Comparing Hamartia In Aristotle And Greek Tragedy

Even Sister James’s desire to be safe in her assumption of Father Flynn’s innocence and Mrs Muller’s similar assumption of a position of comfortable indifference places them appropriately in the grey realm between virtue and vice. If Sister James’s intellectual error was to concede to Sister Aloysius’s instruction to “be on the look out”, which unduly wrecked havoc on her innocence, Mrs Muller operates from a position of mortal flaw with her tendency to subtract the priest’s possible molestation of her child to avoid courting controversy and risking further damage, psychological and physical, to Donald. In Chapter XIII of Aristotle’s Poetics, his explanation of hamartia, “some great error or frailty”, which contains a range of meaning in Greek literature, are contested

C. W. Stinton in his essay “Hamartia in Aristotle and Greek Tragedy”. Stinton argues that hamartia cannot mean only intellectual error but must exhibit a range of applications from “ignorance of fact at one end to moral defect, moral error, at the other.” Kurt von Fritz argues that hamartia significantly communicates the atmosphere of objective horror and subjective innocence. If the uses of moral defect or moral error are to be taken into account, Sister James and Mrs Muller clearly fit the bill and their subjective innocence, organic for the former, coerced for the latter, become their hamartia. As for Sister Aloysius and Father Flynn, Shanley makes them emblems of a debate over the meaning of hamartia, if it is a fatal flaw and indicates a predisposition to a particular crime or if it is an “intellectual error rather than a moral flaw and, consequently, is capable of representing and evoking the