Reading in the Wake: Empathy Debates, “The Reader,” and Toni Morrison’sGod Help the Child

Abstract

Toni Morrison’s 2015 novel God Help the Child complicates both naïve celebrations and outright rejections of empathy as one of reading’s goals. Explicating the protagonist Bride’s journey as a primer in empathy, I argue that in centring a Black protagonist as Everyreader, Morrison undermines the implicit whiteness of both “the reader” and the subject of scientific study and moral theory. Yet the role of racial prejudice in Bride’s childhood trauma refuses to let readers forget that the source of her trouble is not her own moral failing but, rather, what Christina Sharpe calls “the weather” of white supremacy. By the novel’s end, empathy emerges as a powerful source of interpersonal and societal care across racial, class, and generational difference, but one that can be undermined by white supremacy at its most basic, pre-conscious functioning, rendering the role of literature to develop readers’ capacity to empathize across difference all the more important. Ultimately, Morrison’s allegory of readerly empathy challenges not just popular discussions of literature’s good but also the entire interdisciplinary conversation among literary scholars, cognitive psychologists, and neuroscientists by insisting that we attend to the specific but so far under-acknowledged role of racism in the development, practice, and study of empathy.