ENGL 222 Lecture Notes - Lecture 14: John Stuart Mill, Pathetic Fallacy
Document Summary
Ruskin believed heavily in social welfare as did coleridge who helped inspire him. Ruskin"s belief in social welfare was politically progressive, but coleridge was thought of as being conservative compared to contemporary revolutionaries. It was john stuart mill who said that. The narrator does not initially believe the theory. Once the man who comes up with the theory commits suicide, he begins to analyze and then believe and obsess about the theory and find more evidence for it. He realizes at the end though, that all of his evidence was in his imagination, he bought into his own pathetic fallacy the entire time. The friend of the narrator has gone to the south of france and died of tuberculosis, rather than commit suicide as he presented. Oscar wilde wants to show us how fact-like our emotional projections can be and then reveals how un fact-like these projections really are.
