Vicarious Narratives: A Literary History of Sympathy 019884669X, 9780198846697

Table of contents :
Cover
Vicarious Narratives: A Literary History of Sympathy, 1750–1850
Copyright
Dedication
Acknowledgments
Contents
Introduction: Defining Sympathy
Smith’s Sympathy and the History of the Novel
Sympathy, Literary Form, and History
1: 1759 and 1794: Moral Sentiments, Political Revolution, and Narrative Form
Historical Torture and Fictional Imagination
Adam Smith’s “Our Brother . . . upon the Rack” in Post-Revolutionary France
Bodies and Persons in Sympathy’s Grammar of Vicarious Experience
“Things as They Are” or “As If They Were My Own” in Caleb Williams
Kinship in Smith’s Sympathy
Through Smith’s Window: From Visual Perception to Imaginative Perspective
2: Letters in the Novel and the Novel in Letters: Henry Mackenzie’s Julia de Roubigné and the Afterlife of the Epistolary Novel
Sympathy and the Epistolary Novel
Correspondence, Soliloquy, and Mackenzie’s Novelistic Voices
Mackenzie’s Reformulation of Epistolary Perspectives
Shared Language and Racial Difference
3: Laurence Sterne in the Romantic Anthology
Literary Anthologies: Sentimental Extracts and Reading Strategies
Sterne’s Starling and the Mechanics of Citation
“The Negro Girl” of Tristram Shandy
Torture, Kinship, and the Jewish Body in Tristram Shandy
Animal Minds and Perspectival Sympathy
4: The Ends of Kinship in the French Romantic Novel
Narrative Exchange and Sympathetic Experience in Prévost’s Manon Lescaut
Fostering Family Ties in Paul et Virginie
Atala and René: From Fraternity to Difference
Kinship Structures and Narrative Forms
5: Novelistic Sympathy in Frankenstein
Redefining Sympathy: Social Failure and Narrative Promise
Shifting Genres and Shifting Speakers
Copied Letters
“Similar, yet . . . Strangely Unlike”: Forms of Difference
6: Wuthering Heights and the Relics of the Epistolary Novel
Transforming Lockwood’s “Sympathetic Chord”
“I am Heathcliff ”: Sibling and Stranger
Lockwood’s Vicarious Narrative
A “Relic of the Dead”: Reframing the Epistolary Novel
Coda
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

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Vicarious Narratives

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Vicarious Narratives A Literary History of Sympathy, 1750–1850 JEANNE M. BRITTON

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Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, OX2 6DP, United Kingdom Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries © Jeanne M. Britton 2019 The moral rights of the author have been asserted First Edition published in 2019 Impression: 1 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by licence or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press 198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Data available Library of Congress Control Number: 2019937523 ISBN 978–0–19–884669–7 DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198846697.001.0001 Printed and bound in Great Britain by Clays Ltd, Elcograf S.p.A.

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for my parents John and Kathy Britton

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Acknowledgments From its first incarnation as a dissertation at the University of Chicago and through its transformations elsewhere, this book has benefitted from the guidance, encouragement, and support of many people. My ideas about sympathy were profoundly influenced by James Chandler. I am also grateful to Thomas Pavel for nudging me to think more about characters in fictional sympathetic encounters and Robert Morrissey for pushing me to think more about the French Revolution. At the University of Chicago, I also benefitted from the insights of Elaine Hadley, Sandra Macpherson, Robin Valenza, and discussions of the Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Reading Group. Generous support from the Franke Institute of Humanities propelled the original project to completion. Early versions of portions of this book have previously appeared in “Novelistic Sympathy in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein,” Studies in Romanticism 48.1 (2009): 3–22; and “Translating Sympathy by the Letter: Henry Mackenzie, Sophie de Condorcet, and Adam Smith,” Eighteenth-Century Fiction 22.2 (2009): 71–98. I am grateful to the publishers for their permission to use this material here. At various points in this process, I have relied on the following people for their advice, questions, generosity, and humor: Rachel Ablow, Sarah Berry, Claire Colebrook, Danielle Coriale, Eurie Dahn, Susan Edmunds, Paula Feldman, Mike Goode, Emily Harrington, Tony Jarrells, Nicholas Joukovsky, Claudia Klaver, Patricia Roylance, Robin Schulze, Lisa Sternlieb, and Linda Shires. Thanks to an Emerson Fellowship at Syracuse University, I was able to devote substantial time to reformulating the book’s methods and argument. I would also like to thank members of the Faculty Writing Group at Syracuse University and the Upstate New York 19c Reading Group as well as students in my graduate courses at Penn State University and the University of South Carolina for their questions and conversation. I am thrilled to have completed this book at USC, my alma mater, as a member of the library faculty in the Irvin Department of Rare Books and Special Collections. In addition to working among first editions of novels I discuss in this book, I have been very fortunate to work alongside Jessica Crouch and Michael Weisenburg and under the leadership of Associate Dean Elizabeth Sudduth and Dean Thomas McNally. At Oxford University

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Press, I am grateful to Robert Faber, Stephanie Ireland, Eleanor Collins, and Aimee Wright. The informed comments and insightful questions of two anonymous readers reshaped the book’s argument and strengthened its details. My most heartfelt thanks are for my tireless supporters: my parents John and Kathy Britton, and my husband and best friend Jody Fowler. Their unwavering confidence has sustained me and this book. Completing it—a book about resemblance and fraternity—as a mother of identical twin boys has, to say the least, altered my understanding of some of its central concepts. Thanks to Simon and Oliver, I can look forward to many years of being an eager witness to the frequent happiness and occasional strife of brotherhood.

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Contents Introduction: Defining Sympathy Smith’s Sympathy and the History of the Novel Sympathy, Literary Form, and History 1. 1759 and 1794: Moral Sentiments, Political Revolution, and Narrative Form Historical Torture and Fictional Imagination Adam Smith’s “Our Brother . . . upon the Rack” in Post-Revolutionary France Bodies and Persons in Sympathy’s Grammar of Vicarious Experience “Things as They Are” or “As If They Were My Own” in Caleb Williams Kinship in Smith’s Sympathy Through Smith’s Window: From Visual Perception to Imaginative Perspective 2. Letters in the Novel and the Novel in Letters: Henry Mackenzie’s Julia de Roubigné and the Afterlife of the Epistolary Novel Sympathy and the Epistolary Novel Correspondence, Soliloquy, and Mackenzie’s Novelistic Voices Mackenzie’s Reformulation of Epistolary Perspectives Shared Language and Racial Difference 3. Laurence Sterne in the Romantic Anthology Literary Anthologies: Sentimental Extracts and Reading Strategies Sterne’s Starling and the Mechanics of Citation “The Negro Girl” of Tristram Shandy Torture, Kinship, and the Jewish Body in Tristram Shandy Animal Minds and Perspectival Sympathy

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70 72 79 84 89

93 97 102 108 117 122

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4. The Ends of Kinship in the French Romantic Novel Narrative Exchange and Sympathetic Experience in Prévost’s Manon Lescaut Fostering Family Ties in Paul et Virginie Atala and René: From Fraternity to Difference Kinship Structures and Narrative Forms

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5. Novelistic Sympathy in Frankenstein Redefining Sympathy: Social Failure and Narrative Promise Shifting Genres and Shifting Speakers Copied Letters “Similar, yet . . . Strangely Unlike”: Forms of Difference

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6. Wuthering Heights and the Relics of the Epistolary Novel Transforming Lockwood’s “Sympathetic Chord” “I am Heathcliff”: Sibling and Stranger Lockwood’s Vicarious Narrative A “Relic of the Dead”: Reframing the Epistolary Novel

180 183 187 195 200

128 131 139 146

155 159 168 172

Coda

209

Bibliography Index

213 231

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Introduction Defining Sympathy

Novels have long been enjoyed for the sympathetic responses they elicit. For twenty-first century audiences, sympathetic identification is, as it was for many of the genre’s earliest critics, a defining feature of reading novels. Today, reading fiction is frequently discussed as a cultural activity with positive ethical, social, and neurological consequences. But when, rather than the sympathetic responses that living readers have for fictional characters, we consider instead the experiences of sympathy that literary characters share with each other, different consequences come to light. These consequences, which are the subject of this book, lie in the intertwined histories of fiction and sympathy. In depicting rather than eliciting sympathetic response, certain novels reshape sympathy’s shared sentiments and mingled tears into an emphatically structural feature of fiction, and they generate a novelistic version of sympathy that aims to accommodate human difference through the experience of narrative. While sympathy is, as early and recent readers of novels attest, a defining feature of the novel’s cultural value, my contention is that, in the years of the genre’s development between 1750 and 1850, key works of British and French fiction fundamentally redefine sympathy. This redefinition entails fiction’s transformation of philosophical models of sympathy into elements of narrative form. Defining “sympathy,” though, has a long interdisciplinary history that continues today.¹ Rooted in human neurology by current scientific research and differentiated from empathy in early twentieth-century aesthetics and psychology, “sympathy” most broadly refers, during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, to a

¹ Defining emotion is a central task in the field of the history of emotions, which has identified the turn of the nineteenth century as a crucial period. See Thomas Dixon, From Passions to Emotions: The Creation of a Secular Psychological Category (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003) and William M. Reddy, Navigations of Feeling: A Framework for the History of Emotions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001). Vicarious Narratives: A Literary History of Sympathy, 1750–1850. Jeanne M. Britton, Oxford University Press (2019). © Jeanne M. Britton. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198846697.001.0001

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primarily emotional experience that is to some extent shared between people.² Its wide range of meaning encompasses emotional, cognitive, physiological, and mystical transmissions of feeling; self-projection and identification with another person; the contagious, automatic spread of emotions among groups of people; and the labored exchange of feeling between two individuals.³ Distinctive within this range is Adam Smith’s The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759), which characterizes sympathy as a process of shifting perspectives—of seeing, essentially, from another person’s point of view. At a time when “sympathy” more commonly describes easy, inevitable, and sometimes dangerous movements of emotions among people, Smith’s abstract conception of feelings that are shared between two individuals is unique. His version of sympathy is also uniquely amenable to the forms of fiction. The narrative aspects of Smith’s Theory itself have been highlighted in various ways.⁴ But novels also adapt aspects of Smith’s definition as they redefine sympathy through their formal structures—shifting perspectives or “stories within stories” in which one character assumes the perspective and voice of another. In this way, key works of fiction follow Smith’s emphasis on imaginative abstraction and the shifting perspectives that, for him,

² For a popular overview of neurological studies on empathy, see Marco Iacoboni, Mirroring People: The Science of Empathy and How We Connect with Others (New York: Picador, 2009). “Empathy” is derived from the German term “Einfühlung,” which approximates “feeling with” or, more strictly, “feeling into.” See Rae Greiner, “1909: The Introduction of ‘Empathy’ into English,” BRANCH: Britain, Representation, and Nineteenth-Century History, ed. Dino Franco Felluga. Extension of Romanticism and Victorianism on the Net. Accessed July 22, 2014. While I specify the significance of “sympathy,” I agree with Derek Attridge’s urging that readers not be dogmatic in distinguishing among “emotion,” “sentiment,” “feeling,” and “affect.” The Work of Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), p. 261. ³ Jonathan Lamb provides a comprehensive view of the concept’s varied permutations. The Evolution of Sympathy in the Long Eighteenth Century (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2009), esp. pp. 67, 115. On sympathy’s medical meanings, see Anne Jessie van Sant, Eighteenth-Century Sensibility and the Novel: The Senses in Social Context (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004) and Christopher Lawrence, “The Nervous System and Society in the Scottish Enlightenment,” in Natural Order: Historical Studies of Scientific Culture, ed. Barry Barnes and Steven Shapin (Beverly Hills: Sage Publications, 1979). On its metaphysical uses, see Seth Lobis, The Virtue of Sympathy: Magic, Philosophy, and Literature in Seventeenth-Century England (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2015). ⁴ Charles Griswold, for example, has noted in his discussion of Smith that “[t]he sympathetic imagination is not solely representational or reproductive. It is also narrative, always seeking to flow into and fill up another situation and to draw things together into a coherent story.” Adam Smith and the Virtues of Enlightenment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), p. 116. More recently, Stephanie DeGooyer has argued that sentimental fiction “reproduces Smith’s triangulated, formal structure of sympathy” through its representations of “distance, time, and reflection.” “ ‘The Eyes of Other People’: Adam Smith’s Triangular Sympathy and the Sentimental Novel,” English Literary History 85.3 (2018), pp. 685, 686.

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constitute sympathetic response. This formal echo coincides, though, with a significant challenge to the role that resemblance plays in philosophical definitions of sympathy. Despite David Hume’s claims in A Treatise of Human Nature (1738–40) that all human beings resemble each other, he specifies that “We sympathize more with persons contiguous to us, than with persons remote from us: With our acquaintance, than with strangers: With our countrymen, than with foreigners.”⁵ Similarly, Smith explains that, if we are in a state of distress, we “expect less sympathy from a common acquaintance than from a friend” and “expect still less sympathy from an assembly of strangers.”⁶ Even as they aspire to universal inclusivity, Enlightenment theories of sympathy tend to flourish in the closed circles of kinship and familiarity. In the novels I discuss, by contrast, characters who are separated by differences of class, race, or species experience a version of sympathy that struggles to accommodate precisely such differences by greeting strangers as siblings and welcoming foreigners as family members. Encounters between these characters produce shifts in narrative perspective and cited, framed, or inset tales as one character sympathizes with another and begins to tell his story. At these moments, fiction redefines sympathy as the struggle to overcome difference through the active engagement with narrative— through hearing, retelling, and transcribing the stories of others. I use the phrase “vicarious narratives” to identify intersections between second-hand emotions, or feeling another person’s emotions as if they were one’s own, and second-hand narratives, or telling another person’s story as if it were one’s own. British and French novels published between 1750 and 1850 generate a specific version of sympathy by manipulating traditional narrative forms (epistolary fiction, embedded tales) and new publication practices (the anthology, the novelistic extract) in response to Enlightenment theories of shared feeling. Gabrielle Starr has noted the curious absence of any theorization about sympathy’s relationship to narrative in eighteenth-century aesthetics or philosophy, an absence that seems especially odd given that the period is ⁵ David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, ed. David Fate Norton and Mary J. Norton (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), p. 371. Lord Kames, a mentor of Smith’s, offers a similar view: “Our relations in distress claim this duty from us, and even our neighbors; but distant distress, where there is no particular connection, scarce rouses our sympathy, and never is an object of duty.” Principles of Equity (London: A. Millar, 1767), p. 15. ⁶ Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, ed. Knud Haakonssen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), p. 28. Subsequent references to this edition will be noted parenthetically.

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so rich in embedded tales that elicit sympathetic response.⁷ This book identifies connections between works of British and French fiction and philosophy that begin to fill that absence. The relationship between shared feelings and shared stories has a conceptual origin in the most iconic Enlightenment definition of sympathy, the opening scene of Smith’s Theory: “Though our brother is upon the rack,” he begins, “as long as we ourselves are at our ease, our senses will never inform us of what he suffers, . . . and it is by the imagination only that we can form any conception of what are his sensations.” The imagination, he continues, grants access to another person’s sensations only “by representing to us what would be our own, if we were in his case” (11). With this “brother,” Smith makes sympathy rely, whether figuratively or literally, on the bonds of kinship. With the rack, he describes the process of imagining another person’s emotions by referring to an outdated torture device used to inflict extreme physical pain in pursuit of a criminal confession. He does so only to specify, however, that it is the representational capacity of the imagination, not sensory experience, that tells us about another person’s feelings. To submit a suspected criminal to the agonies of the rack is to make the physical display of bodily pain signal buried truth and concealed narrative. This implicit correlation between the experience of sympathy and the pursuit of narrative pervades Smith’s Theory, and its elaboration in works of fiction clarifies the under-theorized relationship between sympathy and narrative in this period.⁸ Smith further explains the role the imagination plays in sympathetic response with his figure of the “impartial spectator,” an imagined third party to a sympathetic encounter whose perspectives on both the sufferer and sympathizer encourage those two parties to moderate their own reactions. Smith tests the perspectival labor that constitutes his version of sympathy when he posits, instead of a family member on the rack, a mass of people suffering from an earthquake in China. In this scenario, Smith initiates a movement beyond his familial notion of sympathy towards a conception of sympathy that might accommodate difference. He also traces a key feature of his notion of sympathy that has particular ramifications for

⁷ G. Gabrielle Starr, Lyric Generations: Poetry and the Novel in the Long Eighteenth Century (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004), pp. 190, 269–70. ⁸ On the connection of criminal confessions to fiction, see Peter Brooks, Troubling Confessions: Speaking Guilt in Law and Literature (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), pp. 8–34; Lennard J. Davis, Factual Fictions: The Origins of the English Novel (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1996); and Philip Rawlings, Drunks, Whores and Idle Apprentices: Criminal Biographies of the Eighteenth Century (New York: Routledge, 1992).

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narrative—the transition from visual perception to imaginative perspective. For Smith, sympathetic response does not necessarily require the operation of the senses; instead, visual perception must give way to the abstraction of cognitive perspective. Unlike other writers for whom sympathy is immediate, inevitable, and contagious, Smith focuses on the strain or obstacles that, by challenging and limiting sympathetic response, give rise to an imaginative form that is spatial, geometric, and structural. In the effort or inability to overcome the obstacle of human difference—indexed in the Theory by the distinction between the tortured brother and suffering foreigners—his conception of perspective anticipates a novelistic version of sympathy that struggles to accommodate difference through the shifting perspectives entailed in acts of narrative transmission. The much-discussed “rise of the novel” seems to stray off course at certain stages during the Romantic period, troubled by odd gothic forms and category-defying “quasi-novels,” torn between Jane Austen’s domesticity and Walter Scott’s historicism.⁹ Attention to sympathy’s formal dynamics across this study’s expansive chronology of “the Romantic century” reframes some of these questions of literary history and generic classification. Sympathy is most commonly associated with a particular kind of realist, psychological fiction, especially the works of Austen or Henry James, but it is both prominently experienced and profoundly redefined in sentimental and gothic fiction, in epistolary novels and frame tales. The works I discuss by Laurence Sterne, William Godwin, François-René de Chateaubriand, Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, Mary Shelley, and Emily Brontë redefine sympathy as a novelistic phenomenon by staging scenes of sympathy between characters whose affinities suggest figurative kinships but whose differences stretch the limits of resemblance. The inset or framed tales that follow or precede such sympathetic encounters suggest that the experience of narrative can temporarily suspend difference by allowing one character to speak and feel for another. These novels redefine sympathy as the intersubjective experience of narrative that replaces lived experiences of sympathy that remain unsustainable or impossible between characters separated by difference. Without privileging either the lived experience of sympathy or its narrative approximation, these works suggest that when sensory experience tells characters little about each other’s pasts and emotions, the shifts in perspective by which one character narrates another’s story more reliably allow the ⁹ The term “quasi-novel” is from Gary Kelly, English Fiction of the Romantic Period: 1789–1830 (Harlow: Longman, 1989), p. 253.

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imagination to represent and simulate the emotions and experiences of another person. Most broadly, this redefinition of sympathy grants certain novels an active role in sympathy’s cultural history. More specifically, it sheds new light on two sub-plots in the story of the novel’s rise—the decline of the epistolary novel at the end of the eighteenth century and the increasing popularity and revisionary effects of novelistic extracts during the Romantic period. In tracing the first of these sub-plots, I offer fictional revisions of sympathy as they appear in Henry Mackenzie’s best-selling novel in letters Julia de Roubigné (1777) as a new explanation for the persistent influence of epistolary dynamics in nineteenth-century frame tales—Chateaubriand’s René (1802), Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818) and Brontë’s Wuthering Heights (1847). Identifying the novel’s revision of sympathy as a mode of vicarious narrative calls for a reinterpretation of retrospective frame tales in which they can be seen to transform features associated with (but not exclusive to) epistolary fiction—vocal mobility, emotional immediacy, and multiple perspectives—into the frame tale’s narrative levels and shifting speakers. The second sub-plot in the history of the novel that this book traces centers on short tales framed by sympathetic response—first, the sympathetic scenes that pervade the anthologies that flooded the British literary market after perpetual copyright was lifted in 1774 and, second, canonical French novels that originally appeared as narrative episodes in longer, non-fictional works. In the first case, literary anthologies are explicit about modeling morality and celebrating sentiment. Less explicitly, they are instrumental in the rises of the novel and of certain types of novel reading. When repackaged, resequenced, and retitled in these collections, the inset, embedded tales of Laurence Sterne’s novels reconfigure significant elements of his works—shared and private feelings, figures of radical difference, and the narrative effects of sympathy. In the second case, I look to the narrative roles that kinship metaphors and sympathetic response play in Paul et Virginie (1788) by Bernardin de SaintPierre and René and Atala (1801) by Chateaubriand, all of which originally appeared as episodes within longer works. The narrative structures and publication histories of these novels put forth a specific model of sympathetic narrative transmission. In these works, experiences of sympathy between adoptive fathers and sons cross lines of racial, cultural, and generational difference, and they produce the shifting perspectives and narrative levels that constitute these canonical frame tales. Along with gothic frame tales and epistolary fiction, narrative extracts and episodes framed by sympathetic response generate a novelistic version of sympathy that reshapes the mental

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faculty that Smith defined into the imaginative attempt to overcome difference through the active engagement with another person’s story. Scholars have drawn a broad range of conclusions about the roles that sympathetic experience plays in cultural history. In a central paradox, sympathy has, on one hand, been praised for its contributions to the rise of democracy and humanistic education while, on the other, its emotional structures have been seen to collude with institutions of social inequality and physical or psychological oppression. Sympathy’s ethical value often hinges on the responses of novel readers, and the role sympathy plays in novelistic forms and subgenres specifies aspects of this far-reaching paradox. Martha Nussbaum has influentially claimed that reading literature fosters habits of mind that facilitate the acceptance of racial or cultural difference by means of the sympathetic imagination.¹⁰ Extending this claim, other scholars have aligned sympathy’s ethical value and its relationship to fiction with major historical developments: Nussbaum’s assertion that the rise of the novel “coincided with, and supported, the rise of modern democracy” has been echoed by Lynn Hunt, who suggests, based on Benedict Anderson’s notion of the imagined community, that the rise of “imagined empathy” contributes to the construction of democratic ideals in the middle of the eighteenth century.¹¹ The novel, according to this view, promotes new versions of psychological identification, which in turn provide the foundation for human rights to be considered self-evident. Ian Baucom has described the philosophical, financial, and literary discourses whose convergence produced an “alternate form of representational legitimacy” through “remonstrance, expostulation, and sympathy,” enumerating the ways in which the reproducibility of the melancholy fact generates a new kind of affective epistemology that is the foundation of modern humanitarianism.¹²

¹⁰ Martha Nussbaum, Cultivating Humanity: A Classical Defense of Reform in Liberal Education (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998), p. 94. Suzanne Keen, by contrast, argues that reading fiction, especially popular fiction, does not lead to ethical behavior. Empathy and the Novel (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007). See also Raymond Mar and Keith Oatley, “The Function of Fiction is the Abstraction and Simulation of Social Experience,” Perspectives on Psychological Science 3 (2008), pp. 173–92; Blakey Vermeule, Why Do We Care about Literary Characters? (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010); and Keith Oatley, The Passionate Muse: Exploring Emotion in Stories (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), pp. 153–70. ¹¹ Nussbaum, p. 94. Lynn Hunt, “Paradoxical Origins of Human Rights,” in Human Rights and Revolutions, ed. Jeffrey N. Wasserstrom, Lynn Hunt, and Marilyn B. Young (New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 2000), pp. 3–17. ¹² Ian Baucom, Specters of the Atlantic: Finance Capital, Slavery, and the Philosophy of History (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005), pp. 208, 209.

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But, as these critics are aware, claims that the genre of the novel fosters the sympathetic imagination, which then fuels the spread of democracy and humanitarianism, risk overlooking other connections between the rise of the novel and the rise of other European political and social institutions, most notably those of empire and slavery. A significant body of work on sentiment and sympathy that focuses on the incorporation of these concepts in novelistic perspective has identified invasive, coercive, and violent implications in eighteenth-century descriptions of sympathy. Other critics have been attentive to sentimentalism’s dependence on inequalities of class, gender, and race; when literary sentimentalism’s tropes migrate to the far reaches of empire, a European’s distress over a colonial subject’s sufferings can be seen to reinforce racial and imperial hierarchies.¹³ Lynn Festa, noting that sentimental fiction and the shared feelings it celebrates reach a height in Britain and France at a time “when categories of national, ethnic, and cultural difference seem most imperiled,” argues that these novels work to “create the semblance of likeness while upholding forms of national, cultural, and economic difference.”¹⁴ This underlining of difference in tandem with the exploration of similarity describes the cultural work that certain novels perform in their very structure. Narrative exchanges enacted by novelistic forms through which one character speaks and feels for another suggest that sympathetic identification can temporarily transcend distinctions of class, race, or species, and that speaking as another need not signal emotional appropriation but instead might, during the act of narrative transmission, suspend the boundaries that create human difference. Challenges in certain novels to philosophy’s apparent insistence on biological similarity mean that, during the same decades that witness the ascendancy of racism as a cultural discourse underwritten by speculative science, key novels integrate attempts to overcome difference in their structural fabric. These novels not only promote the

¹³ Classic studies remain G. J. Barker-Benfield, The Culture of Sensibility: Sex and Society in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992) and R. F. Brissenden, Virtue in Distress: Studies in the Novel of Sentiment from Richardson to Sade (New York: Barnes & Noble, 1974). On sympathy in imperial contexts, see Amit S. Rai, Rule of Sympathy: Sentiment, Race, and Power, 1750–1850 (New York: Palgrave, 2002) and Marcus Wood, Empathy, Slavery, and Pornography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003). In a similar vein but different context, Audrey Jaffe argues that sympathy in Victorian fiction upholds the social divisions it might seem to erase. Scenes of Sympathy: Identity and Representation in Victorian Fiction (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2000). ¹⁴ Lynn Festa, Sentimental Figures of Empire in Eighteenth-Century Britain and France (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006), p. 51.

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experience of sympathetic identification in their readers but actually entail the imaginative dynamics of that experience in their form. By giving material shape to both the philosophical tradition of sympathy and the emotional and ethical effects of novel reading, the traditionally marginal subgenres of the sentimental novel, gothic fiction, and the fictional extract assume more prominent positions in the cultural and literary histories of sympathy. To be sure, the frame tale and the epistolary novel are not the only novelistic forms to engage with sympathy. The marriage plot and the national tale are also linked to sympathy’s cultural currency.¹⁵ Gender and nationality are not the focus of this study, though, because, although they are frequently mediated by sympathetic responses, they also tend to be accommodated by the novelistic forms of the marriage plot and the national tale— in sentimentalism, sympathy frequently morphs into eroticism or romantic love, and in the national tale, sympathy is mobilized to establish new forms of national union. Marriage can offer an apparent resolution to gender difference, and naturalization, often joined with marriage, can seem to accommodate national difference. It is instead through a mode of vicarious narration that this era’s fiction attempts to accommodate differences of race and species that its social institutions and historical realities cannot. In fictional worlds, stories shared by characters who cross lines of difference—lines that would only be reinforced by identity categories and institutional structures—suggest that imaginative forms might suspend these boundaries and, for example, allow a European monster to speak on behalf of an Arabian woman, or permit an Englishman to speak for a caged bird. Such encounters across boundaries of differences that Romantic-era institutions cannot accommodate challenge what Nancy Yousef has called sympathy’s “demands for intersubjective symmetry—be it the perception of similarity, the impression of equality, or the expectation of reciprocity.”¹⁶ When the experience of sympathy between dissimilar individuals is blocked, stymied, strained, or delusional, fiction generates a new version of sympathy that reformulates the imaginative shifts in perspective that characterize Smith’s sympathy in its attempt to accommodate difference.

¹⁵ On sympathy’s relationship to the marriage plot, see especially Rachel Ablow, The Marriage of Minds: Reading Sympathy in the Victorian Marriage Plot (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007); on its relationship to the national tale, see Evan Gottlieb, Feeling British: Sympathy and National Identity in Scottish and English Writing, 1707–1832 (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 2007). ¹⁶ Nancy Yousef, Romantic Intimacy (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2013), p. 3.

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Smith’s Sympathy and the History of the Novel Smith’s definition of sympathy is a radical departure from its earlier and contemporary formulations. An older conception of sympathy as an unreflective, somatic communication persists well into the early nineteenth century and often, even as it accounts for physical phenomena, relies on untraceable, immaterial affinities between organs or across bodies. Hume, Edmund Burke, and Anthony Ashley Cooper, Third Earl of Shaftesbury, describe sympathy as the inevitable flow of sentiments from one body to another. They emphasize the “propensity we have to sympathize with others, and to receive by communication their inclinations and sentiments” (Hume) or the flight of emotion from “from face to face” “by contact or sympathy” that is “no sooner seen than caught” (Shaftesbury).¹⁷ The full duplication of another person’s suffering poses no problem for Burke, as it arises, he claims, “from the mechanical structure of our bodies, or from the natural frame and constitution of our minds.”¹⁸ According to Burke, physical pain moves from person to person with both ease and delight in his aesthetics of fugitive emotions, and for Hume, emotions double between persons through a series of echoing vibrations. “The minds of men,” Hume says, “are mirrors to one another.”¹⁹ Differences between these writers and Smith—for whom the challenge posed by approximating another’s suffering triggers the intricate workings of the mind—can be stark. Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s conception of pity is commonly discussed alongside the British discourse of sympathy, and in emphasizing Smith’s distinctions from these other writers, I acknowledge but do not privilege distinctions between French and British theories of emotion. According to these distinctions, French materialists more often look to the physiology of

¹⁷ Hume, Treatise, p. 206; Anthony Ashley Cooper, Third Earl of Shaftesbury, “A Letter Concerning Enthusiasm,” in Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times, ed. Lawrence E. Klein (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), p. 10. Other authors who presume this easy emotional communicability include l’Abbé du Bos, Lord Kames, and Denis Diderot. Du Bos considers sympathy to be based on visual perception and explicitly beyond the realm of reason: “Les larmes d’un inconnu nous émeuvent même avant que nous sçachions le sujet qui le fait pleurer. Les cris d’un homme qui ne tient à nous que par l’humanité, nous font voler à son secours par un mouvement machinal qui précede toute déliberation.” Réflexions critiques sur la poésie et la peinture (Paris: P-J Mariette, 1733), p. 39. According to Lord Kames, “distress painted on the countenance . . . instantaneously inspires the spectator with pity.” Elements of Criticism (New York: Garland, 1972), p. 440. ¹⁸ Edmund Burke, Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, ed. Adam Phillips (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), p. 41. ¹⁹ Hume, Treatise, p. 236.

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feeling while their British, and primarily Scottish, contemporaries offer a view of sentiment that differentiates bodily responses from the cognitive acts that they alternatively provoke and parallel; French writers more easily presume the lure of society while British theories of sociability seem pressed to coax a solitary individual into a realm of social affections.²⁰ Indeed, stages of social development are the conceptual foundation of Rousseau’s pitié, which shares many features of Smith’s sympathy: both are articulated in scenes of violence committed against family members, both emphasize the role of the imagination, and, as David Marshall illuminates, both expose and, in different ways, resist the theatricality of sympathy.²¹ Across Rousseau’s works, the meaning of “pitié” oscillates between extremes of the innate and unreflective operation of the senses in the Discours Second (1754) and the provoked and abstract exercise of the imagination in the “Essai sur l’origine des langues” (1754; 1781). Although Rousseau’s pitié, like Smith’s sympathy, involves alterations of position, place, and case—“ce n’est pas dans nous, c’est dans lui que nous souffrons”—its fundamental contradictions have more to do with the complex transition from the state of nature to the state of society, with what is for him the inherent theatricality of pity’s ostensibly “natural” experience.²² Conflicts between Smith’s conception of sympathy and the more mobile sentiments that Hume and others describe give rise to a novelistic version of sympathy. Adela Pinch has illustrated the ways that sympathy’s wandering emotions, especially in Hume’s account, divorce the study of emotion from the study of the individual in a period traditionally associated with the harnessing of private feeling to individual identity. These feelings are, in her analysis, “autonomous entities that do not always belong to individuals but rather wander extravagantly from one person to another,” and James

²⁰ See Lynn Festa, Sentimental Figures; for the medical contexts of French sentimentalism, see Anne Vila, Enlightenment and Pathology: Sensibility in the Literature and Medicine of Eighteenth-Century France (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997). ²¹ On Smith, see The Figure of Theater: Shaftesbury, Defoe, Adam Smith, and George Eliot (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), and on Rousseau, Surprising Effects, pp. 135–77. Not unlike Smith’s tortured brother, Rousseau imagines “la pathétique image d’un homme enfermé qui apperçoit au dehors une Bête féroce, arrachant un Enfant du sein de sa Mére, brisant sous sa dent meurtriére les foibles membres, et déchirant de ses ongles les entrailles palpitantes de cet Enfant.” Discours second in Œuvres complètes, ed. Jean Starobinski (Paris: Gallimard, 1959), vol. 3, p. 154. ²² “Essai sur l’origine des langues” in Œuvres complètes, vol. 5, p. 395. On differences between sympathy and pity, see Lamb, The Evolution of Sympathy, p. 42.

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Chandler identifies in Smithean sentiment “a structure of vicariousness.”²³ In the novels I discuss, scenes of sympathy employ grammars of vicariousness—the subjunctive mood, for example, in which William Godwin’s Caleb Williams feels the past and present sufferings of his imperious employer that he is preparing to retell “as if they were my own.”²⁴ Building on Chandler’s discussion of sentimentalism’s “novelistic scheme of interlocking points of view” and Pinch’s unraveling of the ties binding emotional experience to individual subjectivity, I argue that obstacles to emotional transferability give rise to novelistic forms of vicariousness that modify Smith’s definition of sympathy.²⁵ These forms—frame tales, embedded narratives—are by no means exclusive to the novel. But in epistolary, sentimental, and gothic novels, these forms employ grammars of vicariousness that, by destabilizing the referentiality of the first-person singular pronoun, loosen the tenacious hold of the critical narrative that intertwines the historical rises of the novel and the modern individual.²⁶ When, that is to say, one novelistic character speaks as “I” when he relates both his own—and then, in an embedded tale—another person’s past, first-person speech refers to multiple selves. Such shifts in speakers that occur along with representations of sympathetic response often suggest origin stories of both the individual novel of which they are a part and, at least implicitly, “the Novel” as a genre. This book charts key moments in the history of the novel’s generic self-authentication, moments that, taken together, constitute a small but notable challenge to critical accounts of the genre’s dependence on the individual. Long understood as fundamental to the readers’ experience of the novel, sympathy is also, as ²³ Adela Pinch, Strange Fits of Passion: Epistemologies of Emotion, Hume to Austen (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996), p. 3; James Chandler, An Archaeology of Sympathy: The Sentimental Mode in Literature and Cinema (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013), pp. 11–12. Rei Terada suggests a similar point when she says that “pathos conveys the explicitly representational, vicarious, and supplementary dimensions of emotion.” Feeling After Theory: Emotion After the “Death of the Subject” (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001), p. 5. ²⁴ Caleb Williams, ed. Pamela Clemit (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), p. 9. The invisibility of the subjunctive here should not minimize its significance. It is also worth noting that this grammar is distinct from what Julie Ellison has identified in Anglo-American culture of the early eighteenth century as a “culture of vicariousness” that locates sympathy and pity within systems of inequality. Cato’s Tears and the Making of Anglo-American Emotion (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), p. 7. ²⁵ An Archaeology of Sympathy, p. xx. ²⁶ Nancy Armstrong revives Ian Watt’s focus on individualism in How Novels Think: The Limits of Individualism from 1719–1900 (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005). Ian Watt, The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson, and Fielding (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1957). On narratives of vicarious experience, see Monika Fludernik, Towards a Natural Narratology (New York: Routlege, 1996), pp. 52–56.

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these individual works suggest, instrumental in its formal development and generic self-justification. As they are introduced or concluded by experiences of sympathy, framed, embedded, and conspicuously cited novelistic narratives suggest that we risk misunderstanding the novel as a genre by associating it primarily with the rise of the modern individual or the intertwining of private feelings and individual identities. Works of sentimental and gothic fiction anchor their own generic status on the embedded tales that arise from attempts to tell another person’s story rather than one’s own. The challenge of gaining access to such stories often underlies fictional scenes of torture. Smith’s image of the brother on the rack is part of a transition during the eighteenth century in which conceptions of torture come to emphasize the viewer’s imagination and the victim’s psychological interiority over the assumption that the truth can be forced out of a body in pain. In this way, speculative scenes of torture conceptualize the experience of imagining another person’s pain and past; the rack, as Smith suggests in this vignette and as fiction elaborates through narrative representation, theorizes vicarious experience. As Ian Baucom has elaborated, the imaginative category of sympathy involves the abstraction necessary to reconstitute another person’s “case” or “situation,” a process which Chandler has shown to make historicism (especially “romantic historicism”) possible.²⁷ Chandler and Baucom show that historicism depends in particular on acts of intellectual abstraction and imaginative exchangeability that Smith specifies take place through the shifting persons, rather than the shared sensations, that the imagination generates through representation. Vicarious narrative experience modifies the assumptions of a sentimentalist epistemology. For Smith, our knowledge of what the tortured brother feels does not derive from the senses, which he says “never inform us of what he suffers,” but instead requires the representational effects of the imagination, which allow “his agonies” to be “adopted and . . . made . . . our own” before they can “affect us” and cause us to “tremble and shudder” (12). In the opening frame of Wuthering Heights, Lockwood’s claim that his “sympathetic chord within” is what “tells” him about Heathcliff ’s nature is confounded by Heathcliff ’s illegibility before it is reshaped into the novel’s

²⁷ Ian Baucom, Specters of the Atlantic; James Chandler, England in 1819: The Politics of Literary Culture and the Case of Romantic Historicism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998).

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complex narrative structure.²⁸ This scene and the frame tale it precedes distill a fundamental concern of the following chapters—the increasing significance of story-telling’s representational forms over the epistemological purchase of identification based on sensory experience.

Sympathy, Literary Form, and History To consider novelistic forms alongside Smithean sympathy’s “structure of vicariousness” is to approach “the very heterogeneity at the heart of form’s conceptual history” that Caroline Levine has remarked “an attention to both aesthetic and social forms” provides.²⁹ Smith’s version of sympathy constitutes a particular form, an imaginative, psychological pattern, with which the forms of fiction intersect. This intersection in turn confronts social forms by which “otherness” is constructed. In identifying these intersections of forms that are literary, emotional, and social, this study adopts a methodology that has affinities with the politically-engaged new formalism that Levine describes. Uncovering the formal dynamics of sympathy’s novelistic incarnation ultimately suggests that the novelistic version of sympathy embodied in key texts of the Romantic century posits flexible conceptions of identity and greater ease in identifying across boundaries of difference. In their forms rather than their plots, certain novels put forth a more inclusive version of sympathy than that which historical realities offer. In this light, fictional adaptations of philosophical theories of sympathy, serve, as Levine and Susan Wolfson have argued of literary forms, to “investigate problems of ideology, subjectivity, and social conditions.”³⁰ In my argument, literary forms often suggest experiences of sympathetic union and elastic categories of identity that historical realities preclude. The narrative forms discussed in following chapters are proposed, desired, or implied almost as much as they are enacted. These unrealized forms—stories that are promised but untold, suspected but not revealed—conjure structures of narrative layers that never appear in the plots of Tristram Shandy and Caleb Williams (1794); epistolary exchange is a subject of desire rather ²⁸ Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights, ed. Ian Jack (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), p. 3. ²⁹ Chandler, Archaeology of Sympathy, pp. 11–12. Caroline Levine, Forms: Whole, Rhythm, Hierarchy, Network (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015), p. 3. ³⁰ Levine, p. 12. Susan Wolfson, Formal Charges: The Shaping of Poetry in British Romanticism (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997).

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than the content of Henry Mackenzie’s Julia de Roubigné or Chateaubriand’s René; a collection of letters might, in Frankenstein’s internal textual genesis, authenticate its central frame tale. Form, in these situations, becomes quite immaterial, but it is no less, as it were, material. Literary forms are not, then, seen as forces of constraint or ideological contortion, and they are not understood to distort or suppress historical reality. Instead, historical reality functions both to encourage imaginative forms that attempt to reach beyond its limits and to prompt explicit and more careful articulations of sympathy’s dynamics. In chapter 1, the French Revolution does not radically alter the novelistic forms in which sympathy takes shape, but it does lend particular urgency to some of the same novelistic forms that appear, as following chapters show, as early as the 1760s and as late as the 1840s. In discussing the revolution, I emphasize the conceptual, lexical, and formal nuance with which sympathy must, in its wake, be articulated, but in discussing texts published well beyond its influence, I note similar novelistic patterns that question the impact of the revolution on the literary history of sympathy. Many scholars agree that the French Revolution profoundly complicates the cultural history of sympathy. There is less agreement, though, on what that complication actually entails—sympathy’s eradication as a social ideal, its absorption into an insidious mode of narrative omniscience, or its retreat into a realm of private isolation.³¹ A French translation and critique of Smith’s Theory produced immediately after the Terror directly addresses these issues. Sophie de Condorcet, née de Grouchy—a translator, salonnière, and the wife of Jean Antoine Nicolas de Caritat, Marquis de Condorcet— completed her translation after her husband died while in flight from revolutionaries. De Grouchy radically alters Smith’s “brother . . . upon the rack” when she renders his iconic image as one of our “similars” on the “wheel” [“un de nos semblables . . . sur la roue”].³² Readers of her translation, which was the standard French version of Smith’s Theory for nearly two centuries, are asked to imagine the sufferings of a “similar” or a “fellow” on the breaking wheel rather than the pain of a sibling on the rack. In 1794–5, ³¹ For an overview of these discussions, see Ablow, Marriage of Minds, p. 3. Janet Todd has noted that, by the end of the eighteenth century, “sensibility was viewed more and more as anticommunity, a progressing away from, not into, Humean social sympathy.” Sensibility: An Introduction (New York: Routledge, 1986), p. 126. ³² Sophie de Condorcet, née de Grouchy, Théorie des sentimens moraux, ou essai analytique sur les principes des jugemens que portent naturellement les hommes d’abord sur les actions des autres, et ensuite sur leurs propres actions, suivi d’une dissertation sur l’origine des langues par Adam Smith (Paris: F. Buisson, 1798), p. 6.

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when de Grouchy is thought to have begun her translation (published in 1798), torture cannot be understood as the historically or geographically distant metaphor that it is for Smith in 1759. With this phrase, de Grouchy signals the incompatibility of Smith’s figurative violence with the Terror’s actual violence of 1793–4, expands the range of Smith’s sympathy in accordance with the revolution’s promise of universal inclusion in 1789, and initiates a critique of the restrictions that kinship imposes on his version of sympathy. De Grouchy is instrumental in a study of Smith’s influence on British and French narrative fiction not because the novelists I discuss read her translation or used her terminology; indeed, it is also worth noting that Smith’s sympathy informs works by novelists whether they are known to have been familiar with his writing or not. Her translation is a nuanced response to Smith’s philosophical system produced in an incendiary atmosphere that is charged with the very issues—state violence, shared sentiments, pledges for equality and brotherhood—that animate the cultural and critical afterlives of Smith’s sympathy. For Smith’s Theory, which Rae Greiner has described as “a work of narrative theory,” to meet the French Revolution so directly in de Grouchy’s work is for sympathy’s inchoate ties to fiction and form to face exactly the kind of physical violence and emotional contagion that literary adaptations of sympathy have, however problematically, been understood to incarnate.³³ Her translation also mediates between Greiner’s classification of Smith’s text as a work of narrative theory and Baucom’s consideration of it as “a treatise on the relation between the historical event and the human imagination.”³⁴ Her work, which is increasingly being granted the individual attention that it warrants, serves in this study as a conceptual framework for narrative form’s modification of philosophical models of sympathy. For the novels studied in later chapters, the same issues that specify de Grouchy’s divergence from Smith—the roles that the body, the imagination, kinship, and resemblance play in sympathetic response—constitute fiction’s redefinition of sympathy as a particular narrative mode. As reading Smith’s Theory of 1759 through its revolutionary-era translation suggests, a literary history of novelistic sympathy requires not only the broad chronological span of “the Romantic century” that this book adopts but also the somewhat peculiar chronological procedures that many ³³ Rae Greiner, “Sympathy Time: Adam Smith, George Eliot, and the Realist Novel,” Narrative 17 (2009), p. 294. ³⁴ Specters of the Atlantic, p. 274.

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individual chapters follow. My argument is to some extent teleological, insofar as I claim that eighteenth-century novels anticipate a version of sympathy that is most fully incarnated in Shelley’s Frankenstein and Brontë’s Wuthering Heights. I want to emphasize, though, that the development of a mode of vicarious narration is not entirely linear, that it emerges out of nineteenth-century fiction’s revisions of eighteenth-century philosophy and confrontations between new and traditional narrative and print forms. Such anachronisms feature in individual chapters: Sterne’s original publications of the 1760s are considered alongside their altered appearances in early nineteenth-century anthologies, and Brontë’s Victorian novel is discussed as a commentary on eighteenth-century epistolary and sentimental tropes. What this historical range also reveals, in the development of a mode of vicarious narration before, during, and long after the 1790s, is the possibility that the French Revolution might play a different, smaller role in the relationship between sympathy and the novel than has been assumed. This book’s contention that the transmission of narrative offers imaginative experiences that render notions of identity more capacious diverges from current assumptions about Enlightenment individuality and the Romantic self. The shared feelings that Smith describes and that novelists fictionalize are not amenable to assumptions of affect theory, and they rest uneasily with tenets of poststructuralism.³⁵ Smith’s sympathy denies both the privilege that affect theory grants to communal emotions and the exclusive interiority of individual feeling that some traditional histories of both the subject and the novel have valorized.³⁶ Following chapters focus on ³⁵ The analysis offered here refracts the questions in Enlightenment philosophy of shared emotion and individual identity through narrative form rather than a rehearsal of the poststructuralist “death of the subject.” Jacques Khalip’s discussion of sympathy takes as a starting point the unmoored subjectivity that poststructuralism has nearly reified. The prominent role played by human difference in fiction’s redefinition of sympathy runs against what Khalip references as “the humanistic imperative to conceive others as like subjects—an imperative specific to a sentimental politics of recognition.” Anonymous Life: Romanticism and Dispossession (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009), p. 17. Taking a different approach, Thomas Pfau reads romantic affects (paranoia, trauma, and melancholy) in ways that yield a similar conclusion that minimizes the force of the romantic subject. Romantic Moods: Paranoia, Trauma, and Melancholy, 1794–1840 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005). ³⁶ Smith, Hume, Rousseau, and others have no place, for example, in Teresa Brennan’s claim that, after the seventeenth century, “the idea that persons were . . . affected by the emotions of others . . . loses ground in the official record, the philosophical canon.” The Transmission of Affect (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2004), p. 17. Reading eighteenth-century sympathy through affect theory, Miranda Burgess offers a graceful description of conflicting models of sympathy that concludes by favoring the model articulated by Shaftesbury and Hume and characterizing Smith’s opposing model as one of displacement. “On Being Moved: Sympathy, Mobility, and Narrative Form,” Poetics Today 32.2 (2011), pp. 289–321.

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novels whose depictions of sympathy presume that emotions originate in individual experience and that one individual’s emotional experience might be met with responsive identification from another individual. In these novels, emotional experience then serves, through its transformation into cited, transcribed, retold narratives, as the material for novelistic forms by which sympathy is redefined. Based on two case studies centered in the year 1794, de Grouchy’s translation of Smith’s Theory and Godwin’s Caleb Williams, chapter 1 explores historical situatedness as a means to reconsider literary forms that struggle to imagine human connections beyond the social, political, and institutional limitations of contemporary reality. In this chapter’s first case study, de Grouchy’s translation responds to the question of Smithean sympathy’s fate after the French Revolution and highlights the same features of his work (kinship, physicality, and imaginative abstraction) that are fundamental features in novelistic revisions of sympathy. Through its interweaving of historical reference and novelistic form, Caleb Williams shows that modifying Smith through political fiction means that the reality of social oppression limits the possibility of fiction’s unique purview—the imaginative experience of becoming someone else. The responses of Godwin and de Grouchy to Smith’s work of 1759 dramatize the tensions that define the mode of vicarious narration that later chapters elaborate. Historically and conceptually, this mode of vicarious narration has its origins in the decline of the epistolary novel. Chapter 2 positions Henry Mackenzie’s Julia de Roubigné as a transitional text in the history of the novel due to its formal revisions of epistolary perspective and its echoes of Smith’s sympathy. Sympathy invokes an emotionally receptive other, and the acts of imaginative repositioning that Smith describes produce multiple perspectives; these elements shape the particular epistolary form of Mackenzie’s novel. Julia de Roubigné provides only one side of its three correspondences, and characters refer to absent letters in a practice of citation that destabilizes the speaking self and transforms conversation into soliloquy. The novel’s brief encounter with racial difference on a plantation in the Caribbean remains enclosed within the voice of a single letter-writer, as if to indicate that the epistolary novel’s characteristic multiplicity of voices cannot provide equal space for the confrontation of difference. From chapter 2’s focus on the decline and reimagination of epistolary fiction, chapter 3 turns to the rise and revisionary effects of the literary anthology, specifically the immensely popular versions of Sterne’s Tristram Shandy and A Sentimental Journey. Anthologized versions of Sterne

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mobilize prominent aspects of his original works—the structure of the frame tale, an interest in giving voice to figures of radical difference, and intersubjective experiences of sentiment and narrative. Episodes of A Sentimental Journey that circulated widely in literary anthologies stand to complicate critical discussions of Sterne’s sentimentality and subjectivity because they omit not only his bawdy humor and his sentimentalist eroticism but also his emphasis on resolute subjectivity and sympathetic acquisitiveness. In the case of Tristram Shandy, anthologies amplify what is in the novel a muted echo of Smith’s “brother . . . upon the rack.” Tristram Shandy repeatedly gestures towards the untold tale of an African girl that is linked in undisclosed ways to that of Sterne’s own figure of a brother who suffers the pains of the rack. In the novel, Sterne focuses on a tortured brother and a silent former slave in passages that were originally separated by multiple volumes and many years of publication. Extracts in popular anthologies, however, bring the suffering brother closer to the silent former slave and stress the implicit connections between the stories of the tortured Englishman and the African girl. In an elaborate series of embedded tales that repeatedly promise and withhold narrative, Sterne suggests—and anthologies emphasize—that although a familial model of sympathy cannot represent the stories of those beyond notions of human resemblance, the shifting perspectives that constitute Smith’s sympathy offer fiction the structural means by which to aspire to the representation of such narratives. Popular anthologies around the turn of the century suggest that Sterne’s fiction imagines sympathetic identification beyond the historical realities of both the 1760s and later decades that would have maintained the distance between the experiences of an Englishman and a former slave. Chapter 4 further considers textual extraction and the life of sympathy after the French Revolution. Textual extraction of the sort that creates the literary anthology is also at play in the publication histories of René (1802) and Atala by François-René de Chateaubriand and Paul et Virginie (1788) by Jacques-Henri Bernardin de Saint-Pierre. Originally episodes within longer non-fictional texts, each of these novels foregrounds sympathetic responses in its narrative frame. In these works, the exchange of narrative overcomes differences that oppose both a familial model of sympathy and the extreme resemblances that produce unsustainable communities and narrative silence. Threats of sibling incest lie at the core of each framed tale. These three novels, published on the eve and in the wake of the French Revolution, critique the ideal of fraternity through the ancestral lines that narrative transmission forges across generations: young men tell stories to

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adoptive fathers, and fathers tell stories to strangers who are addressed as sons. Structures of kinship offer novelistic solutions to the stasis and silence that the social ideal of universal siblinghood generates. These novels locate a model of sympathy that specifically rejects fraternity at the moments when narrative perspectives shift and the texts of these episodes-turned-novels begin. According to the publication histories of these works, not only is sympathy a defining feature of fiction, but its explicit presence can oversee the transformation of embedded narrative episodes into canonical novels. From Chateaubriand’s fictions set in French Louisiana, chapter 5 turns to Shelley’s Frankenstein, in which a striking scene shows the creature weeping with the Arabian Safie over the fate of Native Americans as he watches her unobserved. This strained identification of an inhuman creature with the novel’s racial other is the crux of Frankenstein’s version of sympathy. The creature embodies a kind of difference beyond classification that Shelley’s novelistic model of sympathy seeks to accommodate through acts of vicarious narration, and his telling and transcription of Safie’s story are both the structural center of the novel’s narrative levels and the conceptual pivot of Shelley’s reformulation of sympathy. With letters at its margins and its center, Frankenstein abandons the form but absorbs key features of epistolary fiction as it explicitly puts forth the transmission of retrospective narratives as compensation for the impossibility of sympathetic experience. Throughout this novel, moments of narration, transcription, and transmission consistently intersect with experiences of sympathy, which provide the impetus for narrative to be both told and recorded. The shifts in perspective around which Smith centers his definition become, in Shelley’s version of novelistic sympathy, acts of narrative framing and novel writing that attempt to overcome difference that defies classification. The final chapter offers a new reading of Wuthering Heights, in which sympathy performs a structural function without facilitating the exchange of sentiment. Focusing on Lockwood’s roles as the novel’s original narrator, Nelly Dean’s auditor, and her story’s scribe, chapter 6 argues that the dynamics of a novelistic rather than physiological version of sympathy negotiate transitions between oral narratives, the written text of Lockwood’s journal, and the printed retrospective narrative that constitutes this novel. The mode of vicarious narration this book identifies originates in the decline of epistolary fiction, and it culminates in the epistolary logic that justifies the unique frame structure of Wuthering Heights. Brontë’s novel transforms Enlightenment conceptions of sympathy not only in its formal manipulation of epistolary logic but also in the shared identity between Heathcliff and

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Catherine, which returns to the extremes of familial proximity and racial difference that trouble eighteenth-century notions of sympathy: Heathcliff ’s unknown origin allows him to be read either as Catherine’s brother or a racial “other.” After explaining that she has “watched and felt” Heathcliff ’s sorrows, Catherine tells Nelly “I am Heathcliff.”³⁷ This assertion of their shared identity simultaneously suggests both extremes, an assimilation of radical otherness or a complete mirroring of the self in the familial other, as if to annihilate, through the experience of shared suffering, the boundary that separates sibling from stranger.

³⁷ Brontë, pp. 72–3.

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1 1759 and 1794 Moral Sentiments, Political Revolution, and Narrative Form

The eighteenth-century discourse of emotion abounds in scenes of violence and spectacles of suffering. To parse the elements of sympathetic response, writers including Adam Smith, David Hume, and Edmund Burke look to state-sponsored acts of punishment and justice; the social sentiments of shame and sympathy are variously defined through references to the pillory, the scaffold, and, most notably, the rack. Such philosophical vignettes invoke real historical violence, whether it is understood as foreign, distant, or comparatively recent. But when sympathy is a topic of consideration during and immediately after the Terror, suggestions of historical or foreign violence pale in comparison to what was the present moment of political upheaval. In the middle of the eighteenth century, Smith defines sympathy through a hypothetical scene of extreme physical pain. After the excesses of the French Revolution, though, such definitions of sympathy through imaginative scenarios of political and juridical violence prompt more explicit articulations of sympathy during a decade that witnessed very real spectacles of suffering. This chapter identifies an urgent clarification and careful articulation, in post-Terror philosophy and fiction, of sympathy’s abstract, imaginative, and potentially transgressive features.¹ Both of this chapter’s case studies are centered in the year 1794. Immediately after the Terror, Sophie de Grouchy, the widow of one of its victims, produced a translation of Smith’s Theory that directly addresses a question that historians and literary critics have been asking for decades: what happens to sympathy, and Smith’s sympathy in particular, after the French Revolution? While some critics argue that sympathy itself fundamentally ¹ This process parallels, on a smaller scale, Michael McKeon’s concept of “explicitation,” the manifestation in conceptual clarity of that which had been present but never articulated. The Secret History of Domesticity: Public, Private, and the Division of Knowledge (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005), p. xix. Vicarious Narratives: A Literary History of Sympathy, 1750–1850. Jeanne M. Britton, Oxford University Press (2019). © Jeanne M. Britton. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198846697.001.0001

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depends on physical or imaginative violence, others have argued that the French Revolution and subsequent anxieties in Britain required a radical reinterpretation if not the outright rejection of sympathy as a viable cultural concept.² Her translation offers a nuanced critique of Smith’s sympathy that highlights the same aspects of his work—kinship, abstraction, and physicality—that are fundamental features in novelistic revisions of sympathy. De Grouchy’s remarkable rendition and, in her “Lettres sur la sympathie,” her rigorous critique of the Theory interrogate Smithean sympathy’s proclivities for violence, its reliance on kinship and resemblance, and its alternations between abstraction and embodiment. When Smith’s sympathy migrates to revolutionary Paris, what emerges in de Grouchy’s lexical nuance and direct critique is an argument that his understanding of sympathy is inadequate in the face of actual political insurrection and that his reliance on kinship is distinct from the revolution’s egalitarian ideology. For the novels studied in later chapters, the issues that specify de Grouchy’s divergence from Smith—the roles of the body, the imagination, kinship, and resemblance in sympathetic response—constitute fiction’s redefinition of sympathy as a particular narrative mode. De Grouchy’s translation is itself a highly charged text in the cultural history of sympathy that warrants individual attention; in the context of this book, it provides a conceptual framework for the modification of sympathy’s dynamics in novelistic form. As they are presented in his original work and its revolutionary-era translation, Smith’s two key figures of the brother on the rack and the impartial spectator specify features of his version of sympathy that give shape to a novelistic mode of vicarious narration. What de Grouchy articulates as philosophical content, William Godwin’s Things as They Are; Or, the Adventures of Caleb Williams (1794) articulates in novelistic form. The full title’s emphatic indicative mood—“Things as They Are”—leaves little room for the grammar of vicariousness that Smith’s ² See Evelyn Forget, “Evocations of Sympathy: Sympathetic Imagery in Eighteenth-Century Social Theory and Physiology,” History of Political Economy, Annual Supplement to Vol. 35 (2003) and Mary Fairclough, The Romantic Crowd: Sympathy, Controversy, and Print Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013). On sympathy’s role in British responses to the revolution, see Harriet Guest, Unbounded Attachment: Sentiment and Politics in the Age of the French Revolution (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013) and John Whale, Imagination under Pressure: Politics, Aesthetics, and Utility 1789–1832 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). Taking the revolution as a case study in the history of emotions, William Reddy has shown that the pursuit of false revolutionaries during the Terror effectively unraveled the dominant discourse of sentimentalism, according to which emotions that are expressed must necessarily be authentic. The Navigation of Feeling: A Framework for the History of the Emotions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), pp. 141–72.

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version of sympathy facilitates. The novel’s plot persistently seeks, but does not adequately provide, a narrative confession. Godwin uses two historicallycharged references—colonial torture, a locked iron chest—to signal stories that are imagined and sought but untold, making novelistic form itself a pure abstraction. According to Caleb Williams, modifying Smith through political fiction means that the reality of social oppression restricts the possibility of fiction’s unique purview—the imaginative experience of becoming someone else—and requires a more explicit articulation of its appeal, dynamics, and challenges. Prominent in critical discussions of fiction’s adaptation of sympathy, the significance of violence and oppression warrants careful attention. It should first be noted that the physical pain that the rack implies fades in the Theory’s subsequent examples of sympathetic response, where this initial image more clearly becomes the foundation for a process that facilitates shared joy as well as sorrow. What follows are pleasant, quotidian familial and social scenes: a mother’s care for her crying infant (15) and a man sharing pleasure with a friend who enjoys, for the first time, a work of fiction already familiar to him (17–18).³ Although later scenarios include instances of social strife and state-supported retribution, it remains just as difficult to find latent violence in Smith’s scene of communal reading as it is to insist that a model of appropriative pain is the philosophical core of his work.⁴ Indeed, pain and suffering are not constituent elements of sympathy for Smith, which he says includes not only shared sorrow but “fellow-feeling with any passion whatever” (13). The potential for sympathy to refer to shared pleasure and sorrow calls into question the influence that violence and disempowerment have had in critical discussions of the incorporation of sympathy in novelistic point of view. It is not without reason, though, that Smith’s opening image of the brother on the rack has seemed to invite claims that Enlightenment notions of sympathy require the very systems of oppression and violence that they might otherwise be expected to ameliorate. These claims are of course at odds with an established argument that sympathy is fundamentally a

³ Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, ed. Knud Haakonssen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002). References will be noted parenthetically. ⁴ According to David Marshall, the most vivid pain in Smith’s Theory is not the agony of the rack but rather the emotional pain provoked by the pillory and the relentless gaze of unsympathetic spectators, the crippling social sentiments of shame and embarrassment. The Figure of the Theater: Shaftesbury, Defoe, Adam Smith, and George Eliot (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), pp. 182–7.

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progressive social force, that the Enlightenment discourse of sentiment ushers in lasting structures of social cohesion. Violence hovers around Smith’s Theory; Robert Mitchell and Ian Baucom have proven the statesponsored executions after the failed Stuart rebellion of 1745 to be, in Baucom’s words, “everywhere and nowhere” in Smith’s work.⁵ Even though Smith specifies that sympathy does not exclusively identify shared suffering, for readers then and now, unpleasant feelings are understood to be the most common motivations of sympathetic response. For a number of recent critics, sympathy arises specifically from institutional structures of oppression. Observing “the proximity of sympathy to aggression,” Jonathan Lamb states that “sympathy thrives in situations of comparative powerlessness.”⁶ In discussions of Enlightenment philosophy and its nineteenth-century cultural inheritance, scholars have exposed this apparent paradox—that a discourse of benevolence entails structures of dominance and cruelty—by drawing out sympathy’s reliance on visuality and uncovering an insidious tinge to its ethical stance.⁷ In this vein, Amit Rai has provocatively claimed that sympathy “needs the trauma of murderous violence to give it life.”⁸ One might wonder, then, whether Smith’s sympathy finds its ideal stage in the bloodbath of the Terror, or if the violence in Paris of 1794 enacts even if it inverts the philosophical assumptions of Smith’s 1759 Theory. No critic has made such an assertion, but it is precisely its incongruity that the more vehement arguments about sympathy’s innate violence seem to ignore.⁹ ⁵ Ian Baucom, Specters of the Atlantic: Finance Capital, Slavery, and the Philosophy of History (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005), pp. 250–1; Robert Mitchell, “The Violence of Sympathy: Adam Smith on Resentment and Executions,” 1650–1850: Ideas, Aesthetics and Inquiries in the Early Modern Era 8 (2003), pp. 321–41. ⁶ Preserving the Self in the South Seas: 1680–1840 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), p. 276; Evolution of Sympathy, p. 1. ⁷ See Marcus Wood, Slavery, Empathy, and Pornography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002); Laura Hinton, The Perverse Gaze of Sympathy: Sadomasochistic Sentiments from Clarissa to Rescue 911 (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1999); and Ildiko Csengei, Sympathy, Sensibility and the Literature of Feeling in the Eighteenth Century (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012). According to Wood, Smith’s Theory offers a model of appropriative pain that, when employed in John Gabriel Stedman’s Narrative of a Five Years Expedition Against the Revolted Negroes of Surinam, permits the sympathetic gaze of the white spectator or reader to take over the body of a slave. For Wood, “an observer’s (viewer’s, voyeur’s, witness’s) sympathetic response to another person’s pain lies in a gesture of extreme psychic masochism” (102). Hinton sees sympathy and its moral authority as more insidious than the panopticon’s prison guard: sympathy “conceals the desire for and the use of power through identification. Through sympathy, the aggressivity of sentiment is safely, perversely, released” (16, italics in original). ⁸ Amit S. Rai, Rule of Sympathy: Sentiment, Race, and Power, 1750–1850 (New York: Palgrave, 2002), p. 70. ⁹ More restrained literary histories have found in the 1790s the ultimate fulfillment of sentimentalism, increased threats of emotional contagion, and anxieties about the emotional

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When literary scholars have focused specifically on sympathy’s relationship to novelistic perspective, the gaze of Smith’s impartial spectator has been understood, especially in Foucauldian work of the 1980s, as insidious, and the violence of Smith’s opening image has been understood to generate in novelistic omniscience a fictional form of psychological invasion and institutional coercion. I remain skeptical about such claims. I do take seriously, though, the implications of surreptitious cruelty lingering beneath sympathy’s veneer of benevolence. Based on the two case studies of de Grouchy’s translation and Godwin’s Caleb Williams, this chapter examines the violence that has been attributed to Smith’s sympathy itself and its reinterpretation in narrative forms in order to specify the significance of metaphor and grammar as well as the function of kinship and physicality in his definition of sympathy. In its figures of the brother on the rack and a natural disaster in the Far East, as the chapter’s final section elaborates, Smith’s Theory initiates a transformation of visual perception into imaginative perspective that Caleb Williams and the novels discussed in later chapters explore in literary form.

