Neo-Victorianism, Empathy and Reading

Muren Zhang

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN:
  9781350297203
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9781350135611
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: English Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

In the words of J. Brooks Boustan, the empathic reader is a participant-observer, who, as they read, is both subject to the disruptive and disturbing responses that characters and texts provoke, and aware of the role they are invited to play when responding to fiction. Calling upon the writings of Margaret Atwood, Julian Barnes, Graeme Macrae Burnet, Sarah Waters, Michael Cox and Jane Harris, this book examines the ethics of the text-reader relationship in neo-Victorian literature, focusing upon the role played by empathy in this engagement. Bringing together recent cultural and theoretical research on narrative temporality, empathy and affect, Muren Zhang presents neo-Victorian literature as a genre defined by its experimentation with 'empathetic narrative'.

Broken down into themes such as voyeurism, shame, nausea, space and place, Neo-Victorianism, Empathy and Reading argues that such literature pushes the reader to critically reflect upon their reading expectations and strategies, as well as their wider ethical responsibilities. As a result, Zhang breathes new life into the debates associated with the genre and demonstrates new ways of reading and valuing these contemporary texts, providing a future-orientated, reparative and politically meaningful way of reading neo-Victorian literature and culture.

1 Suspicious reading

Initially delivered as the Bronfman Lecture at the University of Ottawa in 1996, and later published as an article in 1997, Margaret Atwood’s ‘In Search of Alias Grace: On Writing Canadian Historical Fiction’ traces her writing of the novel. There she uses the example of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter (1850) in demonstrating the importance of revisiting the past in addressing contemporary anxieties and crises:

However, it was out of this questioning and assessing climate – where did we come from, how did we get from there to here, where are we going, who are we now – that Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote The Scarlet Letter, a historical novel set in seventeenth-century New England. […] The Scarlet Letter is not, of course, seventeenth century in any way the Puritans would have recognized. […] Instead, it’s a novel that uses a seventeenth-century New England Colonial setting for the purposes of a newly forged nineteenth-century American Republic. And I think that’s part of the interest for writers and readers of Canadian historical fiction now: by taking a long hard look backwards, we place ourselves. (1998: 1512)

The difference Atwood draws between the actual seventeenth-century New England and Hawthorne’s imaginative reconstruction of it brings to the fore the double consciousness of time that features in literary works such as The Scarlet Letter, which, as argued in the introduction, involves the double movement of looking backwards in order to move forwards. It challenges the perception of historical discourse as a straightforward linear process and emphasizes, instead, the embeddedness between the past, the present and the future in both acts of writing and reading. Atwood’s own novel, Alias Grace, engages with the idea of ‘double time’ in its representation of a double story (which, as Mark Currie notes from Tzvetan Todorov, is characteristic of detective fiction): one about crime, the narration of which goes backwards; and one about investigation, the experience of which goes forwards in time ([2007] 2012: 36). It details the process of how the fictional doctor, Simon Jordan, tries to recover Grace’s notionally repressed memory about her involvement in the murders of her employer Thomas Kinnear and his housekeeper Nancy Montgomery. In its imaginative reconstruction of the notorious 1843 murders in Canada, Alias Grace thematizes the hermeneutics of exposure, rendering itself a useful example for this chapter’s exploration of neo-Victorian fiction’s engagement with suspicious reading and readerly empathy as well as its transformative promises.

The double-story structure of Alias Grace can be seen in a number of neo-Victorian novels that will be examined in this book, including Jane Harris’s The Observations in this chapter, Sarah Waters’s Tipping the Velvet and Affinity in Chapter 2, as well as Michael Cox’s The Meaning of Night in Chapter 3, although, as we will also see, the forms of double story these novels take are all slightly different and will be discussed from different critical perspectives. For this chapter, I choose to work on two novels that revolve around a riddle concerning the central protagonist – The Observations and Alias Grace – in order to demonstrate the oscillating relationship between paranoid and reparative dynamics in neo-Victorian narratives. Both novels start with what Eve Sedgwick calls the ‘paranoid’ inquiry into the hidden ‘truth’ of the past. Both, in the meanwhile, are concerned with our empathetic engagement with the vulnerable textual other and its reparative potential.

