Ghosh 1

University of Calcutta

Evolution of ‘Catharsis’ from Literature to Big Screen

Sristi Ghosh

Sem 5

College Roll: 0110

CU Registration Number: 224-1211-0037-20

CU Roll Number: 202224-11-0030

Course Code: DSE-B1

Course Name: Literary Types, Rhetoric and Prosody

Dr. Mou Chattopadhyay

10 December 2022
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Abstract

A good tragedy is capable of arousing the emotions of pity and fear among the audience,

leading to a healthy purgation (catharsis) of such emotions. In his book Poetics, Aristotle

defines Tragedy on the basis of the plays he witnessed during his time. Therefore, the concept

is not infallible and may not be applied factually to all modern tragedies. The purpose of this

term paper is to examine and compare the treatment of ‘catharsis’ in the context of the

Classical, and Shakespearean tragedies along with the tragic movies of the Modern era,

focusing on the texts of Sophocles’ Antigone, Shakespeare’s Hamlet, and movies of Darren

Aronofsky’s 2009, Black Swan and Bong Joon-ho’s 2019, Parasite. The aim of this paper is

to analyse each work and examine how pity and fear is evoked, thereby leading to their

purgation.
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According to Aristotle, tragedy has within it certain therapeutic powers that invoke feelings

of pleasure to the audience. Aristotle provides justification for the need for tragedy against

his teacher, Plato feels all poets should be banished because they do not study the truth and

incite passion over reason, “all poetical imitations are ruinous to the understanding of the

hearers, and that the knowledge of their true nature is the only antidote to them” (Plato 365).

Tragedy generalises the human characters, making us see ourselves in them and feel

connected to them. According to Aristotle, tragedy “is an imitation of an action that is

serious, complete, and of a certain magnitude; in language embellished with each kind of

artistic ornament, the several kinds being found in separate parts of the play; in the form of an

action, not of narrative; through pity and fear effecting the proper purgation of these

emotions” (Aristotle 23). This “purgation” is an important aspect of tragedy which is

commonly known as ‘katharsis’ that leaves a deep impact on theatre goers. Aristotle

mentions ‘catharsis’ only once in his book Poetics. Some critics say that Aristotle defined

‘catharsis’ in his lecture the notes of which are now lost. Catharsis can be defined as

“purgation”, “purification” or “cleansing”. In his book, Tragedy in relation to Aristotle’s

“Poetics”, F.L. Lucas explains that catharsis is conceived “not in the modern, but in the

older, wider English sense which included the partial removal of excess ‘humours’” (Lucas

36).The lack of details about catharsis resulted in a plethora of interpretations.

Antigone begins with the theme of death which continues throughout the play. The tragedy

of Antigone due to her virtue and loyalty to her family evokes pity and fear among the

audience. From the beginning itself Antigone is well aware of her destiny that, if she is to

bury her brother, Polynices, who is proclaimed as the traitor in the city of Thebes by Creon,

her sentiments will be rewarded with death. Polynices’ body remains unburied and is left for

the vultures to eat which becomes a display of his betrayal for attacking his own city.
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Antigone’s sentiments for her brother makes her determined to take such a risk even if it

would mean her own doom. She tells Ismene, “leave me/ to suffer this—dreadful thing. I will

suffer/ nothing as great as death without glory” (Sophocles 112-113). Her act of giving her

brother a proper burial is also her show of respect to the Gods..

When the sentry informs Creon that someone has buried Polynices' body much against his

instructions, the audience already knows who the offender is. Yet we feel fear for the

uncertainty of the events that are to follow and we pity her for her suffering. To get punished

for such virtue results in grief within the audience which attains a new tragic height. Creon

immediately punishes her by imprisoning her in a tomb and starving her to death. Antigone

laments about not experiencing the bliss of marriage and motherhood, evokes pity and fear

among the audience. We also understand her decision to bury Polynices. She not only wants

to face the retribution of Gods but she also wants to unite with her father, Oedipus, mother,

Jocasta, and brothers, Eteocles and Polynices after death. “I’ll soon be there, soon embrace

my own,/ the great growing family of our dead/ Persephone has received among her ghosts”

(Sophocles 980-982). Even though Antigone was well aware of her destiny she still feels

wronged, as the Gods never intervened to give her some sort of justice. It is only later that the

Gods punish Creon for his conduct but it is too late for her to witness that.