Historical Torture and Fictional Imagination Smith’s speculative scene of torture calls on the long history and contemporary experience of witnessing other people’s real pain. In Smith’s scenario, a group of witnesses is asked to imagine the pain the rack inflicts: “Though our brother is upon the rack, as long as we ourselves are at our ease, our senses will never inform us of what he suffers” (11). For Hume, by contrast, the rack elicits only “horror,” leaving its witnesses “no leisure to temper this uneasy sensation by any opposite sympathy.”¹⁰ It is not for Smith the experience of seeing the victim writhe in pain or hearing his screams, and quite possibly the audible dislocation of his joints, that manages to “inform” witnesses to this scene of the pain being experienced. “It is,” he continues, “by the imagination only that we can form any conception of what are his sensations” (11). While historically, the rack signals a pursuit of criminal confession, philosophically, Smith uses the rack to consider the mental and political force of epistolary correspondences. David Denby, for example, describes the French Revolution as “the ultimate sentimental event.” Sentimental Narrative and the Social Order in France, 1760–1820 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), p. 96. ¹⁰ David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, ed. David Fate Norton and Mary J. Norton (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), p. 250.

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faculty that might give us knowledge—“inform us”—about another person’s experiences. Seeking knowledge of another person’s pain rather than a criminal confession, Smith’s witnesses are informed not by sensory stimulation but by imaginative labor. The rack was primarily used in private, in judges’ quarters, and generally hidden from public view. Secrecy was normally a central feature of legal proceedings that included torture.¹¹ In general, a more limited English practice contrasts with the more widespread use of torture on the continent. During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, torture was more common in Scotland than in England; the rack was outlawed in England in the 1620s and in Scotland in 1708, after the 1707 Acts of Union.¹² The contrast between English and Scottish practice casts the Theory’s opening image as a point of national division forty years after unification; just over a decade after the Jacobite rebellion of ’45, this image can also be understood to register the brutality of English oppression.¹³ If Smith’s moral philosophy intends to forge social bonds that would parallel national union, its opening image might instead invoke threatening degrees of difference and discord. Over the course of the eighteenth century, changing conceptions of torture grant increasing significance to psychological interiority and the mind instead of physical violence and the body.¹⁴ Building on the imaginative implications that the practice had gathered during the eighteenth century, Romantic-era literary depictions of torture frequently point to hidden, untold stories from positions of radical individuality: the novelistic torture scene, by promising and withholding narrative disclosure, conceptualizes psychological interiority ¹¹ John H. Langbein, Torture and the Law of Proof: Europe and England in the Ancien Régime (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976), p. 83; see also Pieter Spierenburg, The Spectacle of Suffering: Executions and the Evolution of Repression: From a Preindustrial Metropolis to the European Experience (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), p. 188. ¹² See Elizabeth Hanson, “Torture and Truth in Renaissance England,” Representations 34 (1991), pp. 53–84. ¹³ Because the rack was banned in Scotland only after the Union with England, it seems quite possible that shame may inform Smith’s scene of torture. It is also worth considering this point in light of Evan Gottlieb’s observation that sympathy may, by virtue of its primarily Scottish origins, arise precisely from culturally enfranchised if politically marginalized national groups. Feeling British: Sympathy and National Identity in Scottish and English Writing, 1707–1832 (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 2007), pp. 20–1. ¹⁴ Steven Bruhm, noting that “off-stage” scenes of torture in gothic literature make another person’s physical suffering the product of imaginative labor, argues that torture prioritizes psychological interiority over visual spectacle. Gothic Bodies: The Politics of Pain in Romantic Fiction (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1994), p. 117. In the French context, Lisa Silverman identifies a transition in which truth comes to be understood as a result of mental deliberation rather than bodily release. Tortured Subjects: Pain, Truth, and the Body in Early Modern France (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), p. 168.

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and impenetrable alterity. In fiction, the rack theorizes vicariousness and prompts representation through its invocation of untold narratives. Godwin extends this logic in a reference to torture that amplifies the role that scenes of torture play in understanding the process of imaginatively feeling another person’s pain and temporarily adopting his identity. Caleb Williams centers on its title character’s agonizing pursuit of a criminal confession—confirmation of his employer’s suspected guilt in three murders. As if writhing in the turmoil of uncertainty, Caleb considers a radical switch in identity a means by which to hear a criminal confession. “Curiosity,” Caleb states, “so long as it lasted, was a principle stronger in my bosom than even the love of independence.” To gratify it, he says, he “would have submitted to the condition of a West Indian Negro, or to the tortures inflicted by North American savages” (139–40).¹⁵ Submitting to slavery and torture, Caleb also imagines a significant alteration in person and position— to satisfy his curiosity, he imagines not only sacrificing his freedom, but also changing his race. Caleb’s employment means that his patron, the troubled squire Ferdinando Falkland, agrees, after the deaths of Caleb’s parents, to “take” him “into his family” (4). But this domestic adoption cannot erase class division, and Caleb bases his homosocial bond with Falkland on difference rather than likeness: “there was,” he says, “a magnetical sympathy between me and my master” (109).¹⁶ Indeed, Caleb’s willingness to sacrifice his Englishness also registers the vast distance—or the opposing poles— between which sympathy’s magnetism reaches. In Godwin’s politically radical novel, Caleb, a servant, might as well be a slave; seeking the experience of otherness that hearing his patron’s confession would grant him, he positions himself alongside the British empire’s most disempowered subjects. For Caleb, torture is perhaps an unsurprising point of comparison. Its specific effects, though, are quite surprising. As he imagines it, torture reverses the logic that presumes that the truth can be forced out of a suffering body by casting the torture victim as he who wishes to hear rather than hide a criminal confession. His speculative torture scene embodies the desired experience of hearing—and then transmitting—another person’s

¹⁵ Caleb Williams, ed. Pamela Clemit (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009). References to the novel’s original edition, noted parenthetically, will be to this edition. ¹⁶ For this term’s resonance with political radicalism, see Eric Daffron, “ ‘Magnetical Sympathy’: Strategies of Power and Resistance in Godwin’s Caleb Williams,” Criticism 37.2 (1995), pp. 213–32. For a discussion of the homoerotic and psychoanalytic significance of the attraction between Caleb and Falkland, see John Rodden, “Godwin’s Caleb Williams: ‘A HalfTold and Mangled Tale’,” College Literature 36.4 (2009), pp. 119–46.

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story. With this scenario, Godwin imagines the potential for a sympathetic exchange of narrative to suspend categories of human difference, to make one individual willing to become—temporarily, imaginatively—another. Elaine Scarry has argued that torture renders pain visible and destroys speech.¹⁷ The literary scenes that reinterpret this historical practice, though, emphasize the possibility of speech, the momentary silence rather than the permanent annihilation of the voice. Just as a spoken confession would bring the suffering induced by the rack to a halt, fictional scenes of torture depend on confessions that are desired but untold, on the voice that remains silent but possible. Smith’s image of visceral pain makes suppressed, unspoken narrative central to his theory of sympathy. The rack is emblematic of the Theory not because it illustrates sympathy’s dependence on extreme violence but because it theorizes the vicarious experience of narrative. While this image invoked Smith’s local contexts when the Theory first appeared in 1759, by its final publication near the end of the century, the “brother . . . upon the rack” had accrued associations with colonial, religious, and wartime atrocities well beyond the English suppression of Scottish rebels. The rack’s broad range of associations by then include interrogation methods of the Inquisition, wartime practices of certain Native American tribes, and, particularly in the final years of the century, the inhumane treatment of slaves in the Caribbean, popularized by images including William Blake’s “The Execution of Breaking on the Rack” of 1796.¹⁸ And yet, the claim, based on Smith’s 1759 image, that “slavery is the first example [of sympathy] Smith offers” in the Theory elides the historical complexity of Smith’s original reference with the resonances that develop in following decades.¹⁹ Eschewing linear chronology in order to emphasize historical specificity, this chapter adopts a temporal span that is intrinsic rather than tangential to Smith’s Theory, which he revised over the course of three decades and substantially supplemented shortly before his death in 1790. When de Grouchy faces Smith’s “brother . . . upon the rack,” both terms have been radically altered: the Terror has sullied the ideal of fraternité for a nation that has quite recently witnessed the replacement of the rack by the guillotine. ¹⁷ The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985), pp. 27–59. ¹⁸ Pierre François Xavier Charlevoix described torture practices in North America in Histoire et Description General de la Nouvelle France (1744). See also Jonathan Lamb, Preserving the Self, p. 255, and Debbie Lee’s discussion of Blake’s engravings, which appeared in John Stedman’s Narrative, in Slavery and the Romantic Imagination (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002), pp. 66–119. ¹⁹ Lee, Slavery and the Romantic Imagination, p. 35.

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Adam Smith’s “Our Brother . . . upon the Rack” in Post-Revolutionary France The migration of Smith’s Theory to revolutionary-era Paris exposes dissonances in Smith’s work that, most broadly, revise histories of sympathy in the Romantic century and, more specifically, shape fiction’s revision of sympathy. With this historical, national, and legal transition from Britain forty years after unification and fifteen years after the Stuart rebellion to Paris during the Reign of Terror, a metaphorical figure of violence stands between alternative registers of physical pain—the conjectural and abstract pain that Smith invoked in the 1750s and the present, real violence that Sophie de Grouchy witnessed and feared during the 1790s. In the context of the Terror, the relationship of Smith’s sympathy to physical pain— whether imagined, witnessed, or experienced—takes on acute urgency, and the distinction between speculative exercise and recent violence unravels. After the fall of the guillotine’s blade, de Grouchy’s rendition of Smith suggests that the delicate balance between philosophical scenario and historical reality, between metaphorical figure and contemporary reference, has been severed. While Smith imagines that “our brother is upon the rack,” de Grouchy speculates “qu’un de nos semblables soit sur la roue.”²⁰ Readers of her translation, the standard French version for nearly two centuries, are asked to imagine the sufferings of a “similar” or a “fellow” on the breaking wheel rather than the pain of a sibling on the rack. These negotiations of Smith’s meaning, whether they are seen as slight, skillful, or both, carry profound historical and philosophical significance. Rather than simply accommodating Scottish empiricism to French materialism or distinguishing a follower of Locke from a disciple of Condillac and the Idéologues, de Grouchy’s translation, here and elsewhere, calls attention to the figurative language by which Smith articulates experiences of sympathy. While contemporary events determine some of her choices as a translator, philosophical conviction makes many of those choices significant moments during a crucial period in the cultural history of sympathy.

²⁰ Sophie de Condorcet, née de Grouchy, Théorie des sentimens moraux, ou essai analytique sur les principes des jugemens que portent naturellement les hommes d’abord sur les actions des autres, et ensuite sur leurs propres actions, suivi d’une dissertation sur l’origine des langues par Adam Smith (Paris: F. Buisson, 1798), 2 vols., vol. 1, p. 6. References to her translation (which was of the seventh edition of Smith’s Theory [1790]) will be to this edition.

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Scholars have been especially attentive to de Grouchy’s philosophical convictions.²¹ The growing body of criticism on de Grouchy’s response to Smith, which has approached her work through the lenses of political philosophy and the gendering of sentiment, has emphasized her “Lettres sur la sympathie,” in which her diversions from Smith are explicit.²² In these letters, she insists on the significance of physical pain as a motivation for sympathetic response and praises the instructive effects of witnessing public executions. The lexical detail of her translation, though, contains a subtle but perhaps more trenchant critique of Smith’s notion of sympathy. First published in 1798 but begun in 1794 or 1795, de Grouchy’s translation challenges as it modifies Smith’s original phrasing, repeatedly altering Smith’s figurative language and the images of embodiment he employs in descriptions of cognitive abstraction.²³ De Grouchy’s rendition of Smith’s “brother . . . upon the rack” as one of our “similars” on the “wheel” conspicuously diverges from both the language of the Theory and the choices of its two previous French translators.²⁴ In his 1764 translation, Marc-Antoine Eidous adheres quite closely to Smith’s language and syntax when he imagines “[n]otre frère” being

²¹ See the essays included in Les Lettres sur la Sympathy (1798) de Sophie de Grouchy: Philosophie Morale et Réforme Sociale, trans. and ed. Marc André Bernier and Deidre Dawson (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 2010); “Introduction,” Sophie de Grouchy, Letters on Sympathy: A Critical Edition, ed. Karin Brown and trans. James E. McClellan III (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 2008); Alexander Broadie, Agreeable Connexions: Scottish Enlightenment Links with France (Edinburgh: Birlinn, 2012), pp. 125–9, 141–59; and Catriona Seth, “Sophie de Grouchy-Condorcet’s Translation of Adam Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments,” The Adam Smith Review, vol. 7, ed. Fonna Forman (New York: Routledge, 2014). ²² The “Lettres” appeared in editions of the Théorie published in 1798, 1820, 1830, and 1860. Her disagreements with Smith are varied. Deidre Dawson, for example, points out that de Grouchy emphasizes the cultivation of sympathy through education while Smith assumes it to be innate. “From Moral Philosophy to Public Policy: Sophie de Grouchy’s Translation and Critique of Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments,” in Scotland and France in the Enlightenment, ed. Deidre Dawson and Pierre Morère (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 2004), pp. 269–73. ²³ On de Grouchy’s modifications of Smith’s language, see Catriona Seth, “Un double service rendu à la postérité: la Théorie des sentiments moraux par Adam Smith, suivie des Lettres sur la sympathie,” in Les Lettres sur la Sympathie (1798) de Sophie de Grouchy: Philosophie Morale et Réforme Sociale, pp. 127–37. ²⁴ Her translation is the third French version of Smith’s Theory to appear within thirty-five years, and early reviews considered it quite favorably. Smith was concerned with the translation of his work: he describes his “mortification” at the quality of the Theory’s first translation by Marc-Antoine Eidous and was also unsatisfied, as were French readers, with the translation by l’Abbé Blavet. Letter to Mme de Boufflers, February 1772, in The Correspondence of Adam Smith, ed. Ernest Campbell Mossner and Ian Simpson Ross (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), p. 161. See Gilbert Faccarello and Philippe Steiner, “The Diffusion of the Work of Adam Smith in the French Language: An Outline History,” in A Critical Bibliography of Adam Smith, ed. Hiroshi Mizuta (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2002), p. 79.

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subjected “à la torture” while “nous sommes à notre aise.”²⁵ In Abbé Blavet’s translation, published ten years later, the phrase reads “Tant que nous serons à notre aise, nos sens ne nous instruiront jamais de ce que souffre un homme actuellement appliqué à la question.”²⁶ Before the French Revolution, translating Smith’s “brother . . . upon the rack” as a tortured family member invites the consideration of shared pain and bodily response that Smith’s phrase originally raised. After the revolution, though, it has become impossible to investigate the nature of sympathy by imagining the torture of “notre frère.” In the years after the Terror, to illustrate Smith’s theory of sympathy through a literal translation of his brother on the rack would risk both aligning an Enlightenment discourse of sympathy with the ideology and the violence of the revolution and, even in de Grouchy’s subjunctive mood, compromising Smith’s meaning, especially his emphasis on the imagination at the expense of the body, in the process.²⁷ Altering Smith’s language in this early, crucial instance, de Grouchy signals the incompatibility of Smith’s figurative violence with the revolution’s real violence of 1793–4, expands the range of Smith’s sympathy in accordance with the universal inclusion promised in 1789, and initiates a critique of the restrictions of kinship on his version of sympathy. After the revolution, Smith’s sympathy calls for a more literal articulation, and the role of the imagination must be rendered more explicitly. The ideology of the revolution and the events of the Terror cast long shadows on de Grouchy’s response to Smith. The Terror claimed her husband, the philosopher and political theorist Jean Antoine Nicolas de Caritat, Marquis de Condorcet, as one of its victims: he died fleeing revolutionaries in March 1794, when she was already working on her “Lettres sur la sympathie.”²⁸ The time she spent thinking intensively about Smith’s notion of ²⁵ Marc-Antoine Eidous, Métaphysique de l’âme, ou Théorie des sentimens moraux (Paris: Briasson, 1764), p. 3. ²⁶ Abbé Blavet, Théorie des sentimens moraux (Paris: Valade, 1774), p. 3. ²⁷ Similarly, Isabelle Bour has found in 1790s translations of Mary Wollstonecraft an investment in clarifying the nuances of sentimental language immediately after the Terror. “The Boundaries of Sensibility: 1790s French Translations of Mary Wollstonecraft,” Women’s Writing 11 (2004), pp. 493–506. ²⁸ A warrant was issued for his arrest in October 1793 after he criticized the Jacobin constitution, and he went into hiding for five months. As a more moderate Girondin and a titled aristocrat, he almost certainly faced death on the guillotine. Despite his work in the National Assembly in favor of the people’s rights, the furor of 1793 left him no way out. After fleeing Paris, his request for an extravagant meal raised suspicions; as authorities tried to confirm his identity, he died in captivity. It is believed he took poison supplied to him by Pierre Jean George Cabanis, Sophie’s brother-in-law. See Jules Michelet, Les Femmes de la révolution (Paris: Adolphe Delahayas, 1855); Thierry Boissel, Sophie de Condorcet: Femme des Lumières (Paris:

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sympathy quickly followed and possibly overlapped with the time she spent visiting her husband in hiding and anticipating his death, a death that is significant in a number of ways. It was probably expected to take place on the guillotine, it was one of many repercussions of the tarnishing of the revolution’s ideals, and by being unseen and hidden from his widow for months, it reversed the kind of public violence that she had witnessed (in the Champs de Mars Massacre of 1791 and the execution of the king in 1793) and likely feared for her husband. In this context, Smith’s image of torture and his conception of physical pain’s limited role in eliciting sympathy fail to address the power of the senses or the significance of bodily suffering. These circumstances certainly inform her avoidance of an explicit reference to kinship in her version of Smith’s scene of torture. But this avoidance also betrays a complex response to figurative kinships as they shape both Smith’s understanding of sympathy and what would later become the revolution’s rallying cry for “liberté, égalité, fraternité.” When de Grouchy translates Smith’s image of the state-inflicted torture of a brother, her translation’s linguistic details warrant careful attention. In other instances, her translation also points to major issues in the international language of sentiment. Her use of the term “sympathie” itself underscores a number of difficulties in rendering Smith’s English in French. For de Grouchy, “sympathie” translates Smith’s “fellow-feeling,” “sensibility,” and nominal and verbal forms of “correspondence.”²⁹ Based on these alterations, the French term seems more elastic and capacious than the English; “sympathie” seems to be a less precise concept and, perhaps consequently, a less common term in French. But de Grouchy conversely translates Smith’s “sympathize” in other ways, most frequently as “partager.” Indeed, “partager” replaces a number of Smith’s phrases, particularly those which employ his figurative and spatial terminology in order to describe imaginative processes. Phrases such as “go along with” or “enter into” most frequently become “partager” or occasionally “sympathiser avec.”³⁰ While de Grouchy does at times approximate Smith’s spatial language of shifting perspectives, to “share” Presses de la Renaissance, 1988), pp. 161–75; Evelyn Forget, “Cultivating Sympathy: Sophie Condorcet’s Letters on Sympathy,” in The Status of Women in Classical Economic Thought, ed. Robert Dimand and Chris Nyland (Northampton, MA: Edward Elgar, 2003), pp. 142–64. ²⁹ Smith’s “fellow-feeling” (15, 42) becomes “sympathie” (13, 65); while Smith’s “sentiments . . . correspond” (24), de Grouchy’s “sentiments sympathisent” (30); Smith’s “dull sensibility” (58) becomes “peu de sympathie” (97). ³⁰ For example, she renders Smith’s phrase “go along with” (54, 63) as “partager” (91) or “sympathiser” (108).

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sentiment simplifies the imaginative movement that Smith’s sympathy repeatedly undertakes, flattening the imaginative triangulation he describes between sympathizer, sufferer, and the impartial spectator into intensity and immediacy. In her translation, sympathy tends to identify an instance of shared sentiment rather than the abstract repositioning of imaginative persona. Her choices expose Smith’s metaphorical articulation of his disembodied conception of sympathy by calling attention to bodies that function imaginatively rather than physically. Rendering Smith’s “brother . . . upon the rack” in French requires translations that are cultural and legal as well as linguistic. The torture devices specified in Smith’s original and de Grouchy’s translation each carry historical resonances that in turn shape their philosophical claims. The rack offers Smith a historically distant yet visceral image, while the wheel—also known as the “breaking wheel” or the “Catherine wheel” in English incarnations— had been banned in France in 1791 and replaced by the guillotine.³¹ De Grouchy’s “semblable . . . sur la roue” of 1798 thus bears a much closer relationship to the historical legal practice to which it refers than does Smith’s “brother . . . upon the rack.” De Grouchy’s proximity to state violence recalibrates notions of distance that have informed critical discussions of torture and sentiment. Claudia Johnson considers torture, from the perspective of eighteenth-century England, to be “hardly a remote affair” and identifies the torture and execution of Robert-François Damiens in France in 1757 as a likely source for Burke’s consideration of torture in his Enquiry.³² The position of Smith’s French translator in 1790s Paris, though, can specify such conceptions of the “remote.” Additionally, even if we acknowledge the shadowy presence of the 1745 rebellion in Smith’s Theory—“the historical,” according to Baucom, whose absence within the Theory means that it “can be accessed only at a spectatorial remove”—to engage in the imaginative exercise specified in its first chapter would for Smith require the compression of geographical or historical distance.³³ For de Grouchy, though, to imagine a

³¹ Her reference to the “roue” also bypasses a possible translation for the English “wheel”—the “chevalet” [horse]—which identified the particular device used by the Spanish Inquisition. The wheel had been used in 1762 in the execution of Jean Calas, who was tried and tortured for the murder of his son in the Calas affair that gripped Toulouse when Smith visited the city in 1764. ³² Claudia Johnson, Equivocal Beings: Politics, Gender, and Sentimentality in the 1790s— Wollstonecraft, Radcliffe, Burney, Austen (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), p. 121. ³³ Baucom, p. 250. Despite torture’s abolition, it continued to be ordered by Parliament and the Privy Council during the seventeenth century; the fact that torture had never been made officially legal permitted its continued use. See George Ryley Scott, The History of Torture throughout the Ages (London: T. W. Laurie, 1940), pp. 86–90.

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fellow-man on the wheel could either call on personal memory or prompt a reasonable fear of the guillotine, its recent replacement. De Grouchy also replaces Smith’s term of kinship with her more capacious language of resemblance. Smith’s “brother,” it is worth acknowledging, need not be understood only biologically, and it certainly encompasses figurative family ties. The Theory describes, for example, brotherhoods that exist among members of the same profession or, in the Scottish Highlands, the same clan (262–3). Brotherhood of course has religious (especially Christian) and political (especially progressive) connotations in the eighteenth century that expand its inclusivity; the British and Foreign AntiSlavery Society used the image of a slave with the caption “Am I not a Man and a Brother?” beginning in the 1780s. In religious and political discourse, brotherhood emphasizes the equality implicit in horizontal, synchronic familial ties and gestures towards an ideal of universal inclusion that is predicated, in some cases quite problematically, on shared parentage. The French term “frère,” used by Smith’s first translator, carries roughly the same connotations as Smith’s use (in English or Scots) of “brother.” De Grouchy’s “semblable,” by contrast, identifies resemblance that includes but neither requires nor implies the familial.³⁴ To some extent, the distinction between Smith’s brother and de Grouchy’s semblable follows a generalized difference between British and French versions of sympathy, according to which British models tend to begin with an isolated individual who needs to be coaxed into a social community while French theories favor a representative figure who signals universal processes.³⁵ But between the publication of the Theory’s final edition in 1790 and de Grouchy’s work translating that edition in 1795, “fraternité” had become increasingly associated with revolutionary violence.³⁶ Her terminology also echoes Rousseau’s conception of pitié, ³⁴ In eighteenth-century Scottish usage, “brother” could signify “fellow man” and a member of a guild or clan. Dictionary of the Scots Language, “Brother.” Le Robert notes that the plural “frères” is used to designate “ceux qui partagent lees mêmes sentiments, intérêts, etc.” Le Robert, Dictionnaire historique de la langue française, vol. 2, ed. Alain Rey (Paris: Dictionnaires le Robert, 1998), p. 1513. On the debate as to whether the concept of family was in transition from a foundation on blood lines to a newer basis of conjugal ties in this period, see Naomi Tadmor, Family and Friends in Eighteenth-Century England: Household, Kinship, and Patronage (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), pp. 4–5. ³⁵ Lynn Festa, Sentimental Figures of Empire in Eighteenth-Century Britain and France (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006), p. 36. ³⁶ On transformations in the meaning of “fraternité,” see Marcel David, Fraternité et révolution française: 1789–1799 (Paris: Aubier, 1987); Lynn Hunt, The Family Romance of the French Revolution (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), pp. 12–13; and Mona Ozouf, “Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité,” in Les Lieux de Mémoire, vol. 3, part 3, ed. Pierre Nora (Paris: Gallimard, 1992), pp. 583–629.

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according to which only civilized man has the capacity to engage in the process of comparison that identifies the semblable, while reason and philosophy, in an apparent paradox, can also dull natural man’s instinctive pity.³⁷ De Grouchy’s use of “semblable” matters in ways that are historically specific and conceptually broad: her term indicates a reluctance to echo fraternité, a hesitation that is in line with recent associations of this revolutionary ideal with violence and exclusion, and it urges us to ask whether sympathy thrives only within closed circles of kinship, relies on looser conceptions of resemblance, or might expand further to be shared between individuals of marked difference. For de Grouchy to avoid the figure of the brother in this case is not, however, evidence of her consistent rejection of the revolution’s call for fraternité; in fact, in her “Lettres sur la sympathie,” she connects esteem with “sympathies individuelles” and suggests that sympathetic identification can forge social bonds similar to those of family lines: he who deserves esteem is happy to hold others in esteem, and in the case of two such men, “cette fraternité de la vertu établit entre eux une liberté, une égalité dont le sentiment est peut-être aussi doux, que celui des liens les plus étroits du sang et de la nature.”³⁸ In the “Lettres,” this staggered echo of the revolutionary call for “liberté, égalité, fraternité” appears at a comfortable distance from Smith’s torture device, and it seems to confirm her replacement of Smith’s “brother” with “semblable” in the first chapter as a notable reluctance, if not a deliberate refusal, to associate fraternity with torture. In 1790s France, ³⁷ Surrounded by semblables that he is unable to classify as such, who appear relationally as father, brother, or son, Rousseau’s natural man is capable of only an instinctive pity that does not include the concatenation of comparison and identification that sympathy requires: “N’ayant jamais rien vû que ce qui était autour d’eux, cela même ils ne le connoissaient pas; ils ne se connoissaient pas eux-mêmes. Ils avoit l’idée d’un Père, d’un fils, d’un frère, et non pas d’un homme. Leur cabane contenait tous leurs semblables; un étranger, une bête, un monstre était pour eux la même chose: hors eux et leur famille, l’univers entier ne leur était rien.” “Essai sur l’origine des langues,” in Œuvres Complètes, vol. 5, p. 396. See Jacques Derrida’s discussion of Rousseau’s conception of pitié. Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), pp. 171–92. On the theatricality of Rousseau’s pity, see David Marshall, The Surprising Effects of Sympathy: Marivaux, Diderot, Rousseau, and Mary Shelley (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), pp. 135–77. ³⁸ Sophie de Grouchy, Lettres sur la sympathie, suivies des lettres d’amour, ed. Jean-Paul de Lagrave (Paris: l’Étincelle Éditeur, 1994), p. 97. References to her “Lettres sur la sympathie” will be to this edition. There is precedence for her to use “frère” to suggest political and legal equality: her husband used the term in this way in his writings on historical development, where “les hommes de tous les climats [sont] égaux et frères par le vœu de la nature,” and, in the dedicatory letter of his Réflexions sur l’esclavage des nègres (1787), he addresses slaves in a gesture of transracial fraternity: “Quoique que je ne sois pas de la même couleur que vous, je vous ai toujours regardés comme mes frères.” Esquisse d’un tableau historique des progrès de l’esprit humain (Paris: Agasse, 1798), p. 200; Réflexions sur l’esclavage (Neuchâtel: Société des typographiques, 1787), p. iii.

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actual violence and a compromised ideal of fraternity make it impossible to introduce a philosophical treatise on shared feeling with a literal translation of Smith’s language that would—as Smith’s first translator, three decades before the Terror, very nearly did—place “notre frère sur la roue.” More inclusive than Smith’s “brother,” de Grouchy’s “semblable” betrays both a reluctance to echo revolutionary fraternité and a dedication to its ideal of égalité. While de Grouchy’s “un de nos semblables” maintains the first-person plural of Smith’s “we,” her additional plural—Smith’s “brother” becomes instead one of a group of our “semblables”—imagines a communal group that might expand beyond the paired individuals that frequently appear in the Theory. This alteration remains authentic to Smith’s full range of signification while challenging the centrality of kinship—which he implies here and directly expresses elsewhere—to his version of sympathy. De Grouchy’s version of sympathy is founded on relationships that require neither consanguinity nor metaphor: resemblance identifies a literal relationship while even the most inclusive, idealistic application of brotherhood still enlists what she takes to be the limiting effects of metaphor and requires the horizontal bonds of kinship.

Bodies and Persons in Sympathy’s Grammar of Vicarious Experience In the sympathetic encounter that Smith stages between a group of spectators and “our brother upon the rack,” he asserts that “our senses will never inform us of what he suffers,” that they “never did, and never can, carry us beyond our own person, and it is by the imagination only that we can form any conception of what are his sensations.” The imagination allows us to “form” a “conception” of the victim’s sensations only “by representing to us what would be our own, if we were in his case” (11). Representation is the product of imagination that, through shifting persons, grants access to another person’s feelings. But in his following explanation, the imagination becomes embodied rather than representational. When Smith’s spectators approximate the pain of “our brother on the rack,” he explains that “By the imagination we place ourselves in his situation, we conceive ourselves enduring all the same torments, we enter as it were into his body, and become in some measure the same person with him” (12).³⁹ De Grouchy, ³⁹ See Baucom’s brilliant analysis of Smith’s use of “with” rather than “as” in this phrase (250).

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by contrast, specifies that “nous nous sentons souffrir de ses tourmens, nous pénéntrons, pour ainsi dire, en lui-même, nous ne faisons plus qu’un avec lui.”⁴⁰ She emphasizes the representational nature of Smith’s metaphorical bodily fusion, favoring abstraction in her use of pronouns (“lui” and “lui-même”) over Smith’s physical, if figurative, “body,” even as the hesitation of “pour ainsi dire” maintains the caution of Smith’s subjunctive “as it were.” The effects of Smith’s process, though, are felt in the body: “His agonies, when they are thus brought home to ourselves . . . begin at last to affect us, and we then tremble and shudder at the thought of what he feels” (12). In her emphasis on representation, de Grouchy almost seems to ask whether Smith’s “persons” are bodily, grammatical, both. While maintaining Smith’s essential meaning, de Grouchy’s translation exposes the figurative processes that Smith’s language masks in metaphor. For Smith, sympathy invokes a metaphor of bodily fusion; for de Grouchy, it initiates a process that entails the representational effects of shifting persons and pronouns. Amit Rai has noted that while the Theory seems to suggest that sympathy “naturally triggers a highly acrobatic form of psychic, bodily identification,” Smith both invokes and resists such extreme levels of physicality in his metaphorical language.⁴¹ De Grouchy denies Smith this ambiguity by frequently rendering his figures of embodiment in literal terms. Smith does, of course, refer to sympathetic response that is constituted and motivated by physical phenomena in his examples of a slack-rope dancer and the sores of a beggar, but these momentary discomforts seem insufficient to de Grouchy’s belief in the consistent force of sympathy that is elicited by physical suffering.⁴² We may twitch when we see the former, or we may itch at the sight of the latter, but such responses are, Smith specifies, of a lesser order than those inspired by imaginative and emotional distress. De Grouchy’s disagreement with Smith about the significance of physical pain emerges

⁴⁰ De Grouchy, Théorie, p. 7. In the 1820 edition, “pénétrons” becomes the even more literal “substituons.” Théorie des sentiments moraux, trans. Sophie de Condorcet, née de Grouchy (Paris: Guillaumin et Cie, 1860), p. 2. ⁴¹ Rai, Rule of Sympathy, pp. 47–8. ⁴² Smith writes that “The mob, when they are gazing at a dancer on the slack rope, naturally writhe and twist and balance their own bodies,” and “Persons of delicate fibres and a weak constitution of body complain, that in looking on the sores and ulcers which are exposed by beggars in the streets, they are apt to feel an itching or uneasy sensation in the correspondent part of their own bodies” (12). On Smith’s reference to rope-dancers, see Laura Rosenthal, “Adam Smith and the Theater in Moral Sentiments,” in Passions, Sympathy and Print Culture: Public Opinion and Emotional Authenticity in Eighteenth-Century Britain, ed. Heather Kerr, David Lemmings, and Robert Phiddian (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), pp. 122–41.

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most clearly in her translations of passages that describe the force of the imagination in metaphorically physical terms. Instances of this metaphorical physicality are at times arresting: in responding to the situation of one in good health who has lost his fortune, “our imaginations,” Smith says, “can more readily mould themselves upon his imagination, than our bodies can mould themselves upon his body.” In a similar register, “The frame of my body,” Smith says, “can be but little affected by the alterations which are brought about upon that of my companion: but my imagination is more ductile, and more readily assumes, if I may say so, the shape and configuration of the imaginations of those with whom I am familiar. A disappointment in love, or ambition, will,” he continues, “call forth more sympathy than the greatest bodily evil” (35). In the “Lettres,” de Grouchy takes particular issue with this last claim as well as his assertion that that “Pain never calls forth any very lively sympathy unless it is accompanied with danger” (36).⁴³ In her translation, she draws attention to the acts of imagination and representation that constitute Smithean sympathy as if to prepare readers for the different view she expresses in the “Lettres” that sympathy is a more physical phenomenon, one which would have no need for Smith’s awkwardly figurative embodiedness. De Grouchy’s version of a passage in which Smith makes bold use of spatial terminology and human bodies illuminates the parameters of his notion of cognitive embodiment. In explaining the phenomenon of sympathizing with the dead, Smith traces a peculiar incarnation of sympathy which can be felt “as we put ourselves in his situation, as we enter, as it were, into his body, and in our imaginations, in some measure, animate anew the deformed and mangled carcass of the slain, when we bring home in this manner his case to our own bosoms” (82–3).⁴⁴ Like the scenario of the brother on the rack, this passage, despite its vivid if speculative corporeality, resolutely and literally locates the experience of sympathy “in our imaginations.” Her translation slightly but significantly alters the perplexing act of positioning in this description of “an illusive sympathy” (83): “Comme en nous plaçant dans sa situation, nous entrons en quelque sorte en lui-même par la pensée, nous prêtons une nouvelle vie à son cadavre déchiré. Nous

⁴³ De Grouchy also states, “Il est donc évident que ce que nous avons dit des peines physiques est vrai aussi des peines morales, du moment que nous en sommes susceptibles. La vue, le souvenir des peines morales d’un autre nous affectent comme la vue et le souvenir des ses peines physiques” (Lettres sur la sympathie, 106). ⁴⁴ For a reading of this passage’s implications for nation-building, see Esther Schor, Bearing the Dead: The British Culture of Mourning from the Enlightenment to Victoria (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), pp. 77–8.

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faisons passer, pour ainsi dire, sa position dans notre propre existence; et il nous arrive alors d’éprouver . . . l’effet d’une sympathie illusoire.”⁴⁵ De Grouchy’s sympathizer instead enters into the more abstract, representational “himself” (“lui-même”) rather than a physical body, and figurative language seems unnecessary for her less bodily, more abstract claim. Her pronoun (“lui-même”), another representational figure, stands in contrast to Smith’s “body.” Similarly, de Grouchy brings the situation of the deceased back to “notre existence,” while Smith turns to the more sentimental and bodily “bosom.” Denying Smith such figurative license, de Grouchy emphasizes the fundamental roles of shifting persons and their grammatical forms rather than fusing bodies and their metaphorical figures in Smith’s sympathy. Smith describes in the passage cited above the imaginative movement that is a defining feature of his version of sympathy. A similar kind of mobility also characterizes Rousseau’s experience of shared sentiment. In his “Essai sur l’origine des langues,” pity operates “[e]n nous transportant hors de nous-mêmes; en nous identifiant avec l’être souffrant. Nous ne souffrons qu’autant que nous jugeons qu’il souffre; ce n’est pas dans nous c’est dans lui que nous souffrons.”⁴⁶ Locating the experience of shared suffering in the other—“dans lui”—means that sympathy for Rousseau more easily overcomes or even annihilates the distance upon which Smithean sympathy often depends. The result of this mobility for Rousseau, however, is amour-propre, and the facility with which shared suffering takes place in the sufferer creates the possibility of self-projection onto the other. According to Smith, the actual location of the experience of sympathy is unstable: it occurs literally in the sympathizer’s imagination, but his structural definition positions sympathy in the space between the minds of the impartial spectator and the sympathizer, alongside the sufferer’s sentiment, or, figuratively, inside the sufferer’s body. In its distinction from the wandering, reverberating sentiments of Hume’s sympathy and the quick transport of Rousseau’s pitié, the mobility of Smithean sympathy is unique. In her “Lettres,” de Grouchy joins the ongoing discussion of sympathy’s role in violent state-sponsored spectacles of justice when she faults Smith for disregarding the sympathetic response that is aroused by witnessing another person’s experience of bodily pain and defends the popular interest in executions. Scenes of suffering, she argues, can cultivate the sensations so as to provide a kind of emotional strength, making the human heart “plus ⁴⁵ De Grouchy, Théorie, pp. 146–7. ⁴⁶ Rousseau, “Essai sur l’origine des langues” in Œuvres Complètes, vol. 5, p. 395.

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flexible” and giving it “plus de facilité à recevoir de nouvelles impressions, et augmenteront par là un des moyens les plus féconds de ses jouissances.”⁴⁷ Karin Brown has observed that it is the imagination rather than the spectacle of suffering that provokes sympathetic response for Smith while, for de Grouchy, the response to a scene of suffering would be “direct and immediate” and avoid Smith’s characteristic perspectival abstraction.⁴⁸ De Grouchy’s own understanding of sympathy here lies somewhere between Smith’s and those of Hume and Burke, which emphasize the quick, inevitable spread of sentiments. The dissonance between Smith and de Grouchy’s language signals not only her careful disagreement with him but also the incompatibility between these competing notions of shared feeling that function by contagion or imagination, by embodiment or representation. In the competition between varying notions of sympathy, Smith offers a grammar of vicarious experience with particular consequences for fictional representation. Modifying Smith’s sympathy, novels discussed in following chapters employ grammatical and literary forms in which second-hand emotions, or feeling another person’s emotions as if they were one’s own, intersect with second-hand narratives, or telling another person’s story as if it were one’s own. Caleb Williams, published in the wake of France’s Reign of Terror and at the height of Britain’s counter-revolution, uses such grammars and forms to ask how fiction’s sympathies might relate to historical realities.

“Things as They Are” or “As If They Were My Own” in Caleb Williams William Godwin’s Caleb Williams is, like Godwin’s œuvre as a whole, profoundly marked by tensions between the political and the literary. The “or” of the novel’s twinned title, as Clifford Siskin has argued, glosses this tension by suggesting that social realities (“Things as They Are”) lead inevitably to the struggles of the individual as incarnated in the fictional character (“Caleb Williams”).⁴⁹ To follow “the vexing questions” that James ⁴⁷ De Grouchy, Lettres sur la sympathie, pp. 107, 88–9. ⁴⁸ Karin Brown, “Introduction,” Sophie de Grouchy, p. 12. ⁴⁹ Clifford Siskin, The Work of Writing: Literature and Social Change in Britain, 1700–1830 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998), p. 156. On critical efforts to reconcile Godwin’s political philosophy with his political fiction, see Paul Keen, The Crisis of Literature in the 1790s: Print Culture and the Public Sphere (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), esp. pp. 28–9, and Kevin Gilmartin, Print Politics: The Press and Radical Opposition in Early Nineteenth-Century England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005).

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Chandler draws from Georg Lukàcs “as to which came first, the character or the age,” it is, according to Siskin’s reading of Godwin’s title, the age that precedes and determines character. Alternatively, Ian Baucom argues that Godwin’s sentimental narrative itself conveys—through the purchase that fiction’s imaginative systems facilitate—the “truths” of contemporary reality.⁵⁰ Appearing less than a year after his Enquiry Concerning Political Justice (1793), this radical Jacobin novel is born of a desire to sway political opinion and to discourage violent political protest of the sort witnessed in France; Britain’s anxious political climate urged Godwin to suppress the novel’s original incendiary preface. While political conflict surrounds this novel’s composition and publication history, narrative conflicts, and specifically conflicts between various means of narrative transmission, animate its core. The novel’s title hints at a relationship between reality and fiction, between the political and the literary, that its patterns and grammars of narrative transmission clarify. Closely tied to this novel’s patterns for the movement of narrative are the models it explores for the transmission of feeling. In Caleb Williams, stories move among people in strikingly different ways—through first-person transmission, second-hand retellings, the social dissemination of gossip and reputation, and the rapid engine of the press. Emotions also move variously among people—by mutual identification or social contagion. Early in the novel, Godwin suggestively combines narrative and emotional modes of transmission in the phenomenon of experiencing and narrating another person’s past as if it were one’s own. Godwin’s first-person narrator begins a new narrative level—the account of his mysterious patron’s past— by justifying his shift in perspective: he feels his employer’s sufferings “as if they were my own” (9). This switch in perspective and the embedded tale it introduces also follow, sequentially and conceptually, Caleb’s discovery of a locked trunk in his patron’s home. With this particularly resonant fictional figure of the locked chest, which serves as both a literary trope and a historical reference, Godwin connects the novel’s concerns with narrative and emotional transmission to the tension between the literary and the political. There is a fundamental separation between the novel’s awkward mode of vicarious narration, through which Caleb hypothetically shares another man’s feelings “as if they were” his own, and its conspicuous dedication to

⁵⁰ Chandler, England in 1819, p. 170, cited in Baucom, p. 220.

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depicting the reality of “things as they are.”⁵¹ Obstacles to sympathetic experience in Smith’s Theory prompt the shifting perspectives that make his version of sympathy, according to which one person feels as if he were another, particularly amenable to a novelistic version of sympathy. In Caleb Williams, hints of that version of sympathy arise from the obstacles of class difference, secrecy, and the indicative mood required to represent historical reality. Caleb Williams articulates the tension that runs through Godwin’s works in the opposition it stages between, on one hand, the indicative mood of current and historical conditions and, on the other, the counterfactual possibilities and emotional desires that are the grammatical content of the subjunctive mood and the generic content of narrative fiction. Isabelle Bour has argued that Caleb Williams, along with Frankenstein and Waverley, illustrates the ways in which sensibility’s diminishing cultural force at the turn of the century led to “a generic restructuring of the novel.”⁵² In the literary history of Smith’s reception, Godwin’s politically radical and formally inventive novel is a crucial text. It shows clear signs of Smith’s influence in its language of impartial spectatorship, the doubling of its two main characters, and its frequent references to sympathy, whether it is described as “involuntary,” “magnetical,” or “animal” (130, 109, 205). Indeed, as these modifiers suggest, competing versions of sympathy alternate in the novel between the threatening and base, the ideal and unattainable, and the immediate and collective. Prominent in this competition is the opposition between a version of sympathy closely aligned with the wandering sentiments and echoing vibrations that Hume describes and the cognitive abstraction, perspectival movement, and interpersonal exchange of Smith’s Theory. The novel is dominated by a desire for sympathy: Caleb’s lament that he was “a solitary being, cut off from the expectation of sympathy, kindness, and the goodwill of mankind” (239), illustrates one of this novel’s many similarities to the work of Godwin’s daughter in Frankenstein, in which sympathy is widely sought but rarely experienced. While Frankenstein’s historical concerns are overshadowed by the apparent ⁵¹ Thomas Pfau describes Godwin’s “psychohistorical narrative” (143) in terms that approximate the distinction between the indicative and subjunctive moods: Godwin’s writings after 1793 “conceive of the past as an absent cause preceded by and traceable only on the basis of its own apparent effect, the present, itself a network of antagonistic forces and vectors from which subjects cannot extricate themselves without once again ‘altering’ the past by means of representing it differently.” Romantic Moods: Paranoia, Trauma, and Melancholy, 1794–1840 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005), p. 127. ⁵² Isabelle Bour, “Sensibility as Epistemology in Caleb Williams, Waverley, and Frankenstein,” Studies in English Literature 45.4 (2005), p. 813.

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fictionality of its science, Caleb Williams relates lived history to literary form with manifest urgency. Caleb Williams articulates the prominence and the paradox of sympathy in eighteenth-century culture, and its critical heritage encapsulates novel theory’s approach to sympathy’s incarnation in narrative form. The novel’s plot and its forms have been seen to enact the oppressive tendencies that characterize the Enlightenment discourse of sympathy; sympathy ultimately serves, in such readings, to uphold the same institutional structures of oppression that its more egalitarian applications might otherwise challenge. Caleb Williams has alternatively been seen to illustrate that political oppression prevents individuals from experiencing the sufferings of their fellows, that “tyranny undermines . . . sympathy.”⁵³ John Bender has influentially if controversially argued that Enlightenment theories of sensibility, especially Smith’s, enable a pernicious version of narrative omniscience. Likening this version of omniscience to physical violence, he asserts that “the sensation of sympathy founds an order of power” and claims that Godwin’s narrative technique in Caleb Williams duplicates the same structures of control that its plot aims to unsettle.⁵⁴ The work of Bender and Monika Fludernik has been in close conversation, though rarely agreement, about the ways that Godwin’s novel responds to Smith’s sympathy with its specular logic, its attention to observation and surveillance, and the visual perspectives that it stages in its plot (Fludernik) and enacts in its discourse (Bender). Bender and others have argued that fiction’s assimilation of philosophical models of sympathy echoes the transition that Foucault identified from the spectacle of the scaffold to the surveillance of the panopticon. Following this approach, critics have understood narrative omniscience, and particularly its manifestation in free indirect discourse, to harness the all-seeing gaze of Jeremy Bentham’s panopticon and to reinterpret the sympathetic spectatorship of Smith’s Theory as an invasive and oppressive novelistic technique.⁵⁵ ⁵³ Monika Fludernik, “Spectacle, Theatre, and Sympathy in Caleb Williams,” Eighteenth Century Fiction 14.1 (2001), p. 14. ⁵⁴ “Impersonal Violence,” p. 114. See also Imagining the Penitentiary, p. 227. Joel Faflak argues that sympathetic curiosity and confession fuel an oppressive power dynamic. “Speaking of Godwin’s Caleb Williams: The Talking Cure and the Psychopathology of Enlightenment,” English Studies in Canada 31 (2005), pp. 99–122. ⁵⁵ D. A. Miller’s The Novel and the Police (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989) offers a similar argument about Victorian fiction. See also Mark Seltzer, Henry James and the Art of Power (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1984). Critics have, especially in discussions of Austen, described free indirect discourse as coercive. See William Galperin, The Historical Austen (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003), Casey Finch and Peter Bowen, “ ‘The Tittle-Tattle of Highbury’: Gossip and the Free Indirect Style in Emma,” Representations

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In the 1832 preface to Richard Bentley’s Standard Novels edition of Fleetwood, or, The New Man of Feeling, Godwin describes the composition history of Caleb Williams by employing a particularly invasive figure for the author’s psychological scrutiny of his characters. Caleb Williams began as a third-person narrative. Godwin attributes his satisfaction in writing what ultimately became a first-person novel to the use of a “metaphysical dissecting knife in tracing and laying bare the involutions of motive, and recording the gradually accumulating impulses” of his characters (350). In this figure, Bender locates the foundations for what he considers Godwin’s insidious practice of narrative omniscience, a novelistic strategy that gives the author and, in Bender’s analysis, the character, access to the minds of fictional beings.⁵⁶ Free indirect discourse, it is worth noting, allows an omniscient narrator to convey a thought or feeling of a character as if it were the narrator’s own: often, the character’s bias, emotion, or urgency seem to mingle with the narrator’s comparative objectivity. Godwin’s “metaphysical dissecting knife” articulates the penetrative narrative method of the author, who is, after all, freely choosing between first-person and third-person narrative perspectives. Alternatively, within the boundaries of the fictional realm, where no such choice is available, Godwin’s first-person narrator, guided by a desire for sympathy, conveys the past sufferings of another character “as if,” he says, “they were my own.” Here, a transition from firstto third-person narrative reformulates sympathy’s perspectival dynamics based on a different figure for narrative exposure. Godwin’s title character is employed by Ferdinando Falkland, an imperious landowner whose noble reputation and reclusive nature make his

31 (1990), pp. 1–18, and Clara Tuite, Romantic Austen: Sexual Politics and the Literary Canon (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002). For a discussion of Bentham that seeks to realign his work within sentimentalism, see David Rosen and Aaron Santesso, “The Panopticon Reviewed: Sentimentalism and Eighteenth-Century Interiority,” English Literary History 77.4 (2010), pp. 1041–59. ⁵⁶ John Bender, “Impersonal Violence: The Penetrating Gaze and the Field of Narration in Caleb Williams,” in Critical Reconstructions: The Relationship of Fiction and Life, ed. Robert M. Polhemus and Roger B. Henkle (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994), p. 267. Dorrit Cohn challenges Bender by calling for limits in applying patterns of domination such as master/ slave, warden/prisoner or, I would add, surgeon/dissected body, to the pairing of author/ character, a fundamentally irreversible power dynamic which holds no potential for equivalence. The Distinction of Fiction (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999), p. 171. In Godwin’s novel, there are a few instances in which characters give voice to the thoughts or likely statements of other characters, and the novel’s lack of quotation marks obscures distinctions between other characters’ spoken and speculated thoughts; reported speech, it is worth specifying, does not constitute the penetration of consciousness that Caleb desires of Falkland.

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involvement in a past crime all the more curious to Caleb. Early in his employment as Falkland’s scribe, Caleb finds himself in “a closet or small apartment” that is “separated from the library by a narrow gallery.” In this sequestered room, where he thinks he is alone, he hears “a deep groan,” “the lid of a chest hastily shut,” and “the noise as of fastening a lock” (6). Falkland’s furious response to being discovered in this hidden room elicits only “anxiety and affection” from his servant (7). But when accusations and threats follow, Caleb speculates that this chest might contain a murder weapon and ultimately becomes convinced that it holds Falkland’s own narrative of his past crimes. In a novel rife with criminality and deception that draws heavily on conventions of eighteenth-century fiction, a hidden trunk emphatically evokes the trope of the récit trouvé, the possibility of discovering a secret correspondence or concealed confession, and the narrative forms of containment that usually frame such discoveries.⁵⁷ As the novel continues, the trunk that appears in its first pages begins to summon with increasing intensity the possibility of an unheard confession, a narrative structure that Falkland’s brief declaration—“I am the murderer”—has only partially fulfilled (131). Caleb’s speculation about the trunk’s contents might be seen as a willing subjection to the fictionality of his own tale, but the initial chapter’s suggestion of a récit trouvé should also be understood to shape the anomalous narrative forms that follow. The agonized aristocrat’s hidden, locked chest functions in multiple ways. As a plot device, it prompts curiosity, of both the hero and the reader. As a fictional trope, it anticipates the discovery of a hand-written narrative. Falkland’s trunk also serves as an especially rich historical reference. Through this single figure’s combination of fictional and historical functions, Godwin lays the groundwork for a connection between novelistic form and contemporary history, specified by the novel’s competing models of sympathy, that resonates with Lennard Davis’s “factual fictions,” Ian Baucom’s “fanciful fact,” or James Chandler’s “romantic historicism.”⁵⁸ Falkland’s hidden chest suggests the widely publicized “iron chest” or “armoire de fer” incident of late 1792 that preceded the execution of the French king. The discovery of Louis XVI’s documents in a hidden compartment at the Tuileries palace led to the publication of his personal correspondence, ⁵⁷ Falkland’s story itself is, as Donald Wehrs has noted, overtly shaped by the conventions of eighteenth-century fiction. “Rhetoric, History, Rebellion: Caleb Williams and the Subversion of Eighteenth-Century Fiction,” Studies in English Literature 28.3 (1988), pp. 497–511. ⁵⁸ Lennard Davis, Factual Fictions: The Origins of the English Novel (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1983); Baucom, Specters of the Atlantic; Chandler, England in 1819.

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motivated his execution, and passed quickly into the revolution’s mythology as proof of royal treachery.⁵⁹ By referring to this incident, Godwin imports a range of associations into the novel. He gestures, to be sure, to the tyranny of aristocratic privilege. Falkland’s crimes, we later learn, smack of similar privilege. It is also a reference to the rapid spread of public opinion by means of the radical press’s frantic pace. Falkland’s trunk additionally conjures secret correspondences, the dangers and threats that letters implied after the revolution. In its twin functions, Falkland’s chest suggests both a novelistic form that Caleb Williams only partially fulfills and the historical reality that it cannot escape: politically-inflected fiction may feverishly seek but cannot, under systemic oppression, give form to one person’s vicarious experience of another person’s past. The expectation of confessional narrative that Falkland’s trunk suggests is technically if unsatisfyingly fulfilled in Falkland’s quick confession and threatening oath of secrecy. This fulfillment begins, though, when Collins, Falkland’s steward, relates the story of his employer’s past to Caleb. Before sharing the story of their benefactor with Caleb, Collins asserts that Falkland himself “would be disposed to a similar communication” were it not for “the disturbance and inflammation of his mind” (8). The story concerns the sad fate of a vulnerable woman, disagreements with her abusive kinsman (Tyrell), his subsequent murder, and the execution of a father and son (the Hawkinses). Falkland seems to be either an admirable man caught in a web of crime or, as Caleb later suspects, an unpunished murderer slavishly devoted to reputation. When Collins later describes Falkland as a “ruin” of his former self, this description, Caleb says, “tended to inflame my curiosity.” Across the class distinctions separating them, Caleb and Falkland share a similar mental “inflammation”: Caleb’s inflamed curiosity propels him towards Falkland’s story, which Falkland is unable to tell because of his own mental inflammation. A shared state prompts an act of narrative transmission that is conspicuously mediated by Collins’s voice. Before he retells Falkland’s story as he has heard it from Collins, Caleb laments, “My heart bleeds at the recollection of his misfortunes, as if they were my own” (9). Caleb’s assumption of Collins’s voice is significant for a number of reasons. To be sure, the story Collins tells him is a public account

⁵⁹ See Olivier Blanc, La Corruption sous la Terreur (Paris: Éditions Robert Laffont, 1992), pp. 15–25, and Damian Walford Davies, “The Politics of Allusion: ‘Caleb Williams,’ ‘The Iron Chest,’ ‘Middlemarch,’ and the armoire de fer,” Review of English Studies 53.212 (2002), pp. 526–43.

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that merely reflects Falkland’s social reputation, and Collins offers no privileged access to their patron’s inner life. Caleb’s phrase enacts the sympathetic process that Smith describes when, as noted earlier, sympathy’s “imaginary change” means that “I consider what I should suffer if I was really you, and I not only change circumstances with you, but I change persons and characters” (Smith, 374). It is this act of appropriation that lets Caleb, in the novel’s revised third edition, take an additional, emphatic step, “drop the person of Collins, and assume to be myself the historian of our patron.”⁶⁰ In the novel’s composition history, Godwin’s alteration of grammatical person—from the third-person novel he began to the firstperson narrative he completed—allows him, as he says, to make Caleb “his own historian” (350). In the novel, Caleb makes himself, with this sympathetically-driven shift in persons, Falkland’s “historian.” Caleb can speak for himself, in the first person, but he still speaks for Falkland in the third person; to “drop the person” of Collins enacts no change in grammatical form. And yet, this shift carries particular weight in the novel’s generic and formal logic. Bender has argued that the containment of Collins’s thirdperson account of Falkland within Caleb’s first-person narrative dramatizes “the illusion of mastery conferred by the false sense of first-person autonomy based upon sympathetic introjection.”⁶¹ Alternatively, Gerard Barker has observed that a retrospective first-person narrative, particularly one of such extreme disillusionment, necessitates a speaker who retells past events without the interruption of his present thoughts.⁶² Caleb, that is, would be hard pressed to describe Falkland’s social prominence and moral worth after having heard him confess to murder. Additionally, when Caleb says of Falkland’s sufferings that “my heart bleeds at the recollection of his misfortunes, as if they were my own,” he enters—in a sentimental stance, and in the subjunctive mood—a mode of vicarious narration that frames his retelling of Collins’s account. The invisibility of the subjunctive mood here does not detract from its importance, and the counterfactual phrase “as if” explicitly ushers in his imaginative experience of another man’s suffering as his own. Falkland’s locked chest, its political associations, and the narrative structure it seems to promise position the novel’s opening chapter between historical reality and fictional potential, ⁶⁰ Things as They Are; or, The Adventures of Caleb Williams, ed. Maurice Hindle (New York: Penguin, 1987), p. 11. References to the novel’s revised edition will be to this edition. ⁶¹ Bender, “Impersonal Violence,” p. 269. ⁶² Gerard Barker, “The Narrative Mode of Caleb Williams: Problems and Resolutions,” Studies in the Novel 25.1 (Spring 1993), pp. 1–15.

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between “things as they are” and a vicarious experience of simulated emotions, an experience that is, after all, the purview of narrative fiction. Witnessing Falkland groan over the trunk, speculating about its contents, and hearing about Falkland’s past in another man’s voice, Caleb experiences a blocked instance of narrative transmission. It is as if the historical associations of the storage chest (the secrecy of aristocratic privilege) stifle its fictional potential (the possibility of experiencing another person’s past and passions). As his title character’s pursuit of a hidden tale is never adequately fulfilled, Godwin has the persistent connotations of class privilege and secrecy that the iron chest carries—rather than its immediate consequences in France of political upheaval—overwhelm the narrative potential and counterfactual possibilities that the implied récit trouvé suggests. In Caleb Williams, sympathetic experience offers narrative possibilities with historically-contingent dangers and difficulties that should not obscure their formal similarities to the possibilities explored in earlier and later works of fiction: in the 1790s, recent history gives novelistic manifestations of sympathy a different level of urgency but not, as following chapters will show, a different form of expression. Through his reference to the political scandal of the iron chest, Godwin stages the strained emergence of a specific aspect of fictional narrative (vicarious emotional experience) out of historical realities (the British class and legal systems, post-revolutionary anxiety). The emergence of “the novel” out of various types of long prose narratives—history, journalism, romance—is a well-known feature of literary history. Crucial in this process, as Lennard Davis, Michael McKeon, and Catherine Gallagher have shown, are shifting conceptions of truth, its opposite, and its appearance. The semblance of truth in narrative, whether termed “verisimilitude” or “realism,” had to assume a status distinct from history and romance in order for “The Novel,” as Gallagher puts it, to exist.⁶³ For Gallagher, a reader’s sympathetic identification with a literary character—a suppositional, imaginary “nobody” with no historical referent—differentiates the novel from other kinds of narratives, and the counterfactual is fundamental to the experience of fiction.⁶⁴ For Godwin, though, the counterfactual content ⁶³ Catherine Gallagher, Nobody’s Story: The Vanishing Acts of Women Writers in the Marketplace, 1670–1820 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), p. 164. According to Michael McKeon, the epistemological shift from locating truth in historical accuracy to identifying it in the realistic simulations of fiction allows the emergence of the novel. The Origins of the English Novel: 1600–1740 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987). ⁶⁴ Early novelists, Gallagher notes, ask their readers to “take the reality of the story itself as a kind of suppositional speculation.” “The Rise of Fictionality,” in The Novel, ed. Franco Moretti (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006), vol. 1, p. 346.

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of the subjunctive mood seems to be overwhelmed by historical reality, whether indicated by his title’s indicative mood or the historical reference of the iron chest. Under conditions of political restraint, the division of the potentially true from the actually true, a division that is foundational to the emergence of the novel as a genre, gains new urgency. While the meaning of the English subjunctive mood, which was something of a puzzle to some eighteenth-century grammarians, does not change with historical circumstances, the counterfactual experience of vicarious emotion that Godwin uses it to express is restricted by, rather than simply distinct from, historical realities.⁶⁵ Godwin’s contrast between the indicative mood of history and the subjunctive experiences of fiction suggests that this novel’s formal oddities might originate in the turbulence of its time and the limitations they place on counterfactual possibilities and vicarious experience. The urgency of this contrast need not be understood to signal fiction’s failure or its historical contingency; indeed, the persistence of similar novelistic forms before and after Caleb Williams suggests that historical reality prompts—at this and other moments—the creation of novelistic forms that might transcend its limits. When, in the final chapter of volume one, Caleb cites Collins, as Collins, in turn, cites Falkland’s courtroom testimony, we are reminded of the layered narrative voices that compose the story of Falkland’s past. We are also provided with an example of physical narrative containment—Collins reads a copy of Falkland’s trial, which he has removed “from a private drawer in his escritoire” (98). These legal statements locked in domestic compartments materialize the form of the embedded tale that lingers as an unrealized possibility not only of the found document but also of narrative that is exchanged freely between a passionate speaker and a sympathetic listener who would then retell that narrative in his own voice. Within Caleb Williams, narratives instead spread like mass contagions, through the channels of gossip and the press, in ways that parallel the easy mobility of Hume’s model of sympathy. Similarity among people, according to Hume, ensures their susceptibility to the same affections: “As in strings equally wound up, the motion of one communicates itself to the rest; so all the affections readily pass from one person to another, and beget correspondent movements in every human creature.”⁶⁶ Hume’s reverberations ⁶⁵ On the theory and use of the subjunctive in this period, see Anita Auer, “The Treatment of the Subjunctive in Eighteenth-Century Grammars of English,” Paradigm 2.8 (2004), pp. 3–18. ⁶⁶ Treatise, p. 368.

