Empathy and the Novel (review)

In reading the opening paragraphs of Suzanne Keen's Empathy and the Novel, many Victorianists will recall the impressive meeting of narratology and cultural analysis that characterized Keen's Victorian Renovations of the Novel: Narrative Annexes and the Boundaries of Representation (1998). In her most recent work, though, Victorian novels and culture do not take center stage but instead provide Keen with her own narrative annex, in which she writes primarily as a teacher-scholar and an American public intellectual, merging disciplines from social psychology to neuroscience to literature, in order to consider "the moral imagination of the immersed reader" and its real-world results (xxv). Though the central texts that Keen analyzes are contemporary fiction, Empathy and the Novel deserves review in Victorian Studies because its most basic question helps us read more distinctly the written record of the nineteenth-century novelists and critics who put overwhelming faith in the sympathetic work of the novel as a form. By debating the social effects of reading, Keen's book also links scholars to those outside the academy.

The fundamental question of Keen's study is whether novel-reading motivates not empathetic feeling—she takes this as a given—but altruistic action: the move from "fleeting feeling to willed steps taken on another's behalf" (xiii). In a sense, the title Empathy and the Novel does not do the book justice, suggesting as it does a consideration of the sort of credo George Eliot made famous in her 1856 review, "The Natural History of German Life": "the greatest benefit we owe to the artist, whether painter, poet, or novelist, is the extension of our sympathies. . . . A picture of human life such as a great artist can give, surprises even the trivial and the selfish into that attention to what is apart from themselves, which may be called the raw material of moral sentiment." While a general reader may not pay much heed to what Keen does with this passage, Victorianists who know this passage by heart will thank Keen for prompting us to hear in it something new. Reader, take note: Eliot says almost nothing here about action, focused as she was on feeling. And if Eliot's credo has implications for action, it is systemic action, the sort devised by legislators, not the kind engaged in by individual reader-citizens.

Keen makes a major contribution to our understanding of empathy, creating a much needed lexicon for the subtle and varied forms of authorial and readerly empathy which, under the pressure of this new lexicon, become so obviously distinct. Yet she also takes us beyond the potentially troubling Victorian glorification of fellow-feeling by recognizing that while empathy is nice, it doesn't feed the hungry. As Keen reminds us, only a few of the tens of thousands of novels read by Victorians "can be causally linked to documented consequences" (53). Novels with major social and political influence such as Charles Dickens's Oliver Twist (1837–38) and Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852) were anomalous, yet not only Victorian novelists and critics but twenty-first-century Americans—from Martha Nussbaum to Oprah's monumental book club—imagine the very act of novel-reading as socially responsible. Of course, as Keen notes, literary reading has not always been considered a virtuous pastime. Studies such as Kate Flint's The Woman Reader 1837–1914 (1995) and Patrick Brantlinger's The Reading Lesson (1998) have clarified how threatening reading could seem when the wrong people were doing it, not to mention the equally dangerous content of many novels. Today, though, Keen reports, the very act of novel-reading is seen to be morally effective, regardless of the content of the novel: "the novel as a form. . . enjoys the best press of its three-century career. Novels get credit for the character-building renovation of readers into open-minded, generous citizens" (39).

Yet Keen argues that when we look at the evidence, "empathetic reading experiences that...