In what follows, I consider the different reading pleasures of contemporary literary reconstruction of the Victorians (e.g. voyeuristic, expository, empathetic) by looking at two texts – Claire Tomalin’s The Invisible Woman: The Story of Nelly Ternan and Charles Dickens ([1990] 1991), a biography of Dickens’s mistress and Harris’s The Observations. Although The Invisible Woman is not a neo-Victorian fiction, its preoccupation with the ‘non-normative’ figure of the nineteenth century has become a staple of the neo-Victorian genre (Carroll 2010: 194). I then examine the self-conscious and self-reflexive dimensions of The Observations so as to demonstrate how neo-Victorian fiction explicitly links empathy to the hermeneutic pleasures of reading and raises certain ethical concerns about the text–reader relationship. These ethical issues are answered in part by Alias Grace where the choices available to the reader are much more obvious. Linking together Sedgwick’s formulation of paranoid and reparative practices with Amy Coplan’s ([2011] 2014) differentiation between empathy as ‘self-orientated perspective-taking’ and ‘other-orientated perspective-taking’, I examine the way in which the ‘intradiegetic’ examples in Alias Grace ‘mirror’ different readerly responses to the story of Grace Marks.¹ I shall be concerned with how the reader’s empathetic engagement with the text facilitates or frustrates their textual pleasures associated with mystery, suspense and problem-solving, as well as the related complex ethical problems. In light of Currie’s formulation of a future-orientated model of reading, I argue that Alias Grace encourages contemporary readers to drop their quest for the ‘truth’ about the past and to empathize with the textual other by taking other-orientated perspective-taking, an act which inaugurates an ethical possibility and involves a concern about the future.

‘Guilty pleasures’

With a recurrent focus on Victorian ‘otherness’ (specified as the figure of the criminal, maid, actress, etc.), neo-Victorian literature constitutes a repository of voyeuristic and cryptic pleasure for the contemporary reader. The beginning of The Invisible Woman, a biography of Dickens’s mistress Nelly Ternan from 1857 until his death in 1870, perfectly captures such reading pleasure, which is also afforded by a great many neo-Victorian novels:

This is the story of someone who – almost – wasn’t there; who vanished into thin air. Her name, dates, family and experiences very nearly disappeared from the record for good. What’s more, she connived at her own obliteration; during her lifetime her children were quite ignorant of her history. Why and how this happened is the theme; and how – by a hair’s breadth – she was reclaimed from oblivion despite strenuous efforts to keep her there. ([1990] 1991: 3)

Tomalin’s biographical account of this ‘invisible’ woman clearly induces the reader’s curiosity, rendering their reading of the text a transhistorical journey with the promise of some remarkable discovery. The focus on how the text operates against the ‘strenuous efforts’ that have, in the past, been made to keep the history of the ‘real’ Nelly Ternan invisible reinforces the liberal fantasies about the ownership of ‘knowledge’. By telling readers that the text they are reading will enable them to ‘gaze’ at an ‘invisible’ woman and her secret romance with the canonical English writer Dickens, the text positions readers as the privileged voyeurs of a hermeneutic puzzle. This reading practice is mirrored by the way Tomalin plays with the elusiveness of Ternan’s identity: ‘She was “N”, otherwise Nelly, Miss Ellen, the Patient, the Princess, E. L. T., the Dear Girl, the Darling, the magic circle of one, the little riddle, Miss T., Miss Fernan, Miss Terman, Miss Teman, Miss Turnham and probably Mrs Tringham’ (10). The list Tomalin makes about Ternan’s various identity markers indicates the intellectual enlightenment and emotional fulfilment expository reading generates. Meanwhile, the ultimate indeterminacy of Ternan’s actual life experience promises that the pleasure of demystification and revelation will not be easily exhausted. Focusing on Ternan’s experience as a professional actress and the dubious association the Victorians made between actress and prostitute in particular, Tomalin’s text also exemplifies the role ‘uncovering’ plays in addressing structural oppression and social injustice. As a way of engaging with the ‘invisible’ past, the hermeneutics of exposure has a clear moral and political agenda. By ‘fashion[ing] causal connections’, Rita Felski argues, it ‘assign[s] responsibility, and often attribute[s] guilt’ (2011: 222).

