Feeling With Real Others: Narrative Empathy in the Autobiographies of Doris Lessing and Alison Bechdel1 Leah Anderst (bio) In The Life of Saint Teresa of Avila by Herself, the 16th century Spanish mystic includes a brief but curious record of her response to reading another important spiritual autobiography written some eleven hundred years prior: Saint Augustine’s Confessions. In her ninth chapter, Teresa describes a deeply emotional and empathetic reaction to Augustine’s narrative of his conversion, his experience of hearing an unseen child’s voice in a garden speaking the words “take it and read, take it and read” (Augustine 177). Understanding this voice as a sign, Augustine describes opening the Epistles of Saint Paul at random and finding words urging their reader to convert to Christianity. “All the darkness of doubt was dispelled,” Augustine writes (178). Prior to this experience and this scene in his Confessions, Augustine struggled with a conflict between his desire to embrace Christianity and his continued craving for “worldly” ambitions and experiences. At just this moment, Augustine describes the conflict as evaporating from him. Reading his Confessions, Teresa seems to experience what Augustine experienced; through his narrative telling, she feels what he felt with him. “When I began to read the Confessions,” she writes, “ I seemed to see myself portrayed there, and I began to commend myself frequently to that glorious Saint. When I came to the tale of his conversion, and read how he heard the voice in the garden, it seemed exactly as if the Lord had spoken to me. So I felt in my heart. For some time I was dissolved in [End Page 271] tears, in great inward affliction and distress” (69). Teresa attests to a profound internal upheaval while reading Augustine’s account of his conversion; in her own moment of grief, hesitation, and self-doubt, Teresa reads the experiences of another, and she feels what he describes with him. In other words, Teresa experiences and then represents, in her own autobiography, her narrative empathy with Augustine. Empathetic responses to others, whether experienced by readers of spiritual autobiographies, newspapers, or novels; by theater, film, or television audiences; or by real people in everyday life as they chat over lunch with a friend, watch the news, take public transit, or participate in studies in laboratory settings, have come to occupy an important place in research across many disciplines. Conceptions of empathy, its defining characteristics, its physical and emotional effects on those who experience it, and its possible effects in the world, continue to be varied and debated. To some, empathy is a spontaneous or a reflexive feeling with another being, an instinctive flinching when witnessing another’s sudden pain, or a baby crying when it hears the cries of another. To others, it’s far more broad and not necessarily physical or instantaneous. It’s an understanding that other beings have minds and an imaginative sharing of the perspectives, experiences, and feelings of those other beings.2 For many, empathy is a positive feature of the human experience; our capacity for empathy allows us to put ourselves in the other guy’s shoes, so to speak, to consider his needs and concerns while momentarily silencing our own. And for some literary theorists as well as mainstream commentators, the empathy of a reader for a fictional character, the reader’s feeling with a character, imaginatively taking her perspective over the course of an engaging novel, functions as a training ground of sorts for increased empathy and altruistic behaviors in the real world.3 The conception of empathy that guides my discussion of its construction in autobiographical narrative comes from Peter Goldie’s The Emotions: A Philosophical Exploration. Goldie explains empathy in this way: “Empathizing with another person is an essentially simulationist approach, and involves imagining the experience of a narrative from that other person’s point of view” (178, emphasis original). Later, Goldie clarifies what he means by “a narrative”; it is “the thoughts, feelings, and emotions” of another (195). Goldie then proposes three requirements for empathy, requirements that allow him to distinguish it from related affective phenomena like sympathy, emotional identification, or emotional contagion. He writes, “First, it is...