Browsing by Subject "Pity"
- Results Per Page
- Sort Options
Item Open Access In Search of Pity: Chaucerian Poetics and the Suffering of Others(2017) Hines, Jessica NIn the opening scene of Chaucer’s Clerk’s Tale, the marquis Walter is confronted by his subjects who beg him with “meeke preyere” and “pitous chere” to marry and produce an heir. In this moment, they seek from Walter something he is reluctant to give. Walter, an avid hunter and a confirmed bachelor, exclaims, “Ye wol...myn owene peple deere, / To that I nevere erst thoughte streyne me.” Despite his lack of desire to constrain himself in marriage, however, Chaucer writes that the meek prayers and piteous appearance of Walter’s people “made the markys herte han pitee.” He subsequently vows to marry. The force of “made” is important here for it suggests that pity acts in such a way that it compels the pitier to act counter to his or her desires. In the moment of experiencing pity, traditional power structures such as those of social status temporarily reverse. Walter, who typically wields power over his people, comes under their power as his pity transforms his desires and overcomes his will.
My dissertation, In Search of Pity: Chaucerian Poetics and the Suffering of Others, considers the development and transformation of the language of pity in medieval English literature and culture through a study of the poetry of Geoffrey Chaucer. I argue that Chaucer reformulated trans-European pity discourses for an English audience, and, in the process, made pity into a central ethical and aesthetic concern in English literature. The fin’amor tradition, Passion meditations, hagiographies, political treatises about common profit, all were concerned with the ways in which pity was formed and the effects it had on those who felt it, and Chaucer drew on these traditions to craft his poetry. Chaucer was one of the earliest English vernacular poets to make extensive use of the language of pity. He refers to it more than 200 times throughout his poetry and does so in a wide variety of contexts. Pity is the primary virtue of Criseyde in Troilus and Criseyde; it is one of Chaucer’s keywords for describing the sorrowful lives and deaths of female martyrs in the Legend of Good Women, and it is Walter’s response to his people in the Clerk’s Tale. In Search of Pity traces how Chaucer’s fascination with pity developed out of larger medieval conversations about the ethical and affective work of responding to the suffering of others.
In my project, I show how individual discourses offered distinctive accounts of the formation and effects of pity. A pitying woman in fin’amor might come to love her male lover as in the Roman de la Rose; a pitying ruler might offer a pardon for offenses, such as in Richard Maidstone’s Concordia. The common thread in medieval treatments of pity, however, was an understanding that it contained the possibility for suspending or obliterating traditional power structures that schematized gender and social status. This capacity is foreign to our contemporary conception of pity. Today, pity frequently suggests a contempt for its object. This association is so culturally embedded that in “Compassion: the Basic Social Emotion” Martha Nussbaum spends most of her essay discussing the historical emotion of pity, but she changes her vocabulary when writing about the contemporary. She notes that pity “...has acquired nuances of condescension and superiority to the sufferer that it did not have formerly,” and thus she “...shall switch over to the currently more appropriate term ‘compassion’ when...talking about contemporary issues.” Medieval pity with its challenge to the social order is a lost concept. In my research, I am thus interested both in rediscovering the nature of that concept and in charting the ways power was represented in early accounts of pity. Through an examination of the function of power in medieval pity, I contend that we can better understand how pity has come to suggest superiority or disdain for its object.
Chaucer is central to rediscovering the forgotten concepts attached to pity. He wrote more about pity than perhaps any other fourteenth-century English author, and the scope of his influence on English literary representations of pity can be seen in Robert Henryson, John Lydgate, and William Shakespeare. I show how Chaucer’s incorporating distinct treatments of pity from fin’amor, Passion meditation, hagiography, and political treatises brought to the fore the modes and effects of pity’s work in challenging power structures. In doing so, I argue that Chaucer is also one of the first authors to explore the limitations and dangers of pity. In my dissertation, I show that this exploration culminates with the Legend of Good Women and the Parson’s Tale in a disavowal of any pity that is not explicitly linked to acts of charity. This disavowal is unusual. Pity in works such as Maidstone’s Concordia or even the Roman de la Rose is enthusiastically embraced. But by reading Chaucer’s poetry alongside Christine de Pizan’s critique of the Roman de la Rose and Julian of Norwich’s revision of affective meditation on the Passion, I argue that Chaucer is participating in a developing critique of pity taking shape across Europe. The difference between Chaucer and Christine de Pizan or Julian of Norwich, however, is that his critique addresses pity not within one medieval discourse such as fin’amor or Passion meditation, but across many. In critiquing pity across discourses, I argue that Chaucer develops the pity discourse in England and reformulates it to include a new examination of its limited social power.
Item Open Access On Compassion: Sustaining the E Pluribus Unum(2012) Brown, WinterContemporary political events reveal a serious partisanship divide in which serious, non-bombastic political conversation appears limited. The theatrical effect is to make Americans appear as enemies of each other. And, while compassion might be bandied about as an ideological tool, it seemingly has little to offer the body politic. Yet I believe that not only is compassion possible but it is necessary at a critical time like now. After reviewing compassion's definitions and the broad literature around it in Chapter One, I take seriously Hannah Arendt's concerns - that compassion is not only apolitical but anti-political in its encouragement of violence or apathy, its sentimentality, and its eradication of political capacities like thinking. To address Arendt I turn to Jean-Jacques Rousseau and retrieve a neglected form of pity, one not only sociable but tied to action in the polity at large. I then consider how Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology of perception opens compassion's inter-corporeal dimensions, creating distance and depth between people while aligning their gestures and mannerisms. The ability of compassion to enter politics and create or strengthen solidarity via Robert F. Kennedy's politics is discussed in the conclusion. Compassion is a discursive and varied phenomenon that appears according to context while also remaining a psycho-physical and emotional capacity to see, acknowledge, and respond to another person. It also acts as a necessary but not sufficient condition for politics, enriching and enlivening other "political" virtues like justice, equality, and freedom by focusing political sight on "the pulse of hearts beating with red blood" (DuBois, Souls of Black Folks).
Item Open Access Rousseau and the Role of Pity in Shaping Political Society(2024) Zhang, KathleenAllan Bloom observes that the “Enlightenment wished to convert the selfishness of man in the state of nature into the enlightened self-interest of man capable of joining civil society.” Amidst this backdrop of philosophers championing self-interest as man’s only true desire and reason as man’s most effective moral tool, Rousseau emerges as their greatest contrarian. Rousseau is adamant that there is not one but two principles of nature: self-preservation and pity. These two principles work together in tandem for the benefit of mankind. Pity is what naturally restrains us from unduly harming each other in the pursuit of our individual desires—it is what makes men more than “monsters.”
According to Rousseau, there was a de facto state of equality in nature, and the moral problems of society are actually the result of the interplay between reason and self-interest which make men establish and crave artificial inequalities (like wealth and power). In the Social Contract, Rousseau argues that well-ordered societies are those that tend to the general will, which refers to the collective desires of the state, or the body politic. The general will exists on account of the social pact in which each member of state has equal sovereignty. Although Rousseau does not make explicit mention of pity in the Social Contract, this paper examines the literature more wholistically in order to draw connections between pity and the general will. These connections point to how pity should be considered more seriously as a moral and social tool to remedy society. Whereas the history of Western philosophy tends to focus on self-interest and individualism, Rousseau’s emphasis on pity and the general will presents a fruitful avenue of exploration for those looking for alternative (and more collectively-oriented) solutions.