kirsty martin - modernism and the rhythms of sympathy [2013][a]

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Modernism and the Rhythms of Sympathy

Vernon Lee, Virginia Woolf, D.H. Lawrence

KIRST Y MARTIN

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Kirsty Martin 2013

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Acknowledgements

Th is book began as a doctoral thesis completed at the University of Oxford, under the supervision of Sophie Ratcliff e and Christopher Butler. Sophie Ratcliff e supervised the fi rst and the last years of this thesis, as well as providing continuing, substantial support as I revised the thesis for publication. I cannot thank her enough; I am enormously grateful for her kindness, patience, and tact. Christopher Butler provided much-needed support for the project at the very beginning of my doctoral work and supervised the middle year of the thesis. His inspiring and generous supervision helped me to expand the reach of my thesis, and helped me to realize what I wanted to say.

I am grateful for the support of Linacre College, Oxford, where I worked on this project fi rst as a graduate student and from 2009 as a Junior Re-search Fellow, and I am also grateful to the fellows and students of Christ Church, Oxford, where I worked on the fi nal stages of this project.

Many thanks to everyone who read and commented on this project in its various forms, including Katharina Boehm, Rosalyn Gregory, Benjamin Kohlmann, Helen Small, and my examiners Gillian Beer, and Valentine Cunningham. Th ank you also to everyone who provided support at vari-ous stages along the way, including Mishtooni Bose, Rachel Crossland, Katherine Macklin, Matthew Reynolds and Tom Stainer. Many thanks to my two anonymous readers for the Press and to Jacqueline Baker, Ariane Petit and Rachel Platt, along with everyone who helped me at OUP.

Th e book is dedicated to my parents, without whose love and support it would not ever have been possible.

Finally, thanks and love to John West for his unwavering, astonishing faith in me, and for everything.

Extracts from the following copyrighted works of Virginia Woolf are reprinted by permission of Th e Random House Group Limited: Th e Dia-ries of Virginia Woolf , ed. Anne Olivier Bell, published by Th e Hogarth Press; Th e Essays of Virginia Woolf , ed. Andrew McNeillie, published by Th e Hogarth Press; Th e Letters of Virginia Woolf , ed. by Nigel Nicolson and Joanne Trautmann, published by Th e Hogarth Press; Moments of Being , published by Th e Hogarth Press. Extracts from Virginia Woolf s works are quoted by permission of the Society of Authors as the Literary Representa-tive of the Estate of Virginia Woolf in electronic versions of this book. Extracts from the following works by Virginia Woolf are reprinted by per-mission of Houghton Miffl in Harcourt Publishing Company:

viii Acknowledgements

Mrs Dalloway . Copyright 1925 by the Houghton Miffl in Harcourt Pub-lishing Company. Copyright renewed 1953 by Leonard Woolf. All rights reserved. To the Lighthouse . Copyright 1927 by the Houghton Miffl in Harcourt Publishing Company. Copyright renewed 1954 by Leonard Woolf. All rights reserved. Th e Waves . Copyright 1931 by the Houghton Miffl in Harcourt Publish-ing Company. Copyright renewed1959 by Leonard Woolf. All rights reserved. Between the Acts . Copyright 1941 by the Houghton Miffl in Harcourt Publishing Company. Copyright renewed 1969 by Leonard Woolf. All rights reserved. Moments of Being . Copyright 1976 by Quentin Bell and Angelica Garnett. All rights reserved. Th e Diary of Virginia Woolf , volumes 15, edited by Anne Olivier Bell. Diary copyright 1977, 1978, 1980, 1982, 1984 by Quentin Bell and Angelica Garnett. All rights reserved. Th e Letters of Virginia Woolf , volumes IVI, edited by Nigel Nicolson and Joanne Trautmann. Letters copyright 1975, 1976, 1977, 1978, 1979, 1980 by Quentin Bell and Angelica Garnett. All rights reserved. Th e Essays of Virginia Woolf , volumes 15, edited by Andrew McNeillie. Text copyright 1986, 1987, 1989, 1994, by Quentin Bell and Angelica Garnett. All rights reserved.

Extracts from the following copyrighted works of D. H. Lawrence are reproduced by permission of Pollinger Limited and the Estate of Frieda Lawrence Ravagli: Study of Th omas Hardy and Other Essays , ed. Bruce Steele (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985) the Estate of Frieda Lawrence Ravagli 1985; Th e Plumed Serpent , ed. L. D. Clark (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987) the Estate of Frieda Lawrence Ravagli 1987; Women in Love , ed. David Farmer, Lindeth Vasey, and John Worthen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987) the Estate of Frieda Lawrence Ravagli 1987; Th e Rainbow , ed. Mark Kinkead-Weekes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989) the Estate of Frieda Lawrence Ravagli 1989; Lady Chatterleys Lover , ed. Michael Squires (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993) the Estate of Frieda Lawrence Ravagli 1993; Th e First and Second Lady Chatterley Novels , ed. Dieter Mehl and Christa Jansohn the Estate of Frieda Lawrence Ravagli 1999; Late Essays and Articles , ed. James T. Boulton (Cambridge: Cam-bridge University Press, 2004) the Estate of Frieda Lawrence Ravagli

Acknowledgements ix

2004; Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious and Fantasia of the Unconscious , ed. Bruce Steele (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004) the Estate of Frieda Lawrence Ravagli 2004; Th e Letters of D. H. Lawrence ed. James T. Boulton et al., 7 volumes the Estate of Frieda Lawrence Ravagli 1979, 198, 1984, 1987, 1989, 1991, 1993.

An earlier version of parts of my second chapter and Introduction ap-peared in my essay Virginia Woolf, Sympathy and Feeling for the Human, Towards a New Literary Humanism ed. Andy Mousley (Hound-mills, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011); this material is reproduced with the permission of Palgrave Macmillan. Aside from all above men-tioned, care has been taken to ensure that quotations fall within the defi -nition of fair dealing for the purposes of criticism.

I am grateful to the Archive at the British Institute of Florence, and Colby College Special Collections, Waterville, Maine, for permission to quote from Vernon Lees unpublished writing, and to Somerville College, University of Oxford, for permission to quote from letters to Vernon Lee.

Contents

List of Abbreviations xii

Introduction 1

1. Vernon Lees Empathy 30

2. Virginia Woolf and the Conditions of Our Love 81

3. D. H. Lawrence: Th e Way Our Sympathy Flows and Recoils 132

Conclusion 188

Bibliography 195 Index 211

List of Abbreviations

OED Oxford English Dictionary , 2nd edition, ed. J. A. Simpson and E. S. C. Weiner. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989.

Introduction In a letter to Vanessa Bell, Roger Fry gestured to the particular type of communion he felt with her: Nessa I should be a real artist really truly and without doubt if I could draw you often because you have this miracle of rhythm in you and not in your body only but in everything you do. 1 Fry is expressing, with a hint of the grasping, his need of Vanessa as artistic inspiration, but his breathless phrase also points to a specifi c attention to her. He is drawn to something which is both in Vanessa and diff used through her actions. He is responding neither solely to her mind nor her body but to rhythm. He is trying to cap-ture something ethereal, as evinced in the breathless pressure of his sentence, and his vague exuberant phrasingthis miracle of rhythmbut he is also expressing something he is very sure about: really truly and without doubt.

Th is book does not claim that by feeling for others, or by feeling for art, we become more altruistic. Instead, it explores a form of sympathy which is driven by a determination to be true to what it is to feel. It focuses on how sympathy is imagined in the work of three writers of the early twentieth century: Vernon Lee, Virginia Woolf, and D. H. Lawrence. It shows how sympathy is inextricable from the interest and pleasure of their work, inseparable from the close detail of their writing, bound up with their particular literary modernism. It reveals these writers interest in forms of intuitive communion, such as that described above, which involve a feeling for something at once integral to a person and hard to place, which are at once bodily and intimate transcendence. For Lee, Woolf, and Lawrence, writing about sympathy demanded thinking on questions of what feeling is, and what life is. At the margins of Vernon Lees theorizing, and more fully realized in the novels of Woolf and Lawrence, is a type of sympathy founded on a conception of what it is to be alive.

1 Roger Fry to Vanessa Bell ( c. 1914), Tate Gallery Archives, cited by Frances Spalding, Vanessa Bell (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1983), xv.

