Scenes of Sympathy

Identity and Representation in Victorian Fiction

Audrey Jaffe

• Verlag: Cornell University Press
• Jahr: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781501719981
• Thema: Literature
• Thema: English Literary Criticism

In Scenes of Sympathy, Audrey Jaffe argues that representations of sympathy in Victorian fiction both reveal and unsettle Victorian ideologies of identity. Situating these representations within the context of Victorian visual culture, and offering new readings of key works by Charles Dickens, Elizabeth Gaskell, Ellen Wood, George Eliot, Oscar Wilde, and Arthur Conan Doyle, Jaffe shows how mid-Victorian spectacles of social difference construct the middle-class self, and how late-Victorian narratives of feeling pave the way for the sympathetic affinities of contemporary identity politics. Perceptive and elegantly written, Scenes of Sympathy is the first detailed examination of the place of sympathy in Victorian fiction and ideology. It will redirect the current critical conversation about sympathy and refocus discussions of late-Victorian fictions of identity.

PART I

Sympathy and the Spirit of Capitalism

1

Sympathy and Spectacle in Dickens’s “A Christmas Carol”

In a well-known essay, Sergei Eisenstein describes literature in general and Dickens in particular as cinema’s predecessors because of their evocation of visual effects. Literature, Eisenstein writes, provides cinema with “parents and [a] pedigree, … a past”; it is “the art of viewing.”¹ What Eisenstein construes as aesthetic development may be regarded, however, as evidence for what Christian Metz calls a persistent “regime of perception” in Western culture—one in which appeals to the eye play a significant role in the production and circulation of ideology.² An emphasis on visuality, whether literary or cinematic, promotes spectatorship as a dominant cultural activity. But such an emphasis also reinforces, and thereby naturalizes, forms of spectatorship already inscribed in the social structures within which particular cultural representations are produced. The idea of a continuity between literature and film may thus be significant less for what it reveals about the genealogy of cinema than for what it tells about the role of visuality and its literary evocations in defining, reinforcing, and disseminating some of Western culture’s dominant values.

“A Christmas Carol” (1843) is arguably Dickens’s most visually evocative text. In its detailed attention to and elaboration of surfaces, its reliance on contrasts between darkness and light, its construction as a series of scenes (a structure reproduced in the images the spirits exhibit to Scrooge), and particularly its engagement with a dynamic of spectatorial desire, the story is an artifact of, and an exemplary text for understanding, the commodity culture Guy Debord terms a “society of the spectacle”; the mechanism of Scrooge’s conversion is, after all, spectatorship.³ Projecting Scrooge’s identity into past and future, associating spectatorial and consumer desire with images of an idealized self, “A Christmas Carol” elaborates what I wish to argue is the circular relation that obtains between, on the one hand, spectacular forms of cultural representation, and, on the other, persons, objects, or scenes invested with ideological value and thus already, within their cultural contexts, spectacular. Moreover, an understanding of the story’s representational effects helps explain the peculiar power of spectacle as a vehicle for ideology. For while “A Christmas Carol” anatomizes the relationship between an individual subject and spectacular culture, it also unfolds as an allegory of the subject’s relation to culture in general, defined, by Clifford Geertz, as “an imaginative universe within which … acts are signs.”⁴

A recent revision of “A Christmas Carol” reproduces the story’s circularity. At the end of the film “Scrooged” (1988), the character played by Bill Murray, involved in making a television version of Dickens’s story, steps out of television space and into cinematic space to address the viewer “directly.” The point of this shift is, of course, to frame television space as fictional by seeming to move into a more “real” space, and the point of his address is to direct spectators to do the same: to become engaged with the world beyond television. Telling viewers not to watch television, Murray’s character reinforces, however, the idea that some medium is needed to send them that message. Implicit in the directive to leave fiction behind and move into the world, in both this film and the text on which it is based, is the claim that the way to the world lies through representation.

