Narrative Hospitality in Late Victorian Fiction: Novel Ethics by Rachel Hollander (review)

In Narrative Hospitality in Late Victorian Fiction: Novel Ethics, Rachel Hollander reads the development of the English novel in ethical terms, suggesting that the transition from realism to modernism can be tied to a late nineteenth-century shift from sympathy to hospitality. As changing gender politics, increasing colonial engagements, and the influence of European writers inspired national debates about the morality of literature at the end of the nineteenth century, novelists became preoccupied with the ethical implications of difference, and their fiction began to investigate an alternative to sympathy that, in Hollander’s words, “embrace[d] rather than trying to overcome the impossibility of fully understanding the other” (31). Drawing on the twentieth-century ethical philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas, Hollander defines this embrace of the unknown as hospitality—an “unconditional welcome of the other” that includes not only the literal act of welcoming a stranger but also, more broadly, “respecting the limits of knowledge” and recognizing the other as an “infinity,” exceeding familiar categories and incapable of being assimilated to the self (16, 1, 9). In chapters on George Eliot, Thomas Hardy, and Olive Schreiner, Hollander demonstrates the ways in which the late Victorian novel anticipated Levinas’s ethics of alterity, practicing receptivity to otherness both thematically and at the level of form.

Describing Eliot as a key transitional figure, Hollander illustrates the turn from sympathy to hospitality in a contrasting study of The Mill on the Floss (1860) and Daniel Deronda (1876). The earlier novel exemplifies the ethics of sympathy, as Maggie Tulliver filters her encounters with others through her “home-centered identity” (60); despite Maggie’s dissatisfaction with the present and longing for a new kind of future—precursors to hospitality for the New Women discussed in later chapters—her hopes remain “fundamentally grounded in her original sense of self” (58). Only Eliot’s final novel “self-consciously proposes a new ethical orientation as an alternative” to sympathy, Hollander suggests: although Daniel Deronda practices a “knowing” sympathy in his relationship with Mirah (whose feelings he attempts to understand and anticipate), his encounters with Mordecai disrupt and fundamentally transform his identity and his sense of home (55, 67).

Hollander’s characterization of sympathy as an attempt to understand others by reference to the self and home coincides with established scholarship on sympathy, much of which is surveyed in the book’s introduction. Occasionally, however—presumably to sharpen the contrast between sympathy and hospitality—Hollander invokes a by-now outdated understanding of sympathy as synonymous with knowledge or identification. Misleading expressions such as “sympathetic identification,” “knowing sympathy,” and “sympathetic knowledge,” though used offhandedly rather than in explicit argumentation, obscure the important role that not knowing—and recognizing the limitations of knowledge—played in Victorian sympathy itself (57, 67, 122). Hollander is on firmer ground when she clarifies that the real difference lies between the aims of sympathy and hospitality: although sympathy-driven novels recognize “the impossibility of complete representation of the mind of another,” she concedes (speaking of Eliot’s early novels), “their energies are generally devoted to surmounting these barriers to understanding” (72). This point about the different ways in which sympathy and hospitality respond to the state of not knowing—the former attempting to overcome it, the latter embracing it as an ethical end in itself—offers a more nuanced intervention in the critical conversation about novel ethics.

Like sympathy, hospitality proves a concept worthy of considerable nuance, especially in the context of late-century fiction. As Hollander’s close readings demonstrate, the versions of hospitality depicted in the late Victorian novel are often imperfect, “fleeting” and “ephemeral” moments that merely “gesture towards an ideal” never quite realized in the narratives themselves (90, 75). Novel endings, in particular, expose the limitations exerted on hospitality by realism, which, as Hollander puts it, “must progress towards knowledge and resolution” (78). Grace’s return to Fitzpiers at the end of Hardy’s The Woodlanders (1886–87) is...