Empathy and the Psychology of Literary Modernism 9780748690992

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Empathy and the Psychology of Literary Modernism

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Empathy and the Psychology of Literary Modernism

Meghan Marie Hammond

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© Meghan Marie Hammond, 2014 Edinburgh University Press Ltd The Tun – Holyrood Road 12(2f) Jackson’s Entry Edinburgh EH8 8PJ www.euppublishing.com Typeset in 10.5/13 pt Sabon by Servis Filmsetting Ltd, Stockport, Cheshire, and printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon CR0 4YY A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978 0 7486 9098 5 (hardback) ISBN 978 0 7486 9099 2 (webready PDF) The right of Meghan Marie Hammond to be identified as Author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, and the Copyright and Related Rights Regulations 2003 (SI No. 2498).

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Contents

Acknowledgements vii Abbreviations ix Introduction: The Problem of Other Minds and the Fin de Siècle World 1 1. Into Other Minds: William and Henry James

32

2. Dorothy Richardson’s Modernist Innovation

60

3. Communities of Feeling in Katherine Mansfield’s Fiction

90

4. Empathy and Violence in the Works of Ford Madox Ford

118

5. Virginia Woolf and the Limits of Empathy

148

Coda: New Structures of Fellow Feeling

176

Bibliography 180 Index 196

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Acknowledgements

I owe thanks to many people for the support they have given me as I worked on this book. Two people in particular deserve my deep ­gratitude – my PhD advisor at New York University, Patrick Deer, and my editor at Edinburgh University Press, Jackie Jones. Their advice and guidance have enriched my work profoundly. I would also like to thank the earliest readers of this project: Martin Harries, Peter Nicholls and Nancy K. Miller, who served on my dissertation committee, and Christian Gerzso and Jen Spitzer, then fellow graduate students. As I revised and rethought, I received incisive comments from a number of kind readers, including Angela Frattarola, Jeannie Im, Noelle Molé Liston, Megan Shea and Lenora Warren. Yohei Igarashi deserves special thanks for his attentive reading and impeccable advice. Sue J. Kim, with whom I co-edited the volume Rethinking Empathy Through Literature, has, along with the many wonderful contributors to that volume, greatly expanded my understanding of empathy. I would also like to thank the members of the Ford Madox Ford Society, especially Sara Haslam, Rob Hawkes, Seamus O’Malley and Max Saunders. I am grateful too for the help of Kali Handelman, who assisted in formatting the manuscript. Portions of Chapter 1 of this book originally appeared in the Winter 2012 issue of a/b: Auto/Biography Studies; I thank them for letting me reprint that material here. Friends and family, too, deserve part of the credit for this book. I would especially like to acknowledge the love and support of my father, John Hammond; my mother, Kathy Simonson; and my dearest friend, Nawojka Lesinski. Finally, I dedicate this book to my husband, Max Schleusener, who always tries to empathise with me, no matter how difficult I make it.

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Abbreviations

AMCSU BA BP

Ford Madox Ford, A Man Could Stand Up– (1926) Virginia Woolf, Between the Acts (1941) Edward Bradford Titchener, A Beginner’s Psychology (1915) BW Dorothy Richardson, Backwater (1916) CFKM-I Katherine Mansfield, Collected Fiction of Katherine Mansfield (1898–1915) CFKM-II Katherine Mansfield, Collected Fiction of Katherine Mansfield (1916–1922) CM Edmund Husserl, Cartesian Meditations (1931) EAP Theodor Lipps, ‘Empathy and Aesthetic Pleasure’ (1905) GS Ford Madox Ford, The Good Soldier (1915) HC Dorothy Richardson, Honeycomb (1917) NS Max Scheler, The Nature of Sympathy ([1913] /1922) OPE Edith Stein, On the Problem of Empathy (1917) PP William James, The Principles of Psychology, vol. 1 (1890) PR Dorothy Richardson, Pointed Roofs (1915) ROO Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own (1929) SB Henry James, A Small Boy and Others (1913) TBP Edward Bradford Titchener, A Text-Book of Psychology (1909) TG Virginia Woolf, Three Guineas (1938) TT Dorothy Richardson, The Tunnel (1919) TW Virginia Woolf, The Waves (1931)

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Introduction

The Problem of Other Minds and the Fin de Siècle World

This book is about empathy and modernism. More specifically, it seeks to map a complicated network of empathic desires and processes in the modernist era.1 Empathy describes a process of ‘feeling into’, of exploring unknown depths; I have found over the past few years that as a subject of enquiry, empathy has a seemingly inexhaustible number of nooks and crannies that invite exploration. It is a complex and slippery concept that, let loose in the rocky terrain of literary modernism, is difficult to contain or even to grasp momentarily. Yet the more I examine this topic, the more I am convinced that empathy’s role in modernism is of profound importance. What follows is my attempt to uncover the ways in which modernist narrative reflects, complicates and enriches contemporaneous conceptions of empathy. I’m sure many readers will be curious to know, upon seeing the title of this book, why I write about empathy rather than sympathy. For those of us who study the early twentieth century, this particular word choice is a difficult one. The term ‘empathy’, coined by the psychologist Edward Bradford Titchener in 1909, came into the world at roughly the same time as literary modernism. Yet it was not used in literary studies until the 1920s and does not appear to have been in common use until after World War II. ‘Empathy’, in fact, is not a word that my primary literary figures – Henry James, Dorothy Richardson, Katherine Mansfield, Ford Madox Ford and Virginia Woolf – were likely to use. They did, on the other hand, frequently use ‘sympathy’ and related phrases like ‘sympathetic imagination’, ‘sympathetic understanding’, and Woolf’s evocative ‘sympathetic vibration’. Nevertheless, ‘empathy’ is the better word for my purposes because I am looking at a particular strain of modernism that is marked by a turn away from sympathetic representation – not a total rupture, but a significant turn nevertheless. This modernist turn in literature follows the first flourishing of modern psychology. Any study on literary modernism must start by defining its parameters

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­2    Empathy and the Psychology of Literary Modernism within that broad, ever-growing field. We are by now used to saying that we deal not with modernism, but rather with modernisms. As Andrzej Gasiorek tells us, ‘modernism is a portmanteau concept, which comprises a variety of often mutually incompatible trajectories’ (Gasiorek 2001: 3). No single form of writing from the modernist era can stand as representative of all those trajectories. This is especially true given the retrospective nature of the term ‘modernism’, which Morag Shiach points out by explaining, ‘the idea of an abstract category of “modernism” understood as a definable literary style, or as a grouping of texts that share central thematic and stylistic features, was essentially a critical creation of the second half of the twentieth century’ (Shiach 2007: 3). The modernist texts I examine here must be understood as part of one particular sub-grouping, retrospectively arranged in order to unearth one set of key concerns from within the wider, less containable field that we collectively call literary modernism. The strain of literary modernism that I focus on here is inwardlooking, concerned with ‘getting inside’ minds and, in David James’s words, ‘prob[ing] greater psychological depths’ (D. James 2010: para. 24). James is sure to note that such probing is only one of many modernist values that we must weigh against others, like detachment (D. James 2010: paras 32–3). This is, however, the modernist value on which I have chosen to concentrate, examining writers understood as integral players in literary modernism’s ‘inward turn’. These writers, I believe, are particularly well suited to a discussion of empathic narrative and its limits. Because my work here involves a number of now obscure psychological thinkers, I have purposely chosen primary authors who are well known and widely accepted as canonical in an attempt to balance my arguments and make them accessible for a wider audience. Additionally, in a further attempt to set a reasonable scope for this study, I have concentrated loosely on one national literary scene – that of England, home to Richardson, Ford and Woolf. Although Henry James was from the United States and Mansfield was from New Zealand, England was central to their work and their adult lives. Good sources for a more capacious international view of literary modernism are Peter Nicholls’s Modernisms: A Literary Guide ([1995] 2009), Rebecca Walkowitz’s Cosmopolitan Style: Modernism Beyond the Nation (2006), or Christopher GoGwilt’s recent volume The Passage of Literature: Genealogies of Modernism in Conrad, Rhys, and Pramoedya (2011). What we mean by ‘the psychology of literary modernism’ might vary just as much as what we mean when we discuss ‘modernism’ itself. Primarily, to speak of the psychology of literary modernism is to evoke

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Introduction    ­3

the psychological discourses that were in play in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It is no stretch to say that such discourses are intimately connected with the development of literary modernism. As Martin Jay writes, ‘[n]o genealogist of the complex and heterogeneous cultural field we have come to call aesthetic modernism can fail to acknowledge its multiple intersections with that other richly articulated field known as modern psychology’ (Jay 1996: 93). Empathy and the Psychology of Literary Modernism contributes to the vibrant expansion of discourse on modernism and psychology started by scholars like Judith Ryan and Ross Posnock in the early 1990s and continued in recent years by others like Mark Micale and David Trotter. My work highlights the cultural significance of psychological thinkers like E. B. Titchener and Vernon Lee (Violet Paget) who have long been overlooked in literary studies. In this book, I focus on three psychological discourses in particular: the empiricist psychology that started with Franz Brentano in the 1870s and the phenomenological thought that descends from it; European and American experimental psychology, also known as the ‘New Psychology’; and the turn-of-the-century psychological aesthetics of Germany and Britain. Clearly, however, what has been called ‘the mind of modernism’ bears the mark of many other psychological discourses, including psychoanalysis, behaviourism, psychical research (with its competitor anomalistic psychology), early child psychology, and the psychologically-minded philosophy of Henri Bergson, among others. The years leading up to and during literary modernism saw great expansion in schools of psychological thought; each of the psychologies of modernism contributes to a larger sense of modernism’s Psychology. What is compelling in the psychological discourses I examine is a shared interest in the psychological distance between individuals, which philosophy articulates as the problem of other minds. Throughout the following chapters, it is my goal to show how literary practice and psychological theory in the modernist era worked together to mutually enrich concepts of fellow feeling. Taken together, these chapters should give a clear sense of the major theories and debates about empathy during the modernist era. Empathy and the Psychology of Literary Modernism concentrates specifically on the era of the lexical shift from ‘sympathy’ to ‘empathy’, which coincides with the rise of literary modernism. I understand this shift as a decadent stage in what the narratologist Manfred Jahn has called the ‘psychological turn’ of Western literature, whose beginnings he places in the eighteenth century (Jahn 2007: 94). The inward-turning branch of modernism I examine here, which seeks to promote cognitive alignment

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­4    Empathy and the Psychology of Literary Modernism between reader and character, clearly follows from the tradition of the nineteenth-century psychological novel, which was largely governed by principles of sympathetic imagination. But as Rae Greiner and Rebecca Mitchell have both noted in their recent books on fellow feeling in the nineteenth century, Victorian literary sympathy depends on distance, on acknowledgment that the other is other. The modernist texts I read in my book, in the tradition of twentieth-century empathy, are caught in the difficult process of denying or obliterating that otherness. Thus the modernist turn to empathy is a restructuring of an already existing set of desires and concerns relating to thinking and feeling with others. My primary authors reconfigure notions of intersubjective experience; their writings mark a key shift away from sympathetic forms of literary representation toward empathic forms that strive to provide an immediate sense of another’s thoughts and feelings. Certain kinds of narrative that develop or flourish during the modernist era, I argue, are best understood as empathy-driven. These include interior monologue, stream-of-consciousness narration, narrative marked by anachrony and fragmentation, and rapidly shifting character focalisation. These developments are not merely reactions to the psychology of the day, but rather complements; they make an important contribution to that psychological thought and to the twentieth-century understanding of empathy that would follow. In the fiction of Henry James, Richardson, Mansfield, Ford and Woolf, I see deep ambivalence about empathic experience – it is desired and feared in equal measure. I also see that while modernist literature tries very hard to enact this split between sympathetic and empathic experience, it can’t really do so in practice. This becomes especially clear in the work of Woolf, with whom I end my book. So while the strain of literary modernism that I examine values empathic experience as an ideal, it is also teeming with voices that recognise potential for danger, or even violence, in acts of empathy. These voices illuminate our culture’s ongoing concern with empathy’s limits. By examining the intertwined histories of fellow feeling and modernist narrative, Empathy and the Psychology of Literary Modernism advances new portraits of both. In particular, it helps us see how sympathy, once understood as the core of moral life, came to be widely understood as a ‘feeling for’ that is inferior to empathic ‘feeling with’. My work suggests that literary modernism’s distrust of sympathetic thinking and its celebration of empathic ‘feeling into’ contributed significantly to this conceptual shift. It is no coincidence that ‘empathy’, an esoteric psychological term in the first years of the twentieth century, was widely known and lauded by the middle of the century. Literary modernism

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Introduction    ­5

trained readers to believe that a more radical joining of subjectivities was possible. Yet the driving ambivalence of modernist empathy signals that fellow feeling, in whatever form, is an act whose dangers we must constantly assess.

What is empathy? To begin, empathy is a cognitive and affective structure of feeling, a way of bridging interpersonal distance.2 The English word ‘empathy’ is so entrenched in our lexicon, and the ability to empathise so often lauded as a constitutional characteristic of humanity, that it is surprising to learn it was not coined until 1909. The word has an appealing international history – Titchener, an Englishman, invented it at Cornell University, translating the German word Einfühlung on ‘the analogy of sympathy’ (TBP 417n.).3 Titchener also borrows from the Greek ‘empatheia’, which means ‘in suffering or passion’. Einfühlung itself, which I discuss at length in Chapter 2 of this book, literally means ‘to feel oneself into’ or ‘in-feeling’. It first became a prominent concept in aesthetic theory after the publication of Robert Vischer’s 1873 doctoral thesis ‘On the optical sense of form’. The turn-of-the-century work of Theodor Lipps is largely responsible for pushing the concept into other fields of study, including psychology. Perhaps one of the most difficult problems for those of us working in empathy studies is how to define it. In its one-century history, empathy’s meaning has proliferated and evolved wildly. It now serves as everything from a banal implication of concern to a cognate for telepathy, particularly in works of science fiction. This confusion is not new; since the early years of the twentieth century those who write about empathy and Einfühlung have disagreed about exactly which processes these words actually describe. One of the first things we need to ask when trying to define ‘empathy’ is whether or not it is the same thing as ‘sympathy’. Titchener never explains why he invented a word ‘on the analogy of sympathy’ rather than simply using ‘sympathy’, as other English speakers did. Vernon Lee, who wrote far more extensively on the topic than did Titchener, used ‘sympathy’ without question until Titchener’s neologism appeared. Gustav Jahoda argues that Titchener was simply mistaken in thinking ‘sympathy’ was not itself an adequate translation of Einfühlung (Jahoda 2005: 161). But the fact that Lee quickly adopted Titchener’s word indicates that those who studied the concept closely felt the need to ­differentiate. Titchener’s word was incorporated into our lexicon, I

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­6    Empathy and the Psychology of Literary Modernism believe, because of a cultural desire for a new kind of connection between minds. Still, we can group both empathy and sympathy together under the umbrella term ‘fellow feeling’. Indeed, the strands of empathy and sympathy are so tangled in the conceptual knot of fellow feeling that to separate them completely would be impossible. But they are in fact different words with different, if overlapping, histories and valences. ‘Sympathy’ dates back to the sixteenth century, when it started appearing as an anglicised version of both the Latin ‘sympathia’ and the French ‘sympathie’. The older English word has proved extremely capacious, taking on myriad meanings. ‘Sympathy’ has, at one time or another, expressed nearly everything that we have come to associate with the younger concept of ‘empathy’. In the late nineteenth century, for example, Leslie Stephen defined sympathy in ways that sound very much like present-day definitions of empathy. He called sympathy the ‘power of vicarious emotion’ (Stephen 1882: 229) that allows us to consider our fellows and ‘realise their feelings in imagination’ (ibid.: 225). Furthermore, the concept of ‘sympathetic imagination’, as understood by the Romantics and many who followed them, is conceptually very close to the idea of empathy that developed in the early twentieth century. Yet in common parlance and in academic disciplines they tend to signify different things.4 The commonplace understanding of the difference, that sympathy is ‘feeling for’ and empathy is ‘feeling with’, has been well established since at least the mid-twentieth century. By the time Robert L. Katz wrote his study Empathy: Its Nature and Uses in 1963, he had a very clear understanding of their difference. Katz, who acknowledges the similarity between ‘sympathetic imagination’ and empathy (R. Katz 1963: 8), separates sympathy and empathy in terms of felt psychological distance between subject and object: When we have sympathetic feelings in our encounters with others, we become even more sharply aware of ourselves [. . .] The empathizer tends to abandon his self-consciousness. He does not feel with the other person as if running along on a parallel track. The sense of similarity is so strong that the two become one – his own identity fuses with the identity of the other [. . .] There is no longer a distance between the subject and the object, when the subject feels himself into the object in the temporary act of empathy. When we empathize, we lose ourselves in the new identity we have temporarily assumed. When we sympathize, we remain more conscious to our separate identity. (R. Katz 1963: 9)

Some of the most prominent psychological research on empathy from the last three decades understands the sympathy/empathy split in a way that echoes Katz. Nancy Eisenberg and Janet Strayer, for example, write,

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Introduction    ­7 empathy involves sharing the perceived emotion of another – ‘feeling with’ another [. . .] we define empathy as an emotional response that stems from another’s emotional state or condition and that is congruent with the other’s emotional state or situation [. . .] Sympathy is ‘feeling for’ someone, and refers to feelings of sorrow, or feeling sorry, for another. (Eisenberg and Strayer 1987: 6)5

In recent years, Brigid Lowe has argued that to project our contemporary understanding of sympathy as ‘feeling for’ onto the past is a ‘fatal misinterpretation’ (Lowe 2007: 9). ‘Sympathy’, however, had already begun to take on meanings that tend more toward ‘feeling for’ in the early nineteenth century. Writing in 1823, for example, Thomas De Quincey complained about the ‘unscholarlike’ habit of using ‘sympathy’ to signify ‘pity or approbation’ (De Quincey 1823: 355).6 The major element contributing to the split between sympathy and empathy is the fact that by 1909 ‘sympathy’ had become an even more overburdened signifier than it was in De Quincey’s day. I would ask that we not write off the difference that has emerged between the two words in everyday speech. Instead, we should be attentive to the ways in which we can see that difference developing in literary modernism. Indeed, my readings in the following chapters show how both the new psychologies and literary modernism attempted to expand and reconfigure how we understand intersubjective experience. It is not surprising that in the wake of their contributions the new word seemed appropriate. In other words, while the writers I study did not yet have the vocabulary to separate sympathy from what I identify as empathy, their work in fact enacts that separation. Recent scholarship on the conceptual history of fellow feeling reveals just how diffuse ‘sympathy’ had become by the time ‘empathy’ was coined. As Susan Lanzoni explains, by the late nineteenth century public discourse about sympathy encompassed a great many topics and participated in multiple fields of inquiry: Sympathy was most often understood to be a kind of tenderheartedness linked to, but distinct from love. At the same time, sympathy was tethered to a variety of moral and epistemological ends – as a cornerstone in evolutionary ethics, an element in aesthetic appreciation, and even as a source for knowledge of other minds. (Lanzoni 2009: 266)

Similarly, Carolyn Burdett tells us that ‘sympathy’ was becoming problematic by the time Vernon Lee introduced the concept of Einfühlung to Britain in the 1890s: ‘empathy appeared in culture when more traditional Victorian terms for feeling, including sympathy and sentiment, were coming under great strain’ (Burdett 2011: 261). As I suggest later

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­8    Empathy and the Psychology of Literary Modernism in this Introduction, that strain is partially due to the rise of modern psychology, which had to deal with the matter of extracting evidence from other minds. While some branches of psychological thought voiced scepticism about any kind of sympathetic understanding, others looked specifically for forms of fellow feeling that would allow two minds to think with each other rather than about each other. The understanding of empathy as a form of emotional intelligence is perhaps the most widespread one today. This particular kind of empathy requires the ability to read affective ‘language’. Suzanne Keen, the most prominent scholar of literary empathy studies, defines empathy broadly as ‘a vicarious, spontaneous sharing of affect [that] can be provoked by witnessing another’s emotional state, by hearing about another’s condition, or even by reading’ (Keen 2010: 62). In her 2007 book, Empathy and the Novel, Keen provides definitions for different kinds of empathy that a reader might experience.7 In the related field of cognitive cultural studies, Lisa Zunshine writes about what we might call the cerebral side of empathy, particularly Theory of Mind, also known as ‘mind-reading’, which refers to the ‘ability to explain behavior in terms of underlying states of mind’ (Zunshine 2003: 271). Both the affective and the cognitive functions are integral to empathy as it is understood today. Indeed, one of the many frustrations for the student of empathy is the fact that fellow feeling covers acts of feeling and thinking both. Thus, we can speak of affective empathy and cognitive empathy. In the tradition of sympathy, acts of thinking would often be identified as ‘sympathetic imagination’. Janet Strayer explains that from a cognitive perspective, empathy means understanding the psychology of others (including thoughts and intentions) or their feelings – even if emotions are involved, ‘the processes responsible for such understanding are cognitive’ (Strayer 1987: 218–19). Affective empathy, on the other hand, is ‘vicarious or shared affect’ (ibid.: 225); in other words, affective empathy involves more than shared knowledge or an ability to imagine the perspective of another. The study of empathy thus covers both ‘thinking with’ and ‘feeling with’ others. That is not to say, however, that these are two completely separate forms of fellow feeling. As Keen explains, ‘Empathy studies have from the start challenged the division of emotion and cognition’ (Keen 2010: 68). This fact is clear even in the 1882 work of Stephen, which mixes knowledge and emotion together in the process of sympathy: ‘it seems clear that I cannot properly know what another man feels without in some degree feeling what he feels’ (Stephen 1882: 221). This issue is even more confusing when we are dealing with the German word Einfühlung. Although we translate the word as ‘feeling oneself into’, it can refer to the processes of understanding both feelings and thoughts.

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Introduction    ­9

For my purposes, the most germane definition of empathy is that of Edith Stein, the student of Edmund Husserl whose published doctoral thesis, On the Problem of Empathy (1917), was one of the first major works to focus on Einfühlung between people. Stein calls empathy ‘the experience of foreign consciousness’ (OPE 11). This understanding of empathy cannot exist without a complementary concept that I call ‘psychological distance’, which is simply the idea that separate minds have no direct interaction, that we cannot think another person’s thought or feel another person’s feeling. Empathy is about overcoming psychological distance and establishing intersubjective experience of other minds – which encompasses both cognitive and affective functions. To empathise is, essentially, to bridge psychological distance.8

The problem of other minds Cognitive forms of sympathy and empathy are particularly important in their capacity as potential solutions to the problem of other minds. This problem, as defined by philosophy, addresses how we can determine if other people have inner experience and whether or not it is possible to know about such inner experience if it does exist (Hyslop 2006: 1). It is thus a two-tiered problem that is both epistemological and conceptual (Avramides 2001: 254).9 Western history indicates that the problem of other minds became important after René Descartes published his work in the seventeenth century. As Carol de Dobay Rifelj writes, ‘Descartes’s emphasis on introspection as the only entry to mental life had another consequence: it emphasized the difference between the way we know about our own mental states and the way we know about those of other people’ (de Dobay Rifelj 1992: 4). Notably, Descartes’s revolutionary ‘cogito’ assures us of only the first person singular; it does not assure us of a thinking ‘we’ or of a thinking ‘they’. Anita Avramides elaborates the consequences further: Descartes’ sceptic manages to cut off the subject from its object and, thereby, from all other subjects [. . .] This move cuts two ways: on the one hand, it divorces the subject from his own body; on the other hand, it ensures that observation of another’s body is nothing but that: observation of a body. (Avramides 2001: 35)

The anxiety-producing limit case that results from this line of thinking should be readily clear. Namely, looking out from my own ­consciousness-holding body, I have no proof that any other body I see houses a consciousness like mine. All other bodies might be empty.

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­10    Empathy and the Psychology of Literary Modernism Since Descartes, the problem of other minds has been a matter of considerable interest in both philosophical and psychological schools of thought. John Locke, for example, mused in 1690 on the limits of what we can know about what goes on inside other bodies: ‘one man’s mind could not pass into another man’s body, to perceive, what appearances were produced by those organs’ (Locke 1690: 114). In the eighteenth century, the Scottish philosophers Thomas Reid and David Hume were the most notable ponderers of this problem. But it was John Stuart Mill who truly brought the problem of other minds to prominence by trying to solve it in the nineteenth century. Mill starts by asking, ‘By what evidence do I know [. . .] the walking and speaking figures which I see and hear, have sensations and thoughts, or, in other words, possess Minds?’ (Mill 1865: 255). His solution works by inference from analogy: I conclude that other human beings have feelings like me, because, first, they have bodies like me, which I know, in my own case, to be the antecedent condition of feelings; and because, secondly, they exhibit the acts, and other outward signs, which in my own case I know by experience to be caused by feelings. (Ibid.: 265)

Simply put, we can watch other bodies, recognise behaviour that we have seen played out by our own bodies, and infer that the conscious mind inside the body is thinking and feeling something similar to what we have thought and felt. As many philosophers since have argued, however, Mill’s approach is decidedly limited. Thomas Nagel, for example, writes, ‘The only experiences you can actually have are your own: if you believe anything about the mental lives of others, it is on the basis of observing their physical construction and behavior’ (Nagel 2003: 171).10 The linguistic, cultural and affective codes that bind us together and provide means of mindreading cannot take the thought of another person and put it in my mind. These codes can only express, or perhaps translate, the thought outside the mind of the other, where I access it. In other words, though there are methods by which I can imagine how others see the world, I can in reality only see it with my own eyes. Stephen’s work helps to show us how sympathy and the problem of other minds were understood when the new psychologies were beginning to form. In his 1882 text, The Science of Ethics, he posed the difficult question of what the developing sciences would really be able to tell us about human nature and behaviour: ‘We have already the names of such sciences as sociology and psychology. Are they anything more than names, or is there any reason to believe they will ever be anything more?’ (Stephen 1882: 10). Devoting himself to the ‘science’ of ethical

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Introduction    ­11

behaviour, Stephen saw sympathy as a crucial matter of study. His understanding of sympathy follows a line of thought akin to Mill’s inference from analogy. Stephen writes, I do not really think of a man till I have interpreted the external signs by the emotions which they signify. Till I do that, he is for me merely a coloured and moving statue [. . .] I must put myself in his place, feel what he feels, and measure his conduct by the analogy of my own behaviour under similar circumstances. (Ibid.: 220)

This sympathy that Stephen describes depends on a belief that what goes on inside one person is applicable to what goes on inside another. One’s own feelings, as Stephen explains, must have broad meaning: ‘I cannot feel for him except in so far as I can regard my feelings as representative’ (ibid.: 221). Clearly, there are two opposing difficulties here: first, we might assume that we can only sympathise with others who are nearly identical to us in experience, circumstance and temperament; and second, we might regard our own feelings as representative in all cases. Stephen is primarily interested in sympathy’s role in promoting altruistic behaviour. In this ethical sense, he indicates that only the undeveloped mind cannot, by means of sympathy, imagine the internal experience of others: ‘The defect of sympathy is also an intellectual defect. The child tormenting the insect or the savage abandoning his infant is simply not capable (in the common phrase) of entering into the feelings of his victim’ (ibid.: 223). Aligning his thought with a belief in the benevolence of progress and imperial power, Stephen does not doubt that our ability to sympathise grows more sophisticated as Western civilisation develops, writing, as a society becomes more civilised, as the reasoning faculties become quicker and wider, and the power of observing many relations between living beings increases, there is an improvement in the virtue of humanity if in nothing else. To think about other beings is to stimulate our sympathies. (Ibid.)

But while Stephen trusts that ‘civilised’ men can sympathise in the ethical sense, he is not so sure that our imaginative powers of sympathy can solve the conceptual problem of other minds. For each individual, other people are made of a ‘shifting and uncomprehensible network of thought and feeling’ (ibid.: 12). Stephen’s ambivalence is hardly unusual; in fact, it is representative of a time when the new psychological discourses were starting to reject Cartesian mind-body dualism. And as Max Scheler would note in the early years of the twentieth century, the traditional argument from analogy is ‘merely an epistemological

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­12    Empathy and the Psychology of Literary Modernism tailpiece tacked on to one particular system of metaphysics, namely the Cartesian and Lotzean dualism of interacting substance, which does not postulate a supra-individual mind’ (NS 226). Nineteenth-century literature and psychology were deeply interested in such supra-individual minds – we might even understand that interest as a constitutional element of the spirit of the age.

The new psychologies While the problem of other minds clearly has implications for our daily lives, in practice it is often easy to ignore or forget. Overcoming this problem becomes absolutely essential, however, for those who have to think about other minds professionally. And in the late nineteenth century, for the first time, there were a growing number of people who were tasked with procuring verifiable information about the contents of other minds. I refer to the first practitioners of the new experimental and empiricist psychologies. Both the opening of Wilhelm Wundt’s psychological laboratory at Leipzig in 1879 and the publication of Franz Brentano’s Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint in 1874 mark the beginning of psychology as a discipline in its own right. It was also during the 1870s that William James started offering classes on psychology at Harvard; the first American doctorate in psychology was awarded there to G. Stanley Hall under James’s direction in 1878. In Britain the first psychological laboratories opened in 1897 at Cambridge and University College London (Rylance 2000: 5). For the proponents of this new field of study, the problem of other minds was a serious roadblock. Their work consistently shows a deepseated tension, at times indicating that each mind is insuperably cut off from all others, at other times claiming that such a solipsistic stance is untenable. Looking back at the first few decades of what we would now recognise as modern psychology, Scheler would write, ‘the question of our grounds for assuming the reality of other selves, and the possibility and limits of our understanding them, is virtually the problem for any theory of knowledge in the social sciences’ (Scheler 1922: xlix).11 Each new branch of psychology attempted, either through constantly refined experimental methods or through radical new theories about consciousness, to heal the wound between the self and the world implied in the problem of other minds. The ambivalence about fellow feeling that played out in these early psychological discourses, I would like to suggest, was a productive one that encouraged innovations not only in psychology, but also in other areas, such as modernist narrative.

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Introduction    ­13

At this point, it is worth saying a few words about psychoanalysis, the psychological discourse whose connections to literary modernism are best known to us today. It is hard to get around the school of psychology founded by the man Harold Bloom famously called ‘the central imagination of our age’ (Bloom 1986: para. 13). We know that for writers in the modernist era, Freud loomed large – the signs of his influence told immediately in the pages of their letters, journals and artistic output. Certainly, all of my central authors in Empathy and the Psychology of Literary Modernism had knowledge of Freud, ranging from minimal in the case of Henry James to extensive in the case of Virginia Woolf. Perhaps more importantly, these writers have been read in the light of psychoanalytic theory for decades, resulting in some of our best scholarship on their fiction, from Shoshanna Felman’s ‘Turning the screw of interpretation’ (1977), to Elizabeth Abel’s Virginia Woolf and the Fictions of Psychoanalysis (1989), to Perry Meisel’s recent volume The Literary Freud (2007), which includes readings of James, Mansfield and Woolf. As Fredric Jameson reminds us, ‘texts come before us as the alwaysalready read; we apprehend them through sedimented layers of previous interpretations’ (Jameson 1981: 9). Much of modernist literature comes before us buried in decades of Freudian, Kleinian and Lacanian readings. Freud’s influence on literary criticism has been so great that for many years ‘psychology’ and ‘psychoanalysis’ were practically synonymous in literary studies. In this book, I join Nidesh Lawtoo in the critical goal of examining modernism ‘through a pre-Freudian, but still emphatically psychological lens’ (Lawtoo 2013: 13), which he lays out in his recent monograph The Phantom of the Ego: Modernism and the Mimetic Unconscious. When I say ‘pre-Freudian’, I refer not only to the era before Freud worked and wrote, but also to the years before his psychology became entrenched in the study of literature. My project in Empathy and the Psychology of Literary Modernism is one of excavation – I am attempting to uncover connections between literary modernism and some early psychologies that are often overlooked in literary studies. I have therefore made a conscious choice not to treat psychoanalysis, the weight of which would, I fear, crush the pieces of modernism’s intellectual history that I am trying to uncover. Many have written about Freud, but few have written about E. B. Titchener or Vernon Lee. I believe that these psychological thinkers, though lesser known, deserve my undivided attention. Nevertheless, as I note later in this Introduction, I do see a number of important ties between the material I read here and psychoanalysis. I hope that this book will prove useful to those who want to elaborate the role of empathy in the discourses of psychoanalytic thought.

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­14    Empathy and the Psychology of Literary Modernism My project of excavation follows that of Judith Ryan, who in her 1991 book The Vanishing Subject focused particularly on the legacies of William James and Ernst Mach. At the time, Ryan’s work moved against the grain of literary criticism. As she explained then, when we think about how psychology relates to literature, ‘most of us think of Freudian psychology [. . .] But James and Mach are representatives of an earlier kind of psychology whose impact on twentieth-century writing was much greater than is generally realized’ (Ryan 1991: 1). Since Ryan, many scholars have stepped in to fill the historical gap she identified.12 Furthermore, the growth of cognitive cultural studies has shown us many ways to look at literature in relation to the sciences of the mind.13 Like Ryan, I begin my work with the rise of empiricist psychology.14 I should note that psychology did not start from scratch in the 1870s; rather, it was then that psychology became recognisably separate from philosophy. As Rick Rylance explains, turn-of-the-century accounts of psychological history, especially those written by experimental psychologists, tended to sever ‘psychology from its origins in the philosophy of mind’ (Rylance 2000: 6). Rylance also points out that we can trace the origins of some psychological concepts associated with literary modernism, like the stream of consciousness, to points before experimental and empiricist psychology (ibid.: 10). My purpose, however, is to focus on those discourses that were born at the same time as most of my central literary figures – in the 1870s and 1880s. This focus aligns my work with Michael Levenson’s understanding of the moment of the modernist novel, which he describes as one in which nineteenth-century characters seek a place in twentieth-century forms (Levenson 1991: xxi). I am also clearly following Meisel, who has written that ‘any claim that literature’s self-announced crisis of the modern is rooted directly in the events of the [twentieth] century is based on a variety of dubious premises’ (Meisel 1987: 3). I want to suggest that to properly conceptualise modernist ideas about intersubjectivity, we must at the very least reach back to the late nineteenth century. The ‘new’ psychologies that I focus on inherit the problem of other minds from their philosophical originators and must confront it in the idiom of science. In his 1874 Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint, Franz Brentano set up the conceptual problem of other minds as a serious difficulty facing his developing field: There remains another circumstance which threatens to place psychology at a disadvantage in comparison with the natural sciences. All that a person apprehends in inner perception and subsequently observes in memory are mental phenomena which appear within that person’s own life. Every

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Introduction    ­15 phenomenon which does not belong to the course of the life of this individual lies outside of his sphere of knowledge [. . .] This limitation is all the more serious since the relation of one human being to another, as far as their inner life is concerned, is in no way comparable to that which exists between two inorganic individuals of the same species, e.g., between two drops of water. (Brentano 1874: 36)

Here Brentano puts forward the anxiety-inducing idea that one can only know from within one’s own consciousness, experience or perspective. In the simplest terms, the problems that Brentano acknowledges amount to a lack of sufficient data. To return to Brentano’s own metaphor, if we study a single uncontaminated drop of water to the best of our ability, using all the information and technology available to us, we will know most of what there is to know about all drops of water. We will know how any uncontaminated drop of water will react to a given situation, process or substance. If we study a single consciousness, much of what we learn will not be applicable, according to Brentano, to other consciousnesses: ‘if we are restricted in our observation to one single individual, what else can we conclude but that our view of mental phenomena is extremely incomplete’ (ibid.: 37). Brentano holds that while direct knowledge of another personal mind is impossible, communication between personal minds is not. He has no doubt that we can obtain ‘indirect knowledge of the mental phenomena of others’: They [phenomena of inner life] are expressed most fully when a person describes them directly in words [. . .] it is obvious that our capacity for mutually intelligible communication encompasses all kinds of phenomena and that we ourselves are able to form ideas of mental states experienced by another person during a fever or under other abnormal conditions on the basis of his description. Similarly, when an educated man wants to give an account of his inner states, he is not at a loss to find the necessary words with which to express himself. (Ibid.: 37–8)

For Brentano, the fact that one cannot really know what another person is thinking or feeling is very little cause for alarm in everyday life. It is only for the professional psychologist or philosopher, who studies how and why we think and feel as we do, that the indirect nature of our knowledge of other minds becomes problematic. Indeed, Brentano was confident enough in the educated man’s ability to communicate his inner state with the ‘necessary words’ that he looked to autobiography as an untapped source of wealth for the emerging field of psychology. The fact of psychological distance was mainly a scientific rather than a social problem for Brentano, but his sentiments were not universal. In

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­16    Empathy and the Psychology of Literary Modernism the modernist era, it became a particular problem in the wake of the Great War and feminism, as my readings of Ford and Woolf indicate. Ernst Mach, a German physicist and physiologist whose work had a considerable effect on the emerging field of psychology, also had conflicting thoughts about psychological distance. In his influential 1886 work, The Analysis of Sensations, he admits to an inherent distance between personal consciousnesses, but insists that this distance can sometimes be breached: The elements that make up the consciousness of a given individual are firmly connected with one another, but with those of another individual they are only feebly connected [. . .] Contents of consciousness, however, that are of universal significance, break through these limits of the individual [. . .] To contribute to this is the greatest happiness of the artist, the scientist, the inventor, the social reformer, etc. (Mach 1886: 24)

Here, Mach presents the desire to conquer interpersonal psychological distance as a driving force behind civilisation. Our artistic, scientific and social goals stem from a strong impulse to communicate with other individuals, to find a way of saying something that will make sense to others because it taps into some kind of truth. The connection he speaks of is the communicative ability to share our knowledge of the world with others. What Mach describes is our ability to break the limits of personal knowledge – we can expand and enrich our own personal vision with knowledge gained from others. He does not, we should note, describe a process by which we can break into another’s subjective experience. Mach’s work, however, displays a longing to deny that our existence is necessarily solipsistic. Admitting that the problem of the ego – that we ‘cannot transcend it and get away from it’ – is ‘in principle insoluble’ (ibid.: 358), Mach implies that we must nevertheless move beyond it, for ‘Whoever cannot get rid of the conception of the Ego as a reality which underlies everything, will also not be able to avoid drawing a fundamental distinction between my sensations and your sensations’ (ibid.: 360). Here, Mach is discussing a practical problem inherent in his work – how can any one person, or any one scientist, confidently make a claim about human sensation in general? How, Mach asks like Brentano before him, can we gather data about phenomena that we experience subjectively? In order to grant his work scientific legitimacy, he implies that we have the ability to step beyond the ego. Mach’s well-known ‘self-portrait’ of his field of vision, however, admits that while it is surely useful to work under the assumption of an empirical standpoint, we are not only trapped in our own perspective, we are our own perspective.15

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Introduction    ­17

As Andrew Pyle points out, ‘the assumption of other minds is unverifiable, therefore, by Mach’s own criteria, meaningless’ (Pyle 1996: viii). Despite the fact that Mach claims, ‘when a man of science tells me that solipsism is the only consistent standpoint, he excites my astonishment’ (Mach 1886: 358), the problem of other minds remains a problem, or rather, a set of problems, for empiricist and experimental psychologists. The troublesome belief that we are psychologically separate from all others was in fact figured as one of the constitutional characteristics of the modern subject in the fin de siècle imaginary. For Titchener, an experimental psychologist, the burden of psychological distance seemed a new one. In his A Text-Book of Psychology, he claims, The individual in a primitive society is too closely connected with his family or clansmen to form any clear idea of his individual self [. . .] We, of the later generation, are born with the personalizing tendencies stamped upon our nervous system; but we, too, obtain the idea of our self, in the first instance, from parents, teachers, and companions. From the time when we begin to understand the words spoken in our hearing, we are familiar with the use of personal names or pronouns to denote different individuals. Selfhood thus comes to us from our social experience. (TBP 546)

Titchener’s ambivalent account of individuation reflects a turn-of-thecentury anxiety that a primal connection between human beings has been lost. At some point in the past, he suggests, man did not feel the burden of psychological distance. But within this fear rests a necessary hope, for what has been lost might be regained. That desire for what is imagined to be lost might reveal the best place of intersection between the concepts of empathy that I study in this volume and psychoanalysis. Meisel begins The Myth of the Modern, a major psychoanalytically-inflected text in modernist studies, by discussing ‘a surprisingly common and uncannily enduring assumption about the modern element in literature’: the ‘presupposition that modern literature acts out of the loss of something primary’ (Meisel 1987: 1). He goes on to elaborate, ‘If there is a recurrent structure to our modernist problematic, it is the structure of the retroactive production of lost primacy by means of evidence belatedly gathered to signify the presence of its absence’ (ibid.: 229). We might easily say that empathy is a relationship retroactively produced to signify the presence of an absence – empathic desires mourn a togetherness that never was. Maud Ellmann’s recent book The Nets of Modernism, which examines interconnectivity and ‘relations of exchange [. . .] that violate the limits of identity’ (Ellmann 2010: 1) in a psychoanalytic context, also sheds light on this connection. One of Ellmann’s central figures, the

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­18    Empathy and the Psychology of Literary Modernism omphalos or navel, opens a particularly good view onto problems of fellow feeling. As Ellmann tells us, this strange bit of anatomy is what marks ‘the primal wound of separation from the mother’s body’ (ibid.: 5) and reminds us of ‘an indelible debt to the lost mother’ (ibid.: 9). But this marker might as well be generalised – it is all too easy to slip from ‘mother’ to ‘other’. Ellmann’s umbilical cord is the scar that reminds us we started as two, together. Now, as one alone, untethered by the umbilical cord, we need the mediation of empathy to feel with others. Despite my own hesitation to use psychoanalytic thought as part of my conceptual framework here, I hope that my work in Empathy and the Psychology of Literary Modernism will prove useful to those who want to explore modernist empathy in a psychoanalytic light. Although James Strachey did not use the word ‘empathy’ in his translations of Freud’s work, Einfühlung can be found occasionally throughout the original German texts, first in ‘Jokes and their relation to the unconscious’ (Auchincloss and Samberg 2012: 74). After Freud, Heinz Kohut placed empathy at the centre of his new school of psychoanalysis, selfpsychology. For anyone using that later twentieth-century u ­ nderstanding of empathy in literary studies, my historical work here should prove useful.

