Romeo, the murderer

I had the pleasure the night before last of seeing a preview performance of Romeo and Juliet by DC's Shakespeare Theatre Company. This post isn't a review; briefly, it was excellent. This post is about the thoughts it made me think on the way home, particularly about dimensions of the tragedy that I've never seen a performance (even this one) explore.

(Addendum: I had further thoughts soon after. If you're interested, they are here.)

There are two main popular conceptions of R&J. The first is as an idealized love story; the second is as a cautionary tale, or satire of teenage lovers getting carried away with themselves. (The first interpretation is most common in people who've never read the play; the second is most common in people who had cool English teachers and like to feel like they have one over on the first group.) I think the truth isn't in the middle, but at both extremes simultaneously. Part of what makes Romeo and Juliet wonderful is that duality: the love story is beautiful and stupid, which is what makes it tragic and not just unfortunate.

Shakespeare creates this duality in a lot of his plays by subverting his source material, but not contradicting it. R&J draws on sources that have much less sympathy for their reckless, horny teenage protagonists. Shakespeare grants that their decisions are terrible and precipitous, but finds beauty and nobility in their motives. Othello's source is a cautionary tale against miscegenation that doesn't even name its murderous Moor of Venice; Shakespeare makes Othello the noblest Venetian and invents Iago to drive Othello into murderous passion. Hamlet's antecedent is cunning and dutiful; Shakespeare's Hamlet is these things but also conflicted and possibly insane.

Othello and Hamlet are definitive Shakespearean tragic heroes. They are noble figures driven to extremity, and they end their respective plays as whirlwinds of destruction. The audience ends up caught between sympathy and horror for them.

What I think I realized is that Romeo has more in common with Othello and Hamlet than we acknowledge. In fact, we edit it out of performances.

Hardly anyone stages Paris' death anymore. To recap: when Romeo goes to the Capulet's tomb, intending to kill himself next to Juliet, Paris is already there paying his respects to the woman he thought he was going to marry. Paris sees Romeo breaking into the tomb and declares a citizen's arrest. Romeo kills him, but grants Paris' dying wish to be part of the tableau in the last scene.

Everyone but Julian Fellowes cuts Paris' death scene. For one thing, it adds to the number of actors trying to breathe inconspicuously onstage for the last few minutes of the show. For another, there's an idea that it interrupts the flow of the play's climactic sequence. But I would argue that Paris' death only looks extraneous to the play because we're already ignoring or excising the inconvenient context.

We edit it out, I think, in order to preserve an image of Romeo as unambiguously sympathetic and pathetic rather than threatening. We want to see Romeo's fall as a more or less straight line from tragedy to self-destruction. But Romeo's fall isn't about self-destruction, it's about destruction more generally.

Tybalt's death* is just a starting point. He's quick to try to kill himself, prompting Friar Laurence to warn, "Wilt thou slay thyself? And stay thy lady too that lives in thee?" (Answer: yes, yes he will.) Exile only puts him in a state of suspense, and the first provocation (in fairness, it's a big one) sends him charging back towards death. More to my point, he makes it very clear how ready he is to take others down with him.

Romeo immediately suborns the convenient apothecary to a capital crime. (Should we assume the apothecary gets away clean? He could just as easily be among those the prince promises to punish in his final speech.) Moreover, here's how Romeo tells Balthasar to leave him alone at the Capulet tomb:

But if thou, jealous, dost return to pry
In what I further shall intend to do,
By heaven, I will tear thee joint by joint
And strew this hungry churchyard with thy limbs:
The time and my intents are savage-wild,
More fierce and more inexorable far
Than empty tigers or the roaring sea.

That's him threatening to dismember his friend, and in about the same tone that Hamlet declared, "Tis now the very witching time of night, When churchyards yawn and hell itself breathes out Contagion to this world: Now could I drink hot blood, And do such bitter business as the day Would quake to look on," shortly before mostly-accidentally killing Polonius. Romeo goes immediately from this exchange to his confrontation with Paris.

