| In nineteenth-and twentieth-century literature of Europe and North America, a pattern of action and imagery emerges to describe the rigid protagonist, man or woman, who too strictly divides himself into a positive and a negative identity. Imposed on the self as a means of rising above human inperfection, these identities, if too rigidly pursued, lead to a "fall" which emphasizes the very failings the protagonist so desperately seeks to avoid. By repressing the negative identity in himself and projecting it onto others whom he then ruthlessly victimizes, the rigid protagonist ironically becomes the "evil" he is attempting to eradicate. Thus rigidity forces a metamorphosis in which extremes meet: images of the hunter and the hunted, the divine and the bestial, the chaotic and the mechanistic converge as the protagonist turns into a grotesque incarnation of his opposite. Death quickly follows, foreshadowing the end of the society in which he has assumed a leading role.Chapter One uses an ancient text, Euripides' Bacchae, and a^modern one, Heinrich von Kleist's "Uber das Marionettentheater,"(' )^to define the rigidity paradigm, tracing the progress of the rigid protagonist from the inception of his rigidity to its climactic metamorphosis. Chapters Two and Three apply the paradigm to Kleist's Penthesilea and Thomas Mann's Der Tod in Venedig the method of analysis employed, the close reading, illumines not only the paradigmatic but the unique and original elements of each writer's vision. The Conclusion, focussing on Victor Hugo's Notre-Dame de Paris and Herman Melville's Moby-Dick, demonstrates the paradigm's applicability to a wide cross-section of nineteenth-and twentieth-century texts and explores the reasons, historical and sociological, for its persuasiveness during this period. |