Empathy in literary studies Since David Marshall’s 1988 study The Surprising Effects of Sympathy, a robust body of criticism treating fellow feeling in literature has developed, focusing particularly on sympathy in eighteenth- and nineteenthcentury fiction.16 Much, though not all, of this work concentrates on sympathy’s relation to sentiment. In the past decade, however, more work has emerged on the cognitive aspects of fellow feeling. Cognitive cultural studies has given us scholarship such as Lisa Zunshine’s Why We Read Fiction: Theory of Mind and the Novel (2006), which addresses the methods by which fiction provides readers with experiences of what I am calling ‘thinking with’. Alan Palmer has contributed a significant body of work treating the ways in which fictional minds relate to each other and the surrounding world in Fictional Minds (2004) and Social Minds in the Novel (2010). Since the publication of Keen’s Empathy and the Novel (2007), which takes up the provocative question of whether or not novels and novel reading promote empathy, there has been a noticeable uptick in literary scholarship that uses the word ‘empathy’ rather than ‘sympathy’. Rebecca Mitchell, for example, examines the cultivation of empathy

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Introduction    ­19

in Victorian novels and painting and argues that ‘Realist art does not make empathy possible by teaching readers what it is like to be another person; it makes empathy possible by teaching us that the alienation that exists between the self and the other cannot be fully overcome’ (Mitchell 2011: x). Some of this scholarship does not differentiate between ‘sympathy’ and ‘empathy’, demonstrating that in practice it is difficult to separate the two concepts. One writer who does try to keep the two apart is Rae Greiner, whose recent book Sympathetic Realism in Nineteenth-Century British Fiction elucidates the importance of what I understand as sympathetic distance. Greiner claims that ‘Free indirect discourse, realist metonymy and characterization, the representation of sentimentalized acts of casuistry – each is designed to cultivate in readers distinctly sympathetic modes of thought’ (Greiner 2012: 9).17 The work of Greiner and Mitchell complicates some older understandings of nineteenth-century fiction, including the one Ryan offers in The Vanishing Subject. Through the 1880s, she explains, Psychology, it was widely assumed, studied how human emotions functioned, and could be best pursued by examining great writers and the way they present the feelings and actions of their characters [. . .] The unstated, because as yet scarcely challenged, presupposition behind this enterprise was the belief that we can understand the thoughts and emotions of others from observing their external actions. (Ryan 1991: 6)

Ryan’s claim here, as I read it, suggests that before the rise of early psychology, representation of fictional minds depended on a belief in the power of inference by analogy. Again, following Leslie Stephen, I associate inference by analogy with sympathy. Ryan implies that if there is a modernist shift in the way minds are represented, it follows the scepticism of early psychology: ‘the empiricist psychologies dissolved the very categories that enable us to tell stories’ (ibid.: 22). The empiricism of the new psychology would reorient efforts to gain knowledge of the world – for thinkers like Mach and William James, such efforts depend on introspection, that is, on attempts to get directly at the mind and its internal experience. The new scepticism Ryan describes goes far beyond the idea that one might have an ‘unreliable narrator’ – late nineteenthcentury shifts in thinking about the accessibility of other minds mean that communication itself, and thus narration, becomes intrinsically unreliable. My general belief – and I emphasise that it is general, not rigid – is that nineteenth-century fiction tends to represent character minds through sympathetic structures that depend on a maintained psychological distance and inference by analogy. I do not mean to say, however, that

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­20    Empathy and the Psychology of Literary Modernism nineteenth-century fiction takes a naïve view of those structures. As Greiner and Mitchell note, Victorian fiction was often quite sceptical about what we can learn from observing other people. According to Mitchell, Realist novels depict characters who recognize on some level the ultimate unknowability of another character [. . .] Such is the marvelous faculty of the omniscient narrator or the multiplot structure that these formal qualities of the book can lay bare the gulf of alterity to the reader. (Mitchell 2011: xi–xii)

Victorian-era fiction, in fact, is constantly pushing us to recognise psychological distance. Following the work of Adela Pinch, Greiner denies that nineteenth-century novels simply grant us access to transparent minds through an omniscient narrator. In fact, these novels work hard to show us how thinking about others happens (Greiner 2012: 9). Sometimes they work so hard that they strain ‘the boundaries of novelistic representation,’ as Pinch says in her reading of Daniel Deronda (Pinch 2010: 145). In my understanding, the non-transparency of fictional nineteenth-century minds tends to cultivate an experience of ‘feeling for’ more readily than an experience of ‘feeling with’. That difference matters. Nevertheless, we do well to remember that nineteenth-century writers were sceptical about the power of sympathy. That scepticism shaped the nineteenth-century world that produced early psychology and modernist literature, pushing both to discover new forms of fellow feeling. What close readings of modernist fiction show time and again, however, is that despite devising new, empathic modes of representation, modernist texts are never at ease with fellow feeling.

Sceptical sympathy in Victorian and Edwardian fiction Ultimately, I understand literary modernism’s engagement with the problem of other minds and empathy to be a continuation of an earlier, nineteenth-century literary tradition that has long been recognised in literary studies. The recent work of Pinch, Mitchell and Greiner excavates a complicated history of ideas that is hinted at in J. Hillis Miller’s 1968 work The Form of Victorian Fiction: The basic mode of narration in Victorian fiction is neither dialogue nor internal monologue, but indirect discourse, that mode of language in which a man plays the role of a narrator who relives from within the thoughts and feelings of a character and registers these in his own language, or in a mixture of the character’s language and his own language [. . .] The juxtaposition in indirect

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Introduction    ­21 discourse of two minds, that of the narrator and that of the character, is, one might say, irony writ large. (Miller 1968: 3)

What Miller recognises here, in my terms, is the sympathetic structure of the nineteenth-century novel. The irony he notes arises from the implied psychological distance between narrator and character. What literary criticism since Miller’s important book has shown us is the way nineteenth-century fiction depends on that distance as a productive space. Miller’s definition of the Victorian novel – a structure of interpenetrating minds (ibid.: 5) – still rings true after nearly fifty years. Of course, where there are interpenetrating minds, we will find some of those minds presented as problems. The novels of Thomas Hardy, for example, are all marked by his characters’ misunderstandings and failures to grasp accurately what others are thinking and feeling. Elaine Scarry points to this tendency as Hardy’s great literary legacy: Literature, it seems fair to conclude, is most helpful not insofar as it takes away the problem of the other – for only with the greatest rarity can it do this – but when it instead takes as its own subject the problem of Imagining Others. The British novelist Thomas Hardy is a brilliant explicator of this problem. He places before our eyes the dense interior of a man or woman. He then juxtaposes this ontological robustness with the inevitable subtractions, the flattenings, the emptyings out that occur in other people’s vision of the person. (Scarry 1998: 48)

What is then valuable about, say, Jude the Obscure, is not so much our ability to feel with Jude as he plods through his unlucky existence, but rather the fact that we see how Arabella, Sue and the rest of the world fail to feel with him. I would add to what Scarry has to say the fact that Jude, too, fails to imagine others successfully – repeatedly he observes, infers and yet finds he knows little about others. Hardy’s work serves as a warning that our conceptual relations to other people cannot match the ontological depth of another human being. As Pinch has argued, ‘the history of ideas about the powers of the mind is full of strange accounts that describe the act of thinking about another as an ethically complex, sometimes even a dangerously powerful thing to do’ (Pinch 2010: 1). This history, as Pinch shows, is a rich and complex one throughout the entirety of the nineteenth century. Hardy’s characters offer us clear examples of what I, borrowing from Pinch, would call dangerous acts of thinking about other people. In Hardy’s novels, the reader witnesses the failures of sympathy that play out between his characters and sees all that is lost to the psychological distance between them. Reading Jude or Tess of the D’Urbervilles is

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­22    Empathy and the Psychology of Literary Modernism a draining experience because those texts force us to sympathise while simultaneously reminding us how rare and difficult it is to accurately map another’s internal experience. Thus while we feel for Hardy’s Tess Durbeyfield, having seen events, more or less, from her point of view, we also see Angel Clare’s failures of sympathy. After Tess confesses that she bore an illegitimate child, he quiets her explanations by saying ‘don’t argue’, and laments her ‘decrepit’ family and conduct by saying, ‘Here was I thinking you a new-sprung child of nature; there were you, the belated seedling of an effete aristocracy’ (Hardy 1891: 215). Angel finds that the mind with which he thought he had established a connection was, in fact, a product of his imagination. It is this breakdown of sympathetic understanding between Tess and Angel that leads to her violent end. In Hardy’s 1878 novel The Return of the Native, it is Eustacia and Clym’s failure to share their interior states that makes the reader grapple seriously with the problem of other minds. Their tendency to attribute imagined thoughts and desires to each other – Clym believes that Eustacia is happy to stay on his native heath, while Eustacia believes Clym will eventually grow restless and take her to Paris – spells their doom early on. This pair shows us what Mitchell reads as the lesson of fellow feeling in Victorian art: ‘realization of the radical alterity of the individual is necessary because in its absence, relationships fail, misunderstandings abound, or communities fracture’ (Mitchell 2011: 14). In Eustacia’s anger toward Clym – ‘You deceived me – not by words, but by appearances, which are less seen through than words’ (Hardy 1878: 323) – we see how poor a solution to the problem of other minds Mill’s inference from analogy can be. Hardy’s novel reveals that psychological distance allows for a particular kind of danger in which one thinks in place of the other instead of trying to think with them. Since communication and observation grant only second-hand sympathetic knowledge of others’ mental processes, it is possible to ignore that knowledge and supplant it with a fiction of one’s own making. What is wanting in The Return of the Native is a form of sympathy that does not depend on the flawed human capacity to ‘read’ other people. Clearly, Hardy’s fictions complement a wider nineteenth-century intellectual enquiry into the possibility of knowing others through sympathy. We might easily offer The Return of the Native as an illustration of Stephen’s point that ‘Each person sees only one aspect of surrounding realities’ (Stephen 1882: 219). Investment in the difficult problem of other minds continued into the Edwardian era, despite what Virginia Woolf would say about that era’s superficiality in her 1923 essay ‘Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown’. We can even find deep-seated anxieties about other minds in the work of John

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Introduction    ­23

Galsworthy, who stands today as one of the representational figures of the bourgeois fin de siècle. In his short story ‘A Fisher of Men’, first published in Ford Madox Ford’s English Review, we find a subtle yet powerful example of a first-person narrator struggling with the problem of psychological distance and using sympathetic thinking as a form of retaliatory violence. This tale, which is about a rector who has seen his fishing village congregation dwindle over many years, is peppered with uncertainty. When we first ‘hear’ the rector’s thoughts, we are reminded that they are the speaker’s conjecture: ‘A certain green spot within that churchyard was kept clear of grave-stones, which thickly covered all the rest of the ground. He never – I believe – failed to look at it, and think: “I will keep that corner free. I will not be buried amongst men who refuse their God!”’ (Galsworthy 1908: 31–2). The narrator’s ‘I believe’ breaks into the sure statement ‘he never failed’ to remind us that our knowledge of the rector is mediated, interrupted and unsure. Later, the narrator’s ‘I believe’ qualifications progress to ‘I fancy’, highlighting the fact that he has to imagine and create what goes on in the pastor’s head in order to communicate it. The rector, as we see him, is completely out of sympathy with the townspeople for whom he is meant to serve as spiritual leader, yet he mistakenly believes he knows their minds. As the narrator states in one of his frequent asides, there is a ‘mystery which each man’s blindness to the nature of his own spirit wraps round his relations with his fellow human beings’ (ibid.: 38). The presumption that he knows the minds of his parishioners, that his own mind does not cloud or skew his judgement, is the rector’s sin against the community. Galsworthy’s story reaches its climax during the harvest festival church service. The embittered townspeople have sent nothing, but have all come to the service to witness the rector’s reaction. The angry rector claims deep knowledge of the entire congregation: Those eyes now had in them the peculiar flare which we knew so well. His voice rose again: ‘And how [. . .] have you shown your gratitude to God, embodied in His Church and in me, Her appointed representative? Do you think, then, that God will let you insult Him with impunity? Do you think in your foolish pride that God will suffer you unpunished to place this conspired slight on Him? If you imagine this, you are woefully mistaken. I know the depths of your rebellious hearts; I read them like this Book’. (Ibid.: 43–4)

The rector’s claim to knowledge of the depths of other hearts is an ethical violation, one that is treated as such by the parishioners. They answer the call to sing with an angry clamour, ‘a mutinous, harsh, roaring sound, as though in the words of that gentle hymn each one of

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­24    Empathy and the Psychology of Literary Modernism this grim congregation were pouring out all the resentment in his heart’ (ibid.: 45–6). The heart, then, resents the presumption that it is known, that it can be read like a text, even one such as the mysterious and holy Bible to which the rector refers. The townspeople repay the rector’s psychological violence with an almost wholesale abandonment of the church. After the service, the former parishioners see the rector atop a cliff, raging and gesticulating into a storm. He dies later that night. The narrator’s story, I would suggest, is a form of posthumous revenge. By taking up the task of ­representing the rector’s heart, of rendering his interiority legible, the narrator has turned the resented man’s violence back on him. The narrator has the humility, however, to remind us that despite first-hand knowledge of the events he relates, he can only ‘think’, ‘believe’ and ‘fancy’ the depths of the rector’s heart. He is an important precursor to Ford’s John Dowell, the narrator of The Good Soldier, which I read in Chapter 4. Dowell continually struggles to ‘sound the depths’ of the obscure human heart, giving us a sustained look at the limits of empathy.

Literary modernism and empathy Clearly, scepticism about fellow feeling is not unique to literary modernism. So what separates empathic modernism from sympathetic realism? Is it those narrative methods that we commonly associate with modernism? I do, throughout this volume, tend to associate free indirect discourse, free direct discourse and internal monologue with empathy. Notably, Sylvia Adamson has called these methods ‘empathetic narrative’ (Adamson 2001: 83). They create moments of what I would call cognitive alignment – character, narrator and reader briefly overlap. Adamson, however, uses sympathy and empathy interchangeably and quite rightly points out that such ‘empathetic narrative’ showed up as early as the seventeenth century in autobiographical writing (ibid.: 84). She explains that it is a mistake to assume that this kind of writing appears only in the twentieth century because its emergence as a distinct narrative type – by which I mean its use as the staple style for a whole narrative span – took place a century earlier. Empathetic narrative can be seen as a reflex in prose genres of the Romantic period’s more general drive toward giving literary expression to what Bate christened ‘the sympathetic imagination’. The act of sympathizing [. . .] had become a key concept in the ethics and aesthetics of the late eighteenth century precisely because it offered a way out of the moral and epistemological limitations of ego-centred consciousness. (Ibid.: 84–5)

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Introduction    ­25

But like Ryan before me, I believe that the rise of the new psychologies made way for a new epistemological crisis in the late nineteenth century. Only after those psychological discourses are thoroughly entrenched do we find forms like stream-of-consciousness narrative that mean to sustain cognitive alignment over a long period or create the illusion that there is no mediating voice between reader and character. The desired result is a collapse of the very psychological distance that sympathy needs. What manifests on the page is a literary structure of feeling into that resembles Vischer and Lipps’s Einfühlung. As the narratologist Manfred Jahn writes, ‘the Modernists discovered that the best way to achieve directness was to exclude the traditional mediator, i.e., the narrator (or let her or him become as inconspicuous, silent, and “covert” as possible)’ (Jahn 2007: 96). Of course, experience of foreign consciousness is always mediated rather than immediate, but modernist texts often seek to make it appear immediate. But modernist empathy is not just about stream of consciousness narrative. In fact, only my second chapter here, which reads the novels of Dorothy Richardson, focuses on that style of writing. Modernist empathy is about a spectrum of ‘feeling into’ in which I recognise connections between modernist literature and fin de siècle psychological discourses. In Henry James’s late writing, for example, empathy happens in temporal slow-downs and sensory overlap between past and present selves. These empathic textual moments reflect the rejection of mindbody dualism that marks the work of his brother William James and E. B. Titchener. Katherine Mansfield, on the other hand, uses shifting focalisation to reveal a familial empathy reminiscent of Max Scheler’s ideas about fellow feeling. Ford Madox Ford’s The Good Soldier creates an empathic reading experience by use of characteristically modernist abstraction. In Ford’s novel I see the reconciliation of the seemingly incompatible empathic theories of Vernon Lee and T. E. Hulme. Finally, Virginia Woolf’s novels back away from ‘unmediated’ representation in a way that mirrors Edith Stein and Edmund Husserl’s phenomenological claims about empathy. Keen has suggested that the history of aesthetic empathy – that descended from Einfühlung – in the modernist era has long been hidden in literary studies. She explains that after the work of Vernon Lee, No sooner had the term been announced and situated so centrally in aesthetic theory for an English-language audience, however, than it received brisk challenge from high modernist quarters. The disdain of Bertolt Brecht for empathy (and his advocacy of so-called alienation effects), the embrace of difficulty by modernist poets, and the dominance of New Criticism, which taught students to avoid the affective fallacy, all interfered with

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­26    Empathy and the Psychology of Literary Modernism the integration of empathy into literary theory until recently. (Keen 2010: 64–5)

Despite that vacancy in literary theory, empathy is very present in the practice of modernist writing. In fact, it is an integral part of those aspects of modernist narrative that are marked by difficulty. Recent scholarship has started to unearth the wealth of empathy buried in modernist history. For example, Timothy C. Vincent has examined the connection between Vischer’s Einfühlung and French modernist literature, tying Baudelaire’s turn away from realism to a split with sympathetic identification. Vincent suggests that the ‘conceptual fault line between sympathetic and empathetic identification’ might serve as a new starting point for thinking about what modernism is (Vincent 2012: 9). Focusing primarily on the visual arts, Juliet Koss has similarly argued for the importance of integrating empathy’s history into the study of modernist culture: Beyond offering a sequence of etymological shifts or discursive trends, the critical history of Einfühlung reveals a fracturing of the disciplines at the turn of the last century; a rejection of narrative, with the emergence of visual abstraction; and widespread transformations, with the birth of cinema, in both the objects of spectatorship and the status of spectators themselves. (Koss 2006: 139)

While I agree with the spirit of what Koss writes here, I want to avoid tying either empathy or modernism to a rejection of narrative. I would say, rather, that both empathy and modernism work together to usher in narrative paradigm shifts. Again, what I see in literary modernism is the continuation of a much longer project of literary fellow feeling. In this, I follow Jahn, who argues, our present notions about perspectival filtering would hardly exist without the psychological interest that informs Western narrative literature from roughly the eighteenth century onwards. The psychological turn reaches its height with the institution of psychology as a discipline and the flowering of the Modernist literary movement in the period of 1900 to 1950. (Jahn 2007: 94)

We might even understand the shift from sympathy to empathy as the beginning of a final, decadent stage of the ‘psychological turn’. Along similar lines, Jameson has argued that ‘preindividualistic narratives’ allow for ‘nothing like narrative “point of view,” let alone “identification” or “empathy” with this or that protagonist’ (Jameson 1981: 124).

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The texts I read here, clear examples of ‘postindividualistic narrative’, develop or refine narrative fellow feeling, often in an attempt to minimise or disguise sympathetic distance. Many of these texts, it seems, turn to more properly empathic representation out of distrust for sympathetic thinking. We might then understand E. M. Forster’s famous epigraph ‘Only connect . . .’ at the start of his 1910 novel Howards End as a way of asking if there is a better way to connect. Of course, like his later work A Passage to India, Forster’s novel ironically explores myriad failures to connect – empathy may have been desired in literary modernism, but it was never trusted. Anxieties about the problem of other minds and psychological distance, however, turn out to be productive rather than paralysing, giving us a literature that is both focused on bridging psychological distance and intent on finding new ways of representing consciousness.

Overview My methodology in Empathy and the Psychology of Literary Modernism is one of historical and conceptual constellation. I pair each of my primary authors with one or more contemporaneous psychological thinkers. In this way, I am able to investigate the history of empathy within the richly heterogeneous context of early twentieth-century psychological thought. I have chosen these primary authors with two essential criteria in mind. First, they exemplify both modernist narrative innovation and modernist anxieties about forms of thinking and feeling with others. Second, they all had considerable knowledge of fin de siècle psychological discourses. Two of them, Henry James and Virginia Woof, had familial ties to people who theorised fellow feeling or intersubjectivity. Richardson, Mansfield and Ford moved in social circles familiar with the developing psychological fields. In fact, Richardson was in the first generation of Englishwomen to study psychology in secondary school. But in writing this book, I have tried not to focus on direct lines of influence from a particular psychological thinker to a particular fiction writer. As Ryan writes, ‘In the decades around the turn of the century, empiricist ideas were very much “in the air”’ (Ryan 1991: 4) – any writer in the early twentieth century could be said to have breathed that air. Finally, it was also my intent to choose authors who wrote for roughly the same British audience but who deliver different perspectives – American, English, colonial, veteran, pacifist, wealthy, poor, female and male. Together, they allow for a diverse map of modernist-era concerns about empathic thinking and representation in the British literary scene.

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­28    Empathy and the Psychology of Literary Modernism In Chapter 1, I examine empathy during the transition to modernism via the work of Henry James, William James and E. B. Titchener. In both the experimental psychology of Titchener and the radical empiricism of William James we encounter fascinating contradictions relating to the problem of other minds. Both men vacillate between claims that individual minds are essentially isolated and assurances that we can think and feel with others. A similar ambivalence reverberates in the later work of Henry James. I argue that the psychological isolation he expresses in his final decade of writing prompts a turn to representational methods that mean to bypass sympathetic distance and allow for something more akin to empathic experience. What I find in his autobiographical text A Small Boy and Others (1913b) is a mix of sympathetic and empathic structures of fellow feeling and the notable presence of ghostly vocabulary, which I read as a trace of scepticism about empathic incursions from James’s autobiographical eyes. Chapter 2 reads the work of Dorothy Richardson and the first major contributors to the theory of aesthetic empathy, Robert Vischer and Theodor Lipps. My reading of fellow feeling in the first four volumes of Richardson’s Pilgrimage is three-pronged. First, I examine the ways in which Richardson’s protagonist, Miriam Henderson, fears and rejects sympathy. I understand this rejection partially as a feminist stance, a way of asserting female agency, that also shows up in the work of Katherine Mansfield and Virginia Woolf. Second, I read Richardson’s stream-of-consciousness method as a specifically empathic turn meant to disguise sympathetic distance. Third, I examine how, within the text, Miriam engages the world in a way that echoes empathic principles laid out in Vischer and Lipps’s psychological aesthetics. I follow my work on Richardson with readings of the short stories of Katherine Mansfield in Chapter 3. Here I use Max Scheler’s influential 1913 book The Nature of Sympathy and return to Titchener’s thoughts on empathy. I find in Mansfield’s stories a rich variety of fellow feeling, which Scheler’s work helps me to identify and read. One particular thread that I notice throughout Mansfield’s oeuvre is a resistance to sympathy that operates along both gender and class lines. But the empathy or ‘feeling with’ that I see in Mansfield’s work is quite different from that which I see in Richardson’s novels. Rather than trying to shrink the sympathetic distance between reader and character, I argue, Mansfield weaves her characters together into an empathic collective. Chapter 4 uses the first work on aesthetic empathy in Britain, that of Vernon Lee and T. E. Hulme, to read Ford Madox Ford’s novels The Good Soldier and A Man Could Stand Up–. Ford’s earlier novel not only represents empathic thinking in action, but also unveils a danger inher-

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ent in empathy as these early theorists saw it. As I understand The Good Soldier, it shows how empathy and abstraction, two aesthetic processes that Hulme, following the work of Wilhelm Worringer, wanted to separate, can actually function productively together. That co-functioning of empathy and abstraction becomes particularly important in Great War literature as exemplified by A Man Could Stand Up–. I argue that this novel, in privileging affective over cognitive fellow feeling at its end, presages widespread beliefs and values about empathy that would develop later in the century. In Chapter 5, which focuses on Virginia Woolf, I examine what I understand as a withdrawal from the empathic experience of oneness. The seeds of this withdrawal are apparent in Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own and her high modernist novel The Waves, but become clearer still in Three Guineas and the late modernist novel Between the Acts. Here I turn to the phenomenology of Edith Stein and Edmund Husserl, whose thoughts on empathy work with and against all of the thinkers I examine in the previous chapters. I recognise in Stein’s and Husserl’s understanding of empathy a return to the sympathetic distance that marks earlier conceptions of fellow feeling, including that of Woolf’s father, Leslie Stephen. Ultimately, I see in Woolf’s work a confirmation of modernist empathy’s inherent instability. As I suggest in my coda, just as we must acknowledge that modernist empathy arises not from the ether, but rather from the sympathetic discourses and traditions of the nineteenth century, we must avoid the temptation to understand literature after the modernist era as postempathic. But my feeling is that modernism’s decadent attempts to produce ‘feeling with’ rather than ‘feeling for’ disintegrate or mutate at the mid-century, which happens to be when the word ‘empathy’ comes into common use. The forms of feeling into that I identify here certainly persist in literature after modernism, but in another cultural and historical context, they surely mean something else. My purpose here is to capture at least part of what those forms meant to some of the modernist writers whom we associate most with the representation of inner experience.

Notes  1. Both ‘empathic’ and ‘empathetic’ are used as the adjectival form of ‘empathy’. I choose to use ‘empathic’ to highlight the conceptual split between sympathetic and empathic thinking. Furthermore, since the man who coined the word ‘empathy’, Edward Bradford Titchener, used ‘empathic’, I find that form more appropriate in the context of this book.

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­30    Empathy and the Psychology of Literary Modernism  2. I find Raymond Williams’s term ‘structure of feeling’ to be a felicitous descriptor for empathy, which comes to us by way of the German Einfühlung (‘feeling oneself into’). Indeed, it is impossible to have a non-structural understanding of empathy, whose function is to bridge. Furthermore, empathy, in the era I examine, is still very much in process and only ‘recognizable at a later stage’ (Williams 1977: 129). That empathy as ‘feeling with’ should emerge in literature before it emerged in common understanding follows what Williams has to say: ‘The idea of a structure of feeling can be specifically related to the evidence of forms and conventions – semantic figures – which, in art and literature, are often among the very first indications that such a new structure is forming’ (ibid.: 133).  3. As of my writing, the OED still lists a 1904 diary entry of Vernon Lee (Violet Paget) as the place where ‘empathy’ was first used. But Lee only published excerpts from her diary in 1912, after she had read Titchener’s thoughts on the subject (Pigman 1995: 243; Jahoda 2005: 161).  4. See Hammond and Kim (2014) for more on the conceptual history of sympathy.   5. See Keen (2010: 63). There are some other notable ways of understanding the empathy/sympathy split: see, for example, Chismar (1988: 258).  6. I’m grateful to Rebecca Mitchell for bringing De Quincey’s thoughts on ‘sympathy’ to my attention.  7. ‘Bounded strategic empathy’ operates within an in-group, ‘ambassadorial strategic empathy’ addresses chosen others in order to cultivate their empathy, and ‘broadcast strategic empathy’ attempts to provoke empathy in all readers (Keen 2007: xvi).   8. One thing we cannot do is define empathy primarily in terms of its social value. As Heinz Kohut was fond of pointing out, it can be employed for compassionate, dispassionate, or even inimical purposes (Kohut 1984: 175). If we have knowledge of another person’s interior thoughts and feelings we can use it to inflict harm. The work of Eisenberg and Strayer confirms this sentiment. They explain, ‘the relation between empathy and prosocial behaviour is neither direct nor inevitable’ (Eisenberg and Strayer 1987: 11). Reaching back to the nineteenth century, Leslie Stephen recognised that ‘Sympathy [. . .] may give rise to antipathy’ (Stephen 1882: 224).   9. It is the conceptual problem of other minds – how do we conceive others’ subjective experience – that is most important in literary studies. 10. Nagel and Colin McGinn are perhaps the two most notable contemporary philosophers to tackle the problem of other minds. See Nagel (1974), Nagel (1986) and McGinn (1989). 11. Similarly, Scheler wrote in The Nature of Sympathy that Münsterberg and others had shown that the question of the reality of other selves ‘is fundamental to the theory of knowledge and methodology of empirical psychology and psychiatry’ (NS 214). 12. See Posnock (1991), Trotter (2001) and Micale (2004). 13. See Shepherd-Barr and Shepherd (1998). 14. As Ryan points out, ‘empiricist’ is a tricky term in the context of late nineteenth-century psychology. Experimental psychology is often described as empirical psychology. But many non-experimental psychological thinkers, like Franz Brentano, called what they were doing ‘empirical’ psychology.

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Introduction    ­31 Today, we tend to label William James, Brentano and Ernst Mach as ‘empiricists’ – these thinkers were dedicated to what Ryan calls the ‘philosophical underpinnings of psychology’ (Ryan 1991: 2). 15. I refer to the self-portrait sketch published in Contributions to the Analysis of the Sensations. In it we see Mach’s reclining body stretched out, from the chest down, framed by the profile of his nose (Mach 1886: 19). 16. See David Marshall (1988), Barnes (1997), Crain (2001), Lamb (2009), Betensky (2010). 17. Greiner associates sympathy with narrative and realism and associates empathy with poetry and modernism (Greiner 2012: 14). While I agree that sympathy pertains more to realism and empathy more to modernism, I obviously differ from Greiner in that I see empathy in modernist narrative forms.

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Chapter 1

Into Other Minds: William and Henry James

The end of Henry James’s 1897 novel What Maisie Knew illustrates his trademark distaste for neat resolutions. It closes with the enigmatic statement that Mrs Wix, one of the young protagonist’s many caretakers, ‘still had room for wonder at what Maisie knew’ (H. James 1897: 275). That Maisie knows a great deal about the world around her is clear, but exactly what she knows is uncertain. Her mind remains, for both Mrs Wix and the reader, inaccessible. James leaves us here to ponder the conceptual problem of other minds that I touched on in the Introduction – how does one know the thoughts of another? That philosophical problem was a practical and professional matter for early experimental psychologists and a productive anxiety for Victorian and Edwardian fiction writers. Within the context of the new psychologies, the problem of other minds was most vividly articulated by Henry James’s older brother, William James. In his monumental 1890 work The Principles of Psychology, William writes, No thought even comes into direct sight of a thought in another personal consciousness than its own. Absolute insulation, irreducible pluralism, is the law [. . .] Neither contemporaneity, nor proximity in space, nor similarity of quality and content are able to fuse thoughts together which are sundered by this barrier of belonging to different personal minds. The breaches between such thoughts are the most absolute breaches in nature. (PP 226)1

Here the older James argues that each human consciousness is absolutely insulated; the thoughts of others are hidden from our sight and beyond our grasp. Certainly, William James would admit that in our daily lives we tend to ignore the epistemological problem of other minds – do other people have thoughts? – because our interactions with others give us reason to believe that they respond to stimuli in much the same way we do. But if we want to know the contents of another’s consciousness with certainty, we find ourselves stymied. What Henry James makes

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apparent with Maisie – we know that she knows, but we don’t always know what she knows – is for William James in Principles a fact of all human interaction. William James’s insistence here on the absolute gap between individual minds might come as a surprise to those familiar with his later work on ‘psychical’ research. As his longstanding interest in phenomena like telepathy and automatic writing indicates, he hoped that his 1890 statement might one day be proven false. His ambivalence on this subject is representative of his era as a whole – radical intersubjective experience is seen as both the ideal form of thought and an utter impossibility. Henry James’s work, particularly that produced in the twentieth century, shows the same tension. The younger James has long been understood as his brother’s artistic complement – a novelist just as devoted to the study of human thought as a psychologist. This was an image that Henry James cultivated for himself in his writing on fiction. Staking out a place for imaginative fiction in twentieth-century psychological discourse, he claimed in 1900 that the novel has ‘for its subject [. . .] the whole of human consciousness’ (H. James 1900: 33). That the novel existed at all, he implied, was precisely because we want to get into other minds: ‘man combines with his eternal desire for more experience an infinite cunning as to getting his experience as cheaply as possible. He will steal it whenever he can. He likes to live the life of others’ (ibid.). As Henry James’s words here indicate, there is perhaps something sinister lurking in our imaginative acts of thinking and feeling with others. Bridging the greatest gap in nature, even in a fictional space, might constitute an act of theft. If so, Henry James was one of our most notable thieves. We celebrate him, more than anything else, for his rich representation of other minds, which he tellingly calls his talent for ‘taking life’ (SB 163). Later, in his 1907 preface to The American, he would call his work a process of getting ‘into the skin of the creature; the act of personal possession of one being by another at its completest’ (H. James 1934: 37). This articulation of the writing process as ‘possession’ has a striking connection to the psychical phenomena that so engaged William James. Indeed, both James brothers must be thanked for helping to shape our modern understanding of cognitive empathy as something to desire, fear and doubt all at once. In this chapter I focus on the particular tensions that produce empathic thinking in Henry James’s later work, specifically in his 1913 autobiography A Small Boy and Others, a key proto-modernist text. As my theoretical frame I use the work of both William James and his sometime rival Edward Bradford Titchener. While I argue that Henry James’s later fiction and memoir writing connects to the ideas of early

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­34    Empathy and the Psychology of Literary Modernism psychology, my goal is not simply to sketch an outline of influence. Rather, I look at Henry and William James’s work together in order to flesh out the complicated network of ideas about empathic thinking that circulated in the early twentieth century. I see the ambivalence about empathy that both James brothers exhibit as a constitutional element of literary modernism. That ambivalence drives the work of the novelists I look at in the following chapters, all of whom reckoned with Henry James as a literary forefather. I start by explicating the psychological theories of William James and Titchener that I believe shed light on James’s autobiographical writing. I then briefly sketch out some of Henry James’s thoughts and practices concerning the representation of consciousness in fiction. Next, I lay out the sense of alienation from twentieth-century America that developed in his final decade of writing, particularly in his travel volume The American Scene and in his later short stories set in New York. That sense of alienation sets up a drive to feel into, or empathise with, minds of the past. In the second half of the chapter, I use William James’s and Titchener’s understandings of consciousness and memory to read Henry James’s autobiographical A Small Boy and Others as an attempt to empathise with the past self.2 This othering of the past self serves as a model for a broader understanding of empathy between self and other. William James and Titchener shared some particular beliefs about the relationship between the mind and the world that are essential for understanding empathy as a structure of thinking and feeling. Their rejection of Cartesian mind-body dualism, I argue, mirrors Henry James’s representation of his own permeable relation to the world and the past. Finally, I argue that the ghostly and liminal figures that haunt A Small Boy are manifestations of the same scepticism about empathic thinking that are present in the psychological discourses of the fin de siècle.

