Vicarious Narratives: A Literary History of Sympathy, 1750–1850

Abstract

A Literary History of Sympathy, 1750–1850 would be a very good thing to have, but this book is not quite that. Rather, it starts with a testing point in Adam Smith's Theory of Moral Sentiments and then discusses various writers who might be seen to respond to it—principally Laurence Sterne, Henry Mackenzie, Saint-Pierre, Chateaubriand, Mary Shelley, Emily Brontë, and the French translator of Smith. The point is the celebrated passage in Moral Sentiments where Smith discusses how we can never really participate in someone else's experience. We are always required to imagine it “in some measure,” he says, even if the experience in question is extreme and proximate, “though our brother is upon the rack.” Britton understands “in some measure” as articulating a limit to sympathy, making sympathy depend “figurative or literally, on the bonds of kinship,” a view apparently confirmed by Smith's remark, later in the book, that people find it difficult to respond spontaneously to the reported troubles of faraway peoples. How much did Smith intend his example to invoke the idea of a “familial bond”? To speak of “our brother” could be as much generic as familial (he is happy to strike the more personal note of “my friends” elsewhere in the book), and I have always thought Smith's sense of fraternity was the product of the effort of sympathy rather than its precondition. Anyhow, it is clear that he is moved by the difficulty of sympathizing with absent strangers, and Britton resourcefully explores the ways in which her novelists imagine characters rising to the same sort of challenge by telling stories from a different point of view. The books she discusses are full of frame stories, embedded tales, quoted letters, and reports, all of which work, as she says, to shift around narrative perspectives and raise at least the possibility of identifying with someone else. Whether “identifying” with someone else is indeed the basis of the moral life is no doubt another matter: “A man only is interested in anything when he identifies himself with it,” Whitman once said—a claim not without its problems.