Thinking of Me Thinking of You: Sympathy Versus Empathy in the Realist Novel

This essay argues for the sympathetic realism of nineteenth-century realist fiction, as evidenced in its formal design and, for present purposes, in the development of sympathetic metonymies in particular. In order to more fully appreciate the distinct metonymies of writers like George Eliot and Charles Dickens, the essay first distinguishes between empathy and sympathy, aligning the former with the trope of metaphor and the formal protocols of poetry (especially modernist and symbolist) and the latter with the trope of metonymy and the formal protocols of narrative, especially realist narrative. Doing so highlights the unique uses to which the nineteenth-century realists put metonymy and sympathy to work, in tandem, in order to produce sympathetic realist fiction.