2 Modernism and the Rhythms of Sympathy

SYMPATHY

Aristotle has not defi ned pity and terror, Stephen Dedalus announces in Joyces A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916). 2 He is referring to one of the earliest attempts to think through how we feel for art, and how we respond to the feelings of others: Aristotle in Th e Poetics suggests that we are moved by alternating fear and pity in watching tragedy. 3 Yet, as Stephen indicates, it is not quite clear how Aristotle imagines terror and pity, and whether his formulation of how we feel for others is suffi cient. Stephen Halliwell has noted that the clipped phrases of Aristotles theory of emotional response have prompted controversyhe describes how re-actions have varied from acceptance of it as a central insight, to repudia-tion of it as superfi cial and inadequate. 4 Th e struggle over the meaning of Th e Poetics suggests the complexity and the longevity of questions of how we feel for art, and of how we feel for each other. Sympathy has formed a part of countless manifestos on the importance of literature. It seems to bind the nature of our attention to art to ethical benefi ts in the world: through feeling for literature we might learn to feel for more people, be prompted to help others, or be enabled to contemplate moral decisions more clearly and tolerantly. Today sympathy continues to be explored and questioned. Th ere have been attempts both to defend the importance of sympathy as central to how we feel for each other and how we feel for art, and to subject such claims to scrutiny. Brigid Lowe has set out to counter the anti-humanist distanced perspective adopted by much recent so-called political literary criticism by focusing on sympathy in the Victo-rian novel, and Suzanne Keen by contrast has debunked the notion that empathetic reading might make us more altruistic people, suggesting that [w]e should not [] risk spoiling a great source of aesthetic pleasure, refreshing escape, and edifi cation, with a task it cannot accomplish. 5

Th is book will explore a form of sympathy that is morally problematic, but that is inextricable from the conditions of feeling itself. With this aim, I shall be countering the classic anti-empathy argument of Bertolt Brecht. For Brecht, a feeling response to theatre was something that was to be avoided in favour of drama that prompted a reaction of reason. 6 Brecht

2 James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916), ed. Seamus Deane (London: Penguin, 2000), 221 .

3 Aristotle, Poetics , trans. Malcolm Heath (London: Penguin, 1996), 10 . 4 Stephen Halliwell, Aristotles Poetics (London: Gerald Duckworth, 1986), 183 , 170. 5 Brigid Lowe, Victorian Fiction and the Insights of Sympathy: An Alternative to the

Hermeneutics of Suspicion (London: Anthem Press, 2007), 241 . Suzanne Keen, Empathy and the Novel (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 168 .

6 Bertolt Brecht, Th e Modern Th eatre is the Epic Th eatre (1930), in Brecht on Th eatre: Th e Development of An Aesthetic , ed. and trans. John Willett (New York: Hill and Wang, 1964), 3342 , 37.

Introduction 3

argued that reason rather than feeling was geared towards producing action; discouraging feeling would thus help in prompting spectators to change their society rather than allowing them simply to be emotionally moved by its condition. Moreover, Brecht suggested feeling for individu-als is somehow misleading, as this kind of personal concern ignores the real forces shaping society. As Christopher Butler explains, Brechts writ-ing falls within a tradition which would not [] allow our awareness of the historical evolution of class diff erences to collapse, via personal sym-pathy, into a merely moral relationship which will relativize our view of individuals in society. 7

Brechts theory is diffi cult to argue with, but it is also diffi cult to accept. Audiences famously failed to live up to the demands of epic theatre, in particular infuriating Brecht by the persistence of their sympathy for the title character in Mother Courage (1941). He had intended his audience to react with indignation at Mother Courages blindness and stupidity, but in the event they were moved to tears at her courage. 8 After unsuccess-fully altering his play to emphasize his point, Brecht seems weary: [a] deeply ingrained habit induces the audience in the theatre to pick out the more emotional aspects of the characters and to ignore the rest . 9 What Brecht recognizes with resignation, Wayne Booth suggests may be some-thing essential that cannot be removed from art: [t]he various kinds of purgewhether of unrealistic authors voice, of impure human emotions, or of the moral judgments which help to produce themcan be under-stood only in the context of what cannot be purged: some kind of interest that will grasp and sustain the reader throughout the work. 10 Th e emo-tions, as Nol Carroll suggests, are intimately related to attention, and the banishing of emotional attachment seems to ask too much of people and of art. 11

Th is investigation will support a sense of the importance of sympathy, but will suggest that the ethics of sympathy might take a diff erent shape than has hitherto been supposed. To this end I will be especially con-cerned with the work of Martha Nussbaum. Nussbaum has argued against an anti-compassion tradition that she feels is especially evident in the moral philosophy of Immanuel Kant. Nussbaum claims that Kant

7 Christopher Butler, Interpretation, Deconstruction, Ideology: An Introduction to Some Current Issues in Literary Th eory (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984), 125 .

8 Martin Esslin, Brecht: A Choice of Evils , 4th rev. edn (London: Methuen, 1985), 211 . For the rest of Esslins account of the Mother Courage reception and Brechts reaction see ibid. 21113.

9 Bertolt Brecht, Der lange Weg in den Krieg, Th eaterarbeit (1952), cited in Esslin, Brecht: A Choice of Evils , 212.

10 Wayne C. Booth, Th e Rhetoric of Fiction , 2nd edn (London: Penguin, 1983), 124 . 11 Nol Carroll, Beyond Aesthetics: Philosophical Essays (Cambridge: Cambridge Univer-

sity Press, 2001), 225 .


demands the mastery of emotions and other sensuous inclinations. 12 For Kant, feeling should have no real place in morality. He suggests that we should treat another person as an end, never merely as a means , with respect for others as separate individuals possessing their own autonomous wills. 13 He argues, however, that ethical conduct depends on action, and can exist without any exercise of feeling. Kant understands the phrase love ones neighbour in the practical rather than the pathological sense, as a love which lies in the will and not in the propensity of feeling, in principles of action and not in melting sympathy. 14 His moral philoso-phy, like Brechts aesthetic and political theory, is hard to square with human psychology: Kant himself admits that no certain example can be cited of the disposition to act from pure duty. 15 Nussbaum condemns Kants morality as suppressive and instead describes virtue in the Aristo-telian way, as involving a reasonable shaping or enlightening of the passions. 16

Lee, Woolf, and Lawrence were also hostile to the suppressive in ethics, but their work complicates the notion of a reasonable shaping or enlightening of the passions. Nussbaum, as others have noted, takes a humanist view of literature as able to teach us how to live. 17 She follows Aristotle in demanding a fi ne-tuned concreteness in ethical attention and suggests that there may be some views of the world and how one should live in it [] that cannot be fully and adequately stated in the language of conventional prose [] but only in a language and in forms themselves more complex, more allusive, more attentive to particulars. 18 For Nuss-baum, literature, and especially minutely mimetic literature, provides this type of language and thus provides a concrete, ethically helpful view of the world. Nussbaums view of what would constitute an ethical attitude corresponds in some ways to that of Kantshe insists on respect for another persons otherness and autonomybut she maintains that this can be achieved through feeling for others, and through having our feelings

12 Martha C. Nussbaum, Upheavals of Th ought: Th e Intelligence of the Emotions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 381 .

13 Immanuel Kant, Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals (1785), trans. and ed. Mary Gregor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 38 . All italics in quotations throughout this Introduction are from the original source, unless stated otherwise.

14 Ibid. 13. 15 Ibid. 19. 16 Nussbaum, Upheavals , 381. 17 Geoff rey Galt Harpham accuses Nussbaum of an unmoderated humanism; Th e

Hunger of Martha Nussbaum, Representations , 77 (Winter, 2002), 5281 , 57. 18 Martha C. Nussbaum, Loves Knowledge: Essays on Philosophy and Literature (New York:

Oxford University Press, 1990), 38 , 34.

Introduction 5

enlightened through literature. 19 Nussbaums sense of how feeling for lit-erary particulars might prove enlightening not only echoes Aristotle, but also chimes with the work of many literary critics and philosophers, as well as providing an expansive exploration of a widely held folk psycho-logical sense of what literature, and particularly the novel, can do. 20

If this book were purely a defence of this point of view, a writer such as George Eliot might have seemed a more obvious focus. Eliot was clear that sympathy was integral to the importance of the novel:

Th e greatest benefi t we owe to the artist, whether painter, poet, or novelist, is the extension of our sympathies. Appeals founded on generalizations and statistics require a sympathy ready-made, a moral sentiment already in activity; but a pic-ture of human life such as a great artist can give, surprises even the trivial and selfi sh into that attention to what is apart from themselves, which may be called the raw material of moral sentiment. 21

George Eliot would provide a good demonstration of Nussbaums humanist ideals for literature, as she too infuses the Kantian ideal with feeling. 22 Eliot suggests the importance of peoples otherness, a need to attend to what is apart from oneself, but she maintains that a reasonable shaping of feeling helps us to do this. In this ideal Eliot is infl uenced by Auguste Comtes System of Positive Polity (18514, trans. 18757), which suggested how human beings were to be held together as the result of freely chosen sympathy and love, love which took for its ideal a mothers feelings for her child. 23 Comte drew Eliot to the conclusion, as Brigid Lowe puts it, that sympathy is an indispensable mode of understand-ing. 24 Feeling helped one understand the similarity of others and thus act altruistically towards them. For example, Eliots sympathetic ideal is played out in Middlemarch (18712), when Dorothea Brooke goes to

19 Nussbaum argues that an adequate view of morality must make room for mutual respect and reciprocity; that it should treat people as ends rather than as means, and as agents rather than simply as passive recipients of benefi t: Upheavals , 12.