Pity and fear is evoked again after we see Creon fall from his prideful tyrannical self to a

grieving father and husband, when he realises that he becomes the reason for her son and

wife’s deaths. He realises that he should not have left Polynices’ body unburied or punished

Anitgone for her betrayal. His heart-wrenching speech evokes pity and fear among the

audience as they sympathise with his tragic fate. He cries, “Whatever I touch goes wrong—

once more/ a crushing fate’s come down upon my head!” (Sophocles 1464-1465). The

audience realises that even the greatest of men make mistakes and pay a heavy price. The pity
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and fear is purged and the audience feels a sense of relief and transforms into a wiser person.

The chorus ultimately concludes:

Wisdom is by far the greatest part of joy,

And reverence towards the gods must be safeguarded.

The mighty words of the proud are paid in full

With mighty blows of fate, and at long last

Those blows will teach us wisdom. (Sphocles 1466-1470).

In Hamlet, the emotions of pity and fear are evoked from the beginning of the play. The

ghost of elder Hamlet leaves a sense of fear among the audience. Hamlet is determined to

seek his revenge against his uncle, however, he is unable to take a step. The audience

sympathises with his sense of morality that prevents him from taking such a drastic step.

However, this sense slowly isolates him from Ophelia and his mother, Gertrude. He becomes

obsessed with the idea of revenge and his inability to take action makes the audience feel pity

and fear for him.

In Act V, the audience becomes aware that Ophelia commits suicide succumbing to her

grief and insanity after her father dies. We sympathise for her miserable life and feel pity for

her tragic death. Hamlet’s grief for her death intensifies this sense of pity. In Act V Scene II,

when all the characters die, including Hamlet, we feel pity for his downfall as the audience do

not receive any poetic justice. The purgation of pity and fear becomes complete when

Fortinbras declares Hamlet as a hero and we feel a sense of relief that even though Hamlet

had to die in the end, he still managed to eliminate the traitor who committed treason. He

valued law and order of the country much more than his own sense of morality. Therefore,

Fortinbras says:

Let four captains

Bear Hamlet like a soldier to the stage;

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For he was likely, had he been put on,

To have prov’d most royal; and for his passage

The soldier’s music and the rite of war

Speak loudly for him.

Take up the bodies. Such a sight as this

Becomes the field, but here shows much amiss.

Go, bid the soldiers shoot. (Ham. V.2.387-394)

All our sympathies that lay with the loss of his father and Ophelia, finally become purged

with him being declared as the country’s hero, returning the law and order to Denmark.

In Aronofsky’s 2010 movie Black Swan, we get a detailed description about the struggles

of an obsessed performer. Throughout the entire movie, we see the protagonist, Nina, a

ballerina, struggle to achieve her goal of becoming the Swan Queen in the season’s new

production of Swan Lake.With the dominance of an overprotective mother, who refuses to let

Nina grow, she is forced to maintain a childish and innocent identity, Nina struggles with the

fear of mediocrity as she pushes her limits to become the Swan Queen. As soon as she

achieves that, she is thrown into a challenge of performing both the roles of White Swan and

Black Swan. The audience feels pity and fear as Nina chooses her path of greatness through

self-destruction. She is able to achieve absolute perfection while playing the White Swan as it

symbolises her real life identity, however, her innocence holds her back from performing the

predatory and seductive Black Swan. The audience is shocked and scared to see how Nina

hallucinates a double and self-harms under stress. She keeps failing to master the

performance of the Black Swan when she suddenly meets Lily, the new girl, who becomes a

threat to her position as the Black Swan. The audience is hit by a sense of uncertainty

whether Nina will actually be able to play Black Swan on the final day or will she be replaced

with Lily by her mentor Thomas. The pity and fear intensifies when the audience sees Nina’s
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horrifying ongoing process of transforming into Black Swan. She disobeys her mothers and

tries to break the control that the latter had on her. She shuts the door of her innocent

childlike world and the audience feels horrified by the grotesque scenes that show her slow

descent into madness. We feel scared and worried about her mental as well as physical health

and what the final outcome will be like.

