The Joy in Fear

            From Baillie’s Introductory Discourse one can see the importance she lays on the passions and how a Drama, in her opinion, represents these in the most realistic way. It’s the sympathetic curiosity which she believes to be an innate feature in all individuals which drives us to question actions and feelings in order to understand the motive behind them. In Baillie’s tragedy Orra, this sympathetic curiosity is evoked by Orra, as by the end of the play she seems to go mad. What leads her to this fate is the crucial question, and that which Baillie attempts to describe throughout the play.

            Orra’s fascination with the supernatural seems almost as an addiction, for despite her knowing what these stories will do to her, she urges Cathrina on. Alice seems to be the one to notice the toll these stories have on Orra and worries about her health and on page 103 addresses her: “What pleasure is there, lady, when thy hand, Cold as the valley’s ice, with hasty grasp Seizes on her who speaks, while thy shrunk from Cow’ring and shiv’ring stands with keen turn’d ear To catch what follows of the pausing tale?” Orra goes on to explain how although to the external eye it may seem that is causes her pain, in reality she finds “joy in fear.” As our sympathetic curiosity grows as readers, we want to decipher why she feels this joy when in her semblance all one can see it terror. Although many interpretations may exist, one explanation can be found in Burke’s definition of the sublime in his A philosophical enquiry into the origin of our ideas of the sublime.

He stated that, “When danger or pain press too nearly, they are incapable of giving any delight, and are simply terrible; but at certain distances, and with certain modifications, they may be, and they are delightful, as we every day experience…Whatever excites this delight, I call sublime.” With this definition one can further understand Orra’s joy, or as Burke would state, delight. He goes on to say that the passions that belong to self-preservation are the strongest of all the passions and in the end this seems to be true, for in order to save herself from what she thinks is the ghost of the huntsman, she crosses this threshold between terror, which can be linked to the sublime and horror, which only inflicts pain. Burke thought no passion so effectually robbed the mind of all its power of acting and reasoning as fear did, which proves true in Orra’s case. Therefore, one can see Orra’s maddening as a mechanism of self-preservation, for on page 134 she says “Would that beneath these planks of senseless matter I could, until the dreadful hour is past, as senseless be!” She wants to escape from this world and does so in the end.

Discussion Questions:

      What effect does the sublime have on Orra in your opinion?

      In her madness, do you still believe she feels this joy she mentions earlier in the play?

   What do you make of this Joy she speaks of?