20 Sophie Ratcliff e notes that Nussbaums claims about sympathy echo Adam Smiths theory of sympathy, and the work of literary critics such as Wayne Booth and Robert Lang-baum; Ratcliff e, On Sympathy (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2008), 13 . Keen suggests that it is a contemporary truism that novel reading cultivates empathy that produces good citi-zens for the world: Empathy and the Novel , xv.

21 George Eliot, Th e Natural History of German Life (1856), in Th e Essays of George Eliot , ed. Th omas Pinney (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1963), 26699 , 270.

22 Christopher Butler describes Eliots Natural History of German Life statement as involving admirable Kantian considerationswhich may lead to an emotionally informed respect for the autonomy of others; Pleasure and the Arts: Enjoying Literature, Painting, and Music (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 40.

23 Philip Davis, Th e Victorians , Oxford English Literary History, vol. 8: 18301880 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 172 .

24 Lowe, Victorian Sympathy , 13.


help Rosamond Vincy, despite suspecting her of an aff air with Ladislaw, with whom she is in love. 25 Dorothea uses her situation as a stepping-stone to understand Rosamonds, analogically contemplating her mar-riage union which, like her own, seemed to have its hidden as well as evident troubles. 26 Seeing similarities allows Dorothea to shape her own feeling into an impetus for helping others: when she speaks to Rosamond it is said that she is speaking from out the heart of her own trial to Rosamonds. 27

Th ere are, however, diffi culties inherent in Eliots view of sympathy. Eliot believed, as Th omas Pinney has pointed out, in truth to feelingin Worldliness and Other-Worldliness: the Poet Young (1859) she casti-gated Young for what she described as his radical insincerity as a poetic artist . 28 Eliot argues that Youngs insincerity can be seen through his focus on abstractions rather than particulars, which results in that defi cient human sympathy, that impiety towards the present and the visible, which fl ies for its motives, its sanctities, and its religion, to the remote, the vague, and the unknown. 29 And yet the essay was a diffi cult one for Eliot to writeshe repeatedly postponed its completion, and contemplated giving it up altogether. Pinney suggests that this diffi culty was because she never liked attacking an object that had once been able to arouse strong and genuine feeling. 30

It is possible that the problem with Young was not solely his insincerity but that his work revealed how truth to feeling might indeed involve elements of the remote, the vague, and the unknown, and might disrupt the morality of sympathy. Th roughout Eliots work there are intimations of how feeling might not buckle to reasonable, altruistic shaping, how it might disquiet notions of morality. Before Dorothea goes to meet Rosa-mond she has to struggle against a paroxysm of grief as waves of suff er-ing shook her too thoroughly to leave any power of thought. 31 Th e waves of suff ering, render Dorothea passive, and elsewhere in Eliots work waves, streams, and currents of feeling trouble the morality of sympathy

25 I am elaborating here on Christopher Butlers comment that the way in which [t]he primary experience of reading Middlemarch will indeed help us to engage in a highly and perhaps uniquely detailed simulation of others situations can be seen particularly when Dorothea fi nally attempts to confront and save Rosamond; Pleasure and the Arts , 204.

26 George Eliot, Middlemarch (18712), ed. David Carroll (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), 776 .

27 Ibid. 783. 28 Pinney (ed.), Essays of George Eliot , 336. George Eliot, Worldliness and Other-

Worldliness: Th e Poet Young (1857), in Essays of George Eliot , ed. Pinney, 33585, 366. 29 Eliot, Worldliness and Other-Worldliness, 385. 30 Pinney (ed.), Essays of George Eliot , 336. See Pinneys account of the essays composi-

tion: Essays of George Eliot , 3356. 31 Eliot, Middlemarch , 776, 774.

Introduction 7

for instance, in Th e Lifted Veil (1859) Latimer is pained rather than morally enlightened by his insight into others, plagued by the way his knowledge of others runs in parallel streams with his own. 32

Most importantly for this book, Eliots notion that the analogical shap-ing of feeling can prompt altruistic understanding is disrupted by streams of feeling which are at once abstract and sensuous. At the beginning of Middlemarch , Dorothea is momentarily captivated by some jewels: She was opening some ring-boxes, which disclosed a fi ne emerald with diamonds, and just then the sun passing beyond a cloud sent a bright gleam over the table.

How very beautiful these gems are! said Dorothea, under a new current of feeling, as sudden as the gleam. 33

Dorothea is subjected to her feeling, under a new current, and the way she is moved is suggested by reference to the nonhuman, her emotion aligned with the movement of the sun and the surface of the emerald. Dorothea explains her feelings with recourse to the spiritual, calling the gems fragments of heaven. 34 Eliot exposes the disingenuousness of this, that Dorothea was trying to justify her delight in the colours by merging them in her mystic religious joy, but there does seem to be something both immediately sensuous, and somewhat ungraspable, about Dorotheas reaction. 35 She struggles to express her delight by synaesthesia, mixing the senses to express something both based in the body and that baffl es the senses: how deeply colours seem to penetrate one, like scents. 36

Th is form of feeling is central to the ideas of sympathy explored by this book. Dorotheas response to the jewels displays how feeling can be at once intimate to a person, and yet beyond them: how feeling can seem both based in the senses and yet diffi cult to map exactly onto bodily senses, both experienced by the individual as intense inner sensation and also something that seems to leave one bereft of autonomy. It suggests how feeling might be something of a disruptive element, so that feeling for another person might not easily preserve and respect the type of autonomy called for in a Kantian ethics. It radically revises questions of what one is trying to feel for when one sympathizes, suggesting that if one wants to enter into anothers feelings, one should not aim to understand

32 George Eliot, Th e Lifted Veil (1859), in Th e Lifted Veil; Brother Jacob , ed. Helen Small (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 21 .

33 Eliot, Middlemarch , 13. 34 Ibid. 13. 35 Ibid. 14. 36 Ibid. 13. For more on how such feeling troubles Eliots writing see Delia da Sousa

Correa, George Eliot, Music and Victorian Culture (Houndmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003) , who notes that music in Eliot reveals strange extremes of sympathy (3).


the individual mind, but instead something else, something that might be diffi cult for the person themselves to know. Th is form of feeling and of sympathy, both bodily and intimating transcendence, has been explored, in diff erent ways, by a variety of writers, from Sternes sense of how emo-tion moves us beyond ourselves, to the subtle responses to nature and people captured variously in Keats and Wordsworth and Th omas Hardy, and the passionate mesmeric sympathies depicted in the novels of Char-lotte and Emily Bront. 37 Th e literature of the early twentieth century, this book will show, off ers particularly rich resources for further exploration.

Intuitive, bodily sympathy not only complicates Nussbaums infl uential understanding of emotion and ethics, but also complicates the notion of sympathy itself. It off ers a view of feeling for others that is distinct from many recent formulations. Audrey Jaff e has explored sympathy in the Vic-torian novel as linked to spectatorship, arguing that sympathy in Victorian fi ction is inseparable from issues of visuality and representation because it is inextricable from the middle-class subjects status as spectator and from the social fi gures to whose visible presence the Victorian middle classes felt it necessary to formulate a response. 38 She imagines sympathy as involving a sympathetic spectator considering the object of their sympathy from a dis-tance. My book explores a form of sympathy which is not primarily con-cerned with matters of class and, moreover, is not primarily concerned with spectatorship. I will explore acts of looking, but, as is apparent in Dorotheas response to the jewels, vision can commingle with other senses, can pene-trate one, like scent. Sympathy can seem at once to be based in the senses and to blur them. Th is book will be concerned with sympathy less as pity-ing spectatorship, than as a complex form of sensory entanglement.

Such sensuous sympathetic entanglement not only collapses autonomy, but can also collapse a sense of the diff erence between people. It questions the importance of respect and tenderness for others that has been at the heart, not only of Nussbaum and Kants ethics, but of many understand-ings of sympathy. Marian Eide, for instance, has written about ethics in Joyce as best understood as the experience and expression of sympathy within the preservation of diff erence. In other words, ethical response makes possible a communion that does not obscure necessary separa-tion. 39 In her insistence on the preservation of diff erence she is infl u-enced by Emmanuel Levinas sense of the need for the respect for anothers

37 James Chandler, Th e Languages of Sentiment, Textual Practice: Languages of Emo-tion , 22:1 (March 2008), 2139 , 25.

38 Audrey Jaff e, Scenes of Sympathy: Identity and Representation in Victorian Fiction (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2000), 8 .

39 Marian Eide, Ethical Joyce (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 4 .

Introduction 9

otherness. 40 She is also incorporating ideas drawn from a feminist ethics of care expounded by writers such as Carol Gilligan, who have stressed how ethics should be based on the idea of mutual human dependency, of care rather than justice. 41 Th e feminist ethics of care has complicated understandings of the need for respect for individual autonomy in ethics. Brigid Lowe, for instance, suggests that the work of George Eliot provides an illustration of Gilligans feminist ethics of care, and argues that sympa-thy in Eliot can involve an abandonment of autonomy, depicting sympa-thy as a distinctively human mode of understanding that dissolves the boundaries of the self, and unites humanity. 42 Yet this is an abandonment that produces reciprocal tenderness based on mutual need. My book sug-gests an alternative way of thinking about sympathy that sets itself apart from both a need for respect for otherness and even, at times, from a sense of union based on tenderness. I explore a form of sympathy that does not only disrupt autonomy, but also does not always involve respect for indi-viduality. Lee, Woolf, and Lawrence explore forms of communion that redefi ne love and complicate compassion, showing how loving people might involve some necessary encroachment on their otherness.

