Rule of Sympathy: Sentiment, Race, and Power, 1750-1850 (review)

In Rule of Sympathy, Amit S. Rai offers "a social and historical critique of sympathy in British discourse in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries" (xviii). He includes a history of the term in eighteenth-century philosophical discourse; discussions of sympathy and the body in medical texts of the same period; an analysis of sympathy's role in government, discourses of gender and race, and the Gothic novel. His intention, shared with other recent critics, is to alert readers to the way sympathy functions as "a modality of power" while seeming not to be one (55).

Rai offers a persuasive account of the internal contradictions endemic to representational structures and political agendas operating under the rubric of humanitarian sympathy. He lays out the philosophical problems that bedevil sympathy, as embodied for him in the rhetoric of abolitionists and missionaries: its implication in an "economy of violence" (53), in which the very offer of sympathy requires the distance between subject and object it ostensibly seeks to efface. Invoking Jacques Derrida, he connects sympathy to the idea of a gift economy; using Adam Smith, he underscores the crucial relationship between sympathy and representations of a suffering subject. He is good at untangling the gender contradictions of sympathetic gestures: the way in which, for instance, for Christian missionaries, "to sympathize with the plight of the Hindu woman was to participate in the manly defense of the weaker sex" (141). And his section on the "Rules" of sympathy, listing the various difficulties, philosophical as well as practical, that attend sympathy's exercise and discursive use, is taut and witty. Perhaps the book's most interesting and original proposition is the idea that sympathy during this period includes within it an unaccounted-for spiritual content, "a kind of premodern occultism, even mysticism...adapted by modern modes of power" (99). But Rai's chief concern is with missionary and abolitionist enterprises, in which he sees a "close linkage between civilization, sympathy, and colonization" (129): sympathy here is aligned with power and the police, its promise never uncompromised, its practice never unmixed with a desire for mastery on the part of the sympathizer.

"Properly performed and executed," Rai argues, "sympathy should obliterate its own conditions of existence" (57). But looking outside the boundaries of such performance—where sympathy, as discourse, must be located—Rai elaborates but never quite succeeds in linking together a variety of meanings for the term. In general, he relies too heavily on the appearance of the word "sympathy" itself and the claims that rulers make for it, and doing so leads him to seek the "proper" performance he avowedly cannot find: a sympathy that "seems to spill beyond good policy" (167).

Rai begins, for instance, by tracing sympathy's meaning for himself ("a specific form of sociality that facilitated the elaboration of various forms of power relations" [xiii]), and the term's genealogy in David Hume and Smith. But in chapter 3, the discussion of Jane Eyre's friendship with Helen Burns and her mysterious sympathy with Rochester nicely supports the occultism argument but seems out of place in relation to other definitions. Rai sometimes relies on the OED definition of sympathy as sameness or likeness, but never fully works through the relation between sympathy as affinity and sympathy as pity. At times one gets a sense of being held hostage to a Google search for the word "sympathy," while at other times, as in the discussion of William Wilberforce's Indian project, sympathy is arguably not the best term for what is being described. And, indeed, Rai ends by renaming the object of his search: what is wanted is not "sympathy" but "solidarity" (161)—as if the replacement of one term with another will enable the "proper performance" of social good.

In addition to the absense of consistency in these instances—the lack of clarity that emerges from...