Aristotle perceived that the spectator of tragedy was putting himself in the place of the characters, living their lives emotionally and sympathizing with them. Since the novel or lyric poem depicts human sorrow, and the reader is purged by reading these literary forms, just like the spectator of tragedy, all literature has the effect of an aesthetic catharsis upon the reader.
The novels of Thackeray and Balzac are poetry in parts and the emotional influence in reading them is the same as in seeing a tragic verse-play acted. Bosanquet, however, does not fully accept Aristotle's theory as applied to tragic stories in prose because he regards poetical prose rhetoric and not poetry. Would he exclude from the domain of tragedy the entire episode in Hardy's _Return of the Native_, of the death of Eustace's mother? Hardy's tragedy is as real as the tragedies of the Greek playwrights. The novel fulfills all the requirements of poetic tragedy in that the reader is purged and relieved of pity and fear and kindred emotions. For tragedy is not to be found only in dialogues in verse, but in narration and dialogue in prose, and its function is to relieve us of any choking emotion, besides fear and pity.
Aristotle is the founder then of psychoanalytic interpretation of literature and is a forerunner of Freud. He however refers only to the catharsis upon the spectator, but not to that of the author's work upon himself.
Every creator of tragedy in prose or verse, in fiction, essay or lyric was first subject to repression and then ecstasy. We may say as Nietzsche did, that tragic art is the reconciliation of Apollo and Dionysius, of dreaming and emotional intoxication, and both these conditions are, in Freud's words, due to repression.
But we have travelled far beyond Aristotle in our views of tragedy. Freud has revolutionized the art of criticism and a disciple of his, F. Wittels, in the _Tragische Motiv_, gave us an interpretation from the psychoanalytic point of view of the nature and sufferings of tragic characters. There is an abstract of the book by Dr. J. S. Van Teslaar in the _American Journal of Psychology_ for April, 1912. Wittels shows that the unconscious unethical desires break into consciousness and cause tragedy. He points out that the Greeks were purified of pent up emotions in the theater, and that they identified the demons of their inner self in the actors. He also says that the Greek drama cannot any longer talk as clearly to us as of old, for with our civilization we have wandered away from the naïve Greek mind. The author emphasizes the fact that unconscious causes make the writer compose his work, as well as the fact that characters in history and literature acted from unconscious causes. Thus suppressed erotic impulses influenced the patriotism of Joan of Arc.