Sympathy runs into problems of defi nition, bordering on, and distin-guishing itself from, other states such as pity, compassion, empathy, altru-ism, and understanding. 43 A distinction can be made between empathy and sympathy, with sympathy involving a more distanced feeling for others and empathy amounting to an absolute inhabiting of anothers experience, feeling with. 44 In a sense this book will be concerned with this diff erence, because it directs attention to the workings of sympathy and the degrees to which we respond to, and understand, each other. I will not, however, be drawing an absolute distinction between sympathy and empathy. Th e problem of whether to use the word sympathy or empathy is a recent oneempathy was only introduced into the lan-guage in the early twentieth century. Neither Woolf nor Lawrence used the term empathy, and their language of feeling for others in their work

40 For Emmanuel Levinas ideas on alterity see Totality and Infi nity: An Essay on Exterior-ity (1961), trans. Alphonso Lingis (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1969) , passim .

41 See Carol Gilligan, In a Diff erent Voice: Psychological Th eory and Womens Development (1982; Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998) . See Eide, Ethical Joyce , 429 for her discussion of Levinas and of the feminist ethics of care.

42 Lowe, Victorian Fiction , 222. 43 Nussbaum notes, in defi ning compassion that [p]ity, sympathy, and empathy

all appear in texts and in common usage, usually without clear distinction either from one another or from what I am calling compassion; Upheavals , 301. See also Adam Phillips and Barbara Taylor on the meaning of kindness: On Kindness (London: Penguin, 2009), 4.

44 See Keen for further discussion of the distinction: Empathy and the Novel , 45.


incorporates shades of feeling for and feeling with. Whilst Lee discussed the word empathy and was importantly involved in the early history of the word, she was, as will be evident, ambivalent about its meaning. For Lee, Woolf, and Lawrence, a sense of a bodily and yet ecstatic form of feeling, hinted at in George Eliot, led to a central concern with a type of sympathy that was both sensuous and epiphanic. Th is book will be con-cerned with a type of attention to others that is emotional and intuitive and that intimates transcendence. Sympathy will be shown to involve degrees of empathy, intuition, understanding, love, sensitivity, and atten-tion, as well as stretching to include states of wider communality and togetherness within groups. Tracing such sympathy involves moving from intense moments between individuals to the far reaches of wide-ranging sympathy, where one feels with groups, cities, and nations, and where emotion becomes even harder to grasp, exceeding our ability fully to reg-ister it.

MODERNISM

Lee, Woolf, and Lawrence are not obvious writers to place together. Th ey were ambivalent and sometimes hostile towards each others work, and they did not exert direct infl uence on each others writing. Th eir writing, however, reveals affi nities in the way they think about sympathy, and reading them alongside each other allows one to study the development of a particular historical ideal of sympathy. Th ese writers off er an insight into what sympathy meant to literary modernism. Vernon Lee was on the edge of modernism, her work falling within both the nineteenth and the twentieth centuries, and her work intimates the need for characteristically modernist modes of writing. Lees theories of empathy, and the gaps in her theories of empathy, begin to suggest the existence of a form of sym-pathetic experience that the modernist novels of Woolf and Lawrence were especially suited to portraying. Th rough techniques such as stream-of-consciousness and rhythm, through careful consideration of the in-sights into feeling off ered by visual art and music, and through a writing both acute and indirect, Woolf and Lawrence were able to suggest the delicate intensities by which people might be drawn together. Placing these writers alongside each other shows how modernism allowed for new, more expansive ways of expressing sympathy. It off ers a fresh per-spective on a literary period, questioning still-pervasive notions of mod-ernisms hostility to notions of feeling for others. It reveals how sympathy was central to modernism, and it reveals how modernism might help us think again about sympathy today.

Introduction 11

Classic (albeit now deeply controversial) accounts of modernism held that it was not concerned with tracing relations between people. Georg Lukcs, for instance, suggested that nineteenth-century and modernist literature can be distinguished by their diff ering interest in people. He argued that in the nineteenth-century novel there are some solitary indi-viduals, yet:

Beside and beyond their solitariness, the common life, the strife and togetherness of other human beings, goes on as before. In a word, their solitariness is a specifi c social fate, not a universal condition humaine . 45

By contrast, for modernist novelists solitariness is indeed a universal con-dition humaine : the modernist novel, for Lukcs, is preoccupied by the documenting of individual consciousness rather than social life. 46 For John Carey, modernist attention to the individual was coupled with and driven by a pathological distrust of people in the mass. His notorious attack on modernism in Intellectuals and the Masses argued that modernism was violently lacking in sympathy: the principle around which modernist literature and culture fashioned themselves was the exclusion of the masses, the defeat of their power, the removal of their literacy, the denial of their humanity. 47

Such stark denunciations have today been modifi ed by other analyses, such as Rachel Potters Modernism and Democracy (2006). Yet modern-isms central concern not just with subjectivity but with how we feel for others has yet to be appreciated. 48 Instead, there is a pervading sense that early twentieth-century writers were hostile to messy emotion and parti-cularly to empathy. Michael Whitworth, summarizing the central aspects of modernism, puts it thus:

Modernist writers distinguish between abstraction and empathy, often claiming to prefer the former. In the novel, the means by which earlier generations of writ-ers would have allowed readers to identify with a character are eschewed or radi-cally revised; in poetry, the identifi able speaking voice of lyric poetry is avoided, or framed in unfamiliar contexts. For example, in narrative, the use of complex time schemes tends to disrupt continuity and thus disrupt our identifi cation with a character. If events which belong late in the chronological sequence are

45 Georg Lukcs, Th e Ideology of Modernism, Th e Meaning of Contemporary Realism (1958), trans. John and Necke Mander (London: Merlin Press, 1963), 1746 , 20.

46 Ibid. 20. 47 John Carey, Th e Intellectuals and the Masses: Pride and Prejudice among the Literary

Intelligentsia, 18801939 (London: Faber and Faber, 1992), 21 . 48 For explorations of modernist subjectivity see Christopher Butler, Early Modernism:

Literature, Music and Painting in Europe 19001916 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994), 89131, and Michael Levenson, Modernism and the Fate of Individuality: Character and Novelistic Form from Conrad to Woolf (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991) .


presented earlier in the narrative, then the reader views the chronologically earlier events with ironic detachment, knowing more than the participants. In some writers, notably Wyndham Lewis, the narrators language may also block empathy, presenting the characters as cultural constructs rather than as free agents. 49

Such a description suggests that a rejection of empathy is engrained in the modernist style, and Whitworths comments are echoed by many charac-terizations of the literature of the period which continue to suggest that central to modernism was a distrust of empathy. 50 Lee Oser has argued that modernist emphasis on abstraction puts it at odds with the type of Aristotelian humanism subscribed to by Nussbaum:

In contrast to the Aristotelian body, what I shall call the modernist body is an aesthetic body. It is an image in the mind, an incorporeal voice, a ghost of style. It is epitomized by the persona or mask. 51

In both Whitworth and Osers statements, a modernist stylistic interest in abstraction seems innately to forestall any interest in feeling for another.

Th ere is the danger in such statements of confl ating modernisms distrust of sentimentality with a distrust of all emotion. In the course of writing this book there has been a proliferation of work showing how modernism does indeed off er original descriptions of particular forms of feeling, that emotion matters to modernism. 52 However, descriptions of modernism as individualistic, and inherently against feeling for others in particular, can be supported by the work of some modernist writers. T. E. Hulme, following Wilhelm Worringer, did indeed privilege abstrac-tion over empathy. 53 Wyndham Lewis did praise those polished and resistant surfaces of a great externalist art as opposed to attempts to reveal

49 Michael H. Whitworth, Introduction, in Michael H. Whitworth (ed.), Modernism (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2007), 360 , 14.

50 See, for instance, David Trotter, Paranoid Modernism: Literary Experiment, Psychosis, and the Professionalization of English Society (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001) , who writes of a will-to-abstraction (3). See also Peter Nicholls, Modernisms: A Literary Guide (Houndmills, Basingstoke: Macmillan Press, 1995) , which begins with Baudelaires To a Red-haired Beggar Girl (18456) and underlines the importance of its tone of ironic distance for modernism (3).

51 Lee Oser, Th e Ethics of Modernism: Moral Ideas in Yeats, Eliot, Joyce, Woolf and Beckett (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 9 .

