Like Me: An Invitation to Domestic/Tragedy

All tragedy is a family matter.

—Jean-François Lyotard, Political Writings

To propose a volume on “domestic/tragedy” is to believe that Westerners can get somewhere by taking seriously the long-standing relation between tragedy and family. Where exactly we get is difficult to specify because of the “no place like home” from which we depart. Such a place is difficult to visualize; other maxims propose similarly opaque destinations in the apparent transparency of “heart” and of heart and home’s resemblance to “castle.” The phrasing of the “no place like home” suggests a second difficulty: negation, resistance to liking. Something in subjects is not eager to confront the relation head-on—unless we are Freudians, in which case we look to classical Greece for models of familial relations and their accounts of the parts that are always missing.¹ Still, people also seem to feel at home in the topic as long as they do not have to think too hard about what or where it is. A frequent reaction to my saying that I am working on domestic tragedy is “well, I’m living it” or “I was raised in it,” and people even react to the admission with the same anxious laughter designated by the names of the genre’s closest kin: laughing tragedy, weeping or melting comedy. This mimeticism, by which we enact what we do not consciously know, comprises part of my interest in domestic tragedy not simply because mimeticism constitutes the means and ends of these plays and seems a fair description of how individual subjects become a family. Another interest is the yoking of opposites in these alternative names. Now as then, we cannot tell if domestic tragedy is tragic or comic, universal or particular, public or private, high drama or a bore. We only feel that its familiarity does not lessen its pain or modify the compulsion to get our version heard.

These brief assertions already bring us to a first place: the border and boundary confusions on which the topic is based. On the simplest level, to be at home in domestic tragedy is to dwell in opposition. “Domestic” is to “tragic” as common is to exalted, private to public, ordinary to extraordinary, woman to man. It is also to challenge apparent oppositions in the spirit of “the domestic,” defined as “relating” both “to the household or the family” and “to one’s own country or the country under consideration.” To analyze domestic tragedy, in turn, is to link different kinds of object—social, aesthetic—and thus separate disciplinary domains. In content and methodology, one initial aim of this collection is to exert pressure on the maintenance of separate spheres. What changes in our expectations of family if we recognize its intrication with tragedy? What happens to such family values as security, harmony, privacy, property, and authenticity when they are seen as performance, as show? Alternatively, what does the domestic/tragedy connection reveal about value asymmetries between family and tragedy from their inception? Why is tragedy degraded when it takes domesticity as its primary domain if character is shaped by family? What does this devaluation say about tragedy’s hostility to the conventional features of home: women and children first, but also order, interiority, the same old same-old? Domestic/Tragedy, then, begins with the alliance of two of the West’s most cherished values to see what their union reveals about the two that never become one—a not-one, however, that does not negate their shared investments in the one-for-all notions of character, time management, unity, or conflict resolution and that constitutes, in fact, their joint end in “the end” as death. This end underscores another question that their versions of history, as well as historical accounts of them, make definitive: Why are both family and tragedy repeatedly declared dead?

Domestic/Tragedy’s way into these questions is via examination of the construction, promulgation, and reaction to the literary subgenre “domestic tragedy.” Here, the point is to recall a time in the mid-eighteenth century when writers first made...