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 Catherine J. Golden COMMUNITIES OF CARE: THE SOCIAL ETHICS OF VICTORIAN FICTION, by Talia Schaffer. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2021. 296 pp. $45.00 hardback; $31.50 ebook. Communities of Care: The Social Ethics of Victorian Fiction by Talia Schaffer is a rare academic book that provides a fresh approach to Victorian literature, stimulates the scholarly mind, and offers sage lessons for academic life. As the subtitle promises, the book examines nineteenth-century fiction in which acts of care are omnipresent. Novels by Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, Charlotte Brontë, Charlotte Mary Yonge, George Eliot, and Henry James offer a record of caregiving before and after the mid-century ascendance of paid care and care communities that we can emulate today. Schaffer is admittedly “trying to do a lot of tasks at once,” but she does these tasks with excellence (p. 2). The result is a capacious, smart, and engaging book that is part theory, history, literary case [End Page 162] study, and pedagogy, bridging nineteenth-century literature with ideas of how we can care for one another today. The book is comprised of an introduction, six chapters, and an epilogue. The opening line, “Reader, I want to warn you from the start”—reminiscent of Jane Eyre’s (1847) “Reader, I married him”1—imparts intimacy, inviting us on a journey to uncover care ethics in fiction and life (p. 1). The introduction establishes a theoretical framework for the ethics of care and a definition of care, here meaning “an action, not a feeling” and “the connective tissue of social life” (pp. 5, 21). Chapter one, “Ethics of Care and the Care Community,” draws on feminist ethics and theories of community. Schaffer outlines five essential characteristics of care communities—“performativity, discursivity, affiliation, egalitarianism, and temporality”—a constellation of qualities evident in fiction and lived experience (p. 49). Schaffer also introduces the sustained metaphor of a cantilevered bridge (aptly a nineteenth-century invention), illuminating how relationship is a founding principle of care. For instance, Shaffer notes that “each side must seek the other by reaching toward that other from its own anchorage, braving the risks of empty space” (p. 30). Turning from theory to history in chapter two, “Austen, Dickens, and Brontë: Bodies before the Normate,” Schaffer considers a shift in nineteenth-century Britain from homebased care (a model she calls “ordinary bodies”) to a professional model of paid caregiving that institutionalized what was once part of everyday life (p. 24). Here we meet skepticism toward the medical professional through Austen’s Sanditon (1817) and the merits of ordinary bodies in Brontë’s Jane Eyre and Austen’s Persuasion (1818) through, respectively, the social relationships Jane forms with the Rivers sisters and the inclusive care community that tends to Louisa Musgrove after her impetuous leap from the Cobb. Dickens’s A Christmas Carol (1843) teaches us about more than saving just one boy with a visible disability but rather about forming a community of care that, in Tiny Tim’s words, embraces “every one!”2 Chapters three through six offer literary case studies of Victorian novels. Chapter three, “Global Migrant Care and Emotional Labor in Villette,” incisively examines professional care by an emerging global migrant population through Brontë’s Villette (1853). As Schaffer teases out the emotional labor of enigmatic Lucy Snowe in her roles as paid companion, nursery-governess, and schoolteacher, she aptly acknowledges the connection between the paid migrant caregiver to today’s disproportionate number of women caregivers of color, a group particularly impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic (p. 95). Chapter four, “Beyond Sympathy: The State of Care in Daniel Deronda,” addresses what Schaffer calls “feeling without acting” and a move from sympathy to care in her perceptive reading of Eliot’s last published novel, Daniel Deronda (1876) (p. 117). Schaffer [End Page 163] foregrounds a dyad of mutual reciprocity that forms between the titular Deronda seeking his identity and the spiritually rich but economically poor, disabled, and dying Mordecai Cohen. This chapter proposes a way of reading Daniel Deronda’s oft criticized turn to Zionism as an imagined “care community on an international scale...