An excellent essay that is extremely pertinent to this question is Arthur Miller's "Tragedy and the Common Man," in which Miller discusses the traditional classical understanding of tragedy as applying only to royal, high-born characters and argues that tragedy is a genre that is just as applicable to "normal" characters, or the "common man." The classical tragedy does indeed only pick noble-born subjects to demonstrate the catharsis that is such an essential element of tragedy. Miller argues that this is incorrect for two reasons: firstly, modern psychiatry has shown that the complexes that famous tragic heroes such as Oedipus suffered from affect everybody, and secondly, the way that all humans, whether noble-born or not, appreciate and love tragedy, strongly indicates that tragedy is something that applies to all. Miller then goes on to underline what is at the heart of the genre of tragedy:
As a general rule, to...
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which there may be exceptions unknown to me, I think the tragic feeling is evoked in us when we are in the presence of a character who is ready to lay down his life, if need be, to secure one thing--his sense of personal dignity. From Orestes to Hamlet, Medea to Macbeth, the underlying struggles that of the individual attempting to gain his "rightful" position in his society.
This therefore leads him to use this common thread in his own modern tragedies, but through using the "common man" instead of only using such important and noble individuals. Miller goes on to explain that actually taking a common man as a tragic protagonist allows the playwright to explore the ways in which he or she is barred from gaining his "rightful" place in society by big forces within that society that seem to stand against him or her. This helps audiences to understand the struggles of characters like Willy Loman, who are prevented in so many ways from gaining their "rightful" position in society by the forces of consumerism. When considering Arthur Miller as a theorist of tragedy it is important to appreciate therefore the impact he had in forming what has come to be known as the domestic tragedy, which makes tragic heroes out of "common" people.
Discuss Arthur Miller as a theorist of tragedy.
Miller’s main argument, as laid out in 1949 for the New York Times, was that the requirement for tragedy to be about “a great man brought low” did not confine tragedy to ancient Greece. Though “great” implies high office, royalty, etc., today in a democratic society all men are “equal”. He maintained that modern psychiatry acknowledges similar nobility by using such terms as “Oedipus complex” in their analysis of psychiatric disorders (“We never hesitate to attribute to the well-placed and the exalted the very same mental processes as the lowly”) and that in modern drama the audience feels something similar to catharsis when a character like Willy Loman follows an uncontrollable path to an inevitable destructive conclusion.
In comparing Elizabethan tragedy such as Shakespeare’s Hamlet and Macbeth he points out that we all, high or low, try to maintain “a sense of personal dignity”, and that the loss of it is tragic in the best sense of the word. In a word, Miller modernized Aristotle's ideas by pointing to general psychology.