William James, Titchener and other minds William James is a puzzling figure in the history of psychology in large part because of his belief in phenomena like mesmerism. But we should remember that he was far from alone in his seemingly unscientific desire to discover supernatural mental faculties. The rise of empiricist psychology and experimental psychology in the late nineteenth century was contemporaneous with a boom in scientific investigation of paranormal activity, including telepathy.3 When William James stated, ‘Each [personal] mind keeps its own thoughts to itself. There is no giving or

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bartering between them’ (PP 226), he did so as a founding member of the American Society for Psychical Research, which was established in 1884. Later, in 1893, he became the president of the London-based Society for Psychical Research (Nicotra 2008: 201; Bjork 1983: 149). James hoped that by bringing scientific rigour to the study of paranormal phenomena, he might find evidence that the distance between human minds could be overcome. Those research goals led some to distrust James. As Stephanie Hawkins writes, ‘by the 1890s, James was declared the “nemesis” of all self-respecting psychologists invested in having psychology taken seriously as a scientific discipline’ (S. Hawkins 2011: 4). Still, James remained deeply respected by many in the growing field of psychology, serving twice as the president of the American Psychological Association, in 1894 and in 1904. Yet James increasingly turned away from empirical investigation as he grew older, losing nearly all interest in the kind of experimental psychology that was taking place in universities across Europe and the United States. As Henryk Misiak and Virginia Staud Sexton write, ‘James preferred ideas to laboratory results’ (Misiak and Sexton 1966: 131); that fact made him quite unlike most of the other leading psychological thinkers of his day, particularly E. B. Titchener. William James and Titchener make a particularly useful pair because their stark differences illustrate the primary tensions that ran through the new psychologies. Those tensions, in turn, contribute to a sense of ambivalence about what it might mean to think or feel with others. Titchener, an Englishman, spent most of his career as a faculty member at Cornell. Contemporaries celebrated him as ‘the dean of American empirical psychology’ (Holt 1911: 25), ‘one of the most prominent figures in American psychology’ (Warren 1927: 208) and ‘the cardinal point in the national systematic orientation’ (Boring 1927: 489). Unlike William James, Titchener was devoted to his laboratory work and took the establishment of psychology as a separate scientific discipline quite seriously. The four volumes of his Experimental Psychology (1901–5) were hugely influential as laboratory manuals long after their publication (Evans 1990: 7). Determined as he was to instil professional rigour and standards in his field, Titchener cuts a rather unromantic figure compared to the philosophically-minded James, who spent his time at Harvard investigating alluring topics like automatic writing with a wideranging set of students, including a young Gertrude Stein. Titchener, on the other hand, penned dry articles like a 1903 piece called ‘A plea for summaries and indexes’, which encouraged psychological researchers to take more organisational care when presenting their findings. In that same year, James published in the Harvard Monthly a screed against the

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­36    Empathy and the Psychology of Literary Modernism proliferation of the doctoral degree, ‘The Ph.D. octopus’. He feared an academy ‘in which no man of science or letters will be accounted respectable unless some kind of badge or diploma is stamped upon him’ (W. James 1903: 3).4 Titchener, who completed his doctorate in Germany under Wilhelm Wundt, believed strongly in the value of academic degrees and accolades – he famously wore his academic robes to every lecture, refusing to adjust to the more casual norms of the American university (Boring 1927: 492; Baker 2003: 27; Taylor 2009: 180). Titchener settled at Cornell because Oxford was still unreceptive to experimental psychology in the 1890s (Boring 1927: 493; Evans 1990: 5). Although Ithaca was friendlier to the new field of study, he still struggled to get recognition for psychology as a field separate from philosophy. James, meanwhile, seemed determined to keep the line between the two blurry, leaving experimental psychology at Harvard to Hugo Münsterberg and developing Pragmatism with Charles Sanders Peirce. A few months before James died in 1910, Titchener gave a lecture at Clark University on the previous ten years of psychology and called for an approach that was ‘scientific as distinct from philosophical’ and a standpoint of ‘pure science, or the desire for knowledge without regard to utility’ (Titchener 1910: 405).5 Without mentioning names, Titchener dismissed Pragmatism, explaining that it ‘could never pass muster with men of science’ (ibid.: 408). Not surprisingly, Titchener firmly disbelieved in the kinds of supernatural phenomena that William James hoped would one day be proven true. In an issue of Science from 1898, Titchener stated firmly that ‘No scientifically-minded psychologist believes in telepathy’ (Titchener 1898: 897). This comment prompted an ongoing, and increasingly bitter, argument with James in the correspondence section of the same journal.6 James took offence to Titchener’s claim that Henry Sidgwick’s experiments on thought-transference had been invalidated by subsequent research (W. James 1899: 655).7 Titchener refused to back down, writing, ‘If the alternatives before me are scientific isolation and companionship on [James’s] logical terms I prefer the isolation’ (Titchener 1899: 687). Contrary to the dismissive Titchener, James thought it was the duty of psychology to discover new potential in human thought. In his 1887 review of Phantasms of the Living, a 1,400–page investigation of apparitions, James wrote that the book gave him ‘a strong suspicion that its authors will prove to be on the winning side. It will surprise me after this if neither “telepathy” nor “veridical hallucinations” are among the beliefs which the future tends to confirm’ (W. James 1887: 20).8 Later, in Principles, he would claim that mediumship was beginning to be examined ‘in a proper scientific way’ (PP 393) and that ‘serious

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study’ of trance-phenomena is ‘one of the greatest needs of psychology’ (PP 396). The tension that saturates the atmosphere of early psychology is apparent not only when we examine the differences between William James and Titchener, but also within James’s own work, which includes some stunning displays of cognitive dissonance. In Principles he tells his reader in no uncertain terms – ‘Absolute insulation, irreducible pluralism, is the law’ – that our mental activity lacks direct contact with that of others and that we can ‘only conceive’ the internal states of others (PP 226, 239). Yet in the same volume he also suggests that what is so far an observed truth might in time be proved wrong: One great use of the Soul has always been to account for, and at the same time to guarantee, the closed individuality of each personal consciousness. The thoughts of one soul must unite into one self, it was supposed, and must be eternally insulated from those of every other soul. But we have already begun to see that, although unity is the rule of each man’s consciousness, yet in some individuals, at least, thoughts may split away from the others and form separate selves. As for insulation, it would be rash, in view of the phenomena of thought transference, mesmeric influence and spirit-control, which are being alleged nowadays on better authority than ever before, to be too sure about that point either. The definitively closed nature of our personal consciousness is probably an average statistical resultant of many conditions, but not an elementary force or fact. (PP 349–50)

Despite his earlier, almost solipsistic, claims in Principles, James indicates here that the ‘separate selves’ documented in the work of Pierre Janet are promise enough of an undiscovered human capacity to exchange conscious thought (today we would call those ‘separate selves’ the symptoms of dissociative identity disorder).9 Indeed, James himself seems to have two separate selves within the pages of Principles of Psychology – one an empirical sceptic, the other a hopeful spiritualist who seeks to undermine the first. The contradictions in William James’s own work serve as a microcosmic glance at the larger, society-wide, reaction to the problem of other minds. As scientific observations about the human mind’s isolation, which were in keeping with already existing nineteenth-century doubts about sympathy’s power, were presented in the works of the new psychologies, a cultural desire to reject or thwart those observations grew. Such conflict helped produce texts that, like What Maisie Knew, try to probe new psychological depths in character minds while still focusing on the pain of psychological distance between people. For his own part, Titchener takes a less provocative approach to the problem of other minds. He tells us that strictly speaking, ‘it is only his

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­38    Empathy and the Psychology of Literary Modernism own mind, the experience upon his own nervous system, that each of us knows first-hand’ (TBP 25). But this statement is primarily a warning to the student of psychology to remember the new discipline’s limitations; Titchener would say that the second-hand nature of laboratory observations should not prevent us from considering them legitimate. As with different human bodies, ‘the resemblances [between minds] are more fundamental than the differences’ (TBP 26). It is surely this belief in the fundamental similarity of minds that helped Titchener understand Einfühlung (‘feeling oneself into’) as a process that could occur between two minds rather than just between a mind and an inanimate object (Titchener 1909a: 91). Indeed, the idea that a subjective sphere can push itself into another sounds oddly reminiscent of William James, who, as Hawkins explains, came to believe that ‘the outer “fringes” or “fields” of each individual consciousness touch upon other fields in ways that multiply or compound fields within fields of other subjective experience’ (S. Hawkins 2011: 6). Yet Titchener could not disregard the gaps that separate one’s own consciousness from that of everybody else, writing, ‘there are as many psychological worlds as there are separate nervous systems’ (BP 307). This idea of the individual ‘psychological world’ is of course not an invention of experimental psychology – it is a key conceit of literary psychological realism, one that is of particular importance in Henry James’s oeuvre. In fact, Henry James’s fiction appears to align just as closely with Titchener’s ideas as it does with his brother’s ideas.

Henry James and psychological realism Early in his career, Henry James started refining a narrative approach that derived largely from the great psychological realists of the midnineteenth century, both English and French. He lauded George Eliot, for example, for works in which the emotions, intelligence and moral consciousness of her characters become the reader’s ‘very own adventure’ (H. James 1909b: 41). In other words, when we read Middlemarch we get to explore other psychological worlds and ‘live the lives of others’. As I mentioned in my Introduction, the psychological realism of the nineteenth century operates largely by means of sympathy as understood by John Stuart Mill – the reader observes characters minutely and absorbs the narrator’s reports of their internal thoughts. Such texts openly mediate our interaction with character minds either through character narration or omniscient narration. Omniscient narration in particular sets up observational sympathetic distance in which we ‘feel for’ characters. Clearly, it does not preclude strong identification

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with characters or emotional cathexis. But it does depend on a readily apprehended distance between reader and character – the reader sees the character, not the world as the character sees it. Character minds become legible (although not necessarily transparent) if we accept that our observations, or a narrator’s, can produce legitimate knowledge of other people’s minds.10 That is not to say, however, that the minds of characters in psychological novels are legible to each other. As any reader of George Eliot (or to reach back before her era, any reader of Jane Austen) knows, the illegibility of other minds is often precisely what drives nineteenth-century narratives. When in his novels Henry James dramatises the conceptual problem of other minds, he is, as Peter Brooks points out, acting within the tradition of literary realism: [Henry James] would learn, no doubt mainly from Flaubert and his followers, something about the radical uses of perspectivism in the presentation of narrative, and about the epistemological uncertainties that go with trying to know the lives of others [. . .] Such texts as The Turn of the Screw, The Figure in the Carpet, What Maisie Knew, The Sacred Fount, and The Beast in the Jungle date from this period, and they all play out a nearly epistemological drama, where what we think we know is always open to contest and reversal, without any sure principle for finding a firm, immovable optic. (Brooks 2005: 181)

Brooks argues that ‘the lesson of Flaubert’ reached James ‘with a certain delay’ (ibid.). Yet from his early years as a writer James displayed a tendency to leave his protagonists’ minds a mystery; this habit frustrated many of his readers. As James pointed out himself in the 1884 essay ‘The art of fiction’, his story ‘An international episode’ (1878) was mocked in the Pall Mall Gazette as a tale ‘in which “Bostonian nymphs” appear to have “rejected English dukes for psychological reasons”’ (H. James 1884: 22). The key word here is ‘appear’, for the reader of ‘An international episode’ can only guess why Bessie Alden rejects Lord Lambeth. Bessie’s actions do not reveal clearly the inner workings of her psyche. Like Percy Beaumont, the reader is left to ponder ‘with some intensity what had happened’ (H. James 1878: 92) inside Bessie’s inaccessible psychological world. Many of James’s earlier works examine the central character obliquely, through the eyes of others. This structure means that while the thing we may want most to know is the mind of the protagonist, we think and feel with the peripheral character. If there is a major shift in James’s oeuvre, it is that we are allowed more time to ‘think with’ our protagonists as the years pass. As Adré Marshall notes, James’s work shows an ­‘increasing

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­40    Empathy and the Psychology of Literary Modernism tendency to refract the action of the novel through the consciousness of one or more central reflectors’ though techniques of ‘increasing sophistication and subtlety’ (A. Marshall 1998: 17). James’s 1881 novel The Portrait of a Lady is a clear evolutionary step in his approach to representing consciousness. In his preface to the New York edition of the novel, James writes that when he started the story of Isabel Archer, he instructed himself to ‘Place the centre of the subject in the young woman’s own consciousness’ (H. James 1908b: 50). The point was not, for James, that one would see Isabel interacting with others and learn about her in that way, but rather that one would see her taking her own mind as an object of study. He claims that he vowed to ‘put the heaviest weight into . . . the scale of her relation to herself’ and the least weight ‘on the consciousness of [his] heroine’s satellites’ (ibid.). But Portrait is clearly a transitional text that has not yet tipped all the way to its protagonist’s mind. As readers, we have considerable access to Isabel’s inner thoughts, but we must also deal with some frustrating mental lacunae there. In fact, the novel denies us access to her mind at those times when the plot has most encouraged us to desire such access. At the novel’s end the reader must, like the shocked Caspar Goodwood, puzzle over Isabel’s sudden return to her husband. As in ‘An international episode’, we ultimately see from the perspective of a satellite figure. James’s dramatisation of the problem of other minds reaches a peak with the celebrated What Maisie Knew. Of the child protagonist in Maisie, Paul B. Armstrong writes, ‘She can only understand others through their Self-for-Others, which may or may not provide a reliable guide to their Self-for-Themselves. Her story dramatises the difficulty of achieving intersubjective clarity since the Other must always remain somewhat opaque’ (Armstrong 1983: 16). Maisie, then, is the story of a young mind coming to grasp the conceptual problem of other minds. But what is perhaps most interesting about James’s great childhood novel is the fact that young Maisie is determined to maintain her interior privacy. Realising at an early age that both of her parents use her as a weapon against each other, Maisie withdraws mentally and emotionally: She would forget everything, she would repeat nothing, and when, as a tribute to the successful application of her system, she began to be called a little idiot, she tasted a pleasure new and keen. When therefore, as she grew older, her parents in turn announced before her that she had grown shockingly dull, it was not from any real contraction of her stream of life. (H. James 1897: 23)

Here James’s allusion to Maisie’s interiority echoes William James’s recent formulation of mental activity, the stream of thought – also

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known as the stream of consciousness, or, in Titchener’s words, the ‘mental stream’ (BP 190).11 Throughout What Maisie Knew Maisie’s inner life becomes a veritable river rather than a stream, but all the while the adults around her have little sense of what her interior goings-on might be. It’s easy to look at Henry James’s novels as a long series of selves by themselves. Since the early years of the twentieth century, when Ford Madox Ford celebrated James in The English Review, critics have been particularly invested in understanding his novels as explorations of the world seen through a particular, limited point of view. Indeed, that novelistic point of view seemed to grow narrower and narrower with each novel he wrote. As Marshall points out, James gradually moved away from an omniscient narrator as his career progressed, providing very little frame outside his character’s thoughts (A. Marshall 1998: 39). This move shows James evading the sympathetic representation that marks psychological realism. That is, he tries to bypass the outside perspective that admits distance and provide a more direct inner perspective that promotes the illusion of ‘feeling with’. Not all of his evasions met with success. One underwhelming attempt was the rare first-person novel The Sacred Fount (1901), which features an obtuse narrator who tries, and fails, to understand the mysterious lives of those around him. In its dramatisation of how the problem of other minds affects a storyteller, it stands as an important precursor to Ford’s The Good Soldier (see Chapter 4). But unlike Ford’s novel, The Sacred Fount gives us a speaking ‘I’ almost completely devoid of interiority. After this novel James took a decidedly different approach, decentralising the sought-after consciousness in his novels. While there are some notable exceptions (The Turn of the Screw, The Aspern Papers, The Author of Beltraffio), the vast majority of James’s works, including those novels for which he is particularly celebrated, are all voiced by an impersonal, if distinctly Jamesian, third-person narrator. The novels of the ‘major phase’ that came directly after The Sacred Fount – The Wings of the Dove (1902), The Ambassadors (1903), The Golden Bowl (1904) – all feature multiple focalisers whose inner workings James represents with a narrative voice that always considers the scene in relation to a character mind. As Sharon Cameron has ­persuasively argued, James’s later novels offer an understanding of consciousness that is largely intersubjective – consciousness exists not only inside of people, but also between them (Cameron 1989: 32–3). Following Cameron’s reading, consciousness is not just what exists in Maggie Verver or Charlotte Stant in The Golden Bowl, for example, but rather what happens when they are thinking about each other.

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­42    Empathy and the Psychology of Literary Modernism Consciousness, that is, manifests in what William James would have seen as the ‘fringe’ areas of overlap between minds, or, in other words, in the staging ground for empathic experience. We might then ask how we are to understand the work that Henry James produced during his final decade. The most salient feature of this era, sometimes called his ‘fourth phase’ (McWhirter 1995: 149), is the dominant presence of James’s own first-person voice. From The American Scene, first published in its entirety in 1907, to the Prefaces of the New York Edition, published between 1907 and 1909, through the autobiographical volumes he worked on until his death in 1916, he uncharacteristically writes as an ‘I’. In these final years, James takes a sustained interest in telling his own story as both a transatlantic mind and as an artist whose lifelong task has been to represent human consciousness and push the limits of fellow feeling and mind-reading.

The Atlantic breach We remember Henry James as the quintessential expatriate, standing with one foot in the United States and the other in Europe. The Atlantic, as a gap between minds and cultures, was perhaps the formative structure of James’s mental life from his earliest years. He writes in A Small Boy that in his childhood he was ‘deeply infected’ and ‘prematurely poisoned’ by a ‘particular throbbing consciousness’, the source of which was England, ‘from over the sea and situated beyond it’ (SB 48). In his body of work the problem of how to straddle the psychological space between America and Europe is ever-present. That problem only deepened for James as time passed. Two trips across the ocean in the early twentieth century – one in 1904, another in 1910 – left a profound mark on his final literary phase. On the first trip, he found himself deeply alienated from a twentieth-century America that bore little resemblance to the nation of his childhood. During the second trip, William James died. These wounds, the common burdens of old age, are perhaps what led Henry James to render the Atlantic a greater breach between minds than ever before in his last works. In 1904, when he returned to his Manhattan birthplace, after twenty-one years abroad, he still remembered vividly the New York of the 1840s. After going back to his home in Sussex, that American trip stayed with him, producing not only The American Scene (1907), but also three of his last short stories: ‘The jolly corner’ (1908a), ‘Crapy Cornelia’ (1909a), and ‘A round of visits’ (1910), all of which take place in a rapidly modernising Manhattan that feels deeply strange for returning expatriates.

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These stories express a pervasive sense of loss, specifically the loss of a community of sympathetic minds. As Donna Przybylowicz explains, ‘On his [1904] return to America, James finds himself a stranger, an observing outsider rather than an imaginative participant in his country’s metamorphosis’ (Przybylowicz 1986: 247). Both ‘The jolly corner’ and ‘Crapy Cornelia’ feature a middle-aged pair of friends, one of whom has just returned from a long absence to find the shared past swept away by a new city that is vulgar and threatening. The protagonist of ‘The jolly corner’, Spencer Brydon, discovers that all that remains of his New York is the house he was born in and his friend Alice Staverton, with whom he has ‘communities of knowledge’ that open up the ‘presences of the other age’ (H. James 1908a: 948). In ‘Crapy Cornelia’ the titular character, Cornelia Rausch, comes back to New York and encounters her childhood friend White-Mason on the verge of asking the rich, young Mrs Worthingham to marry him.12 In the presence of Miss Rausch’s sympathetic mind, WhiteMason finds he cannot propose to Mrs Worthingham, who has ‘no instinct for any old quality or quantity or identity, a single historic or social value, as he might say, of the New York of his already almost legendary past’ (H. James 1909a: 993). White-Mason can overlook the unclear origin of Mrs Worthingham’s wealth, described as a mysterious ‘golden stream’, but he cannot accept that she doesn’t know ‘what it [i]s to be a White-Mason’ (ibid.: 994, 993). Cornelia Rausch does know what it is to be a White-Mason. That fact not only soothes his loneliness in the shifting environment of upper-class New York, but also allows him to feel his way into the past, into his former consciousness. Cornelia is for White-Mason ‘a massive little bundle of data’ (ibid.: 996). Like the beautiful objects she kept in storage while in Europe (ibid.: 1003), she offers White-Mason a physical connection with his past. He imagines that ‘wherever he might touch her, with a gentle though firm pressure, he would, as the fond visitor of old houses taps and fingers a disfeatured, over-papered wall with the conviction of wainscot-edge beneath, recognise some small extrusion of history’ (ibid.: 996). The sense of the past that she makes available is thus figured as a tactile phenomenon related to physical acts of feeling. Through Cornelia, White-Mason can imaginatively ‘feel into’ the New York of the past. It is as if by pushing himself into Cornelia’s figure, he might eradicate the distance between himself and a lost way of seeing. This turn to physical ‘feeling into’ indicates that standard sympathetic modes of feeling, which require that the in-feeler stand back and observe, have been exhausted. The other perspective cannot merely be envisioned, rather, it must be forcefully occupied. While White-Mason finds a manifestation of past consciousness

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­44    Empathy and the Psychology of Literary Modernism in Cornelia Rausch, ‘The jolly corner’ presents us with another kind of psychological object altogether. In that story, Spencer Brydon encounters the apparition of an alternate, present-day self. Surprised by his own knack for business when forced to take care of his inherited Manhattan property, Brydon becomes convinced that his childhood home is haunted by a dreadful alter ego, the man he might have been. His encounter with this ‘spectral yet human’ other, a ‘monstrous’ and ‘evil’ version of himself with two missing fingers, causes him to pass out in terror (H. James 1908a: 974). The horror that accompanies Brydon’s double creates a sense that New York has become a profoundly unsympathetic space for the long-absent expatriate. Perhaps more importantly, the story also suggests that consciousness need not be confined to a single body – it can, somehow, split off and exist in two bodies which can think and feel with each other. There is here a striking connection to the work William James was doing while Henry James made his 1904–5 visit to the United States, in particular the short pieces that would later be collected as Essays in Radical Empiricism. In ‘How two minds can know one thing’, for example, William James asks why ‘might not two or more streams of personal consciousness include one and the same unit of experience?’ (W. James 1905b: 178) and concludes that it is indeed possible. Henry James’s story warns of possible danger in such a shared consciousness, however. Brydon at first treasures his experience of mental doubling as ‘unique in the experience of man’ (H. James 1908a: 960), but his encounter pushes him to the brink of suicide and makes him violently reject the alter ego. The cognitive empathy or ‘thinking with’ he experiences is psychologically untenable. ‘Crapy Cornelia’ and ‘The jolly corner’ clearly bear the mark of Henry James’s own anxieties. The New York of 1904 was in many ways unrecognisable to him, as he makes abundantly clear in The American Scene. He finds Washington Square, where he was born, an alien landscape and particularly dislikes ‘the lamentable little Arch of Triumph which bestrides these beginnings of Washington Square’ (H. James 1907: 87). Erected in his absence, the Arch was immensely popular with turn-of-the century New Yorkers. But for James this new decorative object is what Mrs Worthingham’s gaudy belongings are for White-Mason – both ‘the newest of the new’ and one of many ‘swaggering reproductions’ of the ‘old forms’ (H. James 1909a: 1004). The Arch simultaneously affronts both James’s memories of New York and his sense of the old world. That sense is, not surprisingly, a rather privileged one. Some incursions from Europe are just as disturbing as the changed face of Washington Square. In The American Scene James takes a notably unfriendly view of the

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multitudinous Jewish and Italian immigrants who have recently settled in Manhattan’s Lower East Side. Twentieth-century New York, with its crowds of non-Anglo labourers, is for him an unwelcome place. Peter Collister argues that in this travel book, ‘James develops a discourse in which he, as the incorrigible seeker after impressions, is subjected to landscapes and urban scenes which reduce him to abject passivity by means of their intimidating and progressive modernity’ (Collister 2007: 11). But we must note that this discourse is carefully cultivated; far from being the victim of the landscape, James is the controlling mind that orders it. Along these lines, Cameron suggests that in The American Scene James ‘empties the landscape, marginalises the people, so that consciousness, a pure subject, becomes empowered outside the structures of psychological realism whose limits and conditions it is free to disregard’ (Cameron 1989: 7). Indeed, James’s difficult narrative, so dense that the experience of reading can feel fragmented, reads as a modal shift away from realism toward a nascent form of modernist representation. His visit to the Bowery Theatre helps illustrate the particular ‘empowerment’ Cameron describes: Was that vast and dingy edifice, with its illustrious past, still standing? – a point on which I was to remain vague while I electrically travelled through a strange, a sinister over-roofed clangorous darkness, a wide thoroughfare beset, for all its width, with sound and fury, and bristling, amid the traffic, with posts and piles that were as the supporting columns of a vast cold, yet also uncannily-animated, sepulchre. (H. James 1907: 187–8)

The Bowery here becomes mechanised and electrified, foreign and fragmented through the interventions of the new century. Its sound and fury is cold, inhuman, home only to the dead residents of a sepulchre, who, as it later turns out, are marked by their ‘Hebrew faces’ (ibid.: 188). Their bodies are not evidence of attached psychological worlds; they do not have to be read sympathetically or rendered as ‘real’. And in this space where James feels little sympathy with others (and makes little effort to feel it), he experiences a form of empathy – of feeling himself into – with the cityscape itself. In this altered landscape, the lost and hidden landmarks of James’s childhood become objects of pathos and fellow feeling. Observing that Trinity Church in lower Manhattan, once the skyline’s focal point, is now lost in a jumble of skyscrapers, James laments, ‘It aches and throbs, this smothered visibility, we easily feel [. . .] We commune with it, in tenderness and pity, through the encumbered air; our eyes [. . .] look down on it as on a poor ineffectual thing’ (ibid.: 76). His fellow feeling

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­46    Empathy and the Psychology of Literary Modernism for the inanimate Trinity Church articulates itself in terms of aching and ­throbbing – a pain in the body. To feel with the object here requires an act of transformation whereby one’s feelings become corporeal acts of feeling. As I suggest in my reading of A Small Boy and Others, a similar act of transformation must occur if one is to create a radical sense of fellow feeling with another mind.

Feeling into words Henry James’s final years were disturbed not only by his increasing alienation from his native country – he gave up his United States citizenship during the Great War in what was perhaps the sole political act of his life – but also by the death of William James in 1910. Henry was with William when he passed away in his New Hampshire home. He returned to England in 1911 as the last living sibling from a family of five children and set out to write what he called a ‘family book’ focusing on William in particular (H. James 1913a: 794). But the volumes he produced – A Small Boy and Others (1913b), Notes of a Son and Brother (1914), and the posthumously published The Middle Years (1917) – hardly live up to that goal. The small boy is Henry himself. As Adeline Tintner puts it, in A Small Boy, Henry James is trying to ‘find his way back to his childhood consciousness and to the impressions that formed it’ (Tintner 1977: 241). The body of criticism that has grown up around James’s autobiographical volumes routinely notes that A Small Boy was published in the same year as Proust’s Swann’s Way and credits the autobiographical volumes with a characteristically modernist treatment of memory. Millicent Bell, for example, calls James’s method of dealing with ‘the flooding seas of memory’ a modernist mode ‘born out of the struggle to assert meaning when life is perceived more and more as contingency’ (Bell 1982: 214). Tintner, who has written an extensive comparison of James’s autobiographies and À la recherche du temps perdu, points out that ‘[James] himself wrote that his autobiography was a new kind of “experimental” novel, which would devote itself to the consciousness of the artist independent of and free of all other characters in the novel’ (Tintner 1977: 239). The conditions in which James wrote during these final years are also worth noting. He dictated his work to amanuenses for most of his last two decades; it’s easy to imagine how that practice might produce prose that rings out like Proust’s early stream-of-consciousness narration. It is perhaps the act of writing through speaking that exacerbated his trademark verbal

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density, which, starting with the novels of the ‘major phase’, threatens to over-saturate the page. That density earned James a reputation as a notoriously difficult writer. Upon his death in 1916, his New York Times obituary read, ‘To understand Henry James was, in the popular idea, the gift of a privileged few’ (New York Times 1916). Readers looking for a new Daisy Miller were likely to be disappointed by James’s twentieth-century work. As Collister explains, by the time The American Scene was published in 1907, ‘James’s own discourse, an aspect of his public identity, had reached a condition rendering it inaccessible to the majority in what his brother, William, called this “crowded and hurried reading age”’ (Collister 2007: 25). Indeed, William did not approve of Henry’s later style and in 1907 wrote his younger brother this account of their conflicting literary ideals: [my ideal] being to say a thing in one sentence as straight and explicit as it can be made, and then to drop it forever; [your ideal] being to avoid naming it straight, but by dint of breathing and sighing all round and round it, to rouse in the reader who may have a similar perception already (Heaven help him if he hasn’t!) the illusion of a solid object. (W. James 1920: 277, 4 May 1907)

William James drastically overestimates the straightness of his own prose, which sprouted its own frustrating characteristics as he neared death, but his annoyance with Henry’s later work is understandable. The younger James’s unflagging production of what Ezra Pound called the ‘endless sentence’ (Pound 1925: 24, line 29) can infuriate the reader. But it is here, in the baroque syntax of Henry James’s dying voice, that the nascent modernism of his corpus matures. There is something important about James’s later prolixity, which causes words to accrete as if to form a body that can be felt into, a ‘body’ of consciousness. Michael Levenson has pointed out that ‘[i]n the late work of James [. . .] the only way to see the world is through its verbal veil. Put simply, one must live within a language; there is nowhere else to live’ (Levenson 1991: 58–9). If language is the only possible milieu in which two subjectivities can meet – and in a written encounter, it clearly is – it must thicken in order to fix those two subjectivities in the same place. In one typical sentence from A Small Boy, for example, James writes, Let me hurry, however, to catch again that thread I left dangling from my glance at our small vague spasms of school – my personal sense of them being vague and small, I mean, in contrast with the fuller and stronger cup meted out all round to the Albany cousins, much more privileged, I felt, in every stroke of fortune; or at least much more interesting, though it might

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­48    Empathy and the Psychology of Literary Modernism be wicked to call them more happy, through those numberless bereavements that had so enriched their existence. (SB 99)

The reader must fight her way into such sentences, which are a record of James’s idiosyncratic, meandering, multidirectional way of processing the world. We must push into his syntax, which disorients, confuses and seems to offer no way out. In its simplest terms, A Small Boy and Others is the record of how Henry James became a writer, of how his consciousness became fit to dwell in what he calls ‘the house of representation’ (SB 150). His minute look at the seemingly unimportant actions of his childhood – young Henry James dawdles and observes endlessly in the Manhattan streets he would later revisit in The American Scene – reveals an interest in what William James thought of as a psychological form of fate. The elder James held that ‘fate’ developed largely out of one’s daily actions, which tend to encourage further similar actions: ‘We are spinning our own fates, good or evil, and never to be undone. Every smallest stroke of virtue or of vice leaves its never so little scar [. . .] Nothing we ever do is, in strict scientific literalness, wiped out’ (PP 127). Henry James, looking back on his days as a tiny flâneur in old New York, reveals the habits that moulded the future novelist. For him, as for his brother, nothing from the past is ever wiped out; the past is all waiting for the persistent re-imaginer. However, his autobiographical narrative is by no means seamless; by his own admission, he must ‘grope’ in his memories for his ‘earliest aesthetic seeds’, the little scars that marked him for a literary life (SB 95). This groping work in A Small Boy bears a striking resemblance to something he writes about New York in The American Scene. Despite finding himself out of place and repelled by the latest iteration of Manhattan, James writes, one can only speak with sympathy – of the really human, the communicative, side of that vivid show of a society trying to build itself, with every elaboration, into some coherent sense of itself, and literally putting forth interrogative feelers, as it goes, into the ambient air; literally reaching out (to the charmed beholder, say) for some measure and some test of its success. (H. James 1907: 154)

Here we see both a sympathetic pity for and an empathic movement into the cityscape. In twentieth-century Manhattan, those ‘feelers’ are the new, unattractive buildings for which the old and beautiful were torn down. The ambient air of Henry James’s interrogative feelers is the stuff of memory; that is, time. To bring us into his conscious experience, James manipulates the narrative time of A Small Boy with liberal use of two particular narrative tempos: slow-down and pause (Bal 1997:

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106–11). Such effects depend on verbal accretion – the number of words that he must use to reveal the world of the past as seen through his eyes far exceeds the pace of the text’s action. Przybylowicz argues that this narrative rhythm has a spatialising effect on the representation of experience; she writes that in James’s later work, the passage of time becomes increasingly amorphous: Although the psychological actions and thoughts of the characters are seen as the constant unfolding of time within the mind of the individual, there is paradoxically a feeling of being suspended in a timeless universe, of being lost in the celebrations of the central consciousness, who, though obsessed by temporality and history, produces a text that is strangely free of time. (Przybylowicz 1986: 295)

If James’s writing does indeed manage to spatialise experience, he takes a serious step towards representing consciousness in a way that allows intersubjective engagement. Such spatialising might have the effect of making us feel like we are ‘in’ the represented space – that is, ‘in’ James’s own mind in the act of memory – rather than observing it from outside, thus disrupting our sense of ourselves. But we might also say that empathic experience itself gives one the feeling of being outside of time. For if we experience time as the forward march of our stream of life, the illusion that we have slipped into another stream clearly disrupts our sense of time.

The past self as the other For early psychological thinkers, it was immanently clear that the past self was in many ways a different entity from the present self. William James wrote, ‘Yesterday’s and to-day’s states of consciousness have no substantial identity, for when one is here the other is irrevocably dead and gone. But they have a functional identity’ (W. James 1892: 181). Titchener, with his customary air of caution, echoed a similar sentiment, writing: ‘If, then, there are facts which look toward the persistence and continuity and stability of the self, there are also other facts which look toward impermanence and discontinuity and instability’ (BP 315).13 Yet early psychology tended to take the common-sense view that we know our past minds better than we know the minds of other people in the present. Our memories are a privileged set of thoughts. As William James writes, ‘Remembrance is like direct feeling; its object is suffused with a warmth and intimacy to which no object of mere conception ever attains’ (PP 239). The thoughts of others are obviously objects of

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­50    Empathy and the Psychology of Literary Modernism conception – we must create an understanding of what they are, using hints pieced together from observation. By comparison, memory seems readily accessible. Yet William James was well aware of memory’s complications. First and foremost, it offers incomplete access to one’s past, a fact that James appreciated as a helpful feature of our mental life, explaining, ‘If we remembered everything, we should on most occasions be as ill off as if we remembered nothing’ (PP 680). Retaining all that we have experienced, he implies, would overwhelm our nervous system. The result, however, is that some moments of our past no longer exist for us. In short, there are lost selves of the past with whom we cannot think and feel without the experience of foreign consciousness. What is even more disturbing is the mutability of those memories that we do retain. For his own part, Titchener devoted significant laboratory research to what he called the ‘memory-image’. Declaring that his findings were contradictory to ‘popular psychology’, he insisted that the memory-image was not ‘a stable copy of past perception’, but rather stored in a state of flux (TBP 417). Like William James, he claims that the instability of memory is in fact a necessary element of our mental life: there is no reason in the world why it [the memory-image] should copy the original experience [. . .] Suppose for a moment that memory-images were just weaker copies of the earlier perceptions, and nothing less or more: our mental life would, so far as we can imagine it, be an inextricable confusion of photographically accurate records. It is, in reality, because the image breaks up, because nervous impressions are telescoped, short-circuited, interchanged, suppressed, that memory, as we have memory, is at all possible. (TBP 419)

There are times in A Small Boy when Henry James claims to carry what his brother and Titchener see as an impossible burden – a proliferation of perfect memory-images – as when he writes, ‘I have lost nothing of what I saw and . . . though I can’t now quite divide the total into separate occasions the various items surprisingly swarm for me’ (SB 60). The swarm creates for James’s reader a second-hand experience of ‘inextricable confusion’. James’s digressions and long pauses continually take us away from the primary scene of memory, so that he must repeatedly insert reminders of where he is in his narrative, both temporally and spatially, such as when he explains, ‘I am, strictly speaking, at this point, on a visit to [Uncle] Albert’ (SB 80). Such lack of linearity, such a confusing swarm of memory-images, mimics the conscious experience of looking back on the past, allowing the reader to empathise with James’s act of reminiscence. A Small Boy and Others is littered with instances of James’s prodi-

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gious memory, some of them beyond credibility. One trace of his ‘infantine sensibility’ is the stuff of family legend: I was to communicate to my parents later on that as a baby in long clothes, seated opposite them in carriage and on the lap of another person, I had been impressed with the view [of Paris] [. . .] I had naturally caused them to marvel. (SB 32)

James claims that the accuracy of his ‘miracle’ memory allows him to slip into the inaccessible point of view of an infant (SB 33). So while we ‘think with’ James, he in turn ‘thinks with’ his past self. This recollection of ‘a great stately square’ in the Parisian capital, however, is likely an instance of false memory, a phenomenon that Titchener commented on, noting that accounts heard from others can be ‘bodied forth in images’ that come to ‘bear the memory-label’ (BP 186). And as the rest of Small Boy makes clear, Henry James is actually well aware that his memory is not flawless. Throughout the text he divulges that some of the images he recreates cannot be accurate. In a Titchenerian concession to the instability of the memory-image, he calls the presence of certain family members in one memory the product of ‘the romantic tradition or confused notation of my youth’ and ‘incoherent’ (SB 100, 103). Clearly, it is hard to experience fellow feeling with the past self because it is unstable. Titchener claimed that imagined images are actually marked by a stability that contrasts the protean nature of memory. During his address at Clark University, Titchener explained that he and his colleagues had found in his laboratory that ‘the imaginative mind [. . .] is not a mind whose images change kaleidoscopically, producing by their instability new and still newer mental combinations, but is, on the contrary, a mind equipped with an almost photographically persistent imagery’ (Titchener 1910: 417). Elsewhere, Titchener would imply that this fundamental difference between memory and imagination is what makes art possible, for the artist needs to hold stable images in order to transform them into representations: the image of imagination must be persistent and substantial [. . .] it must stay to be looked at, to be described, to be expressed in artistic form; poet and painter and sculptor would be in a sorry case if their minds were whirligigs of changing imagery. (TBP 419)

Titchener’s words here sound much like Michael Millgate’s assessment of Henry James’s conception of memory: ‘an active and creative force’, capable of ‘generating coherent images, narratives, and explanations by a process of quasi-archeological extrapolation – at once evidential,

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­52    Empathy and the Psychology of Literary Modernism inferential, and imaginative – from perhaps vivid but probably illusive fragments of the actually remembered’ (Millgate 1992: 74). For Henry James, memory and imagination are hopelessly, and productively, intertwined. Millgate’s archeological metaphor is particularly apt, speaking to the same sense of empathic corporeality I mentioned earlier. Indeed, Titchener understands the image of imagination to be related to the process of empathy (TBP 417). James’s way of transforming the memory-image into an image of imagination requires turning the small boy into the site of an empathic dig. One of the most striking features of A Small Boy is the fact that Henry James separates his present self from his past self grammatically: the small boy is not an ‘I’, but rather a ‘he’. As Paul John Eakin explains, James dramatises the autobiographical act with ‘a dialectical relationship between the autobiographical narrator in the present and the character of his earlier self in the past’ (Eakin 1983: 215). James’s ‘I’ stands apart from the little ‘he’ of the past, watching and describing the other’s actions in nineteenth-century New York and Europe. For William Hoffa, James’s objectification of the past self answers a narratorial need to distance himself from the text: ‘His desire for detached narration at times even leads him to see the “small boy” as someone else, a little hero with an adventure all his own, though one with which the older man is sympathetic’ (Hoffa 1969: 284).14 I would argue, however, that James produces the dichotomous I/he structure of A Small Boy to deal with a complicated set of psychological problems. One of these problems is a linguistic difficulty that Titchener recognised in the words we use to conceive the self. Titchener warned students that they must be wary of language, which shapes our view of the world but can lead us to infer things that are ‘foreign to science’ (BP 321). This fact is particularly true, Titchener tells us, in the case of the first person singular, which saturates our speech since our first words: ‘we learn from early childhood to speak a language in which [the self] is already stereotyped, a language which bristles with I and my’ (BP 316). These I’s and my’s gather in one word a self that is neither singular nor stable. Henry James’s third-person small boy mitigates the instability of memory and deals with the difficulties of what William James calls the stream of consciousness. For the older James brother this metaphor is an apt one because ‘consciousness is in constant change’ and ‘no state once gone can recur and be identical with what it was before’ (W. James 1892: 21).15 The fact that consciousness exists in time means that it is not static and therefore has inherent alterities. William James’s figure of the stream spatialises the temporal quality of subjective life, conveniently illustrating the fact that the experience of consciousness is an experience of constant distancing –

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while continuous and seemingly uninterrupted, one’s conscious mind is never the same from one moment to the next. Our past thoughts remain with us as memories, but we cannot rethink them, for each thought is unique to the time of its occurrence, or its place in the stream. For William James, ‘nothing can be conceived twice over without being conceived in entirely different states of mind’ (PP 480). This belief, which seems at odds with what he would later say about the possibility of two minds thinking one thought, means that there is a necessary psychological distance between one’s present self and past self – when the present self speaks for the past self, it speaks for another. This other is always changing because we see it as an unstable memory-image. So the stream of consciousness means that while memories have the sense of familiarity, we cannot simply think and feel with our past selves. The small boy of Henry James’s autobiography is a stable figure of the imagination who can be observed from an exterior point of view. Describing his daily journey home from school in mid-nineteenthcentury Manhattan, James writes, I at any rate watch the small boy dawdle and gape again, I smell the cold dusty paint and iron as the rails of the Eighteenth Street corner rub his contemplative nose, and, feeling him foredoomed, withhold from him no grain of my sympathy. He is a convenient little image or warning of all that was to be for him. (SB 16–17)

He is ‘a convenient image’ in that he helps to represent James, a man who, like any other, is in a constant state of change, as two motionless minds. The conspicuous I/he split here creates a sympathetic, observational, distance that artificially stabilises the ever-changing psychological distance between the present and past selves. This pronominal difference between James the writer and James the small boy demonstrates the split subjectivity that all autobiography, and in fact all retrospective contemplation of the self, enacts. It seems that in order to consider the self, one must necessarily objectify the self, which makes it available to receive sympathy. But in A Small Boy and Others, James tries to shrink the psychological distance between past and present selves so as to have a more direct experience of empathy.