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seem to lie beneath the inevitable attractions of a version of sympathy— which, in the revised edition, Caleb calls “the magnetic virtue”⁶⁷—that determines the quick spread of narrative. When Caleb’s story is taken from him, told by one of Falkland’s accomplices, and published as the “Wonderful and Surprising History of Caleb Williams” (281), freelycirculating narratives follow a model of contagion in opposition to the experience of a sympathetically-charged one-to-one narrative exchange, one that might reveal the truth that Caleb, and Godwin, seek to embody in the forms of fiction. Elsewhere, Godwin describes this opposition when he differentiates between the “unintelligent sympathy” of “noisy assemblies,” which produces false opinion that “carries all men along with a resistless tide,” and the kind of sympathy that is only possible in an encounter between two individuals. “Discussion,” he says, “perhaps never exists with so much vigour and utility as in the conversation of two persons.”⁶⁸ The struggle Caleb Williams stages between two dominant Enlightenment models of sympathetic transmission joins other narrative tensions that critics have identified in this novel— between multiple narratives and among different genres.⁶⁹ In Caleb Williams, an intimate experience of face-to-face narrative confession—the transmission of one tale from its speaker and agent to a listener who then becomes its second-hand teller—stands as the impossible ideal towards which both Smithean sympathy and Godwin’s novelistic forms aspire. Early in the novel, sympathetic identification guides Caleb’s discovery and third-hand narration of Falkland’s past; with both master and servant beset by “inflammation,” their shared state facilitates only a third-hand narrative. In the novel’s second volume, an inflammation of another sort—a chimney that threatens Falkland’s home with fire—fuels Caleb’s burning curiosity about Falkland’s guilt. It also characterizes a sympathetic ⁶⁷ Caleb Williams, ed. Maurice Hindle, p. 318. ⁶⁸ William Godwin, An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice, ed. Mark Philp, in Mark Philp, gen. ed., Political and Philosophical Writings of William Godwin (London: Pickering, 1993), 7 vols., vol. 3, pp. 122, 121. ⁶⁹ Tilottama Rajan argues that, as the novel’s composition history undoes narrative itself, its multiple stories undo its plot. Romantic Narrative: Shelley, Hays, Godwin, Wollstonecraft (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010), pp. 127–9. Emily R. Anderson writes that the novel resolves itself only as “a multiplicity of narratives” and “competing explanations.” “ ‘I Will Unfold a Tale—!’: Narrative, Epistemology, and Caleb Williams,” in Eighteenth-Century Fiction 22 (2009), p. 112. On conflicting genres within the novel, see Jonathan Grossman, The Art of Alibi: English Law Courts and the Novel (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002), and Michal Peled Ginsburg and Lorri G. Nandrea, “The Prose of the World,” in The Novel, vol. 2, ed. Franco Moretti (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006), pp. 260–4.

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bond that leads, in the novel’s second incarnation of this pattern, to a shift in speakers and an additional narrative level. Setting out to help contain rising flames, Caleb passes the same apartment where he had overheard Falkland’s groans and the locking of the chest. Caleb, describing “the general situation” as “desperate,” himself becomes, “by contagion . . . alike desperate.” Led by “involuntary sympathy,” he uncovers and opens the chest (130), at which point Falkland discovers and stops him. According to Peter Logan, when sympathetic curiosity urges Caleb to open the hidden trunk, he seems to be “prying into Falkland’s own breast to discover the narrative hidden within.”⁷⁰ Falkland soon confesses—“I am the blackest of villains. I am the murderer of Tyrrel. I am the assassin of the Hawkinses” (131). After Caleb starts in fear, Falkland elaborates on these brief present-tense statements of self-identification with a clipped narrative account of his past crimes that has been the object of Caleb’s pursuit: “I watched my opportunity, followed Mr. Tyrell from the rooms, seized a sharp pointed knife that fell in my way, came behind him, and stabbed him to the heart” (132). Falkland precedes his confession by requiring his scribe’s vow of secrecy: “He dictated the oath, and I repeated it with an aching heart” (131). Here, Caleb’s repetition of Falkland’s brief narrative is a grim reenactment of his earlier transmission of Collins’s account in the novel’s first volume, where, with a heart that “bleeds” rather than aches, Caleb vicariously experiences and eagerly repeats Falkland’s sufferings. After hearing this confession and repeating Falkland’s command for secrecy, Caleb speculates in the revised edition that the hidden trunk conceals a tale. “I once thought,” he says, “it contained some murderous instrument or relic” related to the past crime. “I am now persuaded,” he continues, “that the secret it encloses is a faithful narrative of that and its concomitant transactions, written by Mr. Falkland, and reserved in case of the worst.”⁷¹ In Caleb’s decision that the trunk likely holds a narrative instead of a weapon, Anthony Jarrells has traced a logic according to which “Literature,” and specifically the novel, supplants history. As he “sit [s] down to give an account of his life” (293), Caleb attempts, Jarrells argues, “to displace not an act of violence—Falkland’s murder of Tyrrel—but rather ⁷⁰ Logan has noted that the “trunk” substituted for the first edition’s “chest” in the revised edition also suggests bodily containment. Nerves and Narratives: A Cultural History of Hysteria in Nineteenth-Century British Prose (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), p. 51; n. pp. 205–6. ⁷¹ Caleb Williams, ed. Maurice Hindle, p. 326. In the original edition, Caleb’s speculation does not specify that the “faithful narrative” is in Falkland’s handwriting (293).

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one of writing: Falkland’s account of the said act.”⁷² Through the novel’s awkwardly enacted and persistently imagined novelistic structures, he achieves a narrative exchange when his account replaces what he imagines to be Falkland’s own. Narrative construction is a frequent topic in Caleb Williams: Caleb is urged to create “the best story you can for yourself,” if not true, then “the most plausible and ingenious you can invent” (158), and he reveals in the published ending his plan to “unfold a tale” (291), one that he describes as “plain and unadulterated” (300) and that Falkland praises as “artless and manly” (301). Against these deliberate acts of self-representation, Caleb is unable to engage in the kind of narrative experience that he seeks and that the novel repeatedly seems to be on the verge of enacting. The kind of sympathetic experience Caleb savors, and that his encounters with Falkland approximate, does occur in brief interactions that yield narrative exchange but no effect on the novel’s formal structure. In one such instance, Falkland’s half-brother, Mr. Forester, offers Caleb general conversation of the sort that pleases the young man: “His manner of telling a story or explaining his thoughts was forcible, perspicuous and original” (138). The revised edition continues: “Every thing he had to relate, delighted me, while in return my sympathy, my eager curiosity, and my unsophisticated passions, rendered me to Forester a most desirable hearer.”⁷³ But in the novel’s central relationship between Caleb and Falkland, sympathy and direct narrative exchange remain impossible. After Caleb escapes from prison and dons disguises, he declares in the revised edition: “I dared not look for the consolations of friendship; but, instead of seeking to identify myself with the joys and sorrows of others, and exchanging the delicious gifts of confidence and sympathy, was compelled to centre my thoughts and my vigilance in myself.”⁷⁴ As Caleb suggests at the end of the novel, the opening of Falkland’s trunk might have revealed a hand-written narrative that Caleb could have then transmitted through first-person citation and transcription. In its place, Caleb supplies his own narrative of pursuit and retreat, containing a hasty confession couched in a threat of eternal enmity.

⁷² Anthony Jarrells, Britain’s Bloodless Revolutions: 1688 and the Romantic Reform of Literature (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), p. 122. ⁷³ Caleb Williams, ed. Maurice Hindle, p. 148. Caleb’s interactions with a fellow prisoner partake of a similar ease in sharing stories. They are “mutually victims without bitterness,” and his fellow prisoner hears his story, Caleb says, “with interest” (185). ⁷⁴ Caleb Williams, ed. Maurice Hindle, p. 265.

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Imagining Falkland’s “faithful narrative” still “enclose[d]” within the trunk, Caleb substitutes the work of his own pen: “If Falkland shall never be detected to the satisfaction of the world, such a narrative will probably never see the light. In that case this story of mine may amply, severely perhaps, supply its place” (293). As Fludernik observes, Caleb here “becomes” Falkland in an extension of their initial sympathetic attraction.⁷⁵ He also fulfills Caleb’s original occupation as a Falkland’s scribe, required for “transcribing and arranging certain papers” and “writing from my master’s dictation” two kinds of texts: letters of business and “sketches of literary composition” (5). To write for another is his occupation at the novel’s beginning. By the novel’s end, it has become his self-denying purpose. Indeed, in the closing courtroom scene, a delirious Caleb addresses an aged Falkland: “I began these memoirs with the idea of vindicating my character. I have now no character that I wish to vindicate: but I will finish them that thy story may be fully understood . . . [that] the world may at least not hear and repeat a half-told and mangled tale” (303). Caleb’s replacement of himself with Falkland as the subject of his narrative is also a replacement of one novelistic pattern with another: narrative exchangeability (Caleb’s selfnarration replacing Falkland’s confession) takes the place of the frame tale (Caleb’s curiosity might have elicited Falkland’s confession). In the contrast between the contained (but undiscovered) and circulating (but uncontrolled) narratives in Caleb Williams, Godwin pits a desire for Smith’s model of sympathetic identification and, by extension, narrative exchange, against Hume’s model of feelings that are spread by contagion and narratives that are transmitted by social reputation, gossip, or print. Through its incessant and unfulfilled sympathetic drive, Caleb Williams makes novelistic form itself an unrealized fiction. In light of the novel’s composition, publication, and form, its conclusion succumbs to a dissolution that reaffirms the novel’s central tensions. In its original, unpublished ending, Caleb accuses Falkland of a criminal act, but his accusation is unsuccessful, Falkland remains free, and Caleb, in erratic prose addressed to Collins, seems to lose his sanity. In the second, published ending, Caleb is moved by Falkland’s weakened physical state, Falkland is reciprocally moved by Caleb’s renunciation of his accusation, each man praises the other’s virtues, Caleb’s accusation and, later, praise of Falkland elicit the tears and sympathy of all listeners, and Caleb’s suspicions are confirmed by Falkland’s ⁷⁵ Monika Fludernik, “William Godwin’s Caleb Williams: The Tarnishing of the Sublime,” English Literary History 68 (2001), p. 862.

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confession.⁷⁶ Caleb writes at progressively later points as the novel moves towards its conclusion, and there is no single moment of retrospection from which he recounts his experiences. These moving moments of narration lend the novel’s final chapter something of the immediacy of epistolary fiction, as Gerard Barker has observed, as well as a destabilizing sense of constant temporal progression.⁷⁷ The epistolary address of the original ending, in which Caleb writes to Collins, is consistent with Caleb’s anxious desire to send away the papers he has kept, presumably before they are confiscated, and renders material the lack of ownership that characters exercise over their own stories in the novel’s patterns of narrative mobility. In the unpublished conclusion, Caleb is explicitly incapable of the imaginative shift in position, foundational to Smith’s sympathy, that his identification with Falkland has motivated: as he contemplates the motivations and likely effects of the story he hopes to tell, he suffers, he says, from “want of strength to put myself in the place of an unprepossessed auditor, and to conceive how the story will impress every one that hears it” (309). Offering his own narrative instead of Falkland’s imagined confession so as to “supply its place” establishes a pattern that ultimately descends into neurosis. This progression suggests that speaking on behalf of another without the benefit of having listened in sympathy, or offering one narrative in order to “supply the place” of another without the ability to “put [one]self in the place of another,” generates Peter Logan’s concept of nervous autonarration after an initial stage of neurotic ventriloquism. The courtroom scenes that conclude the novel firmly locate the spectacles of tale-telling, communal sympathy, and collective judgment within the social institution of the law, and the conjectural mode of vicarious narration that Caleb enters when he feels and narrates Falkland’s sufferings “as if,” he says, “they were my own” stands at odds with emotional but objective courtroom testimonies. The novel’s formal oddities betray Godwin’s refusal to lead literary idealism into a realm of social isolation. Narrative form here arises from and accurately depicts the strain of seeking shared feeling under conditions of political oppression. Godwin’s historically-inflected fiction encourages readers to ask whether the political reality of the armoire de fer outweighs the novelistic possibilities and sympathetic associations of the

⁷⁶ On differences between the novel’s endings, see David Collings, “The Romance of the Impossible: William Godwin in the Empty Place of Reason,” English Literary History 70 (2003), p. 856. ⁷⁷ Barker, p. 10.

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récit trouvé, whether “things as they are” overpower the affective and narrative potential of feeling and narrating another person’s emotions and past as if they were one’s own. Long after the Theory explores the nature of vicarious experience in its opening image of the tortured brother, Smith stages another speculative scene that anticipates the transition from sensation to abstraction that is fundamental to the novelistic version of sympathy.

Kinship in Smith’s Sympathy As a replacement for Smith’s “brother,” de Grouchy’s “semblable” expands the Theory’s familial range of sympathy on its first page. As I elaborate in this chapter’s final section, the question of whether Smith’s sympathy might accommodate national, cultural, and racial differences resurfaces in a dramatic and complex scene that appears later in the Theory. When the impartial spectator imagines the victims of an earthquake in China, Smith elaborates his claim that human difference, like the observation of another person’s physical pain, summons the operation of imaginative perspective. In this staged scene of suffering, added to the Theory’s 1761 edition, Smith is responding indirectly to the earthquake in Lisbon of 1755 and directly to Hume’s criticism of the Theory’s first edition. This scenario begins with a local landscape seen through a window before considering distant victims of an imagined calamity. It meditates on perspective, both visual and imaginative, in ways that have particular relevance for the novelistic grammars and forms that allow one character to feel the emotions of another character who is not bound to him by kinship or resemblance. Recent work in philosophy and history has troubled over whether Smith’s impartial spectator offers an effective model for cosmopolitanism and an internationalist ethics.⁷⁸ This question is of course part of a broader discussion about the inequalities that permeate the Enlightenment’s most progressive assertions of universal humanity. While his moral theory clearly stresses its local foundations, he emphasizes that such partialities should be transcended. According to Baucom, “the more he commands a global knowledge of capital . . . , the more Smith demands a parochial territory of moral vision and knowledge, and the more he recommends . . . a restrained, stoic habit of ⁷⁸ See Luc Boltanski, Distant Suffering: Morality, Media, and Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999); Jennifer Pitts, A Turn to Empire: The Rise of Imperial Liberalism in Britain and France (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005); and Fonna Forman-Barzilai, Adam Smith and the Circles of Sympathy: Cosmopolitanism and Moral Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010).

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sympathizing with a limited set of others.”⁷⁹ And yet, Smith also valorizes the imagination in part because capitalism makes personal knowledge of others with whom we must sympathize impossible. It is additionally worth emphasizing that Smith’s discussions of non-Europeans are remarkably free of cross-cultural disdain or proto-racist superiority.⁸⁰ I emphasize this distinction because the centrality of kinship in Smith’s conception of sympathy does not imply a racialist undertone to his social theory. What I do want to signal is the tension between the partiality of kinship and an idealized universal impartiality. While this tension is of course broadly characteristic of Enlightenment social theory, de Grouchy’s rendition of Smith’s brother on the rack as “one of our similars” exposes a tantalizing ambiguity between literal and figurative kinships that novelists reanimate in their depictions of fictional scenes of sympathy that cross, or attempt to cross, boundaries of difference. The ease of sympathy between kin for Smith and Hume prompts novelists to consider the possibility that experiences of narrative, and particularly the work of cognitive abstraction that such experiences require, might accommodate differences beyond the reach of biological or adoptive kinships. Smith’s references to kinship draw, of course, on Western assumptions that biological kinship is “true,” literal kinship and that adoptive or figurative claims for familial ties are “pseudo”-familial or false.⁸¹ The strength of sympathy that is shared among family members is an explicit issue in Smith’s additions to the revised edition of 1790: the “mutual sympathy” between siblings becomes, over time, increasingly powerful, “more habitual, and thereby more lively, more distinct, and more determinate” (258). Domestic space is the home of “habitual sympathy,” a version of sympathy that is strongest among family members. For every man, “[a]fter himself, the members of his own family, those who usually live in the same house with him, his parents, his children, his brothers and sisters, are naturally the objects of his warmest affections . . . He is more habituated to sympathize with them . . . and his sympathy with them is more precise and determinate, than it can be with the greater part of other people” (257). These claims require a more restricted conception of family, and especially fraternity, than that which governs the tortured brother on the Theory’s first page, where fraternity can certainly be seen to include figurative family ties. While the brother on the rack is by no means an instance of ⁷⁹ Baucom, p. 239. ⁸⁰ On this feature of Smith’s works, see Pitts, pp. 25–58. ⁸¹ Marc Shell observes that “the fundamental distinction between ‘real’ kinship and ‘pseudo’-kinship—or between literal and figural structure—is the topic of a still-unresolved debate.” The End of Kinship: Measure for Measure, Incest, and the Ideal of Universal Siblinghood (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1988), p. 4.

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“habitual” sympathy, the 1790 edition’s descriptions of familial sympathy make it difficult to consider the Theory’s reference to fraternity exclusively or even primarily figurative rather than, at least to some extent, biological. Smith’s additions to the Theory’s final edition have been understood to convey notions that morality is inconsistent with cosmopolitanism, that sympathy fosters a potentially exclusive love of country, and that the French Revolution brought substantial risks and few rewards.⁸² The habitual, familial version of sympathetic experience that he adds in the final edition restricts the circle of inclusion that its opening image might otherwise suggest. In light of these additions, differences between Smith’s “brother” and de Grouchy’s “semblable” become remarkably vivid. To elaborate these additions, Smith looks to literary texts.⁸³ He singles out for critique a popular novelistic trope that is at odds with the fictional version of sympathy that later chapters discuss. The cri du sang entails the reunion of separated family members by mysterious but unmistakable emotional responses that are often indexed as “sympathetic.” Fiction of the second half of the eighteenth century supplies numerous instances of this trope. In Austen’s “Love and Freindship” [sic] (1790), one character, upon meeting an unknown older gentleman, exclaims “At his first appearance my Sensibility was wonderfully affected and e’er I had gazed at him a second time, an instinctive Sympathy whispered to my Heart, that he was my Grandfather.”⁸⁴ This trope and Smith’s attention to it reveal assumptions about kinship’s significance in facilitating sympathetic identification, assumptions that are pervasive enough to solicit Smith’s philosophical dismissal and Austen’s satirical disdain. These responses are part of the larger social change in conceptions of family that Ruth Perry has discussed in eighteenth-century fiction, which she argues was “nostalgic” and “compensatory” in its “responses to a disorienting change in the axis of kinship.”⁸⁵ The cri du sang, Perry argues, ⁸² Anna Plassart, The Scottish Enlightenment and the French Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), p. 34. It is worth noting that Smith’s explication of kinship in the final edition of the Theory, published in 1790, is in no way a direct response to the revolution’s call for “fraternité,” which became prominent after the Terror. ⁸³ Indeed, Smith’s references to literary texts are numerous. Deidre Dawson specifies, for example, that French literature, especially sentimental, informs Smith’s conception of sympathy. “Is Sympathy So Surprising? Adam Smith and French Fictions of Sympathy,” EighteenthCentury Life 15 (1991): 147–62. ⁸⁴ Jane Austen, Catharine and Other Writings, ed. Margaret Anne Doody (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), p. 88. ⁸⁵ Ruth Perry, Novel Relations: The Transformation of Kinship in English Literature and Culture, 1748–1818 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), pp. 14, 13.

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reveals structures of feeling that, rather than engaging with current concerns about conjugal families, look back to an earlier conception of sympathy based on blood.⁸⁶ In his critique, Smith is dismissing as unrealistic a fictional figure that reached a high level of popularity during the same decades that saw his elaboration of the Theory’s notion of familial sympathy. His rejection of this trope, which he says “exists nowhere but in tragedies and romances” (261), is also a refusal to align his “habitual” sympathy with either these melodramatic fictional scenes or older mystical and physiological versions of sympathy. According to Smith, “natural affection” arises not from “the supposed physical connection between the parent and the child” but instead from a moral bond (262–3). The familial version of sympathy he specifies in the Theory’s final edition relies specifically on spatial proximity and moral acclimation reinforced by “habit” rather than the mysterious biological affinities that the cri du sang presupposes. Despite rejecting this literary trope, Smith puts forth a theory of sympathy that would more readily accommodate its basic assumptions—that family members easily sympathize with one another—than it would accommodate strangers or foreigners. While the impartial spectator attempts to overcome such partialities, Smith’s sympathy is nevertheless marked by a resistance to difference and an insistence on familiarity and proximity. Novelistic scenes of sympathy seize on this tension between the easy identification that familiarity and kinship allow and the cognitive strain that distance and difference elicit when one person attempts to imagine another’s suffering. The narrative forms that embody that strain—embedded narratives, conspicuously-cited tales, and fictional letters—also enact the perspectival mechanisms that Smith’s Theory specifies in a rural scene, viewed from a window, whose significance expands beyond the geographic location and disciplinary range of its original setting.

Through Smith’s Window: From Visual Perception to Imaginative Perspective The struggle of Smith’s sympathy to accommodate difference takes vivid shape when the imaginative reach of the impartial spectator looks beyond the local circles of resemblance and familiarity towards the national, cultural, ⁸⁶ “De-Familiarizing the Family; or, Writing Family History from Literary Sources,” MLQ 55 (1994), pp. 415–27.

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and racial differences suggested by the victims of a hypothetical earthquake in the Far East. Imagined calamities and their helpless victims frequently serve, in eighteenth-century aesthetics and philosophy, to explain the sentimental response of spectators at a distance, whether that distance is theatrical, geographical, or imaginative.⁸⁷ When Smith postulates an enlightened European’s attempt to sympathize with people suffering from a natural disaster in China, he sets his scene through the optical distortions, rather than the visual frame, of a window. Conceptually, the abstraction of the impartial spectator’s labor remains in tension with geographical, cultural, and racial distance. This distance is also explicitly spatial and implicitly beyond the “connexions” that, for Smith, bond family members who are consequently “more habituated to sympathize” with each other. This scenario resonates not only with similar philosophical exercises of Rousseau and Hume but also with theories of visual and narrative perspective. In this scenario, Smith reveals the persistent necessity of visual experience in his version of sympathy, even as he gestures towards an internationalist ethic that might transcend vision as well as geographical and human difference. The sight of human suffering, paradoxically, permits the imagination to function at a distance by relying on a version of perspective whose cognitive abstraction remains closely tied to the sensory perception that it nearly overcomes. In material written for the Theory’s second edition of 1761, Smith articulates these issues by imagining an earthquake in China that is, as Eric Hayot has argued, the first of many conjectures in which Westerners consider China, “in the space between sympathy and cruelty,” as “a horizon neither of otherness nor of similarity, but rather of the very distinction between otherness and similarity.”⁸⁸ In Smith’s scenario, the distinction between difference and resemblance gives rise to a nuanced consideration of “perspective” in its visual and ethical senses. Through this scenario, Smith confronts his philosophical doctrine, grounded on local affinities and human resemblance, with the challenges of vast distance and radical difference, and he specifies a transition from the sensory to the imaginative meaning of “perspective.” The Theory’s specular logic draws on the range of meanings, from the optical to the ethical, that “perspective” and “point of view” notoriously ⁸⁷ See especially Marshall, Surprising Effects, pp. 25–6, and The Figure of Theater, pp. 208–9. ⁸⁸ Eric Hayot, The Hypothetical Mandarin: Sympathy, Modernity, and Chinese Pain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), pp. 51, 8. Hayot dates this passage to the 1790 edition, but its initial publication and thus the original moment of the conjectural mode he identifies actually appear thirty years earlier.

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carry.⁸⁹ For Smith, the eyes through which we see are often those of other people. In order to experience sympathy, spectators must adopt the stance of “the person principally concerned”: when spectators consider that person’s situation, “as their sympathy makes them look at it, in some measure, with his eyes, so his sympathy makes him look at it, in some measure, with theirs” (27–8).⁹⁰ He later explains the alteration in perspectives upon which his theory of sympathy rests in terms that are grammatical and literary: in “this imaginary change,” he writes, “I consider what I should suffer if I was really you, and I not only change circumstances with you, but I change persons and characters” (374). Even considering one’s own actions entails this kind of change: “I divide myself, as it were, into two persons,” and “I, the examiner and judge, represent a different character from that other I, the person whose conduct is examined into and judged of” (131).⁹¹ The significance Smith grants these shifting “persons” stands in contrast to Hume’s dismissal of what he calls “nice and subtile questions concerning personal identity” that should “be regarded rather as grammatical than as philosophical difficulties.”⁹² Rendering Smith’s brother on the rack in a subjunctive phrase, de Grouchy underscores the significance of the counterfactual and hypothetical in the experience and analysis of sympathy.⁹³ Substituting pronouns for Smith’s bodies, she embeds Smith’s own emphasis on grammatical

⁸⁹ Seymour Chatman’s Story and Discourse: Narrative Structure in Fiction and Film remains the most insightful account of the imperfections inherent in literary terminology’s dependence on the language of visual experience. (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1978), pp. 151–8. ⁹⁰ Elsewhere, self-scrutiny requires the same perspectival mechanisms as sympathy: “we either approve or disapprove of our own conduct, according as we feel that, when we place ourselves in the situation of another man, and view it, as it were, with his eyes and from his station, we either can or cannot entirely enter into and sympathize with the sentiments and motives which influenced it.” To judge our own “sentiments and motives,” we must “remove ourselves, as it were, from our own natural station, and endeavour to view them as at a certain distance from us. But we can do this in no other way than by endeavouring to view them with the eyes of other people” (128). In analyzing our own behavior, we “endeavour to imagine what effect it would, in this light, produce upon us. This is the only looking-glass by which we can, in some measure, with the eyes of other people, scrutinize the propriety of our own conduct” (131). To deserve praise, “we must become the impartial spectators of our own character and conduct. We must endeavour to view them with the eyes of other people” (133). ⁹¹ Smith’s inconsistent use of the subjunctive mood in these two passages (“if I was really you” and “as it were”) reflects its somewhat problematic status during the eighteenth century. See Luc Boltanski’s insightful reading of Smith’s meditation on the representative nature of the pronoun “I” in his essay, “Considerations Concerning the First Formation of Languages,” Distant Suffering, pp. 40–1. ⁹² Hume, Treatise, p. 171. ⁹³ I do not highlight her addition of the subjunctive here because it is in keeping with traditional French usage, according to which counterfactual, imaginative scenarios are consistently articulated in the subjunctive mood.

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person more deeply in the Theory than his own figures of embodiment might suggest. The shift from visual perception to imaginative perspective that Smith sketches is, like the historical shift in conceptions of torture from an emphasis on the body to a focus on the mind, part of the broad cultural transition towards a culture of interiority. This shift is perhaps most conspicuous in the history of the novel, where it shapes, as Deidre Lynch has shown, the complex negotiation of public and private selves that notions of “character” perform in late eighteenth-century literary culture.⁹⁴ It is through the language and logic of visuality that interiority comes to refine and to some extent replace visual experience. Smith describes this transition by first staging a landscape as viewed through a window. Beginning with a common subject of philosophical consideration—optical distortions—he details the impartial spectator’s ability to allow us to “see what relates to ourselves in its proper shape and dimensions.” This spectator offers a geometric correction of the imagination’s propensity to “swell and dilate” nearby objects and to cause the “immense landscape of lawns, and woods, and distant mountains” seen through Smith’s imaginary glass pane to seem “to do no more than cover the little window which I write by, and to be out of all proportion less than the chamber in which I am sitting.” What is near but small dwarfs what is distant and large. He then likens visual to ethical perspective: “in the same manner to the selfish and original passions of human nature, the loss or gain of a very small interest of our own, appears to be of vastly more importance . . . than the greatest concern of another with whom we have no particular connexion” (156). Smith’s meditation on this particular view from “the little window which I write by” leads to his consideration of selfish concerns that are construed collectively: “what relates to ourselves” and the interests “of our own.” To counteract self-interest’s trick of perspective and correct the illusory immensity of our own interest in relation to the seemingly small concerns of a stranger, “We must view them, neither from our own place nor yet from his, neither with our own eyes nor yet with his, but from the place and with the eyes of a third person, who has no particular connexion with either, and who judges with impartiality between us” (157).⁹⁵ To sympathize with another is, ⁹⁴ Deidre Lynch, The Economy of Character: Novels, Market Culture, and the Business of Inner Meaning (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998). ⁹⁵ Baucom’s discussion of the view from the window of the slave vessel Zong, without addressing Smith’s window, enacts the historicizing potential that Smith’s sympathy facilitates. Specters of the Atlantic, pp. 195–212.

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then, Smith enumerates, in his characteristic metaphorical physicality, to employ cognitive perspective rather than sensory perception. This passage responds to Hume’s suggestions for the revised edition that he knew Smith was planning. His suggestions concern agreeable and disagreeable experiences of sympathy—the well-known quip that, if sympathy was always pleasant (as he finds Smith seems to suggest), then “A hospital would be a more entertaining place than a ball.” The crux of Hume’s point, though, is the significance of human resemblance.⁹⁶ Optical distortions serve in Hume’s analogy to articulate a general standard by which we might judge the emotions and characters of others: “All objects seem to diminish by their distance,” he begins. Despite our reliance on sensory experience, a mental correction allows us to view distant objects accurately. As for Smith, Hume’s analogy pivots from sensation to ethics, from vision to judgment: “In like manner,” Hume continues, “tho’ sympathy be much fainter than our concern for ourselves, and a sympathy with persons remote from us much fainter than that with persons near and contiguous; yet we neglect all these differences in our calm judgments concerning the characters of men.”⁹⁷ Indeed, Smith’s meditation on perspective in many ways echoes Hume’s account of the effort to minimize the eccentricities of individual point of view in the Treatise, where the inevitable “peculiarities” of every person’s situation require us to abandon “that situation and point of view, which is peculiar to us,” to “fix on some steady and general points of view; and always, in our thoughts, place ourselves in them, whatever may be our present situation.”⁹⁸ Smith’s scenario is distinct, though, in that it adapts the optical patterns of distant observation in order to examine the local foundations of an ethical stance that might accommodate differences of nationality, culture, and race. As if to ask how far the metaphorical and geometric transition from visual perspective to moral position might extend, Smith posits the impartial spectator’s perception of the domestic setting of a landscape seen through a window as the grounds from which to measure the distant suffering of large groups of people who are well beyond the “different situations”

⁹⁶ Hume writes that “when we converse with a man with whom we can entirely sympathize, that is, where there is a warm and intimate friendship,” sympathy with pain becomes agreeable because of the strong affinities and complete sympathy between two people who are remarkably similar. Letter to Smith, July 28, 1759. The Correspondence of Adam Smith, ed. Ernest Campbell Mossner and Ian Simpson Ross (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), p. 43. ⁹⁷ Hume, Treatise, pp. 384–5. ⁹⁸ Hume, Treatise, pp. 385, 371–2.

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and quite probably the “general inalterable standard” of Hume’s otherwise similar account.⁹⁹ Imagining a natural disaster in China and the reaction of a European with “no sort of connexion with that part of the world,” Smith makes an appeal for the corrective force of “the eye of this impartial spectator” (157-8). Smith’s man of humanity would, after expressing his sorrow, go calmly about his business. Were he to “lose his little finger to-morrow, he would not sleep to-night; but, provided he never saw them, he will snore with the most profound security over the ruin of a hundred millions of his brethren, and the destruction of that immense multitude seems plainly an object less interesting to him, than this paltry misfortune of his own” (157). In a similar vein, Hume supplies scenarios that display emotional judgments: it is “not contrary to reason” for one “to prefer the destruction of the whole world to the scratching of my finger” or “to choose my total ruin, to prevent the least uneasiness of an Indian or a person wholly unknown to me.”¹⁰⁰ For both Hume and Smith, the shrinking appearance of distant objects serves as an analogy for our diminishing concern for distant people. For de Grouchy, though, it is resemblance rather than distance that bears significant weight in her version of this passage. Expanding upon her revision of Smith’s brother on the rack, she here bypasses the aesthetic and philosophical discourse this passage more readily invokes—that of the theatrical sentiments elicited by staged scenes of suffering at a distance—and instead lingers on the challenge that an increasingly international context poses to a moral system with local foundations. While Smith asks what prods men “to sacrifice their own interests to the greater interests of others” (158), de Grouchy asks why people are urged to sacrifice “leur intérêt propre à l’intérêt de leurs semblables.”¹⁰¹ Semblable appears again in her following sentence, where there is no corresponding phrase in Smith’s original. In asking what motivates mankind to overcome self-interest in favor of the needs of distant sufferers, Smith states that “It is not the soft power of humanity, it is not that feeble spark of benevolence which Nature has lighted up in the human heart, that is thus capable of counteracting the strongest impulses of self-love” (158). De Grouchy drops Smith’s figures of illumination (“spark,” “lighted up”) and supplies instead her notion of resemblance, describing this power as “cette faible bienveillance placée par la nature dans

⁹⁹ Hume, Treatise, p. 385. ¹⁰⁰ Hume, Treatise, p. 267. ¹⁰¹ De Grouchy, Théorie, p. 288.

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le cœur de l’homme pour son semblable.”¹⁰² It is in fact the dreaded disapproval of his fellow-Europeans that motivates Smith’s enlightened man to extend his sympathy beyond both his own interests and the boundaries of nation, culture, and race: the basis of this international sympathy, de Grouchy specifies, lies not in an capacious sense of resemblance but rather in the very near and somewhat rigid sense of shame at the disapproval of one’s closest companions. De Grouchy explicitly links this shame to resemblance: in her version, it derives from a fear of “le mépris et l’indignation de nos semblables.”¹⁰³ Her terminology calls attention to the constitution of the groups among which sympathy might be shared. Smith’s use of the first-person plural is frequent in the Theory, beginning, of course, with the opening passage in which “we ourselves are at our ease” while we witness the torture of “our brother.” His “we” both presumes a social collective and conveys the common nature of the properties he describes. When his model of sympathy confronts a distant group of people, though, this presumed collectivity splinters: unlike models of sympathetic contagion, Smith’s sympathy is construed as a collective practice that “we” experience only if a single individual faces another single individual; indeed, Smith’s sympathy “thrives only when it is private.”¹⁰⁴ De Grouchy does not follow Smith’s use of “brethren” in this passage, and she twice renders his seemingly inclusive “hundred millions of his brethren” (157, 158) as the more objective and less sentimental “millions d’hommes.”¹⁰⁵ Smith’s account would seem, as de Grouchy’s rendition suggests, to deny his own implication of resemblance. The failure of Smith’s sympathy to cross distances that are geographical and racial reveals its fundamentally individual rather than potentially collective nature. When, responding to Hume, Smith compares visual and emotional distance, he examines the illusions of perception—but not his distant spectacle of collective suffering—through a window. For Smith and Hume, optical distortions prompt the analogy between the mind’s learned corrective optics and the ethical realignments they describe. Such visual effects had also been a persistent topic in architectural treatises since the fifteenth century.¹⁰⁶ The view of landscape through Smith’s window might be seen to share elements of the Renaissance theory of visual and artistic perspective put forth by Leon

¹⁰² De Grouchy, Théorie, p. 288. ¹⁰³ De Grouchy, Théorie, p. 290. ¹⁰⁴ Lamb, Preserving the Self, pp. 258–9. ¹⁰⁵ De Grouchy, Théorie, p. 287. ¹⁰⁶ Alberto Pérez-Gómez and Louise Pelletier, Architectural Representation and the Perspective Hinge (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1997), p. 20.

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Battista Alberti’s De pictura (1435), which first made the metaphor of the window the “theoretical centerpiece” of the Renaissance discourse on perspective.¹⁰⁷ In this earlier context, the window serves as a figure for the graphical representation of perspective; it is instructive precisely because it flattens the three dimensions of reality into the two dimensions of visual representation. Smith more directly considers these issues when, in an early essay, “Of the External Senses” (pub. 1795), he imagines what appears to be the same landscape viewed from the window in the Theory: “extensive prospects” of “lawns and woods, and arms of the sea, and distant mountains” are viewed through “a small circle of plain glass.”¹⁰⁸ This lens illustrates the eye’s ability to distinguish between objects as they exist in reality and objects as they are mediated by representation: looking at the landscape as rendered in the lens, we understand the landscape to be immense even though its “visible picture” on the glass surface is small. He then fancifully enacts the artistic, representational implications of this account of distance and distortion: he asks us to imagine “a fairy hand and a fairy pencil” which “could then delineate upon that little glass the outline of all those extensive lawns and woods, and arms of the sea, and distant mountains, in the full and exact dimensions with which they are really seen by the eye.”¹⁰⁹ Viewing this landscape through Smith’s window prioritizes the representation—rather than the experience—of shifting perspectives. The glass pane of a window is, after all, both a medium and a barrier. For Rousseau, it serves to distinguish and to construct a boundary between natural and social man. His seemingly contradictory notion of pity is closely tied to the transition from the state of nature, in which identification and emotional response are immediate, to the state of civilization, in which theatricality precludes authentic emotional identification.¹¹⁰ In the Discours second, civilized man’s self-love (amour-propre) blocks the instinctive identification that natural pity creates, and civilization’s nullification of “la pitié naturelle” means, for the man of society, that “On peut impunément égorger son semblable sous sa fenestre; il n’a qu’à mettre ses mains sur ses oreilles et ¹⁰⁷ Hubert Damisch, The Origin of Perspective, trans. John Goodman (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995), p. 136. ¹⁰⁸ James Buchan notes the similarities of these two landscapes in The Authentic Adam Smith: His Life and Ideas (New York: Norton, 2006), p. 15. ¹⁰⁹ Adam Smith, “On the Sense of Seeing,” in Essays on Philosophical Subjects (New York: Garland Publishing, 1971), p. 303. ¹¹⁰ See Jean Starobinski, Jean-Jacques Rousseau: Transparency and Obstruction, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), esp. pp. 35–45, 201–18.

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s’argumenter un peu, pour empêcher la Nature qui se revolte en lui, de l’identifier avec celui qu’on assassine.”¹¹¹ The very force of civilization that permits the identification of the semblable thus also allows for the denial of shared humanity. While Rousseau’s window visualizes this philosophical paradox, which can blind us to resemblance, and thematizes the separation between natural man and social man, Smith’s window likens the familiar correction of optical distortion to what was in the eighteenth century the defamiliarizing worldwide expansion of benevolence and charity. In both cases, three-dimensional space is conceived of on a two-dimensional plane, but the depth that is occluded by the window’s surface is revived, in Smith’s version of sympathy, by the triangulation that the impartial spectator undertakes in his movement between his position and those of the sufferer and the sympathizer. In Smith’s geometry of perspective, the observer and sufferer moderate their emotional response according to the stance of the impartial spectator, and we are able to see through the eyes of another “person”—the ideal and imagined spectator. These visual realignments among different perspectives resemble the consensus Elizabeth Deeds Ermarth identifies in realist fiction, which recasts the sight lines of Renaissance painting in multiple narrative perspectives.¹¹² But in frame tales and embedded letters in Romantic-era novels, a revision of Smith’s sympathy generates not the consensus of realism but rather conspicuously-shifting perspectives that result from and formally materialize the imaginative strain of identifying with another person across boundaries of human difference. Combining visual with moral perspectives, Smith’s scene through the window suggests an approach to novelistic perspective that signals the ethical, perspectival, and representational features of fiction’s adaptation of sympathy’s foundations in resemblance. Godwin’s vicarious grammar pivots on person and affect in order to generate a peculiar third-hand narrative perspective, while Smith supports his grammar of vicariousness not only with person and emotion but also with a precise account of visual perspective. Key works of fiction redefine sympathy as a narrative practice that arises from the limitations of a version of sympathy that is based on visual ¹¹¹ Discours second in Œuvres Complètes (Paris: Gallimard, 1995), vol. 3, p. 156. See David Marshall on the dynamics of identification in Rousseau, Surprising Effects, pp. 149–50. ¹¹² Elizabeth Deeds Ermarth, Realism and Consensus in the English Novel (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983), pp. 3–37. See also Linda Shires, Perspectives: Modes of Viewing and Knowing in Nineteenth-Century England (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2009).

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immediacy and human resemblance. Frankenstein compensates for the failure of face-to-face sympathetic experience when the creature, pleading with his creator to “listen to my tale,” to “hear me” and, significantly, covering Victor’s eyes, exchanges visual experience for an auditory engagement with narrative.¹¹³ He has already observed the exiled De Laceys and Safie through a gap in a boarded-up window, in a crucial scene of sympathy that, coupled with the creature’s copy of Safie’s letters, ultimately enacts in written form not the experience but instead the verbal representation of shifting perspectives that Smith figures forth with this window. Fiction’s adaptation of sympathetic theory explores a grammar of vicariousness by elaborating the sensory aspects of narrative form—“point of view” becomes abstract, imaginative rather than visual, while “voice,” extending Smith’s language of sympathy’s aural harmonies, becomes literal (auditory) and figurative (narratological).¹¹⁴ For characters whose radical differences lie beyond the most expansive reach of kinship metaphors, the switching perspectives in Smith’s sympathy become the shifting narrators of framed fiction. Shelley’s creature, for example, moves Victor’s compassion with his narrative—“His words had a strange effect upon me”—until the view of the creature’s hideous countenance sours his creator’s momentary susceptibility to his suffering.¹¹⁵ Victor mimics, in the textual version of his presentation of the creature’s story, this adoption of another person’s (or creature’s) lived experience without the acceptance of his visual appearance: he relates the creature’s story by speaking on his behalf in the voice of a conspicuously cited but deeply vexed first-person “I.” As if to outline the structural features of a novelistic frame tale, Smith notes that in the experience of sympathy, “I not only change circumstances with you, but I change persons and characters” (374). In the scene of the earthquake, Smith makes a lack of visual experience, rather than geographical distance, the limit to the impartial spectator’s reach. His consideration of distant suffering underscores a central feature of his philosophy: visual experiences of suffering are necessary aspects of a sympathetic response that originates in but attempts to overcome the optical ¹¹³ Mary Shelley, Frankenstein: The 1818 Text, Contexts, Nineteenth-Century Responses, Modern Criticism, ed. J. Paul Hunter (New York: Norton, 1996), pp. 66, 67. ¹¹⁴ “View” rather than “voice” is the narratological term that has more resonance in the discourse of sympathy: the vibrations in Hume’s sympathy (men’s minds are, he says, “as . . . strings equally wound up”) and the aural metaphors in Smith’s Theory (“pitch,” “harmony,” “keeping time”) suggest music more than the human voice (Treatise, p. 368; Smith, Theory, pp. 31, 399). ¹¹⁵ Shelley, Frankenstein, p. 99.

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distortions of self-interest. Overall, Smith places inconsistent emphasis on the visual foundations of sympathetic response—seeing the brother on the rack provokes imagination, not sensation, but imagining a distant and massive calamity is not sufficient to prompt sympathetic response when the suffering is unseen and, perhaps most importantly, experienced by people who are unfamiliar to us. It is against the contours of that failure that narrative incarnations of “perspective” compensate for the impossibility of face-to-face, one-to-one sympathetic experience rather than the difficulty of comprehending large-scale suffering. Smith’s most prominent figures for the operation of sympathetic response—the impartial spectator and the brother on the rack—establish the roles that visual perception, cognitive perspective, and human resemblance play in vicarious experience. These figures describe the process by which efforts to understand another person’s pain summon the transformation of sensory perception into imaginative perspective. Human difference triggers cognitive labor that, in Smith’s scenario of mass suffering, struggles unsuccessfully to overcome both the necessity of visual experience and, as de Grouchy underscores, the significance of resemblance in Smithean sympathy. Novels that bring characters of notable differences together in experiences of sympathy bear the marks of Smith’s intellectual strain, and they embody the representational dynamics of the scene viewed through Smith’s window in the literary form of shifting narrative perspectives. While a lack of resemblance, for Smith, prompts the transformation of visual perception into abstract perspective, a lack of resemblance, for the novelists discussed in the chapters that follow, prompts a rejection of models of sympathy that prioritize visual experience and visually-discernible likeness in favor of the novel’s version of abstract perspective: narrative point of view. Historically and conceptually, these transformations begin with the decline of the epistolary novel in the closing decades of the eighteenth century.

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2 Letters in the Novel and the Novel in Letters Henry Mackenzie’s Julia de Roubigné and the Afterlife of the Epistolary Novel

It is widely known that the novel in letters declines in popularity around the turn of the nineteenth century. What literary histories less frequently acknowledge is the lingering influence of epistolarity as a novelistic trope in Romantic and Victorian fiction. Novelistic reformulations of sympathetic identification provide a new account of these two phenomena—the decline of the epistolary novel and the persistence of epistolarity in later fiction. Novels that open with but then abandon an epistolary format suggest a history of this novelistic subgenre that is heavily reliant on the sentimental letter’s associations with revolutionary energy; in many cases, the erasure of epistolarity is tantamount to a silencing of the political and cultural threats posed by communicable feelings. As an alternative to this view, sympathy’s role in the history of the novel and its subgenres emphasizes the emotional and structural potential that the letter continues to provide within other novelistic forms, particularly retrospective frame tales. Sympathy exerts a strong influence on the epistolary novel’s afterlife: representations of sympathy serve to position the letter in the novel rather than to perpetuate the novel in letters. This function of sympathy explains the persistent significance of epistolarity—its emotional immediacy and multiple perspectives—for the shifting speakers and listeners of retrospective frame tales. Henry Mackenzie’s Julia de Roubigné (1777) is an adaptation of Rousseau’s La Nouvelle Héloïse, which, as one of the most popular novels of the eighteenth century, helped establish the standard features of epistolary fiction. But Julia de Roubigné is also a notable adaptation of those formal features, an adaptation that is carried out through an engagement with Smithean sympathy. In Graphs, Maps, Trees, Franco Moretti notes that in 1776 “an impossible

Vicarious Narratives: A Literary History of Sympathy, 1750–1850. Jeanne M. Britton, Oxford University Press (2019). © Jeanne M. Britton. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198846697.001.0001

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71 per cent of new titles were novels in letters.”¹ Published in the following year, Mackenzie’s novel responds to Smith’s theory of sympathy in a unique model of epistolary exchange that foreshadows the lingering presence of the epistolary mode in retrospective novels and frame tales published in the following decades. These novels—René, Frankenstein, Wuthering Heights— illustrate Leah Price’s claim that “the dwindling viability of the epistolary mode actually increased its centrality to the self-definition of the novel.”² Looking primarily to Mackenzie’s novel in letters and, briefly, to other novels that are partially told in letters, this chapter argues that the epistolary novel’s cultural dominance in the late eighteenth century might have its origins not only in social factors such as increased literacy or improved postal services but also in the letter’s formal receptivity to the imaginative and emotional dynamics of sympathetic response. In the history of fiction’s reinterpretation of sympathy, epistolarity becomes something of a conceptual dead-end, in part because of its inability to represent narratives that are shared by characters who are separated by human difference. The novelistic letter’s continued relevance well into the nineteenth century lies in its capacity to initiate multiple perspectives and generate shared feeling across narrative levels. In its fifth edition by 1795 and its eighth by 1810, Mackenzie’s once popular but now largely overlooked novel deserves particular attention because its epistolary practice foretells the subgenre’s future reinterpretation rather than its imminent demise. Julia de Roubigné identifies a transition in the history of the novel from epistolary fiction, particularly novels in letters that are characterized by numerous correspondents who betray a desperate need for response, to nineteenth-century frame tales that unite multiple speakers and eager listeners. The interactions that this novel stages among characters of distinctly similar backgrounds and, by contrast, characters separated by racial difference indicate that novelistic methods for speaking on behalf of another rely on the conceptions of familiarity and resemblance that are central to Smith’s notion of sympathy. The parallel rhetorical structures that arise when one character postulates interior, emotional states for another—first his English friend and then a slave on his plantation—expose both the rather restricted social circles characteristic of epistolary fiction and the coercive potential of ¹ Franco Moretti, Graphs, Maps, and Trees: Abstract Models for Literary History (London: Verso, 2005), p. 15. ² Leah Price, The Anthology and the Rise of the Novel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), p. 50.

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the sympathetic imagination. But by indicating the limits of the epistolary novel’s ability to represent difference, Julia de Roubigné suggests that the citational forms that sympathy takes in this novel might more fully represent the engagement with human difference when they are reshaped in embedded tales. Predicting the continued force of epistolary affect and perspective in novels published well into the nineteenth century, Julia de Roubigné indicates the role that fictional scenes of sympathetic response play in the historical transition from the novel in letters to the letter in the novel.

Sympathy and the Epistolary Novel The category of epistolary fiction is quite broad, and the critical discussion of this varied subgenre is extensive. Fictional letters have been considered as emblems of feminine interiority, revolutionary energy, and textuality itself.³ “Epistolary fiction” includes novels whose letters resemble journal entries and those with any number of letter-writers, novels that follow the model of the journal or that of correspondence. In any epistolary discourse, however, the implicit presence of multiple perspectives resonates with the shifting perspectives that constitute Smithean sympathy. Janet Gurkin Altman has stated, for example, that “we read any given letter from at least three points of view,” those of “the intended or actual recipient as well as that of the writer and our own,” and Gerald MacLean observes that letters “invariably entail—directly, implicitly, or by way of exclusion—the position of a third person, singular or plural.”⁴ This multiplicity of perspectives, as opposed to

³ On gender, see Ruth Perry, Women, Letters, and the Novel (New York: AMS Press, 1980); Linda Kauffman, Discourses of Desire: Gender, Genre, and Epistolary Fictions (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988); Susan S. Lanser, Fictions of Authority: Women Writers and Narrative Voice (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1992); Elizabeth Henderson Cook, Epistolary Bodies: Gender and Genre in the Eighteenth-Century Republic of Letters (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996); and April Alliston, Virtue’s Faults: Correspondences in Eighteenth-Century British and French Women’s Fiction (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996). Recent scholarship has emphasized the letter form’s historical implications, which complicate its association with feminine interiority, an assumption that has been deemed “the most historically powerful fiction of the letter.” Epistolary Histories: Letters, Fiction, Culture, ed. Amanda Gilroy and W. M. Verhoeven (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 2000), p. 1. On the status of the letter as an emblem for textuality itself, see the foundational works by Jacques Lacan and Jacques Derrida on Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Purloined Letter” (1845) collected in The Purloined Poe: Lacan, Derrida, and Psychoanalytic Reading, ed. John P. Muller and William J. Richardson (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988). ⁴ Janet Gurkin Altman, Epistolarity: Approaches to a Form (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1982), p. 111. Gerald MacLean, “Re-siting the Subject,” in Epistolary Histories: Letters,

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the textual presence of numerous letter-writers, bears a clear resemblance to the shifts in perspective between Smith’s impartial spectator, sufferer, and sympathizer. I want to emphasize, though, that what the novel in letters shares with the structure of Smith’s sympathy is not limited to this triangulation. Instead, epistolary fiction manipulates the shifting perspectives that are central to the mechanics of his version of sympathy. More specifically, the possibility of these shifting perspectives and the affective charge of the intimate letter to generate shared feeling thrives in both the eighteenthcentury epistolary novel and the epistolary logic that persists in nineteenthcentury frame tales. This epistolary logic prioritizes the present moment and instant emotional communication. Altman specifies that “the pivotal time in epistolary discourse is . . . the present, and the pivotal tense is the present of narration.”⁵ Animated by a rhetoric of immediacy, epistolary fiction creates temporalities distinct from those of the historical novels and retrospective frame tales that would soon displace the subgenre in the literary marketplace. Epistolary immediacy, according to Thomas Keymer, involves the use of “letters as transparent windows on authentic inner lives” that, as in the case of Pride and Prejudice’s Charles Bingley, are marked by “rapidity of thought and carelessness of execution.”⁶ Leah Price specifies the broader literary capital of epistolary immediacy in her study of nineteenth-century anthologies and abridgements, many of which drop the epistolary form of the eighteenthcentury novels that they repackage for wider audiences.⁷ While an emphasis on immediacy is certainly not exclusive to novels in letters, its manifestations in eighteenth-century epistolary novels clarify the significance of its reformulations in the letters that appear in the following century’s retrospective narratives. My focus in this chapter is restricted to a particular pattern of epistolary fiction that includes only one side of a correspondence. As employed by a few novelists, this particular pattern of the novel in letters highlights features that are characteristic of but not exclusive to the broader category of Fiction, Culture, ed. Amanda Gilroy and W. M. Verhoeven (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 2000), p. 177. ⁵ Altman, Epistolarity, p. 123. She also relates this emphasis on the present tense to what she terms “presentification,” “the illusion that both [a letter writer] and his addressee are immediately present to each other and to the action” (202). ⁶ Thomas Keymer, “Narrative,” in The Cambridge Companion to Pride and Prejudice, ed. Janet Todd (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), p. 5. ⁷ Price, The Anthology and the Rise of the Novel, esp. pp. 27–8.

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epistolary fiction. These features most clearly appear in La Nouvelle Héloïse rather than the Richardsonian journal model, the specific brand of the epistolary novel that has played a dominant role in critical histories of the modern subject. Expanding and specifying the subgenre’s features, Mary Favret has argued that critics should move beyond the intimate, feminine self in the models of Richardson and Rousseau, and Altman has differentiated epistolary discourse from that of the memoir or diary by noting that the letter, unlike the memoir, requires a response.⁸ Unlike letters that resemble journal entries more than posted letters (Pamela) or letters of deception and intrigue (in the vein of Les Liaisons dangereuses), the novelistic letters through which the dynamics of Smithean sympathy shape later novelistic forms are those which presume immediacy in composition and response, seek emotional transparency, and strive for easy communicability. Written in this vein, Julia de Roubigné is also marked by a peculiar habit of citation, in which letter-writers cite the otherwise absent letters of their correspondents. When such letters are cited, words originally written in the very moment of emotional urgency come from a different perspective and a different time. These citations, by shifting perspective and temporality, outline the patterns of narrative embedding that sympathetic ventriloquism produces in nineteenth-century frame tales. Like epistolary fiction, the concept of sympathy suffers from associations with the quick spread of revolutionary fervor at the turn of the century. Traditional accounts of the epistolary novel’s decline have argued that the authoritative or coercive narrative forms of Walter Scott’s historical omniscience or Austen’s free indirect discourse serve to control and replace the letter’s associations with revolutionary fervor and contagious sentiments.⁹ Representative of the threats of emotional susceptibility and potential political revolution that narrative omniscience disciplines and contains is Austen’s presentation of Marianne Dashwood in Sense and Sensibility (1811)—her name itself suggestive of the French Republic’s personification. Drowning in tears and surrounded by love letters, she appears not through the novel’s original epistolary form but instead through the voice of Austen’s

⁸ Mary Favret, Romantic Correspondence: Women, Politics and the Fiction of Letters (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), pp. 10, 20–2; Altman, Epistolarity, p. 212. ⁹ See Nicola Watson, Revolution and the Form of the British Novel, 1790–1825: Intercepted Letters, Interrupted Seductions (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994). See also Gabrielle Starr on epistolarity’s reinterpretation (in the verse colloquy and free indirect discourse) as opposed to its eradication. Lyric Generations: Poetry and the Novel in the Long Eighteenth Century (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004), pp. 11–12.

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omniscient narrator. Against the grain of the critical discussion that emphasizes the disciplining of epistolary fiction and the containment of dangerous energies by narrative omniscience, the novels I examine in later chapters (Frankenstein, Wuthering Heights) modify features of epistolary writing—its vocal mobility, emotional immediacy, and multiple perspectives—in order to facilitate and enrich models of narrative framing that arise from feelings shared by means of imaginative labor rather than inevitable contagion. As it is enacted in a number of Romantic-era novels, the role of sympathy in the transition from first-person epistolary immediacy to third-person omniscient retrospection deserves particular attention. A novel that bears the marks of post-revolutionary anxieties, Mary Hays’ Memoirs of Emma Courtney (1796), explicitly connects sympathy to modes of writing. In this novel, the title character’s pursuit of impossible sympathetic attachment and romantic love determines shifts between memoir and letters that are transcribed or cited. Through a reference to Abraham Tucker’s The Light of Nature Pursued (1768–78), Hays postulates an ideal form of communication through a “vehicular state” in which, as opposed to communicating feelings at a distance via “a few scratches upon paper,” we are able to transmit feelings from one mind to another by “raising certain figures or motions on our outsides which communicate the like to our neighbour and thereby excite in him the same ideas that gave rise to them ourselves, making him as it were feel our thoughts.”¹⁰ Sympathy is itself explicitly capable of such communication: the novel includes praise of “the energetic sympathies of truth and feeling—darting from mind to mind, enlightening, warming, with electrical rapidity” and “the touching sympathies which bind, with sacred, indissoluble ties, mind to mind.”¹¹ Hays’ novel gestures towards a model of sympathy that invokes the mediating effects of both script and intersubjective experience. This capacious model of sympathy accounts for this novel’s formal inconsistencies, its transitions between one primary incarnation of the epistolary novel (the journal) and another (the letter). Critics have noted that transitions of a different sort—from letter-writers to omniscient narrators—feature in Scott’s construction of historical fiction’s stabilizing, singular voice of narrative authority. What warrants further attention, though, is the role sympathy plays in this transition in the ¹⁰ Abraham Tucker, The Light of Nature Pursued (London: T. Jones, 1768), vol. 4, pp. 48, 135. For an illuminating consideration of this and other “vehicular states,” see Chandler, An Archaeology of Sympathy, pp. 193–4. ¹¹ Mary Hays, Memoirs of Emma Courtney, ed. Eleanor Ty (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), pp. 99, 124.

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history of the novel. Scott’s literary project extends the work carried out by the national tale’s cultural and historical validation of the British periphery. Frequently littered with footnotes and remarkably varied in narrative form, national tales often display structural oddities that include manipulations of epistolary form. Sydney Owenson, Lady Morgan’s Wild Irish Girl (1806), for example, consists of rhapsodic letters that include lyrical praise of the Irish landscape and of Glorvina, the wild Irish girl of the novel’s title, as well as several informative footnotes. These letters are never met with a response from their addressee but are instead followed first by a third-person “Conclusion” and then by a letter from the original letter-writer’s father. The multiple voices in what is almost exclusively a one-sided epistolary novel— the scholarly voice of the notes, the objective voice of the conclusion, and the instructive voice of parental authority in the novel’s final letter—foreshadow the kind of authoritative voice that Scott’s omniscience and, to some extent, his own notes supply in the place of epistolary contingency. In Scott’s Guy Mannering (1815), epistolary narratives are subjected to the disciplinary control of a third-person narrator, an authority that, according to Nicola Watson, transforms the reader from a “privileged, secret voyeur of intimate passions” into an “acquiescent spectator of critical readings performed by an omniscient narrator on a series of transfixed embedded texts.”¹² In its initial but abandoned epistolary form, Redgauntlet (1824) explores the ascendant social model of affective fraternities. As Ian Duncan observes, Scott divides the novel’s first volume between two narrators who exchange letters, in a formal simulation of the “imaginary change of situation upon which,” according to Smith, “sympathy is founded.” For Duncan, Redgauntlet demonstrates the replacement of the traditional, authoritative social ties of paternity with the sentimental, egalitarian bonds of fraternal sympathy.¹³ When the pressures of an older model of ancestral kinship and the potential for revolution intervene, however, narrative omniscience takes over, initially with the ostensible aim of precluding the “prolixities and redundancies” of an epistolary exchange that “hang as a dead weight on the progress of narrative” and ultimately with the effect of positioning epistolarity and affective kinships against retrospective omniscience and ancestral ties.¹⁴ This opposition reaches an impasse by the novel’s ¹² Watson, Revolution and the Form of the British Novel, p. 136. ¹³ Ian Duncan, Scott’s Shadow: The Novel in Romantic Edinburgh (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007), pp. 265, 271–2. ¹⁴ Walter Scott, Redgauntlet, ed. Kathryn Sutherland (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), p. 141.

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conclusion, when revolution is averted and a letter from Scott’s fictitious antiquarian Dr. Dryasdust, a letter with assumptions quite different from those exchanged between the novel’s characters, closes the novel. Insofar as the friendship between the novel’s central characters relies on sympathetic and figurative fraternal bonds and produces the shared state of passive victimhood, Redgauntlet positions intense affective ties against forgotten ancestral obligation, articulating the former through epistolarity and the latter through chapters that are emphatically titled “narratives.” Redgauntlet aligns sympathy, affective rather than ancestral kinships, and emotional immediacy with epistolarity, a form that Scott’s omniscient historicism eradicates. Scott’s fiction depicts the absorption of epistolarity into omniscience. This well-known transition is of course a feature of Austen’s very process, famously encapsulated in her revision of her early novels’ original epistolary forms into retrospective omniscience. Her use of free indirect discourse reinterprets the emotional intensity and multiple perspectives that epistolarity allows but that narrative omniscience more commonly eschews, and it mirrors certain features of sympathetic experience. In her works, individual passages of free indirect discourse convey in content and form the same sort of effort to understand another mind that incites the operation of Smith’s sympathy. In Sense and Sensibility, this phenomenon—in which the effort to think with another is expressed through the narrative technique that manifests such an effort—appears when one character predicts and enters the affective state of another.¹⁵ After Marianne Dashwood gradually recovers from her illness, her sister Elinor awaits the arrival of their mother, who has been informed of Marianne’s illness but not her recovery. Precisely through the syntax and erratic punctuation of free indirect discourse, Austen articulates Elinor’s speculations about her mother’s emotional state: “The knowledge of what her mother must be feeling as the carriage stopt at the door,— of her doubt—her dread—perhaps her despair!”¹⁶ What critics including D. A. Miller have discussed as the impersonality of Austen’s style is, as rendered by this novelistic technique in particular, an impersonality that selectively absorbs but is never absorbed by personality, a narrative voice ¹⁵ I consider this topic at length in “ ‘To Know What You Are All Thinking’: Riddles and Minds in Jane Austen’s Emma,” Poetics Today 39.4 (2018): 651–78. ¹⁶ Jane Austen, Sense and Sensibility, ed. James Kinsley (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), p. 239. On sympathy and free indirect discourse in this novel, see Deidre Lynch, The Economy of Character: Novels, Market Culture, and the Business of Inner Meaning (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), pp. 234–5.

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that adopts the partiality of character without ever ceding fully to its particularity.¹⁷ Free indirect discourse lets Austen’s narrators feel for and, through the technique’s syntactical balance, speak alongside but not in the voice of the other. Her narrators speak in the emotional state, but not the grammatical person, of her characters. Free indirect discourse suggests but never enacts the “change” in “persons and characters” entailed in Smith’s sympathy and the grammar of vicariousness it suggests when, he says, “I consider what I should suffer if I was really you.”¹⁸ This novelistic strategy can be seen, then, as an articulation of sympathy’s ability to generate shared feeling through shifting perspectives. It is this formulation of sympathy’s emotional effects that Mackenzie’s particular epistolary practice reveals. Later frame tales modify the epistolary dynamics that animate these transitional novels. In Memoirs of Emma Courtney, the pursuits of an impossible romantic love and equally impossible sympathetic experience to a large extent determine the citations of full letters in constructions that fall short of the novel’s ideal state of communication. With similar desperation, Mackenzie’s characters speak on behalf of others in a practice of citation that suggests the structure of the frame tale, in which one character speaks for and, in fact, cites another. Shelley’s Frankenstein, for example, opens and closes as a series of letters from the explorer Robert Walton to his sister in England, and he drops the epistolary form upon meeting and transcribing the story of Victor Frankenstein. Walton longs for sympathy in his letters, which in this extreme case (he is, after all, sailing to the North Pole) seem to mark the impossibility of shared sentiment. The transcribed narrative of another, generated by experiences of sympathy, serves as a surrogate for the impossibility of human sympathy. The letter’s implication of physical mobility also facilitates the movement of narrative perspective: in Wuthering Heights the shift in point of view by which Lockwood fully takes over the narrative voice of Nelly Dean occurs when, in the story she is telling, she carries a letter from Heathcliff to the married Catherine. Julia de Roubigné presents the pursuit of selfactualization through the voice of the other, and that ideal hovers just beyond the reach of characters in later novels that similarly idealize a model of sentimental circulation and exchange, of epistolary and vocal mobility. The model of social assimilation that these fictions suggest is the ¹⁷ D. A. Miller, Jane Austen, or The Secret of Style (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003), p. 59. ¹⁸ Smith, Theory, p. 374.

