keep them in) would surely pale compared with the discomfort of being
surrounded by angry, venomous snakes; and if letting them out of the
box isn’t all that bad, then why did I exert myself so much to keep them
shut up there in thefirst place? Finally, if we repress these truths outside the
theatre, why don’t we repress them inside it, too? Returning to Shelley’s
‘good man using best judgement’truth: if the everyday world is the kind
of place where that holds, and Sophocles’Thebes is also a place where that
holds, then why can’t I repress it at the theatre just as in real life? I might,
for example, deny that Oedipus is good or that he acts in accordance with
his best judgement–both of which are plausible interpretations.
Morality
The next major candidate for a solution to the problem of tragic pleasure
is that tragedy gives us a kind of pleasure that is related to morality. As
we saw in our discussion of theatre and ethics, the case for theatre being
moral in relation to the emotions has been made frequently and in different
ways. Susan Feagin has argued that tragedy provides a kind of test of our
sympathetic, moral responses. If we witness real, tragic events, we are
overcome by sorrow at what we have seen. At the tragedy, in contrast, we
know that it isn’t real; nonetheless, we can see that we do have the correct
kinds of sympathetic responses to tragic events and so we can take pleasure
in the confirmation that we are suitably moral beings, connected with our
fellow moral beings in the right kinds of ways:‘wefind ourselves to be
the kind of people who respond negatively to villainy, treachery and
injustice.’^37 Of course, taking pleasure in being sympathetic would be
completely inappropriate when faced by real, tragic events; but when the
events are taking place in the theatre, we are permitted to feel‘satisfaction’
at our sympathetic, moral responses.^38
Feagin’s proposed solution has the advantage that it can explain why
the negative emotions (pity, fear, and so on) are necessary in order for us
to experience tragedy as pleasurable: pleasure comes from appropriate
sympathetic responses to the hardships of others; such responses occur in
the face of troubling situations; therefore, the pleasurable experience of
tragedy requires the depiction of troubling situations. However, Feagin’s
account still leaves a great deal to be desired. For one thing, feeling
pleasurably satisfied with our moral responses to the pains of others –
even to the pains of characters in play–doesn’t necessarily look that moral.
If the audience atUncle Vanyais composed of hundreds of individuals, who
have attended with the express purpose of delighting in their ability to
pity plain, hardworking, lovelorn girls and their weary, hopeless uncles, then
I’m not sure it reflects very well on any of them, morally or otherwise.^39
We might also recall Rousseau’s point, that it’s hardly a good moral test
146 From the Stage to the World