The permeable self But how is it that the psychological distance between self and other (even past other) can be overcome? Of particular importance here is the sticky question of Cartesian mind-body dualism, which, Anita

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­54    Empathy and the Psychology of Literary Modernism Avramides argues, ‘put[s] in place a conceptual framework which can be understood to give rise to a radical scepticism about the mind of another’ (Avramides 2001: 45). Both William James and Titchener dealt with mind-body dualism in their writing. William James argued in his later work that the self is not separate from the world, and therefore not separate from the other minds in it. Like Titchener, he believed that it was important to move away from a standpoint of mind-body dualism. As usual, Titchener opens his thoughts on this issue by conceding the common-sense view, then refuting it. While it might seem obvious that mind and matter are distinct, he writes, this common-sense idea ‘was high Cartesian philosophy two centuries and a half ago’, which means we should by no means accept it as a natural or established fact of our existence (TBP 12). Science, he explains, has every right to question ideas that clearly depend on a particular cultural history. Titchener believed in what he called psychophysical parallelism, a theory that holds it incorrect to say mind influences body, or vice versa, because ‘they are not separate and independent things’ (TBP 13). He found mind-body dualism particularly frustrating in a psychological context because he felt it gave rise to a belief that the mind is ‘a living being [. . .] that dwells within the material animal’ (TBP 11). Such an ‘insubstantial mannikin living inside the head’ is a remnant of ‘highly respectable antiquity’ that ‘science can make nothing of’ (BP 7). William James was also deeply uncomfortable with the idea that consciousness is a separate being within the self. As his career progressed into the early twentieth century, he tried to distance himself from the very word ‘consciousness’. In his essays on radical empiricism, he insisted that consciousness is not an entity but rather an idea that ‘stands for a function’ (W. James 1904: 478). While he does recognise consciousness ‘emphatically as a phenomenon’ (ibid.: 491), he wants to do away with the idea that thought either originates in us or belongs to us. In one of his more frustrating statements, James tells us that the stream of thought is really just the stream of one’s breathing – Kant’s ‘I think’, he tells us, is really just ‘I breathe’ (ibid.). By virtue of breathing, or living, we exist in a world of thoughts. We do not have thoughts about a world completely severed from the self. As he explains, ‘Consciousness as such is entirely impersonal – “self” and its activities belong to the content’ (ibid.: 479). The standpoint of radical empiricism made William James rethink his stance about the distance between one’s own thought and the thoughts of others. Questioning what he had once proclaimed the greatest gap in nature, he declares it untrue that ‘a fact of consciousness [. . .] can not [. . .] be treated as a portion of two different minds’ (W. James 1905b: 177) and also denies that a thought ‘exists but once’ (ibid.:

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178). Clearly, if our thoughts do not properly belong to us, a thought that passes through us might pass through another. William James’s objection to mind-body dualism gives rise to his concept of ‘pure experience’, which he defines as ‘the original flux of life before reflexion has categorised it’ (W. James 1905a: 29). Pure experience means that mind and world are made out of the same stuff, so that an ‘undivided portion of experience’ can play ‘the part of knower’ or consciousness in one context, but in a different context it might play the part of ‘the thing known, of an objective “content”’ (W. James 1904: 480). This worldview has important implications for any theory of empathic experience. To do away with consciousness as an entity is to remove the barriers between the self and the world, which makes ‘feeling oneself into’ the world or other people much more plausible. It means that we do not have to know others only through sympathetic experience, which requires that we maintain our sense of distance from the other. If a unit of pure experience can be both the object known and the subject that knows, then my thought and an external object (or even another person’s thought) can momentarily become one. Put another way, if mind and world are not separate, we can think or feel with world. ‘Feeling into’ objects makes more sense if we believe that thought and object are not categorically separate – that act becomes a credible possibility rather than a mere figure of speech. Indeed, if we are to believe that empathy exists as more than a capacity of the imagination (especially with our imperfect understanding of how the brain works) we might need to accept that both our thoughts and the physical world are made of some prior ‘substance’ with the potential to behave as either.16 In A Small Boy and Others we see James feeling into the world and minds of the past through language that repeatedly challenges mind-body dualism. His verbosity provides his representation with a ­thickness – his conscious experience of looking at the past thus becomes something solid that we might feel ourselves into. As he looks back to ‘squeeze the sponge of memory’ (SB 37), old minds gradually emerge and their thoughts become confused and tangled with James’s own. The small boy ‘he’ and the authorial ‘I’ are joined in sensory experience as James recalls the past. In one particular instance, he dredges up the very early impression of a hotel in New Brighton: [the hotel’s form] to childish retrospect, unprejudiced by later experience, was that of a great Greek temple shining over blue waters in the splendour of a white colonnade and a great yellow pediment. The elegant image remained, though imprinted in a child so small as to be easily portable by a stout nurse, I remember, and not less easily duckable; I gasp again, and was long to gasp, with the sense of a salt immersion received at her strong hands. Wonderful

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­56    Empathy and the Psychology of Literary Modernism altogether in fact, I find as I write, the quantity, the intensity of picture recoverable from even the blankest and tenderest state of the little canvas. (SB 18)

James the writer gasps in the present, in his moment of composition, collapsing the narrative temporal distance between himself and the small boy. His thought and the child’s thought, connected through the hands of the stout nurse, are here the same thought. So in fact the small boy’s mind does not remain at a sympathetic distance from which he can retain his alterity. As James the writer represents their interaction, that distance collapses and the two Henry Jameses experience oneness. Notably, however, the reader does not feel into the conscious experience of the young James. We are ‘with’ the adult James in his acts of memory, but not so fully that we forget he is mediating our experience with the past self. We can empathise with the adult, but only sympathise with the child.

Conclusion: the ghosts of the past The fact that Henry James achieves empathic union with the small boy does not mean that empathy comes across as an unproblematic good. The empathic experience that ‘vibrates’ throughout A Small Boy is in fact threatening. James’s autobiography is, like ‘The jolly corner’ before it, haunted by ghostly others who resist empathic incursions. In fact, some of those moments that are most empathic are also those couched in the most supernatural terms. His deepest memories of Albany, for example, reveal his acts of ‘feeling into’ to be disturbing: I achieve withal a dim remembrance of my final submission, though it is the faintest ghost of an impression and consists but of the bright blur of a dame’s schoolroom, a mere medium for small piping shuffling sound and suffered heat [. . .] These images are subject, I confess, to a soft confusion – which is somehow consecrated, none the less, and out of which with its shade of contributory truth, some sort of scene insists on glancing. (SB 8)

The ‘piping shuffling sound’ comes back to be experienced again – it is perhaps a bit of pure experience that acts as a point of empathic overlap for James the writer and James the small boy. Images come back and allow James to experience the ‘soft confusion’ of cognitive overlap with the past self. Instead of observing the small boy here, James sees with him. But the joy of feeling with the childhood self is tempered by the language of haunting here – the ghosts and shades of the past perhaps resist the murky ‘medium’ that resurrects them. James’s metaphoric language renders the past as a physical enveloper

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of his subjectivity. ‘I lose myself, of a truth’, he writes, ‘under the whole pressure of the spring of memory proceeding from recent revisitings and recognitions’ (SB 131). This temporal ‘visiting’ that James mentions works in two directions: at times he intentionally visits the past as the ‘I’ looking to construe a continuous self, but at other times the past comes to visit him and make demands, unbidden and ghost-like. He admits that culling memories from his narrative, while necessary if he is to finish, seems an ethical problem: I feel that at such a rate I remember too much, and yet this mild apparitionism is only part of it. To look back at all is to meet the apparitional and to find in its ghostly face the silent stare of an appeal. When I fix it, the hovering shade, whether of person or place, it fixes me back and seems the less lost – not to my consciousness, for that is nothing, but to its own – by my stopping however idly for it. (SB 54)

The world of the past protests when James returns seeking a ‘handful of the substance of history’ (SB 3). When James plunges his hand into that substance, he finds that it resists him as an attacker rather than enveloping him with an empathic embrace. James’s ability to ‘take life’, when directed at his own past, fragments what was experienced as a continuous whole. He begins A Small Boy with a problem familiar to readers of Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy – there is too much past to communicate in the present – and frames it in starkly violent terms: To recover anything like the full treasure of scattered, wasted circumstance was at the same time to live over the spent experience itself, so deep and rich and rare, with whatever sadder and sorer intensities [. . .] [T]he effect of this in turn was to find discrimination among the parts of my subject again and again difficult – so inseparably and beautifully they seemed to hang together and the comprehensive case to decline mutilation or refuse to be treated ­otherwise than handsomely. (SB 3)

Revisiting the past, ‘living over’, is not only frustrating in the abundance of material it provides, but also painful for the speaking subject of the present who must perform an overlapping of consciousnesses. The knowledge of the present self brings to the experience of the past new ‘sadder and sorer intensities’. This pain plays out not only in James’s present consciousness but also in the fabric of the past itself. The ‘parts’ of James’s subject, his memories, protest the selective and organisational ‘mutilation’ that is the act of narration. To represent the already distorted images we have of that which we have seen is, as James shows, to inflict additional mutilation.

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­58    Empathy and the Psychology of Literary Modernism In Titchenerian terms, James’s memory-images object to his narrative attempts to turn them into images of the imagination so that he, and the reader, might experience them. Indeed, James’s dealings with the past seem to reflect what Titchener presents as an unavoidable truth about studying the human mind: If the object of the psychologist is to know mind, to understand mind, then it seems to me – in view of the overwhelming complexity of mind in the concrete – that his only course is to pull mind to pieces, and to scrutinise the fragments as minutely as possible and from all possible points of view. (Titchener 1910: 421)

Strikingly, it is precisely this approach that William James spoke out against in his final years, affirming, ‘Against this rationalistic tendency to treat experience as chopped up into discontinuous static objects, radical empiricism protests’ (W. James 1905c: 236). Throughout A Small Boy and Others Henry James both pulls the mind apart, separating himself and the small boy into two distinct minds who relate to each other at a sympathetic distance, and tries to hold the entirety of the mind together in an empathic embrace that shows him thinking and feeling with the small boy, their distance erased. Even if James’s autobiography resists the alterity within the self, however, it nevertheless gives voice to faint, past others that seem to push back against his empathic incursions. What we see throughout A Small Boy and Others, then, is a struggle with psychological distance. The urge to empathise pushes James to open a new representational space, a recognisably modernist space. But the anxieties that flourish there reveal the fundamental instability in empathic structures of feeling. In my next chapter, on the novels of Dorothy Richardson, I explore the ties between those structures and turn-of-the-century psychological aesthetics.

Notes   1. This quotation comes from the chapter ‘The stream of thought’, which was later called ‘The stream of consciousness’ in Psychology: Briefer Course (1892), the widely-read version of Principles meant for college students. In the Briefer Course William James also calls this phenomenon the ‘stream of subjective life’ (W. James 1892: 26). I will occasionally cite the Briefer Course in this chapter, but only in those cases where I believe the revised version has the advantage of clarity over the original.   2. In this chapter I do not discuss in depth theories of Einfühlung, the concept that Titchener translated as ‘empathy’ in 1909. I cover that particular strain of empathy’s history in the following chapter, which treats Dorothy Richardson’s Pilgrimage.

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  3. See Luckhurst (2002) and Sword (2002).   4. Notably, William James did not hold a PhD, but rather an MD.   5. It was at this conference that Freud and Jung made their American debut (Evans 1990: 7–8). William James also attended this conference – a photo of conference attendees shows James and Titchener standing next to each other, in the same row as the European visitors.   6. William James’s letters appeared in the following issues of Science: 8.209 (1898): 956; 9.227 (1899): 654–5; 9.230 (1899): 752–3. Titchener’s responses appeared in the following issues of the same journal: 9.210 (1899): 36; 9.228 (1899): 686–7; 9.231 (1899): 787.  7. Sidgwick, a Cambridge professor of philosophy, was the first president of the Society for Psychical Research in the United Kingdom. In addition to William James, later presidents included Arthur Balfour and Henri Bergson.   8. For a full account of William James’s participation in psychical research, see Luckhurst (2002) or Bjork (1983).  9. William James cites Janet’s work extensively in Chapters 8 and 10 of Principles. 10. For a different view on distance between readers and characters in nineteenth-century novels, see Mitchell. I do not disagree with Mitchell’s arguments; rather, I believe we are working with slightly different understandings of ‘empathy’. Such variances are inevitable in empathy studies given the diverse definitions that ‘empathy’ carries. 11. William James is often believed to have created this figure of speech, but as Rick Rylance rightly points out, it first appears in English in the work of George Henry Lewes (Rylance 2000: 307). For a thorough history of this figure of speech, which Lewes arrived at by way of Gustav Fechner, see Holland (1986). 12. Henry James does not assign White-Mason a first name. 13. See Mach (1886: 3). Titchener, like many other authors I examine in this book (including William James, Vernon Lee and Edmund Husserl), was liberal in his use of italic. Unless otherwise noted, all italic within citations is from the original work. 14. Here Hoffa echoes Henry James’s own words about George Eliot – in his preface to The Princess Casamassima, James says that the emotions, intelligence and moral consciousness of her characters become the reader’s ‘very own adventure’ (H. James 1909b: 41). 15. See Principles of Psychology, p. 229. In the earlier version, William James writes that ‘thought’ is in a constant state of change. 16. The confusion between thought and the physical world here might give us a hint as to why the great early conceptualisers of empathy, like Theodor Lipps and Vernon Lee (see Chapters 2 and 4), have difficulty determining whether empathy is a physiological, cognitive or affective process.

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Chapter 2

Dorothy Richardson’s Modernist Innovation

In the previous chapter, I examined the lasting bonds that tie Henry James’s fiction to the psychological theories of his brother William James and E. B. Titchener. During James’s childhood years, the discipline of psychology was still an embryonic ‘nameless force’ (H. James 1913b: 194). In this chapter, I examine the works of Dorothy Richardson. Born thirty years after James, Richardson grew up at a time when ‘psychology’ was a name widely spoken. By the time Richardson was an adolescent in the 1880s, the new science, dominated by Wilhelm Wundt in Germany, Théodule-Armand Ribot in France and William James in the United States, was being introduced to some secondary-school students in England, including Richardson. As a young woman, she had the opportunity to take ‘a class for the study of logic and psychology, newly introduced to the sixth form curriculum’ (Richardson 1943: 135). Years later, she remembered those logic lessons with great fondness, but reported that psychology, ‘with its confidence and its amazing claims, aroused, from the first, uneasy scepticism’ (ibid.: 136).1 Despite her distrust, or perhaps because of it, Richardson went on to make a monumental contribution to modernist psychological thought. Her minute study of Miriam Henderson’s inner life, played out over the thirteen volumes of Pilgrimage (published starting in 1915), at once reflects and challenges her era’s understanding of how the conscious mind interacts with the world. Scholarship on Richardson’s work has seen a gratifying surge in recent years, solidifying her place in the modernist canon and broadening our understanding of her contributions to literary and intellectual history. But such scholarship has yet to reckon with many of the connections between Pilgrimage and the turn-of-the-century sciences of the mind that informed the lives of both Richardson and her protagonist. We learn early in Pilgrimage that Miriam, like her creator, studied at her progressive late nineteenth-century school ‘the beginning of

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psychology – that strange, new subject’ (PR 79). Critics such as Mary Loeffelholz have noted that Richardson’s ‘rendition of mental process in many respects parallels the contemporary ideas of Freudian psychoanalysis, which were making their way into British intellectual life during the years Richardson worked on Pilgrimage’ (Loeffelholz 1992: 60). Indeed, Richardson’s correspondence with Bryher makes it clear that she was familiar with, and in fact ‘through with’, psychoanalysis by 1924 (Richardson 1994: 103). Certainly, her early exposure to psychology and her knowledge of German make her work fertile ground for explorations of the connections between early literary modernism and Freudian thought.2 But as Deborah Longworth has pointed out in her work on Richardson, Woolf and Joyce, Freud’s was not the only psychology that had a major influence on the modernist novel – other psychological theorists, such as Henri Bergson, had just as great an impact in the early years of the twentieth century (Parsons 2007: 57). Similarly, I want to insist that we step back and consider Pilgrimage, a key text in the development of literary modernism, in a psychological framework that is more capacious than that of psychoanalysis alone. We do well to remember that the dominant school of psychological thought when Richardson started to write Pilgrimage in 1913 was still the experimental psychology of Wundt and Titchener. Also influential at that time was the psychological aesthetics that had emerged in late nineteenth-century Germany and had been introduced to Britain largely thanks to Vernon Lee (see Chapter 4). Studying Richardson’s intellectual development in order to chart her influences turns out to be a frustrating task, for we have little direct evidence about her interests leading up to 1913. Unlike Henry James, she was reluctant to provide information about her earliest youth. Most of what we know about Richardson’s life comes to us by way of her surviving letters and the highly autobiographical Pilgrimage, which opens when Miriam is seventeen. Those letters that are currently available, however, date back only to 1901, when Richardson was twenty-eight years old (Fromm 1994b: 1). Her existing correspondence remains sparse until about 1917, leaving much to be desired for those who would like to know what she was reading and thinking when she embarked on her life’s work.3 Furthermore, as Longworth has pointed out, it is not until the sixth volume of Pilgrimage, 1921’s Deadlock, that Richardson shows ‘philosophical ideas and inquiry taking persistent and organised shape in Miriam’s maturing thought’ (Longworth 2009: 8). As a result, the first few volumes of Pilgrimage give us only an oblique look at how her work from the 1910s fits into the intellectual era of its production.

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­62    Empathy and the Psychology of Literary Modernism One thing we can say with confidence is that Richardson matched the strange, new subject dedicated to studying the human mind with a strange, new kind of writing that studied her protagonist’s consciousness. For the past century, the volumes of Pilgrimage have been celebrated for their ability to embed the reader in Miriam’s thoughts and scorned for their perceived egotism in equal measure. Richardson’s method was famously the first to be called ‘stream-of-consciousness’ writing, but it might, following Sylvia Adamson, be better understood as ‘empathic’ writing.4 Richardson’s work is marked by striking thematic and structural ties to empathy, a concept that, in the years between her own schooling and her creation of Miriam, had slowly crept into psychology by way of aesthetic theory. It is the specifically empathic turn that marks the vital contribution that Richardson made to the development of early literary modernism. This chapter explores the empathic turn in modernist literature by elucidating the connections between Richardson’s work and two of the originators of the modern concept of empathy: Robert Vischer and Theodor Lipps. I start by reading Vischer’s work on Einfühlung (empathy) as a radical concept that implicitly challenges sympathetic modes of interacting with the surrounding world. I then explain how Lipps expanded and modified Vischer’s idea, bringing it to a much larger audience around the world by relating it to psychological processes. Using Vischer’s and Lipps’s work as a backdrop, I read the first four volumes of Richardson’s Pilgrimage. These are Pointed Roofs (1915), Backwater (1916), Honeycomb (1917) and The Tunnel (1919). As texts published before the 1920s, these volumes inform our understanding of early modernism and its development. Just as importantly, they were all released after Einfühlung became known in intellectual circles but before ‘empathy’ was in wide circulation, which makes them part of an important transitional moment. By reading Richardson alongside Vischer and Lipps, I hope to broaden the cultural and psychological context in which we see Pilgrimage. Furthermore, I would like to suggest that literary modernism was just as crucial to shaping how we understand empathy today as were psychology and aesthetics. I find in each of the first four novels of Pilgrimage both an overarching structure that encourages the reader to proceed by way of Lippsian empathy and a portrayal of Miriam as a woman who engages the world around her through specifically empathic, rather than sympathetic, processes. I do not suggest that Richardson takes her method directly from Vischer or Lipps, but rather that she independently created an empathic model that is strikingly similar to the one they elaborated.

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It is important to repeat here that empathy encompasses both the cognitive process known as ‘thinking with’ others and the affective process known as ‘feeling with’ others. Each of these processes, the cognitive and the affective, is in turn referred to in discourses of empathy as a form of ‘feeling into’. My reading of Richardson’s work in this chapter is more interested in cognitive connections than affective connections. By contrast, my reading of Mansfield in the next chapter focuses more on the affective elements of empathic experience. We might say the fiction writer’s job is always, to some extent, a matter of thinking and feeling with others. Indeed, the most profoundly fictional element of a story is a character’s interiority. As the narratologist Dorrit Cohn has written, ‘the special life-likeness of narrative fiction [. . .] depends on what writers and readers know least in life: how another mind thinks, another body feels. In depicting the inner life, the novelist is truly a fabricator’ (Cohn 1978: 6). Those acts of fabrication depend on sympathetic and empathic operations that imagine another cognitive experience or perspective. The author must envision what the world looks like from her character’s point of view and prompt her reader to do the same. In essence, she must render unknowable minds knowable. As I have argued, certain methods that authors use to produce fellow feeling with character minds align with our modern understanding of sympathy as ‘feeling for’, while others more closely resemble our conception of empathy as ‘feeling with’ (or ‘thinking with’). The important difference to keep in mind is that while sympathy brings us near another in our understanding, empathy goes a step further, trying to collapse psychological distance and confuse subjectivity. When reading a realist novel, we tend to gain knowledge of a character’s mind either from a narrator’s report or from our observation and inference.5 Additionally, we might understand certain kinds of figurative language, like metonymy, as aids to our inferences about character minds. As Rae Greiner has recently argued, the realist novel depends on provoking a specifically sympathetic response rather than an empathic response. Using George Eliot’s Middlemarch as an example, Greiner explains, ‘Dorothea feels real not because we feel what she does but because we can sympathetically experience what it feels like to think along with her’ (Greiner 2011: 424). Greiner’s use of the word ‘along’ here is key – we do not see from Dorothea’s perspective, but rather from one situated alongside her, at a sympathetic distance.6 We have already seen in this book’s Introduction how both empiricist psychology and literary realism implicitly challenged the value of such sympathy in the nineteenth century. Increasing anxieties about the problem of other minds, exacerbated by psychology’s need for

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­64    Empathy and the Psychology of Literary Modernism e­mpirical data about interior states, made the intersubjective distance on which sympathy is predicated a growing problem for fiction writers and readers. Despite its minute detail, the narrator’s report of Dorothea’s inner experience cannot provide definite knowledge because it clearly originates outside of her conscious mind. Once we begin to wonder about the space between Dorothea and the narrator, the information that the narrator gives us becomes speculative in practice despite its assured tone. For some modernist writers who matured along with such cultural doubts, sympathetic thinking could no longer produce a ‘real’ feeling. Considered in this light, realism is evacuated of its central value. For Dorothy Richardson, the inescapable problem of the realist novel was that the reader was always ‘aware of the author and applauding, or deploring, his manipulations’ (Richardson 1943: 139). To surmount that problem, Richardson developed a method that shielded the reader from awareness of the author. Miriam is delivered to us by a narrative presence that, as Kristen Bluemel argues, ‘disguised itself so thoroughly in Miriam’s habits of speech and thought that we read the novel as an unmediated encounter with the consciousness of its heroine’ (Bluemel 1997: 4). In other words, the reader has a mediated experience that appears to be immediate. Richardson’s text promotes the illusion that rather than thinking alongside Miriam, we think from within her. It attempts to trick us into forgetting that we observe Miriam from without and infer her inner state, in the way that Leslie Stephen would say we sympathise with others. To read Pilgrimage is to undergo a cognitive training in which we feel ourselves into Miriam’s way of thinking and suspend the certain knowledge that we are looking at her from across an intersubjective divide. This ‘forgetting’ is temporary and intermittent – a particular occurrence might last only the length of a sentence – and yet it is sustained because the text consistently and repeatedly pushes us into its protagonist/object. Miriam is real for us because of the empathic work that we, as readers, perform when we engage the text.

Vischer’s aesthetic empathy In 1873, Robert Vischer used the word Einfühlung to explain how we interact with viewed objects in his dissertation ‘On the optical sense of form: a contribution to aesthetics’. The concept he described was not entirely new. As Vittorio Gallese writes, ‘Vischer was strongly influenced by the ideas of R. Lotze, who already in 1858 proposed a mechanism by means of which humans are capable of understanding inanimate

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objects and other species of animals by “placing ourselves into them”’ (Gallese 2005: 112). It was Vischer, however, who first named this act Einfühlung (literally ‘feeling oneself into’ or ‘in-feeling’) and applied it systematically to the study of aesthetics. The process of Einfühlung, as Vischer conceived it, was an extreme aesthetic engagement with a beheld object. When we contemplate a form, Vischer suggested, we push ourselves into it and become conflated with it. As Harry Francis Mallgrave and Eleftherios Ikonomou explain: Although the notion of empathy in English can suggest a simple projection of emotions or the emotional response we may feel toward an object, it denotes for Vischer a more radical and thoroughgoing transference of our personal ego, one in which our whole personality (consciously or unconsciously) merges with the object. In essence, we fill out the appearance with the content of our soul. (Mallgrave and Ikonomou 1993: 25)

Vischer’s understanding of Einfühlung suggests a thorough blending of subject and object. That aspect of Einfühlung means that while thinkers like Franz Brentano and Ernst Mach were articulating the anxieties about knowing other minds that we saw in the Introduction, Vischer’s theory was simultaneously affirming that we are not trapped by a singular perspective. Thus, early empathy stands as an implicit challenge to both wholesale solipsism and more nuanced understandings of the mind’s solitude. Much like William James in his later work, Vischer tells us that the mind can interact with the outside world and does have agency outside, or irrespective of, the confines of the body. In aesthetic empathy, that agency is determined by our power of imagination. For Vischer, the object into which we push ourselves is necessarily one that we create with our minds for the purpose of unification. He writes, ‘It does not matter whether the object is imagined or actually perceived; as soon as our idea of the self is projected into it, it always becomes an imagined object: an appearance’ (Vischer 1873: 101). We have the power to convert what we see into a medium for our own experience. Vischer does not suggest, however, that when we experience Einfühlung we rob the aesthetic object of its own agency or that what we experience is not ‘real’. He explains that in the process of in-feeling, subject and object get confused: Thus I project my own life into the lifeless form, just as I quite justifiably do with another living person. Only ostensibly do I keep my own identity although the object remains distinct. I seem merely to adapt and attach myself to it as one hand clasps another, and yet I am mysteriously transplanted and magically transformed into this Other. (Vischer 1873: 104)

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­66    Empathy and the Psychology of Literary Modernism While it is imagination that activates an empathic experience, that experience is not merely a flight of fancy. The in-feeler projects his ‘own life’, effectively splitting himself into subject and object. In sending the objectified self into another form, however, the subjective self undergoes a transformative experience of its own, losing purchase on its sense of identity. What begins as a dominant act in fact carries the promise of subjective confusion and loss for the person who ‘feels into’ an object. The risk of losing one’s identity is made up for by the competing promise of magical transportation and escape from the confines of the self. We should note that although Vischer’s Einfühlung was generally translated as ‘sympathy’ before 1909, it was not simply a German version of what was understood as sympathy in the nineteenth-century, English-speaking world. At the time Vischer’s theories began to spread, sympathy was an extremely broad concept that could indicate anything from a spiritual union of souls to polite pity.7 Einfühlung, in its early decades, was a much narrower concept that focused on the experience of merged identity between self and object. While there are clear connections between David Hume’s and Adam Smith’s sympathy and Vischer’s Einfühlung, the German precursor to ‘empathy’ was only a distant relative to many Victorian understandings of sympathy. In the Victorian era’s novelistic context, the experience of sympathy was in fact premised on the belief that one could not simply ‘feel oneself into’ another. As Greiner explains, sympathy in the realist novel ‘denies what empathy most highly prizes, namely the fusion of self with other’ (Greiner 2011: 418). Einfühlung, then, would not find an easy home in literary realism. In fact, as Greiner goes on to suggest, Vischer’s theories, and the values they imply, stand as a challenge to the sympathetic values of the realist novel: When Vischer emphasised the empathetic identity between subject and its object, it was made to seem preferable to a hierarchical sympathy [. . .] But sympathy as the realist novelists understood it involves a belief that our sympathy depends on an awareness that the other is other. (Greiner 2011: 419)

Vischer’s ‘magical transformation’ clearly clashes with that sensible Victorian awareness. Furthermore, over-identification with a fictional character was traditionally understood as one of the dangers of the novel, a form of misreading that posed a threat to impressionable minds. Addressing the two capacities of sympathy and empathy in a contemporary context, Thomas Natsoulas insists on a separation much like the one Greiner elaborates, claiming, ‘Should one begin to confuse oneself with the other, one would be slipping into a different psychological condition, process, or activity, different than sympathizing since

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sympathizing is an activity that has the other and his or her suffering as its primary intentional objects’ (Natsoulas 1988: 184). Vischer’s Einfühlung, in fact, is premised on the possibility of such confusion, although it is a temporary and illusory confusion – and in moments of interpersonal empathy there is still, ideally, an awareness of the other’s otherness. What empathy offers, however, is a momentary suspension of such awareness that sympathy does not allow. When we feel ourselves into the object of our empathic attention, we briefly forget the integrity of its borders. For some writers, such as Richardson, the promise of modern fiction was an experience of fellow feeling that is more properly understood as empathic than as sympathetic. What her alter ego Miriam, a nascent novelist herself, values most in fiction is its ability to bypass sympathy, which she finds difficult and tiresome. This belief becomes clear in Honeycomb when Miriam thinks, saying things were sad or glad did not matter; there was something behind all the time, something inside people. That was why it was impossible to pretend to sympathise with people. You don’t have to sympathise with authors; you just get at them. (HC 385)

Her sentiments here articulate the problem of other minds that gave so much trouble to early psychology, the ‘strange, new science’ that both Richardson and her heroine experienced with scepticism from an early age. Much like the developers of that new discipline, Miriam believes that no amount of second-hand information about things sad or glad will provide reliable information about the specific experience of another inner life. Vischer’s empathy is related to a similar impulse to ‘just get at’ external objects. As Mallgrave and Ikonomou tell us, Vischer ‘explained that the empathic impulse arises in man’s psychological attempt to bridge the essential “otherness” of nature’ (Vischer 1873: 25–6). Vischer’s concept of empathy, then, was always dependent upon the idea that human consciousness is in fundamental ways cut off from the rest of the world, or, in Miriam’s words, that there’s always ‘something behind all the time, something inside people’ that makes them impossible to know. For Vischer, however, this problem of other minds would only be part of the larger problem of the world outside the self. Years after writing ‘On the  optical sense of form’, he would discuss empathy in an 1890 lecture as the conscious mind’s natural tendency to overcome its separation from everything it encounters, claiming that man ‘can tolerate no obstacle; he wants to roam the whole world and feels himself as one with it’ (Mallgrave and Ikonomou 1993: 26).

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­68    Empathy and the Psychology of Literary Modernism For Richardson, fiction granted the opportunity to overcome such intolerable obstacles. Specifically, Pilgrimage exhibits a deep optimism about a literary work’s ability to open up the mind of its creator for its readers. What Miriam calls ‘just get[ting] at’, the circumvention of sympathetic processes allowed by fiction, applies not to fictional characters, but rather to the author: ‘It meant . . . things coming to you out of books, people, not the people in the books, but knowing, absolutely, everything about the author’ (HC 384). The implication is that fiction offers certain knowledge of another mind that surpasses the sympathetic knowledge available in real life. As we will see later, Richardson chose to withdraw from her own fiction – her reader would instead come to know everything about Miriam. Richardson’s belief, of course, is not representative of a monolithic modernist credo. Some modernists rejected empathy wholesale in order to maintain the sense of the self’s integrity and privacy. And as my later chapters show, even those modernists like Ford Madox Ford and Virginia Woolf who valued fellow feeling often ended up figuring empathy as violence. If the claim that we can know another ‘absolutely’ sounds dubious, it may be helpful, although counter-intuitive, to think of such knowledge as limited to the time of reading. Richardson indicates that the connection established between reader and text allows the reader to pass through the author’s mind for the duration of that reading. Years later, she would describe the author’s interiority as the space that the reader visits: And is not every novel a conducted tour? First and foremost into the personality of the author who, willy-nilly, and whatever be his method of approach, must present the reader with the writer’s self-portrait? [. . .] the novel will remain a tour of the mind of the author, the decisive factor his attitude towards phenomena. (Richardson 1948: 434)

A conducted tour, no matter how thorough, is only temporary. The readerly experience that Richardson describes, I would argue, is not to be judged on the accuracy of the knowledge gained, but rather on the felt experience of union. While engaging a story, the reader understands herself as one who knows the mind of the author. Seen in this light, Richardson’s ‘guided tour’ begins to resemble Vischer’s empathy, in which ‘the imagination seeks to experience itself through the image’ (Vischer 1873: 104). To be clear, although these similarities between Richardson’s views of fiction and Vischer’s understanding of empathy are striking, there are major distinctions between the two. The most important of these distinctions is the power Vischer grants the in-feeler. Employing a

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metaphor that posits the empathic thinker as a hunter, Vischer describes Einfühlung as a process of mental camouflage. Our knack for empathising with objects, he writes, implies a chameleon-like ability to blend into the form we behold: We thus have the wonderful ability to project and incorporate our own physical form into an objective form, in much the same way as wild fowlers gain access to their quarry by concealing themselves in a blind. What can that form be other than the form of a content identical with it? It is therefore our own personality that we project into it. (Ibid.)

Despite the mystical encounter that empathy provides, what we experience in that act is never the object in itself, but rather the object as we construct it. If we are going to look at the reader as an empathiser, Richardson’s view of the author’s work certainly complicates things. Her understanding of a novel as a guided tour implies that the reader experiences not what she creates herself, but rather what the author and the text allow. While Vischer’s empathy depends on the imagination, it is also deeply connected to the body. We have a tendency, Vischer says, to assign sensations that we know to forms that we contemplate. Thus the act of projection through which we understand the world has physical effects on us. For example, when one contemplates a cliff, it ‘appears to stand at attention and squarely face us’ (ibid.: 105). At the same time, one’s body might stiffen in empathic interaction with the cliff. The imagination facilitates aesthetic interaction with the image by projecting human qualities onto it and by leading us to believe that we are taking on the qualities of the object. As we will see later, Miriam often experiences similar sensations in which the physical world seems to feel its way into her body. At such moments, Richardson’s text effectively describes what Vischer’s empathy is like. Despite the fact that ‘On the optical sense of form’ was the product of a young and unproven scholar, Vischer’s ideas about empathy were widely disseminated, and embellished, throughout the rest of the century. As Lauren Wispé writes in an excellent overview of the history of empathy, ‘There is no doubt that the idea of Einfühlung was in the wind in aesthetics by the late nineteenth century, where it meant that aesthetic enjoyment is an objectification of self-enjoyment’ (Wispé 1987: 18). One of the earliest proponents of Vischer’s work was Johannes Volkelt, who incorporated the concept of Einfühlung into his 1876 Der Symbol-Begriff in der neusten Aesthetik and went on to write about empathy in the following decades. Throughout the 1890s other theorists would continue to elaborate and appropriate the ideas

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­70    Empathy and the Psychology of Literary Modernism that Vischer introduced, making them available to a wider audience. As Wispé continues, By about the first part of the twentieth century the idea of Einfühlung/ empathy was – intellectually speaking, everywhere. Although it was called by different names and utilised in different contexts and in different fields of the social sciences, the question of empathy – how one knows the consciousness of another – was current. (Wispé 1987: 24)

The psychologist E. B. Titchener coined the English word ‘empathy’ in 1909, but that word did not come into wide use until many years later. Nevertheless, concepts of Einfühlung were known thanks not only to Volkelt but also to Antonin Prandtl, Theodor Meyer, Max Deri and Max Scheler (Hunsdahl 1967: 186–8). As we will see in Chapter 4, one of the key disseminators of the theory of empathy in the English speaking world was Vernon Lee, whose influential works on aesthetics were released in the years leading up to and during the publication of Richardson’s early volumes of Pilgrimage.

