There's a disconcerting, but wide-sweeping trend making its way onto social media outlets. Maybe you've even participated in it. All over the Internet are these little quizzes you can take to reveal something about yourself: namely, who you would be if you weren't already you, in all your personal specificity.
You can take the "Which Disney princess are you?" quiz or the "Which Downton Abbey character are you?" quiz. You can find out which superhero you are by taking the "Which Superhero are you?" quiz. You can find out which celebrity would portray you in a film about your life. You can even find out which house you would be sent to by the infamous Hogwart's Sorting Hat.
Yes, I have taken these tests and I'm not saying anything beyond the fact that apparently Brad Pitt would portray me in the story of my life.
When Socrates apparently mouthed his famous dictum, know thyself, I doubt this is what he had in mind: Match the superficial personality characteristics and mannerisms of fictional characters as a means of serious introspection. Sure, I'd rather be Belle than Ariel, but I'm going to learn a damn sight more about my own inner workings when I consider the ways in which I might secretly resonate with Albert Camus' existential nihilist, Meursault in The Stranger or the title character's restless longings in Tolstoy's "Anna Karenina."
Because isn't that the way good literature works? We find bits of ourselves in characters we don't especially like. That's creepy. That's cathartic. Plus, it predates the facile quizzes on Facebook by millennia. And it's a lot more fun.
Aristotle said that the function of drama is to evoke pity and fear in the audience. So we need strong, complicated and disagreeable characters to keep us reading, keep us watching. When we encounter these fictional people in the pages of books or in movies, a part of what we do is identify with them, in spite of ourselves. I mean, Dostoyevsky couldn't have come up with a character as morbidly sympathetic as Raskolnikov in "Crime and Punishment" if he didn't, on some level, know that it's a reliable warp in human nature that tempts some people to believe that murder is admissible — at least for an extraordinary person, such as Raskolnikov fancies himself he might be.
Of course, these little online quizzes in which we're supposed to find our doppelganger in popular culture figures are supposed to make us feel good about ourselves. Nobody would come right out and admit that they'd had some pretty strong I-bet-I-can-get-away-with-murder impulses in their salad days.
And can you imagine the "Which Shakespeare character are you?" quiz? Who would boldly post on Facebook "I got Lady MacBeth, the ambition-driven neurotic bitch who can't wash the invisible blood off her hands." Or "I'm Titus Andronicus, the mad ruler who made deep-dish pizza out of his prisoners' brains"?
Nah, nobody wants to self-identify that way.
Understandably, we'd like to see ourselves as noble men who do the right thing or beautiful women who are also kindhearted — Atticus Finch and Arwen come to mind. Certainly I grew up channeling Jo March (which is to say Louisa May Alcott).
But we also find ourselves drawn to weird fictional characters because we're each little baskets of weirdness ourselves.
It's the socially maladroit and morally-ambiguous personalities that we need to keep interacting with in books and on-screen. They both attract and repel us, creating the strange frisson of knowing that this or that unsavory character might have more than a little in common with each of us.
So we need Edgar Allen Poe's madmen, Kafka's insect misfits, Hawthorne's Puritan gothics and literature's whole host of philanderers, adulterers, thieves, drunkards and schemers. We need them so we can know they're we're just a little bit like them. Not too much, of course. But some.
(Or maybe I'm just saying all this because, in the "Downton Abbey" quiz, I got Mrs. Patmore.)
Jo Page's email address is jopage34@yahoo.com. Her website is at >www.jo-page.com>.