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experience of narrative, not as a means of expressing the self in a prose version of the egotistical sublime, but rather of the one-to-one accommodation of the other that the continuous engagement with narrative can facilitate. In this model, the pursuit and experience of sympathy facilitate the expression of the self in the presence and voice of the other.

Correspondence, Soliloquy, and Mackenzie’s Novelistic Voices Critics often emphasize the potential of sympathetic bonds to shape the construction of social, national, and alternative communities.¹⁹ In Mackenzie’s novel, by contrast, the pursuit of sympathy concludes with the unraveling of community and the destabilization of the writing self. Savillon, a character in Julia de Roubigné, describes his relationship with Beauvaris, his childhood friend whose recent death he has just discovered, in a letter written to Herbert, an Englishman whose acquaintance he has made while overseeing his uncle’s sugar plantation in Martinique. He and Beauvaris, Savillon writes, had each been “accustomed to consider his friend but a better part of himself; and, when the heart of either was full, talking to the other was but unloading it in soliloquy.”²⁰ This statement suggests the novel’s primary conceptual tensions: the troubled and necessarily incomplete fusion of self and other, the problematic nature of voice and address, and transitions between dialogue and soliloquy. A description of intimate friendship that uses only the third person, this claim indicates the propensity of this novel’s characters, and those of epistolary novels in general, to speak about the self as if it were an other. Structurally, Julia de Roubigné provides only one side of its three correspondences. Three characters write letters to confidants, whose responses appear only as citation in the letters of the main characters: epistolary dialogue is conveyed through the single point of view. Julia de Roubigné’s peculiar structure of epistolary correspondence is not, on its own, unique. Six years before Mackenzie’s novel appeared, Tobias Smollett’s Humphry Clinker had used the same pattern for a group of six characters as they travel ¹⁹ See especially Lynn Festa, Sentimental Figures of Empire in Eighteenth-Century Britain and France (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006), and April Alliston, “Transnational Sympathies, Imaginary Communities” in The Literary Channel, pp. 133–48. ²⁰ Henry Mackenzie, Julia de Roubigné, ed. Susan Manning (East Linton: Tuckwell Press, 1999), p. 126. Subsequent references to this novel will be noted parenthetically.

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through Scotland. Their correspondents’ responses—absent but sometimes casually referenced—do not, however, weigh on the novel as heavily as the absent responses of Mackenzie’s letter-writers do. Mackenzie’s letter-writers seek a transparent correspondence but instead, through an increasingly problematic practice of citation, ultimately seem to speak only to themselves. Writing to their distant, silent correspondents, these characters resemble the first-person narrator who speaks to a textually absent, if occasionally invoked, “Dear Reader.”²¹ Conversation becomes soliloquy through this novel’s reimagining of epistolary form and its manipulation of sympathy’s structural dynamics. Mackenzie’s direct engagement with Smithean sympathy also elaborates the concept of soliloquy put forth by Anthony Ashley Cooper, the Third Earl of Shaftesbury, in his “Soliloquy, or Advice to an Author” (1710), included in his Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times (1711). The generic instability of Shaftesbury’s works and his examination and practice of the dialogue form have been considered forerunners of the eighteenth-century epistolary novel, but the meditation on perspective that his concept of soliloquy articulates invites close attention for its relationship to the mechanics of epistolary fiction.²² Mackenzie’s reinterpretation of Shaftesbury’s soliloquy dramatizes its failure to ensure virtue but specifies its generative force for epistolary perspective. Splitting the self through manipulations of genre and voice achieves the kind of remediation that early novelists found the rampant publicity of print to require; this self-division, though, also proves crucial in the novelistic considerations of identity and formal developments in subgenre. Shaftesbury’s “Soliloquy” frequently divides into two distinct voices engaged in informal conversation, and the process of soliloquy is defined in the middle of one such exchange. Mackenzie, in his characters as well as his role as “editor,” performs a similar kind of self-division. Within its first three pages, Shaftesbury’s so-called soliloquy splits into two distinct and typographically marked voices. After briefly advocating the process of “selfdissection,” the speaker imagines an opposing argument and

²¹ On this figure, see Garrett Stewart, Dear Reader: The Conscripted Audience in NineteenthCentury British Fiction (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), p. 43. ²² For parallels between Shaftesbury’s writings and eighteenth-century fiction, see Michael Prince, Philosophical Dialogue in the British Enlightenment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 41, 69. On Shaftesbury’s influence on sentimentalism, see G. J. Barker-Benfield, The Culture of Sensibility: Sex and Society in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), pp. 105–19.

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assert[s] the contrary and say[s], for instance, that “we have each of us ourselves to practise on.” “Mere quibble!”, you will say, “for who can thus multiply himself into two persons and be his own subject?” . . . Go to the poets, and they will present you with many instances. . . . A person of profound parts, or perhaps of ordinary capacity, happens on some occasion to commit a fault. He is concerned for it. He comes alone upon the stage, looks about him to see if anybody be near, then takes himself to task without sparing himself in the least. You would wonder to hear how close he pushes matters and how thoroughly he carries on the business of self- dissection. By virtue of this soliloquy, he becomes two distinct persons. He is pupil and preceptor. He teaches and he learns.²³

In these moments of vocal multiplicity, quotation marks are the textual reminder that these philosophical arguments have become—in fact and, significantly, in print—dialogues.²⁴ The speaker of the “Soliloquy” frequently divides into multiple voices, indicated by direct address or a question– response pattern spread over alternating paragraphs, much like a dialogue.²⁵ Quotation marks appear frequently but inconsistently in such exchanges. When the “Soliloquy” splits in this way, Shaftesbury both defines and performs this process in a public textual space, and the instructional text parodies its own seriousness as it presents and simultaneously complicates its lesson. Theatricality is, in Shaftesbury’s writings, an attempt to create one’s own audience, and soliloquy is a dialogue between the multiplied selves of a single speaker: a new self stands in for and annihilates the public audience. The form of the letter is the textual parallel of the solitary practice of selfdivision that resists public theatricality by producing its own audience.²⁶

²³ Anthony Ashley Cooper, Third Earl of Shaftesbury, Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times, ed. Lawrence E. Klein (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), p. 72. ²⁴ Carey McIntosh comments on Shaftesbury’s use of quotation marks in The Evolution of English Prose, 1700–1800: Style, Politeness, and Print Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), p. 74. ²⁵ For example: “What can have a better appearance or bid fairer for genuine and true philosophy?” A new paragraph then continues, as if in a new voice: “Come on then. Let me philosophize in this manner if this be indeed the way I am to grow wise” (134). See also pp. 71, 81, 89, 92, 137, 139, 142–3, and 151. ²⁶ In his discussion of Shaftesbury’s “Letter Concerning Enthusiasm,” David Marshall has noted that the letter “provides a formula which by definition keeps readers in their place: outside of the text’s address.” The Figure of Theater, p. 25. This view of Shaftesbury is at odds with that of Miranda Burgess, who emphasizes his discussion of contagious sympathies at the expense of the formal constraints he places on such emotional communicability. “On Being Moved: Sympathy, Mobility, and Narrative Form,” Poetics Today 32.2 (2011), pp. 289–321.

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Shaftesbury describes a practice of self-inspection that proceeds by way of self-division and vocal multiplicity; in the one-sided epistolary correspondences of Mackenzie’s novel, absent friends come to resemble the audience that is annihilated by the self-address of an actor’s soliloquy. Mackenzie’s theory of friendship, in which “talking to the other was but unloading it in soliloquy,” transforms Shaftesbury’s notion of soliloquy into an odd mixture of thwarted epistolary exchange and imagined, delusional dialogue. Mackenzie’s preface contains a similar instance of self-division that produces an increasingly anonymous audience. Initially a direct, singlevoiced address to “my readers” (3), the novel’s preface becomes a feigned bilingual conversation between Mackenzie and his French acquaintance that is overheard by “the Public” (5). His disavowal of authorship relies on both the false context of cross-channel sociability and a Shaftesburian instance of self-division in which the second self, the French interlocutor, is responsible for conveying the récit trouvé that constitutes this novel. Eighteenth-century novels repeatedly stage this transition from manuscript to print, most commonly in the form of an editor’s publication of discovered private journals or letters.²⁷ The conversation that Mackenzie stages in the novel’s preface seems to distance him from his audience, to transform an engagement with those he initially and intimately terms “my readers” into, as he accurately predicts, his final confrontation with “the Public” (5). Margaret Cohen reads Julia de Roubigné through distinctions between British and French preferences for tragic and melodramatic incarnations of sentimentality. Mackenzie’s tale of the novel’s French origins, she argues, suggests his awareness of its plot’s French tendencies.²⁸ Julia de Roubigné declares its kinship to Rousseau in its title, and it is worth noting that it appears after decades during which novels were translated, imitated, adapted, and sometimes retranslated into their original language across the Channel.²⁹

²⁷ The preface to Julia de Roubigné describes Mackenzie’s previous novels, The Man of Feeling (1771) and The Man of the World (1773), as “little histories which accident enabled [him] to lay before” his readers; the original discovery of the correspondence of Julia is described as “a whimsical accident” (4). For a fuller account of this tendency in the eighteenth-century novel, see Lennard Davis, Factual Fictions: The Origins of the English Novel (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1983). ²⁸ Margaret Cohen, “Sentimental Communities,” in The Literary Channel: The InterNational Invention of the Novel, ed. Margaret Cohen and Carolyn Dever (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002), pp. 109–11. ²⁹ See Mary Helen McMurran, “National or Transnational? The Eighteenth-Century Novel,” in The Literary Channel, p. 51. On Mackenzie’s adaptation of Rousseau’s novel, see Kim Ian Michasiw, “Imitation and Ideology: Henry Mackenzie’s Rousseau,” Eighteenth-Century Fiction 5 (1993), pp. 153–76.

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Mackenzie’s pseudo-editorial account of the novel’s provenance additionally echoes the novel’s conceptual and novelistic significance: Mackenzie not only sets this novel in France but also, according to the preface, transcribes a bilingual conversation with the son of the Frenchman who has come upon the letters that become the novel. Translation thus allows Mackenzie to speak through indirect address in both the novel and its preface. Dividing his authorial self between the voice of the letters’ translator and their French carrier, he casts this disavowal of authorship as an extended and channelcrossing version of Shaftesbury’s soliloquy. An elision between conversation and soliloquy occurs, then, at both the textual origin and the conceptual core of this epistolary novel. Throughout Julia de Roubigné, voices divide and multiply: writing to absent friends, the novel’s correspondents cite, imagine, and adopt the words of their desired but distant moral guides. The three main correspondents—Julia, her husband Montauban, and her childhood love Savillon—all write letters to their confidants, whose responses are imagined, referred to, cited in part, but otherwise absent from the novel. Seeking sympathetic responses whose impossibility this epistolary structure reinforces, these characters perform a polyvocal version of Shaftesbury’s internal soliloquy in letters that are marked by ambiguities of address and voice. This particular version of the epistolary novel, in which the single perspective contains other voices, precludes the possibility of shared distress: its one-sided correspondences reinforce distance without exploring epistolary fiction’s potential for immediacy or imagined presence. Whereas Smollett’s Humphry Clinker, as Evan Gottlieb observes, uses the same epistolary structure as a “technology of consensus” in order to instill a sense of shared identity in the novel’s readers, Mackenzie’s novel uses its single-sided correspondences to portray the pursuit of Smithean sympathy through a stymied epistolary exchange that leads to Shaftesburian selfdivision.³⁰ These features of its epistolary practice mark Julia de Roubigné as a transitional text between the late-eighteenth-century demise of epistolary fiction and the continued significance of epistolarity in nineteenthcentury novels.

³⁰ Evan Gottlieb, Feeling British: Sympathy and National Identity in Scottish and English Writing, 1707–1832 (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 2007), p. 80. Gottlieb specifies that Humphry Clinker “does not deal with Smith’s more complicated—and problematic—ideas about the impartial spectator” (92). Through using and expanding the same epistolary format, Mackenzie enacts this process.

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Mackenzie’s Reformulation of Epistolary Perspectives The form of Mackenzie’s novel is an explicit issue from its very beginning. As he disavows authorship of the novel’s letters in the preface, Mackenzie claims that he “found it a difficult task to reduce them into narrative, because they are made up of sentiment, which narrative would destroy” (5). Mackenzie’s letters not only preserve space for sentiment but also present dialogue and epistolary exchange through the monovocal letter’s single point of view. Mackenzie’s transformation of epistolarity manipulates the imaginative practices described by Smith and Shaftesbury so as to collapse vocal multiplicity into solipsism. By hinting at the decline of epistolary fiction through the subgenre’s characteristic features of polyvocality and address, Julia de Roubigné predicts narrative practices that become prominent in fiction of the Romantic era. Specifically, letters addressed to absent readers parallel the interpolated readers of first- and third-person novels, and letters marked by vestiges of polyvocality and rapid shifts between different speakers, such as those of Julia’s husband Montauban discussed below, resonate with the mechanics of free indirect discourse. The particular form of Mackenzie’s novel creates not only the proper forum for sentiment, as his preface suggests, but also the need for narrative strategies by which to include other perspectives within its one-sided correspondences. Narrative may, as Mackenzie suggests, destroy sentiment, but the pursuit of shared sentiment through the epistolary mode gives rise to novelistic forms that facilitate intersubjective narrative experience. The plot of Julia de Roubigné is fairly conventional: it centers on Julia’s marriage to the Count de Montauban, a marriage that develops out of the financial downfall of Julia’s father and Montauban’s generosity to her family. Having married out of familial debt and a cold sense of gratitude, Julia learns that her childhood love, Savillon, will be returning to France from the Caribbean, and she plans to meet him in secret. Montauban discovers her plan, and after finding the ocular proof of a tear-stained portrait, plans and commits her murder with anxieties and schemes that echo Shakespeare’s Othello. Learning of her innocence too late, he quickly commits suicide. The plot tests the purity and loyalty of a moral heroine, and Mackenzie intended with this novel to construct a tragedy that results from a slavish dedication to virtue. The novel’s particular epistolary structure complicates the nature of address, an issue that is complemented by quite literal problems of the voice. Speech is often overheard rather than heard, and voices deny their

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potential listeners through isolation, separation, or involuntary eruption. This feature of Julia de Roubigné extends the cliché of communicative silence frequent in sentimental fiction, in which emotion stifles speech or silence conveys more feeling than conversation. Julia’s father writes to her as she leaves for her marriage that “the importance of my thoughts, on your behalf, stifles my expression of them” (78); Savillon tells Beauvaris that silence in the company of Julia communicates more than years of conversation with other women (113). Julia, tormented with the guilt of meeting her childhood love, speaks his name in her sleep, “accompanied with sighs so deep, that her heart seemed bursting as it heaved them” (124). This cliché—the speaking voice of a sleeping wife that is overheard by her jealous husband—reconfigures the novel’s ideal version of friendship, in which passionate overflow, addressed to no one, is overheard.³¹ The involuntary voice has no intended listener again when Savillon, sailing from France to the Caribbean, recalled “a thousand things which I should have said” to his friend Beauvaris (the friend to whom he speaks in soliloquy) and “spoke them involuntarily in the ear of the night” (87). Speaking without intention or audience, characters reveal not only their innermost thoughts, but also the more pervasive problem of address that characterizes and, in some sense, structures this novel. As if to reinforce this point, Beauvaris, the intended recipient of six of the novel’s letters, dies a few days after receiving Savillon’s final letter (115), and it is upon learning of his death that Savillon offers his description of conversation as soliloquy. The unheard, misdirected, or otherwise thwarted voice shapes the novel’s practice of citation. A melodramatic example of this practice provides the context in which the novel most productively engages with the theories of Smith and Shaftesbury. In letters to Beauvaris, Savillon tells the story of Herbert, an Englishman whose poor luck in trade has brought him to Martinique to attend to debts. His wife and two young children, impatient after his extended absence, make the journey to the Caribbean but perish en route. After discovering Herbert at his desk, with letters before him and a tear in his eye, Savillon then includes passages from letters written by the deceased wife to her absent husband. Although letters that allow the dead to speak from the grave are by no means uncommon in sentimental fiction, in this novel, these passages are notable because they extend the novel’s patterns of epistolary citation and indirect address. The letters of a wife ³¹ By contrast, in La Nouvelle Héloïse, the secret affair is uncovered by the discovery of Julie’s letters.

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(Herbert’s), who has since died, are transcribed and sent to a friend (Beauvaris), who dies soon thereafter. Citation here solicits a tearful response while it problematizes address, to say the least, by redirecting the voice of a deceased wife to a correspondent who presently dies himself. Against this background, it is through the more common practice of citation among the living that Julia de Roubigné destabilizes the writing self through its peculiar epistolary practice. Citation opens the novel. In Julia’s first letter, she quotes her friend Maria’s statement—“ ‘The friendship of your Maria, misfortune can never deprive you of ’ ” (7)—and begins the novel with a hint of the calamity that will follow, an assurance of their friendship’s permanence, and the inclusion of another voice in the novel’s single side of exchanged letters. To be sure, the practice of citation serves the logistical purpose of incorporating the absent side of each correspondence. But as the novel progresses, and as the return of the title character’s childhood love tests her marriage, this otherwise common novelistic strategy for representing while limiting other voices begins to unfold a paranoid version of self-division. In the scenes of sympathy that following chapters address, characters narrate on behalf of others, sometimes in what are literally and typographically extended citations; in this epistolary novel, instances of speaking on behalf of another seek but fail to replicate sympathetic communication through writing. Both Julia and her husband refer to their correspondents as guides. In language that is suggestive of Smith’s Theory, Julia calls Maria her “support,” her “judge,” her “other conscience” (66), her “best monitor” (77), and “monitor within me” (147); she asks her to “assist me, counsel me, guide me” (34).³² With this terminology, Mackenzie casts the correspondent in a role akin to Smith’s impartial spectator and likens the self-division implicit in sympathetic response to that which develops out of this novel’s epistolary citations. Mackenzie’s engagement with Smith plays out not only in his novel’s terminology but also in its form. These considerations take place through citations of previous letters; in this way, the novel’s peculiar epistolary form itself becomes an exploration of Smithean sympathy. Julia states in her first letter that “I will speak to you on paper when my heart is full, and you will answer me from the sympathy of yours,” and in the novel’s third

³² Susan Manning and David Marshall note that this terminology derives from Smith’s Theory. David Marshall, The Frame of Art: Fictions of Aesthetic Experience, 1750–1815 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005), p. 144; Manning, “Introduction,” Julia de Roubigné, pp. xvi–xviii and 147 n. 22.

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letter, she cites the first clause of this statement (9, 14). Initially, this line suggests that the letter very nearly reproduces the immediacy and proximity of the voice and seems to offer a different gloss on the Richardsonian model of “writing to the moment”: if a writer tells her correspondent she will “speak to you on paper,” the letter is simply written speech. But when Julia later quotes her own statement, after she has also cited short passages from her friend, the writing self inches closer towards the absent and otherwise silent friend. Whereas citation in Rousseau’s La Nouvelle Héloïse solidifies a sense of community, in Julia de Roubigné the practice suggests a division in identity.³³ Julia’s husband Montauban, whose letters begin to appear later in the novel, seeks a guide in Segarva, his correspondent. He suspects his wife of a secret passion, and although he is technically correct, his imagination carries him beyond reality. Segarva interrupts Montauban’s letters more thoroughly than Maria does Julia’s, and in one instance, Montauban confuses his own thoughts with those he ascribes to his friend in a construction that approaches the mingling of two perspectives that is characteristic of free indirect discourse: Montauban writes to Segarva, “I have sometimes allowed myself to think, or rather I have supposed you thinking” that Julia is marrying him out of debt (71). In another instance, he repeatedly anticipates his friend’s responses and replies to each: Montauban defends his new love for Julia to his suspicious friend by opening an imagined dialogue with “I . . . will now hear Segarva with patience. He will tell me of that fascinating power which women possess when they would win us, which fades at once from the character of wife. —But I know Julia de Roubigné well . . . ” (36). By the end of the novel, as he plans his wife’s murder, these interruptions become more desperate, taking the practice modeled in Shaftesbury’s “Soliloquy” from the realm of sober philosophy to that of frenzied action. After he has committed the murder, he writes to Segarva: “methinks I speak to you, when I scrawl upon this paper. I wish for somebody to speak to; to answer, to comfort, to guide me!” (156). Letter writing has at this point become an inadequate surrogate for the absent moral monitor. By contrast, the one-sided correspondences and national differences of Humphry Clinker find resolution in ³³ Saint-Preux writes long descriptive letters of life at Julie’s home to his English friend that contain frequent and lengthy citations, usually of Julie or her husband. Elizabeth MacArthur has observed that the confusion these citations create as to who is actually speaking and whose views are being articulated accurately represents their domestic community of mingled philosophies. Extravagant Narratives: Closure and Dynamics in the Epistolary Form (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990), p. 205.

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multiple marriages. These Anglo-Scottish marriages prove that philosophical models of sympathy fail to achieve social, national unity: national difference must be accommodated by a familial contract for sympathy to succeed.³⁴ Julia de Roubigné’s tragic conclusion exposes a failure of sympathy of another sort. As the novel draws to its close, the distinction between speaking and writing that Julia’s line to Maria elided (“I will speak to you on paper when my heart is full”) and that her subsequent self-citation troubled ultimately characterizes the novel’s communicative mode as polyvocal self-address. The epistolary dynamic that Mackenzie’s letters foster, in which two correspondents are blended into the single voice of one letter-writer, signals two directions in the history of the novel. First, Julia de Roubigné predicts the historical turn away from epistolarity through the form’s own mechanics of vocal multiplicity and exchange, which come to characterize the voice of the single correspondent rather than the result of an exchange of letters. Through a revision of Smith’s sympathy and Shaftesbury’s soliloquy, letterwriters accommodate the voices of others by sliding from citation into vocal multiplicity. Second, this vocal multiplicity conveyed through a single perspective edges towards—but does not enact—the blending of perspectives that free indirect discourse achieves. Although structurally quite different, the shifting voices of Mackenzie’s letter-writers and, for example, the alternating perspectives between narrator and character in Austen’s novels both call into question the imaginative and grammatical boundaries between two speakers. The novelistic form that most clearly absorbs these features of Mackenzie’s novels in letters is, however, the interpolated or framed narrative—the inset tale whose transmission mingles emotions through sympathy and mingles voices through citation. It is not only the structure of Julia de Roubigné or its manipulation of Shaftesbury’s soliloquy that facilitates its elision between self and other: this elision occurs, after all, between correspondents who have similar names, shared class and national identities, and friendships that are likened to familial relationships. The names Julia de Roubigné and Maria de Roncilles, which serve as the heading for the novel’s first letter, include first names that can be read as English or Spanish versions of French names (Julie, Marie), the aristocratic particle, and surnames that appear French. Savillon calls Beauvaris “the friend, brother of my soul” (86). These nominal and familial affinities encourage the novel’s letter-writers to see a version of themselves

³⁴ See Gottlieb, Feeling British, pp. 96–7.

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in their correspondents. Mackenzie’s preface explains his interest in speaking with the Frenchman who conveys the novel’s letters to him by saying that he is “delighted with an intercourse, which removes the barrier of national distinction, and gives to the inhabitants of the world the appearance of one common family” (3). In Mackenzie’s novel, differences between French, Spanish, and English nationalities do seem to be elided in the body of the novel, whether by friendship or marriage. Outside of Europe, however, the racial difference that an African slave on a Caribbean plantation presents cannot be elided by such means.

Shared Language and Racial Difference Attempts at shared feeling that confront human difference clarify the significance of imaginative perspective in Smith’s sympathy, and the structural methods with which fiction responds to such confrontations generate a novelistic version of sympathy. Broadly speaking, epistolary novels tend to present correspondences among characters from largely similar backgrounds: in canonical eighteenth-century epistolary fiction, letters do not cross the stark division of race. The rarity of such historical correspondences no doubt influences this characteristic of epistolary fiction, but, in generic terms, it also seems fair to say that epistolary novels presume a level of human resemblance among their letter-writers, a foundation that seems to facilitate epistolary fiction’s experimentation with vocal multiplicity but limits its ability to depict the voices of racial others. Julia de Roubigné’s representation of a speaking African marks a limit of this and other works of eighteenth-century epistolary fiction, a limit that frame tales negotiate in different ways that are the subject of following chapters. Despite its international cast of French, Spanish, and English characters, Julia de Roubigné includes a fairly restricted social circle until one character’s brief, seemingly tangential encounter with an African slave. In the novel’s plot structure, this encounter partakes of the marginalization of racial difference and abolitionist discourse that is common to sentimental fiction.³⁵ But in the novel’s rhetorical structures, this interaction parallels the patterns that serve to ³⁵ On this particular tendency, see Brycchan Carey, British Abolitionism and the Rhetoric of Sensibility: Writing, Sentiment, and Slavery, 1760–1807 (New York: Palgrave, 2005), pp. 63–4. On race in this novel, see Markman Ellis, The Politics of Sensibility: Race, Gender, and Commerce in the Sentimental Novel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 114–28, and Carey, p. 67.

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articulate identification (Savillon’s with Herbert) and revenge (Montauban’s on Julia). The sympathetic process of postulating another person’s interiority leads, throughout this novel, to varying states of identification or, in this Caribbean episode, to an instance of oppression. The uses of language— cited or borrowed—that result from these interactions indicate the particular brand of identification and shared speech that informs later frame tales that aim to accommodate rather than dominate figures of difference. Having observed the restrained suffering of Yambu, one of his “fellowcreatures” (101) whom he hopes to make a “friend” (98), Savillon decides to establish a less punitive system of managing the slaves he reluctantly oversees on his uncle’s plantation in Martinique. Prompting a call for slavery’s amelioration, if not its abolition, the meeting of a European man of sentiment and a former African prince offers an account of a slave’s psychological interiority that challenges presumptions of eighteenth-century racial thought. Savillon’s decision to experiment with the management of slaves appears to arise from his disgust with their collective treatment and a conviction of Yambu’s character in particular as much as it does from an effort to increase profits. Of his uncle’s slaves, he is convinced “that the most savage and sullen among them had principles of gratitude, which a good master might improve to his advantage,” and his notice is especially attracted by the “gloomy fortitude” with which Yambu endures his position (97). Convinced of the graciousness and resolution of the slaves, Savillon then enquires about Yambu’s background and learns, not from Yambu himself but from the white overseer and a slave with “tolerable French” (98), that he was sold into slavery by an enemy who had defeated his tribe. He then proposes a successful plan by which all the slaves are deemed nominally free but unable to return to Africa and encouraged to work out of a sense of allegiance to Yambu, who becomes their overseer. In this process, the European plantation master, seeing beyond a view of national or racial characteristics, posits a psychological interiority which he quickly dominates by an alternative structure of power. Savillon’s interaction with Yambu resembles his next encounter with national difference in his relationship with Herbert, the bereaved Englishman. With Herbert, Savillon is again attracted to those who suffer: it is the “gloomy fortitude” with which the slave tolerates his situation that attracts his notice, and in Herbert’s case, it is the “tincture of melancholy enthusiasm in his mind” which, Savillon rightly assumes, “was not altogether owing to the national character, but must have arisen from some particular cause” (103–4). Such “national characters” inform his encounter with Yambu,

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whose initial “perfect indifference,” according to Savillon, would have convinced others of his “stupid insensibility, which Europeans often mention as an apology for their cruelties” (98). Savillon’s compassionate curiosity, drawing on the kind of cognitive labor that Smith’s sympathy describes, allows him to overcome theories of national or racial difference in each case: the English malady and African insensibility appear as surface indicators that belie interior states to which sympathetic interest grants him access. Savillon receives third-person accounts of each man’s circumstances. The Englishman’s psychological interiority becomes the site of a psychological division that is central to this novel’s reconceptualization of sympathy through its particular epistolary dynamic. Although initially postulated by similar means, the psychological interiority of the African becomes the site for the exercise of an invisible, oppressive authority that enacts the insidious potential of the discourse of sympathy.³⁶ In this case—which is unique among novels discussed in other chapters—sympathy unambiguously grants both knowledge and power, but its formal mechanics signal alternative possibilities that frame tales explore. Yambu’s borrowed language (broken French) articulates his acquiescence to what remains, in spite of Savillon’s intentions, a version of forced labor when he declares that “chuse work” is “no work at all” (99). Yambu’s silence about his own past— “silence,” “the only throne which adversity has left to princes” (98)—facilitates the projective occupation that Savillon’s labor experiment engenders. When other, European characters speak for themselves, as Savillon’s “sympathetic” attention encourages Herbert to do, and when they write, as each character’s correspondent presumably does, their interiority offers their correspondents another identity to approximate rather than command. By the end of the novel, the revenge plot that leads to the title character’s death illustrates the disintegrating distinction between, on one hand, language that infiltrates a speaker or writer who is increasingly divorced from power and, on the other, the citation of another’s words as a moral guide or another self. Deliberate citation, as opposed to the Shakespearean allusions that run through Montauban’s scheme for revenge, requires a degree of selfconsciousness and agency: citation marks a choice to speak as another person that the stammering use of a foreign language or the literary echo, made by ³⁶ Savillon’s labor experiment serves, James Lilley has argued, as a “moment of perverse abolitionism” by which the African’s perceived “fortitude” and “gratitude” legitimize his position in an even more coercive, if less spectacular, power structure. “Henry Mackenzie’s Ruined Feelings: Romance, Race, and the Afterlife of Sentimental Exchange,” New Literary History 38 (2007), p. 662.

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an author rather than a character, would preclude. Indeed, the citation that opens the novel—Julia’s quotation of Maria’s letter—edges closer to the kind of borrowed speech that displays the powerlessness of the slave and the vengeful husband as well as this novel’s pervasive interest in language’s capacity to efface rather than instantiate the subjectivity of its users. Susan Manning has identified this feature of the scenes in which Montauban is overtaken by the Shakespearean language of suspicion, revenge, and murder. As a source text infiltrates Montauban’s speech, Manning has argued, Othello’s influence on this novelistic tragedy signals the extent to which Mackenzie’s characters have become separated from the agency of language. Montauban’s language of revenge strikes a clear parallel with the play: after receiving sufficient “proof” from a servant, he writes to Segarva that “Enquiry is at an end, and vengeance is the only business I have left. Before you can answer this—the infamy of your friend cannot be erased, but it shall be washed in blood!” Instructing his correspondent to read a copy of Julia’s letter to Savillon, he predicts that Segarva will, while he reads the letter, “wish to stab her” but adds “Montauban has a dagger too” (140). For a character whose anticipations of his correspondent’s thoughts and speech suggest a confusion between self and other, these Shakespearean echoes extend the sense of selfdisintegration that the novel’s epistolary practice develops. This disintegration of address and psyche becomes, in the case of the suspicious husband who is unknowingly reenacting a Shakespearean tragedy, another site that is dominated by a European occupying force; in a Scottish novel, Manning notes, “such borrowed—and English—authority is highly ambiguous.”³⁷ In its tangential Caribbean episode and the conclusion of its tragic plot, Julia de Roubigné explores language’s potential to enact psychological domination. In its more pervasive patterns of epistolary citation, Mackenzie’s novel predicts redefinitions of sympathy through novelistic form that are capable of suspending boundaries of difference. The phenomenon of speaking and feeling along with another in this epistolary novel anticipates the nineteenth-century frame tale, whose structure is built, after all, on extensive citations of another’s speech. The destabilizing effects of citation in Julia de Roubigné signal the revision of sympathy that is also manifested in acts of narrative framing rather than epistolary citation, in interpolated, embedded, and deferred narratives that avoid the dominating effects of Mackenzie’s confrontation with racial difference. ³⁷ Susan L. Manning, “Enlightenment’s Dark Dreams: Two Fictions of Henry Mackenzie and Charles Brockden Brown” Eighteenth-Century Life 21 (1997), p. 49.

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3 Laurence Sterne in the Romantic Anthology

Yorick’s travels in Laurence Sterne’s A Sentimental Journey through France and Italy (1768) famously stop short of the title’s second destination. Before making it far in France, Yorick, travelling without a passport, finds his journey thwarted. Fearing imprisonment in the Bastille—which is, he attempts to console himself, nothing more than a tower from which one “can’t get out”—he hears the voice of a creature that, like him, “could not get out.”¹ The speaker of these words is Sterne’s starling, the caged bird who appears in the novel’s illustration of Sterne’s own family crest and later moves from one nobleman’s possession to another’s. This speaking animal is notable, not only for its visual depiction in the novel or its later movement, which far outpaces that of the novel’s sentimental traveler, but also for the particular features of its cited speech. Lost in anxious thoughts of imprisonment, Yorick first hears a voice that “complained ‘it could not get out.’ ” When the animal voice is unidentified, its words are cited but articulated in the third person: “ ‘it could not get out’ ” [italics mine]. The bird then acquires the voice of a grammatical subject when Yorick “hear[s] the same words repeated twice over . . . —‘I can’t get out—I can’t get out,’ said the starling” (59). To be sure, Sterne’s initial syntax, while odd by twenty-first-century standards, was not uncommon in his time or following decades; Austen’s narrators, for example, occasionally indicate a character’s speech by citing third-person pronouns. In the case of Sterne’s speaking bird, though, the transition from the cited “it” to the self-articulating “I” warrants attention. This transition in grammar and typography signals others: transitions between words as they are thought, heard, or spoken, and transitions among identities of thing, person, and animal. Before Sterne’s bird can speak in the first person, its speech is ¹ Laurence Sterne, A Sentimental Journey and Other Writings, ed. Ian Jack and Tim Parnell (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), p. 59. Subsequent references will be noted parenthetically. Vicarious Narratives: A Literary History of Sympathy, 1750–1850. Jeanne M. Britton, Oxford University Press (2019). © Jeanne M. Britton. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198846697.001.0001

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conveyed through syntax that cites and objectifies a voice expressing precisely what Yorick has just thought to himself, but in a different grammatical person—and, for that matter, as a person. Immediately before Yorick hears the bird, his contemplation of imprisonment uses this very phrase: “as for the Bastille! the terror is in the word— Make the most of it you can, said I to myself, the Bastille is but another word for a tower—and a tower is but another word for a house you can’t get out of— . . . but with . . . pen and ink and paper and patience, albeit a man can’t get out, he may do very well within.” In this meditation, prison seems nothing more than a house from which “you” or “a man” “can’t get out.” The disembodied voice of the bird articulates the same thought in a phrase that is, by contrast, objectified, and its urge to move is rendered anterior and perhaps conjectural when Yorick is “interrupted . . . with a voice which . . . complained ‘it could not get out.’” This echo of Yorick’s statement that a person—whether “you,” “it,” or “I”—“can’t get out” is tempered by the radical difference of its speaker’s species (59). As much as the verbal echo signals similarities between two potential captives, the difference of species calls forth odd mechanics of citation, printed forms that sketch the limitations and possibilities that characterize Sterne’s methods of speaking on behalf of another. Speaking for others is a frequent and fraught element in Sterne’s novels. The mechanics by which Yorick speaks for this caged bird in particular are part of a narrative trajectory in A Sentimental Journey that carries significant conceptual weight. Before the appearance of the speaking bird, Yorick recalls a “dialogue” with his friend Eugenius that, concluding with the speculation that Yorick might end up in the Bastille, gives way to a “soliloquy” on confinement. Here, he reasons that “The mind sits terrified at the objects she has magnified herself, and blackened: reduce them to their proper size and hue she overlooks them—’Tis true, said I, correcting the proposition— the Bastille is not an evil to be despised—but strip it of its towers— . . . call it simply a confinement . . . —the evil vanishes, and you bear the other half without complaint.” Marked by dashes and uncited shifts in voice (“’Tis true, said I . . . ”), this so-called soliloquy divides the single individual into two uncited conversational voices. The initial subject of this soliloquy is an exercise in correcting the optical illusions of the mind: we are to “reduce . . . to their proper size” the objects which our minds have “magnified” (59). Doubled voices discuss errors of vision as perspectives, understood as both grammatical persons and visual orientations, multiply. Similar cognitive labor occupies Smith’s impartial spectator, the figure that readjusts the disproportionate perceptions of self-interest and visual

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perspective. Just as self-interest exaggerates near and present concerns, the tricks of visual perspective enlarge the room and window from which Smith observes a landscape and distant mountains. James Chandler has uncovered the emotional register of such work in A Sentimental Journey’s episode of Maria of Moulines, in which “shifting sight lines” and affective disturbance constitute Sterne’s “ ‘Sentimental Traveler,’ a figure for whom ‘moving’ (shifting perspectives) and ‘being moved’ (registering new feeling) amount to the same thing.”² When Sterne represents characters seeking or presuming knowledge about other minds, he modifies Smithean sympathy’s transformation of sensory perception into imaginative perspective, and in the embedded tales that emerge from such efforts, typographical and narrative forms of representation signal the limits of Sterne’s sentimentalist epistemology. Sterne’s novels are known, of course, for a conspicuously physiological version of sympathy that, more resonant of Hume than Smith, triggers trembling nerves and legible pulses. When this version of sympathy fails, though, and when figures of radical difference cannot be assimilated by adoptive kinships or erotic energy, abstract rather than embodied forms of shared feeling explore the capacity of narrative representation, rather than sensory experience, to communicate another person’s past and passions. It is this kind of shift that has Yorick speaking in the same grammatical person as a bird who potentially shares his circumstances but not his personhood. These mechanics of citation illuminate a grammar of vicariousness when that which inspires identification—an articulation of a shared state, a narrative of suffering—appears as second-hand experience but, in the case of the starling, first-person speech. In what precedes Yorick’s citation of the speaking bird, the shifting, dividing voices of dialogue and soliloquy meet the imaginative abstraction that, for both Smith as he sits at his window and Yorick as he contemplates imprisonment, corrects the errors of perspective. As opposed to the trembling, bodily sentiments that course through his novels and the many ways that he breaks out of the diegetic level in Tristram Shandy (1759–67), Sterne stages confrontations between figures separated by species, religion, or race in encounters that prompt shifting narrative levels and, in so doing, sketch a novelistic version of sympathy. To be sure, Sterne’s fictions emphatically lack standardized methods of representing reported speech. Dialogue appears by way of italics, dashes, or sometimes both. Quotation marks in A Sentimental Journey signal clichés

² Chandler, An Archaeology of Sympathy, p. 174.

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about national practices, moments of self-address, or internal or hypothetical but unuttered speech.³ The bird’s lament might, along such lines, be an instance of Yorick’s imagined but unuttered speech. While, for Jonathan Lamb, the speaking bird is actually an illusion, “a hollow and extended voice of the ‘I’ who taught him to speak,” and Yorick “seem[s] to usurp a nonhuman feeling in order to conduct a dialogue,” Lynn Festa has pointed out that the repetition of these words—by both the starling and Yorick—urges us to ask how a shared language might articulate the particularity of the self.⁴ In this case, the “soliloquy” that is said to be “interrupted” by the bird’s speech may more accurately be said to continue with yet another self. Eve Sedgwick has argued that the novel’s lack of quotation marks renders the products of Yorick’s mind—his “fantasy interlocutors, his fantasy foils, his slightest mental projections”—just as “real” as his actual experiences. In this instance, though, the interlocutor is eventually allowed to speak in his own voice in a formulation that, according to Sedgwick’s claim, complicates the novel’s tendency to “render the intersubjective transparent to the intrapsychic.”⁵ As a cited “it,” the starling initially appears somewhat opaque, its thoughts unknowable. But Sterne’s changing renditions of the bird’s near echo of his speech—the shift from a speaking object, the cited “it,” to what seems, at least grammatically, to be a self-articulating “I”—gradually overcome, whether by strain or delusion, this instance of intersubjective opacity. Yorick’s transition from referencing the voice that “complained ‘it could not get out’ ” to citing the caged bird who says “ ‘I can’t get out’ ” displays the imaginative, grammatical, and printed mechanisms that appear when sympathetic identification, in crossing lines of difference, allows one character to speak for another. As Smith indicates in his Theory, and as de Grouchy emphasizes in her translation, sympathy enables shared knowledge and feeling not through sensation but through acts of imaginative representation and shifts in perspectives, persons, and pronouns. The details of Sterne’s grammar here enact a form of vicariousness, of “seeing through another’s eyes,” that fuels the narrative practice of many of ³ Only Maria’s speech is quoted: addressing her dog, she says “Thou shalt not leave me, Sylvio” (95). ⁴ Lamb, Preserving the Self, pp. 268, 265; Festa, Sentimental Figures of Empire, pp. 84, 92. ⁵ Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, “Sexualism and the Citizen of the World: Wycherley, Sterne, and Male Homosocial Desire,” Critical Inquiry 11 (1984), p. 243. Alternatively, Lorri Nandrea has argued that Sterne’s typographical eccentricities—the marbled page, his manipulation of graphics, typeface, and italics—bear somatic and cognitive connections to theories of sympathetic response. Misfit Forms: Paths Not Taken by the British Novel (New York: Fordham University Press, 2015), pp. 51–4, 90.

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his novels’ most popular episodes. In these scenes, Sterne’s main characters more easily experience and less awkwardly relate the sufferings of others— strangers, a beast of burden, a fallen nobleman, an imagined prisoner, and an African girl. Such scenes feature prominently in literary anthologies. These collections, miscellanies, or “Beauties” played a large role in perpetuating Sterne’s cultural capital into the following century. The renditions of Sterne’s novels presented in these collections are the focus of this chapter. Their numerous editions and large print runs suggest that the version of Sterne’s novels that would have been familiar to significant segments of the Romantic-era reading public is fundamentally different from the versions of Sterne’s two novels that readers encounter today. This popular version of Sterne calls attention to not only the publication facts of Sterne’s anthologized forms—print runs in some cases higher than those of the novels, for example—but also the literary significance of the novel extract as a form. Sterne’s methods for indicating the speech of others could certainly be seen to inform the ways that anthologies alter his published words: citation lies at the center of this chapter’s primary materials and conceptual concerns. My argument, though, locates Sterne’s presentation of the speaking bird in the development of a particular form of narrative sympathy that struggles to overcome human difference through the intersubjective experience of hearing and then telling another person’s story. Many of the episodes from Tristram Shandy and A Sentimental Journey that were widely republished in Romantic-era anthologies depict shared emotional experiences and attempts to tell another person’s story. In the episode of the starling, Yorick’s soliloquy gradually makes space for the other voice of the speaking bird once the animal is seen as well as heard. This episode and others aspire to a mode of vicarious narration, and that effort appears when alternative discursive channels reach a limit and prove incapable of representing otherness. By rearranging and condensing these channels, anthologies foreground an aspirational mode of vicarious narrative that reframes some of the vexing issues in the reception history of Sterne’s fiction.

Literary Anthologies: Sentimental Extracts and Reading Strategies This discussion presumes that novelistic scenes that are taken from longer chapters, retitled, and rearranged as anthology episodes work in significantly different ways—formally, conceptually, and ethically. Following Roger

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Chartier, I consider the texts of literary anthologies as “object[s] whose forms and layout guide and compel the production of meaning.”⁶ To begin with titles, Yorick’s encounter with the starling is, in A Sentimental Journey, an episode within a chapter titled “The Passport: The Hotel at Paris.” In numerous anthologies, this scene, without the chapter’s preceding “dialogue” or Yorick’s initial meditation on the Bastille, becomes “The Starling,” and the passport, Yorick’s object of pursuit across six chapters (all of which include the word “Passport” in their title), disappears—it disappears as a chapter title, legal document, and organizing concept. In anthologized versions of A Sentimental Journey, Yorick acquires neither a passport nor the rights, privileges, or, significantly, the identity that it brings. The effects of such alterations emerge in reading anthology episodes sequentially and identifying their own new narrative trajectories. Anthologies, to be sure, facilitate discontinuous reading. The editor of the very popular Beauties of Sterne presumes, though, that its episodes will be read continuously. They are intentionally arranged, he explains, so as not to “wound the heart of sensibility too deeply.”⁷ Sensibility is but one of many organizational principles guiding editorial arrangements. Following the rhetorical tradition, categories in Vicesimus Knox’s popular Elegant Extracts and William Enfield’s well-known The Speaker, including the “Sentimental,” “Pathetic,” “Didactic,” “Descriptive,” “Narrative,” “Dramatic,” and “Dialogues,” present passages according to their effects (emotional or moral) or their forms (generic or rhetorical).⁸ It is at the risk of imposing one reading practice on some collections that were designed to foster others that I read Sterne’s anthology pieces consecutively and continuously. This ⁶ Roger Chartier, Frenchness in the History of the Book: From the History of Publishing to the History of Reading (Worcester: American Antiquarian Society, 1988), p. 13. ⁷ The Beauties of Sterne: Including All His Pathetic Tales, and Most Distinguished Observations on Life. Selected for the Heart of Sensibility (London: T. Davies, 1782), p. viii. It is, as Christopher Nagle has noted, “unclear whether more knowing readers should imagine a sly wink accompanying this observation or not.” “Sterne, Shelley, and Sensibility’s Pleasures of Proximity,” English Literary History 70 (2003), p. 836. This preface appears in the first through the eleventh edition of 1793. Thomas Keymer has identified the editor as William Holland, a controversial printer of political and pornographic texts. “A Sentimental Journey and the Failure of Feeling,” in Cambridge Companion to Sterne, ed. Thomas Keymer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), p. 79. ⁸ Vicesimus Knox, Elegant Extracts: Or, Useful and Entertaining Passages in Prose, Selected for the Improvement of Young Persons (London: B. Law et al., 1797); William Enfield, The Speaker: Or, Miscellaneous Pieces, Selected from the Best English Writers, and Disposed under Proper Heads, with a View to Facilitate the Improvement of Youth in Reading and Speaking (London: Joseph Johnson, 1781). For information on other anthologies, see William St Clair, Reading Nation in the Romantic Period (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), pp. 525–50.

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strategy illuminates, though, the reconstructed plots that made Sterne’s sentimental figures—the starling, the captive, the fraternal pairs of Tristram Shandy—such well-known figures of literary sentimentalism. Specifically, I identify connections that emerge when anthology editors juxtapose an episode from Tristram Shandy and another from A Sentimental Journey, unite strands in a digressive narrative thread that originally appeared in different volumes of Tristram Shandy, or dismantle the trajectory by which Yorick acquires his passport, which grants him the right (if not the actual means) to carry out the promise of the novel’s title. These sequences of Sterne’s episodes not only capitalize on the fragmentary, episodic quality of his fiction but also create new connections between the unvoiced narratives and suspended sympathies of one episode and the themes of those that follow. Both fulfilling and exceeding their stated editorial aims, Romantic-era anthologies present a version of Sterne that calls for new attention to the function of sympathy in his novels. Reading key episodes in their original and anthologized forms repositions Sterne as a central figure in the paradox of eighteenth-century sympathy— the dissonance between the benevolence and humanitarianism that it would seem to foster and the social inequalities and emotional imperialism that it can be seen to support.⁹ The claims made for literary anthologies in the late eighteenth century loosely parallel the ethical claims often made in favor of reading certain types of fiction today: “the sentimental Sterne” that was widespread in anthologies “came to be used as a model of moralizing excellence.”¹⁰ But this moral excellence stands at odds with what has in recent criticism been exposed as the emotionally acquisitive if not imperialistic Sternean character. In their distinctions from the original texts, anthologies put forth a version of Sterne’s sympathy that prioritizes destabilizing sentiment over an acquisitive subjectivity and celebrates the experience of otherness while downplaying individual identity. If A Sentimental Journey celebrates emotional imperialism but its anthologized versions instead prioritize intersubjectivity and otherness, and if Tristram Shandy silences figures of radical difference but new sequences of its episodes forcefully imply the stories that the novel cannot tell, then distinctions ⁹ These aspects of sensibility frequently invoke discourses of gender. Nancy Armstrong, for example, argues that Sterne’s heroes are feminized by their affective responses to disturbing tales. Desire and Domestic Fiction: A Political History of the Novel (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), p. 4. ¹⁰ John Mullan, Sentiment and Sociability: The Language of Feeling in the Eighteenth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), p. 155.

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between his original and anthologized novels offer a new lens on the popular reception of his works, the ideological significance of their sentiments, and the paradoxical nature of eighteenth-century sympathy. It has long been understood that literary anthologies catered to wider and primarily female audiences and, in the particular case of Sterne, that they celebrated emotion and censored eroticism. More recently, the repackaging of novels in anthologies has been shown to illuminate two features of fiction in the late eighteenth and nineteenth century: prescribed reading practices and the history of narrative form. Barbara Benedict describes a style of reading that favors emotional response over narrative continuity, and Leah Price argues that the anthology, by the end of the nineteenth century, has imprinted on its audience gendered practices of masculine reading for plot and feminine reading for sentiment.¹¹ Benedict has additionally suggested that anthologized versions of sentimental fiction “may have . . . influenced the form of the novel” in the late eighteenth century, a claim that the novelistic model of sympathy I describe specifies.¹² After the lifting of perpetual copyright in 1774 made possible the repackaging of previously-published material, anthologies became increasingly popular. This popularity has contributed to a new understanding of literary culture around the turn of the century: William St Clair’s Reading Nation in the Romantic Period comprehensively demonstrates that these collections “were amongst the largest components of the reading explosion of the Romantic period,” an explosion that made older texts a primary element in this period’s reading material and created shared reading experience and cultural memory “across time, place, and social situation.”¹³ In Sterne’s case, it is likely that The Beauties of Sterne did more than the individual novels to establish his reputation as a writer of high sentimentality.¹⁴ This anthology ¹¹ Barbara Benedict, Making the Modern Reader: Cultural Mediation in Early Modern Literary Anthologies (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996), p. 169; Price, The Anthology and the Rise of the Novel, p. 91. See also Benedict’s “The Paradox of the Anthology: Collecting and Différence in Eighteenth-Century Britain,” New Literary History 34.2 (2003), pp. 231–56. G. J. Barker-Benfield discusses anthologized versions of Sterne in light of their female market. The Culture of Sensibility: Sex and Society in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), pp. 296–7. ¹² Benedict, Making the Modern Reader, pp. 178–9. ¹³ St Clair, Reading Nation, pp. 135, 66. ¹⁴ Keymer, “A Sentimental Journey and the Failure of Feeling.” See also John Mullan, “Sentimental Novels,” in Cambridge Companion to the Eighteenth Century, ed. John Richetti (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 242. It is not clear exactly how many copies of Tristram Shandy’s first two volumes were printed. Kenneth Monkman estimates between 200 and 500 copies of the first York edition and 5,000 for the London edition. “Bibliography of Early Editions of Tristram Shandy,” The Library 5 (1970), pp. 11–39. By 1769 seven editions of the

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went through seven editions in a single year and at least fifteen editions between its initial appearance in 1782 and 1819. Notably, other anthologies seem to have copied its selection and occasionally its sequencing of Sterne’s episodes. In the second half of this chapter, I look at the rearrangement of episodes from Tristram Shandy in this anthology and others that had both more expansive and more restricted readership: Vicesimus Knox’s Elegant Extracts, published between 1783 and 1824; William Enfield’s The Speaker, which first appeared in 1774 and continued to be reprinted into the nineteenth century; and inexpensive and lesser-known pamphlets printed by George Nicholson between 1793 and 1802, which appeared as bound volumes in 1812 and 1825 as The Literary Miscellany.¹⁵ The generic and conceptual implications of Sterne’s anthologized forms exceed the particular motivations of any individual anthology editor. The progressive printer George Nicholson, for example, arranges Sterne’s oblique considerations of slavery in a sequence that almost renders them abolitionist texts. Nicholson is a unique case among the anthologies studied here, though, as the stated aims of other compilations—censoring Sterne’s works to make them appropriate for a wider readership, offering model texts of certain generic types, uniting his “pathetic” pieces for a sentimental readership—fall quite short of what I take to be their full importance. Indeed, new connections emerge in alternative arrangements of Sterne’s episodes, and what one episode generates in unvoiced narratives and suspended sympathies can, in an anthology’s new arrangement, shape the experience of reading the extracts that follow. Key in this formal development is the story within a story. By any name— inset or nested narrative, frame tale, or interpolated tale—the type of narrative discussed in this and following chapters has a long history that would include not only the gothic novel but also Cervantes’ Don Quixote, The Arabian Nights, Boccaccio’s Decameron, Chaucer’s The Canterbury first and second volumes had been printed. Sales of the ninth volume, of which fewer copies were printed (3,500), dropped off. A Sentimental Journey saw large print runs and high sales, going through at least fifty editions between 1769 and 1800, while The Beauties of Sterne, though the most commonly reprinted edition of his works in the 1780s, was not as widely reprinted as Sterne’s second novel. See Christopher Fanning, “Sterne and Print Culture,” in Cambridge Companion to Laurence Sterne, ed. Thomas Keymer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), pp. 125–41 and Alan B. Howes, Yorick and the Critics (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1958), pp. 61–4. ¹⁵ Gleanings from the Works of Laurence Sterne (Wittingham: London, 1796) additionally positions many of the same episodes (including the story of Trim’s brother and the episode of the “Negro Girl”) precisely as they appear in The Beauties of Sterne.

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Tales, and Ovid’s Metamorphoses. The appearance of interpolated tales in long narrative fiction, which is certainly not a new phenomenon in the second half of the eighteenth century, exemplifies what J. Paul Hunter has called the novel’s “parenthetical tendency,” its inclusive, expansive capacity.¹⁶ What is new in the century’s final three decades, though, is the widespread practice of excising and republishing such tales.¹⁷ Sterne’s popular episodes illuminate connections between the reading experiences that anthologies afford and the historical development of novelistic form through their configurations of sympathetic experience, and the abundant, varied appearances of episodes from his novels in anthologies complicate current discussions of the original texts, works that were probably at least as well known, if not more popular, as novel extracts.

Sterne’s Starling and the Mechanics of Citation In their scenes of emotional identification and, more particularly, their methods of conveying the thoughts and speech of others, Sterne’s novels betray the paradoxical nature of eighteenth-century sensibility. On one hand, Yorick’s sensibility implies a weak, delicate, effeminate constitution excessively vulnerable to the feelings of others. On the other, Sterne’s sentimentalism has been seen as acquisitive, appropriative, and imperialistic.¹⁸ The anthologized Sterne stands to intervene in this divergence by exposing the role that a particular version of sympathy—abstract rather than embodied, a struggle more than an impulse—plays in novelistic attempts to narrate the sufferings of others and to adopt without appropriating their stories. Kinship and resemblance, central to sympathy for Smith and Hume, determine much ¹⁶ J. Paul Hunter, Before Novels: The Cultural Contexts of Eighteenth-Century Fiction (New York: Norton, 1990), p. 24. ¹⁷ Robert Mayo noted that no novelistic extracts appear in British magazines in the 1740s and 50s, even though many novels containing such tales were then being published. The English Novel in the Magazines, 1740–1815 (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1962), pp. 245–6. On the inclusion of Sterne’s works in these anthologies, see pp. 179–80, 337. ¹⁸ Following the starling’s lament, Yorick imagines a prisoner in a scene that has earned Yorick the title of a “virtual imperialist of sensibility” and been likened to the slave-owner’s possession and use of the slave body. Judith Frank, “ ‘A Man Who Laughs is Never Dangerous’: Character and Class in Sterne’s A Sentimental Journey,” English Literary History 56 (1989), p. 120. Marcus Wood, Empathy, Slavery, and Pornography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), p. 16. Although he is attentive to the uncertainties of the self in A Sentimental Journey, Stephen Ahern similarly identifies in Yorick’s sympathetic exchanges a “project of sentimental self-aggrandizement.” Affected Sensibilities: Romantic Excess and the Genealogy of the Novel, 1680–1810 (New York: AMS Press, 2007), p. 97.

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of the shared sentiment in Sterne’s fiction. Tristram Shandy’s Trim is said to resemble his imprisoned brother Tom, just as Yorick has been said to resemble the imprisoned captive he imagines in A Sentimental Journey.¹⁹ There seems to be no limit to the exchange of maudlin tales when their tellers and listeners are linked by family, class, nationality, or race. An eroticallycharged sentimentalism fuels a claim for universal kinship in A Sentimental Journey, in which Yorick’s flirtation with the fille de chambre has him feeling “the conviction of consanguinity so strongly” that he examines her face to see if he can “trace out any thing in it of family likeness,” and he is led to pose a question of sentimentalist ethics that encounters with animals and the imagined captive challenge: “are we not all relations?” (56). Shared language, rather than a conviction of shared blood, marks Yorick’s likeness to the speaking bird. This figure of resemblance and difference puns on Sterne’s own name and constitutes, following Homi Bhabha’s description of mimicry, a “subject of difference that is almost the same, but not quite.”²⁰ The starling’s combination of the radical difference of species with threatening resemblance—its mimicry of Yorick’s thoughts along with, for that matter, its verbal echo of Sterne’s name—initiates a process of identification that reappears in the novel’s following episodes. This episode is one of many in which Yorick identifies and sympathizes with another character (animal or human), and a series of such scenes constitutes the plot line that concludes with Yorick’s acquisition of a statesanctioned identity. Yorick’s first move after the scene in which he is “identified” by the Count de B**** as Shakespeare’s jester is to tell the stories of others, to lose himself in reading Shakespeare and imagining the sufferings of Dido.²¹ Simultaneous with Yorick’s process of pursuing and acquiring a passport—manifestly a process of determining his identity—is the experience of identifying and sympathizing with others: on one hand, a ¹⁹ James Rogers, “Sensibility, Sympathy, Benevolence: Physiology and Moral Philosophy in Tristram Shandy,” in Languages of Nature: Critical Essays on Science and Literature, ed. L. J. Jordanova (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1986); Keymer, “A Sentimental Journey and the Failure of Feeling.” ²⁰ In Yorkshire dialect, starn (for starling), from Old English stearn, echoes “Sterne.” Homi Bhabha, “Of Mimicry and Man: The Ambivalence of Colonial Discourse,” in Tensions of Empire: Colonial Cultures in a Bourgeois World, ed. Frederick Cooper and Ann Laura Stoler (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), p. 153. ²¹ Stephanie DeGooyer briefly explores the scene in which Yorick identifies himself through the text of Hamlet as an instance of sentimental fiction’s manifestation of Smithean sympathy. “The Eyes of Other People”: Adam Smith’s Triangular Sympathy and the Sentimental Novel,” English Literary History 85.3 (2018), pp. 687–8. This tendency continues, I argue, through the episodes that follow.

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former soldier stripped of military glory, economic stability, and family title, and, on the other, a classical figure of suffering. In the novel’s plot, before Yorick can declare who he is, he must first experience the sufferings of those he is not. Yorick’s identification with these characters confirms a European identity. After the radical alterity of the starling, resemblance makes Yorick’s transmission of others’ tales more fluid. This sequence is significant for two reasons. First, in the novel’s narrative trajectory, Yorick’s “identity” develops, sequentially and conceptually, from his experience and transmission of other people’s sad tales. Second, The Beauties of Sterne disperses these episodes across the volume; for its readers, Yorick never acquires a passport, and his identification with others finds no resolution in a validated identity. The same individual episodes that, in the novel, construct an identity out of a series of sympathetic encounters instead, as reorganized anthology pieces, reconfigure Sterne’s aspirational mode of vicarious narration. “The Starling” has its title character speaking—whether by delusion or anthropomorphism—in its own voice. In the episodes that follow “The Starling” in the novel, Yorick relates tales of loss in the third person, and he loses himself in reading Shakespeare and imagining the suffering of Dido. He then, in one of the episodes entitled “The Passport: Versailles,” acquires the document that allows him, as he puts it, to resolve the “perplexing affair” of “telling anyone who I am—for there is scarce any body I cannot give a better account of than myself” (71). It is after giving such accounts of others that he can offer something akin to such an account of himself. The Beauties of Sterne reorganizes these episodes. Yorick’s accounts of others in the novel’s “Le Patisser: Versailles” and “The Sword: Rennes” are, in the anthology, distanced from “The Starling” and “The Captive” and, consequently, divorced from his journey through sympathetic self-loss to self-recuperation.²² Separating these episodes from the return to a travelling, narrating, and reconstituted subject—a return that is crucial to the novel’s ideological implications—emphasizes isolated events of sentimental disturbance, the dissolution rather than the consolidation of the individual. If A Sentimental Journey is a paradigm of sentimental fiction, then for the novel, sympathizing with others and retelling their tales lead to the constitution of an identity, but for the Romantic-period anthology, sympathetically-charged ²² “The Starling” and “The Captive” consistently appear as a pair, but at a significant distance from “The Pieman” and “The Sword,” which immediately follow them in the novel. This pattern appears in The Beauties of Sterne and Gleanings from the Works of Laurence Sterne; Knox’s Elegant Extracts includes “The Starling” and “The Captive” together, and Enfield’s Speaker positions “The Sword” between “The Dead Ass” and “Maria.”

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tales of suffering emphasize shared identities and intersubjectivity even as they stand as a synecdoche for the genre traditionally associated with the individual. Jonathan Lamb has argued that the same process that determines Yorick’s encounter with the starling also permits the Shakespeare-reading Count de B**** to identify Yorick through a reinterpretation of Locke’s parrot and the prism of literary character: Yorick, after being “made to act the starling,” acquires his state-sanctioned identity.²³ And yet this progression from thwarted travel to state-sanctioned identity incorporates three additional instances of sentimental identification—Yorick’s responses to the Patisser, the Marquis, and Dido. The paired episodes of “The Pieman” (the anglicized version of “Le Patisser: Versailles”) and “The Sword” call for close attention. Both trace, in Yorick’s third-person summary, the decline of a traditional institution of privilege, a subsequent turn to trade (in an urban bakery in the first episode, a Caribbean sugar colony in the second), and, finally, the reinstatement of traditional national sustenance (a king’s pension, or the restitution of a family title). Sentimental fiction frequently recounts stories of loss, but these episodes are significant in that they detail an individual’s exclusion from an institutional body rather than, for example, a loss of family or fortune. In “Le Patisser,” a military veteran who has been denied a pension turns to the “little trade” of selling pastries in the streets of Versailles. The story that he tells and that Yorick retells, he says, “won my pity,” and “the same story,” having eventually “reach’d at last the king’s ears” through other retellings, leads to a sizeable pension. This chapter ends with a plea that the episode entitled “The Sword” be allowed to follow, since the two “reflect light upon each other,—and ’tis a pity they should be parted” (67). Indeed, “The Sword” also tells of an individual’s exit from a traditional class of national privilege and his ultimate reinstatement, but here, the “trade” that is taken up—“about nineteen or twenty years of successful application to business” in “Martinico”—implies either the labor of indentured servitude, common in Martinique for French peasants until 1774, or participation in the system of chattel slavery in what was one of the Caribbean’s most productive and tumultuous sugar colonies. In this episode European aristocracy is restored as a possible result of slave labor when the Marquis returns to Brittany “to reclaim his nobility” (68). Yorick witnesses the return of the sword, its blade “the shining face of a friend he had once ²³ Lamb, Preserving the Self, pp. 267–8. In a similar vein, Judith Frank has argued that an act of disciplinary characterization allows his passport to be granted (pp. 118–19).