Lipps’s aesthetic empathy Even more influential than Lee, however, was Theodor Lipps. The concept of Einfühlung gained international currency, especially in Anglo-American psychology, through Lipps, who opened more than a decade of work on empathy with the 1897 volume Raumästhetik. Around the turn of the twentieth century, Lipps was widely read not only in Germany, but also in the intellectual circles of Englishspeaking countries. In fact, the foremost theorists of empathy in the early years of the twentieth century, including Edith Stein and Wilhelm Worringer, formed their understanding of the concept directly from Lipps. Furthermore, it was he who saw the potential benefit of importing the concept of Einfühlung into other fields of inquiry and ‘organised and developed the formula [of empathy] for psychology’ (Wispé 1987: 18). Writing in 1907 about the future he envisioned for the study of Einfühlung, Lipps wrote, ‘The concept of empathy has now become a fundamental concept especially of aesthetics. But it must also become a fundamental concept of psychology, and it must furthermore become the fundamental concept of sociology’ (quoted in Pigman 1995: 242). It was also a fundamental concept or force in the literature that emerged in the years following Lipps’s statement. Since Lipps was an instigator of so much early twentieth-century thought on empathy, it is crucial that we understand his theories.

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To understand Lipps, however, is a difficult task, especially for those working outside of the German linguistic context. At the peak of Lipps’s career, working knowledge of German was a requisite for scientific endeavour and for students of psychology in particular. German was also a common second or third language for educated English speakers. Richardson herself was a fluent German speaker; she based Pointed Roofs on her own time in Germany and supplemented her income with German translation work. Unfortunately, since Lipps and his language fell out of fashion in the English-speaking world in the years following his death in 1914, a great deal of his oeuvre was never made available in English. Those translations of Lipps’s work that do exist make for difficult reading, due mainly to the baroque style of the original works. Additionally, his thinking on empathy is frustratingly unsystematic, making it impossible to pin down a singular Lippsian definition of empathy.8 Certain key points in Lipps’s work, however, can help us to understand how Vischer’s concept evolved into the one we know today. Although Lipps expanded and retooled Einfühlung in the large body of work he wrote on the subject, in certain respects he follows Vischer closely.9 Like his predecessor, Lipps emphasises the fact that what one encounters in the aesthetic object is actually oneself. In one of his more pithy summations of Einfühlung, Lipps writes, I enjoy myself in a sensuous object distinct from myself. This type is that of aesthetic enjoyment. It is objectivated self-enjoyment. That I enjoy myself in a sensuous object presupposes that in it I have, or find, or feel myself. Here we encounter the basic idea of present-day aesthetics, the concept of Empathy. (EAP 403)10

Thus in Lipps’s understanding of empathy, what the in-feeler brings to the object is key to shaping his experience in the object. When empathising, we interpret thoughts or feelings that originate in the self as thoughts or feelings that originate in the object. As Douglas Chismar explains: In aesthetic Einfühlung, one imaginatively attributes to an object feelings, attitudes or activities aroused in oneself by the object’s depicted position and surroundings [. . .] These reactions, reflected in the observer’s consciousness as ‘inner motions’, may or may not be identified as one’s own feelings, but are projected back onto the object of art. (Chismar 1988: 259)

In essence, empathy prevents us from apprehending the foreignness of the foreign object by means of a built-in forgetting that makes unclear

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­72    Empathy and the Psychology of Literary Modernism the origin of the experience. This built-in forgetting is a clear point of connection to Richardson’s novels, in which we are meant to forget that a narrative agent is describing Miriam. Lipps made an important step toward the empathy we know today when he applied Vischer’s concept to other human bodies, particularly to bodies in motion. According to Lipps, the spectator of dance understands and experiences the dancer’s body as an aesthetic object by feeling himself into its movements: through projecting myself into it I feel myself striving and performing this same movement [. . .] In a word, I am now with my feeling of activity entirely and wholly in the moving figure [. . .] I am transported into it. I am, so far as my consciousness is concerned, entirely and wholly identical with it. (Lipps 1903b: 375)

In order for this identity to be experienced, the mind must take the beheld object (be it a stationary piece of art or a moving human body) and convert it into what Lipps calls a ‘sensuous appearance’. One of Lipps’s translators, Melvin Rader, explains that the sensuous appearance is ‘not the bare physical object, but the image as remodelled by imagination and charged with vital meaning’ (Rader 1979: 334). Imbued with the meaning the spectator pushes into it, the observed body in motion becomes something that can be understood not as an other, but rather as another locus of the self. When reading Lipps’s work, it is difficult to disentangle the physiological from the purely mental or imaginative. Part of this problem he inherits from Vischer, whose talk of stiffening bodies and other physical responses makes it easy to see empathy merely as a bodily motion triggered automatically by visual stimulus. In the end, Lipps is sure to state that empathy is primarily an experience of the mind: ‘Empathy means, not a sensation in one’s body, but feeling something, namely, oneself, into the esthetic [sic] object’ (Lipps 1903b: 377). Nevertheless, empathic imagination can, according to both Vischer and Lipps, result in a physiological knowledge of the observed object. That belief is crucial to empathy’s history, for as Gallese implies, it is perhaps a short step between understanding other bodies and understanding other minds: [Lipps] extended the concept of Einfühlung to the domain of i­ ntersubjectivity [. . .] When I am watching an acrobat suspended on a wire, Lipps [1903b] notes, I feel myself so inside of him (‘ich fühle mich so in ihm’). We can see here a first suggested relation between imitation (‘inner’ imitation, in Lipps’s words) and the capacity to understand others by ascribing to them feelings, emotions, and thoughts. (Gallese 2003: 175)11

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What Gallese merely intimates here I would like to state clearly: it is impossible for us to ‘feel’ ourselves inside another body without having feelings (or thoughts) that we understand as belonging to that other body. In imagining a physical experience we automatically provide a mental experience to match it. Although Vischer breezily notes that we might feel ourselves into another human form, it was Lipps who first discussed empathy in interpersonal terms and suggested that it might be used to deal with the conceptual problem of other minds (Chismar 1988: 260; Aschenbrenner 1965: 402). And as Christiane Montag, Jürgen Gallinat and Andreas Heinz point out, Lipps could hardly have failed to see the connection between Vischer’s concept and earlier empiricist beliefs about sympathetic mind reading: ‘From translating Hume’s A Treatise on Human Nature into German, Lipps had learned the concept of “sympathy” as a process that allows the contents of “the minds of men” to become “mirrors to one another”’ (Montag et al. 2008: 1261).12 Lipps’s Einfühlung came to bear a greater resemblance to such nineteenthcentury sympathy as years went by. As Francine Deutsch and Ronald A. Madle write, Lipps eventually ‘argued that as a result of individuals partially imitating others with slight movements in either expressions or postures, inner cues are created which lead to an understanding and sharing of feelings’ (Deutsch and Madle 1975: 268). Lipps’s interest in intersubjective empathy, however, should not be attributed completely to an eighteenth-century British influence. As Karl Aschenbrenner indicates when discussing the difficulties of translating Lipps, there is always ambiguity about the possible object of empathy built into his very language: ‘Though there are several problems for the translator in Lipps’s essay, the most difficult is the word zumuten [. . .] The subject of this verb is ordinarily a person. But here we have inanimate or impersonal objects [. . .] serving as subjects’ (Aschenbrenner 1965: 402). Thus Lipps’s work always leaves a linguistic clue that we might feel ourselves into other people. Lipps is careful to point out that empathy becomes more complicated when it engages other minds rather than mere objects and forms. He warns, ‘these sensuous manifestations are not the “man”, they are not the strange personality with his psychological equipment, his ideas, his feelings, his will, etc.’ (quoted in Hunsdahl 1967: 184). The understanding of another mind that we grasp in the act of empathy is in fact a hybrid of that person’s ‘strange personality’ and our own. For Lipps, all acts of empathy produce this hybridity: ‘The object as it exists for me, is, as is commonly said, the resultant or product of two factors, that is, something sensuously given and my own activity’ (EAP 407). While

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­74    Empathy and the Psychology of Literary Modernism Lipps is extremely confident that the experience of empathy has this dual origin, he is far from certain about the exact nature of our ‘own activity’ in empathy. More than anything, Lipps is sure to stress how little we know about the process by which the ‘sensuous appearance’ of another person activates our own inner imitation: We do not know how or why it happens that a glimpse of a laughing face, or a change in that contour of the face, especially the eyes and mouth [. . .] should stimulate the viewer to feel gay and free and happy: and to do this in such a way that an inner attitude is assumed, or that there is a surrender to this inner activity or to the action of the whole inner being. But it is a fact. (EAP 409)

Whatever mechanism moves the mind to empathise is unknown to Lipps.13 What Lipps does purport to know is the speed at which inner imitation occurs. In 1907 he claimed that our grasp of others’ interior states happens immediately and simultaneously with the perception, and that does not mean that we see it or apprehend it by means of the senses. We cannot do that, since anger, friendliness, or sadness cannot be perceived through the senses. We can only experience this kind of thing in ourselves. (Quoted in Jahoda 2005: 156)14

It is here that we see a true break from the kind of sympathy that is said to solve the problem of other minds. The empathising mind, as Lipps conceives it, does not observe and infer. It sees and experiences simultaneously in a powerful moment of oneness with another mind. Such concurrence of sight and interior experience is crucial to understanding the fiction of Dorothy Richardson. Lipps died in October 1914, shortly before Richardson published Pointed Roofs in 1915. By the time of his death, Einfühlung had become ‘empathy’ in English thanks to Titchener. While there is no evidence to suggest a direct link between either Vischer’s or Lipps’s work and Richardson’s literary project, there are structural and contextual links to the concept of empathy in Pilgrimage that bear examination. The place of Richardson’s work in literary history, in fact, is analogous to that of Lipps’s work in the history of psychological thought. Each makes claims and envisions connections between minds that challenge both solipsism and sympathetic thinking. That Richardson creates a reader-protagonist relationship through methods structurally similar to Einfühlung suggests that empathy was deeply entrenched in her intellectual and cultural atmosphere, even if it was, like the psychology of Henry James’s youth, still a nameless force or emergent structure. Furthermore, her work can

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help us explain why ‘empathy’, an almost unknown term in 1915, was a better-known concept by the 1930s. The stream-of-consciousness narrative that Richardson and others developed in the 1910s and 1920s, and which I identify with empathic structures, had taken a prominent place in contemporary literature by the 1930s. So while psychology provided the name for a new way of thinking and feeling with others, one might argue that fiction primed the public to understand it.

Rejecting sympathy In examining the empathic tendencies of Richardson’s fiction, we must begin by asking exactly what it is that Pilgrimage encourages us to feel ourselves into. Despite its massive page count, Richardson’s series of novels famously contains little action. As May Sinclair succinctly put it when writing about Pilgrimage in 1918, ‘Nothing happens’ (Sinclair 1918: 96). To outline the plot of the first four novels is the work of a single paragraph. In the first instalment, Pointed Roofs, we meet Miriam at age seventeen as she prepares to travel from her home in suburban London to a girls’ school in Germany, where she is to work as an English teacher. In Backwater (1916) she works in a North London school for girls; the volume ends suddenly with the death of her mother. In Honeycomb (1917) she serves as governess to a wealthy household in the countryside. We find her working in a London dental office in the longest volume of the series, The Tunnel (1919). In this fourth novel, Miriam’s social life expands to include both bohemian Bloomsbury and the intellectual circle of Hypo Wilson, modelled on H. G. Wells. What little plot Pilgrimage does have derives almost entirely from Richardson’s own life. Yet it would be more correct to say that while nothing happens to Miriam, the reader of Pilgrimage encounters an endless series of things happening in Miriam. Critics from Richardson’s contemporary Virginia Woolf to those writing today almost universally agree with Gill Hanscombe’s assessment that ‘Miriam’s consciousness is the subject matter’ (Hanscombe 1979: 5). Woolf, for example, wrote in her review of The Tunnel, ‘The reader is not provided with a story; he is invited to embed himself in Miriam Henderson’s consciousness’ (Woolf 1976: 121). The sparse plot means that as readers, we have nothing to do but look at the world from Miriam’s perspective – the ‘subject’ of Pilgrimage is the experience of seeing the world as she sees it. Notably, we do not come to take on her point of view by sympathising with her. To experience her mind, we must take a step beyond the kind of sympathy that ‘feels for’ others.

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­76    Empathy and the Psychology of Literary Modernism For Richardson, sympathetic imagination (not ‘sympathy’ in general) was one of the most important tools available to the nineteenth-century writer. In her 1938 Foreword to Pilgrimage, she writes that Balzac had ‘the power of a sympathetic imagination’, which ‘unit[ed] him with each character in turn, giv[ing] to every portrait the quality of a faithful self-portrait’ (Richardson 1938: 429). In other words, Balzac could, by imagination, experience the interior states of his characters so fully that he seemed to know their minds as well as he might know his own. It is this ability, Richardson holds, that makes Balzac the ‘father of realism’ (ibid.). The realism she describes is primarily a psychological one in which it is the author’s duty to make readers believe they have reliable knowledge of what happens in the minds of characters. While Richardson’s admiration for Balzac is great, he is not, however, her model for the twentieth-century novelist. Miriam, who eventually becomes a fiction writer, is markedly unlike Balzac when she is young. One of her most noticeable characteristics in the early volumes of Pilgrimage is her lack of sympathy, or, more precisely, her lack of faith in sympathetic thinking. Although she is a keen student of her surroundings, Miriam’s observations are marked by scepticism and discomfort. She harbours serious doubts that she knows, or that she can even imagine, anything real about others and has deep fears about people whose minds seem different from hers. Her anxieties about others are exacerbated by her youth – we first meet her when she is seventeen years old – and by the fact that she is almost always in a foreign environment, either literally or figuratively. In each of the first four volumes of Pilgrimage we find her in a new home where she is an outsider by virtue of nationality, class or education. Richardson’s protagonist does want to be understood by others, but she believes that desire can never be met. In Backwater, for example, she refuses to answer Miss Haddie’s questions about her state of mind, focusing instead on her unsatisfied need to be read without having to articulate her thoughts: ‘For some time Miriam had parried her questions, fiercely demanding that her mood should be understood without a clue [. . .] Nobody could ever understand what any one else really wanted’ (BW 275). When Miss Haddie cannot use Miriam’s agitation to interpret her thoughts, Miriam grows exasperated. What Miriam wants here is something akin to the kind of automatic apprehension that Lipps discusses. Yet in her own experience, even the most studied reading of others generally fails to provide knowledge or a sense of fellow feeling. Miriam’s surroundings are perhaps most unsympathetic in Pointed Roofs. While she does meet a number of English-speaking girls at the German school, she finds them all unapproachable. The young

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Australian Gertrude, for example, features as a looming monster whose ‘hoarse hacking laugh’ comes out of a wide mouth with ‘enormous teeth’ (PR 39–40). Even to look Gertrude in the eye is impossible for Miriam, who thinks of the younger girl’s line of vision as ‘the danger zone’ (PR 39). She fears both the inscrutable mind behind Gertrude’s gaze and the possibility that Gertrude can do what Miriam cannot – gather what others are thinking by looking at them. Throughout this first volume of Pilgrimage, we often find Miriam frantically and unsuccessfully scanning the bodies around her for clues about the thoughts they hide, as when her Anglican mind is sent into a panic by a collection of the evangelical songs of Moody and Sankey: What was such a thing doing here? . . . Finishing school for the daughters of gentlemen . . . She had never had such a thing in her hands before . . . Fräulein could not know . . . She glanced at her, but Fräulein’s cavernous mouth was serenely open [. . .] What did the English girls think? Had anyone said anything? Were they chapel? Fearfully she told them over. No. Judy might be, and the Martins perhaps, but not Gertrude, nor Jimmie, nor Millie. (PR 49)

This telling over fails to produce clear knowledge of what the others are thinking about the offending hymnal. At best, Miriam can ascertain that the calm faces around her are not thinking what she is thinking. In fact, it becomes clear to Miriam over the course of Pointed Roofs that most people do not think like her. Trying to imagine the interior experience of others, she is unable to establish a sympathetic connection, as when she takes the ‘dangerous’ Gertrude to the dentist: Miriam, sitting strained in the far background near a screen covered with a mass of strange embroideries, wondered how she [Gertrude] really felt. That, she realised with a vision of Gertrude going on through life in smart costumes, one would never know. (PR 86)

Miriam’s thoughts here are symptomatic of a particular modern condition that Wyndham Lewis would point out in The Art of Being Ruled (1926). As Peter Nicholls explains, for Lewis, ‘the more “individual” people think they are, the more they are expressing a “group personality”’ (Nicholls 1995: 180). This fear of the group personality has long been understood as a central modernist concern. Levenson, for example, notes the recurring thematic problem of how to ‘construct a figure of individuality from within the rigid confines of community’ within literary modernism (Levenson 1991: xii). The central figures of modernist texts, Levenson notes, often wonder how to ‘preserve moral autonomy within the collective forms of social life’ (ibid.: 33). Clearly, it is ­seductive for Miriam to think that she could ‘never know’

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­78    Empathy and the Psychology of Literary Modernism what Gertrude thinks – the sense of exclusion allows her to believe she is morally autonomous and therefore superior to the girl whose main concern is to find a ‘smart costume’. Yet the desire to escape group thought does not, by itself, explain the resistance to sympathetic thinking at play in the dentist’s office. Richardson sets up a symbolic apparatus of psychological distance in this scene, separating Miriam and Gertrude with the strangely embroidered screen and the imagined costumes in the younger girl’s future. Both the screen and the costumes have a masking function. The outfits Miriam imagines for Gertrude are indeed costumes in the ‘fancy dress’ sense – they show us that Miriam thinks of Gertrude as somebody who plays a different social role and is therefore psychologically inaccessible by virtue of belonging to the ‘mind’ of another group. The screen not only hides Miriam, it also bears the strange embroideries, an illegible form of writing or marking that symbolises linguistic confusion and breakdown in the space between individual minds. Caught behind the screen, Miriam is no Balzac. She does not have the power of a sympathetic imagination that can unite her with Gertrude and tell her what the younger girl thinks and feels. Miriam’s sense of isolation from those around her continues after her return to England. Near the opening of Backwater we find her thinking about a young man, Ted, whom she will see the following day: She lay looking quietly into his imagined face till the room had gone. Then the face grew dim and far off and at last receded altogether into darkness. That darkness was dreadful. It was his own life. She would never know it. However well they got to know each other they would be strangers. (BW 206–7)

The imagined face of Ted does not become something that Miriam can observe and understand. That face, as she sees it, cannot illuminate the darkness of Ted’s interior life. In other words, sympathetic thinking fails her. What Miriam is searching for is something like Lipps’s ‘sensuous image’ that, paired with her own inner activity, could tell her something about Ted’s mind. She is looking, that is, to make the leap from sympathetic thinking to empathic thinking. Young Ted is not a particularly unreadable figure. The fact is, Miriam has a hard time establishing sympathetic connections with all men. At age seventeen, she sees them as mysterious, off-putting objects without discernible thoughts. As she looks over the crowd in a German church, the men are little more than lifeless shapes for her inquisitive mind: ‘And the men, standing there in their overcoats . . . Why were they there? What were they doing? What were their thoughts? She pressed as against

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a barrier. Nothing came to her from these unconscious forms’ (PR 70). We can infer that Ted’s consciousness is inaccessible because of a privacy that applies to all minds, but in the case of the German churchgoing men another kind of inaccessibility is on display. Like Ted, these male forms hide an unknowable interiority from Miriam. But unlike Ted, they appear to her specifically as unconscious forms. She believes she can sense nothing because there is no ‘own life’ hidden inside the male overcoats. Yet, as we will see shortly, actual inanimate objects yield a great deal of ‘life’ for Miriam, just as they do for Vischer and Lipps. Longworth rightly points out that Miriam holds an ‘essentialist belief in the total separation of the male and female minds’ (Longworth 2009: 36). Although this rift between the sexes in Miriam’s worldview never heals over the course of Pilgrimage, men do become less baffling for her as she matures. Gradually, male forms begin to yield for Miriam an understanding of their interiority. Strikingly, that understanding tends to involve the men in question imagining what others are thinking. In Honeycomb, for example, Miriam considers the bourgeois Mr Crave, whose mispronunciation of ‘Bologne’ offends her educated ears: His small austere face shone a little with dining; the corners of his thin lips slackened. ‘I can read all your thoughts. None of you can disturb my enjoyment of this excellent dinner; none of you can enhance it’ . . . but he was not quite conscious of his thoughts. Why did not the others read them? Perhaps they did. Perhaps they were too much occupied to notice what people were thinking. (HC 378)

Later in the same volume, she considers the implications of her acquaintance Bob’s phrase ‘The vagaries of the Fair’. Sitting with Bob, she silently thinks, that’s old-fashioned politeness; courtliness. Behind it he’s got some sort of mannish thought . . . ‘the unaccountability of women’ . . . ‘who can understand a woman? – she doesn’t even understand herself’ – thought he’d given up trying to make out. He’s gone through life and got his own impressions; all utterly wrong. (HC 422)

Both of these passages are instances of what Lisa Zunshine would call third-level intentionality (Zunshine 2003: 280): Miriam imagines what men believe women are thinking. Zunshine’s analysis of Mrs Dalloway makes clear that much higher levels of intentionality are common in the modernist novel. Such moments are, however, out of the ordinary in Pilgrimage, a text whose devotion to Miriam’s perspective often means foreclosing multi-level intentionality. She remains consistently isolated from other minds.

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­80    Empathy and the Psychology of Literary Modernism Even as the adult Miriam grows to know men, and comes to believe that she can understand what is passing in their minds to a certain extent, she does not seek out sympathetic connections. In fact, Miriam resents the male desire for sympathy. Sitting next to a young man in the home of Alma and Hypo Wilson, she looks upon him as a barren object: ‘He flashed unconscious eyes at her – he had no consciousness of the cold tide with its curious touch of evil’ (TT 120–1). Still, she senses that the young man awaits her interest in his mind: ‘He was demanding her approval, her sympathy’ (TT 121). He becomes for her a parasitic, empty vessel looking to fill himself with the contents of her interior. Later, when her employer Mr Hancock makes it clear that their relationship must in the future be strictly professional, she bitterly thinks, ‘He had not hesitated to seek sympathy’ (TT 205). Yet Miriam receives no sympathy in return, leading her to conclude, ‘Men are simply paltry and silly – all of them’ (TT 206). Thus we find her, after years of experience, holding more or less the same opinion she had in Pointed Roofs – there is nothing for her to gain by searching the minds of men.

No one there to describe her Miriam’s continual rejections of sympathetic thinking are closely linked to Richardson’s method of representing her. In Richardson’s own words, that method operates on the premise that ‘no one else was there to describe her’ (quoted in Fromm 1994a: 66). In other words, there is nobody there to observe her from a sympathetic distance. The narrative voice of Pilgrimage is meant to be a non-entity, a hidden presence. This fact means Miriam’s mind is solitary not only within her fictional world, but also in that she is ostensibly not ‘watched’ by a narrator. That is to say, Richardson tries to represent Miriam through mimesis (showing) rather than diegesis (telling).15 We do well, however, to keep in mind that this narrative effect is just that, an effect. As Shlomith RimmonKenan explains, in practice it is impossible to show without any telling: ‘The crucial distinction, therefore, is not between telling and showing, but between different degrees and kinds of telling’ (Rimmon-Kenan 1983: 108). Richardson’s kind of telling, then, is one that prefers not to be recognised as such. For critics in the first half of the twentieth century, the value of Pilgrimage was to be found in its apparently direct form of representation. As Harvey Eagleson wrote in 1934, ‘Miriam is presented to us objectively. The author gives us her thoughts directly and without comment. All the other characters and the events of the story are given

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us subjectively’ (Eagleson 1934: 43). Yet the experience of reading Miriam’s life is clearly not an objective one. While it is true that we do not bear the subjective weight of Richardson’s voice, we are utterly trapped by Miriam’s subjective point of view. As Eagleson goes on to say, ‘All we can know about Miriam’s environment must be inferred from what she thinks about it. [. . .] Her thoughts are recorded as our own might be, without explanation’ (Eagleson 1934: 44). That lack of explanation is what accounts for the notorious difficulty of Pilgrimage. As Longworth notes, ‘Miriam is not going to describe her surroundings or explain the context of her actions to herself because she is already familiar with them’ (Parsons 2007: 31). Because Miriam does not need to be told what is happening at any given moment, the reader receives no such clarification. If there is no one there to describe Miriam, it follows that there is no one there to aid the reader’s understanding. Similarly, the strength of Pilgrimage in May Sinclair’s estimation is the way in which Richardson is willing to limit her authorial voice: ‘She must not be the wise, all-knowing author. She must be Miriam Henderson. She must not know or divine anything that Miriam does not know or divine; she must not see anything that Miriam does not see’ (Sinclair 1918: 92). I would stipulate that what Richardson ‘knows’ or does not ‘know’ is of little importance. What she chooses not to report, however, is of great importance. By holding back explanations about Miriam’s state of mind, by refraining from putting us into an overtly mediated relationship with her protagonist, Richardson forces us to make the empathic leap that we see Miriam approaching in Pilgrimage. But hiding the intermediary narrative voice promotes the illusion that the reader empathises with Miriam, seeing with her rather than looking at her. Loeffelholz, a much more recent critic, claims that ‘More so perhaps than either Joyce or Woolf, Richardson seemed to aspire to represent our heroine’s consciousness without intervening artifice’ (Loeffelholz 1992: 59). That Loeffelholz makes such a statement is a testament to the success of Richardson’s project. Yet that statement is not quite correct – it is more accurate to say that Richardson aspired to represent our heroine’s consciousness without seeming to intervene. Many early readers of Pilgrimage figured Richardson’s method in graphic terms of ‘getting inside’ of Miriam. One of her earliest champions, J. D. Beresford, wrote, ‘Miss Richardson is, I think, the first novelist who has taken the final plunge, who has neither floated nor waded, but gone ahead under and become a very part of the human element she has described’ (Beresford 1921: vii). A. A. Mendilow similarly explained that Richardson approaches time in Pilgrimage ‘in depth, vertically, by sinking a deep and narrow shaft into the present moment of feeling

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­82    Empathy and the Psychology of Literary Modernism and sensation, the moment contains within itself the whole of the past’ (Mendilow 1952: 84). Notably, the language they use echoes the process of empathy as envisioned by Vischer and Lipps. This echo tells us that while Richardson’s academic contemporaries were working out a theory of empathy, she was creating a practice of literary empathy. Richardson detested the name that was eventually applied to her method: stream-of-consciousness narration. She called it ‘the deathdealing metaphor’ and the ‘Shroud(!) of Consciousness’ (Richardson 1994: 597, 600), protesting that its use was marked by ‘perfect imbecility’ (ibid.: 76). It was Sinclair, a reader of William James, who famously used the term ‘stream of consciousness’ to describe the evolving modernist technique in her 1918 article ‘The novels of Dorothy Richardson’, writing that Pilgrimage ‘is Miriam Henderson’s stream of consciousness going on and on’ (Sinclair 1918: 93). We should note, however, that Richardson’s fiction is not precisely what we would call stream-ofconsciousness narrative after the developments of late twentieth-century narratology. Mieke Bal, for example, holds that stream-of-consciousness literature ‘limits itself to the reproduction of the contents of consciousness’ (Bal 1997: 87). For Seymour Chatman, it is ‘the random ordering of thoughts and impressions’ (Chatman 1978: 188). Richardson’s novels are closer to what Lawrence Bowling described in his influential 1950 article ‘What is the stream of consciousness technique?’ – a combination interior monologue, which he understood as thoughts already verbalised, and the sensory impression of the ‘vast amount of mental activity which our minds never translate into language’ (Bowling 1950: 337). Yet all of these descriptions preclude a third-person narrator, which Pilgrimage has, spare though it is. Richardson’s overall method comes closest to Rimmon-Kenan’s understanding of focalisation, which he calls ‘cognitive, emotive, and ideological orientation’ (Rimmon-Kenan 1983: 71). If we have tended throughout the critical history of Pilgrimage to refer to the series as stream-of-consciousness literature, it is because of its singular focus on one character’s inner experience. Furthermore, the term is in keeping with the empathic character of Richardson’s novels. As Natsoulas puts it, in the act of empathy, ‘the individual is trying to get included in his stream of consciousness accurate awareness of what is now transpiring in the other’s stream of consciousness’ (Natsoulas 1988: 171). Natsoulas’s phrase ‘trying to get included’ is especially helpful in the case of Pilgrimage, for no matter what her very early critics thought, Richardson’s novels do not simply drop us into Miriam’s mind. Gloria G. Fromm, whose work on Richardson helped salvage her place in

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the modernist canon, gives us a more nuanced understanding of how Miriam’s mind develops on the page: ‘With the realization that Miriam must speak for herself and see unaided, the method of Pointed Roofs came into being: the entire novel stemmed from Miriam’s inner and outer point of view’ (Fromm 1963: 593). This inner/out split is key to understanding Richardson’s empathic method. While our ability to see what Miriam sees and ‘think with’ her might seem automatic and instantaneous (like Lipps’s Einfühlung), we are in fact constantly working for that reward. Richardson’s text repeatedly forces us to move from a perspective outside of Miriam to one that seems to originate inside of her – in other words, it guides us to feel ourselves into her mind, to try to be included in her stream of consciousness although we are in our own. Again, this ‘trying to be included’ is not new; it is part of a longer history of fellow feeling in literature. What makes Pilgrimage more inclusive of its central character’s stream of consciousness than the works of realism that came before it is its liberal use of empathic narrative devices that move us from the external to the internal. These include free indirect discourse and free direct discourse, both of which might be best described as moments of textual empathy – the narrative voice overcomes the objective distance between itself and the mind it examines, feeling its way into a character’s interior space. Free indirect discourse has been most pithily described as that with two focalisers – narrator and character (Rimmon-Kenan 1983: 110). Pointed Roofs, for example, ends with a quick move from choppy third-person narration to a bit of free indirect discourse as Miriam leaves Germany on a train: Groups passed by smiling and waving. Miriam sat down. She leaped up, to lean from the window. The platform had disappeared. (PR 185)

Clearly, the final sentence is not merely a narrator’s report. The fact of the platform’s disappearance depends on Miriam’s subjective point of view. Narrator and character meld here into one voice, which, as Lipps says of empathic experience, is ‘the resultant or product of two factors’ (EAP 407). They are joined, we might say, in empathic confusion. The fact that this method had been sporadically in use since the novels of Jane Austen makes clear that such textual empathy does not arrive on the scene only with literary modernism, nor with the theories of thinkers like Vischer and Lipps. As we know, Vischer and Lipps did not gather out of thin air the cluster of ideas they presented under the name Einfühlung. Rather, they organised those ideas as an alternative to the observation-based, distanced thinking that I have identified here

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­84    Empathy and the Psychology of Literary Modernism with sympathy. What is new in Richardson’s Pilgrimage, starting with Pointed Roofs, is the extent to which empathic strategies saturate the narrative, ensuring that the reader spends most of her time ‘feeling into’ Miriam’s mind in order to achieve moments of ‘thinking with’ her. Pilgrimage encourages this empathic reading by alternating between ‘mediated’ and ‘unmediated’ narration. Take, for example, Miriam’s fears about going to Germany in the early pages of Pointed Roofs. First, we read a section of text that features a more traditional third-person narrative style, reporting what Miriam and her father do and what they say out loud. This section ends with ‘Late at night, seated wide-awake opposite her sleeping companion, rushing toward the German city, she began to think’ (PR 29). The following section opens abruptly with those specific thoughts, recording Miriam’s internal goings-on through the use of free direct discourse, also known as ‘transposed thought-quotations’ (Chatman 1978: 182; Cohn 1978: 102–3). These are statements more plausibly attributed to the character than to the narrator, though not in direct quotation or marked by the type of phrases that narratologists refer to as a ‘tag’, such as ‘she thought’. When sustained, such free direct discourse becomes extended internal monologue. Most of Miriam’s thoughts as she speeds toward Hanover are ‘transposed’: It was a fool’s errand . . . To undertake to go to the German school and teach . . . to be going there . . . with nothing to give. The moment would come when there would be a class sitting round a table waiting for her to speak. She imagined one of the rooms at the old school, full of scornful girls . . . How was English taught? How did you begin? (PR 29)

It is essential to note that what we read here, although primarily composed of free direct discourse, does not become a pure interior monologue. The first clauses state Miriam’s own thoughts without clear evidence of a narrator’s intermediate work. It is Miriam who poses these questions, directing them at herself. Richardson’s text, with the help of the ellipses, corrals the reader’s mind so that it momentarily behaves as Miriam’s does, haltingly and searchingly.16 Yet we do find one tag: ‘she imagined’. This is an indirect tag, clearly the work of a narrator. Thus we encounter evidence of the external point of view alongside devices that encourage the reader to sync with the rhythm of Miriam’s internal thoughts and experience what we might call cognitive consonance. Throughout Pilgrimage we experience such cognitive consonance with Miriam’s mind even if we simultaneously feel emotional dissonance. When Miriam first arrives at the German school in Pointed Roofs, for example, we spend pages reading Miriam’s thoughts before and after getting her hair washed by the housekeeper, an incident that

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she finds boggling and humiliating. The moments of actual hair-washing take up relatively little time, but filtered through Miriam’s senses, they stretch to match Miriam’s perception of an endless process: For a moment she thought that the nausea which had seized her as she surrendered would, the next instant, make flight imperative. Then her amazed ears caught the sharp bump – crack – of an eggshell against the rim of the basin, followed by a further brisk crackling just above her. She shuddered from head to foot as the egg descended with a cold slither upon her incredulous skull. Tears came to her eyes as she gave beneath the onslaught of two hugely enveloping, vigorously drubbing hands – ‘sh – ham – poo’ gasped her mind. (PR 60–1)

We see here how Miriam’s internal voice reflects the bodily experience, breaking up mid-word in response to the rhythmic movement of the housekeeper’s hands. When we see the broken up ‘sh – ham – poo’, the cadence of our reading falls into step with the cadence of Miriam’s thought. The text thus sets up an empathic link between Miriam and the reader whereby our internal processing of the word ‘shampoo’ coincides with Miriam’s own, aiding our imaginative understanding of her physical experience. This moment, much like the word ‘shampoo’ in this context, expands in the conscious experience of both Miriam and the reader. Here we ought to recognise a clear connection to Henry James, whose winding sentences lock the reader into his own, idiosyncratic cognitive tempo. This cadence-matching promotes the illusion that rather than observing her actions and making inferences about her interior state, we feel our way into her interior rhythms. Thus we go beyond observation-based sympathy and participate in a narrative structure that, momentarily at least, seems to obliterate the subject-object divide. As readers of Pilgrimage we become Vischerian minds, unable to tolerate obstacles between ourselves and our protagonist/object. The moment of hair-washing expands for Miriam because she is accustomed to genteel rinsing with rosewater. Her predicament is unlikely to arouse our sympathies. Fortunately, our experience of readerly empathy does not require that we ‘feel for’ her. Here, I differ with some readers of Pilgrimage. Mary Ann Gillies, for example, argues that in Miriam’s moment of worry on the train, we understand her mind by means of sympathy: ‘Most of us have faced the prospect of a new challenge for which we feel unprepared or inadequate and thus can identify with Miriam’s anxiety. We can enter her experience’ (Gillies 1996: 156). The great innovation of Richardson’s technique, however, is that it does not depend on our ability to identify with her protagonist’s struggles. We need not understand the pain of leaving home or care that Miriam

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­86    Empathy and the Psychology of Literary Modernism finds a foreign hygiene practice upsetting. No matter what we think of her, we are frequently thinking with her. If there is a lesson of fellow feeling to be gleaned from Pilgrimage, I would suggest it is the fact that successful empathy requires no positive feeling. One of the most salient aspects of Lipps’s empathy, and the one most likely to be disregarded today, is the fact that it can be both pleasant and unpleasant. We may feel ourselves into any object. It is our reaction to that empathic action, in Lipps’s understanding of aesthetic experience, that tells us whether or not we enjoy the object we behold. Sometimes empathy will result in a feeling of harmony, at other times it will result in a feeling of conflict. Lipps explains this phenomenon, also known as negative empathy: The feeling of harmony then is precisely a feeling of pleasure in the object, and the feeling of conflict is a feeling of displeasure in it. Hence the one feeling as well as the other is conditioned by the degree to which I experience or am permeated by the evoked activity. (EAP 408)

We can only know that we do not enjoy an object, according to Lipps’s theory of Einfühlung, after we have felt ourselves into it. The nature of Lippsian empathy can help to explain the mixed reception that has met Pilgrimage over the past century. Richardson’s novel makes us empathise with Miriam, whether or not we like her. If reading her experience prompts nothing but a sense of inner conflict, we have nevertheless entered her stream of consciousness through imaginative in-feeling.

