Catharsis Definition

“A tragedy is the imitation of an action that is serious and also, as having magnitude,
complete in itself; in appropriate and pleasurable language;... in a dramatic rather than
narrative form; with incidents arousing pity and fear, wherewith to accomplish a
catharsis of these emotions.”

The interpretation generally accepted is that through experiencing fear vicariously in a

controlled situation, the spectator’s own anxieties are directed outward, and, through
sympathetic identification with the tragic protagonist, his insight and outlook are
enlarged. Tragedy then has a healthful and humanizing e@ect on the spectator or
reader.

The UNDERSTANDING of human frailty and inability to control what is beyond ones
power renders wisdom and simultaneously compassion towards one’s own self as well
as others. The community has been re-invented as TRUST is re-established within the
depth of one’s own humanity and the humanity of the social whole. Now one can make
up one’s mindanew; can change one’s mind (=metanoia, a di@erent kind of repentance)
and embrace one’s self and others because we are all flawed, yet all able to redirect
ourselves – if all maintain the spiritual transformation gifted through understanding and
acceptance.

What is catharsis? Here’s a quick and simple definition:

Catharsis is the process of releasing strong or pent-up emotions through art. Aristotle coined
the term catharsis—which comes from the Greek kathairein meaning "to cleanse or
purge"—to describe the release of emotional tension that he believed spectators
experienced while watching dramatic tragedy. Today, the word "catharsis" can be used in
reference to any experience of emotional release or cleansing brought about by a work of art.

Some additional key details about catharsis:

• Aristotle (the ancient Greek scientist and philosopher) believed that an audience's
ability to feel the same emotions as those displayed by actors onstage is an integral
part of the experience of watching theater, and that through this experience
audiences can learn to better regulate their emotions in real life.
 • An audience is far more likely to have a cathartic experience if they form a strong
attachment to—or identification with—the characters, whether in a play or book.

• You may have heard the word "catharsis" used to describe emotional
release outside the realm of art. For instance, people often speak of psychological or
social catharsis. While these additional meanings do exist, this guide will focus
specifically on catharsis in literature.

How to Pronounce Catharsis

Here's how to pronounce catharsis: kuh-thar-sis

Catharsis Explained

A cathartic experience—whether in theater or literature—is an experience in which the

audience or reader experiences the same emotions that the characters are experiencing on
stage or on the page. It follows, then, that a cathartic work is any work of literature that gives
readers this experience. Imagine, for example, a book about a young boy who loses his
mother to cancer. Such a book might not be cathartic for everyone, but for someone who has
lost a friend or family member to cancer, reading such a book may be an extremely emotional
experience, in the sense that such a reader may find themselves feeling the character's grief
or anger as though it were their own. This example serves to highlight an important part of
what makes a work of literature cathartic: the reader must have developed a strong
identification with the characters. In other words, if readers aren't able to "see themselves"
in the characters—if they feel they don't have any qualities or experiences in common—then
they probably won't achieve the level of emotional investment necessary to have a cathartic
experience in response to the work. Because of this, it generally takes a great deal of skill
and experience on the part of the author to produce a truly cathartic piece of literature.

Aristotle's definition of catharsis was specific to the experience that audiences have
watching theater, or to people reading literature. According to that definition, only audience
members and readers can experience catharsis—and not the actors or characters
themselves. However, it's sometimes the case that literary characters do have cathartic
experiences. For example, in Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse, Mr. Ramsay reads a tragic
book by Sir Walter Scott, and the emotional impact it has on him leads him to feel a greater
sense of clarity about his own life and his relationships with other characters in the book.

Catharsis Outside of Literature

Today, the word "cathartic" is often used to refer to just about any experience that provides
someone with a feeling of emotional release—even as the term also retains the original
connotation of an experience in the arts. Although this entry deals specifically with catharsis
in literature, some of the same principles may apply generally to other forms of cathartic
experience. For example, somebody who gives away a box of things that once belonged to
an ex-boyfriend might describe the experience as cathartic because it gives them a feeling
of release from emotions of pain or resentment—but that would depend on their having
formed a strong bond of attachment to the objects in the box, just as readers must form a
bond of attachment to characters in a cathartic work of literature.

