An objective correlative is a literary term referring to a symbolic article used to provide explicit, rather than implicit, access to such traditionally inexplicable concepts as emotion or colour.

Origin of terminology

Popularized by T. S. Eliot

T. S. Eliot

Thomas Stearns "T. S." Eliot OM was a playwright, literary critic, and arguably the most important English-language poet of the 20th century. Although he was born an American he moved to the United Kingdom in 1914 and was naturalised as a British subject in 1927 at age 39.The poem that made his...

 in his essay "Hamlet and His Problems

Hamlet and His Problems

"Hamlet and His Problems" is a 1919 essay by T. S. Eliot which offers a critical reading of Hamlet. Originally published in Eliot's The Sacred Wood: Essays on Poetry and Criticism, it was reprinted in Selected Essays, 1917-1932...

", the term was first used by Washington Allston

Washington Allston

Washington Allston was an American painter and poet, born in Waccamaw Parish, South Carolina. Allston pioneered America's Romantic movement of landscape painting...

 around 1840 in the "Introductory Discourse" of his Lectures on Art:
Eliot used the term exclusively to refer to his claimed artistic mechanism whereby emotion is evoked in the audience:
It seems to be in deference to this principle that Eliot famously described Hamlet

Hamlet

The Tragical History of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, or more simply Hamlet, is a tragedy by William Shakespeare, believed to have been written between 1599 and 1601...

as "most certainly an artistic failure": Eliot felt that Hamlet's strong emotions "exceeded the facts" of the play, which is to say they were not supported by an "objective correlative." He acknowledged that such a circumstance is "something which every person of sensibility has known"; but felt that in trying to represent it dramatically, "Shakespeare tackled a problem which proved too much for him."

Theory of the objective correlative

The theory of the objective correlative as it relates to literature was largely developed through the writings of the poet and literary critic T.S. Eliot, who is associated with the literary group called the New Critics. Helping define the objective correlative, T.S. Eliot’s essay “Hamlet and His Problems” http://www.bartleby.com/200/sw9.html in his book The Sacred Wood: Essays on Poetry and Criticism discusses his view of Shakespeare’s incomplete development of Hamlet’s emotions. In this essay, Eliot states: “The artistic ‘inevitability’ lies in this complete adequacy of the external to the emotion….”. According to Eliot, the feelings of Hamlet are not sufficiently supported by the story and the other characters surrounding him. The objective correlative’s purpose is to express the character’s emotions by showing rather than describing feelings as pictured earlier by Plato and referred to by Peter Barry in his book Beginning Theory: An Introduction to Literary and Cultural Theory as “…perhaps little more than the ancient distinction (first made by Plato) between mimesis and diegesis….” (28). According to Formalist critics, this action of creating an emotion through external factors and evidence linked together and thus forming an objective correlative should produce an author’s detachment from the depicted character and unite the emotion of the literary work.

Criticisms of the objective correlative

One possible criticism of Eliot’s theory includes his assumption that an author’s intentions concerning expression will be understood in one way only. This point is stated by Balachandra Rajan as quoted in David A. Goldfarb’s “New Reference Works in Literary Theory” http://www.echonyc.com/~goldfarb/encyc.htm with these words: “Eliot argues that there is a verbal formula for any given state of emotion which, when found and used, will evoke that state and no other.”

External links

• Objective Correlative at Literary Encyclopedia
• http://www.bartleby.com/200/sw9.html
• http://www.echonyc.com/~goldfarb/encyc.htm
• http://www.utpjournals.com/simile/issue11/witkoskifulltext.html