Marcia Eaton's 'Paradox Of Horror'

Similarly to the Paradox of Horror, we also seem to be in a sort of paradoxical state when we experience pleasure from watching films of a melancholic nature. We in engage with these fictions and we experience aesthetic pleasure from these feelings of sadness that they stir up. This stands in conflict with everyday life, where most people seek to avoid sadness in order to avoid experiencing the negative feelings that are associated with real sadness. Some attempts to resolve this paradox amounts to discrediting the sadness provoked by fictions as being fictions themselves. Others put forward concepts of distance to explain this ability to experience pleasure. Marcia Eaton puts forward a theory of control that sufficiently explains how we can
For Eaton, similar to Aristotle, feelings that arise from fictions are concomitant with various features of the artwork. Those feelings of sadness stirred up are real, but they still are different from real sadness experienced in the day to day. In thinking about the paradox of sadness, we may turn to distance theory which suggest that when we engage with fictions we must be sufficiently distanced from the fiction in order to experience pleasure from it. In the case of horror, this could apply by showing that when we are aptly distanced from horror films the fear we’d experience turns into delight. Just as if we were in a plane crash in which we would be afraid, but if instead we were watching from the ground we’d experience delight. However, this concept of distance becomes incoherent when we apply it to a case of sadness, like that of a dying child. It does not make
Eaton herself admits that there is great difficulty in analyzing the exact principles of control. Instead, she sets to distinguish the actions that one can attend to when they are in control and when they are not. A major ability gained by being in control is that we gain the opportunity to attend to various qualities of the objects and events that we are viewing. These are qualities that we are not able to attend to when we are in situations of endangerment. This is to say that, an individual would not focus too finely on the aesthetic characteristics of a fire engulfing their house. But when we find ourselves watching a film of a house fire, we are not struck with practical concerns like calling emergency services, but instead we attend to formal properties like shadow, color, pacing, etc. This shows that how a view of control can allow us to attend to more than if we were not in control, but it doesn’t quite explain why we still experience pleasure. For this Eaton, uses Burke’s theory of the sublime to explain how we can experience this seemingly paradoxical pleasure. Burke suggests that we experience increasingly more delight as the fear we experience diminishes. Eaton distinguishes between two types of delight, one being aesthetic delight and the other being delight in general. We experience the general type of delight when we ride roller coasters, something that is usually not an