Catharsis Examples

Examples of Catharsis in Literature

Shakespeare's tragedies are some of the most famous examples of art that produce
catharsis in audiences. Some authors—such as Chinua Achebe who wrote Things Fall
Apart—have modeled their own work after classical Greek or Shakespearean tragedy, in an
eUort to create contemporary works that create cathartic experiences for readers.

Works that produce catharsis often involve the death or downfall of the main character,
though they don't absolutely have to. Speaking more generally, most plots that produce
feelings of catharsis do usually involve a character losing something very dear to them, as
this can play an important part in the process of eliciting an emotional response from
readers.

Catharsis in Shakespeare's Othello

In Othello, an ambitious, resentful, and just plain malicious soldier named Iago brings about
the downfall of his captain, Othello, by making it look as though Othello's wife is cheating on
him. Othello goes mad with jealousy and eventually kills his own wife. After learning his wife
was in fact faithful, Othello then delivers this monologue in Act 5 Scene 2 after learning the
truth, just before taking his own life:

I pray you, in your letters,

When you shall these unlucky deeds relate,
Speak of me as I am. Nothing extenuate,
Nor set down aught in malice. Then must you speak
Of one that loved not wisely, but too well.
Of one not easily jealous, but being wrought,
Perplexed in the extreme. Of one whose hand,
Like the base Indian, threw a pearl away
Richer than all his tribe.
…
I took by the throat the circumcisèd dog,
And smote him, thus.
Othello's suicide is cathartic for readers for a number of reasons. First and foremost is that
Othello is the play's protagonist—a good-natured and honest person—so readers naturally
identify with him and want the best for him. This strong sense of identification that readers
feel makes it all the more painful for them when Othello takes his own life, but they're able
to experience his death with a strange sense of emotional release because
they also understand the unbearable pain that any good person would feel over having killed
his own wife. So Othello is a cathartic work not only because readers feel Othello's pain,
but especially because readers vicariously experience Othello's feeling of
being released from that pain through his suicide.

Catharsis in Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet

In Act 5, Scene 3 of Romeo and Juliet, Romeo discovers Juliet's sleeping body in the Capulet
tomb. Juliet took a sleeping potion in order to make her parents think she was dead, so that
she could avoid marrying her suitor Paris and remain with Romeo, whom she married in a
secret ceremony without her parents' knowledge. Romeo doesn't realize that Juliet is, in fact,
still alive—and poisons himself out of sorrow:

From this world-wearied flesh. Eyes, look your last!

Arms, take your last embrace! and, lips, O you
The doors of breath, seal with a righteous kiss
A dateless bargain to engrossing death!
Come, bitter conduct, come, unsavoury guide!
Thou desperate pilot, now at once run on
The dashing rocks thy sea-sick weary bark!

Here’s to my love!

[Drinks]

O true apothecary!
Thy drugs are quick. Thus with a kiss I die.

Watching Romeo encounter his true love, whom he believes to be dead, might call to mind
similar experiences of loss for the audience. According to the classical idea of catharsis
outlined by Aristotle, experiencing or re-experiencing the emotional trial of a loved one's
death through Romeo would have provided the audience with some release, allowing them
to work through any lingering feelings of grief in their own lives.

Catharsis in Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse

To the Lighthouse is Woolf's portrait of the Ramsay family and their friends, in which she
writes an account of the family's summer vacation at their house on the Isle of Skye, oU the
coast of Scotland. Mr. Ramsay is a scholar who feels that the happiness and comfort
provided by his family have prevented him from reaching his full intellectual potential. After
a dinner at which he feels intellectually slighted by his guests, Mr. Ramsay
experiences catharsis while reading Sir Walter Scott's The Antiquary:

And he went on reading. His lips twitched. It filled him. It fortified him. He clean forgot all the
little rubs and digs of the evening, and how it bored him unutterably to sit still while people
ate and drank interminably, and his being so irritable with his wife and so touchy and minding
when they passed his books over as if they didn't exist at all. But now, he felt, it didn't matter
a damn who reached Z (if thought ran like an alphabet from A to Z). Somebody would reach
it—if not he, then another. This man's strength and sanity, his feeling for straight forward
simple things, these fishermen, the poor old crazed creature in Mucklebackit's cottage made
him feel so vigorous, so relieved of something that he felt roused and triumphant and could
not choke back his tears. Raising the book a little to hide his face, he let them fall and shook
his head from side to side and forgot himself ... forgot his own bothers and failures
completely in poor Steenie's drowning and Mucklebackit's sorrow (that was Scott at his best)
and the astonishing delight and feeling of vigour that it gave him.