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given up,” and when the Marquis sheds a tear, Yorick declares he “envied him his feelings” (69). In the narrative path of A Sentimental Journey, these two tales fall between threats to Yorick’s identity and its eventual restoration. These stories of an individual’s absorption into traditional orders of European privilege (the military, the aristocracy) perform a crucial step in the process by which Yorick receives proof of national identity. The passport’s validation of identity not only depends on Yorick’s submission to the same role as the starling but also arises from the emotional and narrative effects of the episodes that, in the novel, precede its arrival. In a scene taken from the third of four episodes entitled “The Passport: Versailles” in A Sentimental Journey and renamed “Illusion” in The Beauties of Sterne, Yorick pictures Dido’s turn away from Aeneas and states, “I lose the feelings for myself in hers—and in those affections which were wont to make me mourn for her when I was at school” (73). The sympathetic absorption of the masculine English self into the feminine classical other is, perhaps most significantly, also a recuperation of schoolboy sentiment. After Yorick has been “transported” into the world of Much Ado about Nothing while he awaits the arrival of his passport (72), his identification with the heroic suffering of a classical figure culminates in a sympathetic experience that at once annihilates and recuperates the self. Yorick’s identification with the figures of Dido (whose sufferings revived the young Yorick), the poor (but later state-supported) baker, and the exiled (but eventually reinstated) nobleman each rely on resemblance. His response to Dido confirms his status as an educated European; as a foreigner without proof of identity, Yorick is, like the baker and the Marquis, without institutional or national affiliation. While Yorick remains at an emotional distance when, for example, he “envie[s]” rather than shares the Marquis’ feelings, such distance hardly carries the threat of radical difference that a speaking bird’s echo of his own words brings. In this trajectory, Sterne conceptualizes the confrontation between the threatening alterity of species, the reassurance of youthful sentiment, the resemblance of institutional and national exile, and a validated subjectivity. By restructuring these significantly linked scenes, anthologies omit the novel’s production of a sympathetically-generated subjectivity and instead separate the experience of speaking and feeling for others from the reconstitution of the self. What this means for Sterne’s cultural afterlife is that the self-consolidating implications of Sterne’s sympathetic encounters most likely become less frequent effects of the reading experience of A Sentimental Journey in the nineteenth century. Benedict, specifying connections between the ways

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that anthologies establish a canon and foster readers’ tastes, has argued that “texts become dehistoricized, depoliticized, and hence ‘timeless.’ ”²⁴ Not only removed from its historical and political contexts, an anthology piece is also divorced from the principle of novelistic character and the stability of human identity. Favoring “illusion” over identity, Sterne’s anthology pieces divide but do not restore the novelistic self. What serves as a model of literary value and moral virtue is an individual who is constituted by the experiences of others. After Yorick’s encounter with the starling, “The bird in his cage pursue[s] [him] into [his] room,” where he imagines a single captive and looks “through the twilight of his grated door” so that he can “take his picture” (61). While the episode of the starling establishes resemblance through echoed but altered speech, “The Captive” (as it is titled in the anthology), in its visual language of light and shade, hints at racial difference. In his wellknown correspondence with the former slave Ignatius Sancho, Sterne mentions “the finest tints and most insensible gradations” of complexion that run from “the fairest face about St James’s, to the sootyest complexion in Africa.”²⁵ In his novel, Sterne conjures a scene whose varied shades mirror this range of complexion when Yorick looks through the “twilight” upon the “pale and feverish” prisoner and “darken[s] the little light” in the dungeon. Yorick’s identification with this imagined figure would be impossible, of course, without the visual and situational resemblance that these tints and shadows do not displace. The episode introduces but suspends the implication of racial difference, an issue that Sancho pleaded with Sterne to address directly, and that implication quickly fades into the novel’s trajectory of Yorick’s pursuit of a passport and his and the bird’s physical movement. The truncated anthology piece, by contrast, denies Sterne’s character this recuperative agency. In The Beauties of Sterne and anthologies that copy its format, this episode ends when Yorick, after he “heard his chains upon his legs” and “saw the iron enter into his soul” declares “I burst into tears—I could not sustain the picture of confinement which my fancy had drawn.” In the novel, physical movement absorbs this emotional energy when the sentence continues: “—I startled up from my chair, and calling La Fleur, I bid him bespeak me a remise” (61).

²⁴ Benedict, Making the Modern Reader, pp. 6–7. ²⁵ Letter of July 27, 1766. The Letters of Laurence Sterne: Part Two, 1765–1768. The Florida Edition of the Works of Laurence Sterne, ed. Melvyn New and Peter de Voogd (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2009), vol. 8, p. 701.

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I will have more to say about “The Captive” when I return to Tristram Shandy later in this chapter. Here I want to emphasize that this narrative stasis and suspension in emotional distress are characteristic of Sterne’s anthology pieces. Alternating between Tristram Shandy and A Sentimental Journey, moving from narrator to narrator and one sentimental scene to another, anthologies diminish the significance of character and instead prioritize character interaction—whether through emotional response or narrative transmission. Anthologized extracts of sentimental scenes often divorce emotional experience from stable novelistic character, and they offer up sympathetic experience for the taking, suspended between the events of narrative progression, unassimilated into the stability of novelistic character or the teleology of plot, left available for the emotional and imaginative use of the reader with a “heart of sensibility.” When Yorick speaks for those to whom he bears situational or racial resemblance, his presentation of their stories takes the form of third-person summary. But when an animal’s alterity also comes with the similarity of echoed language, Yorick’s gradual citation of the bird’s speech signals a fleeting, strenuous shift in perspective. Yorick’s retellings of the stories of the baker and the Marquis maintain his grammatical person and serve to reinstate his identity. The extraction of these episodes, though, by diminishing the constancy of literary character, renders their grammatical person less important than their emphasis on intersubjectivity. Tristram Shandy, especially in its anthologized forms, comes closer to a direct confrontation with human difference in a set of interlaced narratives that are dispersed across multiple volumes of the novel. As anthologies deny Sterne’s digressiveness and unite these episodes, they produce a version of his fiction that forcefully engages with the shifting perspectives that constitute Smith’s version of sympathy, and they consider the effects of a novelistic model of sympathy that explicitly reaches beyond fraternal bonds towards the untold story of a racial other. While the anthologized forms of A Sentimental Journey complicate critical discussions of Sterne’s sentimentality and subjectivity in Romantic-era culture, popular versions of Tristram Shandy expose a crucial chapter in the history of fiction’s revision of Smithean sympathy.

“The Negro Girl” of Tristram Shandy As it reappears in popular anthologies, Tristram Shandy’s elaborately embedded and perpetually deferred story of an African girl closely echoes

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and significantly expands Smith’s account of sympathy. The framing of this untold tale betrays certain similarities to episodes that were prominent in The Beauties of Sterne and other anthologies. “Le Fever” and “Maria” are, with “The Monk” of A Sentimental Journey, listed in this anthology’s preface as the affecting tales that require careful arrangement so as not to “wound the heart of sensibility too deeply.” Like Tristram Shandy’s African girl and the elaborate frame that surrounds her untold tale, “Le Fever” and “Maria” proceed by way of competing second- and third-hand narratives. The story of Le Fever’s illness and his son’s concern about his recuperation comes to Toby through Trim’s account, and Tristram tells his readers that he has forgotten “what it was that hindered me from letting the corporal tell it in his own words” and that he “must tell it now in my own.”²⁶ Maria’s story is also conveyed by means other than her own voice: in Tristram Shandy her story is told by the postillon who guides Tristram to her and expressed by the “tale of woe” she plays on her pipe; in A Sentimental Journey, Yorick first learns about her tale from Tristram himself, and it is continued by her mother. The deferral of Maria’s story and her near silence urge us to ask what it would mean for such stories to be told in the first person.²⁷ In the explosion of visual renditions and narrative extensions of this sparse tale, one small anonymous pamphlet carries out this possibility. Entitled Sterne’s Maria: A Pathetic Story, this narrative has Maria tell a version of her story in her own voice. ²⁸ While the enormous popularity of this character in and beyond literary anthologies lies outside my focus, I emphasize instead the elaborately nested narratives that introduce the episode of the African girl because they refuse the kind of accommodation that the episodes of “Le Fever” and “Maria” summon: Le Fever’s assimilation into a military fraternity, Maria’s into either a sentimentalized eroticism or Yorick’s adoptive kinship, since Maria could, if Yorick’s lovers and her own might be forgotten, be to Yorick “as a daughter” (97). Smith’s analogy between ethical perspective and optical distortion—the turn from the view from his window to the imagined spectacle of foreign ²⁶ Laurence Sterne, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, ed. Melvyn New (New York: Penguin, 1997), p. 344. Subsequent references to this novel will be noted parenthetically. ²⁷ Carol Watts calls the possibility of Maria telling her own story “subaltern.” Cultural Work of Empire: The Seven Years’ War and the Imagining of the Shandean State (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2007), p. 234. ²⁸ See Mary Newbould, Adaptations of Laurence Sterne’s Fiction: Sterneana, 1760–1840 (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2013) . On visual depictions of Maria, see W. B. Gerard, Laurence Sterne and the Visual Imagination (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2006), pp. 135–74.

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human suffering—illustrates that, in his conception of sympathy, human difference beyond a figurative assertion of kinship prompts the transformation of visual perception into abstract perspective. For Sterne, the sorrows of Le Fever and Maria pose no such challenge, and their central tales never prompt the shifting imaginative perspectives that would, in novelistic form, allow them to be told, by Le Fever and Maria, in the first person. Smith’s brother on the rack marks a process by which the effort to understand another person’s pain summons the transformation of sensory perception into imaginative perspective. Among the novels I discuss, Tristram Shandy is unique in its seemingly direct reply to this image. In Tristram Shandy’s second volume, Uncle Toby’s servant Trim imagines the tortures his brother Tom has suffered at the hands of the Inquisition. His brother’s story, in undisclosed ways, “makes a part of” the untold story of an African girl who appears in the novel’s ninth, final volume (508). The competing narrative levels that constitute this series of episodes resemble those of “Le Fever” and “Maria,” but at the center of this series is a character—Sterne’s African girl— who cannot be assimilated into available social structures and whose story cannot be told in any grammatical person. Around her untold story, Sterne modifies Smith’s shifting perspectives and generates a novelistic practice of vicarious narration that popular anthologies amplify in the early decades of the nineteenth century. In this popular Romantic-era reconstitution of eighteenth-century sentimentalism, Sterne’s fiction appears to imagine and, in its digressive attempts at narrating an unnarratable story of slavery, to sketch fiction’s means for representing a kind of sympathetic identification that lies beyond the historical realities of both the 1760s and later decades. Sterne’s story of a brother suffering the agonies of the rack expands the logic of torture by invoking but not disclosing a related narrative. In the novel, the African girl’s untold tale lies at the center of a particularly complex web of interlaced narratives that spreads across multiple volumes and spans seven years of the novel’s original publication. The Beauties of Sterne, by contrast, unites these episodes in just a few pages. In this formulation, the proximity of the suffering brother to someone who is probably a former slave amplifies the difficulties posed by representing narratives about figures of radical difference. The final volume of Tristram Shandy, where the episode of the African girl originally appeared, sold very poorly. The Beauties of Sterne and the anthologies that copy its sequencing thus ensure what would have otherwise been an unlikely reading experience in the late eighteenth century—that of encountering the final volume’s African girl within both the narrative frame established in the novel’s second volume

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and, quite significantly, the conceptual frame suggested by a brother’s torture on the rack.²⁹ To begin with the African girl is to begin at the center, or the digressive end, of a sprawling series of narrative layers whose outermost levels I will first outline here and then discuss in more detail. Tom’s story concerns his residence in Lisbon, where he meets and marries the widow of a Jewish butcher and is subsequently imprisoned by the Inquisition. There, according to Trim, he is “tortured upon a rack for nothing—but marrying a Jew’s widow who sold sausages” (226).³⁰ Trim’s tearful response to his imagined version of this scene of torture arises from his performative reading of a sermon, ostensibly about “conscience” but primarily a vehicle for antiCatholic sentiment. The sermon’s description of the Inquisition’s torture victim causes Trim’s vivid imagination to interrupt his reading in a move that shatters the frame of the religious text and initiates the broken narrative of his brother’s sufferings. The sermon itself, furthering the layered containment that this series of tales creates, has been found between the pages of a treatise on military engineering. The untold story of the African girl is framed textually and materially: an engineering text opens to reveal the pages of a sermon, the sermon’s language provokes its reader to imagine a scene of torture so vividly that it interrupts his performative reading, and the brother’s torture on the rack itself introduces the story of Tom’s marriage and imprisonment, which is delayed until the novel’s final volume. It is at this point that the African girl is described as Toby and Trim make their way towards the Widow Wadman. Markman Ellis has rightly called attention to this scene’s digressive presentation. It is, he observes, “a digression (the story of the ‘negro girl’), within a digression (the story of Trim), within a digression (the story of Toby’s amours).”³¹ With each apparent digression, Sterne’s conceptual layers thicken. This muddled layering appears more clearly in the truncated and consolidated forms of The Beauties of Sterne. Here, the issues that each narrative layer raises—religious difference, torture, emotional response, and gestural language—more vividly inform her presence and silence. What the ²⁹ Other anthologies that use this sequence in Beauties of Sterne include Gleanings from the Works of Laurence Sterne (1796) and Knox’s Elegant Extracts. ³⁰ Tom’s torture is very likely inspired in part by John Coustos, who was suspected of freemasonry and tortured by the Inquisition of Lisbon in 1743. ³¹ Markman Ellis, The Politics of Sensibility: Race, Gender, and Commerce in the Sentimental Novel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 69. Ellis is specifically discussing the debate about whether an African has a soul, which is an additional digression within the story of the “Negro girl.”

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1750s novel identifies as an unnamed connection between the stories of the African girl and the tortured brother—her story “makes a part of” his— becomes in the anthologies of the 1780s–1810s a connection of a different sort. Anthologies suggest that relationships between spectacles of physical suffering, the imaginative repositioning that sympathy entails, and the fleeting transcendence of human difference afforded by shared narrative might be the strands that connect these interpolated tales. The first and second volumes of Tristram Shandy appeared in 1759, the same year as the first edition of Smith’s Theory. The distance between consanguinity and racial difference seems to be mapped onto the textual bulk of the next seven volumes of the novel that separate the scenes of the tortured brother (from volume two) and the former slave (from volume nine). The Beauties of Sterne and other anthologies published between the 1780s and 1810s, though, minimize that distance and suggest a novelistic reinterpretation of sympathy according to which the shared experience of narrative offers the possibility of suspending categories of difference. Anthologized versions of these episodes erase the intervening volumes that distance the African girl from the tortured brother and more forcefully invoke the conceptual rubric of torture, sympathy, and narrative. Their new titles—the episode of the African girl appears as part of “The Remainder of the Story of Trim’s Brother”—insist, contrary to Sterne’s digressiveness, on narrative continuity. This continuity then resolutely positions the untold story of slavery within the narrative frame that begins with the brother’s torture and unites the desire for narrative confession suggested by the image of the rack with a personal account of slavery that remains unnarratable. In The Beauties of Sterne the proximity between the tortured brother and the silent slave indicates that even though Smith’s model of familial sympathy remains unable to represent the stories of characters who seem to be beyond notions of human resemblance, his emphasis on shifting perspectives offers structural, narrative means by which to aspire to the representation of such narratives. Conjectural response and narrative deferral introduce the untold story of the African girl, a story that if told “would,” Trim states, “melt a heart of stone” (508). His hesitation to tell her story marks an attempt to transcend boundaries of human difference by means of a sympathetically-charged act of narrative transmission: the approach to that which cannot be articulated— narrative that remains untold, sufferings that cannot be expressed— constitutes an intellectual framework for the role that sympathy plays in the effort to transcend human difference. In this light, the untold story of the

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African girl is not an oppressive silencing of the sufferings of slavery. Instead, the perpetually deferred story adheres to Tristram Shandy’s narrative method; to hint at but never disclose a particular story characterizes the patterns of a novel that, after all, purports to tell the life of the narrator but arrives at his birth in the third volume. Along these lines, Tristram tells his reader that “The truest respect which you can pay to the reader’s understanding, is to . . . leave him something to imagine, in his turn, as well as yourself.” At this point in the novel, the reader is being encouraged to imagine the untold tales concerning Tristram’s birth—“Let the reader imagine then, that Dr. Slop has told his tale; . . . Let him suppose that Obadiah has told his tale also” (88). As opposed to being glossed over as these tales are, the African girl’s tale remains an unfulfilled promise, and this particular instance of narrative digression bespeaks the urgency and difficulty of telling this story, as opposed to those of Dr. Slop or Obadiah. When Sterne’s characteristic digressiveness struggles to articulate not the complications of autobiography or narrative temporality but instead the experience of slavery or the threat of radical difference, what emerge are the limits of his own representational strategies. This untold narrative has a well-known history. In a letter to Ignatius Sancho, Sterne refers to “a tender tale of the sorrows of a distressed friendless poor negro girl” that he “had just been writing” before receiving Sancho’s letter requesting that Sterne address slavery in his fiction. The dissonance between Tristram Shandy’s perpetually deferred story of the African girl and the “tender tale” the letter mentions became available to readers of The Beauties of Sterne in 1787, when the anthology began to include Sterne’s correspondence with Sancho. The visual description of the girl in the Lisbon sausage-shop may in fact constitute this “tale,” but the deferral that is so prominently marked in the novel suggests otherwise. While The Beauties of Sterne reconfigures Sterne’s presentation of the African girl by making a claim for narrative continuity, other anthologies reposition this episode not within the novel’s original nested layers but between unrelated episodes from both novels. These new arrangements forge new conceptual ties. The African girl appears by means of Sterne’s pictorialism, which consists of set-pieces described with great attention to visual detail. These pictures punctuate his novels’ physical and narrative movement.³² They also indicate a struggle to access psychological interiority,

³² On Sterne’s pictorialism, see Gerard, Laurence Sterne and the Visual Imagination.

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much as his imagining of the myth of Momus’s glass signals a fantasy in which interiority is rendered visible.³³ Relationships among such verbal pictures, both novels’ illusionary dialogues, and narrative progression illustrate the representational strategies provoked by the epistemological strain that knowledge of others’ minds and pasts can pose for Sterne’s heroes. Before looking to the outermost levels of this nested narrative, I discuss an alternative presentation of this episode in another anthology whose manipulations of Sterne’s pictorialism signal the limits of this representational strategy.³⁴ In George Nicholson’s inexpensive anthology, Sterne’s silent girl is the title character of an episode entitled “The Negro Girl” that is positioned after “The Starling” and “The Captive” and before “The Ass,” an episode from Tristram Shandy in which Tristram has a “conversation” with an animal.³⁵ While The Beauties of Sterne connects the African girl to both the narrative strand and conceptual context of a brother’s torture, Nicholson’s anthology, by uniting this episode with “The Captive” of A Sentimental Journey, draws on Sterne’s pictorialism in order to point emphatically to the untold, but perhaps more strikingly suggested, story of slavery. Immediately before “The Negro Girl” appears in Nicholson’s anthology, “The Captive” concludes with a description of Yorick’s imagined prisoner: “I heard his chains upon his legs . . . —He gave a deep sigh—I saw the iron enter into his soul—I burst into tears—I could not sustain the picture of confinement which my fancy had drawn” (61). In Nicholson’s next episode, Toby labels Trim’s description of the African girl “a pretty picture”: the “poor negro girl” has “a bunch of white feathers slightly tied to the end of a long cane” with which she is “flapping away flies—not killing them” (508).

³³ Tristram imagines the ease by which psychological interiority could be made visible if Momus’s glass had actually been installed in the heart: “nothing more would have been wanting, in order to have taken a man’s character, but to have taken a chair and gone softly . . . and look’d in—view’d the soul stark naked;—observed all her motions,—her machinations;—traced all her maggots from their first engendering to their crawling forth . . . then taken your pen and ink and set down nothing but what you had seen, and could have sworn to” (59). ³⁴ This episode appears in other configurations as well. The episode of the African girl is excerpted as early as 1774, the same year that restrictions on republication were lifted, in the first edition of William Enfield’s popular The Speaker, a schoolroom text that continued to be reprinted well into the nineteenth century, where the episode is entitled “On Negroes” and grouped with other so-called “Dialogues.” ³⁵ His Extracts from the Tristram Shandy and Sentimental Journey of Lawr.[sic] Sterne, M.A., was one of his serial publications. Editions were printed in 1794, 1796, and 1799. See St Clair, pp. 527–8; Edward W. R. Pitcher, “The Serial Publication and Collection of Pamphlets, 1790–1815,” Library 30 (1975), pp. 323–9; and Pitcher, ed. The Literary Miscellany, Lady and Gentelman’s Pocket Magazine, and Literary Museum, or Monthly Magazine: Three Annotated Catalogues for American Literary Magazines (Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press, 2004), p. 1.

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In the original novels, these descriptions remain isolated images, but Nicholson’s arrangement of episodes links the “picture” of confinement that ends “The Captive” to the “pretty picture” that Trim offers in his visual description of the African girl. To be sure, Nicholson’s sequencing of these episodes might reflect his own abolitionist leanings, but this arrangement also makes the unvoiced narratives and suspended sympathies of one episode shape the extracts that follow. When the “picture of confinement” that concludes “The Captive” introduces the “pretty picture” that opens “The Negro Girl,” her unnamed sufferings become more conclusively linked to the “chains” and “iron” in the Captive episode. Yorick, as he claims, may be unable to “sustain” the image that his imagination has conjured, but for Nicholson and his readers, the anthology’s next episode may do just that: the anthology’s sustained pictorialism more resolutely conjures, although it too does not, of course, provide, the account of slavery that Sterne’s novels perpetually postpone. Unlike most earlier anthologies which, Benedict has shown, “muffle or leach out any overtly political message or context in the literature they reprint,” Nicholson’s arrangement of these episodes brings Sterne as close as possible to articulating the plea for abolition that Sancho urged him to make.³⁶ In Nicholson’s anthology, the African girl’s tale is no longer, as Ellis termed it, a “digression within a digression within a digression.” She instead becomes a subject and an agent of compassion by her gesture of “flapping away flies” with “a bunch of white feathers slightly tied to the end of a long cane,” movement that echoes the kindness of Sterne’s paragon of sensibility, Uncle Toby. His generosity to flies, described in the novel’s second volume, becomes emblematic of Sterne’s sentimentality when it is reprinted in The Beauties of Sterne and Elegant Extracts. This gesture bespeaks the African girl’s compassion but also suggests, as Ellis has pointed out, the whip of the slave-master and the “flourish” Trim gives “with his stick” that leaves the famous twisted line that appears immediately before this episode in the novel (506).³⁷ While the deferral of her story confines her to a speaking but silent gesture and a “pretty picture,” the flapping of her cane marks her resemblance to Uncle Toby, echoes Sterne’s visualization of the speaking gesture, and conjures a tale of slavery that is too difficult to tell.

³⁶ Benedict, Making the Modern Reader, p. 212. ³⁷ Ellis, p. 70. Ellis is following Mark Loveridge, “Liberty and Tristram Shandy,” in Laurence Sterne: Riddles and Mysteries, ed. Valerie Grosvenor Myer (Totowa, NJ: Barnes & Noble, 1984).

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In the fuller version of the episode as it appears in the Beauties and Tristram Shandy, the effect of the “pretty picture” of the African girl is the disruption of narrative continuity: it is not only the story of the African girl that cannot be conveyed, but also the continuation of Tom’s story. When Trim returns to the story of his brother after the description of the African girl and a debate on souls, at which point Nicholson’s anthology piece ends, he is momentarily unable to resume the story. His posture is off, he has “lost the sportable key of his voice, which gave sense and spirit to his tale,” and although “he attempted twice to resume it,” his efforts fail (509). This scene leaves Trim, who very nearly becomes the narrator of another’s sufferings, suspended in a state of troubled silence, at least until he picks up the related story about his brother’s courting of the Jewish widow while she is employed making sausages. Bawdy humor takes over at this point of sentimental distress, when the interiority of a racial other thwarts Sterne’s representational strategies and prompts digression away from an unnarratable story. The African girl of Tristram Shandy is an obstacle to the tendency Lynn Festa has identified for “the opacity of all humans” to give way to “the possibility of momentary translations in a provisionally common tongue.”³⁸ Her story remains untold, I contend, because its introduction through a model of sympathetic identification that is both rooted in fraternal identification and articulated through speculative violence provides an inadequate means by which to access and represent the sufferings of one who stands beyond the limits of resemblance and has likely experienced physical pain. Smithean sympathy, with its reliance on kinship, can sketch a trajectory from the torture of a brother to the sufferings of a racial other, but it cannot provide access to her narrative. The story of Trim’s brother ends, in The Beauties of Sterne, with Tom and the widow signing a marriage certificate, and the sexually suggestive production and discussion of sausages is, in keeping with the anthology’s censorship of Sterne’s eroticism, dutifully omitted. The anthology resolves this series of episodes with a marriage, almost as if to force Sterne’s digressive discursivity into the bounds of a marriage plot even as that union provokes, as Tom’s torture makes clear, other narratives that cannot be told. In the anthologies’ consolidation of these originally dispersed episodes, Trim’s sympathetic response for his brother’s sufferings on the rack is redirected towards the unvoiced sufferings of a former slave. John Mullan

³⁸ Festa, Sentimental Figures of Empire, pp. 93–4.

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has noted that vicarious experience in Sterne gives way to the sort of sentimental scene that appeared in anthologies: Tristram’s memory of his uncle Toby’s amours, which, he says, “had the same effect on me as if they had been my own (528),” establishes a second-hand experience of emotion as the introduction to the pathetic encounter with Maria.³⁹ In a similar way, the scene of torture establishes the vicarious experience of pain as the introduction to the story of the African girl that follows (either seven volumes later in the novel or, in the anthologies, shortly after this scene). The untold confession of the Anglican suffering at the hands of Catholics who suspect him of a hidden Jewish faith, if not a concealed ethnic Jewishness, opens up the space of the concealed narrative, the unspoken confession, that torture presumes. The anthologized version of these episodes brings together what is in the original novel an unbridgeable gap of difference between, on one hand, the narrative silence of the African girl and, on the other, implied anti-Semitism and overt anti-Catholicism. This connection between ethno-religious and racial difference emerges out of the implied pursuit of narrative elucidation that figures of torture signal, but the novel’s digressiveness mutes the connection that anthologies amplify. In the 1790s, connections between history and fiction in Caleb Williams suggest that post-revolutionary anxieties make the counterfactual experience of sympathetic identification more threatening and more urgent. In the decades around the turn of the century, with the spread of abolitionist sentiments, the imaginative experience of other people’s sufferings—as if they were one’s own—gains ethical force that prompts anthology editors to articulate, in more explicit forms, Sterne’s original efforts to imagine and represent the sufferings of an African girl. In each case, historical realities foster the production of narrative forms that foreground fiction’s implicit capacity to foster vicarious experience.

Torture, Kinship, and the Jewish Body in Tristram Shandy When, in Tristram Shandy, a character describes the suffering that his brother experienced on the rack, Sterne adapts Smith’s iconic image by considering the challenges of representing the narratives of those not linked by fraternity or resemblance. The tortured brother’s story remains untold,

³⁹ Mullan, Sentiment and Sociability, pp. 186–7.

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and its stated connection to the tale of an African girl is never explained. The outermost frame of the African girl’s untold story is Trim’s account of his brother Tom’s torture. To be sure, the motivation behind Sterne’s figure of the brother on the rack is, in keeping with the rack’s primary use of eliciting confession, a confession of religious belief. While the purported motivation of this torture remains implied in the novel, that ambiguity differs in the anthologized compilation of these scattered narrative layers. To submit a suspected criminal to the agonies of the rack is to make physical display and bodily pain an index of buried truth. In the narrative structure of these episodes, a sermon prompts Trim to begin the story of his brother’s marriage and torture that is suspended in volume two and resumed with the encounter with the African girl in volume nine. This consolidation of the sequence’s opening frame with what is originally its distant structural center or its digressive conclusion (the untold story of the African girl) emphasizes the parallel silences of two untold narratives—the confession of Trim’s brother and the African girl’s story. Because the anthology transposes the desire for confession that Tom’s torture suggests onto the untold story of the African girl, the motivation of this instance of torture carries special weight in the history of fictional responses to Smith’s theory of sympathy. The Beauties of Sterne not only consolidates these episodes; it also censors them. After Tom’s marriage to the Jewish widow of Lisbon, his torture, especially in its original presentation, complicates questions of difference as they are inflected by interiority (religious belief) or the body (religious practice). In the chapter that describes Tom’s early interactions with his wife, the opening line moves from the previous chapter’s discussion of race, mercy, and the human soul in the episode of the African girl to a scene of courtship and meat-packing: “As Tom, an’ please your honour, had no business at that time with the Moorish girl, he passed on into the room beyond to talk to the Jew’s widow about love—and his pound of sausages” (509).⁴⁰ Omitting any hint of sexual innuendo, The Beauties of Sterne ends this line at the dash and also omits the novel’s discussion of culinary habits. Such omissions not only make Sterne palatable for genteel audiences but also grant religious belief and human interiority greater significance in the ⁴⁰ Norman Simms has argued that these references invoke anti-Semitic discussions of circumcision that circulated around the controversial passage and quick repeal of the Jew Bill in 1752–4. “The Missing Jews and Jewishness in Tristram Shandy,” The Shandean 4 (1992), pp. 135–52. On the problematic position of Jewishness across Sterne’s fiction, see Nicholas Visser, “Tristram Shandy and the Straight Line of History,” Textual Practice 12 (1998), pp. 489–502.

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story of Tom’s torture. Trim repeatedly connects sausage-making to his brother’s torture, which would have been avoided if, he states, “they had but put pork in the sausages” (505). The subject that lands Tom in the Inquisition’s torture chamber—the content of the kosher sausages—comes up briefly in this courtship scene, but more innuendo soon follows as dietary practice cedes to phallic humor when he inquires, “a little gayly, . . . ‘Whether the largest were not the best’ ” (509).⁴¹ After joining the widow in the process of sausage-making, with its clear echoes of the novel’s anxieties about circumcision and castration (the newborn Tristram’s incident with the window-sash, Uncle Toby’s war wound), Tom becomes her second husband, and his fourteen years’ confinement by the Inquisition originates in his marriage and kosher practice. By excluding this scene, The Beauties of Sterne makes a stronger case that suspected religious belief, signaled by what is in the anthologies a disembodied and desexualized participation in “rousing trade” (507), may be the most likely motive of Tom’s torture. The novel and the anthology thus suggest different answers to questions raised by Tom’s story: is he tortured for suspected Jewishness and Judaism (religion and ethnicity), conversion to Judaism (religious belief alone), or Anglicanism? Tristram Shandy rather obliquely describes his torture as a result of his participation in kosher dietary custom. In the anthology, the only indication of the cause of his torture arises when Trim informs the sermon’s audience that Tom has married “a Jew’s widow, who kept a small shop, and sold sausages, which, some how or other, was the cause of his being taken” by the Inquisition (100). If we follow the logic of the torture practices associated with the rack, then Tom’s alliance, “some how or other,” with Jewish culinary practice triggers suspicion of his religious belief, and Tristram Shandy locates an unvoiced confession of Judaism’s unassimilable difference in a single body that can be read in multiple ways: as Trim’s brother, Tom’s body registers the ties of blood but, as a possible participant in kosher dietary laws, it also suggests conceptions of bodily difference—digestive if not ethnic—of Judaism. The anthology, however, emphasizes his marriage and erases nearly all connections between Tom’s torture and the production and consumption of kosher meat and, in the episode newly entitled “The Remainder of the Story of Trim’s Brother,” offers only the excesses of the Inquisition or suspected ⁴¹ In all likelihood, the type of sausage that determines Tom’s imprisonment is the Portuguese alheira, which was commonly made without pork by Jewish butchers who feared the Inquisition.

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conversion as the possible causes of Tom’s torture. The anthology’s omissions of culinary practice inadvertently emphasize spiritual belief rather than religious practice, psychological rather than physical interiority. Even as an unintended result of censorship, this emphasis on interiority at the expense of bodily practice is particularly significant in Sterne’s reimagining of Smith’s tortured brother. Tristram Shandy’s version of this image appears after a similar scene in the sermon that Trim is reading aloud to an audience of Walter Shandy, Uncle Toby, and Dr. Slop. Trim’s reading of the sermon, which begins as an occasion for his oratorical skill, becomes instead an occasion for fraternal sympathy so strong that he is unable to complete his performative reading. Hinting at narrative fulfillment, Trim repeatedly promises to tell his brother’s complete story. The sermon’s invitation to its listeners to imagine the torture victim seems to have found an especially receptive audience in Trim, as his bracketed responses indicate: go with me for a moment into the prisons of the inquisition. [God help my poor brother Tom.]—Behold religion, with Mercy and Justice chained down under her feet,—there sitting ghastly upon a black tribunal, propp’d up with racks and instruments of torment. Hark!—hark! what a piteous groan! [Here Trim’s face turned as pale as ashes.] See the melancholy wretch who utter’d it—[Here the tears began to trickle down] just brought forth to undergo the anguish of a mock trial, and endure the utmost pains that a studied system of cruelty has been able to invent.—[D—n them all, quoth Trim, his colour returning into his face as red as blood.]—Behold this helpless victim delivered up to his tormentors,—his body so wasted with sorrow and confinement—[Oh! ’tis my brother, cried poor Trim in a most passionate exclamation, dropping the sermon upon the ground, and clapping his hands together—I fear ’tis poor Tom. My father’s and my uncle Toby’s hearts yearned with sympathy for the poor fellow’s distress,— even Slop himself acknowledged pity for him . . . ]. (111–12)

As James Rodgers has noted of this scene, “All are moved . . . and sympathy therapeutically conquers all.”⁴² A vividly exercised fraternal sympathy, manifested in the blood that colors Trim’s cheeks and bespeaks kinship ties, provokes warm responses from the novel’s other fraternal pair, Walter and Toby Shandy. Trim’s identification of the sermon’s torture victim with his brother elicits the sympathy of his audience, “even,” we are told, the Catholic Dr. Slop, who has earlier asserted that the Inquisition “has its uses” ⁴² Rodgers, “Sensibility, Sympathy, Benevolence,” p. 150.

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(100). Although this scene is predicated on familial resemblance, it also temporarily overcomes the religious difference that is the sermon’s central concern.⁴³ In its reconfiguration of shared feeling through shifting perspectives—emphatic breaks between Trim’s reading of the sermon and the brackets surrounding his own words—this scene reimagines Smith’s tortured brother through printed forms of speech. Here, familial resemblance facilitates Trim’s fraternal sympathy. Elsewhere, the idiosyncrasies of the Shandy men constitute obstacles to sympathy, specifically “the isolating and socially disruptive force of the hobby-horse and the ruling passion” against which R. F. Brissenden has said that “Sterne sets the power of sympathy.”⁴⁴ Sympathy accommodates the peculiar obsessions of Walter and Toby, but, returning to this scene, Rodgers has asserted that Trim’s “tears would hardly have flowed so copiously for the sufferings of a stranger.”⁴⁵ As the reading of the sermon gradually—seven volumes later—gives way to the promise and withholding of an African girl’s story, Sterne makes fraternal sympathy the initial stage in an imaginative process that edges towards the experience of an individual well beyond this restricted social circle. Although the shared sentiment provoked by kinship can temporarily overcome the comparatively slight discomfort between Dr. Slop and the Shandys, Tristram Shandy can only approach but never transcend the seemingly insurmountable differences embodied by the African girl or the Jewish butchers of Lisbon. Their stories, then, remain untold. But the scene of fraternal torture that introduces them initiates a conceptual pattern that firmly aligns Smith’s iconic figure of sympathy with fictional attempts to represent the stories of others through an abstract, novelistic version of sympathy. It is at the moment between contemplating the position of the torture victim’s body and witnessing the departure of the victim’s soul that the speaker of the sermon shifts from the brother who is hardly, to cite Smith’s formulation, “at his ease” to the sympathetic but more safely distant Walter Shandy, Tristram’s father. Trim’s emotional disturbance brings his delivery of the sermon to an end when its detail focuses on the posture and pain of the tortured body: “Consider the nature of the posture in which he now lies ⁴³ Religious difference appears before the sermon is even read: when the sermon is discovered, the Catholic Dr. Slop and Anglican Walter Shandy speculate about whether the sermon is from “our church” or “yours” (97). ⁴⁴ R. F. Brissenden, Virtue in Distress: Studies in the Novel of Sentiment from Richardson to Sade (New York: Barnes & Noble, 1974), p. 194. ⁴⁵ Rodgers, “Sensibility, Sympathy, Benevolence,” p. 150.

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stretched,—what exquisite tortures he endures by it!” When Trim abandons his performance, he renounces the excessive identification that the sermon has forged. Walter takes up the sermon at this point, continuing: “’Tis all nature can bear!—Good God! See how it keeps his weary soul hanging on his trembling lips,—willing to take its leave,—but not suffered to depart!” (112). When, in the sermon, confession and death seem immanent, and when religious belief is very nearly articulated, the voice that presents this scene must change. Trim, whose brother has suffered similar trials, can no longer maintain the sermon’s perspective, and the imaginative entry into a torture chamber is articulated from a perspective that Trim, the brother of an actual torture victim, can no longer occupy. With this shift of readers and speakers, Sterne makes kinship preclude the mingled perspectives required of interpolated tales such as this imagined scene. Smith’s theory of sympathy exposes an important transition from sensory to imaginative perspective that biological fraternity, in Sterne’s world, renders impossible. In the anthologies that bring the untold story of the African girl closer to the unvoiced confession of Trim’s brother, though, these fraternal sympathies move towards the untold tale of a figure who lies outside the circles of kinship. Sterne’s fictional rendition of Smith’s brother on the rack leads, through embedded narratives and shifts in point of view, towards a conjectured sympathetic response—the African girl’s story “would,” it is worth repeating, “melt a heart of stone”—for a figure of racial difference whose psychological and spiritual interiority, like Tom’s, remains beyond Sterne’s strategies of representation. In the anthologies’ compression of these episodes, the African girl’s story “makes a part of” the tortured brother’s through fiction’s reformulation of Smithean sympathy, particularly the labor that characterizes Smith’s transformation of sensory perception and familial sentiment into imaginative perspective and the accommodation of difference. Smith’s sympathy, in its iconic image of torture and its cognitive labor of abstract perspective, connects one untold tale to another in Tristram Shandy’s popular forms.

Animal Minds and Perspectival Sympathy I want to conclude with a return to A Sentimental Journey’s speaking bird by way of a mute beast from Tristram Shandy. Nicholson’s positioning of Tristram Shandy’s “The Negro Girl” before an episode in which Tristram engages in a “conversation” with a beast invites us to ask whether, like

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Yorick and the starling who “can’t get out,” an animal’s speaking countenance might express the unspoken tale of the African girl.⁴⁶ Tristram, in a brief episode from Tristram Shandy’s seventh volume, sketches the thoughts of a donkey based on the animal’s expressive countenance and anticipated movement. This scene has Tristram imaginatively inhabiting the consciousness of an animal through a process that, echoing Smith’s description of sympathy, maintains while it transcends difference. In Tristram’s “conversations” with a donkey, he says, “never is my imagination so busy as in framing his responses from the etchings of his countenance—and where those carry me not deep enough——in flying from my own heart into his, and seeing what is natural for an ass to think—as well as a man, upon the occasion” (432). There is, in general, “a patient endurance of sufferings, wrote so unaffectedly in his looks and carriage, which pleads so mightily for him” that Tristram is “disarm[ed]” (431–2). Sterne’s donkey heightens the question of agency that such interpretations of bodily postures and movements raise because the animal in question is an over-burdened beast contemplating the process of seeking out food.⁴⁷ The movement being imputed to this animal—whether to leave the gate and risk the thrashing of his owner (which the beast ultimately receives)—concerns liberty and servitude. Tristram pulls the beast through the gate, breaking the harness in the process, at which point the beast looks “pensive in [his] face” and speaks: “—‘Don’t thrash me with [the harness]—but if you will, you may’ ” (433). This dash stands in for Tristram’s interpretive process (“flying” into the beast’s “heart”) and signals the ease with which he has come to discern the animal’s thoughts: there seems to be no need to specify that this sentiment, presented as an animal’s cited speech, is the result of an interpretive process. In “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?” Thomas Nagel has influentially argued that similarity facilitates the comprehension of the other “in the first person as well as in the third, so to speak.” Implicit in Nagel’s articulation is a triangulated structure that relies on comparison: we do not attempt to understand “batness” itself, but we instead approximate that essence indirectly, by seeking a representational entity, “something that it is like to be that

⁴⁶ When episodes of interspecies communication are not read as instances of colonialist appropriation, they are often deemed “folly” or “ridiculousness” even as they are understood to challenge human domination. Paul Moore, “Sterne, Tristram, Yorick, Birds, and Beasts,” British Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies 10 (1987), p. 50. ⁴⁷ On “narrative experiments” that explore the possibilities of entering animal minds, see Jane Spencer, “Creating Animal Experience in Late Eighteenth-Century Narrative,” Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies 33 (2010), pp. 469–86.

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organism—something it is like for the organism.”⁴⁸ Sterne places a similar emphasis on imaginative representation and abstraction in this encounter between man and beast. Tristram, who “see[s] what is natural for an ass to think—as well as a man,” engages in an epistemological process that echoes both the imaginative triangulation that is characteristic of Smith’s sympathy and Nagel’s sense of “what it is like” to be an animal. Speaking in the first person in Tristram Shandy, as Heather Keenleyside has shown, often troubles the distinction between self-expression and citation in ways that can make “I” point to “a life-form,” “a specific form of generality and agency” that is “not necessarily human.”⁴⁹ Invoking Nagel, Lorraine Daston has argued that attempts to think “with” animals participate in developing conceptions of perspective according to which “understanding another mind could only mean seeing with another’s eyes (or smelling with another’s nose or hearing with another’s sonar, depending on the species).” The emergence of what Daston identifies as a “perspectival mode” in the late eighteenth century draws, she argues, on factors including the privileging of interiority, the novel’s language of individual subjectivity, and “the cult of sympathy.”⁵⁰ Sterne’s fictional accounts of thinking alongside animals and, as the episode of the starling has suggested, his odd citational practices, take part in both the emerging perspectival mode Daston identifies and the challenges to first-person subjecthood that Keenleyside describes. These features of Sterne’s works are put to new and at times radical ends when they are transformed in anthologies. As a counterpoint to the speaking starling, this animal voices an acquiescence to physical abuse that renders its cited speech an instance of coercive emotional appropriation. But as it is presented in Nicholson’s anthology, this interpretive translation of animal sentiment resonates with the issues of human agency and forced labor implied in the preceding episode of “The Negro Girl.” Nicholson’s anthology forges a conceptual connection between “The Negro Girl” and “The Ass” that readers of the original novel would be hard pressed to identify, and this editor seems to consider the animal’s complaint as an approximation of the former slave’s story, a story that

⁴⁸ Thomas Nagel, “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?” The Philosophical Review 83.4 (1974), pp. 442, 436. ⁴⁹ Heather Keenleyside, “The First-Person Form of Life: Locke, Sterne, and the Autobiographical Animal,” Critical Inquiry 39.1 (2002), p. 138. ⁵⁰ Lorraine Daston, “Intelligences: Angelic, Animal, Human,” in Thinking with Animals: New Perspectives on Anthropomorphism, ed. Lorraine Daston and Gregg Mitman (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005), p. 53.

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remains impossible to tell. For that complaint to appear by way of imaginative coercion suggests that the African girl’s untold tale might indicate not the silencing of slavery’s injustices but instead the impossibility of telling such stories, in any grammatical person, by way of processes that bear the stamp of physical or imaginative force. The attempt to speak for those beyond Sterne’s web of pseudo-familial relations determines the odd mechanics of citation and the deferred narratives that present the starling and the African girl. Sterne’s characters certainly do appropriate stories, thoughts, and feelings of others, but they most commonly do so by means of an expansive, physiological model of sympathy. It is against that model and its affinities with the reflections of Hume or the mechanical immediacy of Burke that an abstract, perspectival version of sympathy more suggestive of Smith struggles to articulate without appropriating shared experience. Tristram Shandy’s connections between a brother who suffers the agonies of the rack and the untold tale of an African girl suggest—and, in anthologies, enact—both the pursuit of this ideal through narrative embedding and its impossibility in forms of representation available around the turn of the century.

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4 The Ends of Kinship in the French Romantic Novel

Sympathetic responses feature prominently in the opening and closing frames of three best-sellers of post-revolutionary France: Jacques-Henri Bernardin de Saint-Pierre’s Paul et Virginie (1788), and René and Atala (1802, 1801) by François-René de Chateaubriand. The narrative frames of these three novels specify a novelistic version of sympathy that arises when stories of forbidden sibling attachment pass between figurative fathers and sons. These texts, all of which originally appeared as episodes within longer works, did not begin as novels, and while market concerns and literary tastes certainly account for their extraction and publication, their internal stories of textual genesis also suggest that a particular model of sympathy plays a role in the process by which texts that began as fictional digressions and narrative episodes became novels.¹ In each of these novels, siblinghood poses problems that have special relevance for the role of sympathy in fiction—problems of extreme resemblance, a stymied present, and a resistance to the representation and transmission of narrative. Kinship metaphors in each of these novels’ scenes of narrative transmission suggest that in order to become independent works of fiction, these extracted episodes rely in part on the accommodated differences, temporal progression, and narrative channels that figurative relationships of paternity afford. The ideals of the French Revolution radically altered the metaphorical significance of kinship terms; invoking figurative brotherhoods or metaphorical fathers after 1789 brought deeply problematic associations. Marc Shell has, in calling the French Revolution an “imperfect example of Universal Siblinghood,” argued that “its very goal, universal fraternity, undoes

¹ I use the term “novel” in this chapter without rehearsing the questions of terminology that these works can raise: differences between novel, novella, pastoral, roman personelle, and autobiographie fictive are beyond my focus. Vicarious Narratives: A Literary History of Sympathy, 1750–1850. Jeanne M. Britton, Oxford University Press (2019). © Jeanne M. Britton. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198846697.001.0001

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itself because fraternity implies a common (in Christian terms, divine) father.”² In their narrative frames, these three novels emphasize the contrast between synchronic, horizontal relationships of siblinghood and diachronic, vertical relationships of parenthood. Following this emphasis and the critics who have specified patriarchy’s dominance over young men as well as women, I emphasize the significance of generation rather than gender in these texts.³ This emphasis by no means attempts to erase gender from fraternity’s range of signification, nor does it presume an affirmative answer to the question of whether historical applications of “fraternité” included women. Rather, I underline fraternity’s most consistent implications for the revolutionary era, a time when it was slow to gain ground but quick to spawn different formulations. In this period, fraternité signals a social structure based on affective bonds between members of the same generation, a political system that valorized both horizontal, synchronic relationships of equality, and excessive resemblances that, according to those who did understand fraternity to include the sororal, might threaten incest.⁴ Articulating this implicit threat, the Marquis de Sade declares that “l’inceste devrait être la loi de tout gouvernement dont la fraternité fait la base.”⁵ The ends of fraternity, in a narrative sense, are silence and taboo, plots of incest that, for Bernardin and Chateaubriand, require the accommodation of generational, cultural, and racial difference. In their central tales of potential incest, these novels explore the novelistic ends that kinship metaphors serve. For these novels published on the eve (Paul et Virginie) and in the wake (René and Atala) of the French Revolution, the implications of kinship metaphors are, to put it mildly, substantially different from the familial ties in Sterne’s novels. Each of these novels, however, shows the limits of fraternity—whether biological or figurative—as a foundation for sympathy when stories cross or, for Sterne, fail to cross lines of human difference. In René and Paul et Virginie, vertical, diachronic relationships of paternity ² Marc Shell, The End of Kinship: Measure for Measure, Incest, and the Ideal of Universal Siblinghood (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1988), p. 189; see also Lynn Hunt, The Family Romance of the French Revolution (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), pp. 12–13, 73, and Suzanne Desan, The Family on Trial in Revolutionary France (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004). ³ Annette F. Timm and Joshua A. Sanborn, Gender, Sex and the Shaping of Modern Europe: A History from the French Revolution to the Present Day (New York: Berg, 2007), p. 40. On the exclusion of women from French political life, see Hunt, esp. pp. 153–60, and Timm and Sanborn, pp. 20–35. ⁴ Mona Ozouf, “Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité,” in Les Lieux de Mémoire, vol. 3, part 3, edited by Pierre Nora (Paris: Gallimard, 1992), pp. 583–629. ⁵ La Philosophie dans la boudoir (1795). Cited in Hunt, p. 139.

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accommodate differences that the extreme resemblances of siblinghood deny: Chactas is the adoptive Native American father to the exiled French aristocrat René, and Bernardin’s creole “vieillard” and the modern European who serves as the novel’s extradiegetic narrator call each other father and son. In novels whose sibling relationships threaten incest, the very notion of resemblance is unsustainable, and paternity’s accommodation of difference allows these tales to be told and transmitted. For de Grouchy, Smithean fraternity restrains sympathy’s potential inclusiveness. For Bernardin and Chateaubriand, the ideological impasse of fraternity’s social and cultural value takes shape in embedded tales of forbidden desire that resist narrative expression. In this way, their novels rely on figurative relationships of paternity that are notable for the differences they cross (rather than the resemblances that fraternity favors) and the novelistic functions they perform (rather than the insulation from representation that siblinghood produces). In these works, a version of sympathy that is explicitly shared by adoptive fathers and sons crosses lines of generational, racial, and cultural difference, and, by moving away from the limitations of fraternity, allows for the shifting perspectives that Smith’s sympathy entails. These novels derive their independent textual status from the abstraction of narrative embedding that a capacious model of sympathy, abandoning Smith’s fraternity and transcending Condorcet’s resemblance, makes possible.

Narrative Exchange and Sympathetic Experience in Prévost’s Manon Lescaut The publication histories of Paul et Virginie, René, and Atala have a close ancestor in that of l’Abbé Prévost’s Manon Lescaut. Published as the seventh volume of Mémoires et aventures d’un homme de qualité (1728–31), Manon Lescaut follows a volume concluded with “Fin” and begins anew when the narrator from the first volumes, Renancour, meets des Grieux, an itinerant aristocrat, and listens to and transcribes his story. Before des Grieux begins his narrative, his final words in the frame, addressed to Renancour, signal his anticipated response: “Je suis sûr qu’en me condamnant, vous ne pourrez pas vous empêcher de me plaindre.”⁶ After one short paragraph in the voice of the original narrator, the novel’s narrative perspective shifts, and the récit

⁶ Antoine François Prévost, Manon Lescaut, ed. Jean Sgard (Paris: Flammarion, 1995), p. 56.

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opens, in the voice of des Grieux, with the details of his early life. Manon Lescaut continued to appear as the seventh volume of the Mémoires until the early nineteenth century, when it began to be published individually. The extraction of this novel from its substantially longer original context is facilitated, I argue, by the representation of sympathy that coincides with the beginning of a frame narration: the narrator of the novel meets des Grieux, immediately discerns that he is of high status, and before transcribing his story, which constitutes the bulk of Manon Lescaut, notes that this narrator anticipates a sympathetic response to his story. An anticipated sympathetic response to the experience of hearing another person’s story opens the novel and enables a shift in perspective from its frame to its core narrative. Introducing a tale with an anticipation of sympathy is not itself unique— in this era, narrative frames invoking or requesting sympathy introduce Diderot’s La Religieuse (1780; 1796) and Claire de Duras’ Ourika (1823). Bernardin and Chateaubriand’s novels are structured by the same pattern of a narrative exchange that coincides with an experience of sympathy, but they additionally depict bonds of sympathy that attempt to overcome differences of race and nationality through the experience of narrative—its telling, retelling, and transcription. Manon Lescaut in particular serves as a point of historical continuity and conceptual contrast with their novels, and its publication history throughout the eighteenth century identifies a moment from which fiction of the Romantic era proceeds in revising philosophical theories of sympathy. Prévost’s two narrators have a lot in common: they are both high-born world travelers who value the trappings of aristocracy and education. That these two men might imagine themselves in the other’s position is itself not surprising. Their similarities receive no figurative articulation, whereas the emotional ties between, for example, the European traveler and colonial “vieillard” in Paul et Virginie are expressed in terms of paternity that suggest not a class similarity but rather the power of shared feeling to accommodate difference and generate a figurative bond of kinship. In the years immediately before and after the revolution, these novels by Bernardin and Chateaubriand portray the limitations of siblinghood as a social, ideological model while calling on alternative kinship figures to forge emotional ties and facilitate textual inheritance—the transmission of stories from one generation to another. Within the long critical tradition of reading these works by Prévost, Bernardin, and Chateaubriand together, there has been no sustained focus

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on the similar and significant roles that kinship metaphors play in each of these novels’ narrative frames.⁷ My focus on the novelistic rather than the political dimension of these metaphors serves two purposes. First, I offer a counter-narrative to the traditional account by which revolutionary politics and excessive sentiment, à la Rousseau, become intertwined in the French and British imagination. Rousseau’s conception of pitié, particularly its negotiation of the transition between the state of nature and the state of civilization, certainly informs Bernardin and Chateaubriand’s representations of the natural world and forbidden romantic desire. But these works more profoundly invoke the kinship patterns and imaginative perspectives that Smith describes. This chapter therefore looks to the kinship models that shape these novels’ narrative structures in order to identify a version of sympathy that determines a new novelistic status for works that began as narrative episodes. Second, my approach differs from that of critics who have emphasized the political connotations of paternity’s appearance in these three novels and, for that matter, paternity’s oppressive implications in fiction of this period.⁸ This emphasis has obscured the narrative effects that figures of paternity suggest: such figures also invest fiction with a model of kinship that is forged across lines of difference and through bonds of affection rather than being rooted in obedience and authority. Through these bonds of affection, the oral tale, overcoming the excessive resemblance that haunts its telling, becomes the printed novel. Borrowing not only the authority but also the temporal progression and intergenerational inheritance that paternity suggests, these novels find generic stability in figurative kinships developed by a version of sympathy that is instantiated through the transmission of narrative. The termination of fraternity in plots of incest illuminates the narrative functions—what I refer to as the novelistic ends—of paternity: experiences ⁷ Prominent themes in this discussion have included feminine virtue, empire, exoticism, and incest. Fabienne Bercegol discusses Manon Lescaut and Paul et Virginie as sources of Chateaubriand’s American fictions. Chateaubriand: une poétique de la tentation (Paris: Editions classiques Garnier, 2009). Marie-Claire Vallois insightfully reads Paul et Virginie alongside Atala. “Exotic Femininity and the Rights of Man: Paul et Virginie and Atala, or the Revolution in Stasis,” in Rebel Daughters: Women and the French Revolution, ed. Sara E. Melzer and Leslie W. Rabine (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992). Vivienne Mylne read Manon Lescaut as a source for Paul et Virginie’s narrative structure. The Eighteenth-Century French Novel: Techniques of Illusion (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1965). ⁸ See Vallois, “Exotic Femininity and the Rights of Man”; Chris Bongie, Islands and Exiles: The Creole Identities of Post/Colonial Literature (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), pp. 112–17; and Pratima Prasad, Colonialism, Race, and the French Romantic Imagination (New York: Routledge, 2009).

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of sympathy and narrative between characters who share figurative or adoptive intergenerational kinship ties facilitate both the process of textual inheritance, by which stories are passed down over generations, and the process of novelization, by which a spoken narrative becomes a printed novel. When the figure of the brother, as a philosophical model or political ideal, requires resemblance that has become excessive, then the figure of the father, particularly in a novelistic context, works both to accommodate difference and to facilitate the shifts in perspective that constitute acts of narrative transmission.

Fostering Family Ties in Paul et Virginie Paul et Virginie was an international best-seller that appeared in lavish illustrated editions and frequently reprinted translations.⁹ Bernardin’s novel was first published as a part of his sprawling Études de la Nature (1784–8), an ambitious if intellectually flawed project that included natural history and fiction. Following the work’s initial success, the third edition’s fourth volume contained a lengthy “Avis au lecteur” followed by “deux histoires”: “Paul et Virginie,” and the first book of the unfinished l’Arcadie, “Les Gaules.”¹⁰ After the three previous volumes of Études de la Nature and the lengthy “Avis,” “Paul et Virginie” opens with a narrative frame in which a European traveler provides a naturalistic, cartographic description of the novel’s setting, l’Ile de France (now Mauritius). He encounters “le vieillard,” who tells him the story of the inhabitants of two ruined cottages—two mothers and their children—that feature in their panoramic view of the island. The conclusion of the story and return to the extradiegetic level is sealed with the tears of both narrators. Paul et Virginie began to be published independently in 1789 and has never been out of print. The narrative frame’s meeting between the European and the “vieillard” stages two confrontations: one between orality and print, another between the racialized status of the creole and the western European. The novel traces a shift in media between the first and second narrator, between the ⁹ On the novel’s publication history and popularity, see Jean-Marie Goulemot, “L’histoire litteraire en question: l’example de Paul et Virginie,” in Etudes sur Paul et Virginie et l’Œuvre de Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, ed. Jean-Michel Racault (Paris: Didier-Erudition, 1986), pp. 204–14, and David Menhennet, “International Bestseller: Paul and Virginia, by Bernardin de SaintPierre,” The Book Collector 38 (1989), pp. 489–91. ¹⁰ Études de la Nature (Paris: Didot le jeune, 1784–92), p. lxxx.

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metropolitan, objective traveler and the colonial, bardic, story-telling “vieillard.” The novel’s opening line establishes the geographical position of its setting and the stylistic register of its first narrator: “Sur le côté oriental de la montagne qui s’élève derrière le Port-Louis de l’Ile-deFrance, on voit, dans un terrain jadis cultivé, les ruines de deux petites cabanes.”¹¹ From the geographic objectivity of the European narrator, the frame moves towards an oral narrative presented by a man cast in the images of an ancient story-teller or a pastoral shepherd when the European precedes the core story by pointing to the printed version of the old man’s oral narrative: “voici ce que ce vieillard me raconta” (82). As an inhabitant of the island, the “vieillard” lies somewhere between the islandborn “creoles” and the European traveler: the differences of nation and media that separate these two narrators join the implication of the frequently racialized difference that “creole” suggests.¹² After describing the island’s topography, the European greets the old man respectfully and, addressing him as “Mon père,” enquires about the ruined cottages, which we later learn were those of Paul and Virginie’s mothers. In his reply, the vieillard addresses the European as “Mon fils” and hints at the touching story of the cottages’ inhabitants before the European requests their story: “Mon père, . . . racontez-moi, je vous prie, ce que vous savez des anciens habitants de ce désert” (82). This paternal bond, which might seem to arise out of respect and politeness if not cliché, importantly crosses the differences of nationality and media that the frame foregrounds. It also casts the vieillard’s story as an object of ancestral inheritance. In contrast to the figurative sibling relationships between the mothers and their children that the core story details, this figurative bond of paternity attempts to compensate, through the experience of narrative, for the death of the novel’s central family; this loss has, the old man says at the end of his narrative, left him “comme un père qui a perdu ses enfants” (175). Figured as the loss of his own children, the death of the novel’s “petite société” becomes the content and the motivation of a tale shared by strangers who address each other as father and son.

¹¹ Paul et Virginie, ed. Robert Mauzi (Paris: Garnier Flammarion, 1966), p. 81. Subsequent references to this edition will be noted parenthetically. ¹² “Creole” most strictly identifies Europeans who are born outside of Europe but also indicates racialized difference, often in line with theories that climate determined human variation. See Prasad, Colonialism, Race, and the French Romantic Imagination, pp. 59–60, and Bongie, Islands and Exiles.

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These aspects of Paul et Virginie’s familial discourse have been said to stabilize the contested ideological work that the core narrative performs in equating the feminine with the exotic and to give its story of matriarchal families a stamp of patriarchal authority.¹³ Many critics, questioning the usefulness of the European’s presence, contend that he provides an additional layer of subjectivity and that his tearful response models the kind of reaction Bernardin desired from his readers.¹⁴ Structurally, Paul et Virginie additionally suggests that an experience of sympathetically-charged narrative links one generation to the next and, by implying the transition from orality to print, facilitates the independent, novelistic status that Paul et Virginie soon came to acquire. The kinship terms that have been said to abound “almost obsessively” in this novel include the paternal bond between its two narrators, the sisterhood of the core story’s two mothers, and the affective, adoptive siblinghood of the title characters.¹⁵ The pairing of the paternal “vieillard” and the filial European supplies a vertical, diachronic familial relationship in the place of two synchronic relationships, those of the two mothers who know each other as “sœurs” and their unrelated children whose first names for each other are “ceux de frère et de sœur” (88). Biological kinship is of course at the center of this novel about two outcast mothers. Crossing from its frame to its core narrative, Paul et Virginie offers metaphorical paternity in the place of literal maternity. The most important opposition between figurative kinship ties in the novel’s narrative frame and core is that of generation, not gender: diachronic relationships that cross generations replace synchronic relationships among siblings and allow for the continuation of the novel’s families through narrative retellings rather than biological reproduction. The distinction between the paternal relationship that undergirds the narrative frame and the sororal and fraternal relationships that constitute the core narrative emphasizes the limitations of synchronic familial relationships when they serve as the model for social bonds.

¹³ Vallois, “Exotic Femininity and the Rights of Man,” 189. On the patriarchal authority that intercedes in the novel’s matriarchal idyll, see Bongie, Islands and Exiles, pp. 112–17. Prasad, by contrast, argues that “paternity is erased” by the novel’s central tale of motherhood. Colonialism, Race, and the French Romantic Imagination, p. 27. ¹⁴ See Vasanti Heeralall, “Sur l’economie narrative de Paul et Virginie,” in Etudes sur Paul et Virginie et l’Œuvre de Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, edited by Jean-Michel Racault (Paris: DidierErudition, 1986), p. 116, and, in the same volume, Jean-Michel Racault, “Ouverture et clôture dans Paul et Virginie. Essai d’analyse comparative des séquences initiale et finale,” p. 191. ¹⁵ Prasad, Colonialism, Race, and the French Romantic Imagination, p. 37.

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In the novel’s brief concluding frame, Bernardin specifies the affective charge of the paternal bond that unites narrator and listener. Although both the European and the vieillard shed tears in response to the vieillard’s story, their tears fall, unlike the somewhat indiscriminate pools of mingled tears that are characteristic of sentimental fiction, in a rather particularized manner. The conclusion of Paul et Virginie presents the shedding of tears as a disjointed, isolating experience, as a rupture that facilitates textual transmission rather than a bond that forges stable kinships. The European traveler resumes the closing frame by explaining, in the novel’s final sentence, that “En disant ces mots ce bon vieillard s’éloigna en versant des larmes, et les miennes avaient coulé plus d’une fois pendant ce funeste récit” (175). The European narrator’s tear-shedding is characterized as a series of discrete responses that have occurred, over the course of the narrative, “plus d’une fois,” but without the continuousness of the old man’s “versant” at the moment of his narrative’s end and his departure. The novel’s final scene addresses itself to its audience’s sentimentalism, which Roddey Reid has connected to the novel’s break from the pastoral tradition and its embodiment of sentimental fiction.¹⁶ The European’s tears are the result of his experience of the vieillard’s first-hand account, the result of vicarious feeling. Falling at the moment of the novel’s closure and the position of its extraction from Bernardin’s Études, the description of the men’s tears specifies that their figurative kinship bond facilitates the core story’s diegesis but does not outlast its conclusion. In the novel’s core story of two outcast mothers raising children in a French colony, figurative familial ties are, as Reid has noted, “sealed by an exchange of life stories and tears.”¹⁷ Mme de la Tour, Virginie’s mother, comes upon Paul’s mother Marguerite in “une position qu’elle jugea semblable à la sienne.” Their exchange of stories elicits pity, which in turn becomes the foundation of their new family: Mme de la Tour speaks to Marguerite “en peu de mots de sa condition passée et de ses besoins présents. Margeurite au récit de madame de la Tour fut émue de pitié . . . Et elle lui offrait en pleurant sa cabane et son amitié.” This kindness, given among strangers, exceeds any that Mme de la Tour ever found, she says, “ ‘dans mes parents,’ ” a phenomenon the narrator justifies by the particular ¹⁶ He identifies in this scene “a pathos that violates the aesthetic distance afforded by contemplation” that gestures towards “a wider public by shifting to a democratic aesthetics of shameless sentimentality.” Families in Jeopardy: Regulating the Social Body in France, 1750–1910 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993), p. 109. ¹⁷ Families in Jeopardy, p. 112.