52 Sara Crangle, Prosaic Desires: Modernist Boredom, Knowledge, Laughter and Anticipa-tion (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2010) ; Gabrielle McIntire, Modernism, Memory and Desire: T. S. Eliot and Virginia Woolf (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008) ; Julie Taylor, Djuna Barnes and Aff ective Modernism (Edinburgh: Edinburgh Univer-sity Press, 2012) ; Anthony Cuda, Th e Passions of Modernism: Eliot, Yeats, Woolf, and Mann (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2008) .

53 T. E. Hulme, Modern Art and Its Philosophy (1924), in Th e Collected Writings of T. E. Hulme , ed. Karen Csengeri (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994), 26885 .

Introduction 13

the inner life of people. 54 T. S. Eliot did state that [p]oetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality (although the poetic practice of Th e Waste Land (1922) and the confessional Four Quartets (193542) mitigates this principle). 55 Th e work of James Joyce, and of writers includ-ing Aldous Huxley and Evelyn Waugh, does seem more based on parody than sympathy. Some modernist writers also show a deep anxiety about the workings of sympathy in group situations.

Such perspectives are not true of all of modernism. Suzanne Clark in Sentimental Modernism (1991) has pointed out that statements of modernisms hostility to sentiment and sympathy occlude in particular much womens writing, making modernism the terrain of a certain type of masculinity. 56 Th e work of Woolf and Lawrence also sets itself against some of the ideas of emotion in the work of writers such as Eliot and Joyce, and my inclusion of Vernon Lee complicates ideas of modernism in itself, suggesting the variety of work being produced in the early twentieth century. However, this book will not just seek to cement a sense of the diversity of modernist writing, but will challenge some of the ideas of emotion and sympathy that have underpinned previous percep-tions of the period. 57 I will be exploring, for instance, the relation be-tween sympathy and the concept of an autonomous individual, and the relation between sympathy and abstraction.

Th inking about ideas of emotion in the early twentieth century has so far been undertaken in response to a limited range of texts, focusing in particular on the diff erent texts of psychoanalysis: Stephen Frosh has argued that modernist perceptions of subjectivity, individuality, memory and sociality are all deeply entwined with a psychoanalytic sensitivity. 58

54 Wyndham Lewis, Men without Art (1934; repr. New York: Russell and Russell, 1964), 121 . 55 T. S. Eliot, Tradition and the Individual Talent (1919), in Selected Prose of T. S. Eliot ,

ed. Frank Kermode (London: Faber and Faber, 1975), 3744 , 43. 56 See Suzanne Clark, Sentimental Modernism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press,

1991) . Bonnie Kime Scotts Refi guring Modernism: Th e Women of 1928 , 2 vols (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995) aimed to complicate views of modernism as geared towards the men of 1914 which she discusses in detail, I: 77180. She begins to suggest that reconfi guring modernism in this way may mean recognizing a more sympathetic modernismshe notes that Virginia Woolf is intrigued by attachments, unlike T. S. Eliot in his poetics of depersonalization (p. xvi).

57 One article on a modernist writer which also challenges underlying conceptions of empathy is Rochelle Rives, Problem Space: Mary Butts, Modernism and the Etiquette of Placement, Modernism/Modernity , 12:4 (November 2005), 60727 .

58 Stephen Frosh, Psychoanalysis in Britain: Th e Rituals of Destruction , in David Bradshaw (ed.), A Concise Companion to Modernism (Oxford: Blackwell, 2003), 11637 , 116. An exception to this emphasis on the psychoanalytic would be Cudas Passions of Modernism , which situates itself in terms of classical philosophical discourse on the passions (12), as well as understandings of feeling from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (1525).


Some critics have also explored the impact of earlier empiricist psychol-ogy. 59 Lee, Woolf, and Lawrence shared an antipathy to Freud, and it seems that the current sources for thinking about emotion have been insuffi cient for appreciating their formulations of sympathy. Th is book will bring into focus some aspects of these writers sense of sympathy that have hitherto escaped notice by turning to more recent understandings of emotion.

EMOTION

Recently, literary critics have explored literary understandings of sym-pathy in relation to a philosophical distinction between two schools of thought which try to explain how we predict the behaviour of other people in everyday life: Th eory Th eory and simulation theory. 60 My work suggests that such theories may not be enough. Th eory Th eory suggests that we understand others because we have a general sense of how the mind works, which we apply to the situations of others. Simu-lation theory is the theory that we understand others because we re- construct their experience in our own minds, and thus feel an approximation of their feelings. For the phenomenologist Shaun Gallagher, however, Th eory Th eory and simulation theory off er a restrictive view of what one might want to know about another. He notes that:

A common and basic assumption implicit to theory of mind accounts is that to know another person is to know that persons mind, and this means to know their beliefs, desires, or intentional states. 61

Th is results in a circumscribed version of sympathy:

Both theory theory and simulation theory conceive of communicative interaction between two people as a process that takes place between two Cartesian minds. It assumes that ones understanding involves a retreat into a realm of theoria or simulacra , into a set of internal mental operations that come to be expressed (externalized) in speech, gesture or action. 62

Lee, Woolf, and Lawrence suggest, similarly, that knowing another person involves more than knowing another persons mind, more than knowing

59 For a study of early psychologies see Judith Ryan, Th e Vanishing Subject: Early Psychology and Literary Modernism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991) .

60 Nol Carroll, A Philosophy of Mass Art (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998), 344 . See his description of simulation theory and Th eory Th eory in ibid. 3424. Lowe suggests that simulation theory is helpful for understanding George Eliot ( Victorian Fiction , 11112 ); Ratcliff e explores the desires behind such theories ( On Sympathy , 449 ).

61 Shaun Gallagher, How the Body Shapes the Mind (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2005), 209 . 62 Ibid. 21112.

Introduction 15

their beliefs, desires, or intentional states. Th ey show that sympathy can have more subtle, and more ambitious, motivations than the pragmatic goal, espoused by theories of mind, of predict[-ing] the behaviour of other people in everyday life. Th ey want more than to know anothers thoughts, or even their feelings.

Given such ambitions for sympathy, this book turns to recent work on emotion itself, for this gets to the heart of what we are doing when we feel for another person, and what we want to know when we feel for an-other person: it probes the nature of the feeling state we are trying to reach. My work on sympathy will repeatedly move between theories of sympathy and theories of emotion. Th e most infl uential concept in recent philosophical thinking on emotion is the idea that emotions might have cognitive importance, and a particularly rich exposition of this view is off ered by Martha Nussbaums Upheavals of Th ought (2001). 63 Nussbaum argues that we should cease to regard emotions as mere animal energies or impulses that have no connection with our thoughts, imaginings, and appraisals. 64 Instead she argues that emotions are cognitive, suff used with intelligence and discernment and part and parcel of the system of ethical reasoning. 65 She points out that the emotions are always about something: they have an object. 66 Th e particular urgency connected with emotion is not irrational but instead is a sign of the objects importance to the feeling subject. Th us Nussbaum argues that emotion can be seen as a judgement about the world: she describes her grief at her mothers death, for example, as about my mother and directed at her and her life and as forming a judgement about her mothers great importance to her. 67 Th e connection between emotion and rationality adds another strand to Nussbaums criticism of Kant: she argues that his failure to endorse as good the evaluations embodied in compassion derives from his general noncognitive view of the passions. 68

Th e idea that emotions are cognitive complicates much about modern-ism. In particular it suggests that how we feel need not be seen as a merely

63 Jenefer Robinson notes that [c]urrently, the most widely accepted theory of emotion is probably the cognitive or judgement theory of emotion; Deeper Th an Reason: Emo-tion and Its Role in Literature, Music and Art (2005; repr. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2007), 7. She goes on to give a list of defenders of the judgement theory, including, among others, the philosophers Robert C. Solomon and Peter Goldie and the psychologist Richard Laza-rus. She further notes that the great philosophers from Aristotle to Descartes, Spinoza, and Hume, have typically emphasized the cognitive content of emotions, 8.

64 Nussbaum, Upheavals , 1. 65 Ibid. 66 Ibid. 27. 67 Ibid. 27, 30. 68 Ibid. 383.


subjective concern, for feeling itself involves implicit engagements with the world. Ceasing to see emotion as purely private and irrational opens up the possibility of examining the connections it makes between a person and the world; it implicitly invites a greater range in thinking about emo-tion, for it suggests that emotion might not be viewed in isolation but as integral to a view of the world. Th e full acknowledgement that emotion has cognitive importance is what is crucially missing from Lees theories, and it is one of the reasons Woolf and Lawrences novels seem to complete and expand Lees theories.

