Victorian Lessons in Empathy and Difference by Rebecca N. Mitchell (review)

The title of this book had me fearing I was in for something less than a treat. I’m not proud to admit it, but the words “empathy” and “difference” (especially when preceded by “Victorian Lessons in”) tend to cue in me a response combining three parts anticipatory boredom and one part dread. When I actually sat down to read this odd but rather brilliant little book, however, I found it engrossing, edgy, and highly insightful—almost exactly the opposite of what I expected it to be. In a study that has much to say to contemporary scholarship on Victorian feeling, literacy, realism, and ethics, Rebecca N. Mitchell offers a bracing corrective to critical jadedness.

Bucking scholarly trends prevailing among pretty much everyone in the business who studies the affective functions of Victorian culture, Mitchell argues that realist fiction (and painting, but we’ll get to that later) aims to teach its readers that they can’t understand other people. Victorian fictional works by such authors as Charles Dickens, George Eliot, and Thomas Hardy do not enjoin their readers to learn to feel and think as others do; rather, they offer their readers repeated lessons in the folly and pain of erroneously believing that they have the ability to do so. Drawing (with a mercifully light hand) on the philosophy of Emmanuel Lévinas, Mitchell suggests that Victorian realist fiction promotes in its readers an apperception of the irreducible alterity of other human beings. The appreciation of the insurmountable difference between oneself and others that this fiction fosters pushes readers to acknowledge the limits of the self while also at the same time pushing them, from within their awareness of their limitations, to understand the other as best they can. Victorian works of art can perform this pedagogical feat, she contends, because unlike human subjects, books and paintings are, to some degree, knowable. It is just this distinction between the relative accessibility and material stability of cultural products, on the one hand, and the radical alterity of human subjects, on the other, that allows us to learn about the latter from the former. This ethical education makes use of a gap between the knowledge readers have of characters’ unexpressed thoughts and feelings and the knowledge characters have, or rather do not have, of other characters’ unexpressed thoughts and feelings. Realist fiction mobilizes its capacity to make readers believe they understand the inner lives of characters in order to show readers over and over again the pitfalls of assuming they can truly understand other human beings. Victorian realist fiction engages its readers in an ethical project that should ultimately leave them knowing they can never experience life in someone else’s shoes.

After an introduction that lays out the theoretical groundwork and general argument of the study, the first chapter considers Dickens’s focus throughout his career on the incapability of language to communicate adequately states of feeling. Language, reading, and narrative confound the ability of characters to know or understand each other in A Tale of Two Cities (1859), Great Expectations (1861), and Bleak House (1852–53). By staging continual breakdowns in communication among his characters, Dickens teaches us about both how irreducibly mysterious other humans are and how painful but necessary it is to connect with them all the same. Besides her fresh reading of “telescopic philanthropy” I found Mitchell’s take on Lady Dedlock in Bleak House especially illuminating: with Lady Dedlock’s mind closed to the notion that others might think differently about her than she does about herself, she suffers more acutely from her own solipsistic hell than she does from any actual responses from others to the revelation of her past (Dickens qtd. in Mitchell 42–43).

Chapter 2 characterizes Eliot’s Adam Bede (1859) and Middlemarch (1871–72) as novels that do not teach us to be more tolerant of others—or at least not in the ways they have been said to do...