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conditions of the new colonies, where “le simple voisinage . . . était un titre d’amitié” (84).¹⁸ In this colonial setting, the similar stories of marriage across class lines (in Mme de la Tour’s case) and childbirth outside of marriage (a gentleman’s promises to marry Margeurite prove false) create new family lines explicitly founded on pity. While proximity makes friends out of neighbors, resemblance and sympathy make sisters out of strangers. Just as de Grouchy posits in her “Lettres sur la sympathie” that figurative kinships can arise from the experience of sympathy, Mme de la Tour and Margeurite, having experienced “des maux presque semblables,” enter into a relationship of ascending affective bonds as they give each other “les doux noms d’amie, de compagne et de sœur” (87). In the core narrative, shared stories reveal similar pasts that are then described through the language of kinship. The distinction between affectionate so-called “sisters” and unfeeling relatives (“parents”) prioritizes the emotional bonds shared within the same generation over the restrictive moral authority associated with earlier generations. This sisterhood, however, and the siblinghood between Paul and Virginie that it fosters, prove impermanent: synchronic familial ties reach an impasse in the nascent romantic desires between the children, desires whose shades of incest propel the island idyll towards its tragic end. Literary representations of incest have been broadly understood as threatening instances of what Marc Shell catalogs as “solipsism, narcissism, exclusivity, rebellion, difference versus repetition, sexist oppression, and individuation.”¹⁹ When employed in the setting of the colonial periphery, incest, as figure for extreme similarity, calls attention to difference— particularly, as critics have noted, its erasure or transfiguration.²⁰ The sameness that incest prioritizes invokes differences that are crossed (those of class) or avoided (those of race). If incest invokes differences that its

¹⁸ Jean-Louis Flandrin notes that a similar practice—considering other inhabitants of the same village as kin without knowledge of biological ties—persists in regions of rural France. Families in Former Times: Kinship, Household and Sexuality, trans. Richard Southern (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), p. 35. ¹⁹ The End of Kinship: Measure for Measure, Incest, and the Ideal of Universal Siblinghood, p. 180. ²⁰ This novel’s incest plot emphasizes oppositions between sameness and difference through reproduction within (endogamy) and beyond (exogamy) familial lines. Renata Wasserman has argued that the novel’s incestuous desire, based on contiguity, not consanguinity, overlies the “class exogamy” that has produced Virginie, while Pratima Prasad has argued that it reinstates a version of racial exclusivity antithetical to his own more progressive aims. Renata Wasserman, Exotic Nations: Literature and Cultural Identity in the United States and Brazil, 1830–1930 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994), p. 110; Prasad, Colonialism, Race, and the French Romantic Imagination, p. 18.

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sameness erases, then the threatening similarity of Paul and Virginie—a familial bond founded on the joint upbringing and shared maternal milk of adoptive siblings—invokes not only the effaced differences of class and race but also, I want to emphasize, differences of generation. The intergenerational narrative bond of the novel’s frame responds directly to the emphasis on synchronic, horizontal family bonds in the novel’s core. This novel makes much of figurative as opposed to biological relationships, the terms that characters call each other (father, son, sister, brother) rather than the kinship roles individuals actually play (mother). To be sure, classifying these kinship terms as figurative follows Western preconceptions that prioritize consanguinity over proximity, affection, or adoption, but the threat of the nascent desire between biologically unrelated children conveys the force that figurative family ties carry in this novel. The shared experience of narrative between the frame’s “père” and “fils” brings the story of the two families out of the silence that hangs over their ruined cottages as the novel begins. There has been much discussion of the proximity between incest and silence. Marc Shell, for example, has claimed that “insofar as incest marks the end of all ordinary exchange, the better counterpart to incest might be silence, or the end of verbal exchange.”²¹ This proximity is not only accounted for by the unspeakability that is the consequence of its cultural interdiction but also intertwined with the nature of language itself.²² Emphasizing that terms of siblinghood imply a common parent, Shell has identified the term “brother” as “an obstacle—semantic and ideological—to comprehending or effecting the collapse of intergeneration difference that Universal Siblinghood presupposes.”²³ The narration of this novel’s plot of threatened sibling incest from a “father” to a “son,” while certainly suggesting Old Regime authority, also alters the insistence on sameness that undergirds the figurative siblinghood at the center of its idealized family. Paul et Virginie locates a relationship of figurative paternity that accommodates difference outside the core tale in which so-called “sisters” and “brothers” share similarities that ultimately threaten incest. Abandoning fraternity,

²¹ End of Kinship, p. 182. See also Luke Bouvier, “How Not to Speak of Incest: Atala and the Secrets of Speech,” Nineteenth-Century French Studies 30 (2002), pp. 228–42. ²² The taboo against incest has served as a site for poststructuralism’s unraveling of signification: Roland Barthes, claiming that “the family is no more than a lexical area,” remarked that “incest . . . is only a surprise of vocabulary.” Sade, Fourier, Loyola, trans. Richard Miller (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), pp. 137–8. ²³ End of Kinship, p. 190.

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Bernardin’s novel seems to foreshadow de Grouchy’s rejection of Smith’s “brother” in favor of sympathetic bonds that, shared between “similars,” accommodate generational difference. The narrative technique of Paul et Virginie, according to Vivienne Mylne, moves “towards the omniscience of the nineteenth-century third-person narrator.”²⁴ This movement is particularly conspicuous in the grammar of the novel’s most famous passage: Virginie’s spectacular death, as witnessed by all the island’s inhabitants, in a shipwreck on her return from France.²⁵ Like the natural disaster that Smith posits in the Far East, shipwrecks served, in philosophy and aesthetics, as imaginative scenarios for the exploration of sympathetic spectatorship.²⁶ As Bernardin mobilizes the iconic figure of a shipwreck, the structural mechanics of sympathy contribute to his development of narrative omniscience in this passage. Alternating between personal and impersonal pronouns, between collective and individual feeling, between objective description and individual identification, this passage specifies the imaginative, identificatory elements of sympathetic response. The vieillard uses impersonal constructions (“on vit,” “disparassait à la vue,” or “on craignait”) that stand in contrast to his own direct observation of and emotional involvement in the scene before personal pronouns appear in tandem with individual action when the narrator restrains Paul as the boy rushes towards the sea in an attempt to save Virginie. The description of her appearance returns to the impersonal register before concluding with personal identification: “On vit alors un objet digne d’une éternelle pitié: une jeune demoiselle parut dans la galerie de la poupe du Saint-Géran, tendant les bras vers celui qui faisait tant d’efforts pour la joindre. C’était Virginie” (159). From the impersonal “on vit” and the unspecified “objet,” the passage and the spectators’ view sharpen

²⁴ The Eighteenth-Century French Novel, pp. 247, 249. ²⁵ Other scenes also engage with sympathy’s emotional and narrative potential. A brief episode which begins with an escaped slave appealing to the mercy of Virginie initially seems, as Carolyn Vellenga Berman notes, a potential scene of sentimental pity and narrative exchange that might transgress racial difference. Creole Crossings: Domestic Fiction and the Reform of Colonial Slavery (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2006), p. 79. The slave’s plea for pity is followed not by the story of her suffering but instead by the display of her scars; the elegance of Virginie’s body convinces the master to forgive rather than punish his escaped slave. Pitié implicates identification in another scene in which the children’s reenactment of the story of Ruth elicits tears from their entire audience. ²⁶ In an illustration of sympathy, Hume imagines a storm-tossed ship being “driven so near me” that he can see and hear their horror and cries. Treatise, p. 379. On the figure of the shipwreck in considerations of sympathy, see Marshall, Surprising Effects, pp. 25–6, and The Figure of Theater, pp. 208–9.

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their focus on this anonymous “jeune demoiselle” in order to identify her, after a brief pause that maximizes sentimental effect, as Virginie. This passage manifests, in its fusion of objective omniscience with personal narration, sympathy’s shifting perspectives. The vieillard’s diegesis elsewhere overcomes the limitations of the novel’s sympathetically-forged alternative family with a narrative that, when it merges with the European’s experience of the island, implicitly moves from orality to print. The transition from orality to print within the core narrative, though, is highly problematic. Written language enters the families’ lives only as a result of Virginie’s forced absence. For Paul, the written letter triggers thoughts of erotic intrigue and immorality: letters resemble those of Les Liaisons dangereuses more than La Nouvelle Héloïse, and epistolarity, in the form of Virginie’s letter from France, carries none of the novelistic letter’s associations of emotional immediacy and imagined presence. The distinction between the frame’s implicit transition into print and the core story’s resistance to writing characterizes the idealized society that becomes the subject of the printed novel. In the novel’s frame, sympathy is based exclusively on the experience of narrative rather than the recognition of similarity. Here, sympathy overcomes the cultural difference between the European and the colonialist and suggests a narrative model according to which a story itself becomes an object of inheritance. The transmission of the core story across generations marks the end of single-generational idyll. Discrepancies between versions of sympathy explored in the novel’s core story and its narrative frame suggest that sympathy must function in a particular way for the prose pastoral to become a novel both in the material sense of its early publication history, which preserves this narrative frame, and in the broader generic sense of a self-authenticating fictional narrative that stands on its own. In this novel’s self-conception, sympathy moves beyond the kind of pity explored in the familial structures of the core narrative—that which is based on shared pasts and articulated as synchronic kinship ties—and instead accommodates differences of nationality, generation, and media. In this sense, it is perhaps fitting that a story first told by a father to a son would become a classic of children’s literature, a work of fiction that prioritizes the position of the child as the recipient of narrative. This experience of a sympathetically-shared tale is the foundation of this novel’s own fiction of narrative and cultural transmission and the justification for the extraction of “Paul et Virginie” from Études de la Nature. Immediately before (Bernardin) and after (Chateaubriand) the revolution and its call for

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universal siblinghood, fictions predicated on sympathetic experience rely on patterns of narrative exchange that problematize the horizontal, synchronic kinship ties of siblinghood and instead mimic ancestral inheritance.

Atala and René: From Fraternity to Difference The pairing of Chateaubriand’s short novels Atala and René has a long tradition in publication history. Appearing as an advertisement for the forthcoming Génie du christianisme, Atala created a sensation when it was published in 1801, and René, which was originally published as an episode within Génie in 1802, was quickly united with Atala in an edition of 1805. This same coupling, with Atala preceding René, has appeared commonly, though not exclusively, in popular editions until the present day: reading the canonical René almost always means holding Atala in the same volume. Written as episodes of Les Natchez, a long-unpublished prose epic, René and Atala draw from the same group of characters and address the same issues of religious faith and conversion, cultural and racial difference, and threats of sibling incest. Structurally, each novel is centered around the brief confession of a female character couched within a longer narrative that the main male character shares with one or two listeners: in René, the title character reveals the story of his past and his sister’s confession of incestuous desire to two paternal figures, Chactas and Père Souël, while in Atala, Chactas, René’s adoptive father, relates to René his story of pseudo-incestuous desire. In spite of the long-standing pairing of these novels in print, there remains much to be said about their extensive parallels and significant inversions. Frequently published together, René and Atala deserve to be read together. According to the stories of textual genesis and parallel narrative structures that link René and Atala, sympathetic identification facilitates family structures of horizontal relationships (between siblings) and vertical relationships (between parent and child), structures that give rise to particular narrative forms. In Chateaubriand’s novels, sympathy’s narrative mechanics play out in kinship structures. Familial relationships inform each novel’s complex series of narrative frames. While relationships of fraternity cannot serve as a foundation for social bonds or narrative experience, kinship bonds that cross generational levels allow for the experience of sympathy and the transmission of narrative. The paternal figures in these post-revolutionary works make a striking point: instances of shared feeling both promote the

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transmission of narrative between generations and cross lines of racial and cultural difference. The intertwined stories of René and Atala’s textual genesis and their extensive parallels suggest that sympathy justifies, through the kinship and narrative structures that it shapes, the historical publication and literary-historical status of these works as stand-alone novels. Read together, Atala and René constitute a rare instance of equivalent narrative exchange: Chactas narrates his tale of forbidden love to René in Atala, and René reveals his secret story of incestuous desire to Chactas in René. When Chactas shares his story with René, it is as if one of the marginalized and largely silent non-Europeans in other Romantic-era texts is given a voice, even if it is rendered in Chateaubriand’s ventriloquized French.²⁷ The rarity of such equal narrative exchange is itself notable, but beyond casting a non-European as the narrator of his own tale, Chateaubriand also suggests that René, the consummate Romantic individual, is following—chronologically and conceptually—the practice of self-narration that Chactas has modeled in Atala. The novels’ appearance in print, with Atala preceding René, is chronological (Chactas tells René his story first) but also conceptual insofar as it positions René as a response to Atala. René is founded in intersubjective experience, and its very structure mirrors and extends its printed predecessor. Such a claim runs against the critical discussion of the novel’s investment in subjectivity and the nature of René’s appeal for the generation of post-revolutionary writers who valued the novel for its examination of melancholy isolation.²⁸ The publication history that has bound these short novels together emphasizes what an exclusive focus on René would overlook: Chateaubriand’s tale of solipsism and subjectivity has its parallel, model, and origin in the tale of another. Their extensive parallels of plot and structure become explicit in spatial and visual language in the opening of Chactas’s récit in Atala. He tells René:

²⁷ For an insightful reading of Chateaubriand’s attempt at bilingual ventriloquy, see Jennifer Yee, Exotic Subversions in Nineteenth-Century French Fiction (London: Legenda, 2008), pp. 36–7. ²⁸ On René and subjectivity, see Véronique Dufief-Sanchez, Philosophie du roman personnel de Chateaubriand à Fromentin, 1802–1863 (Genève: Librairie Droz, 2010); Margaret Waller, The Male Malady: Fictions of Impotence in the French Romantic Novel (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1993), p. 54; and Béatrice Didier, “La notion de personnage dans le roman à la première personne au lendemain de la Révolution: Rene et Atala,” in Personnage et histoire littéraire: actes du colloque de Toulouse, ed. Yves Reuter (Toulouse: Presses universitaires du Mirail, 1991), pp. 81–93. On René’s popularity, see Margaret Waller, “Being René, Buying Atala: Alienated Subjects and Decorative Objects in Postrevolutionary France,” in Rebel Daughters: Women and the French Revolution, ed. Sara E. Melzer and Leslie W. Rabine (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), pp. 161, 170–2.

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“Je vois en toi l’homme civilisé qui s’est fait sauvage; tu vois en moi l’homme sauvage, que le grand Esprit . . . a voulu civiliser. Entrés l’un et l’autre dans la carrière de la vie, par les deux bouts opposés, tu es venu te reposer à ma place, et j’ai été m’asseoir à la tienne: ainsi nous avons dû avoir des objets une vue totalement différente. Qui, de toi ou de moi, a le plus gagné ou le plus perdu à ce changement de position?”²⁹

The reversals of position suggested by the life stories of Chactas and René yield an instance of cultural hybridity that has drawn the attention of many critics.³⁰ This passage’s language of sight (“Je vois en toi,” “tu vois en moi”) insists on reflections that the characters’ shared secrets later reinforce, and the switching of positions (“tu es venu te reposer à ma place, et j’ai été m’asseoir à la tienne”) suggests an exchange of cultural position that the récits profoundly complicate. The apparent directness of this reversal is belied, though, by the simple fact that Chactas, who begins with a statement of visual observation, is, at this point, blind. Literal vision is not, of course, the central issue here, and the grammatically inverse statements (“je vois en toi,” “tu vois en moi”) suggest that it is a process rather than a stable identity with which he identifies; each individual identifies with the experience of cultural assimilation that the other has undergone rather than the individual himself. Chateaubriand’s paired narrative exchanges, which result from figurative visual reflections, elaborate the progression from sensory perception to imaginative perspective that Smith’s Theory traces. The novels also reflect each other in their adoptive kinships and narrative structures. René, the European exile, is adopted by the Native American Chactas; Chactas has been adopted by the Spaniard Lopez. René’s sister Amélie inadvertently confesses an incestuous love for her brother; Chactas loves Atala, who, as the daughter of a Christian Native American mother and Lopez, is therefore his adoptive sister. Chactas reveals his secret to René, and René reveals his own to Chactas and Père Souël. Against these insistent parallels, a fundamental opposition between the two works concerns what critics have identified in the individual novels as the representation of

²⁹ François-René de Chateaubriand, Atala, René, Les aventures du dernier Abencérage, ed. Jean-Claude Berchet (Paris: Flammarion, 1996), p. 95. Subsequent references to this edition will be noted parenthetically. ³⁰ See especially Prasad, Colonialism, Race, and the French Romantic Imagination, and Claudia Moscovici, “Hybridity and Ethics in Chateaubriand’s Atala,” Nineteenth-Century French Studies 29 (2001), pp. 197–216.

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human subjectivity in René and radical difference in Atala. It is a commonplace to note that René is an emblematic text of Romantic subjectivity, and it has been noted that its paired text Atala is primarily concerned with “the difficulty of representing true otherness.”³¹ The interconnected narrative frames that extend the link between the two novels reveal the specifically literary effects of kinship metaphors after the revolution. According to the structures of René, Atala, and the narrative framing that situates them both, sympathy’s novelistic mechanisms determine the movement of narrative through intersubjective relationships figured as familial bonds within or across generations. René opens his first-person narrative with two instances of triangulated emotion—an admission of shame and appeal to pity—whose dynamics warrant close attention. The first words of his récit, set off from the brief opening frame by blank space and quotation marks, identify his view of himself through the perspectives of his interlocutors (his adoptive Native American father Chactas and the missionary Père Souël) and against the backdrop of the natural landscape as the source of his shame: “Je ne puis, en commençant mon récit, me défendre d’un mouvement de honte. La paix de vos cœurs, respectables vieillards, et le calme de la nature autour de moi, me font rougir du trouble et de l’agitation de mon âme” (168–9). Shame presumes a third-party perception of the self in ways that parallel sympathetic response. Not surprisingly, René’s shame quickly becomes an expectation of pity. Immediately before René begins his story, he anticipates a sympathetic response: addressing his listeners, he exclaims, “Combien vous aurez pitié de moi!” (169). Sympathy and the imaginary split in perspective it entails introduce René’s récit. Imagining the self through the perspectives of two paternal figures makes sympathy’s dynamics of kinship and perspective the prelude to René’s narrative, and the triangulation entailed in this experience frees René from his solipsistic self-referentiality in order to allow the revelation of his past to others. The expectation and dynamics of sympathy continue to inform René’s presentation of his story. Early in his narrative, after an invocation of pity, René falls silent. “Un jeune homme,” he begins, “plein de passions, assis sur la bouche d’un volcan, et pleurant sur les mortels dont à peine il voyait à ses pieds les demeures, n’est sans doute, ô vieillards, qu’un object digne de votre pitié.” His ensuing silence surprises his listeners; when René begins to speak ³¹ Wasserman, Exotic Nations, p. 137. Waller has also argued that Atala is fundamentally about the other. “Being René, Buying Atala,” p. 162.

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again, he addresses a group of “Heureux Sauvages” who “cherchait avec attendrissement ce je ne sais quoi inconnu qui prend pitié du pauvre Sauvage” (175). Twice invoking pity—that of his listeners for himself, that of a divine force for Native Americans—René is met with the effusive words and affectionate embrace of Chactas. The conclusion of his narrative, like its opening, is also marked by features of sympathetic response: the emotional response of Chactas reinforces their kinship tie as he sheds tears, embraces him, and speaks, the unnamed narrator tells us, “à son fils.” Père Souël, said to address him instead as the “frère d’Amélie,” declares in a mode of stern chastisement that “rien ne mérite, dans cette histoire, la pitié qu’on vous montre ici” and berates René’s self-conscious shame: “quelle honte de ne pouvoir songer au seul malheur réel de votre vie, sans être forcé de rougir!” (195). With this moral, the fraternal tie—the synchronic bond that is the source of René’s suffering—is reinstated through the Catholic father, who emphasizes the religious connotations of his paternal role. The selfarticulation that constitutes the bulk of this novel arises from the orientation towards the other that the novel’s narrative frame establishes through sympathy’s triangulation of perspectives. These passages render René’s otherwise appropriative and consuming subjectivity vulnerable to the emotional response of the other, but they also seem to prompt a third-person perspective on the self: formally and rhetorically, René foregrounds the appeal to and response of the other in its very act of self-articulation. René’s preface shares, then, the expectation of emotional response that is a key feature of the epistolary novel’s formal logic. Otherwise, though, the subgenre’s incorporation of multiple voices cedes to René’s individual voice, and letters give way to retrospective narration, in what has been termed a “roman par lettres avorté.”³² The arrival of a letter from France spurs René to tell his story, his communication with his sister Amélie is frequently undertaken in letters, and the close of his narrative consists of his revealing the letter from France, an account of Amélie’s death.³³ All but one of the letters exchanged in René’s récit are summarized rather than cited. While this pattern follows a logical necessity, it also betrays, as René’s monovocal narrative absorbs the other voices that letters convey, his appropriative identity.

³² Pierre Barbéris, René de Chateaubriand: un nouveau roman (Paris: Larousse, 1973), p. 151. ³³ In Les Natchez, the letter is delivered by an African, suggesting the intersection of sameness and difference that informs René’s story. Les Natchez, Atala, René, ed. Jean-Claude Berchet (Paris: Librairie Générale Française, 1989), p. 309.

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René’s absorptive narrative voice parallels his blindness to the reality of his sister’s suffering: he is equally unable to speak and to feel as another. His sister, by contrast, immediately deciphers his suicidal plan after she reads a letter of his and feels, she tells him, “comme si j’avais été avec toi” (182). His letter and her interpretation achieve, even when he attempts to conceal his true thoughts, the kind of absent presence and emotional transparency that the form of the letter idealizes. In the one letter that is reproduced in the body of the novel, Amélie explains her desire to enter a convent and her hope that her brother will, in finding a wife, “rediscover a sister” [“tu croirais retrouver une sœur”] (185). His response to this letter is, in a rare moment of limited insight, to wonder if his sister has “conçu une passion pour un homme qu’elle n’osait avouer” (186). In René, figures of paternity mitigate the radical resemblance that makes incest perilous and renders its representation impossible. After learning of his sister’s feelings, René travels to the French American colonies where he finds a Native American wife and, in Chactas, an adoptive father. His turn from incest is a turn towards difference; fleeing his biological family, he establishes new, interracial familial ties through marriage and adoption.³⁴ Critics have discussed the attempt that René stages to offset the criminal passions of the proximate with the exotic differences of the colonial, but, as Pratima Prasad has noted of Atala, here incest and miscegenation intersect, and the former serves to legitimate the latter: Atala responds enthusiastically to the discovery that she and Chactas share the same father—she, biologically, he, by adoption—in a seeming justification of romantic desire through filial attachment.³⁵ In Atala, radical proximity intersects with radical difference while in René, René’s pursuit of new family ties parallels Amélie’s turn to the figurative family of a religious and culturally-sanctioned universal kinship. Amélie’s death takes place in a convent, and it is a prominent example of the literary trope by which Catholic orders replace or predict incest.³⁶ More specifically, her death suggests that a religious sisterhood is an inadequate solution to the threat of an erotic sibling attachment. It is in the joint textual genesis of Atala and René, where kinship bonds intersect with shifts between narrative levels, that Chateaubriand proposes an alternative solution to the limits of universal siblinghood. ³⁴ Laurence Porter has observed that René is “half-heartedly embracing extreme difference in order to escape the sinful excess of sameness in incest.” “Consciousness of the Exotic and Exotic Consciousness in Chateaubriand,” Nineteenth-Century French Studies 38 (2010), p. 164. ³⁵ Colonialism, Race, and the French Romantic Imagination, pp. 64–5. ³⁶ Shell, The End of Kinship, pp. 10, 14.

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There is no explicit indication of René’s textual genesis. The account of Atala’s retellings, however, implies that the novels are passed on and recorded together. In the epilogue of Atala, Chactas’s story, once told to René, is then said to be passed from one generation to the next, eventually finding its way to an unnamed European traveler who becomes the narrator of both texts’ outermost frames: after Chactas tells René his story, “Les pères l’ont redite aux enfants, et moi, voyageur aux terres lointaines, j’ai fidèlement rapporté ce que des Indiens m’en ont appris.” The story achieves a mythic status by virtue of being passed down through generations but, in its path from oral tale to written novel, it moves through an individual, face-to-face encounter when the European narrator specifies that “un Siminole me raconta cette histoire” (157). Chateaubriand’s repeated emphasis on relationships of paternity in the textual origins of René and Atala, whose central story is retold by fathers to their children, certainly registers the vexed significance of paternal figures after the revolution; as Margaret Waller notes of René, “the power that literally and figurative frames the hero’s disclosure is paternal authority.”³⁷ Alternative forms of paternity determine not only René’s relationships to his two adoptive fathers but also the repeated instances of énonciation that function as the origin of this novel, a reported story whose multiple retellings rehearse and modify the familial bonds by which René’s narrative first comes to light. In a striking intersection of sympathetic affect, ethnic difference, and the end of a family line, Chateaubriand locates the transformation of an oral tale into reported narrative. When the unnamed European narrator of Atala’s epilogue meets René’s descendant, her story of massacre, exile, and death elicits his sympathetic tears (161). When the weeping mother and unnamed European repeatedly address each other as “mon frère” and “ma sœur,” Chateaubriand establishes a synchronic familial model that stands in contrast to the patriarchal, diachronic model that immediately frames René’s narrative. Atala thus returns in its epilogue to the kinship affiliation of siblinghood, which, through the tearful exchange of narrative, temporarily elides the racial and cultural difference separating the European from René’s Native American-European descendant. But rather than asserting similarity through metaphors of kinship, the exchange of stories here—for the European relates the final days of Chactas after René’s granddaughter tells of her own experiences—highlights differences

³⁷ The Male Malady, p. 39.

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between the European and American’s relationships to their ancestral past. In this outermost frame, the daughter of Céluta, the child of René and his Native American wife, attempts to nurse the corpse of an infant in a vivid enactment of extinction that is specifically multiracial. The European narrator, divorced from his own past, praises the presence of ancestors in America, a presence that is both tangible, in the form of the remains Céluta’s daughter carries, and conceptual, in the form of inherited stories. Calling on the trope of the “dying Indian,” this scene invokes a broader sense of imperial decline, the ill-fated nature of the colonial project and its concomitant racial mixing. Atala’s final paragraph establishes a contrast between Native Americans who carry the human fragments of ancestors on their shoulders and the European who is isolated from his historical past. This conclusion of vertical, diachronic kinship ties prompts the process of novelization through a synchronic relationship of siblinghood that recasts, in metaphor, the core narrative’s threatening plot of incestuous desire. This figurative siblinghood is notable for its appearance within references to a lost past and an impossible future: at the novel’s outermost level, the horizontal kinship bond of siblinghood emphasizes a static present that stands outside of time. In response to this temporal stasis, the shared tale and communal tears between this “brother” and “sister” overcome the temporal and narrative limits that synchronic family bonds create. Atala’s epilogue articulates what the paternal bond between Paul et Virginie’s narrators implies: retold stories mimic the kinship structures of ancestral inheritance and generational progression when both have been rendered impossible by incest, death, or the failed pursuit of fraternity.

Kinship Structures and Narrative Forms Structures of kinship, in their parallels with narrative structures, reveal novelistic rather than political solutions to the impasse that the social ideal of universal siblinghood poses. My focus here is not the political significance of Chateaubriand’s post-revolutionary invocations of paternity; indeed, his royalism would render such attention somewhat unproductive. Instead, I unravel the function of kinship ties and the sympathetic responses they facilitate or require in the telling, retelling, and transcription of narrative. I conclude this chapter by considering the relationship between René’s silence and Atala’s inability to represent “true otherness.” This divergence between these paired novels indicates a significant moment in the history of

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sympathy’s negotiations of novelistic form through the ideologically-fraught figures of the brother and the father. Atala and René each contain a central confession within the narrative’s larger frame: Atala tells Chactas of her mother’s vow, and Amélie unintentionally admits her incestuous desire in her brother’s presence. In each novel, listeners—René in Atala, Chactas and Souël in René—await the revelation of the male narrator’s secret, which in turn entails a woman’s secret. These parallels end, however, with the rhetorical measures that reveal each novel’s central secret at the point of the most embedded narrative. Both confessions illustrate, in their motivations and rhetorical structures, sympathy’s narrative dynamics. The central confession of Atala arises from a scene that reverses the narrative implications that physical torture can carry. In this case, it is the spectator, Atala, rather than the torture victim, Chactas, who, after releasing him, tells him the story of her past, uncovers the “secret” which Chactas has said he “entrevoyais dans ses yeux” (115), and reveals their adoptive bond. In the scene of Chactas’s torture, he is pierced with an arrow, spread out on his back while Atala, who is, unbeknownst to him, his adoptive sister, watches and eventually frees him.³⁸ Through this instance of feminine agency, Chateaubriand significantly adapts the turn from visual experience and the aspiration towards narrative confession that scenes of torture convey.³⁹ Not unlike Caleb Williams when he imagines himself tortured in order to learn the truth about his employer’s past, this scene’s reversal of torture’s logistics—the confession comes from the witness, not the victim, of torture—expands its narrative implications. Atala’s reported speech reveals a synchronic, horizontal kinship bond that retrospectively colors this scene, as if to revise Smith’s “brother” so as to include the sister precisely through an act of narrative transmission. The central confession in René also plays on the novelistic dynamics that sympathetic identification creates. In René, the title character is oblivious to the true cause of his sister’s distress until her confirmation ceremony in a ³⁸ Chactas is tied by his neck, feet, and arms to stakes that are secured in the ground; guards ensure his captivity by sleeping on the ropes and stakes. While he is not stretched—“étendu” in this case translates as “spread out” rather than “stretched out”—this scene’s positioning of a bound, reclined victim and spectator resembles that of the rack. ³⁹ Naomi Schor has read this scene as a representation of threatening feminine power, which, she argues, has encouraged Atala’s displacement from the canon of the French novel in favor of René’s melancholy passivity. “Triste Amérique: Atala and the Postrevolutionary Construction of Woman,” in Rebel Daughters: Women and the French Revolution, ed. Sara E. Melzer and Leslie W. Rabine (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), p. 141.

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convent, during which René overhears her prayer: “ ‘Dieu de miséricorde, fais que je ne me relève jamais de cette couche funèbre, et comble de tes biens un frère qui n’a point partagé ma criminelle passion!’ ” (190). This instance of overheard speech carries particular significance not only because of the desire it articulates but also because it constitutes one of the few represented verbal exchanges between the novel’s siblings. René bemoans the “misère de ma vie: une sœur craindre de parler à un frère, et un frère craindre de faire entendre sa voix à une sœur!” (191). In a pattern that the incest plot manifests, Amélie’s desire silences speech; this overheard confession has an additionally striking force because it is a spoken prayer, a direct address to God not intended for human ears. It is rare for René to report another person’s speech, and, in this act of énonciation, he shares the voice that identifies a passion that is not shared.⁴⁰ To speak in the voice of another, a phenomenon that other texts justify by the experience of sympathetic identification and shared emotion, is for René quite specifically not to feel with another. In Atala, an embedded narrative, rather than a single exclamation, articulates both the confession of forbidden desire and the vow which forbids that desire. Atala addresses Chactas as she tells the story of her mother’s conversion, suffering, and her vow to God that, if her daughter is allowed to live, she will remain a virgin. Chactas, linked to Atala through their adoptive father, speaks in her voice in a metadiegetic narrative. In René, Amélie’s confession is a rare and limited instance of shared speech, while in Atala, shared speech suffers from no such limitations. The discovery of their previously-unknown adoptive bond does not entirely efface the difference between these “siblings” that allows Chactas to hear and then relate Atala’s narrative. In Atala, the affinities of adoptive kinship temper differences of religion and race, and the narrating voice articulates the confession of another. In René, the text of problematic subjectivity, the other can only be voiced in a single—if highly charged—confessional moment, articulated in an isolated statement of unrequited passion. The intense consideration of the self in René precludes the kind of shifts in perspective within its core that Atala, with its frequent elisions of biological kinship and cultural and racial difference, more easily accommodates. This incest plot stymies, in its threat of extreme resemblance, the ease of feeling and speaking for the other that ⁴⁰ In the only other instance of Amélie’s cited speech, she explains that she has discerned René’s secret plan to commit suicide (182). When she does speak through his voice, the subject is her ability to read his thoughts.

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the absorbed differences of Atala’s characters facilitate. In René, narrative performs what emotion cannot by sharing the confessional voice; in Atala, narrative mimics the tendencies of family by adopting, as it were, the voice of the other in an additional narrative level. In their inverse emphasis on assimilation and isolation, Atala and René suggest that verbal forms that incorporate the speech of others—summary, citation, narrative embedding— rely on particular conceptions of intersubjectivity. Between the final words of Chactas’s narrative and the epilogue, spoken by the anonymous European traveler, there is only the blank space of a chapter division. René does not respond to Chactas’s story. The closing frames of René and Atala constitute a significant break in the parallels established at the beginning of Atala and sustained throughout the novels’ plots, as Chactas responds to René’s narrative with tears and an embrace. By initiating this imbalance, though, René’s silence says a great deal: it registers affinities with incest and the unrepresentable nature of radical similarity, and it manifests the solipsistic nature of both his person and his narrative. On one hand, in René, the fractured self that is incapable of sharing feeling, whether incestuous or chaste, summons the presence and response of the other. In Atala, the core narrative’s proliferating resemblances preclude any emotional response of the sort that Chactas offers René at the conclusion of his narrative. The rarity of unbridgeable difference in Atala matches the ease with which the novel represents métissage, which, in other works of nineteenth-century literature, prompts textual or cultural anxieties.⁴¹ In Chactas’s narrative, the novel’s multiple instances of adoptive ties and racial hybridity suggest an assimilation of difference that requires no response. While René’s solipsism could certainly explain his silence, Atala’s apparent exclusion of radical otherness might also account for René’s lack of affective response: at the close of a tale centered on characters who are variously linked to each other, René, despite his own adoptive filial tie to Chactas, can only respond with silence. At this pause between Atala and René—a textual blank resulting from extraction and joint publication—the combination of René’s solipsism and Atala’s lack of true otherness determines René’s silence. By contrast, the responses of Chactas and Père Souël constitute prominent aspects of the text of René itself. The blind Chactas’s sympathy bespeaks the power of the affective narrative, a rejection of a version of sympathy that

⁴¹ Prasad, Colonialism, Race, and the French Romantic Imagination, p. 69.

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relies on visible resemblance, and the alternative kinship ties he shares with his adoptive son. His blindness suggests the separation of sensory vision from imaginative perspective that Smith’s Theory considers in the operation of the impartial spectator. In addition to the comparatively harsh response of René’s other listener, Père Souël, the details of the novel’s narrative transmission minimize the suggestion that a lack of vision promotes a shift in cognitive or narrative perspective. What Souël’s harsh response specifically scorns is a life of solitude as he orders René to commit himself to the aid of his “semblables” (196) and join a community based on resemblance. The conclusions of the two novels thus reposition their narrators in a further reversal of the mirrored positions described in the opening of Chactas’s récit in Atala: the conclusion of Atala leaves Chactas in a state of verbal isolation, but René concludes with affirmations (in Chactas’s sympathetic tears) and commands (in Souël’s urging him towards “les voies communes” [196] of social bonds) that suggest the ties of adoptive kinship and social obligation that are absent from his narrative. The self-exiled aristocrat is divorced from his native land and, as his lack of family name reinforces, a tie to his ancestral past. The story of incestuous desire further questions the nature of selfhood and the possibilities of narrative self-expression insofar as it prioritizes extreme resemblance if not approximate identity. René’s reluctant confession to Chactas and Père Souël, however, breaks from the solipsism that has characterized his past. In light of the narrative structure and textual origins that René shares with Atala, though, the paradigmatic tale of post-revolutionary selfhood can be seen to draw if not to rely on the narrative of another. René, the text, rather than René, the character, offers the response that is lacking at the conclusion of Chactas’ narrative. The narrative frame’s account of the novel’s textual genesis formally manifests a gesture towards the other that crosses a generational divide: René, as a response to Atala, makes the exchange of narrative through the sympathetic attachments between father and son the means of overcoming the temporal impasse of siblinghood. The parallel narrative structures and interrelated stories of textual genesis that shape René and Atala rely on patterns of kinship that alternate between biological and adoptive, between horizontal and vertical. From each novel’s central confession between siblings (metadiegesis) through the central tales told between fathers and sons (diegesis) to the outermost levels of these narratives’ dissemination as myths passed both from fathers to sons and between figurative siblings (extradiegesis), narrative is consistently conveyed between characters who are linked by particular kinship relationships. The

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confessions of sister to brother at the center of both novels are transmitted between fathers and sons: this tendency towards vertical, ancestral models of textual inheritance suggests that an idealized fraternity is unable to sustain the kind of retelling that is, according to the frame these two novels share, fundamental to their existence. In Chateaubriand’s two novels and Bernardin’s Paul et Virginie, telling another’s story is an affective and specifically transgenerational experience that challenges the kinship metaphors that underlie both revolutionary idealism and Smithean sympathy.

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5 Novelistic Sympathy in Frankenstein

Characters in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818) desperately seek but almost never find sympathetic companionship. Indeed, as Janis McLarren Caldwell observes, the novel’s plot “repeatedly dramatizes the failure of social sympathy.”¹ If sympathy in the novel can be said to fail because it is madly but fruitlessly pursued or disastrous in its results, it should also be understood to succeed insofar as it leads to the acts of textual production and narrative framing that structure Frankenstein itself. When they are strained, stymied, or delusional, experiences of sympathy often generate new versions of the concept. If fraternity has reached a dead end in an ideological and a narrative sense in French novels published around the turn of the century, in Frankenstein, metaphorical brotherhoods mark the potential for sympathetic engagement to generate novelistic narrative. Shelley’s novel offers a version of sympathy that is constituted by the production and transmission of narrative as compensation for failures of face-to-face sympathetic experience: in staging “the failure of social sympathy,” Frankenstein instead brings to life its own version of novelistic sympathy. This version of sympathy is generated through the inset narratives of figures of racial and species difference—the Arabian Safie and the humanoid creature. With its shifts between narrative levels, this frame tale reflects the shifts in perspective that define Smith’s sympathy, but in Frankenstein, the production of and engagement with narrative approximate and replace the sustained relationships of sympathetic identification that remain impossible between the novel’s characters. Sympathy in Frankenstein ultimately comes to depend on auditory experience and textual transmission, and it is manifested most reliably not in the imaginative space between two individuals but rather in the textual space of the novelistic page. In that space, Shelley’s version of sympathy struggles to accommodate linguistic, racial, and species difference. Through the creature’s pursuit of sympathy, ¹ Literature and Medicine in Nineteenth-Century Britain: From Mary Shelley to George Eliot (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), p. 42. Vicarious Narratives: A Literary History of Sympathy, 1750–1850. Jeanne M. Britton, Oxford University Press (2019). © Jeanne M. Britton. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198846697.001.0001

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the novel addresses difference as an abstraction that invokes but is not confined to the historical particularities of Romantic-era race science. Exploring distinctions between kinship and resemblance, between biological, adoptive, and artificial family ties, experiences of sympathy in this novel challenge the familial and national basis of sympathy that characterizes the accounts of Smith and Hume, an insistence that de Grouchy’s adaptation of Smith’s “brother” as one of our “semblables” emphasizes. The acts of narrative transmission that these sympathetic encounters produce in turn suggest that the experience of narrative, and especially the mental abstraction it entails, might accommodate the radical difference that the creature embodies. By staging a clear struggle between sight and sound, Shelley’s novel makes the alignment of visual experience, auditory engagement, and physiological resemblance impossible. At these moments, Frankenstein redefines sympathy as a narrative phenomenon that moves beyond visual immediacy, implicates engaged listening and textual production, struggles to accommodate differences of race and species, and attempts to stretch Smith’s familial version of sympathy towards and beyond de Grouchy’s notion of resemblance. Frankenstein emphasizes the implicitly narrative capacity of sympathetic experience by bringing together characters whose differences—national, linguistic, and biological—conspicuously preclude sympathetic identification. As the novel’s frame structure opens and closes, instances of narration, transcription, and transmission are consistently marked by either the experience or impossibility of sympathy, which produces the impetus for narrative to be both told and recorded. These instances are also marked by a collapse of linguistic difference if not actual translation: Victor Frankenstein speaks in English, not his native French, to the English Robert Walton, and the creature’s encounter with the Arabian Safie is mediated by the translation of her letters. As narrative levels are broken or tested, linguistic barriers are transcended, and the novel’s silent accommodation of linguistic difference, in unnoted acts of translation, stands in contrast to the inability of sympathy to overcome differences of race, culture, and species. But in failing to accommodate difference in lived experience, sympathetic identification reveals, in its ties to narrative transmission, the process by which visual perception becomes abstract perspective. Sympathy is, as noted, often said to fail in this novel, and in its truest sense, it certainly does: sympathetic experiences are illusory or fleeting. But in repeatedly seeking sympathy and insisting on the process of comparison that serves as its foundation, Robert Walton, Victor Frankenstein, and the creature each find that writing the story of another approximates the shared sentiment

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they desire. Relationships of strained likeness—the creature’s pseudo-filial relationship to Victor Frankenstein and especially his identification with another exile, an Arabian woman—explore two features of Smith’s account of sympathy: the problem of human difference and the transformation of sensory perception into imaginative perspective. In Shelley’s version of novelistic sympathy, the shifts in perspective around which Smith centers his definition become attempts to accommodate difference through acts of narrative framing. Frankenstein’s redefinition of sympathy specifies its role in the history of the novel. Shelley’s version of sympathy prioritizes engaged listening and narrative production over visual experience and human resemblance, issues that Smith’s Theory struggles to negotiate. Letters at the margins and the center of Frankenstein attest to persistent associations between epistolary writing and emotional communicability. In acts of narrative transmission that sympathetic experience facilitates, an epistolary logic characterized by vocal mobility, emotional reciprocity, and multiple perspectives shapes this novel of retrospective narration. Through the pursuit and redefinition of sympathy, Frankenstein’s initial epistolary form disappears into a structure of first-person retrospective frame narratives that attempts to preserve the emotional immediacy and multiple perspectives associated with epistolary exchange. Smith’s sympathy is a cognitive process that is restricted by the partiality of resemblance and best suited to the communication of individual rather than collective sentiments. Fiction adapts the cognitive operation of Smith’s impartial spectator as it experiments with the potential of sympathetic encounters that move beyond the partiality of resemblance. The creature’s encounters with his creator, the father of the De Lacey family, and Safie’s letters to Felix isolate sympathy’s physiological or visual requirements which, by their absence, lead to the alternatives of writing and speaking on behalf of another. The creature’s radical difference prompts, in an extension of the labor that Smith’s impartial spectator oversees, the transformation of sensory perception into imaginative perspective. If, as Smith and Hume argue, sympathy is strongest between members of the same family, what happens when transgressive science produces an artificial family? If sympathy depends on resemblance, what happens when resemblance has itself become monstrous? In its attempt and failure to accommodate insurmountable difference through the sympathetic encounters that it stages, Shelley’s novel proposes a model of sympathy constituted by telling the story of another person through the patterns of cognitive abstraction that Smith

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describes. In Frankenstein, when the experience of feeling with another person becomes impossible, narrating for another, in speech or text, becomes the novel’s most reliable substitution.

Redefining Sympathy: Social Failure and Narrative Promise In the middle of Frankenstein’s embedded levels, the brief story of Safie and the exiled De Laceys is the center of both the novel’s narrative frames and its investigation of sympathy’s human and narrative limits. The textual source of Safie’s story is a series of letters that the creature discovers and, after eavesdropping on her linguistic education, manages to copy. These documents are twice said to prove the truth of his tale—first to Victor, then again to Robert Walton. In a novel composed of interpolated first-person narratives, this third-person summary, at the novel’s structural center, is somewhat puzzling. By validating both the story and existence of the creature, his copy of Safie’s letters becomes a remarkable piece of evidence. The creature claims that the setting sun leaves him time only to give Victor the “substance” of these letters, but the suppression of their original form raises a number of questions about the novel’s oscillation between written, spoken, epistolary, and retrospective narrative modes.² What, for example, is the relationship between these letters, first transcribed and later summarized, and Victor’s story, which Walton transcribes in the first person? Is it possible to account for the dissonance between the letters’ textual materiality—the bundle that passes from hand to hand—and their narrated, third-person summary? Why would the creature, if he manages to obtain these letters, offer copies rather than originals as proof of his story? In a novel with English, French, and Arabic speakers, what is the significance of the repeated translation of Safie’s letters—from Arabic to French, from French to Walton’s English? Above all, the novel’s narrative levels must, of course, end somewhere—but why here? The creature’s emotional and textual encounter with Safie imitates a pattern of simultaneous sympathetic experience and shift in perspective that produces the novel’s narrative levels. Frankenstein’s patterns of ² Mary Shelley, Frankenstein: The 1818 Text, Contexts, Nineteenth-Century Responses, Modern Criticism, ed. J. Paul Hunter (New York: Norton, 1996), p. 83. Unless otherwise stated, references, noted parenthetically, are to the first edition.

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vicarious narrative specify the role sympathy plays in this text and its textual genesis. The creature’s copy of Safie’s letters mimics the transmission of stories from the creature to Victor and then from Victor to Walton. He reads, copies, and then summarizes Safie’s story; Victor and Walton hear, transcribe, and cite the respective stories of the creature and the creator. Offering its own definition of sympathy by testing the concept’s limits and plotting its failures, Frankenstein proposes narrative as compensation for the impossibility of lived sympathetic experience. Details of transcription and transmission provide the background against which the creature’s copy and summary of Safie’s letters indicate that where sympathetic experiences fail, the production and transmission of narrative can succeed. Experiences of sympathy precede the acts of narration, transcription, and transmission that create the novel’s frame structure and establish the pattern against which the novel’s presentation of Safie’s letters—as evidence for the creature’s veracity, as physical documents, and as a spoken, third-person summary—identifies Shelley’s reformulation of sympathy. At the beginning of the novel, Walton is a letter-writer and first-person narrator when he meets Victor and almost immediately sympathizes with him. Victor then becomes a first-person narrator himself, telling his story in a new narrative level. The novel’s third narrative level opens when Victor meets the creature, reluctantly feels sympathy for him, and then tells his story. At the center of these narrative levels, however, the creature tells Safie’s story in his own voice and in the third person, and this story exists in the two distinct forms of speech and text, as narrative summary and epistolary document. The difference between these two forms, between the oral and written, points to the limitations of interpersonal sympathy and its novelistic potential, its social failure and narrative promise. The creature’s summary of Safie’s letters is also the novel’s second turn away from epistolarity after Walton replaces his letters to his sister that open the novel with novelistic “chapters” transcribed from Victor’s speech. The process by which the creature can tentatively identify with the novel’s racial other and, in the act of transcribing her letters, adopt her voice marks the limit of the pattern according to which an experience of sympathy initiates a shift in perspective, as seen when varying levels of sympathy and compassion allow Walton to speak for Victor, and Victor to speak for his creature. But by generating this transcription of letters, the desire for a seemingly attainable sympathetic experience additionally produces a physical document that attests not only to the truth of the creature’s tale but also to the narrative and novelistic functions that sympathy performs. The creature’s telling and transcription of Safie’s

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story produce the structural center of the novel, and they constitute the conceptual pivot of Shelley’s reformulation of sympathy. Frankenstein opens and closes with Walton’s letters, and chapter headings mark the narratives of both Victor and the creature as explicitly novelistic. As the frames open, and as letters are replaced with novelistic chapters, each shift between perspectives and from letter to chapter quickly follows an experience of sympathy. Conversely, as those frames close, and as the text returns to its outermost level and original epistolary form, the impossibility of sustained sympathetic experience silences each voice and concludes each narrative frame. These narrative shifts parallel but ultimately revise the shifts in perspective that constitute Smith’s version of sympathy. When experiences of sympathy are impossible, transcribed narratives suggest that textual production approximates, preserves, and replaces the visual and auditory engagement that would otherwise facilitate an interpersonal experience of sympathy. Shelley adopts the gothic novel’s characteristic narrative frames, threats of incest, and oddly- or barely-integrated narrative episodes in order to examine concepts of resemblance and difference through the mechanics of novelistic structure. Charles Maturin’s Melmoth the Wanderer (1820) is notable for its labyrinthine structure of multiple narrative levels, many of which are justified when the title character reveals that after making an exchange for eternal life with the devil, he has been on a quest for someone with whom he might exchange the pact. Stories in which he tempts people into intimacy are motivated by this desire to change places, an impetus that is clarified only much later in the novel. The opposite is the case for Shelley’s novel, in which the shifts in narrative perspective that are fostered by sympathy themselves enact a temporary change of position—when Walton speaks for Victor, he has adopted his position. Melmoth the Wanderer obscures its frame tale’s narrative function, as listeners are often inattentive even when a story is told as a specific, personal warning. Another gothic novel, Charlotte Dacre’s Zofloya, or the Moor (1806), explores sympathy’s potential to transcend differences of class and race before construing its power as satanic force. Zofloya exhibits the danger of a complete sympathy and the impossibility of human sympathy: the human, secular version of sympathy explored in Shelley’s work of science fiction takes sympathy’s supernatural associations in these gothic novels into the realm of human interaction and novelistic discourse. Frankenstein’s narrative frames have been frequently interpreted as formal manifestations of various themes in either the novel or Shelley’s

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own life.³ In examining the role sympathy plays at each shift in narrative level, I provide an account of rather than an analogy for the novel’s structure, and I focus on sympathy as it is represented within the novel, not as it is experienced by the novel’s readers.⁴ Michael Macovski’s attention to the novel’s dialogic structure offers a productive approach to the novel’s patterns of tale-telling. His convincing application of Bakhtin’s dialogism to the novel simplifies, however, the complexity of the novel’s consideration of sympathy when he argues that the creature’s quest for sympathy is simply a desire for existence.⁵ Shelley atomizes and manipulates individual elements of sympathetic response in the scenes when narrative address is negotiated, and these scenes reveal the novelistic role that the quest for sympathy plays. The significance of sympathy within Frankenstein has been insightfully analyzed by David Marshall and Janis Caldwell.⁶ Marshall notes the fundamental similarities between patterns of sympathy and structures of comparison, and he examines the productive ambiguity of the creature’s status as a “figure”—in both shape and resemblance.⁷ Assessing the conflict between vision and language that is central to the novel’s revision of sympathy, Caldwell concludes that Shelley is “redefining sympathy as an active reception of difference” that is based on “sympathetic listening, or straining to hear what one cannot see” rather than physiological or visual immediacy. Shelley, she argues, reformulates sympathy’s presumed passivity as an ³ Marc A. Rubenstein, for example, has argued that the enfolding narratives make story-telling “a vicarious pregnancy” and the novel itself a womb. “ ‘My Accursed Origin’: The Search for the Mother in Frankenstein,” Studies in Romanticism 15.2 (1976), pp. 173, 194. Joseph Kestner reads the novel’s frames as the structural embodiment of its narcissistic characters. “Narcissism as Symptom and Structure: The Case of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein,” in New Casebooks: Frankenstein, ed. Fred Botting (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1995), pp. 68–80. More recently, Miranda Burgess has argued that semantic echoes across the novel’s narrative levels enact “the contemporary anxiety about and figuration of subjectivity.” “Frankenstein’s Transport: Modernity, Mobility, and the Science of Feeling,” in Global Romanticism: Origins, Orientations, and Engagements, 1760–1820, ed. Evan Gottlieb (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press), p. 147. ⁴ Despite the frequency of sympathy between characters, whether it is begrudgingly experienced or directly requested, many studies of sympathy in Frankenstein either focus on or conclude with the reader’s alternating sympathies for Victor and the monster. See Sydny M. Conger, “Aporia and Radical Empathy: Frankenstein (Re)Trains the Reader,” in Approaches to Teaching Shelley’s Frankenstein, ed. Stephen C. Behrendt (New York: Modern Language Association of America, 1990), and Caldwell, Literature and Medicine, pp. 26–45. ⁵ Dialogue and Literature: Apostrophe, Auditors, and the Collapse of Romantic Discourse (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), p. 118. ⁶ David Marshall, Surprising Effects of Sympathy: Marivaux, Diderot, Rousseau, and Mary Shelley (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), pp. 178–227; Caldwell, Literature and Medicine, pp. 26–45. ⁷ Surprising Effects, p. 198.

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“active accommodation of difference” by means of “attentive exertion.”⁸ This difference is, after all, the difference between human beings and a galvanized composite corpse, and it is a necessary understatement to note that problematic species status would strain any attempt to accommodate such difference. Building on the work of Marshall and Caldwell, I claim that sympathy in Frankenstein moves from vision towards the speaking voice and finds resolution, after struggling to accommodate insurmountable difference, with the transcribed narrative of another. Sympathy guides textual production, and in telling its own story of novel-formation, Frankenstein positions sympathy as it is experienced, desired, or lost at the center of what this individual text understands as the genre of the novel.

Shifting Genres and Shifting Speakers The anticipation, experience, and impossibility of sympathy produce the novel’s carefully-structured pattern of three narrative levels framed by Walton’s epistolary voice. The details of these shifts warrant particular scrutiny. As it is experienced or anticipated, sympathy generates the shifts in genre and perspective that open each of the novel’s narrative layers. Conversely, the impossibility or loss of sympathy closes each frame and produces the reverse shift from novel to letter. At the novel’s outermost level, Walton writes letters while he longs for a sympathetic friend; shortly thereafter, he pens a novel while such a friend speaks to him; finally, he resumes his letters as that friend approaches death. Within the novel’s frames, the creature’s tale begins when his creator reluctantly sympathizes with him; it ends with his request for a mate who would, he says, grant him the sympathy he has thus far been denied. Throughout Frankenstein, sympathetic identification introduces transitions between diegetic levels: when one character feels sympathy—whether eagerly, delusionally, or reluctantly—for a second character, the shifts of perspective in Smith’s version of sympathy become shifts in narrative level as the first character begins to narrate for the second. This stable, parallel structure dissolves at the center of the novel, though, when the creature furtively adopts, through transcription, the epistolary voice of an exiled Arabian woman. Through the written adoption of another voice, the creature’s copy of Safie’s letters

⁸ Literature and Medicine, pp. 42, 45, 42.

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identifies the novelistic mechanics that instantiate a model of novelistic sympathy through which the alternating perspectives of Smith’s sympathy, stymied by the challenge of radical difference, become the shifting speakers of this frame tale. The novel’s generic shifts from letter to narrative, which both Walton and the creature perform, position sympathy at the center of the transition in literary history from the epistolary novel of the eighteenth century, which was slowly declining in popularity in the years before Frankenstein’s publication, to the first-person narrative mode that became more characteristic of nineteenth-century fiction.⁹ In Frankenstein the letter comes to be associated with a lack of sympathy, and first-person narrative arises from experiences of sympathy. Walton’s letters, which describe his desire for sympathy to his sister, open the novel with an implicit challenge to a familial conception of sympathy. The novel begins by interrogating paradigms of Enlightenment theories of sympathy and, at its center, the creature’s copy of Safie’s letters specifies Shelley’s novelistic adaptation of those philosophical models: Frankenstein explores the possibility that the engagement with and transmission of narrative may compensate for the impossibility of sustainable sympathetic relationships among individuals not linked by biological kinship. The creature’s summary of an epistolary source mirrors the historical shift in fiction from epistolarity to retrospective narration while his studious transcription complicates the role, established in the novel’s three narrative levels, that sympathy plays in novelistic production. It is significant that these transcribed letters appear as physical documents, but never as cited, first-person text. The novel therefore proposes, as its means of internal authentication, a combination of the letter’s status as an evidentiary document with the process of sympathy that allows the creature to adopt, in transcription but not in speech, Safie’s voice. Letters are written or copied when sympathy is desired, and they frame and authenticate this novel. I use the phrase “internal authentication” to refer to attempts by the creature and his creator to prove the novel’s unbelievable story. Frankenstein, unlike many novels of letters, does not suggest to its readers that its contents are true, non-fictional documents, but within its explicitly fictional limits, it does posit similar forms of verification. Indeed, although the novel’s ⁹ Franco Moretti dates the height of the epistolary novel between 1766 and 1795. Graphs, Maps, Trees (London: Verso, 2005), p. 31. Leah Price has noted that epistolary novels of the eighteenth century were, in early nineteenth-century anthologies and abridgments, transformed into retrospective summaries. The Anthology and the Rise of the Novel: From Richardson to George Eliot (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp. 15–16.

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two prefaces, the first written by Percy, and the second by Mary for the revised 1831 edition, state that the novel’s central event of corpse reanimation is not considered impossible, they nevertheless confirm the novel’s status as fiction.¹⁰ These texts hint at scientific possibility only to emphasize fictional production. To be sure, Frankenstein makes for more compelling science fiction if there is some effort to establish proof of the creature’s existence, and it is the method, and not the fact, of such attempts that I mean to problematize. The novel does refer to other potential means of authentication, all of them “series” that carry narrative connotations. Victor, for example, persuades Walton to trust the progression and cohesion of his story: “my tale,” he says, “conveys in its series internal evidence of the truth of the events of which it is composed” (17). Mary Favret argues that this insistence on the nature of narrative suggests that the novel, by skirting the issue of its most convincing means to prove the truth of its tale—the revelation of its science—intimates that fiction may, quite simply, authenticate itself by its very nature as a series of interrelated, coherent events. Another group of sequentially narrated events, in Victor’s laboratory journal, further suggests the self-authenticating capacity of narrative. The creature describes this document, which is not, of course, reproduced, as a “history . . . mingled with accounts of domestic occurrences” that contains “the whole detail of that series of disgusting circumstances” that produced his “accursed origin” (87). The series of scientific events is mixed with a narrative of private events, and the ostensibly objective, clinical nature of this text—a story of origins that the creature reads immediately after Paradise Lost—is compromised by the interference of autobiographical, domestic details more appropriate to the genres of the confessional, the diary, or perhaps the novel.¹¹ The novel’s claims for the authenticating function of Safie’s letters, however, pose particular questions about the role of sympathy in the production of this text. I want to stress the significance of these letters’ authenticating function insofar as it attests to the force and the limits of narrative, specifically narrative that is written in the voice of another. ¹⁰ Percy resolutely labels the text a “fiction,” and significant attention, particularly in Mary’s preface, is devoted to the novel’s inspiration and creation. He states that such a creation is considered “as not of impossible occurrence” (5), and she emphasizes its possibility: “Perhaps a corpse would be reanimated; galvanism had given token of such things: perhaps the component parts of a creature might be manufactured, brought together, and embued with vital warmth” (New York: Bantam, 2003), p. xxvi. References to the revised version are to this edition. ¹¹ For further discussion of narrative authority in the novel, see Mary Favret, Romantic Correspondence: Women, Politics and the Fiction of Letters (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), pp. 179–88.

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By dividing the written text from the speaking voice, the creature’s manuscript copy and spoken summary of Safie’s letters aspire to the pattern of sympathetic encounter and subsequent shift in point of view that generates Frankenstein’s frame structure. In approximating without following that pattern, the dynamics of which I will now examine, the creature’s engagement with Safie’s story specifies Shelley’s novelistic version of sympathy. The novel’s concern with sympathy is first made evident in Walton’s second letter, in which the explorer complains to Mrs. Saville, his married sister at home in England, of his lack of a sympathetic friend. There is nobody to share his joy or amend his faults, and paper, he says, is “a poor medium for the communication of feeling.” Perhaps if Walton were writing to a brother, the male community of sympathetic feeling idealized in Scottish Enlightenment philosophy would have been more easily achieved. He makes it clear that the sympathy he seeks is that of a male friend, “a man who could sympathize with me, whose eyes would reply to mine” (10), “a friend who might sympathize with me, and direct me by his counsel” (16). When Victor Frankenstein is brought on board, he quickly feels “sympathy,” “compassion,” “affection,” and “pity” for his new shipmate. Victor’s suffering fills Walton with “sympathy and compassion”: he “begin[s] to love him as a brother” and describes him as “a man who, before his spirit had been broken by misery, I should have been happy to have possessed as the brother of my heart” (15). A more promising candidate for sympathetic experience than Walton’s familial tie to his sister, this figurative brotherhood suggests that sympathy thrives between figurative kin while it hints at the kind of bond that will remain beyond the creature’s grasp. With Walton’s eager and, as he admits, “romantic” desire for a friend met, his fourth letter then continues as a brief “journal” (15) before he begins the transcription of Victor’s tale. Walton’s sympathy for Victor serves to introduce the framed narrative that soon follows, as if to enact, in novelistic form, the shifts in perspective that Smith’s sympathy entails. The prelude to this transcription additionally indicates a change in Walton’s attitude towards the function of the letter, and it suggests a version of sympathy with reanimating potential by moving away from an implicit desire for epistolary response and a dependence on aural and visual experience. It is in this way that Shelley’s novel extends the move from visual experience towards abstract perspective that is initiated in Smith’s Theory. This process runs parallel to Frankenstein’s absorption of epistolarity’s associations with emotional response and multiple perspectives into the structure of embedded narratives that are generated by experiences of sympathy. Beginning with an

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explicit call for a version of sympathy based in visual experience—the responsive eyes of a sympathetic friend—Frankenstein reformulates sympathy by showing a desire for visual experience give way to shifting perspectives that facilitate acts of textual production and, in this case, anticipated reception. Revisions in the 1831 edition elaborate and extend sympathy’s narrative power by further explaining its ability to recreate, by means of transcription, the lost friend.¹² Brief journal entries lie between the numbered letters and the novelistic “Chapter I” heading, between Walton’s epistolary voice and Victor’s narrative voice. Walton tells Victor of his longing for a friend, and revisions in his admission of this desire change the nature of the sympathy he seeks from discrete experiences in the first edition to a continuous relationship in the second. In the novel’s first edition, he reveals “the desire I had always felt of finding a friend who might sympathize with me, and direct me by his counsel” (16). In the revised edition, he longs instead for “a more intimate sympathy with a fellow mind than had ever fallen to my lot” (14). This alteration from a potential experience (“might sympathize”) to a nominalized certainty (“a more intimate sympathy”) characterizes Walton’s desire as more extensive and insatiable. The sustained sympathy Walton desires in the revised edition is precisely that which the plot of the novel proves to be impossible for all its characters. Frankenstein presents experiences of sympathy that are not only strained or illusory, but, like the narrative levels that they generate, they all come to an end. This liminal passage, between letter and novel, declares a desire for an unbroken sympathy, a state that would preclude the shifts in perspective that define this text. This journal-letter ends with Walton’s expectations of the transcribed narrative that follows. For his addressee, his sister, it “will doubtless afford . . . the greatest pleasure,” but for himself, it will be read with “interest and sympathy . . . in some future day” (17). This anticipatory sympathy echoes a passage in Hume’s Treatise which posits that “sympathy is not always limited to the present moment” and that “we often feel by communication the pains and pleasures of others, which are not in being, and which we only anticipate by the force of the imagination.”¹³ Resembling ¹² On Shelley’s revisions, see James O’Rourke, “The 1831 Introduction and Revisions to Frankenstein: Mary Shelley Dictates Her Legacy,” Studies in Romanticism 38.3 (1999), pp. 365–85. Marshall has noted, in Surprising Effects of Sympathy, that the revised edition makes “the problem of sympathy even more explicit” (195–6). ¹³ Treatise, p. 248.

