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Motifs
Definition of Pathos
Pathos, along with logos and ethos, is one of the three "modes of persuasion" in rhetoric (the art of effective speaking or writing). Pathos is an argument that appeals to... read full definition
Pathos, along with logos and ethos, is one of the three "modes of persuasion" in rhetoric (the art of effective speaking or writing). Pathos is... read full definition
Pathos, along with logos and ethos, is one of the three "modes of persuasion" in rhetoric (the art of effective... read full definition
Section 8
Explanation and Analysis—Marie Antionette:
Over the course of several pages, Burke attempts to generate sympathy for the royals of France, humanizing them for his reading audience by dramatizing their plight. He uses pathos to establish Marie Antoinette as a sympathetic figure, describing his own encounter with her:
It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then the dauphiness, at Versailles [...]. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she just began to move in,—glittering like the morning-star, full of life, and splendor, and joy. Oh! what a revolution! and what an heart must I have, to contemplate without emotion that elevation and that fall!
In this passage, Burke attempts to paint Marie Antoinette in a positive light, using a simile to describe her face as "glittering" like the "morning-star"—ironically, a likeness often used to describe Lucifer before his fall from grace in the Bible. By portraying Marie Antoinette as a beautiful person who is "full of life," Burke primes his readers to experience retrospective horror at the earlier description of her persecution. Contrast Antoinette's characterization in the above passage to the revolutionaries' characterization in the following:
A band of cruel ruffians and assassins, reeking with his blood, rushed into the chamber of the queen, and pierced with an hundred strokes of bayonets and poniards the bed, from whence this persecuted woman had but just had time to fly almost naked, and through ways unknown to the murderers had escaped to seek refuge at the feet of a king and husband, not secure of his own life for a moment.
The revolutionaries, rather than being depicted as oppressed peoples rising up against the oppressive figureheads of their government, are "cruel ruffians" and "assassins." These descriptors invoke pathos, situating the revolutionaries as morally bankrupt actors pursuing the "persecuted" Marie Antoinette. In Burke's dramatization of events, the immoral revolutionaries add further insult to injury, humiliating the "persecuted" Antoinette by forcing her to flee in a state of nakedness.
