When I was ten years old, my siblings and I came home after spending a weekend with different relatives to find that our mother had sat through a marathon performance of Sally Struthers and her plea for people to "adopt" starving children from third-world countries. We were informed that she had been so moved by the pictures of the children and their villages, as well as the "facts" that Struthers and other speakers for the Christian Children's Fund shared in their special, that she had already called to adopt one of the children.
We spent the next three or so years sending money to Eduardo and reading his letters to us, thanking us for our kindness and getting updates on his progress at school. I don't think the "facts" of these children's situations ever touched mother, and if they did, they were carefully selected to make her feel for their plight. The facts were combined carefully with pictures to elicit the most emotional response from viewers of the program. It worked on mother; in fact, I waited for the next show so that I could be equally persuaded.
In the same way that we often like to believe that the character of the speaker shouldn't matter, we also tend to believe that we should be creatures ruled more by reason than emotion. That idea began to develop during the Enlightenment of the 17th and 18th centuries, and given the inventions of science in the 20th century, we shouldn't be surprised that we're still encouraged to be creatures of reason.
However, if we think about it carefully, most of us have made our decisions on more emotional than "logical" bases. Is it a logical argument that we gave our parents for why they should buy us a car at sixteen? Perhaps, but what drove us to make that argument, most likely, was something emotional: we wanted to be "cool," to be "liked" by our peers; or maybe we wanted to be able to hang out with our boyfriends and girlfriends, so we used a "logical" argument like how we'd be helpful with grocery shopping and picking up younger siblings from soccer practice, but our real motives were emotional. We loved that boyfriend and wanted to be able to see him.
The Greeks recognized the power and importance of emotion to persuade listeners. In fact, for most ancient rhetoricians, the emotions represent one path to knowledge, so they were part of the intellectual processes of coming to understanding (Crowley & Hawhee 149). When these speakers performed in the general assemblies, particularly in trying cases, they used emotions to help people realize the severity of the issues at hand. This sort of work is still done courtrooms where lawyers fight to bring in video tapes and graphic pictures that will stir emotions, while the opposing counsel fights to keep them out because they know that they jury can be persuaded more by these photos than the "facts" of the case.
Consider the following passages from recent reports of the same incident. These monologues come from Anna Deveare Smith's Fires in the Mirror. In this section, Smith gives us two perspectives on an incident in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, when an eleven year old boy, Gavin Cato, was killed by a speeding car as it ran up on the sidewalk. Cato was black; the driver of the car was an elderly white Jew. The incident and the way it was handled over the next few days sparked riots in Crown Heights:
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Obviously, for the most part, Rabbi Joseph Spielman |
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So the traffic The Reverend Canon Doctor Heron Sam |
In the first monologue, Rabbi Joseph Spielman shifts the readers' emotions away from the dead boy, who was "regrettably . . . killed," and toward the Jewish man who was being beaten so severely by young blacks that he needed "fifteen or sixteen stitches" in his head. Then, he points out that accompanying the beatings was a black person who stole a Jewish person's cellular phone while he was trying to call for help. These "facts" of the incident have been carefully selected so as to create sympathy for the helpful and thoughtful Jewish people involved.
In the other monologue by a black minister, Reverend Canon Doctor Heron Sam, we feel our emotions being brought in line with the young black boy who was killed by the speeding car. Sam places blame on the driver who ran the light and then maligns the character of the other Jews who were concerned with "licking their own wounds" and not with helping the hurt boy. When you see these monologues performed back to back on stage — and the other seven or eight monologues that discuss this incident — you are constantly pulled back and forth between the two camps, the Jews and the Blacks of Crown Heights. We realize quickly that each different speaker has a different story of what happened, and thus our shifting alliances are not "factual" so much as they are "emotional." It is important to note, also, that ethos is as important in these two monologues as pathos. Just because I am addressing pathos here specifically, we could apply the same critiques we looked at in the previous section to these two monologues for a fuller understanding of how rhetoric works here.
Just as ethos is constrained by context, so too is pathos. In any analysis of the emotional impact or constraints on a particular text or situation, one must take into account the context of the situation itself. In the example above, the context is created during the stage performance. For the first monologue, we see an older Jewish man and hear his accent; we see how he is dressed and we hear how disconnected he seems to be from the dead boy, Gavin Cato. Likewise, we see the ministerial robes of the Reverend Sam and hear his contempt as he talks about how the Jews behaved. These are performance clues for the audience.
But there are also context clues that good writers use when they construct their texts. Like ethos, sometimes this context relies on the writing coming at a particularly effective time. The play The Normal Heart, by Larry Kramer, was published in 1987 and had been performed for a year before its publication. As the first play to deal with AIDS – when the disease itself was still considered a "gay disease" – the context in which the play was received was often one of skepticism and disbelief, so the details that Kramer chose to include had to work against the skepticism to persuade his audience of how tragic the escalating deaths were.
In more general terms, though, consider how people use a major incident like the school shooting at Columbine High School in Colorodo. Television talk show host Rosie O'Donnell, who had been vocal about gun control before the incident, used her show and her talking time to demonstrate her own sadness over the loss of the children at Columbine — even crying on air at one point — but she also spent her opening monologue arguing for increased gun control. Her argument for gun control was dependent on people's emotional engagement with what had just happened at Columbine. Consciously or not, O'Donnell played on a pathetic appeal.