The Marriage of Minds: Reading Sympathy in the Victorian Marriage Plot (review)

Much has been made of an "ethical turn" in literary criticism that has, I hope, only begun a long and salutary revolution. At stake isn't simply a revitalized interest in what the editors of Mapping the Ethical Turn (2001) called, appropriately enough, "the marriage of ethical thought and literary study" (ix)—something that, as they point out, never really went away—but the creation of new, and newly profitable, critical methods: witness Sharon Marcus's ethically charged "just reading" in Between Women (2007), the "reticent assertions" and "nontransmissable" moral examples of Anne-Lise François's Open Secrets (2007), or Andrew Miller's "implicative" (which is to say, generative) criticism in The Burdens of Perfection (2008). In her first book, Rachel Ablow springs gracefully into that whirl, offering an account of sympathy refreshing in its approach. That this isn't a book about affect is immediately clear. The term "sympathy" is not emotive; rather, it structures and impels a "wide variety of ways in which the encounter between minds . . . was imagined in the nineteenth century," though Ablow is more or less exclusively focused on two homologous meetings of the mind, those between reader and text, husband and wife (8). Thus while I sometimes wondered why "sympathy" should be the preferred term of analysis over "romantic love," Ablow's sophisticated, theoretically expansive treatment of sympathy-as-relation is timely, robust, and altogether welcome.

While relying on a paradigmatic-example structure for her argument—the five chapters are dedicated to canonical authors and texts—taking "coverture" as an organizing principle allows Ablow to trace how differing accounts of the "one flesh" paradigm were "mobilized to very different political ends" (11), lending a compelling logic to the book's form. Opening with David Copperfield (1849–50) and closing with He Knew He Was Right (1869), Ablow moves between Dickensian "love" and Trollopian "cynicism," or from a novel "not centrally concerned with marriage law, at least in part because it takes coverture so entirely for granted" (44) to one published just shy of the passage of the 1870 Married Women's Property Act and in the midst of what Ablow calls an "increas[ed] sense that changes in gender relations and in the structure of marriage were on the horizon" (119). Given this rationale, Ablow's end point makes the most sense, for while David Copperfield might offer "a paradigmatic understanding of the relation between marital and readerly sympathy," there are surely others (14). That said, Ablow skillfully charts the shifts and discordances characterizing the rhetoric of marital sympathy in the relatively short, twenty-odd-year period under scrutiny; more importantly, she makes them meaningful, offering fresh readings of well-known materials.

Here's how. For starters, Ablow is a capable close reader, able to marshal legal and social history to her own literary critical ends. This is especially true in her second chapter, "The 'Failure' of Wuthering Heights," where Ablow maintains that Emily Brontë scuttles the conventional marriage plot in favor of an epic critique of power. Ablow defines the difference between Brontë and Charles Dickens (on the side of convention here) this way: for David Copperfield, the wife functions as "a kind of mirror in which one can see reflected one's limitless improvability" (46). "Wife" is thus an ideal text whose narrative arc structures David's subject formation (46); in contrast, in the Brontëan world where "influence" is indistinct from "power," amelioration turns into competition, and a "wife" is anyone resistless to another's violence, the entirely subjected recipient of pain. Both novels "largely [take] the permanence of coverture for granted" (48), but where for Dickens this results in faith that novels, unlike wives, "cannot conceal, disappoint, or be mistaken" (43), Wuthering Heights offers no such consolation. The "failure" Ablow points to in the chapter's title is the lack of meaningful difference between being married and being mad: the choicelessness of Catherine...