'The Subject of Tragedy' takes the drama of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries as the starting point for the analysis of the differential identities of man and woman.
Arguing that fiction is not outside the meanings in circulation in a society, but is one of the locations of these meanings, Catherine Belsey charts in a range of fictional and non-fictional texts the production in the Renaissance of a meaning for subjectivity which is identifiable modern. The subject of liberal humanism- self-determining free origin of language, choice and action- is the product of a specific epoch. Constructed at once in the theatre and on the stage of history, modern man, solitary, aggressive and sexist, brought with him woman, the opposite but indispensable sex, who defies him by her difference. The two have subsequently been held in place in the family and the state by reiterated meanings of which they are an effect rather than an origin. The liberal-humanist subject was constructed in conflict and in contradiction - with conflicting and contradictory consequences.
'The Subject of Tragedy' identifies the past as a site of change, and as the ground, in consequence, of the politics of change.
