Sympathy in Nineteenth-Century American Literature and Our Discipline

Abstract

Abstract This essay situates Marianne Noble’s Rethinking Sympathy and Human Contact in Nineteenth-Century American Literature: Hawthorne, Douglass, Stowe, Dickinson (2019) and Hannah Walser’s Writing the Mind: Social Cognition in Nineteenth-Century American Fiction (2022) in the current conversation our discipline has been having about sympathy/empathy. Noble and Walser describe ways of knowing other minds that avoid the dangers the discipline has associated with sympathy/empathy—foremost among them, the harm that comes from the assumption on the part of a witness to suffering that they can understand exactly what the sufferer is feeling. Noble finds in a group of nineteenth-century authors a conceptualization of sympathy that honors the differences between people and a state of benevolent not-knowing; Walser investigates how an overlapping cluster of nineteenth-century authors depicts ways of knowing other minds that do not require mind-reading. By making explicit the extent to which Noble’s and Walser’s exhilarating, rigorous studies align with our discipline’s association of empathy with a myriad of ethical harms, this essay seeks to carve out a space outside of this antipathy and suggest that literary sympathy can be seen as a narrative resource, with unpredetermined ethical effects, rather than an inevitable ethical lapse.This antipathy [towards empathy] has left the literary scholar with three options regarding [it]: (1) one can point out its dangers and offer more salubrious methods for interpersonal connection; (2) one can try to rescue empathy by demonstrating there are other ways of conceptualizing it; or (3) one can defend it.