Michael Bell has already begun to draw out the implications of this cognitive-evaluative view for our characterization of modernism. He notes that feelings connection to thought is embedded in language, as the word feel is a near synonym for think and therefore suggests, half sub-liminally, the mixture of the aff ective and the conceptual in what we call thought . 69 Understanding the cognitive aspect of emotion means that Bell is able to recognize that modernism was suspicious of personal, con-ventional sentiment whilst pointing out that modernism does not reject emotion:

An attack on sentimentality was one of the few threads uniting the internal vari-ety of modernisms and even now it takes an exercise in historical sympathy to appreciate the sentimentalist tradition. Yet the modernist generation also contin-ued the transformation of sentiment into an implicit criterion of true feeling, a development which even now largely escapes recognition whether in the common language of feeling or in the specialist practice of literary criticism. 70

Bell argues that the modernists, instead of infusing ethics with authentic-ity through the involvement of feeling, based their ethics on feeling itself: modernism involved a move from truth of feeling to truth to feeling. 71

My book will continue to explore how emotion in modernist fi ction off ers a form of knowledge, but it will also consider how modernist fi ction is not only enlightened by the cognitive-evaluative view, but in fact com-plicates some of its most fundamental assumptions. One premise of the cognitive-evaluative that is extended by the work of Lee, Woolf, and Law-rence relates to the question of what exactly constitutes a judgement. Patricia Greenspan, for example, notes that Nussbaums defence of the rationality of emotion may in fact amount to a rationalization of emo-tion, especially when considering experiences such as phobic reactions. Greenspan takes as her example a case of a man who becomes afraid of a

69 Michael Bell, Sentimentalism, Ethics and the Culture of Feeling (Houndmills, Basing-stoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2000), 1 .

70 Ibid. 160. 71 Ibid. 170.

Introduction 17

harmless dog after being attacked by a rabid dog and argues that this type of experience doesnt seem to involve rational thought: his fear is centred entirely on himself, without any reasons, good or bad, for thinking that the dog threatens him any more than others. 72 Nussbaum has argued against Greenspans idea that one might remove the evaluative beliefs without re-moving the emotions by stating that a judgement might involve a false belief, but this seems to ignore the stipulation that there is no reasoning going on, good or bad. 73 Robert C. Solomon has attempted to defend the cognitive-evaluative view from this form of observation by stating that we need a more sophisticated understanding of judgement: a judgment is not a detached intellectual act but a way of cognitively grappling with the world. 74 Even Solomons modifi cation to grappling does not quite seem to cover the type of ways that feeling makes judgements on the world in Lee, Woolf, and Lawrencetheir work off ers a more explorative and ex-pansive sense of what forms of knowledge emotion might produce.

Moreover, questions as to the nature of judgement raise further funda-mental questions about the cognitive-evaluative views understanding of the self. Simon Blackburn has suggested that Nussbaums claim that emo-tions involve judgements and are thus cognitive could be countered: Nussbaum wants [] to make the emotion cognitive, others [] would read it as making the apparent cognition really emotional. 75 He proceeds to argue that Nussbaums view of emotion is bound up with questions of the nature of our perspective on the world:

Th e cognitive view needs more than an equation between feelings towards things on the one hand, and judgments of value on the other. It also requires that the judgments of value are themselves pure cognitions, representing aspects of the world. 76

Sophie Ratcliff e, citing Blackburn, has argued that his distinction is an important one as Nussbaums idea of emotions as having objects that are important for the self s fl ourishing is highly dependent on the ques-tion of what one views to be a self and what one views as an object (not to mention a valuable object) in the fi rst place. 77 Ratcliff e argues that

72 Patricia Greenspan, Emotions and Reasons: An Inquiry into Emotional Justifi cation (New York: Routledge, 1988), 18 .

73 Nussbaum, Upheavals , 356. 74 Robert C. Solomon, Emotions, Th oughts, and Feelings: Emotions as Engagements

with the World, in Robert C. Solomon (ed.), Th inking about Feeling: Contemporary Philosophers on Emotions (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 7688 , 77.

75 Simon Blackburn, To Feel and Feel Not, A Review of Martha Nussbaum, Upheavals of Th ought. Th e New Republic (24 December 2001), 348, 38.

76 Ibid. 38. 77 Ratcliff e, On Sympathy , 15.


Nussbaums most valuable object is her own post-Freudian, rationalist view of the human self , a self capable of making autonomous judge-ments. 78 For some writers (Ratcliff e focuses on Browning, Beckett, and Auden), the idea of sympathy might be fraught with concerns about scep-ticism and the ways in which we cannot quite get outside ourselves. Sym-pathy might prompt an understanding of the human self not as a self-directing subject but as a creaturely object, dependent on others, and with an inescapably incomplete knowledge of the world. Such an idea has theological overtones: Browning, Auden, and Beckett are interested in the way in which they are unable to conceive, let alone sympathize with, an-other mindthe ways in which they attempt to, but cannot, be God. 79

Lee, Woolf, and Lawrence were all equivocal about, if not hostile to, a theological view of thingsindeed, Woolf is antagonistic to the idea of creaturely dependence, declaring there is no Shakespeare, there is no Beethoven; certainly and emphatically there is no God; we are the words; we are the music; we are the thing itself . 80 Yet there is to be another way in which the self might seem like an object in the work of the writers in my book. As Greenspan argues, there is a type of retreat into the self involved in fear: his fear is centred entirely on himself . Greenspans phrasing is strange: it seems to suggest that the man is afraid not only for himself, but also of himself. Th e strange centring of the emotion suggests that feeling is not a cognitive mapping between self and object, but that one can instead be both subject and object of an emotion. Th ere is, it would seem, a way in which emotion might be at once intimate to our person and not quite something we own and control.

Th is type of emotion can be clarifi ed through attention to another complication in the cognitive-evaluative view. One of the acknowledged diffi culties in Nussbaums argument is the idea of embodiment. Nuss-baum is happy to concede that emotion is of the body: [w]e should certainly grant that all human experiences are embodied, but she is unwilling to accept all the possible ramifi cations of this idea. 81 Consid-ering again her central example of her grief at her mothers death she questions:

78 Ibid. 15. 79 Ibid. 70. 80 Virginia Woolf, Sketch of the Past (written 193940), in Moments of Being: Auto-

biographical Writings , ed. Jeanne Schulkind, revised and introd. Hermione Lee (London: Pimlico, 2002), 78160 , 85. All subsequent references are to this edition, incorporated within the text. For Vernon Lees religious views, see Peter Gunn, Vernon Lee: Violet Paget, 18561935 (London: Oxford University Press, 1964), 11215 . Th roughout my chapter on D. H. Lawrence I indicate some of his concerns about Christian ethics.

81 Nussbaum, Upheavals , 58.

Introduction 19

What element in me is it that experiences the terrible shock of grief? I think of my mother; I embrace in my mind the fact that she will never be with me againand I am shaken. How and where? Do we imagine the thought causing a fl uttering in my hands, or a trembling in my stomach? And if we do, do we really want to say that this fl uttering or trembling is my grief about my mothers death? 82

Nussbaum is drawn to bodily description when it comes to the question: what element in me is it. Yet the phrasing: element in me (my emphasis) implies that Nussbaum hopes to contain the infl uence of the body within an overarching conception of a controlling self. Th e problem with thinking about emotion in terms of the body is for Nussbaum a problem of posses-sion. She can acknowledge bodily response as a part of her self, but not as constituting herself: she cannot acknowledge the bodys responses as my grief .

Nussbaum is avoiding a conception of emotion that would make feel-ing no more than nonintentional bodily movements. 83 Other writers, however, have suggested that there may be a way of re-evaluating the knowledge off ered by our bodies so that the reactions of the body might themselves be seen as cognitive. Jesse Prinz argues:

In developing a theory of emotion, we should not feel compelled to supplement embodied states with meaningful thoughts; we should instead put meaning into our bodies and let the perceptions of the heart reveal our situation in the world. 84

Prinz suggests a type of capitulation as opposed to Nussbaums scrupulous control: let the perceptions of the heart reveal our situation in the world. Prinz is suggesting a re-evaluation of how we think of the body, infolding meaning and questioning how we think of cognition at all. Th e possibility of this type of capitulation of authority and autonomy, concomitant on the idea that the body constitutes our self rather than being something we control, is centrally important in the work of Lee, Woolf, and Lawrence. For these writers, emotion is intimately connected with the body, and thus something which is both integral to and disruptive of our self. Th ey explore the repercussions that an embodied awareness entails, and urge

82 Ibid. 44. 83 Ibid. 25. 84 Jesse Prinz, Embodied Emotions, in Solomon (ed.), Th inking About Feeling , 4458, 58.

For another physiological account of emotion see Antonio Damasios Descartes Error: Emotion, Reason and the Human Brain (London: Picador, 1994) . See also Jean Decety and Th ierry Chaminades essay Th e Neurophysiology of Imitation and Intersubjectivity, in Susan Hurley and Nick Chater (eds), Perspectives on Imitation: From Neuroscience to Social Science , vol. I: Mechanisms of Imitation and Imitation in Animals (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005), 11940 .


that in thinking about sympathy, in feeling for others and understanding the feelings of others, we must take into account a way of knowing the world that is basic, bodily, and intuitive. 85

I will not, however, argue for a completely bodily sense of emotion. Th ere are problems with the concept of emotions as entirely embodied and good reasons for Nussbaum to phrase her rejection of the embodied view of emotion in terms of deep personal reluctance: do we really want. Pursuing the implications of the embodied view of emotion can lead to questions that represent a drastic failure of sympathy and imagination. One of Nussbaums rightful complaints about the view of emotion as embodied is that [q]uadriplegics lack altogether the usual connections between central blood pressure and heart rate regulatory mechanisms and peripheral eff ector mechanisms, and yet we have no diffi culty think-ing that such people really have emotions. 86 Nussbaum is undoubtedly right to be fi rm on the matter, and this book records how a view of emotion that is entirely dependent on the body can have dangerous repercussionsnotably in the work of Lawrence.