Romeo killing Paris is hardly surprising. Romeo is a powder-keg at this point**. He's been itching to kill someone since Friar Laurence talked him down from killing himself the first time. I think that we should be afraid of Romeo by the end, like we are afraid of Hamlet at his most manic or Othello at his extremity of passion. He has become the explosion that everyone else has warned about since the first act, and maybe we should feel a little relief when he's finally extinguished.

Romeo and Juliet ends with four named corpses on stage, even with the closing abattoir of Hamlet. I think we miss whole dimensions of the tragedy by downplaying these other victims, or by treating Romeo as fundamentally passive in all this destruction. In fact, Romeo starts the play trying to hold himself aloof from the violence in Verona. He ends it not just as a victim, but a participant--driven to it by the thing we hoped would take him out of it. The change in Romeo is why his part of a story is a "tragedy" in the way we use that word in English classes, and not just in the way we use it on the news.

* As some oft-excised lines make clear, Romeo fights Tybalt because he believes manhood requires that of him:

O sweet Juliet,
Thy beauty hath made me effeminate
And in my temper soften'd valour's steel!
...
Away to heaven, respective lenity,
And fire-eyed fury be my conduct now!

There's a paper in there about toxic masculinity, but I'll leave it to someone more enthusiastic to write.

** There is definitely a gunpowder motif in R&J. I'm surprised I've never seen it on the lists of obvious Shakespearean motifs, alongside poison in Hamlet and blood in Macbeth.

The next big thing

Sometimes I run into some fridge logic in my own life. For instance, I have the strong impression of having watched the following trailer in a theater, but for that to have happened it would have had to have been shown before The Lego Movie, which would have been an interesting choice, to say the least.

Anyway, the news that another Godzilla movie was coming down the pipe lit a fire under the vague desire I've had for a while to watch the original Godzilla/Gojira from 1954. Partly because the Godzilla franchise became so goofy over time, it was intriguing to me that the original movie was so deadly serious, and so relevant in the bizarre way that we've been getting more and more used to things being relevant.

I've spent plenty of time since college noticing how America's cultural anxieties play out in our media. In the aughts we watched Spider-Man, Batman, and the crew of the Battlestar Galactica deal with the ramifications of the War on Terror. Then, of course, there are the hordes of zombies manifesting our fears of societal collapse.

It's 2014. Are we ready to be afraid of Godzilla again? If this new movie catches on, I think we might be. People are getting tired of zombies (the degree to which I continue to be impressed with The Walking Dead notwithstanding), but our anxiety seems prepared to outlast the trend. Zombies and kaiju both play on the same fears that our civilization is inadequate to deal with a serious challenge... flimsy, even. Are those state-of-the-art tanks defending us, or plastic toys? Are our walls made of brick or cardboard? Push them and find out.

In 1954, 60 years ago and 9 years after the atomic destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Godzilla was a dark movie about a radioactive monster destroying Tokyo. Some reviewers thought it was too soon (especially because, earlier that year, a Japanese fishing boat had been caught in the fallout from a botched American H-bomb test).

If Godzilla were just about anger at America, I doubt it would have caught on here. And if it were just about nuclear weapons, I doubt it would have the same staying power. But Godzilla was, more generally, a disaster movie, and Japan's is a culture well acquainted with disaster: earthquakes, famines, fires, centuries of civil war... typhoon and tsunami are Japanese loan-words.

The civilians in this first Godzilla are already a bit jaded.

I came to Godzilla curious and finished it impressed. Not all of it ages well, of course, but most of it made good on its mighty ambitions. (It won the Japan Movie Association award for Best Special Effects, and lost Best Picture to Seven Samurai, possibly just my favorite movie ever.) It's at its best with the monster shrouded in smoke and darkness, which doesn't feel like cheating so much as a good use of the medium.

I take it as a good sign that the new movie's trailer, at least, is choosing to imitate that.

Of course this new movie could still turn out as poorly as the one in 1998 did. I think it's about time for it to be done right, though. Who knows? Maybe we can be as sick of city-flattening monsters in 2020 as we were of vampires in 2010.

