Compare and contrast fiction and drama

Compare And Contrast Essay

by Sophocles with the play Trifles by Susan Glaspell. You should focus on at least 4 of the following elements in your essay: theme, character, setting, dialogue, stage directions, plot, and structure.Please consider 2 of the following questions in your essay:

1.How is Oedipus Rex an example of ancient Greek drama, and how is Trifles an example of modern drama? Ancient Greek drama is often characterized by a ritualistic tone. The presence of a chorus is an example of this tone.

2. Is Susan Glaspell's Trifles an example of a feminist play? In a feminist story or play, the female characters typically struggle to assert their rights in a society dominated by men.

3. The title character in Sophocles’ play Oedipus Rex is often referred to as a tragic hero. A tragic hero or heroine begins the play as a well-loved person of stature, but that stature disappears, because of a tragic set of circumstances that (a) is foretold, (b) is inevitable, and (c) is brought about by the hero’s or heroine's own actions. Compare and contrast Oedipus, Creon, or another character from Oedipus Rex

with Minnie Foster or another character from Trifles.Is Minnie a tragic heroine? Is Minnie’s tragic circumstance (being arrested for and possibly convicted of murder after killing her husband) foretold, inevitable, and brought about by her own actions, like Oedipus’s circumstance?

Perhaps the earliest literary critic in the Western tradition was Aristotle, who, in the fifth century B.C.E ., set about explaining the power of the genre of tragedy by identifying the six elements of drama and analyzing the contribution each of these elements makes to the functioning of a play as a whole. The elements Aristotle identified as common to all dramas were plot, characterization, theme, diction, melody, and spectacle. Some of these are the same as or very similar to the basic components of prose fiction and poetry, but others are either unique to drama or expressed differently in dramatic texts.

tragedy

A play in which the plot moves from relative stability to death or other serious sorrow for the protagonist . A traditional tragedy is written in a grand style and shows a hero of high social stature brought down by peripeteia or by events beyond his or her control.

elements of drama

The six features identified by Aristotle in Poetics as descriptive of and necessary to drama. They are, in order of the importance assigned to them by Aristotle, plot , characterization , theme ,diction , melody , and spectacle .

ELEMENTS OF DRAMA Plot, Character, and Theme

The words plot , character , and theme mean basically the same thing in drama as they do in fiction, though there is a difference in how they are presented. A story tells you about a series of events, whereas a play shows you these events happening in real time. The information that might be conveyed in descriptive passages in prose fiction must be conveyed in a play through dialogue (and to a lesser extent through stage directions and the set and character descriptions that sometimes occur at the start of a play). The “How to Read a Play” section later in this chapter gives suggestions and advice for understanding these special features of drama.

Dialogue

Words spoken by characters, often in the form of a conversation between two or more characters. In stories and other forms of prose, dialogue is commonly enclosed between quotation marks. Dialogue is an important element in characterization and plot : much of the characterization and action in Ernest Hemingway’s “Hills Like White Elephants” ( p. 176 ) is presented through its characters’ dialogue.

Stage directions

Written instructions in the script telling actors how to move on the stage or how to deliver a particular line. To facilitate the reading of scripts and to distinguish them from simple dialogue, stage directions are interspersed throughout the text, typically placed in parentheses and set in italics.

Set

The stage dressing for a play, consisting of backdrops, furniture, and similar large items.

Diction

When Aristotle speaks of diction , he means the specific words that a playwright chooses to put into the mouth of a character. In a well-written play, different characters will have different ways of speaking, and these will tell us a good deal about their character and personality. Does one character sound very formal and well educated? Does another speak in slang or dialect? Does someone hesitate or speak in fits and starts, perhaps indicating distraction or nervousness? Practice paying attention to these nuances. And keep in mind that just because a character says something, that doesn’t make it true. As in real life, some characters might be mistaken in what they say, or they may be hiding the truth or even telling outright lies.

