Domestic Troubles

Domestic tragedy, conventionally associated with the sensibility of the emergent metropolitan \nmiddle classes, has never been held in very high esteem by Marxian critics. In recent times, \nmany critics on the Left have tended to regard the whole genre of tragedy, with its supposedly \nelitist sensibility and leanings toward an apocalyptic conception of history, in a rather dim light. \nIt was not always so, of course. Marx shared the enthusiasm of his age and class for classical \nGreek and Shakespearean tragedy, and some of the greatest Marxist cultural critics of this \ncentury, such as Georg Lukács, Walter Benjamin, and Raymond Williams, have written about \ntragedy in quite positive terms. \nHere, I want to look at three dramas, all of a tragic character or design, that deal with the \nconflict in Northern Ireland: St. John Ervine’s Mixed Marriage (1911), which can be \nconsidered a domestic tragedy; Sam Thompson’s Over the Bridge (1960), which, although set \nin the more “masculine” space of the Belfast shipyards, tells a story about the way sectarianism \nimpedes the development of class politics in Northern Ireland that is quite similar to Ervine’s; \nand The Riot Act: [End Page 501] A Version of Sophocles’ Antigone (1984) by Tom Paulin, \nwhich adapts one of the great Greek tragedies to the Northern situation. When considered in \nconjunction with each other, these plays demonstrate some of the different ways in which \nvarious types of tragic drama utilize the family and the distinction between public and private \nspheres as well as, more generally, suggesting some of the ways in which different types of \ntragic narrative structure our broad perceptions of class and sectarian conflict in Northern \nIreland

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