Commentary: Andrea Yates' Greek tragedy

WASHINGTON, March 18 (UPI) -- The Texas judicial system, widely criticized for mercilessly executing too many people, proved merciless in letting poor Andrea Yates live. For her, death, and the prospect of being reunited with the five beloved children she drowned in a bathtub while caught in the throes of madness and terror, would have been a kindness.

For Yates, death would have been a merciful release from a life that can only promise the endless torments of the damned. She is 37 years old. She will not be eligible for parole for 40 years. For the foreseeable future, she will spend 23 hours a day in solitary confinement in a cell whose likely dimensions will be 8 feet by 14 feet.

There may be villains in this story, but they are not poor Andrea Yates, or, for that matter, the medical profession in the city of Houston. Yates' medical record was filled with the most intense, serious warnings of her mounting condition that medical professionals were capable of making.

Controversy is now, understandably, swirling around the figure of her husband, NASA engineer Russell. He is blaming the medical profession. But poor Mrs. Yates' family has made no bones about the fact that they are blaming him.

As reported on the Houston Chronicle Web site Monday, in a group interview with the Houston television station KTRK broadcast on ABC's Good Morning America Monday, Mrs. Yates' brother Brian Kennedy called Russell Yates "unemotional" and charged he was inattentive to his troubled sister's needs.

Russell Yates defended himself on NBC's Today show putting down the tragedy to "the biochemical nature of Andrea's illness." He also described as "all false" allegations of critics that "there must have been something else going on in that household."

But there was indeed a lot going on in that household that was a matter of record.

It is a matter of record that Andrea Yates was first treated for serious psychosis after the birth of her first child. It is a matter of record that Russell Yates, who now proclaims his readiness to sue the medical professionals for their alleged culpability in the death of his children, removed her from the psychiatrist who had treated her successfully with prescriptions of the drug Haldol and later expressed his belief that there was no need to go back to the same psychiatrist as all psychiatrists were alike.

Yates now claims that he did not know his wife was psychotic. But he knew she had previously unsuccessfully tried to commit suicide on at least two occasions. And even so, he left her alone with five young children for two hours when she was pregnant once again.

It is a matter of record that that Mrs. Yates was hospitalized for mental illness after the birth of their fourth child. And it is a matter of record that Mr. Yates was warned on that occasion that another pregnancy could trigger another outbreak of mental illness. But it is also a matter of record that Russell Yates insisted his wife home school their children, putting a crushing burden on a highly mentally unstable woman. And it is a matter of record that he did so knowing full well how unstable she was.

As Laura Parker rightly wrote in a "USA Today" report Monday, "The portrait of the Yates marriage that emerged during the trial cast Rusty Yates as domineering at worst and inept at best."

Inept is a mild term for it.

There is evil in the world and there is stupidity. Unless and until the Messianic times dreamed of by Christians, Jews and Muslims in their different ways finally come, that will always be the case. And until then, there will always be tragedy in human existence too. But there are different kinds of tragedy.

It is one kind of tragedy when a famine sweeps a nation, a volcano explodes without warning or a city is devastated by an earthquake. These are unavoidable tragedies.

It is a very different kind of tragedy when repeated acts of blindness and stupidity, neglecting every warning lead to a catastrophic and horrific denouement. The story of the sinking of the White Star liner Titanic is that kind of tragedy. So, arguably, was the failure of America's intelligence and domestic security services to detect or prevent the hijacking of airliners that lead to the destruction of the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center last Sept. 11 and the loss of 2,800 lives.

There is a variant on this theme of avoidable tragedy too. It is the human-scale tragedy celebrated, if that is the word, by the great Classical Greek playwrights and by William Shakespeare.

In Greek tragedy, catastrophe was a remorseless outcome of the inexorable workings of fate. Nothing could avert it. The terrible machine, once set in motion, had to grind out its entire course.

But Shakespeare raised the concept of tragedy to a heartrendingly intense new level. His tragic heroes, King Lear, Othello and Hamlet above all, were not doomed or destroyed by a remote, inevitable fate. They were destroyed by drives, flaws and even strengths within their own characters. And so it appears to have been with poor Andrea Yates.

Part of the remorseless fascination that has gripped the entire American nation since the horrific events of June 20 last year reflects this aspect of the case. As one media report put it, Andrea Yates went mad not because she cared too little but because she cared too much.

She was a devoted mother. She kept having all the children her husband wanted her to have. She kept trying to do the home schooling for her children he insisted they should have. In a supreme irony, she appears to have despised and rejected the concept of women's liberation and the arguments for conceiving marriage as a genuine partnership rather than a relationship where the husband should always be in command. But her own terrible fate make that case with more devastating effect than a thousand pro-NOW editorials.

The tragedy of Andrea Yates is far from over. In many respects, it has only just begun. Previously crucified by the demands and burdens placed on her by her husband, she has now been crucified by a state legal system with an antiquated, rigidly inadequate concept of insanity. She has been doomed to be locked away at least four decades.

Her continued suffering will continue to fulfill the classic criteria of the Classical Greek masters when they defined the concept of dramatic tragedy as tales that could only evoke pity and terror in all who heard them.