Always Sympathize! Surface Reading, Affect, and George Eliot’s Romola

Surface reading, the most prominent example of the recent backlash against the “hermeneutics of suspicion,” eschews traditional depth-based approaches to literary and cultural analysis in favor of more descriptive reading practices. Despite the stridency of these assertions, however, when compared to traditional reading practices the published examples of surface reading demonstrate little methodological innovation. A discursive analysis of the emotional rhetoric mobilized by these arguments suggests that the real issue at stake has less to do with methodological dissatisfaction than with political disappointment. A reading of George Eliot’s Romola (1862–63) draws a parallel between Romola’s disillusionment with her spiritual and political mentor and surface reading’s frustration with a previous generation of critics whose political promises remain unfulfilled. Eliot’s merciless dissection of both characters reminds us that, for her, sympathy was both an ethical mandate and a critical practice, a positive form of suspicion that reorients, rather than repudiates, accepted interpretive methodologies.