The audience feels anxious as she almost makes it on time for her performance. However,

her distress never recedes and she falls down in the middle of the first Act, much to her

humiliation. Pity for Nina is evoked when the audience sees her as a bundle of nerves. She

returns to her dressing room to change into the Black Swan’s costume when she finds Lily

already there. Lily provokes her which makes an already jealous Nina stab her. The audience

is taken aback by a sudden death scene caused by the protagonist. Nina does not know what

to do but the show must go on. She immediately hides the body and covers the pool of blood

and changes into her costume. In Act II, Nina’s old-self is completely consumed by a

predatory-self similar to the Black Swan. She transforms into an actual black swan and gives

a powerful performance, mesmerising the audience. The jubilation is high in the air after Act

II ends and she goes back to her dressing room to change for the final act. When she goes

back to check the body, both Nina and the audience are surprised to see that Lily’s body is

nowhere to be found. As she changes back to her white costume, Nina sees herself in the

mirror and we finally understand that she never stabbed Lily in the first place and it was

merely a product of her hallucination. However, the blood that she saw was her own, caused

by a self-inflicted wound. Pity and fear is evoked again as the audience remains unsure about

what will happen next. Nina goes on to the stage, finishing her performance beautifully and

elegantly. As she jumps from the stair onto the mattress below, her face reflects a sense of

bliss, as she smiles looking at nothing. The crowd applauds, Thomas and the crew

congratulate her, and at that very moment, Lily notices the bleeding. She notifies Thomas,
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who immediately calls for help but Nina remains unfazed. She smiles with wide-eyes and

says “I felt it…Perfect. It was perfect” (BS. 1:42:31-1:42:44). The screen fades into white,

and it is not revealed whether Nina died or was taken to a hospital. The audience feels

relieved to see that Nina is finally able to accomplish the absolute perfection she was pining

for. Her obsessive nature and madness has finally come to an end.

In Bong Joon-ho’s 2019 movie Parasite, a realistic portrayal of the class distinction is

presented that is innate in a capitalistic society. Bong takes the audience through a series of

episodes using various symbols of scholars’ stone, stairways and windows to explain the

vicious hierarchical cycle. The movie begins with the Kim family who make a measly

earning by folding pizza boxes. Their sudden advent as employees to the rich Park family is

done through careful schemings, by getting rid of the previous employees. They each take up

an identity and sponge out benefits from the Park family. We see glimpses of the Kim

family’s economic deprivation and on-going class struggle as opposed to the rich Park

family’s obsession with Americanism.

Bong mentions that the real film begins from the second-half of the movie, with the return

of the previous housekeeper, Gook Moon-gwang. Suspense thickens when Mun-gwang

reveals that her husband, Oh Geun-se, is kept hidden in the bunker of the house. The

audience feels scared for the Kim family who are bewildered by the sudden threat that might

alter the course of their luck.

The garden party is where all chaos breaks free taking the audience on an emotional

rollercoaster. When Geun-se breaks free from the bunker and injures Ki-woo’s (the Kim

family’s son) head with the scholars’ stone, the audience can not comprehend whether he is

dead or unconscious. We are unable to process the shock as the scene shifts to Geun-se who

climbs up the stairs of the basement going straight to the garden party with a knife in hand.

He stabs Ki-taek’s (the head of the Kim family) daughter, and Ki-jung in-turn gets stabbed by
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Ki-taek. Ki-taek then stabs the Park family’s patriarch, Dong-ik, after the latter recoils from

the stench of Geun-se’s dead body. He immediately flees the scene, hiding in the same

bunker.

The continuous deaths shocks the audience as they are unable to process the reality of the

situation. The movie fast forwards to a few months, revealing that Ki-jung has in fact died

and Ki-woo recovers from his injury and is grieving the loss of his sister and father. Bong

mentions in a GQ magazine interview that killing the daughter was necessary for the tragic

element as, “The daughter is the smartest person in that family, and she's also the person who

created the opportunity to avoid the tragedy at the end. She was suggesting that they went too

overboard yesterday and they should go down and talk to the couple in the basement. So she

was trying to bring about this negotiation among the ‘have-nots’ in the film..The person who

tried to create the opportunity to avoid the tragedy: she's the one who died. That's the sad

irony of the climax”. (Bong). It is necessary for the audience to understand that life goes

downhill when we least expect it.