Diction

A writer’s selection of words; the kind of words, phrases, and figurative language used to make up a work of literature. In fiction, particular patterns or arrangements of words in sentences and paragraphs constitute prose style. Hemingway’s diction is said to be precise, concrete, and economical. Aristotle identified diction as one of the six elements of drama . See also poetic diction .

Melody

When Aristotle writes of melody , he is referring to the fact that Greek drama was written in verse and was chanted or sung onstage. The role of melody varies substantially with the work created in different cultures and time periods. In the English Renaissance, Shakespeare and his contemporaries used iambic pentameter and occasional end-rhymes to create dramas in verse, and staged productions have often used some kind of music, whether it be instrumental, vocal, or a mix of both. Melody is much less significant in drama today, though some plays do contain songs, of course. In musical theater, and even more in opera, songs carry much of the meaning of the play. Even in a play with no overt musical component, though, the rhythm of spoken words is important, just as it is in a poem.

Even an actor’s tone of voice can be considered a part of melody in the Aristotelian sense.

Melody

One of the six elements of drama identified by Aristotle. Since the Greek chorus communicated through song and dance, melody was an important part of even the most serious play, though it is now largely confined to musical comedy.

Spectacle

Spectacle refers to what we actually see onstage when we go to a play — the costumes, the actors’ movements, the sets, the lights, and so forth. All of these details make a difference in how we understand and interpret a play’s message. Hamlet’s famous “To be or not to be” soliloquy will resonate differently with an audience if the actor playing Hamlet is wearing ripped jeans and a T-shirt, or a modern military uniform, rather than the conventional Renaissance doublet and hose. In reading a play, it is important to remember that it was not written to be read only, but rather so that it would be seen onstage in the communal setting of a theater. Reading with this in mind and trying to imagine the spectacle of a real production will increase your enjoyment of plays immensely. Specific suggestions for this sort of reading can be found in the “How to Read a Play” section of this chapter.

Spectacle

The purely visual elements of a play, including the sets , costumes, props , lighting, and special effects. Of the six elements of drama he identified, Aristotle considered spectacle to be the least important.

Setting

Setting , which Aristotle ignores completely, is just as important in drama as it is in fiction. But again, in drama it must be either displayed onstage or alluded to through the characters’ words rather than being described as it might be in a story or a poem. The texts of modern plays often (though not always) begin with elaborate descriptions of the stage, furniture, major props, and so forth, which can be very useful in helping you picture a production. These tend to be absent in older plays, so in some cases you will have to use your imagination to fill in these gaps. In Act 4 of Hamlet , the characters are in a castle one moment and on a windswept plain the next. The only way a reader can be aware of this shift, though, is by paying close attention to the words and actions that characters use to signal a change of locale.

Setting

One of the elements of fiction, setting is the context for the action: the time, place, culture, and atmosphere in which it occurs. A work may have several settings; the relation among them may be significant to the meaning of the work. In Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “Young Goodman Brown” ( p. 3 ), for example, the larger setting is seventeenth-century Puritan Salem, Massachusetts, but Brown’s mysterious journey is set in a forest, and its prelude and melancholy aftermath are set in the village.

HOW TO READ A PLAY

Very few of us read plays for pleasure in the same way that we might take a novel with us to the beach. This isn’t surprising: most playwrights, in fact, never intend for their plays to be read in this way. Drama is a living art, and if you read the play text on the page, you are getting only one part of what has made drama so important to all cultures across many time periods. Plays are written for the stage and are meant to be experienced primarily in live performance. This means that as a reader you must be especially attentive to nuances of language in a play, which often means imagining what might be happening onstage during a particular passage of speech.

Using your imagination in this way — in effect, staging the play in your mind — will help you with some of the difficulties inherent in reading plays.

Watching the Play

If you have access to film versions of the play that you are examining, be sure to watch them. Do bear in mind, though, that play scripts usually undergo substantial rewriting to adapt them for film, so you will still need to read the play in its original form, perhaps making comparisons between the stage and film versions. If you are reading a Shakespeare play, you can usually choose from several film versions, many of which might be in your library’s collection. Live drama, of course, is different from film. Check the listings of local theaters to see what they are staging; you might find that a theater company is performing the play that you have to read for your class.