Conclusion: feeling into the world The reader’s acts of empathy are not the only ones in Pilgrimage – Miriam empathises with her physical surroundings. As David Trotter notes in a brief discussion of Pilgrimage, ‘[a]s the distance between author and protagonist collapsed, so did that between protagonist and world’ (Trotter 1999: 91). Her way of interacting with the world around her is by feeling herself into it, especially in times of excitement or stress. Backwater opens with one such moment. Miriam, on her way home from her interview at the North London school where she is to teach, imagines the unpleasant neighbourhood she has just seen: The little shock sent her mind feeling out along the road they had just left. She considered its unbroken length, its shops, its treelessness. The wide thoroughfare, up which they now began to rumble, repeated it on a larger scale. The pavements were wide causeways reached from the roadway by stone steps,

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Dorothy Richardson’s Modernist Innovation    ­87 three deep. The people passing along them were unlike any she knew. There were no ladies, no gentlemen, no girls or young men as she knew. They were all alike. They were . . . She could find no word for the strange impression they made. (BW 194–5)

This passage shows us both Miriam’s tendency to empathise with her surroundings, to insinuate herself mentally into her physical environment, and her continued inability to gain knowledge from observation. Throughout Backwater, the apparent outward mobility of Miriam’s mind is striking. Later, in a moment of exhilaration, Miriam contemplates the cliffs and the sea and we read that ‘Her mind slid out’ (BW 316). This repeatedly figured mobility of mind casts Miriam’s character in a decidedly empathic light – she sends her own inner life out to greet what she perceives. As Miriam ages, she acquires an involuntary ability to imbue the objects around her with life that is informed by her particular internal experience. Asked to settle the dispute over how to pronounce ‘Bologne’ in Honeycomb, she senses a stir in her surroundings: ‘Miriam carefully enunciated the word. The blood sang in her ears as everyone looked her way. The furniture and all the room mimicked her’ (HC 377–8). Notably, the life she injects into the furniture here is a reflection of her deeply unsympathetic relationship with the other dinner guests. Later, in The Tunnel, she finds herself unable to contain her inner life in her own body. Sitting at lunch with the staff of her dental office, Her delight and horror and astonishment seemed to flow all over the table. Desperately she tried to gather in all her emotions behind an easy appreciative smile. She felt astonishment and dismay coming out of her hair, swelling her hands, making her clumsy with her knife and fork. (TT 168)

Her ego effectively outgrows its boundaries, pushing out of her extremities and onto the shared space of the table. This boundary-crossing process, however, also occurs in reverse, as when the ground beneath her seems to fill Miriam with an external life source: ‘Life streamed up from the close dense stone. With every footstep she felt she could fly’ (HC 416). As Longworth has pointed out, this exchange does not seem to Miriam to be one in which she fills external objects with her own ego or personality: ‘For Miriam Henderson, the Tansley Street boarding house where she lives, and objects within it such as her table and window, seem to possess identity’ (Longworth 2009: 14). As Miriam sees it, the world puts life into her. This seeming reversal of empathy, I would argue, is actually indicative of the confusion that Vischer and Lipps discuss. Miriam exists so that we might, seemingly

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­88    Empathy and the Psychology of Literary Modernism without mediation, think with her. It is only fitting that she believes the world outside can inject life into her. After all, every time we read Pilgrimage, our own life streams into her. She becomes our sensuous object, vivified by our readerly activity. Ultimately, empathy consists of such contact with a vivified object. It is a contact that differs significantly from that which we find in sympathy, which is fundamentally about awareness and knowledge of the other. Lipps writes, ‘Empathizing is experiencing. It is not simply knowing that somewhere in the outer world there is something mental or inward, some joy, sorrow, woe, or despair, nor is it merely imaging such things’ (EAP 411). Richardson’s statement that there is no one there to describe Miriam applies also to the reader. Our role is not to look at her and then create the story of her inner life. Miriam’s mind is, remarkably, something more than a simulacrum. It is a process that exists because Richardson’s text forces our minds to think thoughts that we recognise as Miriam’s – in other words, to feel ourselves into her consciousness. For the reader of Pilgrimage, Miriam is experience.

Notes   1. It is unclear how thorough these lessons were. As James Cutting recently pointed out to me after the ‘Cognitive historicist approaches to literature’ panel at the 2014 MLA Convention, few people in England would have been qualified to teach students about the new discipline of experimental psychology in the late 1880s. What is important here is Richardson’s memory of having been exposed to it and her sense of scepticism.  2. We should note that Richardson considered Mary Boole’s 1911 The Forging of Passion Into Power a great ‘pre-Freudian’ work of psychology (Richardson 1994: 285), so it is very possible that Freud’s work had not made its way into Richardson’s particular intellectual life by 1913.   3. The Richardson Editions Project, headed up by Scott McCracken, is currently working on a three-volume Collected Letters, the first volume of which is scheduled for publication in 2015 by Oxford University Press. This exciting project should do much to expand our understanding of Richardson’s life and work.   4. See Introduction (24) and Adamson (2001: 83).   5. That is not to say that realist texts only communicate information about interiority through straightforward, easily interpreted acts of telling. There is, however, a marked structural difference between sympathy and empathy for which there is a recognisable correlate in the differences between realist and modernist narration.  6. We might compare Greiner’s understanding of sympathy as a ‘feeling along with’ to Robert Katz’s implication that when we sympathise, we are ‘running on a parallel track’ next to the person with whom we are sympathising (R. Katz 1963: 9). See also Introduction (6).

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Dorothy Richardson’s Modernist Innovation    ­89   7. See Introduction (7) and Lanzoni (2009).   8. Lipps identifies four kinds of Einfühlung: general apperceptive Einfühlung, empirical or natural Einfühlung, the atmosphere of Einfühlung, and Einfühlung in the sensuous manifestations of living beings (Hunsdahl 1967: 183–4).  9. Lipps’s first major work primarily on Einfühlung was the 1902 volume Das Selbstbewusstsein; Empfindung und Gefühl, but the following year’s ‘Einfühlung, innere Nachahmung und Organempfindungen’ had a greater influence on aesthetic theory and psychological thought. It is the latter text’s reflections on ‘inner imitation’ that Lipps’s earliest interlocutors seized upon. In his two-volume Ästhetik (1903 and 1906), he continued to explore empathy at length. 10. The piece I cite here, ‘Empathy and aesthetic pleasure’, is a 1965 translation of Lipps’s 1905 work. A contemporaneous translation, of course, would not have used the word ‘empathy’. 11. Gallese is citing Lipps’s 1903 work Einfühlung, innere Nachahmung und Organempfindung. 12. Montag et al. (2008) are citing Hume here. 13. Indeed, that mechanism was unknown until the discovery of mirror neurons in the 1980s. Research on these neurons is still in its infancy but has greatly expanded our understanding of a neurological basis of empathy. 14. What we know about mirror neurons today both vindicates and contradicts Lipps. They help us apprehend the emotional states of others faster than we could by reasoning, but they do not fire without input from our senses. 15. Rimmon-Kenan’s explanation of the perceived difference may be helpful here: ‘“Showing” is the supposedly direct presentation of events and conversations, the narrator seeming to disappear (as in drama) [. . .] “Telling”, on the other hand, is a presentation mediated by the narrator’ (RimmonKenan 1983: 107). 16. Notably, E. B. Titchener comments on the use of such ellipses in A Beginner’s Psychology. Noting that Lafcadio Hearn’s Japan features this device, Titchener calls it a ‘rather clumsy means to arouse in his reader the specific feeling-attitude in which he wrote’ (BP 294). We might also relate modernist use of ellipses in internal monologue to Titchener’s thoughts on the intermittence of inner experience: ‘Experimental and everyday observation both testify, when the question is directly put, to the intermittence of the self-experience. We are not always aware of our self’ (BP 320).

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Chapter 3

Communities of Feeling in Katherine Mansfield’s Fiction

The fourth volume of Dorothy Richardson’s Pilgrimage, 1919’s The Tunnel, found an ambivalent reader in her contemporary, Katherine Mansfield. In a review of Richardson’s fourth ‘chapter-novel’, Mansfield wrote, Miss Richardson has a passion for registering every single thing that happens in the clear, shadowless country of her mind. One cannot imagine her appealing to the reader or planning out her novel; her concern is primarily, and perhaps, ultimately, with herself. ‘What cannot I do with this mind of mine!’ one can fancy her saying. ‘What can I not see and remember and express!’ There are times when she seems deliberately to set it a task, just for the joy of realising again how brilliant a machine it is, and we, too, share her admiration for its power of absorbing. (Mansfield 1930: 3)

The implied criticism here – that Richardson is too enamoured of her own mind – has haunted Pilgrimage since the first volume was published a century ago. Mansfield’s view of Richardson here highlights a significant difference in the way each writer treats fellow feeling in her respective fiction. While impressed with Richardson’s technical skill, Mansfield is bored by the primary literary contribution of Pilgrimage – its singular focus on a unique conscious mind with whom the reader can think and feel over a sustained period. Throughout her own short but fruitful career, Mansfield produced hundreds of fictional minds whose rich interior lives are revealed to us but briefly. The way Mansfield’s thought proliferated into this vast crowd of characters would seem to align her work with Michael Tratner’s central thesis in Modernism and Mass Politics. Modernism, he argues, was not a retreat into solipsism or introspection, but rather ‘an effort to escape the limits of nineteenth-century individualist conventions and write about distinctly “collectivist” phenomena’ (Tratner 1995: 3). During her short life Mansfield produced no massive novels – no Dorothea Brookes or

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Isabel Archers. In that sense, her work certainly makes a cleaner break with the realist past than Richardson’s does. Stephen Kern, who allows for multiple understandings of distinctly modernist narrative, also insists that we ought not to equate modernism with the kind of individualised worldview we have seen in Richardson’s work. He argues, ‘[w]hile singular focalization narrowed and sharpened vision, other innovative focalizations expanded and varied it’ (Kern 2011: 183). Kern connects this expansion to the multiple reference systems of Albert Einstein and Émile Durkheim, among others. For Kern, there is a split in intent between what we might call the Richardson approach and the Mansfield approach: ‘[s]ingular focalization served the modernist interest in interior experience [. . .] serial, parallel, and embedded focalization served the cultural pluralism and mutli-perspectivism of the age’ (ibid.: 185). What connects the two approaches, as I hope to reveal in this chapter, is the ever-complicating presence of fellow feeling. Certainly, Mansfield’s writing is not nearly as focused on her characters’ interior speech as is Richardson’s. But Mansfield’s short stories do immerse us in character thought – that is, if we can agree with E. B. Titchener when he says that thought, broadly understood, ‘may go on in terms of attitude, of words, or of images’ (TBP 525–6). One thing Richardson and Mansfield do have in common is the way their characters distrust, reject or fail to establish fellow feeling with others. But Mansfield’s kaleidoscope of minds creates an oeuvre with a far more tangled web of in-feeling, cognitive role taking and intersubjectivity than we find in Richardson’s Miriam Henderson. Until recently, Mansfield’s contribution to twentieth-century literature was, like that of Richardson, greatly underestimated. Since the 1980s, however, a significant body of critical work about Mansfield has developed. Largely through the efforts of a handful of dedicated scholars,1 Mansfield’s status has changed from that of a minor New Zealand writer to a central figure of global modernism. That Mansfield never fell off the map completely during the twentieth century is due probably to the fact that as a short story writer she is readily anthologised. Yet long-prevailing attitudes that see the short story as a lesser form also kept her a marginal figure. Even her friend D. H. Lawrence thought, in Roger Robinson’s words, ‘she was a short-story writer who never quite graduated to the big league of the novel’ (Robinson 1994: 1). It is precisely the form of her writing, however, that makes her work ideal if we want to consider modernist concerns about fellow feeling. In their ephemerality, her character minds always leave our readerly desire to empathise frustrated. In this chapter I ask what kind of fellow feeling Mansfield allows and

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­92    Empathy and the Psychology of Literary Modernism cultivates in her writing. What empathy we find in her work is quite unlike what we see in James’s later work or in Richardson’s long series of novels. Specifically, the brevity of her works does not allow the kind of sustained perspective-sharing or cognitive overlap we see in A Small Boy and Others or Pilgrimage. Mansfield’s fiction certainly displays some of the narrative processes that I have identified as empathic – those that push the reader to ‘think with’ or ‘see with’ a represented mind. In that sense, her work is definitely part of the modernist tradition that is the focus of this book – that which seeks to collapse psychological distance and focus on inner experience. Her stories have long been understood as part of the ‘inward turn’ of modernism that resulted in stream-of-consciousness narration and interior monologue. At least one early critic, Ethel Wallace Hawkins, grouped her with Richardson and Woolf as one of the originators of stream-of-consciousness narration (E. Hawkins 1926: 105). Writing in 1926, Hawkins has only a vague sense of what makes Mansfield’s work fit in the still embryonic stream-of-consciousness category – she explains that within the short story, to represent the stream of consciousness means ‘to reveal the recesses of a spirit by a flash’ (ibid.: 107). Such an understanding seems to me problematic if we are trying to sort out what makes Mansfield’s work innovative – a countless number of nineteenth-century texts, for example, could be said to reveal the recesses of a spirit by a flash. Indeed, what is an occasional bit of free indirect discourse, such as we often find in Victorian literature, if not a brief ‘flash’ of spirit or consciousness? In her reading of Mansfield’s work, Julia van Gunsteren calls such moments of free indirect discourse and free direct discourse ‘the projection of raw, apprehensive data from the mind of a character’ (van Gunsteren 1990: 108). There are some particularly notable bits of empathic narration in Mansfield’s body of work, such as when ‘At the bay’ represents the maid Alice’s thoughts about Mrs Stubbs’s photographs by mimicking her working-class speech: ‘Life! How many there were! There were three dozzing at least’ (CFKM-II 360). Mansfield’s early story ‘The tiredness of Rosabel’ also induces short flashes of cognitive overlap between reader and character. But unlike Richardson, Mansfield does not mean to cultivate the illusion that no one is there to describe her protagonist. Although we are able to gather some raw data ‘directly’ from Rosabel’s mind, for the most part we gain knowledge of her thoughts indirectly, through the narrator’s report of those thoughts. Empathy, in Mansfield’s work, is a problem of the communal life that exists beyond the individual sphere. Mansfield’s contribution to empathic narrative, I mean to suggest, lies in the way she moves between minds.

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My psychological framework in this chapter is based on the work of the German philosopher Max Scheler, whose book The Nature of Sympathy is one of the major contributions to early twentiethcentury thought on fellow feeling, and on E. B. Titchener’s A Beginner’s Psychology and A Text-Book of Psychology. Scheler, whose career included periods teaching at the universities of Jena, Munich and Cologne, is perhaps best known in literary studies for his 1912 work Ressentiment. Elsewhere his impact has been most important in phenomenology and Catholic theology. The Nature of Sympathy was first published as Zur Phänomenologie und Theorie der Sympathiegefühle und von Liebe und Hass in 1913 but was significantly expanded to consider the problem of others minds in the 1922 edition. Scheler rejected the theory of Einfühlung that Titchener enthusiastically introduced to the English-speaking world as ‘empathy’ in 1909. He insisted that his work was about sympathy and not what he saw as the misguided new concept of in-feeling; for him, Robert Vischer and Theodor Lipps’s Einfühlung was not a legitimate way to experience others. I include Scheler in my work here, however, because like Vischer and Lipps (as well as William James and Titchener), he wants to break with old understandings of fellow feeling and reconceptualise intersubjective experience going forward into the twentieth century. Like William James, he asks us to question the Cartesian belief that the only primary experience in our life is that of our own mind (NS 244). Above and beyond his contemporaneity to modernist experimentation, his desire to make new the discourse of fellow feeling ties him to modernism’s first flourishing. I find that Scheler is a particularly good partner for Mansfield because both are trying to sort out the different ways in which people feel together and assess the worth of those experiences. Scheler’s work issues challenges on two major fronts. First, he disregards the long-prevailing theory that sympathy works by analogy; our primary understanding of others, he says, does not arise from a conscious reading of other bodies (NS 244). Second, he insists that Lipps’s concept of aesthetic empathy cannot tell us anything about other people. Like most early critics of empathy theory, he fixates on the idea that Lipps’s empathy works primarily through projection. For Scheler, the fundamental danger of empathy as projection is that it leads us to ‘impute our own experience to others’ (NS 246). Scheler’s scepticism about these forms of fellow feeling is matched only by his faith that there do indeed exist transcendental states in which we exceed the limits of our own lives, experiencing others. In the following pages I use the work of both Scheler and Titchener to read failures of fellow feeling and maintenance of interior privacy in

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­94    Empathy and the Psychology of Literary Modernism Mansfield’s stories. In the first half of this chapter, I establish the centrality of both emotional and psychological isolation to Mansfield’s work. Throughout her career she continually developed characters whose sense of separation from others is perhaps the most striking feature of their internal lives. We find these characters everywhere in Mansfield’s fictional universe – from the crowded working-class quarters of metropolitan London to the confines of the bustling colonial home. Some of her characters approach other minds with fear, others with indifference, and yet others with unfulfilled desire. Collectively, their voices create an ever-present hum of empathic concern in Mansfield’s oeuvre. I close the chapter with a reading of what is probably her most celebrated work, the long New Zealand story Prelude. Like Pilgrimage, Mansfield’s Prelude tackles the problem of fellow feeling by using an empathic narrative structure that collapses intersubjective distance. But Mansfield’s work in Prelude resists and circumvents isolation to create a collective stream of consciousness that stands in contrast to the individual one that Richardson developed in Pilgrimage.

Empathic projection in ‘The tiredness of Rosabel’ The empathic character of ‘The tiredness of Rosabel’ (1908), written when Mansfield was not yet twenty, has largely to do with the imaginative processes that work in response to class consciousness.2 In this story the titular character, an assistant in a milliner’s shop, comes home hungry to a cold flat and imagines another life for herself. The story opens with typically modernist allusions to the alienating effects of life in the growing twentieth-century metropolis. Rosabel jumps on the omnibus, where she is surrounded by others but psychologically isolated: ‘There was a sickening smell of warm humanity – it seemed to be oozing out of everybody in the ’bus – and everybody had the same expression, sitting so still, staring in front of them’ (CFKM-I 133). Despite the smell of warm humanity, the bodies around her are strikingly lifeless – there is nothing to read on their faces or in their bodily movement, so the standard means of both sympathetic and empathic connection are missing. The text communicates an overwhelming sense of how draining the world is and how stifling other people can be to one’s sense of self. ‘Rosabel’ thus establishes a number of themes that Mansfield would return to throughout her career. Primarily, we glimpse the isolation of a working woman in modern society, a subject which is at the heart of stories like ‘The little governess’, ‘Life of Ma Parker’ and the oft-anthologised ‘Miss Brill’. We also find a protagonist with a rich

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fantasy life that anticipates that of Beryl Fairfield in Prelude and ‘At the bay’. ‘Rosabel’ represents a problematic case of the Lippsian aesthetic empathy that I examined in Chapter 2. Mansfield’s story shows acts of imaginative empathic projection and pushes us to ask what happens when what Lipps called ‘objectivated self-enjoyment’ takes another person as its object.3 The primary empathiser in this text is Rosabel herself, who spends most of the story thinking about others. The main action occurs in Rosabel’s imagination, as she fantasises about leading the life of a rich young woman whom she served in the millinery. The beautiful young lady uses Rosabel as a model so she can observe how an ornate hat will look from another perspective. The girl thus forces Rosabel into the position of passive aesthetic object, the position that she, as a wealthy and unmarried woman, usually occupies. Upon being told that the hat suits her beautifully, Rosabel is overtaken by ‘a sudden, ridiculous feeling of anger’ (CFKM-I 135).4 Rosabel’s disturbance only increases when the young woman’s handsome companion, Harry, tells her that she ought to be painted, as she has ‘such a damned pretty little figure’ (CFKM-I 135). It is clear that the couple notices Rosabel only as a body, specifically an attractive one, which serves to drive home her invisibility as a feeling entity. Much like Alice in Prelude, who can only respond to Beryl with imagined retorts, Rosabel must retreat into the privacy of her own mind to seek redress. The moment of forced playacting, in which Rosabel must wear an item that the realities of class and economics forbid her, gets picked up later as Rosabel imagines that it was she who drove off with the young woman’s handsome companion: ‘Suppose they changed places. Rosabel would drive home with him, of course they were in love with each other’ (CFKM-I 136). Here, the textual command ‘suppose’ does the double duty of revealing Rosabel’s own interior thoughts and instructing the reader to imagine along with her. The reader, however, never becomes completely immersed in Rosabel’s fantasy, for the text focuses on Rosabel’s act of creating that fantasy. When we read that ‘Harry bought her great sprays of Parma violets’, we remember that the real Rosabel is going hungry for the night because she ‘bought a bunch of violets, and that was practically the reason why she had so little tea’ (CFKM-I 136, 133). In fact, Rosabel’s fantasy comes in large part from having read, in the hands of another girl on the omnibus, a page from the 1901 novel Anna Lombard, by Victoria Cross (Annie Sophie Cory): ‘it was something about a hot, voluptuous night, a band playing, and a girl with lovely, white shoulders’ (CFKM-I 133). Later, when she is out with Harry in her mind, we read, ‘Yes, it

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­96    Empathy and the Psychology of Literary Modernism was a v­ oluptuous night, a band playing, and her lovely white shoulders’ (CFKM-I 136). As Sydney Janet Kaplan points out, Rosabel’s fantasy, modelled on popular plots of the day, is ‘in bold relief against the realities of Rosabel’s impoverished life and the narrator’s awareness of the impossibility of their resolution in the class-bound society Rosabel inhabits’ (Kaplan 1991: 84–5). My understanding here is that Rosabel is also aware of that impossibility. Her awareness is particularly clear in one of two parenthetical asides that interrupt the fantasy. We read, ‘(The real Rosabel, the girl crouched on the floor in the dark, laughed aloud, and put her hand up to her hot mouth.)’ (CFKM-I 137). Rosabel’s laughter here shows that she apprehends the distance that separates her from the imagined Rosabel, and indeed from the girl in the shop. As Nick Hubble explains, Rosabel maintains awareness of ‘the difference between her conscious and unconscious identities’ by fictionalising her experience (Hubble 2009: para. 2). The other girl becomes her aesthetic object, the other body she projects her feelings into and inhabits through imagination. We might think that ‘Rosabel’ represents a worst-case scenario for empathic thinking between two individuals. It is clear that Rosabel’s projection of her own ego into the foreign body she perceives empties the other girl of her interiority. There is no intersubjective exchange here. The story thus illustrates what Scheler understood to be the great danger of Lipps’s Einfühlung – it fails to grant ‘acceptance and understanding’ of other people and their experiences (NS 9). As Scheler understands the process of projective empathy, it can only produce delusion (NS 12). But Rosabel, as I have argued, is not deluded. We must therefore ask why she engages in this empathic act of imagination that is in fact empty of fellow feeling. As the story nears its end, we find the feelings of Rosabel’s imagined self conflated with those of her real self – both are very tired. As Rosabel struggles to stay awake, her fantasy goes on, ‘But she became very tired. Harry took her home, and came in with her for just one moment’ (CFKM-I 136). What has truly ‘tired’ Rosabel is the lack of sympathetic imagination with which the girl in the store treated her, the way that girl made no effort to envision Rosabel’s experience. The crux of ‘Rosabel’ is the fact that for the rich girl, there is no conceptual problem of other minds between her and our shop girl protagonist. Rosabel’s social status means her thoughts have no value and are not even worth conceiving. Mansfield’s heroine, then, is isolated within an inner life that no other imaginative mind stretches out to meet. It is this isolation that sends Rosabel looking for relief in fantasy. By using the process of empathy without the goal of experiencing another mind, she is able to retaliate against her forced role as a hollow aesthetic

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object. More important than her escape is the fact that she takes the time to live in and enrich her private mental sphere, which goes unacknowledged in public. Ultimately, ‘Rosabel’ suggests that the process of empathy might provide a way to fight back against the stifling lack of concern in the modern city.

Not feeling with others ‘Rosabel’ is one of many Mansfield stories that feature the limits and failures of fellow feeling. But like Scheler’s work, her stories are deeply invested in exploring how we might become open to the thoughts and feelings of those around us. This investment means that her stories show different kinds of ‘feeling with’ going on at the same time, often in conflict with each other. The resulting tangle of fellow feeling would come as no surprise to Scheler, who found it necessary in his work to sort and classify the different ways to feel with others. Frustratingly, Scheler does not bother to provide a primary working definition of sympathy in The Nature of Sympathy. This elision is typical of the time – sympathy’s ubiquity led to an endless proliferation of understandings that made it an overburdened signifier in the early twentieth century. That proliferation necessitated the creation of taxonomies. In his efforts to sort things out, Scheler identifies four broad categories of fellow feeling: immediate community of feeling ‘with someone’, fellow feeling ‘about something’, emotional infection, and true emotional identification (NS 12). He also lays out five ‘sympathetic functions’: identification, vicarious feeling, fellow feeling, benevolence, and non-cosmic personal love (NS 103).5 These sympathetic functions are nested, so that identification underlies vicarious feeling, which in turn underlies fellow feeling, which in turn underlies benevolence, which in turn underlies non-cosmic personal love (NS 96–9). Such sympathetic functions can, Scheler claims, enable us ‘to effect a real enlargement of our own lives and transcend the limitations of our own actual experience’ (NS 49). Scheler’s four categories of fellow feeling are especially helpful interpretive tools for reading Mansfield’s fiction, which depicts all four and their limitations. One text that represents a particularly rich tapestry of fellow feeling is the 1921 story ‘The garden party’. ‘The garden party’ stands as an inverse to ‘The tiredness of Rosabel’. While preparing for her family’s elaborate garden party, Laura Sheridan dreams of being friends with the workmen setting up the marquee instead of the ‘silly boys’ she’ll be dancing with: ‘It’s all the fault, she decided [. . .] of these absurd class distinctions. Well, for her part she

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­98    Empathy and the Psychology of Literary Modernism didn’t feel them [. . .] She felt just like a work-girl’ (CFKM-II 403). Laura’s naïve desire to escape the homogeneity of her own social circle reflects Mansfield’s ideals as a teenager and even those she held as an adult. Later in life, Mansfield was especially invested in the idea that literature should represent a spectrum of people. In the Athenaeum piece that reviews Richardson’s The Tunnel, for example, she is sharply critical of another novel whose characters are all of the same class, complaining that the work grants no reprieve from an upper-middleclass atmosphere (Mansfield 1930: 3).6 Yet ‘The garden party’ takes an unflinching look at the way actual forays into other class environments play out. The story suggests that seeking to broaden one’s horizons leads to uncomfortable class tourism more easily than it leads to meaningful exchange. Laura’s adventures into the nearby workman’s lane with her brother Laurie make this unpleasant fact clear: When the Sheridans were little they were forbidden to set foot there because of what they might catch. But since they were grown up, Laura and Laurie on their prowls sometimes walked through. It was disgusting and sordid. They came out with a shudder. But still one must go everywhere; one must see everything. So through they went. (CFKM-II 408)

Laura’s presumptuous belief that she transcends the class barriers which complicate fellow feeling make her an object of fun at the story’s beginning, but Mansfield is not merely taking a biting look at an easy, adolescent target. In fact, as the only member of her family who is at all inclined to consider the working-class neighbours, Laura is to some extent admirable. When a carter who lives in the ‘disgusting and sordid’ lane dies in an accident, leaving ‘a wife and five little ones’ (CFKM-II 407), only Laura worries that the noise from their party will bother the grieving widow. After she suggests that they cancel the festivities, she receives cold treatment from the other Sheridans. Her sister Jose tells her, ‘If you’re going to stop a band playing every time some one has an accident, you’ll lead a very strenuous life. I’m every bit as sorry about it as you. I feel just as sympathetic’ (CFKM-II 408). As Laura persists, the family turns the scrutiny back on her, accusing her of lacking concern for what others are feeling. Her mother shuts down her request by saying, ‘it’s not very sympathetic to spoil everybody’s enjoyment as you’re doing now’ (CFKM-II 409). Laura is finally distracted with the gift of a magnificent hat from her mother; she enjoys the party along with everybody else, forgetting the neighbours until her father mentions the accident later that night. Mrs Sheridan then sends an uncomfortable Laura to the home of the grieving widow with a basket of leftovers.

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As in ‘The tiredness of Rosabel’, it is the fabulous hat, a stamp of social and economic power, that makes clear Laura’s distance from the class Other. Walking through the poor lane of shabby houses to deliver the basket, she inwardly bemoans ‘the big hat with the velvet streamer – if only it was another hat’ (CFKM-II 411). But it is not until she enters the home of the dead man and sees her neighbour’s face that she begins to understand the gravity of her misunderstanding: Her face, puffed up, red, with swollen eyes and swollen lips, looked terrible. She seemed as though she couldn’t understand why Laura was there. What did it mean? Why was this stranger standing in the kitchen with a basket? What was it all about? And the poor face puckered up again. (CFKM-II 412)

Notably, Laura experiences here both observation-based sympathy and an empathic reorientation of her vision through the eyes of the widow – she sees herself as a stranger. Through this experience, she suddenly comes to understand the gap between Scheler’s first two kinds of fellow feeling: immediate community of feeling ‘with someone’, and fellow feeling ‘about something’ (NS 12). For Scheler, community of feeling is what happens when two people share an experience. As an example, he cites the mutual pain that two parents would feel upon the death of their child. The two parents thus share, in Scheler’s understanding, one feeling. If an outsider, such as a friend of the two parents, enters the picture, he will experience fellow feeling about the parents’ loss, but will not be a part of their immediate community of feeling. As Scheler explains, ‘my commiseration and his suffering are phenomenologically two different facts’ (NS 13). The realisation of this difference aids the development of an ethical understanding of the other, for if we do not understand that our commiseration is not the primary fact, our fellow feeling is nothing but a form of spiritual vampirism in which a person tries ‘to fill his empty belly with the experience of others’ (NS 43). Scheler warns that spurious fellow feeling manifests in people who can’t stand other people’s pain – in truth, he explains, such people are only thinking of themselves (NS 41). Laura’s pain arises in the first place so that she can nurture her understanding of herself as a sympathetic person. But when she sees how inaccessible the primary pain of the event is for her, she realises she has trespassed on the community of feeling inside the widow’s home by displaying her secondary fellow feeling. So in front of the dead workman and his widow, Laura comes to see that she does not feel ‘just like a work-girl’. In particular, it is the inappropriate hat that inspires this knowledge. Overcome by shame, Laura stumbles into the other room and cries, ‘Forgive my hat’ to the dead man’s laid out body before escaping into

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­100    Empathy and the Psychology of Literary Modernism the lane (CFKM-II 413). This odd moment corroborates Scheler’s belief that our ‘flow of sympathy’ works in mysterious, unpredictable ways. We can ignore intense suffering but be floored by ‘some trifle’, he says, ‘as if a light were suddenly shone, or a window opened, in a darkened room’ (NS 50). The problematic flow of fellow feeling is even more apparent in Mansfield’s 1921 story ‘Life of Ma Parker’, which is about a woman whose vulnerable class position and economic circumstances leave her without a community of feeling. Ma Parker, who works as a cleaning woman in London, has just lost her grandson to a long illness. Her employer, a ‘literary gentleman’, shows no sympathy, awkwardly asking if the funeral was ‘a success’ (CFKM-II 292). But if anyone’s life should evoke pity and compassion, it is Ma Parker’s. Indeed, the whole neighbourhood is well aware that Ma Parker has had ‘a hard life’ (CFKM-II 293). Throughout the brief narrative, tiny glimpses of that life surface: employment as a kitchen maid; the early death of her husband; the loss of twelve children to death, emigration and estrangement; and ever-present physical pain. Ma Parker has spent decades hiding her distress from the unfeeling world. But the latest loss proves overwhelming: No, she simply couldn’t think about it. It was too much – she’d had too much in her life to bear. She’d born it up till now, she’d kept herself to herself, and never once had she been seen to cry. Never by a living soul. Not even her own children had seen Ma break down. (CFKM-II 296)

Ma Parker does not go in search of someone who will understand her or treat her with sympathy. Rather, she wants solitude, a private space in which to feel her pain. She leaves the literary gentleman’s flat and finds herself out in the cold where ‘nobody knew – nobody cared’ (CFKM-II 296). She realises that she must finally have a ‘proper cry’, but she can’t go home where her daughter is or cry in the gentleman’s flat: ‘she had no right to cry in strangers’ houses’. Nor can she weep on a set of steps, for fear ‘a policeman would speak to her’ (CFKM-II 297). It is clear, then, that Ma Parker has neither community of feeling at home nor fellow feeling out in the world. We might well ask why Ma Parker is so afraid to display the symptoms of the body that indicate grief. There are multiple fears at play here that relate to sympathetic mind-reading. To parse out those fears, it helps to read Titchener’s thoughts on the expression of emotion: the outward show of emotion in gesture and facial expression has always been attractive to those who pondered the relations of mind and body. It may even be true that observation of these expressive movements lies at the

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Communities of Feeling in Katherine Mansfield’s Fiction    ­101 very root of psychology; for in emotion a man is changed, transformed; he is unlike himself, out of himself, beside himself; and what could suggest, more plainly than such transformation, the activity of an indwelling mind? (BP 222)

To be ‘beside oneself’ is to betray a very particular version of oneself – the public self, the collected representation of the self. It is to behave in unexpected ways. In Ma Parker’s case, it is to act unlike the stoic, silent sufferer she shows the world. On the other hand, the symptomatic reading that Titchener describes, which Scheler would say involves treating ‘the body as a field of expression’, can reveal what is happening in the ‘indwelling mind’, or the private self. So if Ma Parker were to cry in public she would reveal a self that both is and is not her – it coincides with her actual emotional experience and also violates the standards of her performed self. Perhaps more terrifying for Ma Parker, however, is the possibility that her tears will be seen but will fail to provoke sympathy. The story ends as she looks up and down the street and realises ‘There was nowhere’ (CFKM-II 297). Mansfield is showing us something that Scheler’s insistence on the automatic nature of sympathy glosses over – if we fail to see the other as an object with interiority, we effectively shut down or paralyse our systems of fellow feeling, thus leaving the unrecognised other in a psychological ‘nowhere’. The ‘trifle’ that opens one’s heart might, in some cases, never come. Such is the case in Mansfield’s 1918 story ‘Je ne parle pas français …’, which features a narrator in a perpetually ‘closed’ state. The story’s speaker, a young Parisian named Raoul Duquette, has a conception of human interiority that, as Perry Meisel puts it, ‘reduces people to inhuman parcels, and their moral care, or lack of it, to a kind of haphazard registry’ (Meisel 1994: 114). Raoul, an aspiring writer, explains, ‘I don’t believe in the human soul. I never have. I believe that people are like portmanteaux – packed with certain things, started going, thrown about, tossed away, dumped down, lost and found, half emptied suddenly, or squeezed fatter than ever’ (CFKM-II 112). He understands people, then, as inherently empty vessels that might, at best, occasionally hold a piece of interesting flotsam. As the story continues, it becomes clear that Raoul does not grasp the significance of his own figure of speech here. This failure is typical of him. As Angela Smith explains, ‘The narrator offers the reader a sequence of events, each sharply delineated by self-conscious metaphorical language, but the story also has a rhythmical counter-discourse of which the narrator seems unaware as he poses for the reader’ (Smith 2000: 19). Although Raoul believes he is a great writer of ‘submerged

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­102    Empathy and the Psychology of Literary Modernism life’ (CFKM-II 120), he does not even see the clear double meaning of his portmanteau image. While the portmanteau certainly is an object that can be repacked and emptied, it is also an object that hides what it holds. So Raoul’s figure of human selfhood in fact allows for the possibility that somebody else’s ‘portmanteau’ has a wealth of inner contents to which he has no access. Raoul’s ethical failure is not that he doesn’t consider the contents of other human interiors, but rather the simpler fact that he refuses to admit that they even have contents. This fact produces the story’s central irony – Raoul, who wants desperately to write a groundbreaking modern novel, writes about the abandoned Englishwoman he knows only as ‘Mouse’ without understanding how fascinating her interiority is for the modern reader. While his audience wonders what will happen to her alone in Paris, he regards her as a cipher, an empty container. Just as we have seen with Rosabel and Ma Parker, if interiority is not acknowledged, no acts of ‘feeling together’ or ‘feeling into’ are possible. Certainly, all of Scheler’s forms of fellow feeling or sympathetic functions require that basic acknowledgment. We might dismiss Raoul’s lack of fellow feeling in ‘Je ne parle pas français . . .’ as the moral failing of a particular character, just as we might simply explain the failures of sympathy in ‘The tiredness of Rosabel’, ‘The garden party’ and ‘Life of Ma Parker’ as illustrations of class constraints. Clearly, it is difficult for meaningful intersubjective experience to take root if one party is deficient. But as Joanna Kokot explains, the problem of other minds plays out broadly in Mansfield’s work, which raises ‘questions concerning the relations between the world and the observer, about the possibility and limits of intuiting both reality and another person’ (Kokot 2011: 67). We find in Mansfield’s stories that even when the conditions for fellow feeling are seemingly ideal, connections between two minds tend to be tenuous. She addresses this difficulty most directly in her 1920 story ‘Psychology’.

