PRESENTEDBY- URVI DAVE

CLASS- M.A. SEM 1

TOPIC- CATHARSIS

PAPER NO.- 3

SUBMITTED TO- SMT. S.B. GARDI DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH & M. K. BHAVNAGAR UNIVERSITY

What is Catharsis?As the exact meaning and

concept of Catharsis, there has been a lot of controversy among scholars and critics down to the centuries. Therefore, it deserved separate treatment. Let us consider it in details.

John Morley has rightly said: “the immense controversy, carried on in books, pamphlets, sheets and flying articles, mostly German, as to what it was that Aristotle really meant by the famous words in the sixth chapter of the poetics, about tragedy accomplishing the purification of our moods and sympathetic fear, is one of the disgraces of the human intelligence, a grotesque movement of sterility”.

F.L.Lucas in his tragedy: serious drama in relation to Aristotle's poetics asks three questions. These questions are-

1. What was really Aristotle's views?• Catharsis means ‘purification’, correction

or refinement’.• It has been suggested that our pity and

fear are ‘purified' in the theatre by becoming disinterested.

• It is bad to be selfishly sentimental. Timid and querulous; but it is good to pity Othello or to fear for hamlet.

• Catharsis means not ‘purification’, but ‘purgation’; a medical metaphor. Yet, owing to changes in medical thought, ‘purgation’ has become radically misleading to modern minds.

• But catharsis means ‘purgation’, not in the modern, but in the older, wider English sense which includes the partial removal of excess ‘humour’.

• Catharsis as ‘moderating' or ‘tempting' of the passions.

2. How far is Aristotle's view of catharsis true?• Here is a example of tragedy that we may feel

released when certain emotions are worked up in the mind and are rinsed out as it were at the end which is more or less positive by implication for death or calamity is explained and accounted for as arising from certain avoidable weakness or emasculations of the hero.

• Fulfillment or satisfaction.• Positive and corrective of tragic errors to the

spectators.• Tragic delight.• Certain moral ends of catharsis might be

incidentally achieved. But it is not the chief end of tragedy.

3.What led Aristotle to adopt this theory?• F.L.Lucas quote that “poetry, said Plato,

makes men cowardly by its picture of the afterworld. No replies by Aristotle, it can purge men’s fears. Poetry, said Plato, encourages men to be hysterical and uncontrolled. On the contrary, answers his pupil, it makes them less, not more, emotional by giving a periodic healthy outlet to their feelings. Aristotle’s definition of tragedy is half a defence”.

Analytical inquiry of Aristotle's into the nature of tragic delight and its psychological effects.

Catharsis established tragedy as a drama of balance.

Such tragic beauty and tragic feeling which it evokes constitutes the aesthetics of balance as propounded for the first time by Aristotle in his theory of catharsis.

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