What do we want? Strong female characters! What do we mean? I'm glad you asked...

How the time goes by. One may justly ask me what I’ve been doing lately instead of blogging. Well, I’ve been watching TV. I’ve been working. I’ve been reading my friend Elinor Diamond’s blog.

I had the neat opportunity to write a guest post for Ms Diamond, and that should be going up today. If you’re interested in some observations of mine on narrative voice and the reader’s place in a story, check it out there.

Meanwhile, Ms Diamond’s recent post opining on “strong female characters” has caused me to start opining in turn.

As she pointed out, the concept of the “strong female character” has drawn some fire lately. Once we started talking about SFCs as something that should exist—perhaps something that writers should be applauded for creating—writers naturally started trying to create SFCs in larger quantities. Yet as a general rule, more people want to be applauded than actually want to do something they find difficult. The result has been a glut of SFC-bait—characters who we’re supposed to appreciate as progressive but who don’t actually do the women of the world any favors.

Part of the problem is people misunderstanding the meaning of “strong.” Maybe it’s not entirely fair to blame them, because when we call for “strong female characters” I don’t think that’s precisely what we mean (I’ll get to that later). But those of us who call for SFCs in media are not (I hope) satisfied with female characters who are merely muscular, merely violent, merely invincible,* merely obnoxious, or who are active when surrounded by minor characters but become passive when they interact with the main (male) cast.

I don’t think we should publicly abandon the idea of the strong female character. It would be a shame if the idea fell out of style without achieving its purpose (or worse, because it had been terminally derailed). But we need to ask some clarifying questions.

People have already been asking what qualifies as a “strong female character.” Precisely, when we demand SFCs in our media, what exactly are we asking for?

I think, as a general rule, what we (I?) really want to see is female characters who shape the story according to their own motivations. That’s what I would call “narrative strength.”**

Some of the better examples from media I’ve recently ingested aren’t exactly egalitarian. Having finished the first season of the new House of Cards, I find Zoe Barnes an interesting liminal case. I actually argued with Girlfriend about whether or not she qualified, but I think if she isn’t an SFC, then the dividing line passes very close to her. I’m going to try to break down the case for her without significant spoilers.

Zoe’s ambition is a major force in the show. Only one other female character competes with her in terms of narrative influence, and in my opinion Zoe is the more influential. She certainly overwhelms the influence of the other characters in her own sphere. It’s only up against Frank, our main character/villain, that she’s clearly in over her head.

That may be the first objection raised against Zoe’s status as an SFC—that the strongest male character in the show exerts so much power over her—but I would argue a key distinction. She doesn’t fade into the woodwork when she shares the screen with Frank—instead, the struggle between Frank and Zoe is one of the main elements of the story. As for her being in over her head, if we respect the characters we write we must allow them to get into trouble. A protagonist certainly needs enough rope to hang themselves with, and Zoe takes her turns as protagonist.

A stronger objection may be the way she works for her goals. She trades on her gender, both offering sex and using gender politics as a bludgeon when one or the other will get her what she wants. It’s not exactly role-model behavior. It’s less of an issue in a show like House of Cards, where the morally uncompromised are a vanishing minority, and a character doesn’t need to be sympathetic to be narratively strong.

Maybe this highlights a shortcoming of the term “strong female character,” though. After all, a media universe filled with “strong” women who trade primarily on their sexuality would be a pretty regressive one, even if those women exerted disproportionate influence on their stories. But the problem of whether we should depict this sort of thing at all turns into two questions, and I’m a little afraid to chase them down because of how long this post is getting already. I’ll make a go of it, though.

The first question: What means can a strong female character use to get what she wants? Must she be a role model? I think girls deserve to see female characters in media who use a variety of empowering means to achieve their goals, but I don’t think media for adults*** can afford to completely ignore that women have certain disadvantages in our society, and a few “dirty tricks” that they can use to get ahead if their goals are bigger than the accepted means at their disposal.