Th inking about emotion in terms of the body does not only pose ques-tions about whether any bodies are to be excluded from defi nitions of emotion, but it poses questions when it comes to sympathy. If emotions are really bound to individual bodies, then it would seem that a certain loneliness is inevitable. Elaine Scarry, for example, notes the essential in-communicability of bodily pain, and how it brings about this absolute split between ones sense of ones own reality and the reality of other persons. 87 Th e fact that we do not perpetually sense this absolute split between ourselves and others suggests that the boundaries of the body do not entirely contain our experience. Lakoff and Johnson, who explore the implications of embodied cognition, note:

A major function of the embodied mind is empathic. From birth we have the capacity to imitate others, to vividly imagine being another person, doing what that person does, experiencing what that person experiences. Th e capacity for imaginative projection is a vital cognitive faculty. Experientially, it is a form of transcendence. Th rough it, one can experience something akin to getting out of our bodiesyet it is very much a bodily capacity. 88

85 Some of Lee, Woolf, and Lawrences thinking on the body has similarities in this re-spect to the theories espoused by Maurice Merleau-Ponty in Phenomenology of Perception (1945). I point out a key point at which this seems to be the case in Chapter 1 , n. 46.

86 Nussbaum, Upheavals , 58. 87 Elaine Scarry, Th e Body in Pain: Th e Making and Unmaking of the World (New York:

Oxford University Press, 1985), 4 . 88 George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Philosophy in the Flesh: Th e Embodied Mind and Its

Challenge to Western Th ought (New York: Basic Books, 1999), 565 .

Introduction 21

Lakoff and Johnson observe that the experience of sympathy suggests that there is something in our body that intimates transcendence. Although the facts of our embodiment urge that our body is our self, we still imag-ine a self that is able to go outside our body. Lee, Woolf, and Lawrence consider this predicament carefully, exploring the ways in which bodily feelings can seem to take us out of our body. Emotion, for Lee, Woolf, and Lawrence, is integrally a judgement of the body rather than a cogni-tive reaction coupled with bodily reactions; yet it seems to strain at the boundaries of the body, suggesting a type of transcendence.

One way of thinking about how emotion might move between the bodily and the social has been off ered by evolutionary literary criticism, a fi eld which been coming into ever-greater prominence during the com-position of this book. 89 Evolutionary literary criticism has sought to inter-pret literature on the principle that human nature, human bodies, and human emotions are shaped by our evolved biology. One key insight has been the idea that the human body has evolved to allow for social coop-eration and togetherness. Critics such as Brian Boyd have made much, in particular, of the discovery of mirror neurons: Mirror neurons, whose function was discovered only the early 1990s, fi re when we see others act or express emotion as if we were making the same action, and allow us through a kind of automatic inner imitation to understand their inten-tions and attune ourselves to their feelings. 90 Mirror neurons suggest how human interaction might be based on bodily responses, developed over time, to bodily movement. Lee, Woolf, and Lawrence explore how such forms of understanding might work, how writers might reach a sense of the importance of the body, how they might enfl esh its workings.

Lee, Woolf, and Lawrences work also explores what might be unnerv-ing about a bodily, evolutionary view of sympathy and of how one might share emotions. Evolutionary critics have not always fully recognized what might be lost in their view of emotion. Brian Boyd defends himself strongly against the possibility that evolutionary psychology might neglect individuality and human diff erence, arguing that the complexity and randomness of genetic recombination in sexual reproduction means that we are each the result of an unpredictably generated variation unique to each of us. 91 How basing individuality in the body rather than the will

89 For a discussion of the growing body of evo-criticism, see Sophie Ratcliff e, Little Wonder, A Review of Blakey Vermeule, Why Do We Care About Literary Characters? , Times Literary Supplement (7 May 2010), 11 .

90 Brian Boyd, On the Origin of Stories: Evolution, Cognition, and Fiction (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2009), 1034 .

91 Ibid. 234.


or mind can be disquieting is sensitively explored by Lee, Woolf, and Lawrences work. Evolutionary biology suggests that we might be moved in ways which have their origin in our deep past, or in ways which take place automatically, below consciousness. Exploring sympathy in Lee, Woolf, and Lawrence raises the possibility that sympathy might take place at a level beyond conscious feeling, and it shows how this might be un-nerving. Pursuing sympathy at such an unconscious level seems to remove the need for sensuously appreciable emotionLee, Woolf, and Lawrence suggest how basing sympathy on the body can fl atten individuality and emotion, and they inscribe the consequences of such bodily sympathy on the texture of their work.

Lee, Woolf, and Lawrence explore diff erent ways of thinking about how emotion might be shared, and of how sympathy might work, and they explore the anxieties that ideas of communal emotion might gener-ate. Acknowledging that emotion intimates transcendence of the body does not only lead, in the work of Lee, Woolf, and Lawrence, to the acknowledgement that sympathy might involve moments of ungraspable epiphany between individuals. Th e sense of a bodily form of transcend-ence prompts Lee, Woolf, and Lawrence to consider the limits of indi-vidual feeling, to consider the limitations of our ability to sense the reach of our emotions. Above and beyond their exploration of sensuously appreciable sympathies, Lee, Woolf, and Lawrence acknowledge how one might participate in emotions that seem external: those of groups, cities, and nations. Such group emotion might bind people together in ways that suggest, or threaten, absolute transcendence of the individual.

And acts of feeling with groups have been identifi ed as one of the most crucial issues arising from the study of emotions today. In his afterword to a special issue of Textual Practice reporting on the Language of Emo-tions conference (which was held in 2004), Peter de Bolla notes that debate at the conference kept returning to questions of sympathy and empathy. Th is, he suggests, is because the question of sympathy is the greatest challenge in thinking about emotion today. He argues that think-ing about sympathy gives rise to the question of whether all emotion in-volves degrees of sympathy, the question of how we share an emotion, and how our subjectivity might be grounded in the collective or the com-munal. 92 As Teresa Brennan (whose work de Bolla cites) argues: It is all very well to think that the ideas or thoughts a given subject has are so-cially constructed, dependent on cultures, times, and social groups [. . .] we are, nonetheless, peculiarly resistant to the idea that our emotions are

92 Peter de Bolla, Afterword, Textual Practice: Languages of Emotion , 22:1 (March 2008), 14550 , 149.

Introduction 23

not altogether our own. 93 For de Bolla, acts of feeling with others can prompt some intriguing and unnerving questions:

It is a truth, I think, acknowledged by many that we are comfortable being in an emotion. Indeed we can hardly think of ourselves otherwise. But what would it be if we began to feel comfortable being with an emotion? If something like that emerges from the continuing work represented by these essays we may have excit-ing (if diffi cult) times ahead. 94

Th is book explores how sympathy involves an emotional response which partly consists of inner, intimate feeling, and partly transcends our ability to feel or register it. Lee, Woolf, and Lawrence were writing at a time when such questions were being considered in particularly subtle and sur-prising ways. Th eir work thinks through some of the exciting (if diffi cult) consequences of sympathy.

THE BODY IN THE EARLY TWENTIETH CENTURY

Basing sympathy on the conditions of the body necessitates a poised understanding of the historicity of emotions. Understanding feeling as bodily led each of the writers explored in this book to a sense of how there might be elements of emotion that might transcend time. Yet, each writ-ers understanding of the body was shaped by particular historical condi-tions, and the place of the body in considering emotion and the human self was much discussed in the early twentieth century. 95

Nineteenth-century scientifi c discoveries had begun to suggest that emotion was crucially dependent on the body. Sally Shuttleworth and Jenny Bourne Taylor, introducing their anthology of nineteenth-century writing on psychology, noted the prevalence of a materialist science of the self which rejected the dualistic division between mind and body, conceiving both the body and the mind in diverse and com-plex ways. 96 Herbert Spencer, for instance, argued that [t]hough we commonly regard mental and bodily life as distinct, it needs only to ascend somewhat above the ordinary point of view, to see that they are

93 Teresa Brennan, Th e Transmission of Aff ect (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2004), 2 . 94 De Bolla, Afterword, 150. 95 See also Tim Armstrong, Modernism, Technology, and the Body: A Cultural Study

(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), and Craig A. Gordon, Literary Modernism, Bioscience and Community in Early 20th Century Britain (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007) .