Although The Invisible Woman is a historical biography rather than a neo-Victorian novel, the link it makes between voyeurism and the hermeneutic pleasures of reading can be found in other neo-Victorian novels. Harris’s The Observations, for example, plays with the reader’s desire for both voyeuristic consumption and mystery-solving through its use of a provocative intradiegetic narrator. Set in and around the world of a dilapidated country house outside Edinburgh in 1863, the story is narrated by one of the many marginal figures of Victorian fiction, a fifteen-year-old Irish prostitute, Bessy Buckley. Composed of a collection of diaries and first-person reports addressed to specific audiences and/or the extradiegetic reader, The Observations revolves around how Bessy, who chances upon a job as a maid to Arabella Reid, the twenty-year-old mistress of Castle Haivers, gradually falls under the spell of her eccentric mistress. The story finishes with the admittance of Arabella to a mental asylum, an ending that evokes contemporary examinations of the discursive construction of female madness in Victorian England (see Gilbert and Gubar 1979; Showalter [1985] 1987).² Similar to the opening paragraphs of The Invisible Woman, The Observations actively engages the reader in the hermeneutic process by presenting the reading experience as a journey, complete with the promise of solving a riddle: ‘my missus often said to me, “Now then Bessy, don’t be calling me missus.” She said this especially when the minister was coming for his tea. My missus wanted me to call her “marm” but I always forgot’ (vii). Beginning with an out-of-context dialogue regarding the form of address between Bessy and her mistress, Harris’s text makes both curiosity and suspense a feature of the reading process, setting up a hermeneutic quest to ‘solve’ the nature of the relationship between these two characters. The final message from Bessy at the end of this extract connects Bessy with the reader, who, at this stage in the novel may be given to believe that s/he is her intradiegetic addressee of the text: ‘but wait on. I am getting ahead of myself. Let me begin nearer the beginning’ (vii). By revealing Bessy’s awareness of and care for her interlocutor, this message clearly indicates that Bessy and her dialogist will travel together on the journey that lies ahead, thus causing the reader to drop their guard and get involved in ‘solving the mystery’. In addition, the fact that the novel begins with a material journey – from Glasgow to Edinburgh – reinforces the sense that the reader will travel with Bessy on the narrative journey that follows.

This process of expository reading is complicated by the text’s belated introduction to Bessy’s intradiegetic addressees: the ‘gentlemen readers’ who first appear on here of the novel: ‘I have been assured that this document is only for the PRIVATE perusal of one or two gentlemen’ (original emphasis). Bessy’s mention of her gentlemen readers instantly clarifies who the ‘real’ interlocutors of the text are and repositions the reader as a voyeur rather than a fellow conspirator. This shift of textual positioning is arguably designed to provoke and reinforce the reader’s voyeuristic and erotic pleasures. By emphasizing the secrecy of Bessy’s narrative (‘[Dr Lawrence] has shown me the locked cupboard where the manuscript is to be kept’ (520)), the text raises further questions about the status of Bessy’s account: for example, who has permitted the reader access to her writing? Who is mediating her writing for the gentlemen readers to us? The textual illusion that Bessy’s manuscript must have been prepared for publication by a third party other than Bessy herself caters for the reader’s voyeuristic interests. Further, if the readers pause for a moment, they will realize that all these layers of narration are the invention of the ‘real-life’ author, Jane Harris. The image of the secret, locked-away manuscript, in this context, makes all the readers somehow complicit in the revelation. This implied complicity presents the act of reading as a means of erotic manipulation. Although Bessy – the narrator – repeatedly warns her narratee(s) that ‘these extracts should not be reproduced by anybody in any way shape or form whatsoever without prior application to me’ (107, original emphasis), we know that anyone who has access to the key would have access to her secret – and we hope that this will include ourselves as readers. As Lynne Pearce argues, whenever readers prepare to read a text they become ‘liable to’ – or look forward to – ‘enchantment’ (1997: 86). Thus, this literal key reported upon in the text becomes a symbolic one: a code, as it were, for the readers to ‘crack’. Also, the associated meaning of the lock – a latent desire for being opened and occupied – presents the image of the locked-up manuscript as a tantalizing, if cryptic, pleasure which permeates the text as a whole. It therefore produces two layers of pseudo-erotic pleasure for the reader; first, by simulation of a tactile encounter with the text, the reader is arguably ‘inserting’ themselves into its body when they...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-title Page
• Dedication Page
• Title Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Suspicious reading
• 2 Reading (with) shame
• 3 Tragic man
• 4 Affective embodiment
• Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index
• Copyright Page