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  • Sympathetic Realism in Nineteenth-Century British Fiction by Rae Greiner
  • Harry E. Shaw (bio)
Sympathetic Realism in Nineteenth-Century British Fiction, by Rae Greiner; pp. viii + 203. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012, $60.00.

There was a time when it seemed easy to deflate the claims of novelistic realism, either by identifying it as attempting to embody a naively transparent view of the world, or by alleging that it unwittingly served deplorable political interests. More recently, however, critics are taking a second look at realism. One tack has involved focusing on the mental acts elicited by realist novels, on what one may call the realist habit of mind. This is the approach taken by Rae Greiner in her important new study, Sympathetic Realism in Nineteenth-Century British Fiction.

How should we imagine the habit of mind realist novels help to create? For an answer, Greiner turns to Adam Smith and The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759). Realist novels engage their characters and readers, she argues, in a way well described by Smith’s notion of sympathy. Greiner follows Smith in refusing to conflate sympathy with emotion, making sympathy cognitive, not emotive. We can “supply a wider ranging sensibility, more and more varied sentiments once sympathy requires neither certain knowledge nor that a single feeling pass identically from one person to the next. Sympathy is productive,” not simply imitative. The consequences of this way of imagining sympathy are profound: “The insistence that sympathy deals in representations alone turns private emotions into public currency. The result is a concept of feeling as profoundly social, and a flexible sympathy in which thinking of others thinking of us, and the reverse, is the psychological mechanism enabling the sense of self” (21).

For Greiner, the core of sympathy involves what Smith calls “going along with” another person. This is the mode of perception realist novels elicit in us. It also provides a useful way of characterizing a technique central to novelistic realism, free indirect discourse (FID), which can be seen as a variety of Smith’s “going along with.” The common description of FID as involving a blend of two voices, the narrator’s and a character’s, can be fruitfully mapped onto “going along with”: “FID works like metonymic meaning does, cumulatively and over time, in the process of narrative unfolding … FID produces not so much the fused identity of narrator and character, [End Page 161] character and readers, but the partial, merely approximate cohabitation of individualized persons and an impersonal, virtual voice” (41). This emphasis on the tentative and evolving role FID plays in the reading process is important not least because, transferred to the meaning and effects of a work as a whole, it blunts the notion that realist fiction could enslave us. The emphasis falls on reading fiction as a process which involves “not seeing into other heads but guessing what is in them” as we “go along with” them (43). Another key concept Greiner draws from Smith is the “case,” which involves placing one’s own self or a character’s self in a concrete socio-historical setting, the sort of setting that provides much that is real about realist novels (51). For Greiner, the interest of the “case” extends beyond prose fiction. She demonstrates that it is at work in Jeremy Bentham and in the twentieth-century historian Robin George Colling-wood, where “an otherwise inaccessible reality gains new life and renewed significance through an imaginative sympathy through which we revive the sentiments of others by rewriting their sentences in our own minds” (63).

Sympathetic Realism offers extended readings of novels by Jane Austen and Charles Dickens, and briefer discussions of works by George Eliot, Joseph Conrad, Anthony Trollope, and Henry James. One thing that interests Greiner about Persuasion (1817) is the question of why at novel’s end Anne Elliot insists on declaring to Frederick Wentworth that she was “perfectly right” not to marry him years before (Austen, Persuasion [Penguin, 2003], 230). Now that she is sure of his love, why bring up the past? Greiner explains that in resurrecting the past, Anne directs the protocols of sympathy toward her own past self, not the...

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