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Victorian Studies 43.4 (2001) 667-668



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Book Review

Scenes of Sympathy: Identity and Representation in Victorian Fiction


Scenes of Sympathy: Identity and Representation in Victorian Fiction, by Audrey Jaffe; pp. vii + 184. Ithaca, NY and London: Cornell University Press, 2000, $39.95, £24.95.

Sympathy has regularly been understood as the form of intelligence native to reading and writing fiction--as reason, say, is often thought the form of intelligence native to practicing philosophy. But the familiarity of this understanding of sympathy also invites us to ignore its powers; it is an aspect of reading and writing fiction so familiar that we can easily forget it. In her new book, Audrey Jaffe returns to sympathy and reminds us of its intricacies, its cultural centrality, and the rigorous demands which it places on interpretation.

The title of Scenes of Sympathy, like the argument that follows it, is matter-of-fact and exact: Jaffe understands compassion to rely upon visual representation, and her book is thus as much about scenes as it is about sympathy. Feeling with others, she claims, requires us to picture them, to place them in a visualized narrative. Jaffe duly quotes from the opening of Adam Smith's Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759): "'though our brother is upon the rack,'" Smith famously writes, "'as long as we ourselves are at our ease, our senses will never inform us of what he suffers'" (qtd. 2). As it initiates Jaffe's argument concerning the spectacular nature of sympathy, Smith's scene also initiates the reader into Jaffe's astringent view of the topic. It is impressions, and those derived from culture in particular, to which we respond in responding to the image of suffering. In this way, Jaffe claims, sympathy, most comfortably thought of as a psychological means of defining and extending one's identity, quickly becomes an arena in which that identity is lost, and we are left with the whirring exchange of cultural fantasies. There is always a third in sympathy--whether in its religious incarnation ("there but for the grace of God go I") or in the identifications that structure Freudian family romance--and in Jaffe's model that third, culture, often eclipses the pair locked in sympathetic exchange.

Scenes of Sympathy is especially rich in its demonstration of the remarkable range of preoccupations, Victorian and current, which find their underpinning in sympathy. The opening section of the book, with chapters on Charles Dickens's A Christmas Carol (1843) and on Arthur Conan Doyle's "The Man with the Twisted Lip" (1891) and Henry Mayhew's London Labour and the London Poor (1851), argues that the sorts of exchange imagined in acts of sympathy had their material analogue and support in the exchange of commodities; not surprisingly, these exchanges destabilize rather than consolidate the sympathetic self. More remarkably, the second section of the book, again comprised of two chapters, deftly argues that Victorian anxieties about economic decline--about falling in class status--were projected onto the fallen women of Elizabeth Gaskell's Ruth (1853) and Mrs. Henry Wood's East Lynne (1861). Class anxiety is rewritten as moral and sexual anxiety. In the final third of the book, Jaffe turns from sympathy across class lines and toward gestures of sympathy that serve to assert cultural identity. Although theories of sympathy have tended to concentrate on our compassion for others' suffering (Julie Ellison's 1999 Cato's Tears is a remarkable [End Page 667] instance here), Jaffe rightly points out that the Victorians were enthusiastically sympathetic with ideal figures. Her readings of Daniel Deronda (1876) and The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890) explore the ways that collective identities (British, Jewish, or homosexual) rely upon sympathy with an idealized self (often a self only recently retrieved from a degraded position). In Jaffe's hands, the study of sympathy is often, illuminatingly, the study of conversion.

"Visuality in this study," writes Jaffe, may "be understood as a metaphor for representation and knowledge: what can be known at any given time is what can be seen" (15n23); and she...

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