Wuthering Heights and the Relics of the Epistolary Novel

This chapter argues that a novelistic version of sympathy negotiates transitions between oral, written, and printed texts in Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights. The mode of vicarious narration that earlier chapters locate in the decline of epistolary fiction culminates in a logic of epistolarity that justifies this novel’s narrative form. Brontë’s novel also transforms Enlightenment conceptions of sympathy through the shared identity between Heathcliff and Catherine, which returns to the extremes of familial proximity and racial difference that trouble Enlightenment notions of sympathy: Heathcliff could just as easily be Catherine’s brother or a racial “other.” After explaining that she has “watched and felt” Heathcliff’s sorrows, Catherine declares “I am Heathcliff.” This assertion suggests an assimilation of radical otherness or a complete mirroring of the self in the familial other, as if to annihilate, through the experience of shared suffering, the boundary that separates sibling from stranger.

The Ends of Kinship in the French Romantic Novel

René and Atala by François-René de Chateaubriand and Paul et Virginie by Jacques-Henri Bernardin de Saint-Pierre each specify a novelistic version of sympathy that arises when stories of forbidden sibling attachment that threaten incest pass between figurative fathers and sons. These texts did not begin as novels, and their internal stories of textual genesis suggest that a particular model of sympathy shapes the transformation of narrative episode into stand-alone novel. In each of these novels, which were popular after the French Revolution’s critique of paternity and its cry of fraternité, siblinghood poses problems of extreme resemblance, a stymied present, and a resistance to the representation and transmission of narrative. Kinship metaphors in scenes of narrative transmission suggest that in order to become independent works of fiction, these extracted episodes rely in part on the accommodated differences, temporal progression, and narrative channels that figurative relationships of paternity offer.

Laurence Sterne in the Romantic Anthology

This chapter describes the fictional forms by which Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy and A Sentimental Journey present confrontations between characters separated by differences of ethnicity, race, and species, particularly in episodes that were frequently republished in popular anthologies. Around the turn of the nineteenth century, readers encountered a version of Sterne’s sentimental fiction that is incompatible with a critical consensus about his novels. While Sterne has been understood to base subject-formation on the appropriation of another’s sentiments through the experience of sympathy, popular anthologized forms of his works, by contrast, emphasize emotional disturbance and preclude the return to a stable, narrating self. Anthologized versions of Sterne mobilize aspects of his original works—the structure of the frame tale, an interest in giving voice to figures of radical difference (including animals and former slaves), and the experience of shared affect and narrative—and specify Romantic-era fiction’s revision of sympathy.

Letters in the Novel and the Novel in Letters

This chapter argues that Henry Mackenzie’s novel in letters Julia de Roubigné marks a transition from epistolary novels that are characterized by numerous correspondents who betray a desperate need for response to nineteenth-century frame tales that unite multiple speakers and eager listeners. Predicting the continued force of epistolary affect and perspective in novels published well into the nineteenth century, Julia de Roubigné indicates the role that fictional scenes of sympathetic response play in the historical transition from the novel in letters to the letter in the novel. This function of sympathy points to the persistent significance of the emotional immediacy and multiple perspectives that are characteristic of a logic of epistolarity, which in turn guides the shifting speakers and listeners of retrospective frame tales, such as René, Frankenstein, and Wuthering Heights, discussed in later chapters.

Introduction

Key figures in Smith’s definition of sympathy clarify the ways his definition is unique and representative in Enlightenment discourse and suggest significant correlations with narrative perspective. His figures of the brother on the rack and the impartial spectator make kinship, physical pain, visual perception, and abstract perspective central to his influential account of sympathy. In the effort to overcome human difference, his conception of perspective anticipates a novelistic version of sympathy that struggles to accommodate difference through shifting narrative perspectives. “Vicarious narratives” identifies intersections between second-hand emotions, or feeling another person’s emotions as if they were one’s own, and second-hand narratives, or telling another person’s story as if it were one’s own. Details of grammar and citation posit a grammar of vicarious experience that destabilizes the meaning of the first-person singular pronoun and challenges the association between the individual and the novel as a genre.

Coda

The coda explores the relationship between the framed narratives discussed in previous chapters and free indirect discourse. Fiction’s redefinition of sympathy arises from the attempt to represent, in the first person, the experience of being another person. Through grammars and structures of vicarious narrative, one character tells another’s story after a shift in perspective. Similar modifications of perspective characterize free indirect discourse, which often follows the cognitive patterns that Smith identifies in the workings of sympathetic response. The similarities between vicarious narratives and free indirect discourse betray a fundamental aspect of the novel—a pervasive interest in witnessing the attempt to uncover and inhabit another person’s present emotional state and past lived experience. Shifts in narrative levels that are indexed by strained experiences of sympathy, however, show how novelistic structures, and fiction itself, can stand in for human sympathies in their absence.

1759 and 1794

Adam Smith’s mid-eighteenth-century account of sympathy begins with an imagined scene of torture. After the excesses of the French Revolution, such speculative scenarios of political and juridical violence prompt more explicit articulations of sympathy. This chapter identifies an urgent clarification of sympathy’s abstract, imaginative, and potentially transgressive features in the post-Terror philosophical work of Smith’s French translator, Sophie de Grouchy, and William Godwin’s Caleb Williams. De Grouchy’s translation highlights the same aspects of Smith’s work—fraternity, abstraction, and physicality—that are fundamental features in novelistic revisions of sympathy. In its figures of the brother on the rack and a natural disaster in the Far East, Smith’s Theory initiates a transformation of visual perception into imaginative perspective that Godwin’s Caleb Williams explores in narrative form.

Novelistic Sympathy in Frankenstein

In Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, a pivotal scene shows the monster weeping together with the Arabian Safie over the fate of Native Americans. The monster embodies an unrecognizable difference that Shelley’s novelistic model of sympathy seeks to accommodate through acts of vicarious narration, and his telling and transcription of Safie’s story are not only the structural center of the novel’s narrative levels but also the conceptual pivot of Shelley’s reformulation of sympathy. Frankenstein explicitly puts forth the genre of the novel as compensation for the impossibility of sympathetic experience. Throughout this novel, moments of narration, transcription, and transmission consistently intersect with experiences of sympathy, which produce the impetus for narrative to be both told and recorded. The shifts in perspective around which Smith centers his definition become, in Shelley’s novelistic sympathy, acts of narrative framing and novel-writing that attempt to overcome difference that defies classification.