In this passage, Mr. Ramsay experiences Aristotle's classical model of catharsis: by

vicariously experiencing tragedy in the lives of literary characters Steenie and Mucklebackit,
he's better able to deal with his own emotions. He emerges from his reading feeling
"relieved...roused and triumphant."

Catharsis in Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart

Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart tells the story of Okonkwo, leader of the Igbo community
of Umuofia in Nigeria. Okonkwo, who embodies the values of a traditional Igbo warrior, is
infuriated when British colonists and Christian missionaries begin to interfere with his
community's way of life. So when a British messenger tells Okonkwo that he and his men
have to disband a meeting, he kills the messenger in anger. Seeing that none of the other
clansmen will stand in support of his action, Okonkwo hangs himself. In the following
passage, a group of clansmen (including Okonkwo's good friend Obierika) ask the British
District Commissioner to help them take down Okonkwo's body for burial:

"Why can't you take him down yourselves?" he asked.

"It is against our custom," said one of the men. "It is an abomination for a man to take his
own life. It is an oUence against the Earth, and a man who commits it will not be buried by
his clansmen. His body is evil, and only strangers may touch it. That is why we ask your
people to bring him down, because you are strangers."

"Will you bury him like any other man?" asked the Commissioner.

"We cannot bury him. Only strangers can. We shall pay your men to do it. When he has been
buried we will then do our duty by him. We shall make sacrifices to cleanse the desecrated
land."

Obierika, who had been gazing steadily at his friend's dangling body, turned suddenly to the
District Commissioner and said ferociously: "That man was one of the greatest men in
Umuofia. You drove him to kill himself and now he will be buried like a dog..." He could not
say any more. His voice trembled and choked his words.

Achebe employed the form of classical Greek tragedy to tell the story of Okonkwo's fall. After
a lifetime of honoring his community's traditions, Okonkwo is driven to kill himself, an act
that his community considers to be a major oUense. However, Okonkwo's death also
represents a kind of triumph: although he's unable to save his community from the
encroaching power of the British colonists, his suicide forces the British to observe Igbo
customs to bury him, creating a moment of justice and dramatic catharsis in a narrative of
loss.

What's the Function of Catharsis in Literature?

Catharsis in literature works a lot like therapy does in real life: by giving readers the
opportunity to experience intense emotions from a distance, it allows them to "let it all out."
Cathartic works are especially good at tapping into repressed emotions—that is, emotions
that a reader or audience member may not typically allow themselves to feel. For instance,
a person may be disinclined to cry over their own feelings of grief because ignoring their pain
makes it feel more manageable, but if that person watches a character in a film break into
tears at a funeral, they may find themselves unexpectedly moved to tears. In this sense,
sometimes feeling somebody else's feelings proves to be a lot easier than feeling your own—
and catharsis has a way of making use of that fact to help people experience emotional
release. True believers in dramatic catharsis (as Aristotle defined it) would say that
experiencing emotions like pity or fear in response to an artwork can even help people to
better handle these emotions in real life.

Some writers, like the German playwright Bertolt Brecht, have taken a less optimistic view of
the benefits of catharsis. Brecht was a twentieth-century writer and a Marxist who believed
that the highest purpose of theater was to serve as a forum for political ideas and to inspire
spectators to take political action. He thought that works that seek to inspire catharsis were
nothing more than cheap, undemanding entertainment for the masses, and that spectators
lost their ability to think and judge for themselves when they became too emotionally
involved in a play. To combat what he believed to be the harmful eUects of catharsis, Brecht
purposefully wrote plays that didn't come to an emotional resolution. His idea was that
instead of giving audience remembers the release they'd come to expect through the play
itself, he'd have spectators leave the theater full of unresolved emotions, which would then
spur them to seek emotional release in real life—through their own actions.