This Lee is the tragic and valorous embodiment of the Lost Cause, a mythic South that fought not so much to defend slavery as to protect states' rights and a noble, superior way of life, while Grant becomes a drunken butcher, a slaughterer of his own men and a failed, scandal-plagued president who belongs in the company of Warren G. Harding.
On a winter afternoon just before the collapse of the Soviet regime, I paid a call on Dmitri Likhachev, an eminent scholar of medieval Russian literature and an embodiment of the tragic history of his city.
In the United States, Nathaniel Hawthorne's novel The Scarlet Letter (1850) and Herman Melville's Moby Dick (1851) are surprisingly complete embodiments of the tragic form, written as they were at a time of booming American optimism, materialistic expansion, and sentimentalism in fiction and no tragic theatre whatever.
Thus, the previous progression of the genre from tragedy to tragicomedy to romantic tragedy continued to a literary-musical embodiment of what Nietzsche called "tragic dithyrambs".
Here, danced by Laëtitia Pujol, Odette is more like a figment of Siegfried's imagination than a doomed heroine, and so the idea of the corps de ballet of swans as an epic embodiment of her predicament never achieves tragic sweep.
It also set the trend for seeing vampires as poetic tragic heroes rather than as the more traditional embodiment of evil.
In Mr. Epstein's hands, in a suitably modest production of "King Lear" at the La MaMa Annex, first seen in Boston and directed by Patrick Swanson, Lear is not an embodiment of majesty brought low, a figure of tragic glory or glorious tragedy.
Although the series was created five years after her death in 1962, she is in many ways the perfect embodiment of Warhol's ideal: the sexy and the tragic wrapped up in one famous package.
