Communities of Care: The Social Ethics of Victorian Fiction, by Talia Schaffer

Abstract

Reviewed by: Communities of Care: The Social Ethics of Victorian Fiction by Talia Schaffer Adela Pinch (bio) Communities of Care: The Social Ethics of Victorian Fiction, by Talia Schaffer; pp. xvii + 274. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2021, $45.00. It is consoling to imagine a historian of the future, looking back at the early 2020s for signs of the ways in which the crises and upheavals of our decade brought not only pain but also hope to all reaches of human thought. I am imagining such a historian reading Talia Schaffer’s Communities of Care: The Social Ethics of Victorian Fiction and marveling at the ways a scholar of Victorian literature infused her scholarship with such a profound response to her moment. In Communities of Care, Schaffer brings Victorian and early-twenty-first-century discussions of caring for others into conversation with each other in ways that deepen our appreciation of both. Though clearly begun before the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, the book is mindful of other recent challenges to change the way we care for others in our communities, including the changing conditions of academic labor. Communities of Care is a stunning appeal to make our scholarship and our relations to our own communities mindful investigations of the same ethical values. These values—generosity, inclusiveness, acknowledgement of partialness, and careful, intimate address—are ones that, moreover, Schaffer practices on every page of her book. Schaffer draws her definition of “communities of care” both from the Victorian texts she studies and from the contemporary theories (above all, feminist ethics of care) that inspire her. From the Victorians, she draws the challenges and urgencies of focusing on, and building, middle-ground smallish-scale communities that are neither institutions nor individual relations. In chapter 1, she asks us to think about the particular historical conditions, and transhistorical resources, of the kind of care communities that flourished before disease was the target of professionalized, medical advice. Throughout most of the nineteenth century, bodily suffering was endured as a matter of course and met with a fluid mixture of professional and amateur caregiving, though this was challenged by medical models that began to be professionalized in the middle of the century. In Jane Austen’s Persuasion (1817)—to cite just one of the novels Schaffer discusses in chapter 2— bodies wax and wane, and clusters of family and friends attend to injured bodies with adaptation, vigilance, and sympathy. From the Victorian culture of care, Schaffer also draws her emphasis on care as a practice rather than caring as a feeling. Care is something that needs to be done: a form of labor that often does not feel good, and indeed needs to be done even in instances where it is doomed to fail. These features—the smaller-scale, relatively informal networks of care communities, the emphasis on labor, and the acknowledgement of failure—are the cornerstones of Schaffer’s ethical vision, her readings of the Victorian novels she treats, and her approach to reading. Schaffer’s attunement to a historically-informed understanding of Victorian caring allows her to recalibrate our understanding of novels we thought we knew well. No one who reads her treatment of Charlotte Brontë’s Villette (1853) in chapter 3 will be able to [End Page 677] forget Schaffer’s reframing of Lucy Snow as a “global migrant caregiver,” a harbinger of an often overlooked laborer who is essential to global capitalism (88). Her focus on the ethics of care in Daniel Deronda (1876) in chapter 4 provides an alternative to debates about sympathy—is George Eliot for or against it?—that have dominated discussions of this novel. Schaffer recognizes throughout Communities of Care that the action of care always contains within it the prospect of failure, that no act of caring is ever complete, and that the difference between caring and failed care is a thin line. She defines sentiment as “the irritating feeling of wanting to act when you cannot,” exemplified in the Victorian reader of Felicia Hemans’s “Casabianca” (1826), who wishes to jump in and save the boy on the burning deck (123). Indeed, it is by tarrying with the incomplete nature of almost all...