Failed heroics ‘Psychology’ opens with two friends, a man and a woman, having a discussion about literature. The unnamed characters, writers both, speak mundane thoughts out loud, while their ‘secret selves’ silently voice thoughts with emotional content. As Kaplan explains, ‘Mansfield’s man and woman assume their own transparency [. . .] yet Mansfield knows they are deluding themselves’ (Kaplan 1991: 154). Indeed, the two begin with the belief that they have transcended the intersubjective barriers that haunt other human relationships. As the story begins, we read,

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‘Like two open cities in the midst of some vast plain their two minds lay open to each other [. . .] they were eager, serious travellers, absorbed in understanding what was to be seen and discovering what was hidden’ (CFKM-II 194). The implication here, in the opening paragraphs, is that the secret selves, though silent, are mutually ‘audible’ to each other. The bond that the man and woman believe themselves to share may seem idealistic and unreasonable, but in fact it is not out of line with theories from the most exacting and sceptical experimental psychology of the day. According to Titchener, for example, it is possible for two people to have mutually legible minds. He explains that certain conditions help to nurture such mental exchanges: Consider first the case of your fellow men. You do not doubt that they have experiences like your own; you take them for granted, accept them instinctively as your kin, and are able – the better you know them better – to put yourself in their place. (BP 12)

Long acquaintance and time spent together, Titchener explains, will help two people trade points of view. Indeed, Mansfield’s two protagonists have precisely the kind of relationship that Titchener would say allows empathic understanding. Empathic connections develop, he claims, between people who ‘have reached the same mental level’ in a particular field of enquiry: ‘If they have honestly wrestled with their problem – there is a felt psychological community between them’ (BP 293). Mansfield’s two writers value each other because they believe they are on the same literary ‘level’ and can therefore think and feel together. Their empathic bond depends on the thought he is putting into his ‘very big novels’ and on her ‘exquisite sense of real English comedy’ (CFKM-II 194). The very core of their relationship is their understanding of themselves as important writers who derive mutual pleasure from talking about literature. Their many conversations about books and ideas have led them to believe that they have, as Titchener would explain it, ‘establish[ed] a social bond of empathic understanding among those who would else be psychological strangers’ (BP 293). They have neither class barriers nor the kind of moral-epistemological failings we see in ‘Je ne parle pas français . . .’ to seal their minds in unhappy privacy. Shortly after the two protagonists begin their conversation, however, an awkward and inexplicable silence suddenly pops up between them, and both feel that their secret selves have simultaneously ceased to ‘speak’. They begin to use their outer voices to perform for each other, to impress each other with their depth of thought and erudition, as when they discuss the future of the psychological novel. But they both realise, and admit internally, that they hate what they have been saying. He, we

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­104    Empathy and the Psychology of Literary Modernism read, ‘was so utterly bored he almost groaned’ and she thinks, ‘What a spectacle we have made of ourselves’ (CFKM-II 196). The cause of the sudden shift is unclear, but what is quite clear is that they are feeling the same angst. In fact, they are experiencing a case of Scheler’s third type of fellow feeling: emotional infection. Scheler makes quick work of emotional infection, which is the process by which we are affected by the atmosphere of a given place or group of people – when we walk into a cheerful pub we begin to feel cheerful too, or when somebody else laughs we might ‘catch’ that laughter (NS 15). The fact that the two protagonists feel something together in this case does not, however, mean they have formed a productive intersubjective bond. According to Scheler, emotional infection can only be a negative factor if it increases ‘the total amount of suffering present’ (NS 138). This particular experience of intersubjective feeling, then, can only damage their relationship. Scheler is far more concerned with ‘true emotional identification’ or emotional unity, which is actually a ‘limiting case’ of emotional infection (NS 18). This definition is deceptively simple, however. As Scheler goes on to say, emotional identification is present in ‘very different kinds of experience – of which only a few main types can be indicated here’ (NS 19). He discusses eleven such types at length, using a variety of sources including the religious mysteries of antiquity, Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde and Freud’s Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego. Scheler claims that identification is always automatic and ‘never a matter of choice’ (NS 35). Yet he also indicates that it takes a great deal of effort, writing, ‘To attain to identification, man must elevate himself “heroically” above the body and all its concerns’ and become ‘unmindful of his spiritual individuality’ (NS 35). Mansfield’s ‘Psychology’ shows us how hard such elevation is, particularly if one is invested in the kind of affinity-based identification that Titchener discusses. After the unexpected awkwardness manifests, the male protagonist introduces an intellectual problem to the conversation in order to re-open their felt psychological community. He says, ‘I have been wondering very much lately whether the novel of the future will be a psychological novel or not. How sure are you that psychology qua psychology has got anything to do with literature at all?’ Answering his attempt to resurrect their fellow feeling, the woman responds, ‘Do you mean you feel there’s quite a chance that the mysterious non-existent creatures – the young writers of today – are trying simply to jump the psycho-analyst’s claim?’ (CFKM-II 196). The man replies to this question and what sounds like a robust literary discussion proceeds. But despite their vigorous conversation, the two cannot find their way back to the feeling of community – their inner voices remain mute. The

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male protagonist tries to get his secret self to speak out loud in order to salvage their harmonious empathic communication, but he fails: ‘There was another way for them to speak to each other, and in the new way he wanted to murmur: “Do you feel this too? Do you understand it at all?”’ (CFKM-II 197). Strikingly, his thoughts echo a question that a frustrated Mansfield posed to Murry in a letter she sent from France in February 1920. In an attempt to make J.M. Murry understand her loneliness in Menton, she writes, ‘Can you understand? Try to imagine it!!’ (Mansfield 1993: 206). That Mansfield asks this question directly does not, however, mean she was any less inclined to keep silent and hope that her mind would be ‘open’ to Murry. Forced by circumstances to spend much of her time on the continent while Murry stayed in England, Mansfield often wished he would anticipate her thoughts and needs, especially where finances were concerned. In a letter from January 1920, for example, she writes, Now let me tell you what I ‘imagined’ you would do on receipt of my first letter from Menton. I imagined you would immediately wire me £10. I ‘imagined’ you would have written ‘its so gorgeous to know you are there & getting better. Dont worry. Of course I shall contribute £10 a month towards your expenses’. In addition I counted upon your loving sympathy and understanding, and the fact that you failed me in this is hardest of all to bear. (Ibid.: 202)

Doubtful as Mansfield’s fiction is about the power of sympathy, she indicates here that love might empower sympathy to transcend individual experience, which Scheler believes is possible (NS 49). Such love, Mansfield indicates, might let Murry know her mind across the psychological distance created by physical separation, illness and gender difference. Unlike Mansfield, the protagonists of ‘Psychology’ never give in and say what they imagine. Rather than speak the truth of his inner life, the man leaves, while the woman’s secret self cries out: ‘You’ve hurt me; you’ve hurt me! We’ve failed!’ (CFKM-II 197). Readers of Mansfield’s story must ask exactly what their failure is. Have the protagonists failed by losing their special communicative link, or have they failed merely by believing that they had such a link? It might be that their failure lies in trying to bypass worldly sympathy and go directly to a radical empathy. That is, rather than trying to ‘feel for’ each other with the help of verbal mediation, they hope to mystically ‘feel with’ each other. They hold themselves above the sordid business of outer speech. Clearly, Mansfield is poking fun at her protagonists’ sense of importance in ‘Psychology’ – but not at their sense of loss. Furthermore,

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­106    Empathy and the Psychology of Literary Modernism there are losses to which they do not admit. The formation of their artistic community has prevented them from forming a romantic or erotic c­ommunity – they have avoided what they think of as ‘stupid emotional complication’ (CFKM-II 194). Scheler might blame their lost feeling of oneness on their rejection of love. Both love and sympathy, he tells us, allow us to escape the solipsism that we learn as we become adults (NS 98). In a rather romantic turn, he lists as one type of genuine identification something he calls ‘mutual coalescence’, which can be found ‘in truly loving sexual intercourse [. . .] when the partners [. . .] seem to relapse into a single life-stream in which nothing of their individual selves remains any longer distinct’ (NS 25). Just as they reject the mediation of honest words, so too do they reject the mediation of physical touch. Without the help of any ‘loving sympathy’, the man and woman of ‘Psychology’ end up in states of severe psychological isolation. Indeed, in Mansfield’s work the members of many romantic dyads find themselves in similar situations – most notably the central couples of ‘Bliss’ (1918), ‘The Stranger’ (1920) and ‘Marriage à la mode’ (1921). Failures of ‘loving sympathy’ such as those we see in ‘Psychology’ show the difficulty of establishing an affective community between two people. But Mansfield’s engagement with intersubjectivity expands in her linked stories Prelude (1918) and ‘At the bay’ (1922). In these two works, we find several minds working with and against each other. It is here that Mansfield deals most thoroughly with difficulties of fellow feeling in a familial context, guiding her reader through the daily life of a multigenerational household. In their notable use of shifting focalisation, Prelude and ‘At the bay’ represent the height of Mansfield’s contribution to modernist structures of fellow feeling. They form a collective stream of consciousness that rivals the empathic achievement of Richardson’s singular one.

Private women Prelude is a partially autobiographical story that follows a late nineteenth-century New Zealand family, the Burnells, during the first wave of suburban expansion in Wellington. It was the death of Mansfield’s brother in France, where he served the British cause in World War I, that prompted her to write this story about her native country. After her brother’s death, Mansfield began working in earnest on The Aloe, the novel in progress that she would later shorten and publish as Prelude at Leonard and Virginia Woolf’s Hogarth Press. Vincent O’Sullivan argues that the composition of The Aloe was driven by Mansfield’s belief that

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human minds are opaque to each other. Mansfield derived this belief, he claims, at least in part from reading Walter Pater’s The Child in the House years earlier. O’Sullivan writes, [Mansfield] shared with Pater the feeling that one is only peripherally, as it were, in relation to other minds. The sense of ‘mystery’ in so much of Mansfield’s work is the intensity of one mind’s perceiving freshly, crossed with that different, disconcerting sense that others, however vivid to themselves, exist remotely. (O’Sullivan 1983: 9)

This Paterian undercurrent in Prelude is a reckoning with the conceptual problem of other minds. Mansfield’s text asks if remote minds can become ‘vivid’ for each other, or if they must always remain in murky isolation. It is certainly true that the three central female characters – Linda Burnell, her sister Beryl Fairfield and her daughter Kezia Burnell – all appear before the reader in states of psychological isolation. Linda is emotionally distant from the opening sentences onward. As the jumbled scene outside the old Burnell home takes shape, she emerges as an unattached figure, ‘Linda Burnell’. Meanwhile, her mother, Mrs Fairfield, is simply ‘the grandmother’. The older woman is thus introduced, unlike Linda, in relation to the young Kezia and Lottie, who anxiously watch their mother as she exclaims that the girls must stay behind so her material ‘necessities’ can come with her. Yet it is the distant Linda whose thoughts first manifest on the page as she looks at her furniture turned upside down on the lawn: ‘How absurd they looked! Either they ought to be the other way up, or Lottie and Kezia ought to stand on their heads, too. And she longed to say: “Stand on your heads, children, and wait for the storeman”’ (CFKM-II 57). Linda’s thoughts here reverse Lippsian and Titchenerian empathy, in which the in-feeler fills an inanimate object with human feeling – among other things, Titchener understands empathy as the ‘process of humanising objects’ (TBP 417 note 1). Unlike Richardson’s Miriam, Linda does not fill up the world with her overflowing interior. Rather, she conceives her children as objects devoid of feeling. For Linda, the members of her family are at best shadowy presences, as when she watches the ‘remote’ Stanley and Beryl playing cribbage (CFKM-II 85). She comes across as remote in return, which Beryl confirms in a letter to her friend Nan: ‘What Linda thinks about the whole affair, per usual, I haven’t the slightest idea. Mysterious as ever . . . ’ (CFKM-II 89). In a rejection of the Victorian ‘angel of the house’ role, Linda spends most of her time trying to ignore her co-inhabitants. When Kezia and Lottie finally arrive in the new house, for example, Linda

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­108    Empathy and the Psychology of Literary Modernism does not ‘even open her eyes to see’ (CFKM-II 62). It is clear in Prelude that she does not have what Scheler understood to be the ‘maternal instinct’, which he describes as a desire to draw the child back ‘into the protecting womb’ (NS 27). Nor does she display much of what Scheler would call maternal love, the counterbalance to maternal instinct that looks upon the child ‘as an independent being’ (NS 27). We learn as she daydreams in ‘At the bay’ that having to bear children is her ‘grudge against life’ (CFKM-II 355). Linda knows how shocking these private thoughts would be to others. As she says to her infant son, ‘Why do you keep on smiling? [. . .] If you knew what I was thinking about, you wouldn’t’ (CFKM-II 355). In spite of these thoughts, Linda is not an unsympathetic figure. As we learn more about her private world, it is hard to begrudge her the distance she maintains. Bearing child after child against her own will, unable to protect her body from sexual invasion and forced reproductive labour, she fortifies her mental life against incursions from the minds that crowd her home. But of course that mental life is not safe from Mansfield’s reader. Mansfield manages to treat Linda as both the distant Mrs Burnell who maintains an emotional and psychological distance from those around her and as a rich, accessible interior space into which the reader can feel. We observe Linda from the outside as a body that hides and distances her interiority, but we also see with her as the text pulls us into her sleeping and waking dreams. Mansfield’s text, and the reader along with it, feels its way into Linda’s mind by moving from the loud, natural world that surrounds the house into a dream that reflects that world: And then at the first beam of sun the birds began. Big cheeky birds, starlings and mynahs, whistled on the lawns, the little birds, the goldfinches and linnets and fan-tails flicked from bough to bough. A lovely kingfisher perched on the paddock fence preening his rich beauty, and a tui sang his three notes and laughed and sang them again. ‘How loud the birds are’, said Linda in her dream. She was walking with her father through a green paddock sprinkled with daisies. (CFKM-II 66)

Here, we go quickly from impersonal narration of the scene outside, where the birds are chirping, to the ‘scene’ inside of Linda, where the birds are also chirping. This mirroring allows us to see the rest of the Burnell family from Linda’s perspective. Once we get into her dream and see her metaphorised anxieties, we also see the waking world from her point of view. In the dream, Linda picks up a baby bird that grows into a grotesque human baby in her arms, with ‘a big naked head and a gaping bird-mouth, opening and shutting’ (CFKM-II 66). Even after she wakes up, the text shows us how she sees her family as grotesque animals – as

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she looks on from bed in the morning, she sees Stanley, ‘bending and squatting like a frog shooting out his legs’ (CFKM-II 66). Linda’s daughter Kezia is the second mind we glimpse in Prelude. As Linda drives off to the new home, leaving Kezia and Lottie temporarily with the neighbours, we follow the abandoned Kezia into the Samuel Josephs’ home. Like her mother’s perspective, however, Kezia’s point of view is never completely available. In fact, she tries desperately to prevent others from gaining knowledge of her interiority. She works to block the kind of mind-reading that Scheler allows is possible when he writes, ‘We can thus have insight into others, in so far as we treat their bodies as a field of expression for their experiences’ (NS 10). As Kezia eats her bread while the young Samuel Josephs mock her, we read, ‘With the bite out it made a dear little sort of gate. Pooh! She didn’t care! A tear rolled down her cheek, but she wasn’t crying’ (CFKM-II 58). Despite her determination not to cry, Kezia does cry, and in so doing gives us a wonderful image of emotional privacy: ‘She sat with her head bent, and as the tear dripped slowly down, she caught it with a neat little whisk of her tongue and ate it before any of them had seen’ (CFKM-II 58). A traditional reading of the sympathetic processes at play here would say Kezia hides the symptoms of the body that allow inference by analogy: the young Samuel Josephs, knowing that they cry when they are sad, would be able to infer that Kezia is sad if they saw her tears. But while Scheler calls the body a field of expression, he is adamant that sympathy does not work by way of inference or a conscious act of reading. He argues, But that ‘experiences’ occur there [inside of other people] is given for us in expressive phenomena – again, not by inference, but directly, as a sort of primary ‘perception’. It is in the blush that we perceive shame, in laughter joy. To say that ‘our only initial datum is the body’ is completely erroneous. This is true only for the doctor or the scientist. (NS 10)

Scheler wants to break with the tradition of Adam Smith and John Stuart Mill by arguing that our knowledge of other hearts and minds does not come to us consciously. Unsurprisingly, he does not note that this belief puts him in agreement with Lipps, who believes empathy happens instantaneously as we look at others.7 What is most important in the context of Prelude is that Kezia, a small child, is already aware that if she wants to maintain her privacy, she must not let others observe the outward manifestations of her emotions. But, like her mother, she cannot hide it from the reader. As Kezia whisks away her rolling tear, we breach what Scheler calls ‘the sphere of absolute personal privacy’, the interior space that in the real world ‘can never be given to us’ (NS 10).

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­110    Empathy and the Psychology of Literary Modernism We find ourselves thinking with Kezia during the brief moment of free indirect discourse when Kezia and the narrative voice combine to tell us ‘A tear rolled down her cheek, but she wasn’t crying’. Here, we get an empathic glimpse of the tone and content of her stream of consciousness. In Linda’s sister Beryl we find yet another example of female solitude. What makes Beryl fascinating is the way she understands her own isolation, through a process of self-aestheticisation and self-objectification. Beryl is ready to imagine herself as an object that others would like to observe and ‘feel into’ psychologically. Bored and lonely, she constantly imagines a perspective outside of herself from which to analyse her own body and manner. We see this self-produced double gaze in Beryl’s musings as she plays her guitar and imagines how she would appear to another: She played and sang half to herself, for she was watching herself playing and singing. The firelight gleamed on her shoes, on the ruddy belly of the guitar, and on her white fingers . . . ‘If I were outside the window and looked in and saw myself I really would be rather struck’, thought she. Still more softly she played the accompaniment – not singing now but listening . . . ‘The first time that I ever saw you, little girl – oh, you had no idea that you were not alone – you were sitting with your little feet upon a hassock, playing the guitar. God, I can never forget . . .’. (CFKM-II 77)

Beryl’s self-viewing from an imagined outside vantage point is a practice that Prelude implicitly critiques by letting us in on her thought process and revealing to us the male voice that she invokes when thinking about herself.8 Beryl, after playing her guitar, thinks, ‘How beautiful she looked, but there was nobody to see, nobody’ (CFKM-II 77). What is most interesting, however, is the way Beryl posits her imagined male viewer: he thinks about what she might be thinking about, wonders if she knows he is watching, and concludes that she is thinking only of her music. In her fantasy, that is, she is the kind of person whose body does not betray the contents of her mind. The Beryl of her imagination looks like somebody who does not bother to wonder who might be watching her. The actual Beryl wonders about little else. Yet Beryl herself brings up some interesting questions about who the actual Beryl is. In her letter to her friend Nan, where we find the only instance of sustained first person utterance in Prelude, Beryl carefully crafts the voice that she believes Nan will find most sympathetic. Reading along as Beryl composes her letter, we soon learn that she thinks her first-person voice is inherently false: Beryl sat writing this letter at a little table in her room. In a way, of course, it was all perfectly true, but in another way it was all the greatest rubbish and

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Communities of Feeling in Katherine Mansfield’s Fiction    ­111 she didn’t believe a word of it. No, that wasn’t true. She felt all those things, but she didn’t really feel them like that. It was her other self who had written that letter. It not only bored, it rather disgusted her real self. (CFKM-II 89)

Beryl’s ‘real self’, which echoes the ‘secret selves’ of ‘Psychology’, is the one who looks in at herself to imagine how others see her, the one who imagines and projects a self that she believes they want to see. The created self, she believes, is necessary for her social survival – it must serve as a screen that hides her real self: ‘If she had been her real self with Nan Pym, Nannie would have jumped out of the window with surprise’ (CFKM-II 90). Beryl’s belief in the power of her own crafted image, along with her profound self-centredness, elicits an interpretation of Prelude as a survey of solipsistic individual minds who happen to share a home. Kokot, for example, writes, In ‘Prelude’ and ‘At the Bay’ a whole spectrum of points of view is presented – the result being an incongruous mosaic of incompatible versions of reality that do not complement but rather exclude one another. Not only are these world visions incompatible, but they also seem independent, none being influenced or modified by anyone else’s. Indeed, a very important aspect of Mansfield’s world is the isolation of the individual. (Kokot 2011: 71)

Despite the psychological distance between characters that marks many of her stories, however, we should keep in mind that Mansfield did not adhere strictly to an atomised view of life. Her review of May Sinclair’s Mary Oliver: A Life, for example, criticised the book precisely for being an example of a new kind of literature whose aim ‘is to represent things and persons as separate, as distinct, as apart as possible’ (Mansfield 1930: 41). While I agree that the isolation of the individual is deeply important in Mansfield’s oeuvre, I object to the idea that the minds of the Burnell stories do not complement each other. Her characters in Prelude may feel like they are ‘as apart as possible’, but in fact they are inseparable and indistinct. Although they may not have much sympathy for each other in the traditional, moral sense, they are inherently complementary, woven together in a tapestry of fellow feeling.

Like so many views seen through bright glass What is primarily missing in the account of Prelude as a collection of incompatible subjective realities is a realm of experience between the individual and the outside world – that is, family life. In fact, by cycling through the eyes of all the Burnells, the reader is able to compose what

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­112    Empathy and the Psychology of Literary Modernism each character cannot see objectively: her life in relation to others. According to Scheler, we do not begin our lives in a state of estrangement from others; rather, we begin ‘feeling’ with our family members. He writes, The ideas, feelings and tendencies which govern the life of a child [. . .] are initially confined entirely to those of his immediate environment, his parents and relatives [. . .] Imbued as he is with ‘family feeling’, his own life is at first almost completely hidden from him [. . .] Only very slowly does he raise his mental head, as it were, above the stream floating over it, and find himself as a being who also, at times, has feelings, ideas, and tendencies of his own. (NS 247)

Prelude shows Kezia in the process of raising her ‘mental head’ and establishing her own current in the river of Burnell family life. This process becomes clear not only in the small hints of Kezia’s rebelliousness, but also in the way she processes certain sensory data differently than other people in the family do. What Kezia perceives vividly at one moment, the reader gets to see from a new, sometimes contradictory, perspective the next moment. As she lies awake in bed, for example, Kezia hears ‘Aunt Beryl’s rush of high laughter’, and ‘a loud trumpeting from Burnell blowing his nose’ (CFKM-II 64). Looking out the window of her new, unfamiliar bedroom, she sees ‘hundreds of black cats with yellow eyes [sitting] in the sky watching her’ (CFKM-II 64). We soon discover, however, that Kezia’s audio-visual reality is significantly shaped by misunderstanding and imagination. The source of the loud trumpeting is not her father, but the adenoidal housemaid, Alice. The laughter comes not from Beryl, but rather from an animal that makes a ‘ha-ha-ha’ noise in the bush. Not surprisingly, there are no cats in the sky – what Kezia sees are the reflective eyes of owls sitting in the tree outside her window (CFKM-II 65). Certainly, Kezia’s misperception reveals that she is, in many ways, psychologically separate from the other Burnells. I would argue, however, that this sequence does not simply show minds in isolation, but also suggests that human interiority is intrinsically networked. Kezia feels herself connected to Beryl and Stanley – her first thoughts, even if mistaken, are of them. Her inclination is to interpret the world in relation to her family circle, her first community of feeling. Here in the Burnell stories Mansfield creates a ‘family feeling’ that is rich and deep, what we might understand as a collective stream of consciousness. Even if the individual eddies and currents within that stream differ, they are nevertheless representative of minds that are thinking and feeling together. Mansfield shows us this collective stream of consciousness by

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refining the method of shifting focalisation that was so important to the nineteenth-century novel. Prelude is perhaps the modernist example par excellence of shifting focalisation, condensing into a few dozen pages what writers like Joyce and Woolf only managed to do in the long form of the novel. O’Sullivan provides a summary of the story’s structure that is fairly representative of Mansfield scholarship: ‘Various minds in turn are entered into, then drawn back from. Anything like “reality” is in how they converge, drift apart, lose touch, come back’ (O’Sullivan 1983: 9). Accordingly, one of the most remarked-upon passages in Prelude, in which Kezia looks out at the world from a window, is a clear analogue for the text as a whole: The dining room window had a square of coloured glass at each corner. One was blue and one was yellow. Kezia bent down to have one more look at a blue lawn with blue arum lilies growing at the gate, and then at a yellow lawn with yellow lilies and a yellow fence. As she looked a little Chinese Lottie came out on to the lawn and began to dust the tables and chairs with a corner of her pinafore. Was that really Lottie? Kezia was not quite sure until she had looked through the ordinary window. (CFKM-II 59)

Tellingly, this particular passage is not in the earlier, longer version of the story, The Aloe.9 It effectively acts as a guide to the newer, pareddown version. As Kaplan explains, the most noticeable difference between the two texts is the way the author’s voice is cut away from Prelude (Kaplan 1991: 113). Without the original third-person narrative filler, our experience of Prelude is a continually disorienting look through various ‘colours’. Throughout the story we see Kezia through a number of narrative glasses, or focalisations: those of her mother, her father, her aunt and herself. Each character’s perspective acts as what Seymour Chatman calls a ‘filter’ (Bortolussi and Dixon 2003: 170). What Kezia is really coming to understand as Prelude unfolds is the fact that her mind is not a clear pane of glass, but rather one of many in a large mosaic that she cannot step back from to see fully. But neither can the reader look at the entire family from one objective point of view. In fact, we never see the world ‘unfiltered’ in Prelude. Each point of view is inherently subjective. Kokot agrees that there is no ‘ordinary’ window, explaining, ‘a character’s vision of the world does not come across as a deformation of what “really” exists – but the shape of reality has a quasi-solipsistic dependence upon the observer, as the factual and the imagined attain some equivalence’ (Kokot 2011: 70). Mansfield’s method here clearly aligns with some of Ford Madox Ford’s contemporaneous thoughts on literary impressionism. He wrote, for example, ‘I suppose that Impressionism exists to render those queer effects of

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­114    Empathy and the Psychology of Literary Modernism real life that are like so many views seen through bright glass’ (Ford 1913: 41). By abandoning the colourless glass of the objective observer, Mansfield is better able to represent those queer, subjective effects. No ordinary view exists, but through a layering of all the filters, which is completed by the reader’s constantly shifting gaze, the full mosaic starts to emerge. Our experience reading the Burnell family stream of consciousness, which necessitates moving from one to another, never lingering in a particular mind, is not one that allows complete investment in any particular ‘I’. No individual mind, in our readerly experience, is always ‘awake’ to consciously process the world. In the context of Prelude, each ‘I’ is only occasionally self-aware. Notably, this facet of Mansfield’s text relates to Titchener’s understanding of what it is to be a thinking, feeling ‘I’: It is often said, in the psychological text-books, that a conscious self forms the permanent background of consciousness [. . .] In the author’s experience, the conscious self, while it can always be constructed by a voluntary effort, is of comparatively rare occurrence [. . .] In a word, the mental life, as the author has lived it, is very intermittently personal. The conscious self appears as a casual visitant in various contexts; oftenest, perhaps, in connection with the feeling of loneliness; but this feeling is itself, in the experience of the civilised adult, no more than occasional. (TBP 545)

Such a belief that the conscious self is intermittent might explain why we encounter internal character thoughts only in ‘flashes’ in Mansfield’s stories. It may be that a conscious ‘I’ only surfaces occasionally in the experience of each person. If so, it would mean that a large part of mental life is experienced outside the limits of self-awareness. That, in turn, would mean that our subjective understanding of the world becomes less important. Considering Mansfield in this light, it becomes easy to see why she found the never-ending singular focus of Pilgrimage uncompelling. If there is no stable, omnipresent ‘I’, it may be that we cannot represent minds accurately without rendering them as part of a ‘we’. Mansfield’s ‘we’, I want to insist again, is not just a collection of separate ‘I’s. No particular subjective thread of narrative would make sense if pulled out of Prelude. The cognitive alignment that we experience with each character in turn means little on its own, for there is no ‘I’ here, only ‘we’. In order for the reader to understand or feel anything, characters must be captured ‘feeling with’ each other. Mansfield’s story thus illustrates a point that Scheler argues in his discussion of the problem of other minds:

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Communities of Feeling in Katherine Mansfield’s Fiction    ­115 the essential character of human consciousness is such that the community is in some sense implicit in every individual, and that man is not only part of society, but that society and the social bond are an essential part of himself; that not only is the ‘I’ a member of the ‘We’, but also that the ‘We’ is a necessary member of the ‘I’. (NS 229–30)

One place where this ‘we’ shows up clearly is in the thoughts and anxieties that tie together the seemingly separate Linda and Kezia. Although Linda is both emotionally and psychologically distant from her children, she shares with her daughter a peculiar fear of ‘rushing things’ (CFKMII 61, 87). For both Kezia and Linda, intimacy with other bodies and minds can be burdensome and distressing. Both suffer from paranoid fears that they are being watched, Kezia by something called IT (CFKMII 59), and Linda by an equally sinister THEY (CFKM-II 68). These connecting thoughts reveal that despite their apparent inner solitude, both are still participating in a mental life that exceeds their own conscious minds. Put another way, the fringe areas of their minds overlap, as William James might say. Operating outside the strictures of mind-body dualism, they participate in the same pure experience.10

Conclusion: the integral whole To close my reading of Prelude, I would like to suggest that Linda and Kezia, along with the rest of their family, are indeed watched by an IT – the narrative agent. As O’Sullivan argues, the presence of this narrative agent becomes less apparent between The Aloe, which has much more third-person commentary, and Prelude. Yet it remains as a pervasive ghost, weaving all the members of the Burnell household together. This narrative IT replaces the bogeyman that Kezia fears in The Aloe – a thing, in Kezia’s mind, known to turn ‘round and round’ and hang in the air (CFKM-I 473). In Prelude there is surely something that winds its way through the Burnell house, hanging in the air, occasionally entering a family member. The IT feels its way into each character, taking us through each filter of consciousness in turn, allowing the family stream of consciousness to manifest on the page. This ghostly presence, which can move from mind to mind, from body to body, puts on the page what Scheler calls integral wholes: Our immediate perceptions of our fellow-men do not relate to their bodies [. . .] nor yet to their ‘selves’ or ‘souls’. What we perceive are integral wholes, whose intuitive content is not immediately resolved in terms of external or internal perception. (NS 261)

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­116    Empathy and the Psychology of Literary Modernism Clearly, the mental content of each Burnell is not immediately resolved in terms of internal or external perception. When we see a floating cat through Kezia’s eyes, the ghostly narrative agent quietly revisits the scene to show us owls sitting in a tree. Taken as a whole, Prelude shows all the members of the Burnell family feeling together, even if they are not feeling for each other. Furthermore, it allows us to travel in their family stream of ­consciousness – while we read, we ‘think with’ the family as a collective unit.11 Despite the feelings of isolation that each character experiences, Prelude may ultimately be one of the most optimistically empathic texts in the modernist canon. Indeed, it ameliorates many of the failures of empathy that we see play out in Mansfield’s other fiction. By using Alice’s point of view as a corrective to Beryl’s self-centred imaginative thoughts, it takes us where Laura realises she cannot go in ‘The garden party’. By bringing us into Linda’s dreams and making the reasons for her lack of fellow feeling clear, it opens up the mental ‘portmanteaux’ that Raoul refuses to acknowledge in ‘Je ne parle pas français …’. And by leaving the connective work to the narrative agent and the reader, it frees its characters from the dangerous presumption of empathic experience that we see in ‘Psychology’. Such presumption is at the centre of my next chapter. If Mansfield’s collective stream of consciousness in Prelude offers us a reprieve from epistemological anxiety, Ford introduces us to a full-blown epistemological crisis with one of literary modernism’s most studied narrators – John Dowell of The Good Soldier. As a first-person narrator, Dowell has no ghostly IT to link him to other minds and weave his story for him. Empathy, if any is to be found in Ford’s novel, will come from Dowell himself. As we will see, it is precisely his desire to experience empathy that drives his troubled efforts to gather ‘so many views seen through bright glass’ (Ford 1913: 41).

Notes  1. The work of Sydney Janet Kaplan, Gerri Kimber, Janet Wilson, Clare Hanson and Vincent O’Sullivan has been especially helpful in securing Mansfield’s place since the late 1980s. Also foundational in Mansfield studies is the biographical work of Antony Alpers and Claire Tomalin.  2. As Antony Alpers points out, there might be reason to doubt that ‘The tiredness of Rosabel’ was actually completed in 1908. Rosabel’s anachronistic thoughts about the escalator at the Earls Court underground station, which was not installed until 1911, are certainly troubling. The date on the typescript is in pencil, which might prompt further doubts. Alpers, however, accepted the date after inspecting the typescript and judging the

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Communities of Feeling in Katherine Mansfield’s Fiction    ­117 handwriting to be consistent with Mansfield’s 1908 hand (Alpers 1984: 546).   3. See Chapter 2 (71) and EAP 403.  4. Such class resentment shows up in a number of Mansfield’s stories. See CFKM-II 84.   5. Unfortunately, Scheler’s efforts don’t always provide clarity, partly because he uses a frustrating vocabulary that does not remain consistent. For example, in some passages he will sharply separate the concepts of identification and sympathy (NS 23), while in others he lists identification as one of many ‘grades of sympathy’ (NS 232).   6. Here Mansfield is writing about The House of Courage, by Jessie Louisa Rickard.   7. See Chapter 2 (74) and Jahoda (2005: 156).  8. This critique anticipates later twentieth-century theories about the selfimposed ‘male’ gaze on the female body. See Berger (1972).   9. Kezia does look through the window at Lottie in The Aloe, but there are no coloured panes of glass (CFKM-I 473). 10. See Chapter 1 (55). 11. See Tratner (1995: 4) for an overview of related arguments about other modernist texts.

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Chapter 4

Empathy and Violence in the Works of Ford Madox Ford

In the early months of World War I, Ford Madox Ford wrote in one of his ‘Literary portraits’ for Outlook, we are fighting to answer the question whether it is right to thank God for the deaths of a million fellow-beings. Is it then right? Is it then wrong? I don’t know. I know nothing anymore; nobody knows anything. We are down in the mud of the trenches of right and wrong, grappling with each other’s throats, gouging out each other’s eyes. (Ford 2004: 211)

Seven months later, Ford was on his way to France as a second lieutenant in the British Army. There he would see first-hand the overwhelming violence of the Somme and the Ypres Salient. Readers familiar with Ford’s fiction will recognise his words here. They echo the continual claims to ‘know nothing’ that John Dowell makes as narrator of The Good Soldier, which was first released in its entirety in 1915, two months after the Outlook piece. This passage also repeats what is perhaps the most disturbing image in The Good Soldier, a work brimming with suicide, deception and psychological cruelty. Toward the novel’s end, Dowell considers his friends Edward, Leonora and Nancy and reflects, ‘I think that it would have been better in the eyes of God if they had all attempted to gouge out each other’s eyes with carving knives’ (GS 158). This striking image is at the psychological and emotional core of Ford’s modernism, which I read as a deeply ambivalent exploration of empathic thinking and feeling. In this chapter, I examine empathy in The Good Soldier (1915) and A Man Could Stand Up– (1926), the third volume of Ford’s Parade’s End tetralogy (1924–8).1 The influential empathy theories of Vernon Lee, Wilhelm Worringer and T. E. Hulme, which circulated in Ford’s pre-war social circle, help me consider how Ford participates in and enriches early twentieth-century discourses of fellow feeling. I am interested not only in Ford’s contribution as one of the guiding critical voices of liter-

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ary modernism, but also in what he adds as a veteran of World War I, a conflict that was understood as an unprecedented challenge to imagination and perspective sharing. What is particularly notable about Ford, I suggest, is the way his work incorporates, and perhaps even reconciles, competing notions of empathy in its attempts to represent psychological and physical violence.

Ford and the problem of other minds Throughout his career, Ford saw the cultivation of understanding between minds as central to his work. To be more precise, he was concerned with what since the eighteenth century had been known as ‘sympathetic imagination’. In his exhaustive literary biography of Ford, Max Saunders calls sympathetic imagination ‘Ford’s most important aesthetic doctrine’, explaining, ‘all his criticism rests on a broad sense of how art effects a “contact” between individuals; how “feeling with” or “feeling like” someone quite other militates against human isolation; how it enables knowledge, understanding, self-understanding’ (Saunders 1996: 400). In the early decades of the twentieth century, following the recent influx of German aesthetic theories of Einfühlung (‘feeling oneself into’), ‘sympathetic imagination’ was starting to split off from the larger umbrella of ‘sympathy’ and become ‘empathy’.2 Ford’s major works coincide with a flourishing of theories of empathy in England, a flourishing anticipated by the English Review, the modernist journal he founded and edited for fifteen months. In the first issue of the English Review, released in December 1908, he proclaimed in no uncertain terms that he wanted to publish and to publicise works that attempted to overcome gaps of understanding between people, writing, the principal aim of the ENGLISH REVIEW is by means of the literature which it prints and the literature to which it calls attention to ascertain where we stand and to aid in the comprehension of one kind of mind by another. (Ford 1908: 163)

Ford believed that the imaginative writer could ‘vicariously’ bring us into contact with other minds and assuage the ‘great danger of losing alike human knowledge and human sympathy’ that threatens modern man (Ford 1911: 67).3 What is truly important about great literature, in this philosophy, is that it exposes us to foreign consciousness and a diversity of perspectives. Yet Ford’s editorials throughout the run of the English Review make it clear that the imaginative writer cannot actually

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­120    Empathy and the Psychology of Literary Modernism step away from his own point of view: ‘His business is to register a truth as he sees it, and no more than Pilate can he, as a rule, see the truth as it is’ (ibid.: 102).4 This attention to subjective points of view is part of Ford’s literary impressionism, which was largely concerned with capturing what the world looks like to a particular mind. Jesse Matz has explained the goal of literary impressionism in liminal terms. ‘The literary Impressionists,’ he writes, ‘meant that fiction should locate itself where we “have an impression”: not in sense, nor in thought, but in the feeling that comes between’ (Matz 2001: 1). For Ford, who worked out his ideas with Joseph Conrad, impressionist values were largely about erasing another kind of in-betweenness: ‘we saw that Life did not narrate, but made impressions on our brains. We, in turn, if we wished to produce on you an effect of life, must not narrate but render . . . impressions’ (Ford 1924b: 72, 73). Ford’s insistence that life does not narrate is strikingly reminiscent of Dorothy Richardson’s desire that there should be nobody there to describe her protagonist. Like Richardson, Ford did not understand his ideas as a sharp break with recent, realist literary history. As David James explains, literary impressionism clearly carries forward the artistic values of novelists like Henry James and Thomas Hardy (D. James 2010: para. 9), two writers Ford admired immensely. Peter Brooker, discussing literary impressionism’s place in the modernist landscape, has even suggested that ‘we might view impressionism as a distinctive “realist-modernism”’ (Brooker 2007: 38). Along similar lines, Tamar Katz has written that theories of literary impressionism often spoke ‘in the name of a greater, more mimetic realism’ and Michael Levenson has called Ford’s impressionism in particular an ‘extreme realist proposition’ (Levenson 1991: 102; T. Katz 2000: 5). Indeed, Ford himself explained that impressionism is meant to render reality: ‘It seems to me that one is an Impressionist because one tries to produce an illusion of reality’ (Ford 1913: 43). We might also see in Ford’s words an echo of Richardson’s belief that a novel takes the reader on a tour of the writer’s mind. He writes, for example, ‘Probably this school differs from other schools, principally, in that it recognises, frankly, that all art must be the expression of an ego’ (ibid.: 34).5 We ought not, however, take Ford’s sentiments here as evidence that his method is solipsistic. Literary impressionism is valuable largely in that it stimulates sympathetic imagination or empathic thinking. Like many of his contemporaries in the early years of the twentieth century, however, Ford feared that comprehension between different kinds of people was growing more difficult with each passing year. By the third issue of the English Review, he was voicing concerns that ‘to be brought

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really into contact with our fellow men, to become intimately acquainted with the lives of those around us, this is a thing which grows daily more difficult in the complexities of modern life’ (Ford 1911: 66–7).6 Here he makes explicit the worries that were implicit in the fiction of his favoured writers. For example, James’s ‘The jolly corner’, which Ford published in the first issue of the English Review, centres on a man who returns to his native New York after decades in Europe to find that his countrymen are incomprehensible bodies moving through a city choked by commerce and threatening technology.7 Such anxieties are in line with contemporaneous discourse on aesthetic empathy, especially that of Vernon Lee,8 whose work Ford was familiar with. She was one of several female authors whom he featured in the pages of the English Review. In 1909 he published her story ‘The virgin of the seven daggers’ in the second and third numbers of the periodical. Additionally, many of the essays in her 1923 collection The Handling of Words and Other Studies in Psychology were originally published the English Review – though they appeared after Ford’s departure, he read and accepted them before leaving (Colby 2003: 281).

