Victorian Interpretation

George Eliot’s Hermeneutics of Sympathy

c h a p t e r t h r e e M George Eliot’s Hermeneutics of Sympathy While it is true, in one sense, that the thoughts and feelings of others are inaccessible to us, in another sense it is inadmissible. . . . It is true that your subjective state can only be an objective fact to me, except in so far as I am able to interpret the objective fact in its subjective aspect. But this is true of all facts. . . . The psychologist interprets certain visible facts as signs of invisible feelings, just as he knows that sugar is sweet and dogs bite. The statement that “each individual is absolutely incapable of knowing any feeling but his own” is acceptable only on a very restricted definition of knowledge; and on this definition we must declare that man is incapable of knowing anything except his present feelings. —George Henry Lewes The statement that I dislike your pain becomes perverted into the assertion that I dislike something else; or, in other words, it is inferred that sympathy is a mere delusion. —Leslie Stephen Yet surely, surely the only true knowledge of our fellow-man is that which enables us to feel with him. —George Eliot 95 If Carlyle offered a hermeneutic theory that was transitional, located somewhere in between the theological and the secular, George Eliot’s thought on interpretation moved hermeneutics fully into the secular realm. As with Carlyle, hermeneutics was crucially important to all of her writing. Again like Carlyle, she was interested in large epistemological questions about the relationship between human knowledge and the act of interpretation. But whereas the latter issue was Carlyle’s central problem , Eliot’s primary concern was understanding others, and, especially, linguistic interpretation. Like the German Romantic hermeneuts, she believed that meaning was grounded in a speaker’s intentions, although she was deeply aware of the problems attending an intentionalist account of meaning. Coming from an impressive grounding in religious hermeneutics and philosophy, George Eliot was well equipped to speculate on the complex issues involved in interpretation. In her view, theological exegesis had been for the most part a series of misguided distortions, usually prompted by personal need and rationalized by claims of infallibility or divine inspiration. Eliot attempted to shape a more viable and principled secular hermeneutic: a hermeneutics of sympathy. In the last decades of the twentieth century, the view that Eliot’s novels represent a proto-poststructuralist stance on interpretation, even if that stance works against some of her explicitly professed beliefs, has been a strong strain in literary criticism. More recently, critics, displaying Hobbesian tendencies, have reread sympathy in Eliot’s works in analogous ways: sympathy, it turns out, is always disguised egoism, a form of narcissistic projection that subverts itself in the novels. Eliot begins chapter 29 of Middlemarch with a description of Dorothea, abruptly breaking off midsentence to ask, “—but why always Dorothea? Was her point of view the only possible one?”1 This chapter similarly attempts to shift perspective to ask, “—but why always misunderstanding and appropriation? Is this mode of reading the only possible one?” The answer may have come to seem self-evident, as perhaps it does to some readers of Middlemarch when the contest is between Dorothea and Casaubon. Yet the view of Eliot as a, perhaps unconscious, representative of skeptical views on interpretation and sympathy needs to be reconsidered. Her novels have been able to support such readings because her inquiries into understanding and ethics are so sophisticated that she could incorporate into them most of the objections that later thought would raise. Granted, one might continue to regard Eliot’s philosophical and hermeneutic arguments as covers for the subversion of sympathy that critics discern in her novels, even after recognizing the depth of her knowledge on the subjects. A close examination of her writing, however, 96 Victorian Interpretation in the context of the intellectual tradition to which she belongs (and helps form) ought to make it more difficult to accept that stance. To understand Eliot’s perspective, we must shift from our contemporary orientation to the more solidly grounded historical recognition that Eliot’s views are related to nineteenth-century Romantic hermeneutics. Against the current view, I am not positing an Eliot who naively or stubbornly imagines that perfect sympathy is easily attained. The Eliot I am arguing for appreciates the obstacles in the way of understanding others, but...