Presenting Scrooge with images of his past, present, and future lives, Dickens’s spectacular text seeks to awaken that character’s sympathy and direct it to the world beyond representation. As a model of socialization through spectatorship, the narrative posits the visual as a means toward recapturing one’s lost or alienated self—and becoming one’s best self. If it fails to explain how the process occurs—how sympathy emerges from identification, and identification from spectatorship—it nevertheless asks its readers’ assent to this series of effects. And if, as I argue, Scrooge’s sympathetic self emerges from his relation to representation, such is also the implied effect of the reader’s relation to the scenes of “A Christmas Carol,” given the text’s explicit analogy between Scrooge’s activity and the reader’s (the narrator notes, for example, that Scrooge is as close to the Spirit of Christmas Past as the narrator is to the reader: “and I am standing in the spirit at your elbow”).⁵

Making visual representation necessary for the production of individual sympathy and thus, ultimately, to social harmony, Dickens’s text both participates in and reinforces the perceptual regime to which Metz refers. For at stake in the story’s appeal to visuality is not just the assertion of a connection between spectatorship and sympathy but a definition of spectatorship as a means of access to cultural life. Paul Davis has used the term “culture-text” to describe the way the “Carol” has been rewritten to reflect particular cultural and historical circumstances.⁶ I wish to argue that the story deserves this name, however, because it identifies itself with culture: it projects images of, has come to stand for, and constitutes an exemplary narrative of enculturation into the dominant values of its time.

“A Christmas Carol” tells the story of a Victorian businessman’s interpellation as the subject of a phantasmatic commodity culture in which laissez-faire economics is happily wedded to natural benevolence. And, in a manner that would be appropriate for a general definition of culture but is especially suited to a spectacular society, the story articulates the relation between the subject and culture as a relation between the subject and representation. Scrooge gains access to his former, feeling self and to a community with which that self is in harmony—and, not incidentally, he saves his own life—by learning to negotiate the text’s field of visual representations. Cultural “frames” embedded in the story’s images invite the spectator’s identification, collapsing sympathy into an identification with representation itself. Making participation in its scenes dependent on such identification, the story constitutes both its idealized charitable self and the ideal subject of commodity culture. “A Christmas Carol” reconciles Christmases Past and Christmases Yet to Come, that is, by conjuring up an illusion of presence.

The story’s ideological project—its attempt to link sympathy and business by incorporating a charitable impulse into its readers’ self-conceptions—underlies its association of charitable feeling with participation in cultural life.⁷ A narrative whose ostensible purpose is the production of social sympathy, “A Christmas Carol” both recalls and revises those scenes in eighteenth-century fiction that, depicting encounters between charity givers and receivers, model sympathy for readers positioned as witnesses.⁸ Although such scenes have an instructional function and were meant to direct readers from the text to the world beyond it, they also posit the existence of strictly “literary” feeling; intended to “inculcate … humanity and benevolence,” they nevertheless provided “a course in the development of emotional response, whose beginning and end are literary.”⁹ What I have described as a certain circularity in representations of sympathy is thus not new in the nineteenth century But from the eighteenth-century novel’s scenes of sympathy to the spectacles observed by Scrooge, the sympathetic text has both widened its scope and tightened its grasp on the reader; from a display of virtue meant to incite imitation and teach judgment to a relatively select audience, it has moved to a profound manipulation of the reader’s visual sense in the form of—and by means of—the mass marketing of sympathetic representations. In the “Carol,” the subject is not the man of feeling but the man who has forgotten how to feel; in Victorian England, the potential charity giver no less than the beggar requires socialization. Not simply a representation of an act of benevolence or an exhortation about the pleasures of sympathy, Dickens’s text situates its readers in the position of the man without feeling in a narrative whose function is to teach him how to feel, and it constructs them as sympathetic subjects no less than as spectacular ones by manipulating “visual” effects in a manner that mirrors Scrooges own interpellation through spectacle.

The story opens on a world shrouded in fog that gradually dissolves to reveal Scrooge working in his counting house (47). Here, as in numerous other scenes that evoke contrasts between darkness and light or in other ways emphasize the visual, the story draws attention to its own surface and its control over visual techniques (what Metz calls “mechanisms of desire”)—its power to let readers, positioned as spectators, see or not see.¹⁰ In doing so, it seems to create spectacle out of a grab bag of projective or framing devices that it implicitly describes as the property of literary texts. But while suggesting that literature can transform any reality into spectacle, the story focuses chiefly on objects, persons, and scenes that are already spectacular in Victorian culture: already invested with cultural value and desire. As the story seems to spectacularize the real, that is, it in fact reinforces the desirability of a series of culturally valorized images and contributes to a sense that nothing exists—at least, nothing worth looking at—outside those images.

