Arthur Miller argued in 'Tragedy and the Common Man' that Willy Loman's tragedy is not diminished by his ordinariness. What is the core of this argument?
AOrdinary people suffer more intensely than kings because they lack resources to recover from misfortune
BThe struggle to maintain dignity and identity against forces that deny them is universally tragic precisely because it is available to everyone
CDomestic tragedy is more realistic than classical tragedy and therefore more emotionally credible to modern audiences
DWilly Loman's tragedy is diminished by his ordinariness but compensated for by Miller's dramatic skill
Miller's argument is that the tragic dimension is not scale of social position but the fundamental human experience of struggling to maintain dignity against forces that deny it. Because Willy Loman is ordinary, his tragedy is universally available — not just to those unlucky enough to be kings. The ordinariness is not a limitation but the source of the play's claim on every audience member. Option A confuses economic disadvantage with tragic depth; option C gestures at realism but misses the philosophical argument.
Question 2 Multiple Choice
A student argues: 'Domestic tragedy is less serious than classical tragedy because ordinary people's problems are smaller in scale — no kingdoms fall, no gods are offended.' What does this view misunderstand?
AThe student is partially right — domestic tragedies do lack the broad social resonance of classical tragedy
BDomestic tragedy uses intimate scale to argue that private suffering can have the same depth of irreversibility and meaning as classical catastrophe — social status is not equivalent to tragic depth
CDomestic tragedies actually involve social collapse as much as classical tragedy, just in household form
DClassical tragedy also concerned ordinary people — the student is simply wrong about what classical tragedy depicts
This is exactly the democratizing argument domestic tragedy makes: the tragic fall from a high place does not require a literal throne. The irreversibility of a failed marriage, the catastrophe of a parent who cannot see their child clearly, the collapse of self-deception — these can be as profound as any dynastic downfall. The student assumes tragedy requires high social stakes, which is the assumption domestic tragedy directly challenges. Ibsen and Miller argue that the household can generate equally irreversible, equally meaningful suffering.
Question 3 True / False
Domestic tragedy is primarily distinguished from classical tragedy by its use of melodrama and heightened emotional expression rather than realistic technique.
TTrue
FFalse
Answer: False
This reverses the actual distinction. Domestic tragedy tends toward realism — in setting, dialogue, and psychology — precisely because it must convince an audience that unexceptional people have interior lives rich enough to generate genuine tragedy. Melodrama relies on exaggeration and sentiment to manufacture emotion; domestic tragedy is explicitly not melodrama. The realism is what earns the tragic weight for ordinary characters. Heightened expression would undermine the claim that this could happen to anyone.
Question 4 True / False
In domestic tragedy, the intimate antagonist — a spouse, a parent, a self-deception — can generate tragic conflict as profound as the divine or political forces in classical tragedy.
TTrue
FFalse
Answer: True
This is the central claim of the genre. The antagonist in domestic tragedy is not fate or the gods but the person across the breakfast table — yet the conflict can be just as irreversible and devastating. Ibsen's characters are caught in social structures (gender roles, economic dependencies, expectations) that prevent self-knowledge and destroy them. Miller's Willy Loman collapses under the weight of a belief system that cannot accommodate his actual life. The intimacy intensifies rather than diminishes the stakes.
Question 5 Short Answer
What does Ibsen's domestic tragedy reveal about the relationship between private catastrophe and social diagnosis? Why is the intimate scale not a limitation but a feature?
Think about your answer, then reveal below.
Model answer: Ibsen uses the household as a diagnostic lens: the private catastrophe of a specific family reveals the systematic operation of social structures — gender roles, economic dependencies, social expectations — that produce those catastrophes generally. The intimacy is a feature because it makes the social diagnosis concrete and emotionally available. The particular case becomes a general indictment: not this one family's misfortune but a portrait of what a particular social order does to people.
This is why Ibsen's plays work both as individual dramas and as social critiques: Nora's slamming door in 'A Doll's House' is simultaneously a specific personal act and a diagnosis of what bourgeois marriage does to women. The domestic scale enables this double function — particular and universal at once — in a way that epic or political drama cannot achieve with the same intimacy.