The second question: Are strong female characters descriptive or aspirational? That is, are we showing the world as we see it, or are we showing the world as we want it to be in hopes that life will imitate art? I think the truth for creators is usually a little of both. But what are we asking creators to do when we ask for SFCs? To show us what women can do of in this world, or to show us what women should be able to do in a better one? (How strong a distinction this is is a function of your setting and your worldview.)

As a creator, I think at some point you need to be honest with your characters. They can’t come alive as long as they’re artificially constrained by a lesson we want them to teach. They need to pursue their own goals as they see fit, with the means available to them.

Of course all of this hair-splitting would be less necessary if there were more active female characters in media. We can’t really be honest with characters until we don’t feel the need to make them representative of anything other than themselves.

* Admittedly, we’ve been dealing for centuries with male characters with no personality outside of their proficiency with violence, but writers don’t expect a pat on the head for writing them.

** This isn’t to completely ignore egalitarian portrayals of women—that is, women in traditionally masculine roles: warriors, leaders, any job that usually ends with “-man.” But 1) that’s not exactly the cutting edge of 21st-Century progress, and 2) doing it lazily leads to tokenism. Independent goals and narrative agency are the antidote.

*** If your little girl is watching House of Cards then the portrayal of women in media probably isn’t her biggest obstacle to success.

Netflix, stars, treks, observations thereon

Since Netflix came into my house I've become keenly aware that I had been living the life of a savage, eking media one serving at a time out of solid-form magnetic storage devices.  I get the feeling that the next generation is going to think of bandwidth like we think of running water: so essential, pervasive, and reliable that it’s easy to forget how recently it became normal.  (Not that my bandwidth is that reliable.  I’m writing this post in Word while I wait for my webotubes to unclog.  But I suspect that I will live to see the datastream made continuous.)  Now, I hope never to live in a house without a bookshelf, and probably a DVD collection as well, but I wonder if the first generation to see indoor plumbing didn’t also have its holdouts who never learned to trust pipes enough to move somewhere without a well.

Thanks to Netflix, I have joined some of my friends in watching Star Trek: The Next Generation.  I remember watching ST:TNG with my dad when it was on television originally, and never took to another Trek like I did that one.  But being the tender age I was, I missed the first few seasons.  The opportunity to go back and watch from “Encounter at Farpoint” has been… fascinating.

The episodes of the first season I’ve seen have not been the Trek I remember.  Certainly if I didn’t know what it would become, I wouldn’t seek out more episodes.  There’s a lot of bad.  But, as with Q vis a vis the human race, the pilot shows just enough potential that we’re willing to withhold judgment for a season or two.

The geneses are there of what would become really cool by the end of the series.  It lays out the cast of characters that, with a little tweaking (sorry, Tasha) provide a rich range of characters to play with, without resorting to the sort of incompetence and destructive behavior that fueled the drama in, say, Battlestar Galactica.  (In some regards, ST:TNG is a procedural, like Law and Order or The West Wing; we come to it to see the crew of the Enterprise do their jobs well.)

All in all, it’s a sort of homo erectus to the original series’ Australopithecus.  In time we’ll see the show develop intellectually, and learn to knap Worf’s head into a more functional shape.

But I must say, one thing that really struck me is that in Gene Roddenberry’s vision of the future, humans have apparently evolved into a race of insufferable space twits.  Couldn’t we have learned anything about diplomacy?  Tolerance?  Instead, say, when an alien ambassador wants to show Commander William “Babyface” Riker his scrapbook, he just smiles and says, “Oh, scrapbooking.  We humans gave up that barbaric practice long ago.”

One thing it really makes me want to do is read Wil Wheaton’s book, Memories of the Future, because looking back on this show can be so darn fun, and I’ve seen him do it with merciless, good-natured verve.

I come back to my newly frustrating internet connection, which has been spotty ever since I moved into Girlfriend's old room.  As consequence, I’m not sure when this post will actually go up, but it’s too late for me to keep waiting for it tonight.