The Director’s Vision

Some of the most skilled readers of plays are theater directors. These professionals have developed the ability to read a play and instantly see and hear in their minds the many possibilities for how the play might look and sound onstage. Directors understand that a play script is just one piece of a large, collaborative process involving playwright, director, designers, actors, backstage crew, and audience. Every new production of a play is different — sometimes vastly different — from the productions that have gone before, and every play script yields nearly endless possibilities for creative staging. By altering the look and feel of a play, a director puts his or her individual stamp on it, connecting with the audience in a unique way and helping that audience understand the playwright’s and the director’s messages. The questions that follow are the sort that a director would consider when reading a play. As you read plays for your literature class, these questions can help you formulate a consistent and strong interpretation.

DIRECTOR’S QUESTIONS FOR PLAY ANALYSIS

What is the main message or theme of the play? What thoughts and/or feelings could be stirred up in an audience during a

STUDENT ESSAY: AN ANALYSIS

Sarah Johnson was free to choose the topic and focus of her paper. In the same semester as her literature class, she was enrolled in a philosophy course on ethics where she was introduced to the idea of situational ethics, the notion that exterior pressures often cause people to act in ways they might normally deem unethical, often to prevent or allay a worse evil. This philosophical concept was on Sarah’s mind when she read Susan Glaspell’s play Trifles ( page 939 ). She noticed that the character of Mrs. Peters does indeed end up behaving in a way she would probably never have imagined for herself. This seemed an interesting concept to pursue, so Sarah decided

performance?

In what kind of theater would you like to stage this play? A large, high-tech space with room to accommodate a huge audience? Or something more intimate?

What type of audience would you hope to attract to a production of this play? Older people? Young adults? Kids? Urban or rural? A mix? Who would get the most from the play’s messages and themes?

Which actors would you cast in the lead roles? Think about the sort of people you want for the various roles in terms of age, physical description, and so on. What should their voices sound like? Loud and commanding? Soft and timid?

What kind of physical movement, blocking, or choreography would you want to see onstage? What are the most dramatic moments in the script? The most quiet or subtle?

What would the set design look like? Would it change between acts and scenes or remain the same for the duration of the play?

How would the characters be costumed? Period clothes? Modern dress? Something totally different? How could costuming contribute to character development?

How much spectacle do you want? Would there be vivid sound and lighting effects? Or are you looking for a more naturalistic feel? How would this help portray the play’s message?

to trace the development of Mrs. Peters’ journey away from her original moral certainty.

Sarah Johnson Professor Riley English 253

24 October 2016

Moral Ambiguity and Character Development in Trifles

What is the relationship between legality and morality? Susan Glaspell’s short play Trifles asks us to ponder this question, but it provides no clear answers. Part murder mystery, part battle of the sexes, the play makes its readers confront and question many issues about laws, morals, and human relationships. In the person of Mrs. Peters, a sheriff’s wife, the play chronicles one woman’s moral journey from a certain, unambiguous belief in the law to a more situational view of ethics. Before it is over, this once legally minded woman is even willing to cover up the truth and let some-one get away with murder.

At the beginning of the play, Mrs. Peters believes that law, truth, and morality are one and the same. Though never unkind about the accused, Mrs. Wright, Mrs. Peters is at first firm in her belief that the men will find the truth and that the crime will be punished as it should be. Mrs. Hale feels the men are “kind of sneaking ” as they look about Mrs. Wright’s abandoned house for evidence against her, but Mrs. Peters assures her that “the law is the law.” It is not that Mrs. Peters is less sympathetic toward women than her companion, but she is even more sympathetic toward the lawmen, because her version of morality is so absolute. When the men deride the women’s interest in so-called trifles, like sewing and housework, Mrs. Hale takes offense. But Mrs. Peters, convinced that the law must prevail, defends them, saying, “It’s no more than their duty,” and later, “They’ve got awful important things on their minds.”