96 Sally Shuttleworth and Jenny Bourne Taylor, in Sally Shuttleworth and Jenny Bourne Taylor (eds), Introduction, Embodied Selves: An Anthology of Psychological Texts 18301890 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), xiiixviii , xiv.


but sub-divisions of life in general; and that no line of demarcation can be drawn between them, otherwise than arbitrarily, and Henry Maud-sley observed that [o]n all hands it is admitted that the manifestations of mind take place through the nervous system. 97 However, whilst key nineteenth-century thinkers argued that the mind was essentially em-bodied, some people did continue to think in dualistic ways, maintain-ing the existence of a soul in addition to the body. Modernism has been linked to mysticism, spiritualism, and Idealism, and has been seen as drawn to theories that would suggest that we are not solely contained within the boundaries of the body. 98

Alongside materialist theories of the self as entirely embodied, and dualist beliefs in the existence of the soul, was the theory of vitalismthe belief that there was a type of energy diff used in fl esh, a type of vital spirit that creates and defi nes lifeand this book will show that vitalism was crucial to Lee, Woolf, and Lawrences ideas of sympathy. Vitalism took on many shapes in the early twentieth century, and is thus diffi cult to defi ne, but it can be subtly opposed both to materialist science and to dualist thinking. Many vitalist theorists defi ned their position specifi cally in reaction against materialist science, stating that living things were actuated by some power or principle additional to those of mechanics and chemistry. 99 Vitalism, however, could often be opposed to dualist thinking in that it suggested that the type of energy that animated living things was infused within fl esh, rather than separate to the body. Vitalism distinguished the spirit from the soulsuggesting that the spirit was diff erent because whilst it intimated that something more than the materialist scientifi c body existed, it did not denote something absolutely opposed to the material. 100 Th e only critic

97 Herbert Spencer, Th e Principles of Psychology (London: Longman, Brown, Green and Longmans, 1855), 347 . Henry Maudsley, Body and Mind: An Inquiry into Th eir Connection and Mutual Infl uence, Specially in Reference to Mental Disorders , rev. edn (London: Macmillan, 1873), 3 .

98 See Suzanne Raitt who notes that [i]n the early decades of the twentieth century, there was a general renewal of interest in mysticism and mystic states of mind: Vita and Virginia: Th e Work and Friendship of V. Sackville-West and Virginia Woolf (Oxford: Claren-don Press, 1993), 118.

99 L. Richmond Wheeler, Vitalism: Its History and Validity (London: H. F. and G. Witherby, 1939) , vii. See also Bertram C. A. Windle, What is Life?: A Study of Vitalism and Neo- Vitalism (London: Sands, 1908) , who states that no one will deny that in certain respects the human and other bodies are mechanisms and that the processes which take place in them are to be explained in terms of chemistry and physics. But the vitalist would add to this the statement that all the processes which take place in the body are not expli-cable in these terms, and moreover that none of them fi nd their full explanation in any such way (7).

100 In William McDougalls Body and Mind: A History and a Defense of Animism (London: Methuen, 1911) , he defends the wider movement of animism partly by noting that no punctual seat of the soul has been found in the human body (105) . Evelyn Underhill, in

Introduction 25

fully to convey the central importance of vitalism to modernismRichard A. Lofthousenotes both that vitalism has a long pedigree and that [t]he end of the nineteenth century and the years leading up to 1914 witnessed vitalism in its most intense form. 101 Adherents to vitalism in the early twen-tieth century included thinkers as diverse as Friedrich Nietzsche, Sigmund Freud, George Bernard Shaw, and Henri Bergson. As Lofthouse shows with reference to Otto Dix, Max Beckmann, Stanley Spencer, and Jacob Epstein, vitalism could also exert an implicit, shaping infl uence on visual art. With such varieties of vitalist belief, in this book I will mostly be defi ning vitalism as an interest in the energies specifi c to living things, and a sense that our self contains energies diff used through, and immanent in, fl esh, gesturing towards a transcendence of the body.

Vitalism can easily be dismissed when viewed as a single doctrine, and vitalism has little credibility today. However, vitalism is more than a single anti-scientifi c claimindeed for the writers I will be discussing, it can sometimes work alongside an interest in science, especially in the energies suggested by biological understanding of the human body. Craig A. Gor-dons study of Woolf, Lawrence, and bioscience touches repeatedly on vitalism, and argues that vitalism can be understood as operating (at least marginally) within the realm of scientifi c discourse. 102 Moreover, Gordon notes that vitalism is more than just a single anti-scientifi c claim in that it is important as a shaping infl uence on ideas of community articulated by Woolf and Lawrencehe explores how the idea of vital force can provide the medium of aff ective, nonmental communication. 103

Lee, Woolf, and Lawrence did not identify themselves as vitalist theo-rists, but vitalist tendencies implicit in their work create a rhetoric of the human that is not easily dismissed. Vitalism suggests an understanding of the human which acknowledges experiences such as Dorotheas moment of sensuous transcendence in Middlemarch . It emphasizes the inner part of human beings, urging the importance of the inner life, of individual

Mysticism: A Study in the Nature and Development of Mans Spiritual Consciousness , 12th edn (London: Methuen, 1930) , stated that Vitalism was interested in life and energy as immanent (30). Some vitalists do, however, seem to imagine the spirit in terms which suggest dualist thinkingsee my comments on Bergson in relation to D. H. Lawrence.

101 Richard A. Lofthouse, Vitalism in Modern Art, c.19001950: Otto Dix, Stanley Spencer, Max Beckmann, and Jacob Epstein , Studies in Art History, vol 10 (Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellon Press, 2005), 14 . For some contemporary articles discussing vitalism, see Anon., Th e Relativity of Life, Th e Times (7 March 1923), 7 , and D. L. Murrays review of Hans Drieschs History and Th eory of Vitalism , which concludes that in the best-informed quar-ters the mechanistic theory of life is no longer above discussion; Matter and Life, Times Literary Supplement (17 September 1914), 426.

102 Gordon, Literary Modernism , 83. 103 Ibid. 92.


experience. In arguing, however, that this inner life does not consist in a soul or a Cartesian mind, but in something diff used in fl esh, vitalism sug-gests that our selves are not entirely under our control. Vitalism suggests a notion of individuality that is at odds with the ethics of Kant, Nuss-baum, and George Eliot as outlined in this Introduction. Some of the possibilities of vitalism can be discerned through the OED s lengthy entry for spirit. Th e defi nition of spirit poises between ideas of soul and body. Th e entry cites uses of the word that suggest the immaterial, including meanings of soul [I.2.a.] and disembodied soul [I.2.b.]. Th e word spirit can also mean something infused in individual persons: [t]he essential character, nature, or qualities of something: that which consti-tutes the pervading or tempering principle of anything [II.10.a.], and it can mean something that is invasive of personhood, with reference to [a] being [. . .] imagined as possessing and actuating a person [I.3.c.]. Vital-ism can suggest an understanding of the human that grounds moments of subtle response to something in other people that is both of their body and transcends their body, constituting their essential energy, their way of being. It can also suggest how the individual might be sympathetically open to the world in ways beyond their control, implying a great Cosmic life transcending and including our own. 104

Suggesting this intricate understanding of what we might feel for in others, and how we might be connected together in ways based on life itself, vitalism also has importance in terms of another crucial historical context for Lee, Woolf, and Lawrences bodily sympathy. Lee, Woolf, and Lawrence were infl uenced by physiological and spiritual understandings of the life of bodies, but such understandings were given a particular impetus, as shall be evident, because of the way each responded to the First World War. Hostility to the First World War necessitated for many contemporary writers a need to think about the importance of human life and the nature of humanity. Grace Brockington has traced, for instance, a belief in how the unjustifi ed brutality of war devalued and even incapacitated rational thought, infl icting psychological damage equal to the horrendous physical damage on the battlefi eld, and cites E. M. Forster: If the war was only death, wrote Forster in 1914, there would be little to say against it; for we must all die [. . .] but war is also hatred, a narrowing of the spirit. 105 Lee, Woolf, and Lawrences explorations of sympathy become, in diff erent ways, driven by the war, and their vitalistic sympathy is bound up with their sense not of how war incapacitated rational thought but how it

104 Underhill, Mysticism , 32. 105 Grace Brockington, Above the Battlefi eld: Modernism and the Peace Movement in

Britain 19001918 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2010), 12 , 95.

Introduction 27

meant a narrowing of the spirit by neglecting to value the intricacies of human life and feeling.

Lee, Woolf, and Lawrences vitalist sense of the body, along with a cognitive-evaluative sense that emotions do off er a form of knowledge, will thus be crucial to this books understanding of sympathy. Th eir work acknowledges how emotion might be connected to thoughts, imaginings, appraisals, but complicates this view, suggesting a type of sympathy that stands at odds with a respect for others as autonomous individuals, and at odds with some theories of the morality of sympathy, but that is never-theless driven by a concern with human life. Th is book explores how emotion off ers a form of knowledge about others, but it complicates conceptions of the forms of knowledge that sympathy might entail. It suggests we need to look not just at how our emotions might be directed at objects, but at what type of objects we ourselves are.

THE RHY THMS OF SYMPATHY

In exploring a vitalist, bodily form of sympathy, I shall be returning to the idea of rhythm throughout this book. Rhythm is integral to our lives and bodies. Lee, Woolf, and Lawrence were typical of their time in b

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