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Hume’s account in its content and temporality, Walton’s expectation for sympathy follows Smith’s version in its method and form. Walton originally rejected the written letter as unequal to the expression of his feelings; here, writing functions, in the form of first-person narrative, as an intended surrogate for the sympathetic friend in his impending absence. The journal of the first edition ends with this line, with anticipated sympathy the final word before the first chapter heading after Walton’s letters indicates that the novel begins. Here, Frankenstein’s first narrator and scribe anticipates a sympathetic response to the textual representation of another person’s story. This anticipated sympathy extends the temporal limitations of sympathetic experience from the fleeting moments in which it is experienced into a form of narrative progression that ensures its permanent possibility. In its own story of textual genesis, Frankenstein transforms the temporality and nature of sympathetic experience: sympathy becomes continuous and textual when it is attributed to the transcribed narratives that themselves began, in fact, as the consequence of momentary sympathetic experience. The revised edition, however, also contains a short addition that grants the act of writing powers of reanimation: “Even now, as I commence my task, his full-toned voice swells in my ears; his lustrous eyes dwell on me with all their melancholy sweetness; I see his thin hand raised in animation, while the lineaments of his face are irradiated by the soul within” (16). Textual reanimation certainly seems to be a formal parallel to the novel’s plot of corpse reanimation. Sympathy’s role here more significantly suggests, though, that its novelistic function extends beyond that of structure mirroring plot: in its acts of transcription, the novel reproduces experiences of sympathy. The revised edition specifies that rereading the first-person narrative, this énoncé, will elicit a textual experience of sympathy that revives and duplicates the human experience of sympathy that is occasioned by its telling, its énonciation. The confidence with which Walton predicts a textually-induced sympathetic reanimation of Victor’s speaking voice is buttressed by the failure of sympathetic experience in the novel’s plot and structure: according to the novel’s patterns of vicarious narratives, sympathetic experience comes about most reliably as a result of the retelling and transcription of another’s story. By guiding this transition between media, the anticipation of sympathy thus generates the particular form of this novel—a written version of spoken tales. Shelley’s novelistic version of sympathy adapts features of Smithean sympathy—its insistence on human resemblance, its cognitive abstraction, and its implication of criminal confession—in framed narratives that report,

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second-hand, another person’s story in first-person speech. The circumstances of Frankenstein’s second shift in diegetic level, from Victor’s story to that of the creature, indicate the centrality of progressive narrative and auditory experience as opposed to visual immediacy in Shelley’s novelistic version of sympathy. This narrative level opens in the middle of Victor’s tale when “curiosity” and “compassion” eventually compel him to listen to the creature’s story (67). Unlike Victor, he must repeatedly request his listener’s attention and sympathy: “Let your compassion be moved . . . Listen to my tale . . . hear me” (66–7). This prelude to the novel’s third narrative level also invokes Smith’s scene of torture by hinting at a criminal confession when Victor states of the creature that he “supposed him to be the murderer” of William and that he “eagerly sought a confirmation or denial of this opinion.” The creature must beg to be heard, but his hideous appearance repeatedly shocks his potential auditors into a disgusted aversion of the eyes and refusal to listen. Victor initially insists that the creature “relieve me from the sight of your detested form,” to which the creature responds by covering his creator’s eyes. Victor then throws off the creature’s hands, and the creature persists, “Still thou canst listen to me, and grant me thy compassion” (67). They then retire to a hut where the creature lights a fire before relating his story. Favret claims that “verbal sympathy” takes precedence over “visual evidence” in this scene: “From the ‘blind faith’ and distance required by the letter form emerges the possibility of a language that mediates difference and communicates life.”¹⁴ The creature proposes a version of sympathy based on an auditory engagement with narrative that, unlike the image of Victor’s face and the sound of his voice that Walton hopes his transcription will revive, challenges the conception of sympathy that relies on visual immediacy, sensory response, and physical or familial resemblance. Shelley specifies here that her novelistic version of sympathy requires imaginative perspective rather than sensory perception. As each narrative level opens, Frankenstein increasingly separates visual from verbal experience and insists on the shifting voices and narrative perspectives that sympathy entails. Through explicit struggles between visual and auditory experience, Shelley’s divergence from Smith’s model of sympathy becomes apparent. To transcend the immediacy of sympathetic experience that is based primarily on visual observation is to explore the possibility of sympathetic response that arises from listening to narrative,

¹⁴ Romantic Correspondence, p. 186.

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from the prolonged, attentive engagement of the imagination rather than the immediate recognition of visible signs of emotional distress or physical resemblance. In Shelley’s novel, an auditory engagement with another person’s narrative produces novelistic frames; more broadly, it suggests that the alternations in perspective entailed in an experience of sympathy foster a reformulation of novelistic media and temporality as well as transitions from letter-writing to story-telling, from epistolary immediacy to narrative retrospection. In the scene between the creature and his creator, spoken language may overcome visual immediacy, but remnants of that struggle appear in the transcription of the narrative that follows. Not only does this scene put sight and sound in competition, it also challenges the centrality of resemblance to the experience of sympathy. Whereas Victor’s revived figure lingers encouragingly over Walton’s transcription—his “voice swells” in his ears, and his “eyes dwell” on him “in melancholy sweetness”—Victor instead tolerates the sight of his creation by the light of a fire only as an alternative to being blinded by the touch of his hands. Walton’s point of view is thoroughly absorbed by that of Victor’s narrative, as the explorer’s quick assumption of uncited first-person pronouns indicates: he seamlessly adopts Victor’s voice. By contrast, quotation marks that surround the creature’s narrative and, in the original edition, appear at the beginning of every paragraph he utters maintain Victor’s dominating narrative perspective: to tell his creature’s story, he speaks as a conspicuously cited “I.” A reluctant experience of sympathy with a creature to whom Victor bears both responsibility and resemblance makes for a transcription that is repeatedly distanced from its second-hand speaker by marks of citation. Walton, as the novel’s scribe, would of course be responsible for these marks, but, without speculating about his motivation in including them, I want to emphasize their subtle but persistent indication of distance, the distance of printed or spoken language, either of which they equally suggest. Only possible, of course, in print, these marks operate novelistically and conceptually. Novelistically, they register Frankenstein’s frequent transitions between spoken and written language and its foundation on citation and transcription. Conceptually, they mark the limits of a version of sympathy based on resemblance by indicating that narrative as it is told and retold compensates for sympathetic experience that is precluded by insurmountable difference. The creature ends his narrative with the request that Victor construct a “companion . . . of the same species” (97). After a chapter break and Victor’s initial response, their conversation continues, now under Victor’s narrative

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control. The creature bases his request for species companionship on the necessity of sympathy: he states, “You must create a female for me, with whom I can live in the interchange of those sympathies necessary for my being,” and “My evil passions will have fled, for I shall meet with sympathy” (98, 99). Frankenstein’s narrative levels end with requests for future action— Victor closes his narrative by insisting to Walton that he destroy the creature—and Beth Newman has argued these requests gesture beyond the confines of the narrative levels that contain them, that each embedded tale “violat[es] its own frame.”¹⁵ With these requests also comes the stated absence of sympathy, an absence that brings about the conclusion of the novel’s narrative levels. At least according to Victor, the creature’s desire carries a sexual connotation, and he worries that “one of the first results of those sympathies for which the dæmon thirsted would be children” (114). The novel’s frames explore the narrative potential of sympathetic experience, but the sui generis creature marks the extent of that potential by summoning a notion of sympathy that explicitly requires physiological resemblance. To experience sympathy, the creature states, he needs the companionship of one who is “of the same species.” This scene stages a confrontation between different features of the Enlightenment discourse: its emphasis on human resemblance (in Smith and Hume), and its reliance on shifts in imaginative perspective (Smith). By triggering the conclusion of a narrative level, the impossibility of a version of sympathy that accommodates monstrous resemblance attests to the structural role that sympathy performs in the absence or pursuit of its lived experience. It is against a conception of sympathy that is based on similarity that the novel explores the abstraction of narrative embedding that Smith seems to predict when, considering the suffering of unknown foreigners after describing a window’s optical distortions, he describes a transformation of sensory perception into cognitive perspective. At the end of the novel, an anticipated loss of sympathy produces the final shift in narrative level and genre when, as Victor approaches death, Walton understands he is soon to lose his sympathetic friend. Walton speaks in his own voice only to resume his letters to his sister upon realizing that the sympathetic identification he has desired, and briefly experienced, is coming to an end: “I have sought one who would sympathize with and love me, . . . I ¹⁵ “Narratives of Seduction and the Seductions of Narrative: The Frame Structure of Frankenstein,” in New Casebooks: Frankenstein, ed. Fred Botting (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1995), p. 178.

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have gained him only to know his value, and lose him” (147). With this loss, sparse trappings of the letter are resumed—five dated entries, only one salutation, and no signatures. As the novel reaches its end, in Walton’s restricted epistolary voice, sympathy is possible only in its textually and novelistically recreated form.

Copied Letters I have been arguing that sympathetic experience produces the novel’s frame structure by facilitating shifts in point of view, that the experience of sympathy leads to the opening of each narrative level, and that the impossibility of sympathy leads to their closure. The vivid sympathetic bond between Victor and Henry Clerval establishes a practice of affective ventriloquism that reappears in these shifting levels with Walton’s transcription of Victor’s narrative and the creature’s copy of Safie’s letters. Clerval is repeatedly described as an ideal sympathetic friend: during Victor’s agony after his creation of the creature, he states that Clerval “sincerely sympathized in my feelings” and displayed the “truest sympathy” (44, 46). Two manifestations of this ideal sympathetic bond in instances of textual production serve as models of sympathy’s novelistic functions. In Victor’s delirium, as his wife-to-be Elizabeth observes in a letter to him, he must have “been obliged to dictate your letters to Henry,” circumstances that are apparent when Victor’s letters are in Clerval’s handwriting (39). As a precursor to Victor’s dictation to Walton and the creature’s transcription of Safie’s letters, the sympathetic Clerval writes in another person’s voice. Victor himself expresses his pleasure in conveying his friend’s passionate description of the landscape of the Rhine, addressing his deceased friend in Walton’s company: “even now it delights me to record your words, and to dwell on the praise of which you are so eminently deserving” (107). The sympathetic connection that determines his temporary pleasure in speaking on behalf of his friend is echoed and extended in Walton’s recording of Victor’s narrative, which suggests the reanimating and hagiographic effects of sympathetically-charged narrative transcription. While the ideal sympathetic bond between Victor and Clerval generates acts of transcription and vicarious textual production, its continuous state never produces a shift in narrative level. Such shifts are, in Frankenstein, the result of momentary experiences of sympathy rather than stable, constant relationships of sympathetic identification. At the center of the novel, where

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its frames reach their center and begin their movement towards closure, the creature’s transmission of Safie’s story complicates the pattern by which such fleeting experiences of sympathy produce the novel’s narrative layers. Like Walton before him, the creature longs for sympathy and eventually narrates for another, but although he generates a copy and third-person summary of Safie’s letters, he produces narrative content without a new narrative level. He approximates, through the novel’s proposed textual processes, a written version of the sympathy he desires but cannot experience. The story of Safie and the De Laceys functions materially, thematically, and structurally. In the strictest sense, Safie’s letters almost certainly do not describe the events of the De Laceys’ betrayal by Safie’s father, which the creature in all likelihood learns by eavesdropping on the cottagers. Because the letters serve to verify the creature’s tale in its entirety, their authenticating function must necessarily apply to the narrative of Safie’s involvement with the De Laceys as well, regardless of that story’s unspecified source. Her letters are said to convey her biography, including the story of her Christian Arab mother’s audacious espousal of intellectual freedom despite her enslavement by Muslim Turks. Her mother’s story thematically echoes the creature’s struggle for independence and, with Safie’s, gives the creature many reasons to identify with this marginalized other. Indeed, Joyce Zonana has argued that Safie’s letters validate his story “only if we accept an identity between Safie and the creature.”¹⁶ This identity needs to be troubled, though, and I argue that its limitations necessitate the end of the novel’s embedded levels: the novel’s logic of sympathy requires him to summarize her letters but precludes his adoption of her voice. Offered as material proof of his story, these letters attest more significantly to the generation of this novel through the pursuit, experience, and impossibility of sympathy. As authenticating documents, Safie’s letters verify the stories the creature tells—those of the cottagers and of his own development. The first mention of these letters appears in the middle of the cottagers’ story when the creature tells Victor that “they will prove the truth of my tale” (83), and they reappear to validate Victor’s story to Walton, giving the explorer “a greater conviction of the truth of [Victor’s] narrative than his asseverations” (146). It is possible, although not specified, that the explorer includes them with his own letters to his sister. In the novel’s proposed story of its textual form, Zonana has suggested, these letters, at the novel’s center, could pass ¹⁶ “ ‘They Will Prove the Truth of My Tale’: Safie’s Letters as the Feminist Core of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein,” Journal of Narrative Technique 21.2 (1991), p. 174.

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materially to its outermost layer.¹⁷ The transition in novel history that Frankenstein fictionalizes also registers the material function of Safie’s letters: the possibility that these letters are included in Walton’s packet to his sister suggests a potential reversal of the pattern by which thin narrative frames often, in an allegedly editorial voice, authenticated novels of letters or journals, as is the case with Rousseau’s Julie, ou la Nouvelle Héloïse or Henry Mackenzie’s Julia de Roubigné. If these copied letters indeed make that journey, then Frankenstein would not only enact the historical turn from the epistolary novel, but it would also invert the pattern of the framed epistolary novel by presenting letters as both the frame (Walton’s) and the authentication (Safie’s) of the first-person novel. Thematically, the story of the cottagers tells of the dangers, rather than the limits, of sympathy. The pity Felix has for Safie’s father, which is perhaps the novel’s most promising candidate for ameliorative sympathetic behavior, leads only to the betrayal and exile of both the De Laceys and Safie. Felix witnesses the trial of Safie’s father and attempts to aid his escape from prison. Safie’s father encourages Felix’s devotion to securing his liberation by promising wealth but realizes that his daughter, who is visiting him in prison, offers a more alluring reward. He encourages their affection, even after fleeing prison, only to abandon them both while the De Lacey father and Agatha, Felix’s sister, are themselves imprisoned when the original plot is discovered. Although this story makes no explicit reference to sympathy, its social benevolence and transcultural charity echo the moral discourse of sympathy’s public ramifications. This story, in its transmission, reflects anxieties about sympathy’s social dangers while signaling its potential to generate narrative. There is no shift in narrative level when the creature tells Safie’s story because, most specifically, his experience of her never includes direct auditory engagement and, more broadly, because the novel here reaches the most impenetrable barrier to sympathetic identification. His knowledge of her is confined to minimal visual and textual exposure: he observes her through a gap in the wood used to conceal one of the cabin’s windows, and he reads and copies translations of her letters. Despite their shared sensibility—he displays an emotional identification with her when the music she plays elicits his tears (79), and they both shed tears when Felix instructs them in the injustices of history (80)—but the creature cannot, without an unmediated experience of her voice, in turn adopt that voice when he tells

¹⁷ “ ‘They Will Prove the Truth of My Tale,’ ” p. 171.

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her story.¹⁸ Told in letters, Safie’s brief tale would necessarily register the immediacy associated with epistolary fiction; as translations from her native Arabic, however, these letters also present her voice as linguistically and textually mediated. The multiple translations of these letters suggest an accommodation of linguistic difference in tandem with the failure to transcend the social and biological differences that keep Safie and the creature at a distance. These documents imply both the immediacy of the letter and the distance of translated language—they represent a kind of mediated immediacy. The creature’s transcription differs from Walton’s in the simple fact that Walton’s is reproduced in the text of the novel while the creature’s is not and, more significantly, because the creature copies translated, stolen letters instead of words originally intended for his ears. The creature has many reasons to sympathize with Safie: he could easily identify with her experience of paternal deception and betrayal, they are both exiles, and they share a tearful sensibility. According to the novel’s revision of philosophical models of sympathy, though, visual experience alone is insufficient to prompt the shifting perspectives of a specifically novelistic version of sympathy. Not only is there is no reciprocity in the creature’s voyeuristic experience of Safie, but their circumstantial resemblance encourages an experience of sympathy that his radical difference ultimately restricts. Shelley’s parsing of sympathy’s elements tests a conception of sympathy that reaches beyond physiological resemblance and direct visual and auditory engagement: Frankenstein’s sympathetic encounters stage confrontations between the familial bonds that are central for Smith and Hume, the more capacious resemblance that de Grouchy articulates, and the visual perception that Smith’s cognitive perspective struggles to transcend. Spying through an obscured window and copying letters not meant for him, the creature mimics in written form the transformation of visual perception into imaginative perspective that Smith—through his own window—outlines. Aspiring towards an inclusive notion of resemblance and the imaginative rather than sensory experience of otherness, Shelley’s novelistic sympathy fails in the lived experience of its characters, but it succeeds in the production of narrative. Walton’s transcription of Victor’s story and the creature’s copies of Safie’s letters recast sympathetic longing as an act of ¹⁸ The monster does, though, as Anna E. Clark illuminates, present the story of the cottagers from both outside and occasionally inside their perspectives: unlike Walton’s and Victor’s, his narrative is at times focalized through other characters and thus “preserves the distinctions between [his and the cottagers’] viewpoints while still marking their sympathetic alignment.” “Frankenstein; or, the Modern Protagonist,” English Literary History 81.1 (2014), p. 248.

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writing, the production of a physical document to replace either another text, such as the énoncé of Safie’s letters, or the énonciation of Victor’s narrative, the person and his speaking voice. It is a copy of translated letters that serves as both the creature’s nearest approximation of a sympathetic experience and the novel’s most trusted evidence of narrative authenticity. The novel proposes various “series” to authenticate the tale of unbelievable science and monstrous creation—the progression of Victor’s narrative, the details of his lab journal, or this transcribed series of letters. Of these, the authenticating document is a vicarious narrative that attempts to overcome difference by means of writing in another’s voice.

“Similar, yet . . . Strangely Unlike”: Forms of Difference The secret of the creature’s origin is, of course, never revealed. The various terms by which the novel attempts to identify him, however, establish resemblance itself as an unstable foundation for determining species identity or ensuring sympathetic experience. The novel’s lexicon for the human and the inhuman, by failing to maintain clear species distinctions, emphasizes patterns of comparison that are fundamental to establishing identity as well as experiencing sympathy. First christened “the creature” (34), he, it seems, is able to associate with the numerous “fellow creatures” who populate the novel, a possibility David Marshall considers the crux of Shelley’s consideration of sympathy. The term “creature” is itself profoundly unclear on this question— the Oxford English Dictionary defines the term as “an animal . . . as distinct from ‘man,’” on one hand, or “a human being” on the other. In Frankenstein, figures of speech for the creature’s identity insist that we ask whether this creature might rightly consider human beings his own fellow-creatures. These figures of speech correspond to another figure—the creature himself. Marshall specifies the double significance of “figure,” physical and representative, for the creature. He is figurative not only in the sense that he resembles a man, but also “in the sense that he stands as a simile: he is in fact a being like his creator—and it is this likeness that makes him so monstrous.”¹⁹ Similar to humans but also unlike any other creature, he represents that which he seeks—resemblance. He shares aspects of de

¹⁹ Surprising Effects of Sympathy, p. 208.

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Grouchy’s semblable, a term that nominalizes a process of identification rather than denoting a pre-existing bond of kinship or affinity. Terms used for both Victor’s creation and human beings establish a semantic fluidity that makes distinctions between literal and figurative language, as well as those between human and inhuman, increasingly difficult to make. Not only, then, does the novel’s consideration of contemporary science suggest that monstrosity and humanity may be difficult to distinguish, but the novel’s own terminology amplifies this imprecision.²⁰ The creature is frequently described as “the figure of a man,” and human beings, repeatedly called “creatures” or described as “wretched,” are said to resemble “creatures” and carry “fiends” within them.²¹ For the language-learning creature, this imprecision hints at the possibility of resemblance, identification, and sympathy only to give false hope. Frankenstein thus makes a precondition for sympathy a source of horror: disturbingly similar yet horribly different, the creature unsettles the very notion of resemblance that remains the foundation of Enlightenment conceptions of sympathy. The creature’s physiological difference suggests the context of racial science, which in the early nineteenth century is largely influenced by the system of classification being developed by Johann Friedrich Blumenbach.²² The creature has been linked, either in the novel itself or in recent criticism, to nearly every race. He weeps over the fate of Native Americans with the Arabian Safie, and, should he be provided with a mate, he plans to retire to the wilds of what he seems to imagine as a pre-conquest South America. His narrative has been said to resonate with the conventions of slave narratives, his skin and hair have been seen to mark him as East and South Asian, and his hybridity echoes discussions of miscegenation in India and elsewhere.²³

²⁰ For the scientific context of the novel, see especially Anne Mellor, Mary Shelley: Her Life, Her Fiction, Her Monsters (New York: Methuen, 1988), pp. 89–110, and Marilyn Butler’s “Introduction,” in Frankenstein: 1818 Text (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), pp. ix–li. ²¹ After the birth scene Victor says of his creation, “A mummy again endued with animation could not be so hideous as that wretch” and then, a few lines later, states, “I passed the night wretchedly” (35). Justine, wrongly accused of the murder of Victor’s young brother, is so relentlessly hounded by her confessor that she states, “I almost began to think that I was the monster that he said I was” (56). Elizabeth responds to Justine’s trial by asserting that “men appear to me as monsters.” Victor describes her demeanor during this conversation: “She shed tears as she said this, distrusting the very solace that she gave; but at the same time she smiled, that she might chase away the fiend that lurked in my heart” (61). “Fiend” is a term frequently associated with Victor’s creation. ²² See Ivan Hannaford, Race: The History of an Idea in the West (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), pp. 202–13. ²³ See Zonana, “ ‘They Will Prove the Truth of My Tale.’ ” For Frankenstein’s resonances with slavery, see Allan Lloyd Smith, “Racial Discourse in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein,” Gothic

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I want to suggest that the ease with which the creature can be aligned with multiple races raises the question of race by defying classification rather than standing for a particular racial group, by functioning as an instance of Felicity Nussbaum’s category of the “anomaly.” ²⁴ Critical approaches to the issue of the creature’s race have often overlooked what I take to be Shelley’s point: his otherness thwarts any attempts at classification and instead insists on an unrecognizable difference, and it is this unrecognizable difference that her novelistic model of sympathy seeks to accommodate through his attempt at the kind of vicarious narration that instantiates the novel’s frame structure. Taking a different approach to the creature’s physiology, Frances Ferguson has emphasized the thinness rather than the color of the creature’s skin, identifying it as a marker of his body’s struggle to contain its promiscuous variety. The “yellow skin” that “scarcely covered the work of muscles and arteries beneath” (34) suggests the strained elasticity of social groups, especially the family, and Ferguson notes that the stretched skin reformulates the attempts of Victor’s nuclear family to include a cousin, (Elizabeth) a servant (Justine), and a friend (Henry Clerval).²⁵ This elasticity does not, of course, extend to the creature himself, and the 1831 revision that recasts Elizabeth as a stranger of Italian and German ancestry further extends the reach of the Frankenstein family’s inclusion while emphasizing the complete isolation of the creature from any familial tie. Rather than invoking a particular racial group, the creature’s flesh signals the struggle to accommodate difference. Studies 6.2 (Nov. 2004), pp. 208–22; H. L. Malchow, Gothic Images of Race in NineteenthCentury Britain (Stanford, Stanford University Press: 1996), pp. 9-40; and John Bugg, “ ‘Master of Their Language’: Education and Exile in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein,” The Huntington Library Quarterly 68.4 (2005), pp. 655–66. Anne Mellor has argued that the monster’s “yellow skin” and “black lustrous hair” mark him as Asian. “Frankenstein, Racial Science, and the Yellow Peril,” Nineteenth Century Contexts 25 (2001), pp. 1–28. Joseph W. Lew sees in the monster’s skin a suggestion of Bengali identity. “The Deceptive Other: Mary Shelley’s Critique of Orientalism in Frankenstein,” Studies in Romanticism 30 (1991), p. 273. For the novel’s resonance with racial hybridity in South Asia, see D. S. Neff, “ ‘Hostages of Empire’ ”: The Anglo-Indian problem in Frankenstein, The Curse of Kehama, and The Missionary,” European Romantic Review 8 (1997), pp. 386–409. For a persuasive consideration of race in the 1831 revisions of Elizabeth Lavenza’s background, see O’Rourke, “The 1831 Introduction and Revisions to Frankenstein.” ²⁴ Felicity A. Nussbaum, The Limits of the Human: Fictions of Anomaly, Race, and Gender in the Long Eighteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003). In a similar vein, Bugg has observed that “the exact referent of the Creature’s difference is less important than the basic fact of alterity” (659), and Elizabeth Bohls has insightfully argued that the monster represents “Britain’s collective anxieties about otherness of more than one kind” and “amalgamates multiple dimensions of difference.” Women Travel Writers and the Language of Aesthetics, 1716–1818 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), pp. 231, 243–4. ²⁵ “The Nuclear Sublime,” Diacritics 14. 2 (1984), pp. 8–9.

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Frankenstein is most explicitly invested in the process of comparison and identification by which subjects determine resemblance and facilitate inclusion. The creature’s linguistic and literary education is central to his understanding of this process and its limits. His experience with Safie and the De Lacey family calls on the lexicon of “human,” “creature,” and “monster” and provides his education in human sentiment and the humanities, in species designation and literary sympathy. Marshall considers the creature’s observation of them “the paradigmatic scene of sympathy in Frankenstein—the scene of the origins of the creature’s sympathy.”²⁶ His observation of this family and Safie also presents a striking scene of pedagogy that links methodical linguistic education with instruction in personal relationships, sympathy, and ethnic stereotyping: the creature learns, he says, “of the slothful Asiatics; of the stupendous genius and mental activity of the Grecians; of the wars and wonderful virtue of the early Romans” (80). This lesson also guides his identification with Europe’s racial others, with the romanticized “noble savage” of the Native Americans, in a sentimental response that proves his human sensibility. The tears he shares with Safie over the fate of Native Americans serve a narrative purpose, as I have argued, but this double identification with Native Americans as well as an Arabian woman additionally conveys the centrality of racial identification—and his own unnamable difference—to the creature’s historical and linguistic education. According to Maureen McLane, language learning in this scene is objectified “through the technology of print and the combinatoire of the alphabet,” and this classroom provides instruction in “an always already mediated orality, a speech acquired through a technology of the letter.”²⁷ The creature’s experience of language relies, from its beginnings, on mediation, and it is in some sense appropriate that the copied letters of an exiled, oriental other serve the strictly pedagogical purposes they do. Writing is, for the creature, an early, essential step in the humanizing process of languagelearning, but his education repeatedly returns to the differences that foster both strained identification and his increasing sense of powerlessness. The humanistic texts the creature happens upon—Paradise Lost, a volume of Plutarch’s Lives, and Goethe’s Sorrows of Werther—elicit his sympathetic response while they raise questions of resemblance and species

²⁶ Surprising Effects of Sympathy, p. 214. ²⁷ Romanticism and the Human Sciences: Poetry, Population, and the Discourse of the Species (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), p. 15.

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status: “I found myself similar, yet at the same time strangely unlike the beings concerning whom I read . . . I sympathized with, and partly understood them, but I was unformed in mind; I was dependent on none, and related to none . . . My person was hideous, and my stature gigantic: what did this mean? Who was I? What was I?” (86). Responding sympathetically to literary works, despite the imaginative abstraction such identification entails, nevertheless returns to the problem of resemblance, and even though he is emotionally aligned with non-Europeans, the creature’s difference cannot be assimilated into any racial group. Capable of perspectival sympathy but “related to none,” he can easily imagine but never experience a version of sympathy based on even the slightest degree of resemblance. By experimenting with the extremely sensitive yet grotesque humanoid body, Shelley creates a novelistic version of sympathy that attempts to accommodate radical difference through the production of narrative. The creature’s appearance is, to say the least, problematic. In a reworking of the reflection scene in Paradise Lost, his first glimpse of himself reveals an additional absence: “I had admired the perfect forms of my cottagers—their grace, beauty, and delicate complexions: but how was I terrified, when I viewed myself in a transparent pool! At first I started back, unable to believe that it was indeed I who was reflected in the mirror; and when I became fully convinced that I was in reality the monster that I am, I was filled with the bitterest sensations of despondence and mortification” (76). Read against Milton’s depiction of Eve’s similar self-encounter, this scene clarifies that a lack of more than physical beauty spawns the creature’s horror. Eve’s self-discovery is of course more pleasant: “As I bent down to look, just opposite, / A Shape within the wat’ry gleam appear’d / Bending to look on me, I started back, / It started back, but pleas’d I soon return’d.” The response of Eve’s reflected image underscores the absence of sympathy in the creature’s attempts at identification, even self-identification. In Eve’s description, her reflection reappears “with answering looks / Of sympathy and love; there I had fixt / Mine eyes till now, and pin’d with vain desire, / Had not a voice thus warn’d me, What thou seest, / What there thou seest fair Creature is thyself.”²⁸ Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar have emphasized Eve’s monstrous narcissism in this scene.²⁹ But Eve learns, guided by the

²⁸ John Milton, Paradise Lost, ed. Merritt Y. Hughes (New York: Macmillan, 1962), Book IV, ll. 460–8, pp. 97–8. ²⁹ The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979), pp. 236–40.

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voice of God, to consider herself a “fair Creature,” while Victor’s creature learns to call himself a monster. She is met with sympathy, albeit an illusory and literally self-reflective version of sympathy, and the creature, who has met “none like me” and “never yet seen a being resembling me” (81), is merely confirmed in his isolation from any fellow-feeling whatsoever. Comparison reinforces species difference as it focuses attention on the verbally human but visually repulsive creature. The scene of the creature’s meeting with the De Laceys, like his meeting with Victor, dramatizes an opposition between visual and verbal communication, as a number of critics have noted.³⁰ It is this opposition, which is also an opposition between competing models of sympathy, that brings Shelley’s version of novelistic sympathy into focus. Armed with new learning in language and sympathy, the creature approaches the cottagers, only to have his distinctly different status reinforced in spite of the novel’s imprecise species terminology. The creature’s interaction with the blind De Lacey begins as a potential sympathetic encounter, and the father is on the verge of making a pact similar to those that have opened each of the novel’s narrative frames when he asks the creature to “confide to me the particulars of your tale” and states “I am blind, and cannot judge of your countenance, but there is something in your words which persuades me that you are sincere” (91). Of the man’s children, the creature states, “they are the most excellent creatures in the world, . . . but a fatal prejudice clouds their eyes, and where they ought to see a feeling and kind friend, they behold only a detestable monster” (90). Literal blindness necessarily prioritizes the creature’s human language and, by transcending the obstacles of both the monstrous body and versions of sympathy that emphasize sensory perception or physical resemblance, suggests a version of sympathy that is auditory and narrative, based on imaginative perspective rather than sensory perception. Vision, however, figuratively blinds the cottagers by emphasizing physical monstrosity above verbal mastery. The moment between the old man’s nascent sympathy and the entrance of Felix, Agatha, and Safie places the creature between two versions of sympathy— that which is based on auditory, narrative progression, and that which is based on physiological immediacy and visual appearance. The old man’s response to the creature’s request—“it will afford me true pleasure to be in any way serviceable to a human creature”—specifies, with “human,” a ³⁰ See Favret, Romantic Correspondence, p. 186; Peter Brooks, Body Work: Objects of Desire in Modern Narrative (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), pp. 201, 207; Caldwell, Literature and Medicine, p. 43.

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distinct boundary which will soon conclusively isolate the creature from his desired companions, but he replies with the novel’s more capacious terminology: “I trust that, by your aid, I shall not be driven from the society and sympathy of your fellow-creatures” (91). These hopes are dashed, of course, when the De Lacey children and Safie enter the cottage and witness the creature’s grotesque form. By momentarily suspending the requirements of physical resemblance and visual perception, the creature’s meeting with the blind De Lacey invokes an abstract version of sympathy based on shifts in imaginative rather than visual perspective, on progressive auditory engagement rather than visual recognition. It is this version of sympathy that determines Frankenstein’s vicarious narratives. After this rejection, the creature briefly drops the benevolent language of “fellow-creatures” to declare “everlasting war against the species” (92) and soon demands a mate, as noted, “of the same species.” This change in terminology suggests a realization of sharper species distinctions. While the terms of his request affirm the species boundary, this boundary continues to be blurred by the lexicon of “human,” “monster,” and “creature.” He uses both the newly-adopted term “species” as well as the problematic “creature,” and competing vocabularies prohibit any real precision. The significance of his indeterminate species status becomes clear once he has experienced both the inadequacy of responding sympathetically to literary texts and the impossibility of a sympathetic encounter involving physiological resemblance, visual engagement, and auditory experience. When the creature requests a mate, as he does in the moment that immediately precedes his narrative, Victor feels compassion for his creation, but his sympathy is, in this instance, brought to a halt: “I compassionated him, . . . but when I looked upon him, when I saw the filthy mass that moved and talked, my heart sickened, and my feelings were altered to those of horror and hatred” (99). Physical monstrosity once again prevents the sympathy that the creature’s eloquence is on the verge of eliciting, as it does in the scene with the blind De Lacey. His request is not, of course, fulfilled—Victor destroys the female body that the creature demanded he create—and the provocative possibility that sympathy might paradoxically humanize him by confirming his species through identification with another, by providing the sui generis creature with a “semblable,” remains unexplored. Shelley continues the turn that Smith’s Theory initiates from visual perception to imaginative perspective, but Frankenstein extends beyond a conception of sympathy centered on familial resemblance by offering the experience of narrative as compensation for failures of sympathy that arise

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from insurmountable difference.³¹ Without a Smithean brother or one of de Grouchy’s semblables, the creature achieves sympathy only through the act of vicarious narration. Shelley tests the extent to which narrative sympathy is possible through the figure of the creature, whose pursuit of sympathy is repeatedly stymied by visual experience and physiological difference. But what in Smith remains an unresolved tension—a claim for abstraction that attempts to overcome even as it is persistently limited by the requirements of familial resemblance—concludes for Shelley with the production of narrative, which takes the place of sympathies that are unsustainable or impossible. The same tensions that plague Smith’s Theory are plotted as disappointment and agony for Shelley’s creature, who finds that, although his hideous appearance and disturbing difference prevent him from experiencing sympathy with another living creature, transcribing the words of another offers an alternative version of sympathy, the vicarious experience of writing another person’s story. Through its acts of vicarious writing, epistolary transcription, or narrative transmission, Frankenstein posits the novel, born of a desire for sympathy, as compensation for the differences that make immediate and direct experiences of sympathy dangerous, fleeting, or impossible. Most broadly, this individual novel might be understood to imply an origin story of the genre— not only this novel, but “The Novel”—as the recreation of the shifts in point of view by which Smith defines sympathy. Specific transitions between epistolary immediacy and narrative summary constitute, through their consistent foundations in sympathy, Shelley’s novelistic revision of philosophical models of sympathy. A revision of these models joins revisions of epistolary fiction and literary sentimentalism in Brontë’s Wuthering Heights, which, like Frankenstein, centers its complex narrative structure on the pursuit of sympathy.

³¹ Compensating for the impossibility of lived experiences of sympathy, Shelley’s textual version of sympathy parallels Derrida’s conception of writing as a figure for the absent other.

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6 Wuthering Heights and the Relics of the Epistolary Novel

The moors of Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights hardly seem fertile ground for the experience of sympathy. In response to this explicit absence, Brontë recasts eighteenth-century literary forms through a revision of philosophical models of sympathy. Wuthering Heights generates, through the dynamics of vicarious narrative, a structural version of novelistic sympathy that draws on the emotional and vocal mobility of epistolary fiction. At the core of the novel’s plot, the complete identification between Catherine Earnshaw and Heathcliff posits a version of sympathy capable of erasing the distinction between kinship and difference that troubles Enlightenment theories of shared feeling. Structurally, the novel builds on the remnants of sympathy’s associations with sentimentalism and epistolarity, eighteenth-century literary discourses whose influence in this Victorian novel provide a new account for its anomalous pattern of embedded narrative levels. Transforming sympathy’s philosophical foundations and its literary structures, Wuthering Heights instantiates a specifically literary, textual model of sympathy as a modification and replacement of personal, emotional, and physiological versions of sympathy. The novel articulates two strikingly different instances of sympathetic identification, and their oppositions trace Brontë’s mode of vicarious narrative. In the novel’s central relationship, Catherine Earnshaw describes a unique instance of sympathetic identification when she tells Nelly Dean, “I am Heathcliff.”¹ Because Brontë maintains Heathcliff ’s ambiguous status—his adoption into the Earnshaw family and his obscured origins can position him as either Catherine’s foster-brother or a racial “other”— Catherine’s declaration suggests a version of sympathetic identification ¹ I follow the practice of calling the mother Catherine and the daughter Cathy despite compelling reasons to take Heathcliff ’s perspective and reverse their names. Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights, ed. Ian Jack (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), p. 73. Subsequent references will be to this edition. Vicarious Narratives: A Literary History of Sympathy, 1750–1850. Jeanne M. Britton, Oxford University Press (2019). © Jeanne M. Britton. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198846697.001.0001

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based on shared suffering that denies the distinction between resemblance and difference that philosophical theories of sympathy presuppose. When Brontë has an Englishwoman emphatically state that she shares an identity with another—an “other” of every sort—who is, in many senses, also her brother, Wuthering Heights erases the distinction between stranger and sibling around which Smith specifies his version of sympathy. In the novel’s most explicit instance of sympathetic identification, Lockwood momentarily enacts a bond with Heathcliff based on the tremblings of a “sympathetic chord within.” Lockwood’s identification with a man he initially classifies as a “gypsy” (3) is quickly proven delusional; the failure of this sympathetic identification, which attempts to cross perceived lines of difference, yields alternative methods of meeting Lockwood’s expectations for shared feeling. That failure of sympathy—and the unavailability, for other characters, of Catherine and Heathcliff ’s complete interassimilation—prompts the novel’s elaborate structure of second-hand narration, shifting speakers, and recited letters. Wuthering Heights is often discussed as a frame tale of particular complexity or formal irregularity, but it has not been acknowledged that letters, in their negotiation of voice and their customary appeal to sympathetic response, play a crucial role in determining the novel’s structure. What I identify as its epistolary logic illuminates the patterns of vicarious narration by which Wuthering Heights folds eighteenth-century traditions of epistolarity and sentimentality into its unique patterns of Victorian gothicism. Brontë’s novel reconceptualizes sympathy as both an interpersonal phenomenon capable of accommodating radical difference (in Catherine’s identification with Heathcliff ) and as a textual surrogate for the impossibility of direct human engagement (in Lockwood’s narrative roles). It is Lockwood’s inability to attain Catherine and Heathcliff ’s experience of complete identification that initiates the acts of narrative transmission and production that structure this novel. Caroline Levine has called for “attention to the longues durées of different forms, their portability across time and space.”² The portability of epistolary forms in Wuthering Heights complicates critical discussions of early nineteenth-century fiction’s eradication of the epistolary novel along with its affiliations with revolutionary sentiment and emotional susceptibility. What remains to be identified are the crucial ways in which an epistolary logic—the novelistic letter’s associations with vocal mobility, emotional ² Forms: Whole, Rhythm, Hierarchy, Network (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015), p. 13.

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reciprocity, and multiple perspectives—persists in nineteenth-century novels primarily characterized by retrospective narration. In Wuthering Heights, the composition, delivery, and reading of letters determines significant aspects of the novel’s notoriously complex frame structure. Based on a logic of epistolary fiction, I argue that the transmission of letters within the core narrative justifies a notable—if often unnoted—aspect of this frame structure. The delivery of letters opens and closes Lockwood’s narration in Nelly’s voice, and at the center of the novel’s narrative layers is Isabella Heathcliff ’s letter detailing the absence of sympathy at Wuthering Heights. Reading this letter aloud to Lockwood, Nelly models the vocal mobility that the form of the letter affords. Her recitation of this letter and the transition from written to spoken language she performs seem to instruct her listener in the potential of the letter—in its associations, materiality, and transmission—to trigger polyvocality. As if eager to put this lesson into practice, Lockwood soon takes over Nelly’s narrative position and begins to speak in his own voice when Nelly, in the tale she is telling, describes her reluctant delivery of a letter from Heathcliff to Catherine. Like Frankenstein, Wuthering Heights constructs a series of shifting narrators through a revision of epistolary fiction’s affective and formal features: the novelistic letter’s characteristic desire for sympathetic response, capacity for emotional immediacy, and invocation of multiple perspectives. Crucial in this reconfiguration are the generic assumptions that undergird the particular shape of Brontë’s novel—why a letter is read aloud rather than summarized, why one narrative level ends when Lockwood begins to speak for Nelly, and the conditions of plot that facilitate his assumption of her voice. Just as Wuthering Heights betrays profound debts to eighteenth-century epistolary fiction, Brontë’s novel is not as distant from the moral systems of Smith and Hume as its position in literary history would seem to suggest. Brontë’s revisions of the previous century’s novelistic tropes justify an approach to the history of the novel that is facilitated by the designation of “the Romantic century.” But to see eighteenth-century echoes in this novel is also to provide an account of its form that locates a revisionary history of novelistic subgenre within particular features of its frame structure. Following the critical tradition that reads Wuthering Heights as a commentary on the genre, as a “metanovel,” I argue that its configuration of a novelistic version of sympathy reassesses the vexing issue of its frame structure, an aspect of the novel that troubled its readers for nearly a century. It is well known that contemporary readers found Wuthering Heights a strange and disturbing work, primarily for its rough language and candid

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depictions of violence; another common criticism was its lack of any sympathetic character.³ Early- and mid-twentieth-century readers, though, expressed particular disapproval of the novel’s formal oddities. One critic lists the novel’s “Chinese-box narratives” among its “superficially awkward and inexperienced” qualities; bemoaning the way it “leaps from narrative to narrative like a frog, and flashes across the generations like a dragon fly,” another critic labels it “[a]s a piece of construction,” “one of the worst novels in the language.”⁴ By virtue of the novel’s frame structure, Lockwood takes on the position of a reader, a point that more recent critics have often emphasized by detailing both his poor interpretations of the characters he meets and parallels between his experience of Nelly’s history and the habits of a nineteenth-century novel-reader.⁵ Emphasizing Lockwood’s status as a listener rather than a reader, Michael Macovski observes that the novel’s form of rhetorical address presents the lives of Catherine and Heathcliff “within the context of sustained audition.” The novel’s structure of what Macovski terms “failed audition” indicates what I consider an instance of sympathy’s impossibility in this novel: Lockwood is, to be sure, not the most perceptive or responsive listener.⁶ But Lockwood’s limitations as a listener clarify the significance of the novel’s frame structure insofar as the formal solutions to the problem of failed audition generate Brontë’s version of vicarious narrative.

Transforming Lockwood’s “Sympathetic Chord” While Lockwood’s position as a listener and his limitations as a reader are well established in critical discussions of Wuthering Heights, the manner in ³ One reviewer observes that Brontë’s characters “are devoid of truthfulness, are not in harmony with the actual world, and have, therefore, but little more power to move our sympathies than the romances of the middle ages, or the ghost stories which made our granddames tremble.” Eclectic Review 93 (1851). Cited in Melvin R. Watson, “ ‘Wuthering Heights’ and the Critics,” Trollopian 3.4 (1949), p. 227. ⁴ Oliver Elton, A Survey of English Literature, 1780–1880 (New York: Macmillan, 1920), vol. iv, p. 294; Norman Collins, The Facts of Fiction (London: Gollancz, 1932), p. 186. ⁵ See Stewart, Dear Reader, pp. 241, 268–9; Carl R. Woodring, “The Narrators of Wuthering Heights,” Nineteenth-Century Fiction 11.4 (1957), pp. 298–305; Graham Clarke, “ ‘Bound in Moss and Cloth’: Reading a Long Victorian Novel,” in Reading the Victorian Novel, ed. Ian Gregor (London: Vision, 1980), pp. 54–71. John T. Matthews argues that gaps in the novel’s core narrative summon its frame narrative. “Framing in Wuthering Heights,” Texas Studies in Literature and Language 27.1 (1985), pp. 25–61. ⁶ Michael Macovski, Dialogue and Literature: Apostrophe, Auditors, and the Collapse of Romantic Discourse (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), pp. 136, 137.

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which this listener/reader becomes a narrator recasts the significance of the novel’s formal construction. Lockwood’s unsatisfied expectations, more than his failures of reading or feeling, and the conditions under which he adopts, rather than cites, Nelly’s narrative voice suggest that the novel’s shifting voices develop from manipulations of epistolary dynamics. In Wuthering Heights, novelistic structures that mimic sympathy’s fusion of self and other supplant lived experiences of sympathetic identification that prove to be impossible. Sympathetic identification does not guide transitions between diegetic levels in this novel, but the novelistic letter—a fictional form prized precisely for its ability to transmit feeling—performs this very function. Any assessment of the features that Wuthering Heights adopts from eighteenth-century sentimental and epistolary fiction will necessarily make much of Lockwood, whose assumptions introduce the novel and create an amusing dissonance with its setting and characters. Scholars have catalogued the manifestations of his latent violence and naïve eroticism, but Lockwood’s expectations also bring to the novel a set of late eighteenthcentury literary tropes that gradually transform into the particular features of this frame tale: he facilitates the novel’s structural progression, through which modified eighteenth-century fictional patterns determine the shape of this mid-nineteenth century novel. Expecting a sympathetic response and keen to identify with his new landlord, Lockwood leads readers into the novel as this southerner first encounters the barren Yorkshire landscape. It quickly becomes clear that sympathy is an object of troubled pursuit in Wuthering Heights.⁷ In the novel’s opening paragraph, Lockwood describes Heathcliff as a “solitary neighbor” and his location as a “perfect misanthropist’s heaven” (1). His search for isolation is, of course, belied by his immediate affection for Heathcliff when he declares: Mr. Heathcliff and I are such a suitable pair to divide the desolation between us. A capital fellow! He little imagined how my heart warmed towards him

⁷ Carol Jacobs has observed that “The novel opens with Lockwood’s attempt to construe desolation as a basis for human sympathy,” and April Alliston has called the novel “an anguished exploration of the multifarious deformations, betrayals, and abuses of sympathy as a basis for imagined community.” “Wuthering Heights: At the Threshold of Interpretation,” in Gendered Agents: Women and Institutional Knowledge, ed. Silvestra Mariniello and Paul A. Bové (Durham: Duke University Press, 1998), p. 382; “Transnational Sympathies, Imaginary Communities,” in The Literary Channel, p. 142.

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when I beheld his black eyes withdraw so suspiciously under their brows, as I rode up, and when his fingers sheltered themselves, with a jealous resolution, still further in his waistcoat, as I announced my name. (1)

Critics have discussed the larger tendencies that this scene articulates. Laura Hinton argues that Heathcliff ’s divergent affective states, which Lockwood terms his “aversion to showy displays of feeling,” provoke Lockwood’s “supplement of sympathy.” His forced identification with Heathcliff is determined by both the interpretive strains of sympathy and the novel’s own patterns of “wuthering,” by which identity alternates between resolute impermeability and affective vulnerability. According to Hinton, Lockwood can, like Catherine, assert that he is Heathcliff.⁸ This assertion of shared identity, Mieke Bal has argued, propels the novel’s plot.⁹ It also manifests the emotional and generic assumptions whose altered incarnations constitute the narrative framing of this novel itself. Lockwood’s eager if short-lived identification with the sullen Heathcliff reveals the desire that will most closely be satisfied by his participation in acts of narrative production and transmission. The pursuit of sympathy continues in Lockwood’s persistent expectation of a sympathetic address or decorous welcome in the interaction that follows: Heathcliff ’s injunction that Lockwood “ ‘walk in,’ ” we are told, “was uttered with closed teeth and expressed the sentiment, ‘Go to the Deuce!’. Even the gate over which he leant manifested no sympathizing movement to the words” (1). The gate that remains closed in opposition to Heathcliff ’s snarled invitation to enter indicates both the lack of sympathy that greets outsiders and a fissure between Lockwood’s expectations, which would be more appropriate in sentimental fiction, and Heathcliff ’s gothic realm. For Lockwood, entering the gate to Wuthering Heights means subjecting his fiction-fueled sentimental assumptions to Heathcliff ’s lack of sympathy. This entrance also begins a process of generic transformation that finds fulfillment in the novel’s frame structure, a novelistic form whose contours outline the void left by Lockwood’s disappointed expectations of sympathy. That process relies on a reformulation of sympathetic identification. Reading Heathcliff ’s character, Lockwood reveals the model of sympathy ⁸ Laura Hinton, The Perverse Gaze of Sympathy: Sadomasochistic Sentiments from Clarissa to Rescue 911 (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1999), p. 166. ⁹ Mieke Bal, trans. Eve Tavor, “Notes on Narrative Embedding,” Poetics Today 2 (1981), p. 49.

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and displays the sort of identification that, in significantly altered forms, sculpt the novel’s structure: “Possibly,” he states, “some people might suspect him of a degree of under-bred pride—I have a sympathetic chord within that tells me it is nothing of the sort; I know, by instinct, his reserve springs from an aversion to showy displays of feeling—to manifestations of mutual kindliness.” He quickly admits his mistake: “No, I’m running on too fast—I bestow my own attributes over-liberally on him” (3). This confession of self-projection that is substituted for interpretation describes a common tendency in the novel, a tendency that also characterizes the relationships that Catherine has with books and that Lockwood will come to have with Nelly Dean’s narrative. Lockwood’s sentimentalist epistemology—his assumption that a “sympathetic chord . . . tells” him about Heathcliff ’s inner nature—gives way to the novel’s embedded narratives, as storytelling’s representational forms displace any knowledge derived from sensory experience. Lockwood’s trembling “sympathetic chord” resonates not only with the nervous vibrations of a sentimental hero’s tightly-wound sensibility but also with Heathcliff ’s “shivering” as he approaches death: towards the end of the novel, he shivers “not as one shivers with chill or weakness, but as a tightstretched cord vibrates—a strong thrilling, rather than trembling” (292). Both Lockwood and Heathcliff ’s vibrations additionally invoke the reciprocal nervous tremblings and patterns of reflection in Hume’s model of sympathy, and they parallel the implications of othering that the etymology of “wuthering” suggests. An external tumult and an internally-motivated trembling, “wuthering” points up the boundaries of identity, and “trembling” submits subjectivities to the dualities by which they are constituted.¹⁰ Lockwood’s trembling predicts Heathcliff ’s “shivering” as he anticipates his union, in death, with Catherine, when he will, as Leo Bersani has claimed, “find himself again in her.”¹¹ Heathcliff trembles because, in this reading, he is about to reunite with his “self” in death, and in Heathcliff ’s suffering and Lockwood’s confusion, trembling complicates identity by insisting on selfreflection. Lockwood’s initial response to Heathcliff calls on a physiological, Humean version of sympathy, one that indicates a sustained pattern of othering and self-consolidation that characterizes the affective behaviors of

¹⁰ Steven Vine, “The Wuther of the Other in Wuthering Heights,” Nineteenth-Century Literature 49 (1994), pp. 340–1. ¹¹ A Future for Astyanax: Character and Desire in Literature (Boston: Little, Brown & Company, 1976), p. 209.

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both men. Over the course of the novel, though, an abstract, Smithean model of sympathy replaces this physiological version of sympathy in the novel’s frame structure, shifting narrators, and its revision of epistolary dynamics. The replacement of a physiological version of sympathy with an emphatically novelistic, structural model of sympathy coincides with a number of other replacements that redirect Lockwood’s expectations. These expectations about sympathetic response, narrative exchange, erotic desire, and visual pleasure introduce the residents of Wuthering Heights, and the modification of these assumptions justifies the novel’s odd narrative structure. That process includes many transitions: sympathy becomes novelistic and structural when its interpersonal, lived experience proves impossible; desire shades into the erotics of plot when marriage operates more as a novelistic structure than an object of human desire; visual pleasure gives way to narrative production. Brontë’s novelistic model of sympathy entails the recalibration of eighteenth-century fictional forms, the replacement of people with texts, and an increasing turn, primarily on the part of Lockwood, to narrative instead of visual or romantic desire.

“I am Heathcliff ”: Sibling and Stranger In addition to Lockwood’s eager assertion that he and Heathcliff would make “a suitable pair” and his interpretation of his landlord based on the tremblings of his “sympathetic chord,” the novel offers a striking if surprising instance of sympathetic identification when Catherine famously declares to Nelly Dean “I am Heathcliff” (3, 73). For both the novel’s narrator and its heroine to articulate two versions of identification with Heathcliff—one homosocial and naïve, the other romantic and all-encompassing—suggests that Brontë’s construction of Heathcliff ’s identity has much to reveal about the possibilities of identification in this novel. To be sure, the differences between these instances of identification, both of which seem to leave Heathcliff in a rather passive state, are vast: Catherine’s comes at the pivotal moment of her decision to marry Edgar Linton after spending her childhood with her foster-brother, while Lockwood’s erupts after one brief encounter. Such differences do not, however, obscure the significance of the identificatory impulse Heathcliff prompts in others who either possess or presume shared characteristics with him. These instances of identification specify, in Catherine’s declaration of shared identity, this novel’s revision of

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Smithean sympathy and, in Lockwood’s approximation of a similar form of sympathetic identification through narrative production, Brontë’s configuration of novelistic sympathy. Lockwood’s identification with Heathcliff initiates his pursuit of a complete, but unattainable, sympathetic bond. That pursuit concludes with the replacement of human sympathy with novelistic sympathy. It is something of an understatement to claim that identity is a vexed question in this novel, where many critics have noted that resemblance seems to preclude rather than foster identification.¹² Bersani has persuasively argued that in this novel resemblance challenges individual identity, and that familial relationships deny characters any sense of a discrete, contained self.¹³ The echoed names across the novel’s two generations only emphasize the recurrence of similarities and the fundamental difficulty of differentiating among characters.¹⁴ Hareton and Cathy, in the novel’s second generation, are said to have eyes that are “precisely similar” in their resemblance to those of their aunt and mother, Catherine Earnshaw. Combining the approximate identification implied in resemblance (“similar”) with an absolute specificity (“precisely”), this paradoxical phrase encapsulates the figurative and haunting aspects of resemblance in Wuthering Heights.¹⁵ Resemblance seems to overwhelm individual identity for both generations of the two families that the novel follows. It is accordingly not resemblance that motivates Catherine and Lockwood to identify with Heathcliff but rather a notion of shared identity (for Catherine) and selfprojection (for Lockwood). The shaping force of sympathetic identification on Wuthering Heights involves adapting outmoded literary forms to approximate an unattainable level of shared identity. Catherine’s shared identity with Heathcliff idealizes the self ’s full assimilation into the other ¹² John Allen Stevenson, for example, has observed that “Instead of taking likeness for granted, Brontë powerfully raises the question of what likeness is, and she offers us no single answer.” “ ‘Heathcliff is Me!’: Wuthering Heights and the Question of Likeness,” NineteenthCentury Literature 43.1 (1988), p. 78; see also Hinton, p. 154. More specifically, Susan Stewart has noted that Nelly’s position in the Earnshaw family is one of pseudo-kinship. “The Ballad in Wuthering Heights,” Representations 86 (2004), p. 184. ¹³ A Future for Astyanax, pp. 199–203. ¹⁴ For a discussion of names and the novel’s “complex patterns of differentiation,” see Carol Jacobs, p. 377. ¹⁵ Commenting on this phrase, Beth Newman has noted that it focuses “less on their resemblance than on the original that both sets of eyes reflect: the eyes of Catherine Earnshaw.” “ ‘Situation of Looker-On’: Gender, Narration, and Gaze in Wuthering Heights,” PMLA 105 (1990), p. 1038.

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in a formulation that, joining the novel’s insistently imprecise depiction of Heathcliff ’s ethnicity, radically transforms eighteenth-century models of sympathy. Catherine’s identification with Heathcliff posits a version of sympathy capable of reasserting familial likeness while accommodating radical difference. By approximating the kind of sympathy that Catherine articulates, Lockwood generates the novel’s formal structure. With Catherine’s declaration, Brontë offers a model of sympathetic identification that entails a complete interassimilation of self and other, a model that remains unavailable to the novel’s other characters. In designating their bond as an instance of sympathetic identification, I acknowledge that it is also an instance of romantic passion, symbiosis, shared disempowerment, and sadomasochism.¹⁶ Laura Hinton has likened Lockwood’s assertion of a shared identity with Heathcliff, founded on “the supplement of sympathy,” to Catherine’s insistence of their interassimilation, and Rachel Ablow has described Catherine’s bond to Heathcliff as “a form of sympathetic mutuality that appears to be immune to competition or selfishness.”¹⁷ Identifying the resonance of Catherine’s claim with the language of sympathetic discourse specifies this novel’s transformation of Enlightenment notions of sympathy in two ways. First, given the ambiguity of Heathcliff ’s own identity, Catherine’s statement erases the distinction between sibling and stranger that trouble philosophical models of sympathy. Second, her statement also describes a stable state of mutual identity that serves as an impossible ideal towards which Lockwood and the narrative forms that he generates aspire. In light of the roles that fraternity, visual experience, and physical pain play in Smith’s conception of sympathy and de Grouchy’s translation, Catherine’s articulation of shared identity with her adoptive brother invites careful attention: she tells Nelly, “My great miseries in this world have been Heathcliff ’s miseries, and I watched and felt each from the beginning” before concluding, “Nelly, I am Heathcliff” (72–3). To watch and feel Heathcliff ’s sufferings is, in Catherine’s account, to take them on as her ¹⁶ For example, Catherine and Heathcliff ’s identification is prompted, Terry Eagleton and Vine have argued, by a shared inability to inherit. Terry Eagleton, Heathcliff and the Great Hunger: Studies in Irish Culture (New York: Verso, 1995), p. 103; Vine, “The Wuther of the Other,” p. 345. Daniel Cottom has read this instance of identification as emblematic of the gothic novel’s construction of subjectivity, arguing that “To think, in the Gothic novel, is to recognize one’s existence in the other.” “I Think; Therefore, I Am Heathcliff,” English Literary History 70 (2003), p. 1079. ¹⁷ Hinton, p. 166; Rachel Ablow, Marriage of Minds: Reading Sympathy in the Victorian Marriage Plot (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007), p. 53.

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own—or, according to her grammar, to have already made them her own. The process of sharing his pain that allows her to claim full identification reformulates both Smith’s image of the brother on the rack and de Grouchy’s semblable sur la roue. The apparent illogic of Catherine’s syntax, as Ablow has argued, conveys the extent of their mutual identification.¹⁸ This grammar also reconfigures the dynamics of sympathetic identification. Catherine begins with “My miseries” before explaining that those which she has seen and felt are, presumably, those of Heathcliff: Catherine’s visual experience of these sufferings—she has “watched” them—suggests, despite the lexical imprecision of this line, that her identification with Heathcliff arises from a visual and affective experience of his pain. For Smith, sympathy allows the pains of another man, “when they are thus brought home to ourselves,” to affect us as if they were our own, for “we then tremble and shudder at the thought of what he feels.”¹⁹ Brontë expands this experience by explicitly making the experience of shared suffering a foundation for shared identity rather than shared pain alone. Catherine’s locution thus invokes but confounds the model of Smithean sympathy in its procedure and its pairing of adoptive kin. Heathcliff ’s status as her foster-brother suggests the suffering brother of Smith’s sympathy, while the novel’s farreaching speculations about his racial origins also make her declaration an assimilation of ultimate difference, a claim of shared identity based on resemblance achieved through the observation of suffering. When Catherine asserts “I am Heathcliff,” the novel begins a rare foray into metaphorical language, a shift that indicates the resistance to representation that characterizes this instance of sympathetic identification. That resistance to representation is particularly significant because, as I detail below, it finds its inverse in Lockwood’s acts of narrative transmission and textual production. Catherine is, as Bersani has noted, not “like” Heathcliff, in an articulation that would more closely parallel Smith’s pattern of the imaginative triangulation that aspires to the third-person perspective of the impartial spectator.²⁰ Her statement is not one of conjecture—she does not, of course, suppose in the subjunctive mood, “I feel as if I were Heathcliff”— but instead an indicative statement of complete equivalence. There is, in her formulation, no need for abstraction or conjecture in order to access his sufferings. In rejecting resemblance and triangulation in favor of equivalence and full identification, her statement adopts figurative language that spills

¹⁸ Marriage of Minds, p. 53.

¹⁹ Theory, p. 12.

²⁰ A Future for Astyanax, p. 204.

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over into following passages: her love for Heathcliff “resembles the eternal rocks” as opposed to her love for Linton, which will change “like the foliage in the woods” (73).²¹ This metaphorical language—rare in Wuthering Heights—suggests a strained effort to articulate her connection to Heathcliff. While Susan Meyer has understood Heathcliff ’s own silence about his past as a kind of resistance to the translation of his experience into the language of the colonizer, it is also worth noting that Catherine’s expression of their bond largely avoids literal language.²² Beyond this brief account of witnessed and shared suffering, fully assimilated selves do not, it seems, easily lend themselves to forms of verbal representation. In a description that suggests the similarities connecting the novel’s various family members, Catherine asks Nelly whether she has considered the possibility of “an existence of yours beyond you” (72). As Richard Dellamora has argued, Catherine’s language posits an “intersubjective being” that lies “outside the limits of consanguinity.” Taking a similar approach, Daniela Garofalo has identified in the novel a conception of family that, by rejecting individual possession and racially-based exclusion, depends on a dissolution of the boundaries upon which more traditional understandings of family rely.²³ In extending beyond a connection of kinship or fosterage to a state of complete assimilation, the relationship between Catherine and Heathcliff additionally rejects the remaining distance between self and other that, in the model of vicarious narrative, prompts narrative exchange. In light of the range of ethnicities the novel bestows on Heathcliff and its silence about his “true” origins, reading Catherine’s identification with him as an instance of sympathy uncovers Brontë’s transformation of versions of sympathy that distinguish between resemblance and difference. The apparent dismissal of gender difference in Catherine’s identification with Heathcliff, it is worth noting, fails to register as such.²⁴ This instance of identification conjures not only the blood ties of kinship that lend Smith’s image of the tortured brother its visceral discomfort but also the radical

²¹ Steven Vine observes that Catherine here “fictionalizes herself” and “produces herself as tenor to Heathcliff ’s vehicle.” “The Wuther of the Other,” p. 347. ²² Imperialism at Home: Race and Victorian Women’s Fiction (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996), p. 101. ²³ Richard Dellamora, “Earnshaw’s Neighbor / Catherine’s Friend: Ethical Contingencies in Wuthering Heights,” English Literary History 74 (2007), p. 541. Daniela Garofalo, “Impossible Love and Commodity Culture in Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights,” English Literary History 75 (2008), p. 833. ²⁴ Indeed, as Ablow has observed, Wuthering Heights “describes gender difference as little more than a byproduct of different degrees of power.” Marriage of Minds, p. 45.

