Unmanageable Sympathy in Wilkie Collins’s Poor Miss Finch

Abstract

80 Victorians Journal Unmanageable Sympathy in Wilkie Collins’s poorMiss finch by Lauren N. tiofter Lucilla Finch, the heroine of Collins’s 1872 novel, rebukes her companion, Madame Pratolungo, for laughing at her distress following the “agony of a horrid dream,” demanding, “Have you no sympathy for me?” (136). In this scene, Lucilla, a lovely, genteel blind girl who dreamt that she wed her fiance’s dastardly twin brother, highlights a central theme of the novel: sympathy, both displaced and misdirected. Readers may find Lucilla petulant or insipid or even agree with Madame Pratolungo (hereafter Mme. P.) that Nugent is “the most agreeable man of the two”; and yet, Mme. P. has been hired to provide companionship—to entertain, chaperone, and serve as Lucilla’s confidante. Whether responding to light-hearted gossip or the most intimate ofsecrets, she is expected to be a fount ofready sympathy. Given the intimacy of the relationship, Mme. P.’s sympathy should be unassailable; therefore, her insensitive response in this scene—together with numerous attempts throughout the novel to win sympathy for herselfrather than offer it to others—represents a marked failure in the management of sympathy, a project in which this novel, its author, and his contemporaries were quite interested. Sharon Marcus notes that “Victorians accepted friendship between women because they believed it cultivated the feminine virtues ofsympathy and altruism that made women into good helpmates” (26). Essentially a salaried friend serving as a helpmate for another woman, the paid companion was expected to provide the sympathy Victorians supposed to be organic to female friendships; accordingly, depictions of the mistresscompanion dynamic throughout the fiction of such authors as Burney and Austen, Dickens and Thackeray, Charlotte Bronte, Braddon, and Anthony Trollope emphasize the centrality of sympathy to the mistress / companion relationship. Catherine Gallagher’s Humean definition—sympathy “is not an emotion about someone else but is rather the process by which someone Victorians Journal 81 else’s emotion becomes our own” (169)—is especially apt in this case. If Victorians often viewed sympathy in economic terms, representing it “as an investment in or exchange with others” (Jaffe 9), then we can further understand the relationship in this way. Whereas the mistress invested financially in the companion as a friend-employee, the companion was obliged to invest herself emotionally in her employer—iofeel with her by participating in her emotions. The mistress in effect purchases the companion’s sympathy, commanding sentiment-upon-demand from her attendant. Thus, not only was the sympathy central to this relationship at least partially artificial, it was also conditioned by both the power and economic dynamics inherent within the employment contract. A companion’s status—both genteel friend and paid employee, neither a true equal nor a servant—made her vulnerable but also empowered her. She was constantly subjected to the moods and whims ofher mistress, often suffering from the sycophantic or servile nature of her occupation. According to Betty Rizzo, “The autonomous mistress had the same powers over her companion that the husband had over his wife. ... A woman who found herself empowered over another socially equal adult—her companion—could, possibly for the first time in her life, elect to play one role or the other, the domestic tyrant or the benevolent friend” (2, 13). However, while the mistress could exercise virtually unlimited authority over her companion, she was also dependent on that companion socially and emotionally. Hegel’s master-and-slave dialectic is a useful paradigm here, as it highlights the ways such relationships are mutually dependent, inextricable systems wherein power never moves smoothly in one direction. Because the “slave” produces the object of the master’s desire and is thus “the object which embodies the truth ofhis certainty ofhimself,” the master “really finds that something has come about quite different from an independent consciousness. It is not an independent, but rather a dependent consciousness that he has achieved” (90). Devoney Looser writes that, while the mistress needs the companion to define herselfas mistress, she relies on her in various other ways: “A companion was useful to her patroness for both formal and informal outings that would be considered improper if conducted alone” (580). The companion makes it...