By this time the Park family have left their residence, and Ki-woo begins visiting a hill

that is parallel to the view of the residence. After a few weeks of his visit, he notices that

someone is trying to communicate with him through morse code, which is later revealed to be

his father. Ki-woo is later seen to be writing a letter that displays his fantasy of going to

school, earning lots of money and then buying the Park residence so that he can reunite with

his father. The penultimate shot of father-son hugging each other in the lawn of the Park

residence evokes a sense of relief. However, it does not last long, as the scene returns to the

cramped semi-basement where Ki-woo was writing his letter. We understand that Ki-woo

never attains his goal and the father spends the rest of his life in the bunker. The gap between

the rich and the poor is too big to fill. Bong mentions that he wanted to take the shot from the

deeply emotional hugging scene to the basement to show the cruel reality of life. “It’s quite
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cruel and sad, but I thought it was being real and honest with the audience. You know and I

know— we all know that this kid isn’t going to be able to buy the house. I just felt that

frankness was right for the film, even though it’s sad”. (Bong)

Bong purposefully ends the movie in a lonely tone to leave an impressionable mark of

confusion within the audience. In the GQ interview, Bong mentions that, “In our actual lives,

when we witness a traffic accident or something violent happening all of a sudden, we have

no room to process what's going on. We don't know what to think and we kind of become

blank. We come home and get in our beds, and then it's the next day when we start thinking

about what's happened. And that's what I wanted the audience to feel with the climax. And I

think it's been pretty similar. No one really knows what's going on, and they can't really

process anything.” (Bong). This is important to note that Bong purposely wanted to create

such a reaction within the audience. Perhaps the purgation happens after the madness ends in

the garden party incident. At the same time it leaves an uncomfortable feeling as the audience

takes time to process the entire movie. Every shot, every symbol is connected intricately to

the climax. Maybe the required purgation never occurs and the balance never returns but

somehow we are still okay with it.

The concept of catharsis is an ongoing and ever evolving idea. The catharsis that Aristotle

speaks about is strictly applicable to the classical age. With evolution of the concept of

tragedy itself, it is natural that catharsis too evolves. Catharsis is influenced by the evocation

of pity and fear which itself is influenced by the plot of the tragedy. It is up to the artist how

they will make the ending to which the audience will react. In the case of Antigone we feel

more wiser, in Hamlet we are revived by the heroic qualities of the hero. In Black Swan we

are relieved to see the heroine achieve her biggest dream, while in Parasite, we experience

partial relief as the horror of reality lingers in the back of our mind. Catharsis is only
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achieved when the audience feels that they are in tune with the tragic characters, and feel

their fall as their own.

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Works Cited

Aristotle. The Poetics of Aristotle. S.H. Butcher (translated and edited). London: Macmillan and

Co. Limited. 1984.

Sophocles. The Three Theban Plays: Antigone, Oedipus the king, Oedipus at Colonus. Robert

Fagles (translated). New York: Penguin Classics. 1984.

Shakespeare, William. Hamlet. London: Collin Classics. 2011.

Black Swan. Darren Aronofsky (directed). Fox Searchlight Pictures. 2009. Disney+Hotstar

<https://www.hotstar.com/in/movies/black-swan/1770000699>

Parasite. Bong Joon-ho (directed). C J Entertainment. 2019. Fmovies

<https://fmoviesto.site/parasite>

Nicoll, Allardyce.”The Theory of Drama”. The Theory of Drama. London: George G. Harrap

and Company Ltd. 1937. p.p. 9-98.

Nicoll, Allardyce.”Tragedy”. The Theory of Drama. London: George G. Harrap and Company

Ltd. 1937. p.p. 103-173.

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Aesthetics.<https://doi.org/10.1093/bjaesthetics/15.2.132> p.p. 132–143. Accessed 16

October 2022.

Papanoutsos, P. E. “The Aristotelian Katharsis” .The British Journal of Aesthetics, vol 17, issue

4, 1 April 1977. The British Journal of Aesthetics.

<https://doi.org/10.1093/bjaesthetics/17.4.361> p.p. 361–364. Accessed 16 October 2022.

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26, no. 2. June 1992. JSTOR. <http://www.jstor.org/stable/2215735> pp. 204-217. Accessed

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Schef, J. Thomas. “Catharsis And Other Heresies: A Theory Of Emotion”. Journal of Social,

Evolutionary, and Cultural Psychology, vol1, no. 3. September 2007. ResearchGate.

<https://www.researchgate.net/publication/228359758> p.p. 98-113. Accessed 30 October

2022.