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difference of an indeterminate race that Smith’s sympathy can only attempt to accommodate. Catherine’s confession suggests both extremes at once—an assimilation of radical otherness and a complete mirroring of the self in the familial other. The novel’s depiction of Heathcliff—as foster-brother, as resolutely unspecified racial other—renders Catherine’s statement a denial of the dichotomy between resemblance and difference, between the familial and the foreign, that troubles Smith’s theory of sympathy. Catherine’s assertion that she is Heathcliff suggests that to share the sufferings of another is effectively to erase the boundary that separates sibling from stranger. Insisting on these two possibilities—that Heathcliff is Catherine’s fosterbrother and that he is a member of any number of different races—runs against the grain of much of the critical discussion of Heathcliff ’s ethnicity, which has often sought to ascribe to him a single racial or familial origin. The English Catherine Earnshaw’s identification with Heathcliff carries with it the range of ethnic origins the novel’s characters invent for him, beginning on its first page. The novel’s first word—“1801”—dates Lockwood’s initial assessment of Heathcliff. Their encounter also follows the previous century’s conceptions of race: “He is,” to Lockwood’s eighteenth-century eye, “a darkskinned gypsy in aspect, in dress and manners a gentleman” (3). By first considering complexion and origin, then attire and manners, Lockwood’s chiastic description includes aspects of the racial discourse that is contemporary with the period of the novel’s setting, a period when “race” was only just coming to be more exclusively tied to complexion and hair color as opposed to other signs of difference, specifically dress, manners, and religion.²⁵ His skin and face appear to him as exotic and lowly, but with “dress and manners” Lockwood partakes of eighteenth-century understandings of race before he concludes with the comfort of legible class standing. Lockwood’s conclusion with Heathcliff ’s apparent gentlemanly status softens any discomfort that his use of “gypsy” might betray, and Hinton’s claim that Heathcliff ’s “color and origins threaten Lockwood’s certainty about white mastery and hegemony” deemphasizes the second half of his description.²⁶ Lockwood’s designation is one of many the novel bestows on Heathcliff, and it is the abundance of such language rather than the implications of any ²⁵ This discussion relies in particular on two excellent studies of the shifting registers in race discourse in the final decades of the eighteenth century: Dror Wahrman’s Making of the Modern Self: Identity and Culture in Eighteenth-Century England (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004) and Roxann Wheeler’s The Complexion of Race (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000). ²⁶ The Perverse Gaze, p. 164.

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individual term that makes Catherine’s assertion of their shared identity all the more significant: rather than an instance of identification with a member of one particular group, her claim is potentially one of ultimate assimilation, precisely because Heathcliff ’s origins remain unspecified. I want therefore to emphasize rather than decode the insistent uncertainty of Heathcliff ’s racial status in order to consider its fictional range instead of its historical referent. This range accrues in lists, and speculations about Heathcliff ’s origins most frequently appear as juxtapositions or amalgamations of various ethnicities. In one scene, Nelly instructs Heathcliff in the art of facial expression while conjuring a regal racialized past: after Heathcliff wishes aloud for “ ‘light hair’ ” and “ ‘fair skin,’ ” Nelly tells him that “ ‘A good heart will help you to a bonny face, my lad . . . if you were a regular black; and a bad one will turn the bonniest into something worse than ugly.’ ” “ ‘Who knows,’ ” she continues, “ ‘but your father was Emperor of China, and your mother an Indian queen . . . ? And you were kidnapped by wicked sailors, and brought to England. Were I in your place, I would frame high notions of my birth’ ” (50). The imagined ancestry that Nelly grants Heathcliff includes multiple races: while recent criticism has tended to read him as a figure for one particular ethnicity, Nelly’s story emphasizes racial multiplicity.²⁷ Significantly, it is through the form of narrative that Nelly accounts for his origins: the story she weaves indicates that Heathcliff ’s unknown identity encourages a tendency to project, imagine, and narrate—in short, to fictionalize.²⁸ In another scene, Catherine and Heathcliff scamper away to Thrushcross Grange and spy on the Lintons as the children fight over a puppy. They are attacked by the family’s dog, and Heathcliff is assessed, by Mr. Linton, as “‘a gypsy’” and then as “‘that strange acquisition my late neighbor made in his journey to Liverpool—a little Lascar, or an American or Spanish castaway’” (44).²⁹ Alternatively a “gypsy,” a South Asian shipman,

²⁷ This tendency also appears in Charlotte’s preface, in which she discusses the humanizing effects of Heathcliff ’s feelings for Hareton and Nelly. Without these sentiments, she says, Heathcliff would be considered “child neither of Lascar nor gipsy, but a man’s shape animated by demon life—a Ghoul—an Afreet” (327). Racial hybridity characterizes what he is considered in the novel (Lascar or gypsy) while racial and metaphysical difference would, if he had no kind feelings, determine his identity (as a Ghoul [otherworldly] or an Afreet [a demon in Islamic myth]). ²⁸ John Allen Stevenson has commented that “being nothing in himself, Heathcliff is uniquely available to everyone else’s powers of projection”; this claim is an apt description of new historicist approaches to the unanswered question of Heathcliff ’s ethnic identity. “ ‘Heathcliff is Me!’ ” p. 71. ²⁹ Savage violence lurks behind class privilege here. See Eagleton, Heathcliff and the Great Hunger, pp. 106–7, and Elsie Michie, “From Simianized Irish to Oriental Despots: Heathcliff, Rochester and Racial Difference,” Novel: A Forum on Fiction 25 (1992), p. 133.

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or a Native American or Hispanic orphaned child of the seas, Heathcliff conjures, by means of his unknown identity, extreme geographical mobility of the sort that narratives of slavery and colonialism foreground.³⁰ As opposed to the critics who have emphasized Heathcliff ’s unexplained origins, scholars who have read Heathcliff as a member of any particular group have minimized the significance of the wide variety of the novel’s speculative histories of his origins. In Heathcliff ’s characterization, Brontë invokes, much as Shelley does with Frankenstein’s creature, not an echo of any single racial identity but the more general condition of difference that is beyond classification. Reading this racial multiplicity as an indication that Heathcliff is, as some critics have claimed, a gypsy, Irishman, or African eliminates the importance of Heathcliff ’s obscure origins.³¹ His unknown and unknowable racial identity, as a result of Catherine’s identification with him, redefines sympathetic identification as the erasure of the boundary between resemblance and difference, and it encourages, for the characters who try to classify him, a propensity to fictionalize. To identify with Heathcliff, as Lockwood does at the novel’s outset, is to engage in acts of fictionalizing. But for Lockwood, such acts reach a decidedly more elaborate end than the speculative narratives that Nelly or Mr. Linton offer. The imaginative dynamics of Lockwood’s sympathetic identification with Heathcliff eventually take the form of the self-projection by which he transcribes

³⁰ The multiplicity of his racial status has been read in various ways. For Susan Meyer, Heathcliff ’s racially “collective” status challenges approaches to the novel that have emphasized class. Imperialism at Home, pp. 97–116. H. L. Malchow sees Heathcliff ’s racially-hybrid status as a portrayal of Victorian fears about an infectious but hidden racial identity. Gothic Images of Race, pp. 39–40. ³¹ Elsie Michie assumes that literary character has a historical referent that a reading of racialized stereotypes will reveal. She seeks “historical situations that lie behind such stereotypes, in this case the English relation to Ireland in the 1840s, because that background will allow us to see the stereotype functioning as a screen.” “From Simianized Irish to Oriental Despots,” p. 140. Michie’s approach insists on an essentialism in Heathcliff ’s representation that risks repeating the racist discourse that essentializes difference: if the Irishman, according to this logic, does not manifest his national “type,” it must be suppressed, and if Heathcliff exhibits behaviors typically classified as characteristically “Irish,” then he must be Irish. See also Deborah Epstein Nord, “ ‘Marks of Race’: Gypsy Figures and Eccentric Femininity in Nineteenth-Century Women’s Writing,” Victorian Studies 41 (1998), pp. 189–210, and Eagleton, Heathcliff and the Great Hunger. Even though Maja-Lisa von Sneidern has argued that the novel interrogates the power structures inherent in the system of slavery based not on Heathcliff ’s ethnicity but on the setting’s proximity to Liverpool, she nevertheless reads Linton Heathcliff, the child of Isabella Linton and Heathcliff, as an instance of “miscegenation.” “Wuthering Heights and the Liverpool Slave Trade,” English Literary History 62 (1995), p. 184. For an account of the Brontës’ proximity to Caribbean plantation owners and the likely influence of Yorkshire slaveholders on their fiction, see Christopher Heywood, “Yorkshire Slavery in Wuthering Heights,” Review of English Studies 38 (1987), pp. 184–98.

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and narrates the novel’s central events in the voice of another. In pursuing his own sympathetic attachment, Lockwood extends the tendency to fictionalize that Heathcliff ’s blankness triggers for other characters: seeking sympathy, Lockwood engages instead in practices of hearing, transcribing, and narrating the tales of others. Lockwood’s relationship to Nelly’s narrative, then, compensates for the impossibility of sympathetic identification of the sort that bonds Catherine to Heathcliff. Among the many repetitions between the novel’s characters, such parallels have not gone unnoted: Hinton has, for example, argued that the sympathetic attachment between Lockwood and Nelly Dean manifests a sado-erotic connection that echoes the relationship between Catherine and Heathcliff.³² Extending Ablow’s observation that Brontë promotes “the novel’s ability to compensate for the limitations of sympathy between persons,” I argue that Lockwood’s bond with Nelly allows him to fulfill unattainable sympathetic bonds by modifying imaginative perspective into narrative voice.³³ If to feel and identify with another is impossible, then to narrate for another—through the novelistic forms of narrative embedding and shifting perspectives—seems to offer the only adequate alternative.

Lockwood’s Vicarious Narrative Brontë’s version of vicarious narrative entails a series of redirected desires and altered expectations that explain Lockwood’s adoption of Nelly’s narrative voice at the beginning of the original edition’s second volume. Adaptations of Lockwood’s assumptions determine this novel’s version of sympathy: in coming to narrate for others, Lockwood seems to transform his longing for human sympathy into a longing for narrative, and his romantic interest in Cathy becomes an interest in the marriage plot as a structural abstraction. Additionally, he exhibits a tendency whose extension easily facilitates the novel’s generation of vicarious narrative—that of referring to and understanding people as written and specifically printed texts. Writing abounds in this novel: the series of names carved in a windowledge, inscriptions above the door to Wuthering Heights, books whose

³² Hinton, The Perverse Gaze, p. 155. See also N. M. Jacobs, “Gender and Layered Narrative in Wuthering Heights and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall,” Journal of Narrative Technique 16 (1986), pp. 204–19. ³³ The Marriage of Minds, p. 46.

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margins serve as Catherine’s diary, the books and letters exchanged between Cathy and Linton, and the letter from Isabella Heathcliff that Nelly preserves. References to characters in the novel that employ the language of writing’s materiality, both script and print, predict the novel’s replacement of human sympathy with novelistic sympathy. Lockwood’s language of the printed novel (“sequel,” [79] “second edition” [136]) and of fiction (his union with Cathy would be “more romantic than a fairy tale” [270]) stands in for the direct interaction he might have with the Yorkshire residents. His terms from the publishing industry cast Nelly’s spoken tale as a serialized novel read aloud in installments; he refers to Heathcliff as a “hero” shortly after speaking with the man himself (80).³⁴ The replacement of people with texts that this language suggests is one of the alterations that sympathy will perform in compensating for the impossibility of a personal emotional experience with the experience of hearing, transcribing, and eventually narrating the story of others. The interpretive force and self-confessed projective tendencies of Lockwood’s “sympathetic chord” determine, in a revised form, the production of a written tale that offers him the position of narrator. In Wuthering Heights, the experience of sympathy comes to be one of textual production, of hearing and telling a tale, and particularly of finding a way to insert oneself into the tale of another. The fictionalizing tendencies of certain characters appear in their relationships with texts. Beginning early in the novel, Lockwood’s engagement with the people around him quickly turns to metaphors of published rather than written texts. The famous series of carved names appears “in all kinds of characters, large and small—Catherine Earnshaw, here and there varied to Catherine Heathcliff, and then again to Catherine Linton” (15). A harbinger of Lockwood’s “sequel” and “second edition” that are to follow, these “characters,” by implying carved script and literary personae, simultaneously suggest the written text and the living person, and this language begins to enact the textual version of sympathy Lockwood will accept—and is in the process of generating—as compensation for personal experiences of sympathetic identification that prove impossible. It is perhaps not surprising that a novel by one of the Brontë sisters would replace people with the terminology of written texts. Nancy Armstrong has noted in Desire and Domestic Fiction the textual nature of the Brontës’ ³⁴ Carol Jacobs and Joseph Allen Boone have noted this second point. Jacobs, “Wuthering Heights: At the Threshold of Interpretation,” p. 388; Boone, Tradition Counter Tradition: Love and the Form of Fiction (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), p. 166.

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experience of the outside world.³⁵ Especially noteworthy are the particular ways in which texts are used, responded to, and, most importantly, produced in Wuthering Heights. Lockwood proclaims to Cathy, after she reads the note he brings from Nelly and laments the lack of books at the Heights, “ ‘No books! . . . How do you contrive to live here without them? . . . Though provided with a large library, I’m frequently very dull at the Grange—take my books away, and I should be desperate!’ ” (266). Of course, books, piled against the window during his night at Wuthering Heights, served him in an earlier moment of fear. Without books, Lockwood is indeed desperate, and that desperation encourages him to transform a personal, human interaction with the people he has met into a series of drawn-out journal entries detailing their narrative past; it explains and motivates his narrative production, even as he convalesces in the large and presumably untouched library. Central aspects of his narrative production include the structural rather than affective or social role of the marriage plot and the reconfiguration of his short-lived emotional desires—for companionship (with Heathcliff ), and for marriage (with Cathy)—into narrative structures of transmission and closure. When Lockwood speculates about whether Cathy will turn out to be a “second edition” of her mother and steels himself against the beauty of her eyes, he claims to fear his own possible involvement in the tale. Looking at Cathy’s portrait, and noting he should “beware of the fascination that lurks in Catherine Heathcliff ’s brilliant eyes” if “the daughter turned out a second edition of the mother,” Lockwood momentarily imagines a place for himself in the narrative he is hearing (136). A metaphor of print—the “second edition”—allows him to place the person of Catherine Heathcliff at a safe distance while simultaneously facilitating his participation in the emphatically novelistic marriage plot that Nelly proposes. It is at this very moment that Lockwood does, in fact, become involved in the tale, but he does so not by taking up a position of a romantic suitor but instead by adopting a role of narrative agency. The imaginative perspectives of narrative involvement supersede the visual pleasure of looking, as narrating in his voice takes the place of looking at Cathy’s portrait while listening to Nelly’s narrative. Visuality quickly leads to metaphors of print and publication, and the marriage plot serves more as a structure of novelistic closure than as a

³⁵ Nancy Armstrong, Desire and Domestic Fiction: A Political History of the Novel (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), p. 189.

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device through which to validate erotic desire by social convention.³⁶ The marriage plot performs, then, a structural function that is notable not in terms of the novel’s actual resolution, in which the anticipated marriage between Cathy and Hareton is significant primarily for its return to a kinship model of society, but in terms of framing and voice: with this novelistic structure as a potential response to Lockwood’s desire for printed texts, he soon begins to tell Nelly’s story in his own voice. Conceiving of a marriage plot as way to fulfill narrative rather than romantic desire offers Lockwood a familiar novelistic trope by which to access narrative agency. Lockwood’s projective and visual proclivities become entwined with his generic expectations in Nelly’s construction of a marriage plot: he begins as an obsessive looker, continues gazing on Cathy’s portrait during Nelly’s narrative, but is drawn to imagine a narrative conclusion that abandons the visual in order to pursue the textual and generic. While critics have been attentive to the gendered implications of Lockwood’s scopic drive, which tends toward the containment of the feminine and the validation of an inherently violent system, I argue that Lockwood’s visual proclivities find their outlet in the fabrication of a marriage plot and in his adoption of Nelly’s narrative voice in a transformation of visual experience into narrative perspective.³⁷ When Nelly and Lockwood engage in this fancy, they are positing a conclusion to events that they have been narrating and witnessing. Lisa Sternlieb has rightly noted that Nelly is telling Lockwood the story of her employers in order to construct “a different plot,” one in which Cathy’s future can, against the admission in her final line narrated in Lockwood’s voice, “come within [her] province to arrange” (264).³⁸ Lockwood’s resistance to this plot coincides with his allegiance to such a plot as a device of narrative closure. Responding to Nelly’s observations that he looks “lively and interested” when she describes Cathy and that he has asked her to hang Cathy’s portrait over his fireplace, he exclaims, “Stop, my good friend! . . . It may be very possible that I should love her; but would she love me? . . . I’m of the busy world, and to its arms I must return” (226). Fearing a lack of ³⁶ Without addressing Lockwood’s desire in particular, Armstrong has emphasized the division that the Brontës’ fiction creates between desire and social convention, as opposed to the validation of erotic desire’s position in a social order that Austen’s marriage plots enact. Desire and Domestic Fiction, pp. 191–6. ³⁷ See Newman, “ ‘Situation of Looker-On,’ ” and Judith E. Pike, “ ‘My name was Isabella Linton’: Coverture, Domestic Violence, and Mrs. Heathcliff ’s Narrative in Wuthering Heights,” Nineteenth-Century Literature 64 (2009), pp. 347–83. ³⁸ The Female Narrator in the British Novel: Hidden Agendas (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), p. 41.

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reciprocity—the same absence that would also describe his interaction with Heathcliff—Lockwood resists his entry into Nelly’s imagined marriage plot. Because marriage is for Lockwood an issue of narrative more than romantic desire, of novelistic rather than social convention, his sliding in and out of the novel’s plot and his shifting narrative roles emphasize the structural function that his relationship to the marriage plot serves. Catherine finds a willing recipient of her projective tendencies in Heathcliff ’s unknown identity, which Lockwood discerns in her childhood journal. Examining Catherine’s library, Lockwood describes her books as “well used, though not altogether for a legitimate purpose; scarcely one chapter,” he explains, “had escaped a pen-and-ink commentary—at least, the appearance of one—covering every morsel of blank that the printer had left” (16). Lockwood’s commentary on what he terms Catherine’s commentary suggests his own notions of “legitimate” literate practice. Transforming pious discourse into adolescent autobiography, inserting a narrative of daily life into the margins of a printed book, Catherine’s diary embodies the textual practice of projecting the self into the other of the text.³⁹ Her makeshift diary has “the appearance” of a “commentary”—as marginalia, it looks like interpretive text that takes another text as its subject, but it is in fact autobiographical writing. Her “pen and ink” script stands in contrast to the “blank that the printer had left,” and writing and printing become intertwined but oppositional forces in a formulation that suggests the preference for print echoed in Lockwood’s later reference to Cathy as a “second edition” of her mother. The novel repeatedly illustrates the projective tendencies that texts incite. Catherine’s use of books, which duplicates the patterns of a projective sympathy by locating the self in the blank spaces of the other, is analogous to the move that her claim of shared identity with Heathcliff undertakes. When projection proves inaccurate, as it does in Lockwood’s interaction with the residents of the estate, he compensates by engaging in acts of literary fabrication. Not content to listen and comment from his sickbed, he begins at this point to narrate the story of the Yorkshire residents in his own voice and in Nelly’s words. The self-projection that texts motivate culminates in the feature of the novel’s odd narrative structure that critics have largely dismissed or ignored: Lockwood’s assumption of Nelly’s voice.

³⁹ John Farrell classifies the novel’s characters according to their treatment of books: Catherine projects herself into books, Edgar hides among them, Cathy lets books imprint themselves on her mind, and Lockwood sees them as a diversion. “Reading the Text of Community in Wuthering Heights,” English Literary History 56 (1989), pp. 173–208.

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A “Relic of the Dead”: Reframing the Epistolary Novel Wuthering Heights features numerous transitions—from oral to written text, from romance to realism, between Romantic balladry and Victorian commercialism. The novel’s transitional generic status also includes a reconfiguration of literary sentimentalism and a gothic frame tale’s manipulation of epistolary dynamics. These transformations occur through the mechanics by which Lockwood assumes Nelly’s narrative voice. After hearing Nelly read the married Isabella Heathcliff ’s letter aloud, Lockwood begins to speak with—rather than cite—Nelly’s narrative voice at a moment in the story she is telling when a letter is in the process of being delivered. Additionally, he removes himself from the novel’s core narrative of Catherine and Heathcliff ’s story and reenters the novel’s extradiegetic present moment by delivering a letter from Nelly to Cathy. The circulation and recitation of these letters specifies the roles that epistolary polyvocality and the mechanics of sympathy play in Lockwood’s adoption of Nelly’s voice in particular and the novel’s odd structure in general. Arising from the conjunction of circulating letters with shifts in perspective, the novel’s anomalous frame structure illustrates epistolary fiction’s lingering significance in this midnineteenth-century novel. By shaping the narrative layers of Wuthering Heights, the perspectival mobility that sympathy entails and the shifting speakers and transcendence of distance that the letter affords illuminate the novel’s revision, in its frame structure, of literary sentimentalism. Lennard Davis has examined the ways that the transition from oral to written narrative informs practices of framing in the early English novel, a feature that serves new purposes in this Victorian novel.⁴⁰ This transition from oral to written text, which appears repeatedly in Wuthering Heights, is most vivid in Lockwood’s record of Nelly’s spoken tale. Lockwood’s reception, transcription, and partial narration of this tale constitute his cure: he declares, “Thus ended Mrs. Dean’s story” before noting that he is “rapidly recovering strength” and resuming his original narrative role (264). By contrast, another oral narrative, the ballad, is requested in the novel’s core story as a means to remedy young Linton Heathcliff ’s illness, but Cathy’s recitation of a long ballad fails to cure him.⁴¹ The narrative authority of ⁴⁰ Lennard Davis, Factual Fictions: The Origins of the English Novel (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1983). ⁴¹ On this episode, Susan Stewart argues that ballads, in their multiple perspectives, call forth the novel’s own shifting perspectives. “The Ballad in Wuthering Heights,” Representations 86 (2004), p. 176.

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Nelly’s oral tale is rooted in a written text she seems to keep with her at all times—the letter from Isabella, which forms the novel’s central level. In this sense, the novel’s transitions from oral to written texts have their authenticating origin in the written form of the letter. The transition from orality to script joins the generic transformation of literary sentimentalism, with its heroes eager for a maudlin tale to which they can respond with a tear and a coin. Henry Mackenzie’s Man of Feeling (1771), a novel that celebrates as it parodies effusive feeling, illustrates Lockwood’s similarity to heroes of sentimental fiction. In episodes loosely strung together, Harley, Mackenzie’s titular hero, hears the sad tale of an unfortunate character and responds with effusive tears and, more often than not, the tribute of a coin.⁴² Harley’s sympathetic responses are marked by nervous vibrations and bodily weakness that find an echo in the physiological version of fellow-feeling that trembles in Lockwood’s “sympathetic chord”; the embedded narratives that threaten to break the seams of this barely-stitched together novel are also mirrored in the complex narrative frame that positions Lockwood as the auditor and, later, second-hand narrator of Nelly’s tale. Seeking rental property and shared feeling as the novel begins, Lockwood, true to this generic lineage, leaves “a remembrance” in Nelly’s hand and assures his readers at the novel’s conclusion that the servant Joseph has “recognized” him as “a respectable character by the sweet ring of a sovereign at his feet” (300). While this payment might suggest a Victorian novel-reader’s treatment of a bookseller, in light of his sympathetic trembling in the novel’s first chapter and the novel’s complex frame structure, it is also possible to see this “remembrance” as a reenactment of the tropes of sentimental fiction, as a relic of the eighteenth-century commodified culture of sentiment. Another kind of relic lies at the center of the novel’s enclosed narrative levels. Isabella Heathcliff muses, in a letter to Nelly, on the absence of sympathy. The enclosure of Isabella’s letter within the novel’s nested structure casts it as a “relic,” as Nelly calls it, not only “of the dead” (119), but also, I argue, of the epistolary novel’s aspirations to emotional communicability. Through a reconfiguration of the letter’s vocal possibilities, its ability to mobilize voices and sentiments, Wuthering Heights shows the letter—both Isabella’s letter and the letter as a form—to be at the core of this novel’s frame structure. Letters are, to be sure, exchanged in the plot of the novel, ⁴² For a reading of the novel’s economy of sentiment, see Maureen Harkin, “Mackenzie’s Man of Feeling: Embalming Sensibility,” English Literary History 61 (1994), pp. 317–40.

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but I look to two letters in particular to consider the role that their delivery plays in allowing Lockwood to narrate in Nelly Dean’s voice.⁴³ The novelistic letter’s associations with sympathy—with emotional communicability and shifting perspectives—indicate the extent to which the anomalous frame structure of Wuthering Heights relies on a revision of sympathy’s literary incarnations. Wuthering Heights belongs to a history of the novel that emphasizes the lingering significance of the written letter in particular and emphasizes the continued relevance of outmoded literary forms in general. While such an approach is necessarily at odds with many influential readings of Brontë’s novel, Lockwood’s literary provenance, responsive tendencies, and narrative agency expose the revisionary role of Wuthering Heights in histories of sympathy and the novel. Second-hand transmission determines Wuthering Heights’s frame structure and informs the circulation of letters in its plot: stories told are those of others, and letters delivered are those written by other hands. Nelly is telling a story of which she is a part but not the central agent. The common practice of employing a letter-carrier informs the novel’s narrative perspective when Lockwood seems to learn from Nelly’s tale and her presentation, in voice and text, of Isabella’s letter, that carrying another’s letter permits the telling of another’s story. Nelly’s unfolding and reading of Isabella’s letter offers Lockwood valuable instruction in the authenticating value of the letter, and this scene is soon followed by Lockwood’s assumption of Nelly’s voice. In the eighteenth-century epistolary novel, the form of the letter implies vocal mobility and shared sentiment; in Wuthering Heights, these residual associations encourage Lockwood to speak in Nelly’s voice even if this shift is not accompanied by shared feeling. When, in the story she is telling, Nelly carries a letter from Heathcliff to Catherine, that letter’s delayed transmission allows Lockwood, according to the novel’s revision of epistolarity, to begin to speak in her voice and from his own narrative position: with the delivery of a letter, Lockwood begins to speak as another person. Isabella’s letter introduces the formal mechanism of shifting voices and textual production that can attempt to compensate for its subject—the absence of sympathy in her married life at Wuthering Heights. Critics have minimized the importance of this letter for a number of reasons: Isabella is a minor character, she appears naïve and foolish, and her account ⁴³ Other letters in the novel include Nelly’s notes, Heathcliff ’s letter to Catherine, Isabella’s announcement of her marriage to Edgar, Edgar’s letter after Isabella’s funeral, and the notes exchanged between Linton and Cathy.

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has been understood to do little more than supply information beyond Nelly’s view.⁴⁴ Her letter is occasionally noted as the central narrative layer in this frame tale—Gérard Genette, in fact, singles it out as an example of metadiegetic narrative—but the conceptual and formal significance of this letter remains to be explored.⁴⁵ Nelly’s recitation of Isabella’s letter and Lockwood’s subsequent adoption of Nelly’s narrative voice constitute the novel’s attempt to resolve the generic, affective, and projective desires that its early chapters leave unsatisfied. The logic according to which Lockwood can take up Nelly’s voice clarifies the reconfigurations of literary sentimentalism that determine the odd structure of Wuthering Heights. Nelly’s introduction of her letter makes Isabella’s voice speak from the desperate isolation of the Heights and the silence of the grave: she states, “I’ll read it, for I keep it yet. Any relic of the dead is precious, if they were valued living” (119). The value of this relic is in part, of course, the insight it gives into Heathcliff ’s marriage—an account of domestic abuse, as Judith Pike has argued, whose value is registered in the term “relic.”⁴⁶ Alternatively, it is possible to emphasize the temporal distance that this term implies, distance that I suggest can be understood as generic. From the position of Nelly’s diegesis, Isabella herself, her suffering, and, significantly, her sentimental expectations are at a far remove. The letter is, in Wuthering Heights, a lost art from an earlier time, and Isabella’s letter engages in an obsolete sentimental mode before she describes the utter want of sympathy at the estate. Structurally, Lockwood’s framing of the novel’s core story fulfills the promise that Isabella’s stymied hopes for sympathetic exchange articulate at the novel’s center: the novel’s narrative frames or extradiegetic levels, particularly as they overlap with its diegesis, satisfy the expectations of shared perspectives if not shared feeling that Isabella’s central, metadiegetic narrative expresses. In her letter, Isabella asks Nelly about her time at Wuthering Heights: “How did you contrive to preserve the common sympathies of human ⁴⁴ For a nuanced approach to Isabella’s significance as a narrator, see Pike, “ ‘My name was Isabella Linton.’ ” Gideon Shunami argues that Isabella’s letter fills the “dead space” between the novel’s two parts. “The Unreliable Narrator in Wuthering Heights,” Nineteenth-Century Fiction 27 (1973), p. 466. Susan Stewart describes her letter as a “deviation” from Nelly’s narrative voice. “The Ballad in Wuthering Heights,” p. 184. Margaret Homans dismisses Isabella’s letter despite its status as a “proof” document and observes that it simply supplies part of the story. “Repression and Sublimation of Nature in Wuthering Heights,” PMLA 93 (1978), p. 10. ⁴⁵ Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method, trans. Jane E. Lewin (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1980), p. 232. ⁴⁶ “ ‘My name was Isabella Linton,’ ” p. 358.

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nature when you resided here? I cannot recognise any sentiment which those around share with me” (120). Under Heathcliff ’s vengeful control, the estate pits each resident against the others, and the only sentiment likely to be shared is that of intense antipathy. While Heathcliff tortures his new wife and foster-brother Hindley, Isabella tells Nelly—in person, after Nelly receives her letter—that Hindley “search[ed] in [her] eyes a sympathy with the burning hate that gleamed from his: as he both looked and felt like an assassin, he couldn’t exactly find that; but he discovered enough to encourage him to speak” (155). They conspire to bar Heathcliff from entering the house, and the struggle ends when Heathcliff attacks Hindley. Sympathetic attachments produce conspiratorial revenge that results in a savage physical struggle. The only letter to be reproduced in the body of the novel, Isabella’s missive reveals an absence of any emotional reciprocity other than hatred, a lack of sympathy that is emphasized by its articulation in a form associated with the communicability of feeling. Isabella’s letter borrows from a sentimental discourse that sketches her naïveté and specifies the perspectival potential this letter carries. Early in her letter, she tells Nelly to “Inform Edgar that I’d give the world to see his face again—that my heart returned to Thrushcross Grange in twenty-four hours after I left it, and is there at this moment, full of warm feelings for him, and Catherine! I can’t follow it, though—(those words are underlined)” (120). Nelly indicates that what the reader of the printed novel sees as italics, and what Lockwood possibly hears as vocal emphasis, is in its original written form an underlined phrase. Describing the simultaneous presence and absence that features in so much epistolary fiction of the previous century, Isabella allows herself a moment of vulnerability that, in its graphic marks of emotional excess, appears as a distinction between the written, spoken, and printed word when her letter is read aloud. The explicit unavailability of sentimentalism marks the point at which the printed novel becomes visible in Brontë’s italics and Nelly’s parenthetical comment. As opposed to Catherine’s emphatic “I am Heathcliff,” these italics point to the novel’s linguistic media—oral, written, and printed. The printed novel comes into the foreground for the reader when outmoded literary forms fail, as if to emphasize the condition of Wuthering Heights as a recited, transcribed, and printed story, its status as the record of Lockwood’s production of vicarious narrative as a replacement for impossible experiences of sympathy. Earlier noted for her reading of romances and tales of chivalry, Isabella suggests in her letter a correction of her past fantasies. She describes Joseph’s locking of an outer gate, “as if,” she mocks him, “we lived in an ancient castle”

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and seems to revoke her fiction-fueled assumptions (120). For Lockwood, himself a poor reader given to fiction-fueled assumptions, Isabella’s letter offers him another kind of corrective—the formal means of shifting perspectives by which he can assume a new role within the narrative he has been hearing. Positioned within the first volume’s penultimate chapter, Isabella’s letter suggests the narrative authority of the written word, the affective and vocal mobility of the letter as a form, and the thwarted anticipation of reciprocal sentiment. At the conclusion of the following chapter and the novel’s first volume, Nelly pauses in her tale-telling while she is, in her story, carrying Heathcliff ’s letter. Isabella’s letter offers narrative, vocal, and affective associations which validate Lockwood’s assumption of Nelly’s voice. This shift in perspective replaces an impossible affective sympathy with a narrative, textual approximation of sympathy and generates a Victorian frame tale by reshaping assumptions of eighteenth-century literary modes. The prominent materiality of books in Wuthering Heights is emblematic of the structural work that sympathy performs in replacing a personal emotional experience with a transcribed, narrative experience; indeed, the volume break in the original edition, whether the result of printer’s need or Brontë’s choice, reinforces Lockwood’s ascent in structural and material registers. In light of the novel’s emphasis on the materiality of texts, it is particularly suggestive that he effectively narrates an entire volume of this novel, which, in its original form, constituted the first two volumes of a three-volume set (Anne Brontë’s Agnes Grey was the third). The perspectival and material break in Nelly’s story effectively grants Lockwood, a figure of the novel-reader, the authority of novelistic and, in the novel’s original format, perhaps even publication forms. Critics have noted Lockwood’s assumption of Nelly’s voice at the beginning of the second volume. His role in the narrative has been likened to “the feeble position of a copyist,” and his assumption of Nelly’s voice has been considered “a move of narrative efficiency” or an indication of his complicity with Nelly’s unreliability.⁴⁷ By contrast, I argue that Lockwood’s entry into the fictional realm of the novel and assumption of narrative agency are especially significant for the revision of epistolary dynamics that they enact. ⁴⁷ John Farrell, “Reading the Text,” p. 181; Jeffrey Williams, Theory and the Novel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), p. 138. Carol Jacobs has argued that Lockwood is displaced “as a direct narrator of the novel.” “Wuthering Heights: At the Threshold of Interpretation,” p. 372. Gideon Shuanami, by contrast, has noted that Lockwood here “enters the narrative universe of intrigue” and that “the two narrators are united.” “The Unreliable Narrator in Wuthering Heights,” Nineteenth-Century Fiction 27 (1973), p. 460.

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As letters in epistolary fiction frequently bemoan the distance they hope to transcend, the letters that open and close Lockwood’s narration of Nelly’s story—letters that suggest, each in its own way, transgressions of decorum— offer a means by which Lockwood can overcome the distance that separates him from the events of the core story. One chapter after Isabella’s letter, as this shift takes place, Nelly is, in the core narrative, reluctantly carrying a letter from Heathcliff to Catherine. The transgressive nature of the letter from the recently returned Heathcliff to the now married Catherine—the letter bears his request that Catherine see him in her home—threatens domestic boundaries and sexual decorum. The transgressive mobility this letter suggests in its content (Heathcliff ’s request) and its form facilitates Lockwood’s act of narrative transgression. This shift in voice, like each shift in perspective in this novel, is not directly actuated through shared feeling. Instead, the formal dynamics of sympathy appear here and throughout the novel without affect. As Garrett Stewart has observed, Nelly’s narrative remains a story for Lockwood, and “Desire does not escape the tale.”⁴⁸ Lockwood’s projective rather than affective “sympathetic chord” facilitates narrative structures rather than interpersonal bonds. The novel’s second volume opens with Lockwood’s declaration that he is “nearer health” and that, having heard “all my neighbor’s history,” he will “continue it in her own words, only a little condensed. She is, on the whole, a very fair narrator and I don’t think I could improve her style.” This shift in narrative perspective is largely indiscernible: true to his word, Lockwood does not seem to alter Nelly’s style. The core narrative is interrupted at the end of volume one and taken up again at the beginning of volume two, at which point Lockwood stumbles as he begins to ventriloquize Nelly’s voice. With its first words, Lockwood’s second-hand narrative is marked by stammering and conjecture: “In the evening, she said, the evening of my visit to the Heights, I knew, as well as if I saw him, that Mr. Heathcliff was about the place; and I shunned going out, because I still carried his letter in my pocket” (137). Lockwood trips up, repeating “the evening” before shifting from thirdto first-person pronouns in the same sentence, and then borrows the certitude and conjecture of Nelly’s original “I knew, as well as if I saw him” in order to assert his new position as proxy narrator. He begins his narration of Nelly’s tale, thus, with a claim of knowledge ascribed to conjectural visual certainty. In this sentence, visual perspective fuels second-hand narrative perspective

⁴⁸ Dear Reader, p. 240.

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as Lockwood learns to see and speak not as himself but as another. Nelly’s delivery of this letter is reluctant: she “argued, and complained, and flatly refused” Heathcliff ’s request “fifty times,” and after being “forced” into an agreement, three days and “many misgivings” later, she gives the note to Catherine (135–6). In addition to the letter’s vocal mobility, Nelly’s account of her withdrawal from events of the core narrative and her delayed delivery of Heathcliff ’s letter allow Lockwood to project himself into what now seems to be the available role of narrator. When Lockwood again narrates in his own voice, he describes his own reluctance to carry Nelly’s note to Cathy: he does not refuse, “for the worthy woman was not conscious of anything odd in her request” (265). Again, a letter’s transgression of decorum—here, Lockwood’s shame at being considered the writer of the letter he delivers and therefore a possible suitor of Cathy—facilitates, in that letter’s second-hand transmission, the novel’s final shift in narrative perspective. With a response of disapproval at the oddness of Nelly’s request, Lockwood effectively enters the events of the plot that he has thus far been hearing and transcribing. This letter’s delivery bridges the distance between diegesis and metadiegesis in two ways: first, by bringing events in the story up to the moment of their narration and, second, by linking this somewhat unclear shift in perspective—Lockwood ceases to speak in his voice as Nelly and begins to speak in his voice as himself again—with epistolary circulation. At the close of this chapter, Lockwood has been emplotted in Nelly’s hopeful scheme for Cathy’s marriage, while his persistent fictionalizing indicates that Nelly’s romantic scheme strikes him as an appropriate “plot,” as a cliché of narrative closure but not a scheme for romantic attachment. Speculating about his attachment to Cathy, he opines, “What a realization of something more romantic than a fairy tale it would have been” (270). In Wuthering Heights, the letter’s association with a novelistic tradition of affective communicability facilitates shifts in narrative voice. Lockwood’s narrative role derives from a residual, structural logic of epistolarity and an interpretive version of sympathy that is constituted by projection rather than affect. In Wuthering Heights, the practice of carrying the letter of another, transposing the voice of one speaker by another hand, facilitates the novel’s formal shifts between speakers. While Nelly carries the voice of Heathcliff in his letter, Lockwood can assume her narrative voice, and while Lockwood is asked to carry Nelly’s voice to Cathy, he is also being asked to return to the present-day events of the novel’s outermost narrative level and enter the core narrative’s world by means of a proposed marriage plot.

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In her novel’s fundamental revision of eighteenth-century moral philosophy and sentimental, epistolary fiction, Brontë challenges theories of sympathy that rely on human resemblance and modifies the novelistic forms that arise from the pursuit of shared sentiment. Reconfiguring the dynamics of epistolarity and capitalizing on the novelistic version of sympathy that previous novels have struggled to articulate, the frame structure of Wuthering Heights renders the sympathetic transmission of narrative an exclusively formal process that is predicated on the imaginative, structural dynamics rather than the lived experience of shared feeling. Through its reformulation of sympathy, Wuthering Heights brings the affective patterns of eighteenth-century epistolary fiction to the formal mechanisms of the Victorian novel.

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Coda

The foregoing chapters identify a novelistic version of sympathy in which the exchange of narrative replaces a sustained, complete experience of sympathetic identification between characters who are separated by difference. This abstract version of sympathy determines the narrative structures of Sterne’s episodic novels, the embedded tales of canonical French fiction, and classic frame tales by Shelley and Brontë, and it entails shifting narrative perspectives rather than sensory perception. Exposing fundamental dualities in “point of view,” such sympathetic experiences generate imaginative and textual perspectives that explicitly overcome the limitations of embodied visual perception. The attempt—and specifically the failed attempt—to achieve, express, and sustain sympathetic attachment is crucial to the production of these novels. Such attempts fail when radical difference forestalls the sentiments that, in many Enlightenment accounts of sympathy, float freely between those who resemble each other. The familial bond that underscores Smith’s scenario of “our brother . . . upon the rack” implies the intractable necessity of resemblance in his theory of shared feeling, a necessity that the impartiality of his third-party spectator struggles to overcome. In this philosophical context, resemblance facilitates sympathetic experience. In the novels I discuss, though, excessive likeness—the siblings of revolutionary-era French fiction, Shelley’s threatening monstrous resemblance, the complete interassimilation of Heathcliff and Catherine—thwarts narrative representation and precludes the structures of embedded narratives upon which these works anchor their generic status. This is not to claim, in a mode of deconstructionist generality, that opposition or tension is the foundation of novelistic discourse. Instead, the structures that I call vicarious narratives identify a particular version of sympathetic identification and the function it performs in making key novels depend on the attempt to represent, in the first person, the experience of being another person. These cited tales and framed narratives bear a close historical relationship to free indirect discourse. Through grammars and structures of vicarious Vicarious Narratives: A Literary History of Sympathy, 1750–1850. Jeanne M. Britton, Oxford University Press (2019). © Jeanne M. Britton. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198846697.001.0001

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narrative, one character tells another’s story after a shift in perspective; similar modifications of perspective characterize the novelistic strategy of free indirect discourse. Hailed as “the novel’s one and only formal contribution to literature,” this narrative technique develops over the same period that spans the publication of novels by Sterne and Brontë.¹ The technique arises most clearly in the works of Austen, whose earliest fictions were first written as epistolary novels and later revised as third-person narratives that include frequent forays into free indirect discourse. While I have argued that sympathy oversees the reformulation of epistolarity into retrospective firstperson narratives, the textual history and stylistic development of Austen’s works attest to the refining of epistolary perspectives into free indirect discourse. Free indirect discourse and vicarious narratives have more in common than this possible common source in the emotional urgency and varied perspectives of epistolary fiction. The imprecision of “free indirect discourse”—it can, for some critics, refer to reported speech as well as reported thoughts—captures the emotional and auditory aspects of novelistic experiences of sympathy, which result in cited, framed speech after attempts to share another person’s feelings, to identify with another through emotional but not necessarily verbal means. The mingled thoughts and speech that incite and constitute vicarious narratives find a stylistic corollary in the mingled thoughts and speech that free indirect discourse represents. This correlation appears more clearly in the mechanics of citation in Mackenzie’s epistolary Julia de Roubigné or the odd syntax in which Sterne’s Yorick relates the speech of a caged bird than it does in the frame structures of Frankenstein or Wuthering Heights. What most distinctly sets free indirect discourse apart from vicarious narratives is the fact that free indirect discourse usually involves the narrator’s efforts to enter the mind of a character in third-person narrative, while novelistic sympathy describes the labors of characters, who exist on an equal playing field of opaque consciousnesses, to access the thoughts of other characters. In eighteenth- and nineteenth-century fiction, free indirect discourse tends not to cross lines of radical difference.² Differences between the ¹ Frances Ferguson, “Jane Austen, Emma, and the Impact of Form,” in Reading for Form, ed. Susan J. Wolfson and Marshall Brown (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2007), p. 233. ² It is worth noting, though, that Ann Banfield’s classic study pointed out that the earliest hints of free indirect discourse, in La Fontaine’s Fables, convey the thoughts of animals. Unspeakable Sentences: Narration and Representation in the Language of Fiction (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1982), p. 261.

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characters and narrators whose thoughts and positions meld in free indirect discourse are, in its most paradigmatic instances, comparatively subtle: Austen certainly mocks Emma Woodhouse, but she does so from a position of intimate familiarity and affectionate disapproval. Discussions of this technique have called special attention to its ethical and ideological implications, its echoes and encouragement of sympathetic identification as well as its collusion with systematic authority. On one hand, free indirect discourse simulates a narrator’s sympathetic identification with a character while, on the other, this narrative style can enact a disciplinary force. Rae Greiner identifies sympathy’s redeployment in free indirect discourse as one of realism’s foundational mechanisms in an argument that lacks the insidiousness of, for example, William Galperin’s claim that Austen understood it as a “sinister instrument of coercion.”³ Free indirect discourse follows the cognitive patterns that Smith identifies in the workings of sympathetic response.⁴ In its fluid and subtle movement between two distinct consciousnesses—the narrator’s and the character’s— this technique renders in narrative discourse the shifting perspectives that animate Smith’s sympathy. But this technique’s fluidity is precisely what limits its parallel with Smithean sympathy, an imaginative process that does not share the inevitability and easy mobility of Hume’s wandering sentiments. When Smith’s sympathy encounters challenges—especially that of human difference—he describes shifting perspectives of a sort that novelists employ to reconsider the limits of human resemblance. In this period, narrators tend, with a few well-known exceptions, to share the race and background of their authors, and they certainly enter and articulate the thoughts of imperial subjects and slaves, but they do not do so, to my knowledge, through free indirect discourse. The relationship between free indirect discourse and the sympathetic imagination lies beyond the confines of this book, then, because it does not, during this historical period,

³ Greiner, Sympathetic Realism; Galperin, The Historical Austen, p. 10. For a discussion of free indirect discourse’s relationship to sympathetic identification, see Wendy Jones’s “Emma, Gender, and the Mind-Brain,” English Literary History 75.2 (2008), pp. 315–43. Michael McKeon reconciles the ethical and coercive views by describing free indirect discourse as both insidious and effective because it seems to foster sympathetic response without drawing attention to itself as a rhetorical technique. The Secret History of Domesticity, pp. 703–7. ⁴ Indeed, Angus Fletcher has suggested that Smith anticipates this novelistic technique in his Lectures on Rhetoric, where he speculates about an “ ‘indirect method’ ” that, as Fletcher puts it, entails “a combination of diegetic narrative and dramatic presentation.” Angus Fletcher and Mike Benveniste, “A Scientific Justification for Literature: Jane Austen’s Free Indirect Style as Ethical Tool,” Journal of Narrative Theory 43.1 (2013), p. 6.

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encompass the confrontation with difference that the novelistic mode of vicarious narration articulates. The similarities between vicarious narratives and free indirect discourse do, however, betray a fundamental aspect of the novel—a pervasive interest in witnessing, in all the formal and stylistic complexity its fictional forms take, the attempt to uncover and inhabit another person’s present emotional state and past lived experience. Nevertheless, distinctions between vicarious narratives and free indirect discourse sketch the particular generic and conceptual significance of narrative levels that shift as a result of stymied sympathetic response. Cited, embedded, and framed narratives respond not only to the phenomenological limits and imaginative struggle that Smith’s account of sympathy identifies, but also to the absence of sympathetic identification in the textual worlds of Godwin, Mackenzie, Bernardin, Chateaubriand, Shelley, and Brontë. Even in the midst of the sympathetic pulses that keep Sterne’s worlds in an almost constant tremble, this structure of abstract sympathy appears when his expansive kinships reach their limit. Free indirect discourse, like vicarious narration, responds to an interest in identifying and sharing the hidden activity of another person’s mind. Shifts in narrative levels that are indexed by strained experiences of sympathy, however, show how novelistic structures, and fiction itself, can stand in for human sympathies in their absence.

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Index Abbé Prévost see Prévost d’Exiles, Antoine François anthology rise and revisionary effects of 18–19 Atala (Chateaubriand) kinship and sympathy in relation 6–7 sympathy within 19–20 Austen, Jane domesticity of 5–6 free indirect discourse 77–8, 209–10 Sense and Sensibility 77–8 sympathy, and 5–6 Blake, William 29 Brontë, Emily, redefinition of sympathy 5–6 see also Wuthering Heights Burke, Edmund, definition of sympathy 10 Caleb Williams (William Godwin) de Grouchy’s translation of Smith’s Theory, and 18, 23–4 grammars of vicariousness 11–12 narrative forms 14–15 Smith’s model of sympathy, and 23–4 sympathetic identification, and 18 violence 27–9, 44, 52–3 Chateaubriand, François-René de see also Atala; René citation 148–9 redefinition of sympathy 5–6 resemblance 144, 148–50 sympathetic response 142 citation Caleb Williams 53 Chateaubriand’s novels 148–9 Enlightenment theories of 51 Frankenstein 78, 166 Julia de Roubigné 18, 71–4, 79–80, 85–8, 91–2, 210 Memoirs of Emma Courtney 78 Sterne’s novels 94–7, 102–8, 123–5 Wuthering Heights 181–2, 200, 202–3

Condorcet, Jean Antoine Nicolas de Caritat, Marquis de 15–16 Condorcet, Sophie de see de Grouchy, Sophie Dacre, Charlotte 157 definition of sympathy 1–21 de Grouchy, Sophie, critique of Smith’s Theory bodies and persons, actual or abstract representation of 37–41 Caleb Williams, and 18, 23–4 differences from Smith’s theory 15–16, 22–3 kinship 15–16, 18, 22–3, 31–3, 35–7 Smith’s “our Brother . . . upon the rack,” and 30–7 sympathetic response 16, 23, 31, 40–1 difference crossing of, by sympathetic identification 9, 96–7 epistolary novel, within 71–2 forms of, in Frankenstein 172–9 racial see racial difference resemblance, and 5–6, 60, 180–1, 191–2 similarity, and 8–9 sympathetic experience, and 172 vicarious narrative, within 172 embedded narrative animal minds and perspectival sympathy 125 Atala as 148–9 form of 12–13, 148–9, 195, 209 frame tales, in 73–4 Smith’s concept of sympathy, and 59, 122, 162–3, 166–7 sympathy within 19–20, 127–8, 147 Wuthering Heights, as 180, 185–6, 201 Enlightenment individuality, and 17–18 Scotland 162 social theory 56–7

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Enlightenment (cont.) theories of sympathy 2–3, 20–1, 24–5, 31–2, 44, 51, 160, 164–7, 172–3, 180, 189, 209 universal humanity, and 56–7 epistemology affective 7 sentimentalist 13–14, 94–5, 185–6 epistolary novel citation within see citation cultural dominance of 70–1 decline of 6, 18, 20–1, 70, 160, 169–70, 181–2 difference within 71–2 early works of Jane Austen 209–10 epistolary forms in frame tales 6, 70–3, 78, 89, 92 epistolary forms in Wuthering Heights 181–2, 184, 200–8 features of 6 forerunners of 80 formal logic 143 free indirect discourse 77–8 Julia de Roubigné and reformulation of epistolary perspectives 84–9 multiplicity of voices 18, 83 racial difference within 89–92 resemblance and 89 self as other within 79 sympathetic response 12–13 sympathy within 5–6, 9, 70, 72–9, 86 frame tale embedded narrative within 73–4 epistolary forms in 6, 70–3, 78, 89, 92 form of 14–15, 101–2 French Revolution, and 19–20 narrative exchangeability as substitute for 54 narrative function 157 racial difference within 89–91 retrospective tales 70 Smith’s concept of sympathy, and 67, 152–3, 159–60 structure of, in Lawrence Sterne’s works 18–19 sympathy within 5–7, 9, 11–12, 45–59, 67–9, 104–25, 134–6, 142–3, 146–51, 159–72, 183–95, 209 Frankenstein as 152–7 Wuthering Heights as 13–14, 181, 184, 202–4

Frankenstein (Mary Shelley) citation 166 forms of difference 172–9 kinship 68–9, 160, 172–3 narrative forms 14–15 redefinition of sympathy 6 resemblance 152–4, 157 sympathetic response 157–8, 163–6, 175–6 sympathy within 16–17, 20 free indirect discourse epistolary novel 77–8 Julia de Roubigné 84, 87–8 narrative omniscience, and 44, 77–8 Smith’s model of sympathy 211–12 sympathetic experience, and 77–8 sympathetic identification, and 210–11 vicarious narrative, and 209–12 French Revolution anthology, and 19–20 kinship, and 126–7 Smith’s model of sympathy, and 22, 25–6, 30 sympathy within 15, 18 violence 15–16, 22, 30–7 French romantic novels see Atala; Paul et Virginie; René gender, sympathy and 9, 191–2 Godwin, William, redefinition of sympathy 5–6 see also Caleb Williams gothic novel frame tale, as 101–2, 157 sympathy within 12–13, 157 grammar eighteenth-century 49–50 narrative technique, and 137 perspective, and 56 Smith’s concept of sympathy, and 25–6 sympathetic identification, and 189–90 vicariousness of 11–12, 23–4, 37–41, 67–8, 77–8, 95–7, 209–10 Guy Mannering (Walter Scott) 76–7 Hays, Mary 75 Hume, David definition of sympathy 10 significance of human resemblance 63 Treatise of Human Nature, A 2–3 indirect discourse see free indirect discourse individuality, Enlightenment and 17–18

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 inset narrative see frame tale interpolated tale see frame tale James, Henry 5–6 Julia de Roubigné (Henry Mackenzie) 162 citation 18, 71–4, 79–80, 85–8, 91–2, 210 epistolary perspective within 18 free indirect discourse 84, 87–8 narrative forms 14–15 redefinition of sympathy 6 reformulation of epistolary perspectives 84–9 shared language and racial difference in relation 89–92 sympathetic response 70–2, 83, 86–7 sympathy within 79–83 kinship Chateaubriand’s novels 139–51 de Grouchy’s critique of Smith, and 15–16, 18, 22–3, 31–3, 35–7 difference, and 180 Enlightenment theories of sympathy, and 2–3 Frankenstein 68–9, 160, 172–3 French Revolution, and 126–7 French romantic novels 126–8 Manon Lescaut 129–31 narrative exchange, and 138–9 narrative form, and 146–51 Paul et Virginie 133–6, 138–9 Redgauntlet 76–7 resemblance, and 35–7, 152–3 Smith’s model of sympathy, and 3–4, 22–3, 56–9, 109–10, 116 Sterne’s novels 95, 102–3, 109, 212 structures of 19–20 structures of, and narrative forms 146–51 sympathetic identification, and 58, 139 sympathetic response, and 6–7, 146–7 sympathy, and 5–6 Tristram Shandy 117–22 Wuthering Heights 180, 191, 197–8 language and racial difference in relation 89–92 Mackenzie, Henry see Julia de Roubigné; Man of Feeling Man of Feeling (Henry Mackenzie) 201

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Manon Lescaut (Prévost) 128–31 Maturin, Charles 157 Melmoth the Wanderer (Charles Maturin) 157 Memoirs of Emma Courtney (Mary Hays) 75, 78 narrative aspects of Smith’s model of sympathy 2–3 embedded see embedded narrative substitute for sympathetic experience 20, 67–8, 152, 155–6, 166, 172 substitute for sympathetic identification 152–3, 187–8, 195–6 narrative exchange achievement of 52–3 equivalent exchanges 140 frame tale replaced by 54 impossibility of 53 kinship structures, and 138–9 Manon Lescaut 128–31 paired exchanges 140 Smith’s model of 54 sympathetic experience, and 128–31 sympathetic identification, and 8–9, 50–1 vicarious narrative, within 191 Wuthering Heights 187 narrative form authoritative or coercive forms 74–5 characters giving rise to 189 containment of 45–6 depictions of strain of sympathetic imagining 55–6, 59 family relationships giving rise to 139 historical realities giving rise to 117 history of 100 kinship structure, and 146–51 national tales, of 75–6 reinterpretation of philosophical models of sympathy 1–2, 25–6, 44 representation of 94–5 sensory aspects of 67–8 types of 3 unrealized forms 14–15 narrative omniscience, free indirect discourse and 44, 77–8 narrative technique action of 44, 137 free indirect discourse, and 77–8 vicarious narrative 209–10

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narrative transmission action of 108, 149–50 acts of 4–5, 8–9, 47, 112–13, 126, 130–1, 147–8, 152–4, 179, 181 blocked instance of 48–9 conflicting means of 20 cross-generational 19–20, 126–8, 131–46 grammar and 20–1 sympathetic 6–7, 112–13 sympathetic experience, and 154 sympathetic identification, and 17–18, 153–4 nested narrative see frame tale novel see also gothic novel; sentimental novel development of, Smith’s model of sympathy and 10–14 distinction from history and romance, and 49–50 ‘Our brother . . . upon the rack’ see Smith’s model of sympathy Owenson, Sydney (Lady Morgan) 75–6 Paul et Virginie (Saint-Pierre) kinship and sympathy in relation 6–7 resemblance 134–5 sympathetic response 137–8 sympathy within 19–20 pity and sympathy compared 10–11 Prévost d’Exiles, Antoine François (l‘Abbé Prévost) 128–31 racial difference epistolary novel, within 89–92 frame tale, within 89–91 sentimental novel, within 8 shared language in relation 89–92 rack, torture by 27–8, 110–12 Redgauntlet (Walter Scott) 76–7 René (Chateaubriand) kinship and sympathy in relation 6–7 narrative forms 14–15 redefinition of sympathy 6 sympathy within 19–20 resemblance Chateaubriand’s novels 144, 148–50 de Grouchy’s critique of Smith, and 23, 35, 64–5

difference, and 5–6, 60, 180–1, 191–2 epistolary novel 89 Frankenstein 152–4, 157–9, 164–7, 171–9 French romantic novels 126–8, 130–1 kinship, and 35–7, 152–3 Paul et Virginie 134–5 Smith’s model of sympathy 22–3, 56, 59–60, 66–7, 69, 71–2, 209, 211–12 Sterne’s novels 102–3, 106–8, 112, 115–16 sympathetic experience, and 209 sympathetic response, and 16 sympathy, and 2–3, 18–19, 63, 67 Tristram Shandy 116, 120–1 Wuthering Heights 180–1, 188–92, 208 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, conception of pity 10–11 Saint-Pierre, Jacques-Henri Bernardin de, redefinition of sympathy 5–6 see also Paul et Virginie Scott, Walter 75–8 historicism of 5–6 Sense and Sensibility (Jane Austen) 77–8 Sentimental Journey, A (Laurence Sterne) 93–7, 102–8 anthologization of 18–19, 104–8 sentimental novel racial difference within 8 sympathy within 8–9 Shaftesbury, Anthony Ashley Cooper, Third Earl of, definition of sympathy 10 shared feeling see sympathy Shelley, Mary, redefinition of sympathy 5–6 see also Frankenstein similarity, difference and 8–9 Smith, Adam see Smith’s model of sympathy; Theory of Moral Sentiments, The Smith’s model of sympathy bodies and persons, actual or abstract representation of 37–41 Caleb Williams, and 23–4 definition of sympathy 1–21 de Grouchy’s translation and critique of see de Grouchy, Sophie development of novel, and 10–14 French Revolution, and 16, 22, 25–6, 30 historical torture and fictional imagination 26–9

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 influence on development of the novel 16 kinship, and 3–4, 22–3, 56–9, 109–10, 116 narrative aspects of 2–3 “our Brother . . . upon the rack” 1, 3–4, 15–16, 26–7, 30–8, 65, 209 resemblance 22–3, 56, 59–60, 66–7, 69, 71–2, 209, 211–12 shift from visual perception to imaginative perspective 1–2, 4–5, 59–69 sympathetic response 2–5, 24, 38–9, 68–9, 211–12 vicariousness of 14 violence and 22–3 social theory, Enlightenment and 56–7 Sterne, Laurence see also Sentimental Journey, A; Tristram Shandy citation 94–7, 102–8, 123–5 historical development of vicarious narrative 16–17 kinship 95, 102–3, 109, 212 redefinition of sympathy 5–7 resemblance 102–3, 106–8, 112, 115–16 story within a story see frame tale sympathetic experience configurations of 80 desire for 156–7 difference, and 172 fleeting nature of 153–4 free indirect discourse, and 77–8 illusory nature of 153–4 impossibility of 78, 155–7 Manon Lescaut 128–31 narrative as substitute for 20, 67–8, 152, 155–6, 166, 172 narrative capacity of 153 narrative exchange, and 128–31 narrative transmission, and 154 obstacles to 42–3 offering of 108 potential for 162–4, 166–7 reformulations of 163–6 resemblance, and 209 role of 7 scholarly theories of 7 simultaneous 155–6 vicarious narrative, and 164 sympathetic identification absence of 212 contrasting instances of 180–1

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crossing of difference 9, 96–7 defining feature of novel, as 1, 49–50 desire for 167–8 experience of 8–9, 117, 147–8, 168–9, 183–4, 209 see also sympathetic experience extreme instance of 187–8 failure of 180–1 free indirect discourse, and 210–11 grammar, and 189–90 imagination of 18–19 kinship, and 58, 139 narrative as substitute for 152–3, 187–8, 195–6 narrative exchange, and 8–9 narrative transmission, and 17–18, 153–4 obstacles to 170–1 preclusion of 153 reformulations of 70, 185–6, 189–90, 194–5 resistance to representation, and 190–1 Smith’s model of 54 social bond of 36–7 transcendent quality of 8–9, 95–6, 110–11 vicarious narrative, and 209 sympathetic response Chateaubriand’s novels 142 de Grouchy’s critique of Smith, and 16, 23, 31, 40–1 eliciting of 1, 3–4 epistolary novel 12–13 Frankenstein 157–8, 163–6, 175–6 French romantic novels 19–20, 126 imagination, and 4–5 Julia de Roubigné 70–2, 83, 86–7 kinship, and 6–7, 146–7 Man of Feeling 201 Manon Lescaut 128–9 mediatory role of 9 Paul et Virginie 137–8 resemblance, and 16 Smith’s model of sympathy 2–5, 24, 38–9, 68–9, 211–12 stymied 212 Tristram Shandy 116–17, 122 violence, and 22, 24–5, 31 Wuthering Heights 181, 184, 187 sympathy see also sympathetic experience; sympathetic identification definition of 1–21

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sympathy (cont.) English and French meanings compared 33–4 Enlightenment theories of 2–3, 20–1, 24–5, 31–2, 44, 160, 166–7, 172–3, 180, 189, 209 Smith’s model of see Smith’s model of sympathy Theory of Moral Sentiments, The (Adam Smith) see also Smith’s model of sympathy characterisation of sympathy 1–2 de Grouchy’s critique of 15–16, 18 Things as They Are; Or, the Adventures of Caleb Williams (William Godwin) see Caleb Williams torture ‘our brother . . . upon the rack’ see Smith’s model of sympathy use of rack 27–8 Tristram Shandy (Laurence Sterne) African girl, untold story of 108–17 anthologization 18–19 kinship 117–22 narrative forms 14–15 resemblance 116–18, 120–1 sympathetic response 116–17, 122 sympathy within 18–19 violence 116–22 universal humanity, Enlightenment and 56–7 vicarious narrative aspirational mode of 97 creation of 180–3 decline of epistolary novel, and 18 definition of 3 difference within 172 free indirect discourse in relation 209–12 historical development of 16–17

narrative exchange within 191 sentimentalist epistemology, and 13–14 sympathetic identification within 209 sympathy as mode of 6 sympathy within 155–6, 164, 177–8, 180 technique of 209–10 Wuthering Heights 195–9 violence Caleb Williams 27–9, 44, 52–3 eighteenth-century discourse of emotion, and 22 Enlightenment notions of sympathy, and 24–5 French Revolution 15–16, 22, 30–7 historical torture and fictional imagination 26–9 Rousseau’s conception of pity, and 10–11 Smith’s model of sympathy, and 22–3 state-sponsored 16 sympathetic response, and 22, 24–5, 31 sympathy, and 8 torture, use of rack 27–8 Tristram Shandy 116–22 Wuthering Heights 182–4 Wild Irish Girl (Sydney Owenson, Lady Morgan) 75–6 Wuthering Heights (Emily Brontë) citation 181–2, 200, 202–3 embedded narrative in 180, 185–6, 201 frame tale, as 13–14, 181, 184, 202–4 historical development of vicarious narrative 16–17 redefinition of sympathy 6 resemblance 180–1, 188–92, 208 sympathetic response 181, 184, 187 sympathy within 16–17, 20–1 violence 182–4 Zofloya, or the Moor (Charlotte Dacre) 157