Spectacle depends on a distinction between vision and participation, a distance that produces desire in a spectator. The early parts of Dickens’s story dramatize the elder Scrooge’s identification with images of his youth and associate the effect of those images with that of literary texts. The scenes of Scrooge’s youth possess an immediacy that the Spirit of Christmas Past underscores by warning Scrooge against it: “‘These are but shadows of the things that have been,’ said the Ghost. ‘They have no consciousness of us’” (71). But the text’s emphasis is on the “reality” of these “shadows,” and that emphasis is reinforced by an insistence on the reality of an even more removed level of representation: the characters of Ali Baba and Robinson Crusoe, products of the young Scrooge’s imagination, not only appear in the first scene but are “wonderfully real and distinct to look at.” And their realism seems both to produce and to be evidence of the spectator’s ability to identify with representations; exclaiming about the adventures of these fictional characters, Scrooge “expend[s] all the earnestness of his nature … in a most extraordinary voice between laughing and crying,” his face “heightened and excited” (72). Subsequent scenes produced by the spirit similarly evoke desire and compel identification. The scene of Fezziwigs ball takes Scrooge “out of his wits”: “His heart and soul were in the scene, and with his former self”; he speaks “unconsciously like his former, not his latter, self” (78). If Scrooge’s relation to the scenes from the Arabian Nights and Robinson Crusoe is analogous to his response to other scenes from his past and both are analogous to the reader’s relation to the text of “A Christmas Carol,” then literature is here imagined as spectacle, and both are defined as compelling identification while precluding participation.

Although temporal distance and fictionality separate observer from observed in these scenes, the story’s emphasis on the realism of what is seen blurs the difference between a spectacularity literature finds and one it creates. Similarly, what the spirits choose to represent as “scene” is often, in effect, already one. Davis has described the story’s construction as a series of scenes in its use of dream and projection and its allusions to popular Victorian images. But its scenes are also related to what Mary Ann Doane calls “scenarios”: constellations of objects or persons charged with cultural significance, they are images of images displayed to evoke desire in a spectator who recognizes the values embedded in them.¹¹ The scenes of Scrooge’s boyhood friends, for instance, compel spectatorial desire through their temporal distance and through Scrooge’s evident, immediate pleasure in apprehending them. Indistinct as they are, however, they serve chiefly to signify youth and boyhood fellowship and to gesture toward an idealized preindustrial world in which work resembles play. In the description of Fezziwigs ball, similarly, desire is signaled by absorption, the disappearance of both the spirit and Scrooge while the scene is being described. But desire is also inscribed in the display of the dance itself, with its stylized emphasis on couples and courtship. Encoding specific cultural values in visionary scenes, surrounding with a golden or rosy light the images that convey them, the story identifies those values with light and vision themselves, and ultimately, as I argue below, with what it calls “spirit.”¹²

Encoded in these scenes, then, are some of Victorian culture’s dominant values—youth, boyhood fellowship, heterosexual desire, and familial pleasure—their naturalness asserted by means of a strategy that identifies seeing with desiring. For embedded in the scenes are screens of their own: cultural frames that define the contents as desirable. In perhaps the most powerful example, a scene after the ball, the narrator models desire, moving into the spirit’s position and, imaginatively, into the scene itself. He supposes himself one of several “young brigands” playing a game at the center of which is a young woman who might in other circumstances, it seems, have been Scrooge’s daughter.

As to measuring her waist in sport, as they did, bold young brood, I couldn’t have done it; I should have expected my arm to have grown round it for a punishment, and never come straight again. And yet I should have dearly liked, I own, to have touched her lips; to have questioned her, that she might have opened them; to have looked upon the lashes of her downcast eyes, and never raised a blush; to have let loose waves of hair, … in short, I should have liked, I do confess, to have had the lightest licence of a child, and yet to have been man enough to know its value. (81–82)

The merging of narrator, spirit, and Scrooge in the speaker’s “I” is the narrative’s characteristic way of dramatizing the powe...