fear), and how is feeling these emotions toward protagonists in tragedy an
aspect of metaphorical identification with them?
In theRhetoricAristotle defines pity as
a feeling of pain caused by the sight of some evil, destructive or painful, which
befalls one who does not deserve it, and which we might expect to befall
ourselves or some friend of ours, and moreover, to befall us soon. In order to
feel pity, we must obviously be capable of supposing that some evil may
happen to us or some friend of ours...What we fear for ourselves excites our
pity when it happens to others.^60“Fear,”he tells us,
is caused by whatever we feel has great power of destroying us, or of harming
us in ways that tend to cause us great pain...Fear is felt by those who
believe that something is likely to happen to them, at the hands of a particular
person, in a particular form, and at a particular time...Consequently, when
it is advisable that the audience should be frightened, the orator must make
them feel that they really are in danger of something, pointing out that it has
happened to others who were stronger than they are, and is happening, or
has happened, to people like themselves, at the hands of unexpected people, in
an unexpected form, and at an unexpected time.^61These definitions make it clear that pitying another and fearing for another
involve seeingoneselfas in the same or similar situations as another–facing
the same or similar problems, subject to the same or similar misfortunes and
losses. If something is utterly unlike ourselves, then we cannot pity it or fear
for it. Pity and fear get no foothold for us with a rock or a distant star. If we
manage to pity or fear for the fly struggling in the spider’s web, that is
because we take ourselves, rightly or wrongly, to share a sensate life with
it, and we see ourselves in it. To pity and fear for another involves both
sympathy and apprehensiveness: feeling with another that an undeserved
misfortune of the kind we ourselves might suffer is imminent. The same
structure of seeing oneself in another and feeling with another is part also of
(^60) Aristotle,Rhetoric, trans. W. Rhys Roberts, inThe Basic Works of Aristotle, ed. Richard
McKeon (New York: Random House, 1941), pp. 1325–451, Book II, ch. 8, 1385b, 1386a,
pp. 1396, 1398. I thank my colleague, Grace Ledbetter, for directing me toward Aristo-
tle’s discussions of pity and fear in theRhetoric.
(^61) Ibid., Book II, ch. 5, 1382a, 1382b, 1383a, pp. 1389, 1390–91, 1391.
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