As she attempts to comply with the requirements of the law, Mrs. Peters is described in a stage direction as “businesslike,” and she tries to maintain a skeptical attitude as she waits for the truth to emerge. Asked if she thinks Mrs. Wright killed her husband, she says, “Oh, I don’t know.” She seems to be trying to convince herself that the accused is innocent until proven guilty, though she admits that her husband thinks it “looks bad for her.” She seems to have absorbed her husband’s

Johnson 1

Sarah focuses on Mrs. Peters right away.

Sarah uses direct quotations from the play text as backup for her claims.

attitudes and values and to be keeping a sort of legalistic distance from her feelings about the case.

Johnson 2 Mrs. Hale is less convinced of the rightness of the men or the law. Even before the

two women discover a possible motive for the murder, Mrs. Hale is already tampering with evidence, tearing out the erratic sewing stitches that suggest Mrs. Wright was agitated. Mrs. Peters says, “I don’t think we ought to touch things,” but she doesn’t make any stronger move to stop Mrs. Hale, who continues to fix the sewing. At this point, we see her first beginning to waver from her previously firm stance on right and wrong.

It is not that Mrs. Peters is unsympathetic to the hard life that Mrs. Wright has led. She worries with Mrs. Hale about the accused woman’s frozen jars of preserves, her half-done bread, and her unfinished quilt. But she tries to think, like the men, that these things are “trifles” and that what matters is the legal truth. But when she sees a bird with a wrung neck, things begin to change in a major way. She remembers the boy who killed her kitten when she was a child, and the sympathy she has felt for Mrs. Wright begins to turn to empathy. The empathy is enough to prompt her first lie to the men. When the county attorney spies the empty birdcage, she corroborates Mrs. Hale’s story about a cat getting the bird, even though she knows there was no cat in the house.

Even after she has reached that point of empathy, Mrs. Peters tries hard to maintain her old way of thinking and of being. Alone again with Mrs. Hale, she says firmly, “We don’t know who killed the bird,” even though convincing evidence points to John Wright. More important, she says of Wright himself, “We don’t know who killed him. We don’t know .” But her repetition and her “rising voice,” described in a stage direction, show how agitated she has become. As a believer in the law, she should feel certain that everyone is innocent until proven guilty, but she thinks she knows the truth, and, perhaps for the first time in her life, legal truth does not square with moral truth. Her empathy deepens further still when she thinks about the stillness of the house in which Mrs. Wright was forced to live after the death of her beloved pet, which brought song to an otherwise grim life. She knows Mrs. Wright is childless, and she now remembers not just the death of her childhood kitten but also the terrible quiet in her own house after her first child died. She reaches a moment of crisis between her two ways of thinking when she says, “I know what stillness is. ( Pulling herself back. ) The law has got to punish crimes, Mrs. Hale.” This is perhaps the most important line in the chronicle of her growth as a character. First she expresses her newfound empathy with the woman she believes to be a murderer; then, as the stage directions say, she tries to pull herself back and return to the comfortable moral certainty that she felt just a short time before. It is too late for that, though.

In this para-graph, Sarah analyzes a turn-ing point in the play text: a mo-ment in which Mrs. Peters expe-riences a trans-formation.

Here and else-where, Sarah relies on stage directions as evidence for her claims about Mrs. Peters.

Johnson 3 In the end, Mrs. Peters gives in to what she believes to be emotionally right rather

than what is legally permissible. She collab-orates with Mrs. Hale to cover up evidence of the motive and hide the dead canary. Though very little time has gone by, she has under-gone a major transformation. She may be, as the county attorney says, “married to the law,” but she is also divorced from her old ideals. When she tries to cover up the evidence, a stage direction says she “goes to pieces,” and Mrs. Hale has to help her. By the time she pulls herself together, the new woman she is will be a very different person from the old one. She, along with the reader, is now in a world where the relationship between legality and moral-ity is far more complex than she had ever suspected.

Works Cited

Glaspell, Susan. Trifles. Literature: A Portable Anthology , edited by Janet E. Gardner et al., 4th edition, Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2017, pp. 939 – 50 .