Aesthetic empathy in Britain One of the things that makes the concept of aesthetic empathy so congenial to modernist thought is the fact that it is understood to be already lost by the time it is recognised and defined, already ‘more difficult in the complexities of modern life’, as Ford would say. Lee, for example, saw empathy as a time-consuming act that many people resist in practice: ‘Any tendency to Empathy is perpetually being checked by the need for practical thinking’ (Lee 1913: 70). Empathy, as she implied in 1913, is difficult to experience if one’s life is dominated by the everyday demands of the twentieth-century world. When practical people look at a landscape, she tells us, ‘There is not much chance of Empathy and Empathy’s pleasures and pains in their lightning-speed, touch-and-go visions’ (ibid.: 71). In short, empathy requires an endangered frame of mind. Lee started developing her ideas on aesthetics with the help of Kit Anstruther-Thomson in the 1880s. As Carolyn Burdett explains, ‘The origins of empathy in Britain lie with these two Victorian women and their frequent visits to the galleries and churches of Italy (where Lee lived) and elsewhere in Britain and the continent’ (Burdett 2011: 265). Together they cultivated an aesthetic theory that was similar to Robert Vischer’s concept of Einfühlung and presented it in ‘Beauty and ugliness’, first published in 1897 in the Contemporary Review. Lee

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­122    Empathy and the Psychology of Literary Modernism would later revise her theories after receiving criticism from Theodor Lipps and reading his own volume from 1897, Raumästhetik (Gunn 1964: 158). The publication of Beauty and Ugliness and Other Studies in Psychological Aesthetics in 1912, followed by the release of The Beautiful: An Introduction to Psychological Aesthetics in 1913, brought significant attention to the process of in-feeling (Gettman 1968: xi). Burdett has argued that Lee’s understanding of empathy breaks with certain kinds of sympathy, particularly that which is related to sentiment, writing, ‘Lee’s model of looking is sharply distinguished from those associated with sentimental responses. Sentimental looking entails identification with narrative’ (Burdett 2011: 265). But Lee does see empathy as analogous to sympathetic imagination, which she calls moral sympathy. She explains that aesthetic empathy is similar to the process in which ‘we “put ourselves in the place” or, more vulgarly, “in the skin” of a fellow-creature [. . .] attributing to him the feelings we should have in similar circumstances’ (Lee 1912: 20).9 What is important to note is that, for Lee, this is not an act of attribution that happens from a distance, or at least not one that feels like it occurs across psychological distance. When we feel ourselves into other objects and people, we feel as if that distance has been bridged: ‘For we are inside them; we have “felt ourselves,” projected our own experience, into them’ (ibid.: 19). Like Vischer before her, Lee holds that when we see a mountain ‘rising’ in the distance, for example, we feel as if we ‘rise’ with it. Yet Lee warns us that the very name of Einfühlung and the idea of projection can be misleading, for the activity of ‘feeling oneself into’ a foreign object or person actually goes on within the so-called in-feeler (Lee 1907: 54–6). She denies that our ego actually joins the other in empathy, calling such a process of projection ‘quasi-mythological’ (Lee 1913: 67). For her, empathy depends upon a comparative or momentary abeyance of all thought of an ego; if we became aware that it is we who are thinking the rising, we who are feeling the rising, we should not think or feel that the mountain did the rising. (Ibid.)

What we feel in empathy is our own activity; we just don’t process it as such. As we empathise, we are allowed a momentary release from awareness of self: when we are engrossed by something outside ourselves, as we are engrossed in looking at the shape (for we can look at only the shape, not the substance) of that mountain we cease thinking about ourselves, and cease thinking about ourselves exactly in proportion as we are thinking of the mountain’s shape. (Ibid.: 62–3)

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Much like Lipps, Lee understands confusion to be a central aspect of empathic experience. Empathy, she explains, results in ‘the merging of the perceptive activities of the subject in the qualities of the object of perception’ (ibid.: 57, 63). Our acts of in-feeling thus tend to take our subjective experience and translate it as an ontological fact about an object. Such merging is what encourages us to say ‘this is beautiful’ rather than ‘I experience pleasure in viewing this landscape’ or ‘this smells nasty’ rather than ‘I smell something nasty’ (ibid.: 58). This process is something that Lee wants to separate from sympathy. In fact, she argues that empathy must happen first, before sympathy can take place: ‘What must be grasped by the student of Aesthetic Empathy is that there exists, for one reason or another, an act of attribution of our energies, activities, or feelings to the non-ego, an act necessarily preceding all sympathy’ (Lee 1907: 47). It is only after we have imagined that we are ‘feeling with’ another person that we can ‘feel for’ that person. Lee recognises both higher-order empathy, which enables mature aesthetic experience, and lower-order empathy, which is a natural part of our basic cognitive functioning. So while we might not experience the pleasure of feeling into beautiful objects on a regular basis, empathy nevertheless pervades our daily experience: ‘Empathy exists or tends to exist throughout our mental life. It is, indeed, one of our simpler, though far from absolutely elementary, psychological processes’ (Lee 1913: 68). We process the world we see, according to Lee, through unconscious acts of in-feeling. This simplicity and pervasiveness means that empathy is hidden in plain sight. As Lee explains it, ‘if Empathy is so recent a discovery, this may be due to its being part and parcel of our thinking; so that we are surprised to learn its existence, as Molière’s good man was to hear that he talked prose’ (ibid.: 69). Encouraged by her visits to Oswald’s Külpe’s psychological laboratory in Bonn, Lee hoped that the developing field of experimental psychology would be able to figure out how empathy worked in our everyday mental life (Lee 1911: vii). But some of Lee’s contemporaries wanted to question the idea that empathy is our natural mode of aesthetic engagement, particularly Wilhelm Worringer and T. E. Hulme. The role Hulme played is particularly important for those looking to expand the intellectual framework in which modernism is understood. As Edward P. Comentale and Andrzej Gasiorek have argued, Hulme’s work ‘provides an engaged model for all recent efforts to theorize the uneven terrain of modernity’ (Comentale and Gasiorek 2006: 5). This is certainly true where empathy is concerned – Hulme’s take on Worringer complicated the developing discourse on empathy in Britain, introducing productive tensions from the very start. Less than a year after Lee published The Beautiful, Hulme made another

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­124    Empathy and the Psychology of Literary Modernism significant contribution to British knowledge of Einfühlung. On 22 January 1914 he delivered a lecture to the Quest Society in London that was derived from his understanding of Worringer’s work on empathy (Hulme 1936: 75 note 1). Worringer’s 1906 doctoral thesis, published as Abstraction and Empathy: A Contribution to the Psychology of Style in 1908, is an important chapter in the history of empathy. It reveals the long presence of twentieth-century scepticism about empathy’s benefits. Hulme heard Worringer lecture and spoke with him at the 1912 Berlin Congress of Aesthetics (Jones 1960: 1). The ideas introduced to the Quest Society in 1914 were, in Hulme’s own words, ‘practically an abstract of Worringer’s views’ (Hulme 1936: 82). The talk Hulme gave that night showed London’s avant-garde literary scene the potential that empathic thinking had in a post-realism context. Wyndham Lewis and Ezra Pound, two of Ford’s English Review-era protégés, were in attendance at the talk (Oliver 2001: 91), on which Pound later wrote a review piece. Worringer’s ideas started to creep into modernist literary discourse after 1914, as Elisabeth Oliver suggests, ‘second hand through Hulme and Kandinsky or trickled down through Pound, Lewis and Eliot’ (ibid.: 105). Like Worringer before him, Hulme understood empathy and abstraction as competing forces. Both men claimed that realism operated through empathy and depended on a desire to project one’s ego into external objects. Hulme sums it up by saying that in empathic aesthetic enjoyment, ‘any work of art we find beautiful is an objectification of our own pleasure in activity, and our own vitality. The worth of a line or form consists in the value of the life which it contains for us’ (Hulme 1936: 85). It is important to note here that Worringer and Hulme, unlike Lee, are not interested in the difference between sympathy and empathy. They focus instead on the difference between empathy as the urge to ‘feel into’ and abstraction as the urge to ‘push away’. This broad understanding of empathy, in a British historical and linguistic context, should more properly be called ‘fellow feeling’ and should include sympathy. These seemingly superficial semantic differences matter because they highlight two competing narratives of modernism. The first narrative understands modernism as a break with fellow feeling writ large, a turn towards abstraction. The second narrative sees modernism as a reinvestment in the ideal of fellow feeling, a further turn within. I have taken pains in the earlier chapters of this book to uncover parts of that second narrative, particularly the ways in which modernist writers reject sympathetic fellow feeling and seek a more radical empathic fellow feeling. Yet it is a clear, and well-established, fact that abstraction plays a major role in the developments of modernist literature.

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Worringer hinted that abstract art might have promise in the contemporary West, but his thesis did not address twentieth-century art. Hulme, however, directly addressed the ‘new’ abstraction that was developing in the wake of realism: a new geometrical art is emerging which may be considered as different in kind from the art which preceded it, it being much more akin to the geometrical arts of the past [. . .] this change from a vital to a geometrical art is the product of and will be accompanied by a certain change of sensibility, a certain change of general attitude [. . .] (Hulme 1936: 91)

Predictably, this suggestion of a break with the recent past excited Pound. In his review of the Quest Society talk, he announced, ‘Realism in literature has had its run [. . .] We have heard all that the “realists” have to say’ (Pound 1914: 68). As Joseph A. Buttigieg argues, Worringer’s thoughts about the urge to abstraction were readily accepted by early modernists, who ‘considered distancing a crucial feature of their aesthetics’ (Buttigieg 1979: 362). Wyndham Lewis, too, would have found much to his liking in Hulme’s interpretation of Worringer, which yoked the geometrical forms of machinery to those found in archaic art (Hansen 1980: 372). Certainly, Lewis’s manifesto in the first issue of Blast famously celebrates artistic approaches that reach back to a ‘savage’ past. In that piece, he proclaims, ‘The Art- Instinct is permanently primitive’ and ‘The artist of the modern movement is a savage [. . .] this enormous jangling, journalistic, fairy desert of modern life serves him as Nature did more technically primitive men’ (Lewis 1914: 33). Simply put, the message that emerges from Worringer’s and Hulme’s work is that abstraction, not empathy, helps the modern artist conceive the world around him. What a reading of Ford’s work shows us, however, is that empathy and abstraction can work together in modernist literature. Lewis’s inaugural issue of Blast famously featured the opening chapters of Ford’s The Good Soldier, listed under its original title, The Saddest Story. This might seem like an unlikely place for Ford’s Edwardian tale of love and deceit. As Peter Nicholls points out, Ford’s novel is clearly ‘outside Lewis’s own conception of the modernist avantgarde’ (Nicholls 1995: 182). Indeed, The Saddest Story seems at first to clash with its surroundings, particularly with the Vorticist drawings by Frederick Etchells that appear alongside Ford’s text. Yet part of the appeal of avant-garde art like Etchells’s work was its potential to take the self out of the self and get the kind of vicarious experience that Ford valued. In the experimental work of turn-of-the-century writers and visual artists alike, there manifested a longing to escape the confines of personal vision. In an article published in 1910, for example, C. Lewis

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­126    Empathy and the Psychology of Literary Modernism Hind described for readers the desire of the new forms of visual art: ‘to see, to draw, to paint with unspoiled eyes, to observe things fundamentally as they were seen by unsophisticated, primitive men; to approach an object with the heart of a child’ (Hind 1910: 181). A century later, our instinct is to frown upon such romantic notions of unspoiled peoples and condemn presumptions that the ‘primitive’ worldview is unsophisticated. But Hind’s words reveal how deep the desire to experience other minds remained even as artistic forms underwent revolutionary changes. This act of taking the self out of the self is both abstract and empathic, requiring both a ‘pushing away’ and a ‘feeling into’. What Worringer and Hulme did not foresee was that many writers would keep trying to feel into other minds in the twentieth century. With the benefit of hindsight we know that for many modernist writers the move away from realism demanded an even deeper inward turn that both disabled and enabled the reader’s ego. In The Good Soldier, for example, acts of empathy actually have an abstracting effect on other minds. When the urge to empathise is satisfied in that book, the result is a violent linguistic breakdown that fractures minds and the connections between them.

Sounding the heart In order to tell his ‘saddest story’ in The Good Soldier, John Dowell treats his act of writing as an imagined conversation, saying, ‘So I shall just imagine myself for a fortnight or so at one side of the fireplace of a country cottage, with a sympathetic soul opposite me’ (GS 15). Certainly, his story is one that might easily inspire the form of sympathy that resembles tender-hearted pity, but it also requires a listener who is disposed to employ sympathetic imagination. Here, Dowell imagines the ideal listener that Ford argues must be implied for every writer in ‘On impressionism’: ‘Let us now consider the audience to which the artist should address himself [. . .] he must typify for himself a human soul in sympathy with his own; a silent listener who will be attentive to him’ (Ford 1913: 48). Indeed, Dowell’s storytelling approach often takes recognisably impressionist cues; as Michael Levenson has noted, Dowell is ‘an instance, and to an extent a theorist, of literary Impressionist doctrine’ who conforms to Ford’s principles and defends them in Fordian terms (Levenson 1991: 111). But unlike Ford, Dowell is a new writer; his struggles dramatise the inherent difficulties of the impressionist proposition. Dowell’s solitude and loneliness at the novel’s start emphasise the difficulty of creating a written account that can be ‘heard’ – we will find

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out at the novel’s end that Dowell is alone in the Ashburnham mansion save Nancy, who has gone mad and is incapable of any form of fellow feeling. Nancy ends up unaware of her surroundings; she is beyond communication, beyond listening and beyond the possibility of forming the kind of I-you relationship that facilitates cognitive role taking. Thus his attempts to proceed by way of a beginner’s literary impressionism are met with complications from beginning to end. Dowell, retelling a story that spans the early years of the new century, returns again and again to his trusty refrain, ‘I know nothing’. In particular, he claims to know nothing of the human heart. Dowell’s fundamental task is to recount the adulterous love affair of Ashburnham and Florence, who pretend to have heart conditions in order to facilitate their decade-long liaison. But ‘heart’, for our narrator, is nothing less than interiority itself. To get beyond the ‘false’ story he lived and get to a ‘true’ story that can be told, Dowell must somehow breach the isolated hearts of others. As Sally Bachner explains, in The Good Soldier, ‘The inaccessibility of the human heart [. . .] is the central obstacle to epistemological success’ (Bachner 2003: 104). The epistemological problem Bachner points out overwhelms Dowell. Crushed by his inability to escape his own limited perspective, he suffers what Vita Fortunati has called ‘epistemological malaise’ (Fortunati 2003: 279).10 By the novel’s end, he finds the traditional treatment for that solipsistic ailment – ­imagining himself in the position of the other – but leaves us asking if the cure is worse than the disease. In Dowell’s narrative endeavours we see that empathy is afflicted by what Perry Meisel identifies as a dilemma central to modernism: ‘what enables also wounds, what empowers also makes for anxiety’ (Meisel 1987: 5). At his story’s opening, Dowell immediately posits the ‘heart’ of another as something that resists knowledge, but initially attributes this resistance to differences of nationality: My wife and I knew Captain and Mrs Ashburnham as well as it was possible to know anybody, and yet, in another sense, we knew nothing at all about them. This is, I believe, a state of things only possible with English people of whom, till today, when I sit down to puzzle out what I know of this sad affair, I knew nothing whatever. Six months ago I had never been to England, and, certainly, I had never sounded the depths of an English heart. I had known the shallows. (GS 9)11

In the case of The Good Soldier, it soon becomes clear that any heart whose depths Dowell tries to ‘sound’ will prove resistant to his efforts. For him, what marks the difference between exploring the ‘the shallows’ and ‘the depths’ of a heart is the act of narrating. We should note

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­128    Empathy and the Psychology of Literary Modernism that Dowell makes no claim to knowledge of those depths – he soon exclaims, ‘I know nothing – nothing in the world – of the hearts of men’ (GS 12). His nautical treatment of ‘heart’, an initially jarring mixed metaphor, is in fact a wonderfully apt way of considering modernist ideas about representing interiority. The act of sounding provides information about what is hidden beneath the surface, but does not provide direct contact between explorer and explored. One can extrapolate a representation of the sounded territory, a topographical map of sorts, but that representation will always remain a creation filtered through one’s own imagination. For Dowell, it quickly becomes apparent that the ‘puzzling out’ he feels impelled to do will by its very nature suffer from these topographical limitations. The act of sounding a heart stands also as a particularly fitting figure of the act of empathy, for it is a feeling into that promotes an imprecise, albeit useful, understanding.12 Dowell’s work continues with a proliferation of metaphors and figures of speech that result from his empathic sounding. In the opening pages he rapidly cycles through a number of these in an attempt to understand the four-person relationship he and Florence had with the Ashburnhams. That relationship is a ‘minuet’, a ‘prison full of screaming hysterics’, ‘a goodly apple that is rotten at the core’ and a ‘four-square house’ with two rotten pillars (GS 12). This crowd of metaphors is the product of Dowell’s ‘feeling into’. We might, of course, provide many explanations for why we use figurative language – it helps us frame new things in familiar ways and conversely it prompts us to recognise new aspects of what is already familiar. But for Lee, ‘Empathy is what explains why we employ figures of speech at all’ (Lee 1913: 62). The verbalisation of empathic experience was for her a cornerstone of figurative and aesthetic language. Lee’s beliefs stem from some very elementary phrases that we might simply wave away as products of the pathetic fallacy. When she discusses empathic engagement with a distant mountain (one of Vischer’s central examples in ‘On the optical sense of form’), she focuses on the idiomatic expression, ‘the mountain rises’ (ibid.: 61). Why, she asks, do we say the mountain rises when, geologically speaking, the mountain is actually settling or descending? And why do we say the mountain ‘looks like’ it rises when we know that we, the observers, do the looking? As Lee understands it, the exchange that occurs in empathy provokes and demands figurative language. Her ideas here relate to something that William James says in his essay ‘Does “consciousness” exist?’. In his efforts to refute mind-body dualism, he asks why we ‘call a fire hot, and water wet, and yet refuse to say that our mental state, when it is “of” these objects, is either wet or hot?’ and concludes, ‘when the mental

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state is a vivid image, hotness and wetness are in it just as much as they are in the physical experience’ (W. James 1904: 489). If we are to accept that empathic experience is possible, that the relationship between self and world is fluid, we have to accept such fluidity in language. Using such language may, in fact, be the only way to escape the boundaries of the solipsistic mind. In order to conceptualise other minds, that is, we end up metaphorising them. What Dowell finds is that even contemplating such an escape requires him to pile one metaphor on top of another. His use of ‘heart’ quickly becomes insufficient and when he does deploy it, his narrative tends to snowball into even more complicated figures of speech: I know nothing – nothing in the world – of the hearts of men. I only know that I am alone – horribly alone. No hearthstone will ever again witness, for me, friendly intercourse. No smoking-room will ever be other than peopled with incalculable simulacra amidst smoke wreaths. (GS 12)

Here we find the Edwardian descendent of Plato’s allegory of the cave – Dowell’s lament to the smoking room. There is, however, a decidedly pessimistic slant in Dowell’s formulation: recognising that one’s former perspective is false does not prompt an escape from the ‘smoking-room’, nor does it grant one new eyes capable of seeing the truth. Dowell has not shaken off the simulacra of other people – he has only recognised the impossibility of communicating with anything other than simulacra. This realisation also means that as a narrator he is restricted to creating a shadowy representation of an already compromised imaginative map of other minds. It means that he tends, as Katz writes, to ‘flatten’ those whom he represents (T. Katz 2000: 117). Dowell displays the desperation of solipsism that Ernst Mach laid out in The Analysis of Sensations: ‘either we must set over against the ego a world of unknowable ­entities [. . .] or we must regard the whole world, the egos of other people included, as comprised in our own ego’ (Mach 1886: 28). At this early point in the text, Dowell’s behaviour reflects the first of Mach’s options. As the text progresses, he will move toward the second, compromising others in his own ego.

Seeing with new eyes Throughout the first half of his narrative Dowell takes care not to lapse into what narratologists call ‘paralepsis’ – a narrator’s assumption of a perspective that he or she does not have, a moment of omniscience in a narrative with an otherwise limited point of view (Genette 1980:

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­130    Empathy and the Psychology of Literary Modernism 195–7; Heinze 2008: 281). In Part III, our view broadens to include ‘Leonora’s side of the case’ (GS 117) and an account of Leonora and Edward’s early years of marriage culled from Edward’s ‘view of it’ (GS 104). These passages on the Ashburnham courtship and Edward’s infidelities register clearly as second-hand reports. But Dowell’s knowledge intensifies in the novel’s fourth and final section, which describes what happened after Florence’s suicide. Here, he reports the painful days of ‘eye gouging’ that played out between Leonora, Nancy and Edward as if he had seen them. These descriptions of the discussion and arguments between the threesome, which Dowell could not have witnessed, echo the ways Dowell’s friends ‘blind’ each other, writing over each other’s perspectives. Leonora, for example, thrusts upon Nancy her memories of Edward as a man ‘violent, overbearing, vain, drunken, arrogant, and monstrously a prey to his sexual necessities’ (GS 153), and then urges her to become his lover. In short, Leonora tries to force Nancy to empathise, to see as she has seen, and to feel her own humiliating love for Edward. Dowell’s concerns about ‘new eyes’ should make us wonder if empathic thinking or narrating can ever be completely benign. His description of a man’s passion for a woman, which hints at the dangers inherent in feeling oneself into other minds and hearts, makes a strong case for distrusting empathic desires: But the real fierceness of desire, the real heat of a passion long continued and withering up the soul of a man is the craving for identity with the woman that he loves. He desires to see with the same eyes, to touch with the same sense of touch, to hear with the same ears, to lose his identity, to be enveloped, to be supported. (GS 79)

Dowell’s language here reveals a terror hiding beneath the desire for a marriage of minds. What he describes is, by his own admission, a desire that withers the soul. But Dowell’s true passion is not actually, as he suggests, to see with the eyes of the women he loves – and he implies that he loves Florence, Leonora and Nancy to various degrees – but rather to see with Edward Ashburnham’s eyes. As Dowell nears the end of his story, the narrative having caught up to the moment of his writing, he admits, ‘I can’t conceal from myself the fact that I loved Edward Ashburnham – and that I love him because he was just myself’ (GS 161). For David Trotter, this admission marks modest progress for Dowell, who ‘at least recognizes his own desire for an identity based on moral choice’ (Trotter 1999: 74). Going a step further, Bachner understands this moment as pivotal to the entire arc of Ford’s novel:

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Dowell’s identification with Edward ultimately enables the resolution of the novel because the conflict of different points of view, of values and of interests was the basis of contradiction. It is only when Dowell chooses sides, when he abandons the singularity of his own visual, perspectival ‘point of view’ that judgment is possible. (Bachner 2003: 114)

That resolution, however, is only achieved through imaginative acts that are invasive, demanding and ultimately violent. Dowell’s claim that Edward Ashburnham was ‘just myself’ denies the necessary distance between individuals that maintains subjectivity. He does not solve the problem of other minds in his efforts to escape his epistemological malaise but rather reveals how easy it is for empathic urges to derail. Dowell ends the tale sitting in Edward’s gunroom – he has bought the Ashburnham estate and is caring for the now insane Nancy. He has essentially stepped into Edward’s life in an attempt to inhabit his perspective. As Nicholls explains, we find here ‘the pathos of identification which the novel cannot bring itself to disavow’ (Nicholls 1995: 182). Nicholls’s observation is a keen one, for while Ford’s novel does not disavow identification (spoken in Dowell’s desirous voice it hardly could), it certainly conveys a deep uneasiness about identification, hinting that we perhaps should beware of that particular pathos. Our last glimpse of Dowell is of a person morbidly masquerading as a dead man who can no longer see or speak for himself. I’d like to suggest that this act of imagination, far from neatly joining Dowell and Edward, actually sets up the novel’s fractured, violent end.

Linguistic breakdown As The Good Soldier comes to a close, Dowell’s metaphors collapse and are replaced by a confusing collage of repeated phrases and fleeting images. Throughout the novel, his point of view is characterised not only by his worries about other minds, but also by its jaggedness and lack of continuity. More than one critic has linked this fractured way of seeing to modern methods of painting. Laura Colombino calls Dowell’s statement that ‘the whole world for me is like spots of colour on an immense canvas’ (GS 17) a ‘pointillist remark’ (Colombino 2002: 210) and Giovanni Cianci describes how Ford created visual images in The Good Soldier that mimic ‘the Futurist prescription of “dislocating and dismembering the objects”’ (Cianci 2003: 55).13 But such dislocating and dismembering also occurs verbally, always where ‘thinking with’ the other is involved. Dowell’s incessantly repeated refrains, for example, act like the spots of colour he describes – uttered so often that

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­132    Empathy and the Psychology of Literary Modernism any individual instance means nothing, they only begin to communicate something when we step back and consider them all together. In addition to ‘I know nothing’, his speech is littered with jarring repetitions of the phrase ‘you understand’. Many of these ‘you understand’ statements function performatively – their utterance is precisely what allows the reader to know what Dowell knows, such as when he says early in his narrative, ‘You understand that there was nothing the matter with Edward Ashburnham’s heart’ (GS 20). The reader has not understood, up to this point, that Ashburnham’s heart problem was false. Dowell’s exhortations to understand grow increasingly direct throughout the novel, revealing a desperate need to have his listener or reader sound the depths of his heart and map his interiority. Later, Dowell’s imperative statements become clear and direct commands, as when he tells the reader, ‘You are to understand that Leonora loved Edward with a passion that was yet like an agony of hatred’ (GS 91). As that which is to be understood becomes more difficult for Dowell himself to know and communicate, his vocabulary of demand grows stronger. Each pointillist dot of ‘you understand’ is actually a tear in the fabric of the reader’s own understanding, a sharp incursion from Dowell’s mind. Dowell’s need for understanding reaches its apogee precisely when he stops using the word ‘understand’. Notably, he drops that word when he escapes his figurative smoking room and starts incorporating other perspectives into his narrative. When he comes to a point in his story that requires him to imagine, he exhorts his reader to do the same. At the climax of his tale – the weeks-long battle of wills between Edward, Leonora and Nancy – Dowell says, ‘What happened was just Hell’. In order to communicate this ‘Hell’ to his silent listener, he repeatedly demands that the reader imagine the scene he relays: Leonora had spoken to Nancy; Nancy had spoken to Edward; Edward had spoken to Leonora – and they had talked and talked. And talked. You have to imagine horrible pictures of gloom and half lights, and emotions running through silent nights – through whole nights. You have to imagine my beautiful Nancy appearing suddenly to Edward, rising up at the foot of his bed, with her long hair falling, like a split cone of shadow, in the glimmer of a night-light that burned beside him. You have to imagine her, a silent, a no doubt agonised figure, like a spectre, suddenly offering herself to him – to save his reason! And you have to imagine his frantic refusal – and talk. And talk! My God! (GS 130, emphasis added)

In fact, the prime agent of imagination here is Dowell himself. He did not witness the ‘Hell’ he relates to his listener; he has had to conjure Edward’s perspective in order to create the spectral image of Nancy. Knowing that his own limited understanding depends on his act of

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imagination, he commands his listener to do the same in order to communicate, or, in his own words at the novel’s opening, ‘to get the sight out of [his] head’ (GS 11).14 Haunted by the vision of Nancy that his taking of Edward’s perspective has created, he attempts to transfer the painful image to another by prompting his reader to a similar act of cognitive empathy. To feel into his experience, which is one of distancing and confusion, we must read through his abstracting, pointillist refrains. These repeated phrases have both a suturing effect and a fracturing effect – connecting us to Dowell’s mind and revealing other minds failing to connect. Dowell’s repetition of ‘you have to imagine’ is one of many similar linguistic loops. Toward the middle of his narrative, he begins to reuse phrases in close succession, sometimes within the same sentence. These repetitions, whether voiced by Dowell or other characters, act as demands to be heard or as refusals to hear the voice of another, as when Leonora tells Nancy, ‘You must stay here. You must stay here. I tell you you must stay here’, and receives the response, ‘I am going to Glasgow. I shall go to Glasgow tomorrow morning. My mother is in Glasgow’, or when Edward fends off Nancy’s offer of sex by exclaiming, ‘I don’t want it; I don’t want it; I don’t want it’ (GS 138, 154). After weeks of such hysterical repetitions and demands to be heard, Dowell makes it clear that none of the three has managed to communicate anything: Edward puts an end to their endless talking by saying ‘This is all nonsense’, leaving Nancy and Leonora, in Dowell’s words, ‘baffled’. Dowell himself, assessing the scene he has just created, returns to his old adage: ‘I don’t know. I know nothing. I am very tired’ (GS 154, 156). Just as weeks of verbal bickering did nothing to foster understanding between Edward, Leonora and Nancy, weeks of putting words to paper have done nothing to enlighten Dowell. David Trotter has noted that ‘[i]n Worringer’s understanding, abstraction, wherever and whenever it occurs, is both violent and compulsive’ (Trotter 2001: 228). But Dowell’s experience with the mutually implicated processes of empathy and abstraction shows that both of these urges participate in the same violence. Trotter goes on to explain that ‘the abstract art [Hulme] championed was indeed both violent and compulsive in the fury with which it “wrested” the object from its “natural context”’ (ibid.: 230). Dowell’s final thoughts about Nancy show that such a ‘wresting’ might just as easily be the result of the empathic urge. At the novel’s end, he claims to know the meaning of her final, confusing verbal repetition. He explains, yesterday at lunch she said suddenly: ‘Shuttlecocks!’ And she repeated the word ‘shuttlecocks’ three times. I know what was passing in her mind, if she

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­134    Empathy and the Psychology of Literary Modernism can be said to have a mind, for Leonora has told me that, once, the poor girl said she felt like a shuttlecock being tossed backwards and forwards between the violent personalities of Edward and his wife. (GS 160)

Dowell’s text has up to this point trained us to flee from the belief that we can know what ‘was passing in her mind’. Outside the ‘natural context’ of her consciousness, her thought might mean anything. All the reader can say is that Nancy’s voice cries out as a final affirmation of the linguistic breakdown that haunts the whole novel and comes to a peak as the three objects of Dowell’s imagination scream at each other in the Ashburnham home. Despite Dowell’s interpretation, Nancy’s outbursts foreclose figurative language and therefore empathic thinking as Lee would have it. Her repetition of the word ‘Shuttlecocks!’ serves, in its situational absurdity, to deny the possibility of communication or empathy and highlight the psychological distance between her and Dowell, who must create his fireside companion. But of course his imagined listener is no more capable of empathy than is the shattered Nancy: ‘You, the listener, sit opposite me. But you are so silent. You don’t tell me anything’ (GS 17). It is only The Good Soldier’s true audience, the readers of whom Dowell cannot conceive, who are witness to his narrative struggles. Dowell talks into a void, desperate for a moment of perspective sharing that will never come. Productive empathy remains for him, at the novel’s end, an impossibility, and he is left with nothing but the aftermath of violent acts of empathy and abstraction.

The Great War Nancy, the silent and traumatised other, presages the unknowable wounds that would soon be all too common because of the Great War. Parade’s End similarly ends with a silent, impenetrable figure in the final volume, Last Post. Notably, that figure is not the series protagonist, the soldier Christopher Tietjens, but rather his civilian brother Mark, the probable victim of a stroke on Armistice Day. Christopher’s own traumatic experience and the matter of what is passing in his mind are best explored in the penultimate volume, A Man Could Stand Up–. Ford’s post-war work, which was deeply influenced by his own service in the European conflict, clearly extends his thought on the importance of fellow feeling in literature. At the start of the war, Ford found his old worries about modern life from the days of the English Review renewed. Just after the war broke out, he wrote,

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when again the world has leisure to think about letters the whole world will have changed. It will have changed in morality, in manners, in all human relationships, in all views of life, possibly even in language, certainly in its estimates of literature. What then is the good of it all? I don’t know. (Ford 2004: 207)

Strikingly, Ford, who was still putting the last touches to The Good Soldier in August 1914, displays Dowell’s signature verbal tic here. In the context of a modern world that is already understood to be in a state of rapid, confusing change, the war presented as distant and impenetrable to the imagination from its earliest days. Like many other writers, Ford claimed that he struggled to articulate his thoughts on the spectre of modern warfare. In September 1914, he wondered why he could not compose a poem on the war: ‘There is the blank sheet – and then [. . .] nothing. It is, I think, because of the hazy remoteness of the wargrounds; the impossibility of visualising anything, because of the total incapacity to believe any single thing that I read’ (ibid.: 209). So before Ford had ever donned a military uniform, he had conceived military service as an experience inaccessible to those on the home front. By the time The Good Soldier was published in 1915, Ford had already begun his service. He did not escape the anticipated effects of shockingly new modern warfare. As Paul Skinner notes, ‘Like most serving soldiers, [Ford] had also been confronted or affronted by sights and sounds which had no real precedent and would have been unimaginable in the world before 1914’ (Skinner 2002: viii). While abroad, Ford was ‘blown up’ and suffered shell-shock; afterwards, he found that his ability to access visual memories was compromised. For Ford, this interruption of visual continuity was one of the particularly troubling effects of war on the mind. In his 1916 essay ‘A day of battle’, written in the Ypres Salient, he explains, ‘I have asked myself continuously why I can write nothing [. . .] why cannot I even evoke pictures of the Somme or the flat lands round Ploegsteert? With the pen, I used to be able to “visualise things”’ (Ford 2004: 36). After the carnage of the French and Belgian fronts, the fields of battle are no more available to Ford’s writerly vision than they were before he left England. The physical and psychological trauma he suffered, we are meant to gather, left his creative vision damaged. Years later, Ford would understand that change to be the universal cost paid by all soldiers of the Great War, writing in his 1933 memoir It Was the Nightingale, ‘No one could have come through that shattering experience and still view life and mankind with any normal vision’ (Ford 1933: 63). During the war, Ford’s writing suggests, ‘normal’ vision is interrupted and supplanted with a wartime vision that strips the seer of

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­136    Empathy and the Psychology of Literary Modernism agency. As Patrick Deer explains in his reading of ‘A day of battle’, at the front, ‘vision is actively controlled, limited, and dehumanised [. . .] [it] becomes an instrument of violence’ (Deer 2009: 18). And with one’s vision transformed into a tool of the state, sharing what one has seen becomes an almost impossible task. Walter Benjamin famously pondered this problem in the 1930s, asking, ‘Was it not noticeable at the end of the war that men returned from the battlefield grown silent – not richer, but poorer in communicable experience?’ (Benjamin 1936: 84). The narrator of Ford’s No Enemy: A Tale of Reconstruction, a text started in 1919 but not published until 1929, notices this silence: ‘you hear of the men that went, and you hear of what they did when they were There. But you never hear how It left them’ (Ford 1929: 7). In the aftermath of the war, facts are plentiful, but testimony about how soldiers experienced those facts remains scarce. No Enemy clearly shows us that the prevailing narrative of silenced war experience became entrenched immediately after the soldiers returned home. A Man Could Stand Up– reveals Ford trying to end that silence and show what the mysterious ‘It’ of war was like. This volume of Parade’s End is particularly good at revealing how the experience of war complicated the already difficult matter of intersubjective thinking and feeling. One could easily fit A Man Could Stand Up– into a tidy narrative about World War I literature. Since the earliest reports from the front lines, the Great War has been seen as the cause of an age-ending crisis of epistemology, imagination and representation. As Paul Fussell notes, ‘the presumed inadequacy of language itself to convey the facts about trench warfare is one of the motifs of all who wrote about the war’ (Fussell 1975: 170). The typical understanding of the new warfare, which helped give rise to trauma theory, is that what had been seen could not be understood and thus could not be made clear to others. Samuel Hynes suggests that Ford could not visualise the Somme because of an ‘imaginative vacuum’ that ‘prevailed in 1916’ (Hynes 1991: 105). According to Hynes, Ford himself attributed this lack of imaginative air to two factors: ‘the mere fact of being a soldier narrowed the imagination, and the war was too vast to be understood’ (ibid.: 106). Nevertheless, our literary record of the Great War indicates that what has been seen, even if it has not been understood or processed, cries out for representation. Furthermore, acts of witnessing in war often become ethical burdens to remember and testify. As Sara Haslam pithily states in her study of Ford and the Great War, ‘Sight is knowledge is responsibility’ (Haslam 2002: 98). Ford’s work in the Parade’s End series is an answer to that responsibility that is particularly attentive to structures of fellow feeling.

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The greyish lacuna A Man Could Stand Up– is divided into three sections. It is in the long middle section that we see Tietjens at the front, addled by the war’s noise, the broken landscape and the madness of his fellow officer, McKechnie. The chapters of that middle section flash back to a single day, significant because Tietjens is nearly killed in an artillery explosion. In the first and third parts of the novel, which both take place on Armistice Day in London, the narrative is dominated by the thoughts of Tietjens’s would-be lover, Valentine Wannop. The novel ends with the pair, who have not spoken in years, deciding that they will live together as a couple, despite the fact that Tietjens remains married to his wife Sylvia. The outer sections cohere around a centre that within Valentine’s diegetic world is empty. But for Tietjens and the reader, that centre space is overflowing with experience. What the middle section strives so fervently to show the reader – the horror of the war – remains hidden from Valentine’s sight. Yet it is precisely Valentine’s imaginative difficulties that put Tietjens’s mind in relief, sending a message similar to the one Levenson pulls out of Conrad’s Heart of Darkness: ‘the only way to represent the individual mind is to represent two individual minds’ (Levenson 1991: 13). Valentine’s mind is the frame that reveals how ‘It’ – the war – left Tietjens’s mind. The novel opens at the very moment of Armistice, 11 o’clock in the morning on 11 November 1918, which Valentine understands as a ‘crack across the table of history’ (AMCSU 17). Saunders argues that this turn of phrase ‘implies a view of the war as both disjunctive and eschatological; a break in historical time, and the breaking of historical time’ (Saunders 2002: 12).15 For soldiers, the war was famously full of such breaks. Ford was no exception; his shell-shock caused a break in his own timeline, as he later reported: ‘It had been from some date in August till about the 17th September that I had completely lost my memory so that, as I have said, three weeks of my life are completely dead to me’ (Ford 1933: 194). Tietjens weathers a similar attack on his prodigious stream of thought in Some Do Not . . ., the first volume of Parade’s End. Valentine’s sense of his entire wartime experience as a crack in their history is thus a magnified structural echo of that earlier break. In the London of 1918, Valentine is cut off from the past, knowable world of 1914. Facing what seems like a malfunction in the very organising principle of social and cultural order, she will soon find herself confronted with empathic difficulties. Amidst the ‘intolerable noises’ of celebrations in ‘squalid suburban streets’ (AMCSU 8), she is called to

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­138    Empathy and the Psychology of Literary Modernism the telephone at the middle-class girls’ school where she teaches physical education. Over a bad connection, Valentine finds herself speaking to an unknown woman whom she slowly comes to understand is her former friend Edith Ethel, now Lady MacMaster. The call cultivates an immediate experience of confusion and frustration for both Valentine and the reader. Philip Horne explains the full effect of this passage, describing ‘the modern state of shock it produces; the fragmentation of the sentence and its consequent incomprehensibility [. . .] Diverse realities, their sounds and fractured voices, dazzlingly overlap and collide in the rendering of her consciousness’ (Horne 2003: 30).16 Eventually, Valentine realises that Tietjens has suffered a mental breakdown and is back in London. This half-grasped idea feeds into her understanding of Tietjens as an impenetrable vessel of isolated thoughts: ‘she hardly thought of him as a man. She thought of him as a ponderous, grey, intellectual mass who now, presumably, was mooning, obviously dotty, since he did not recognise the porter, behind the closed shutters of an empty house’ (AMCSU 27). Throughout the novel, Valentine continues to see Tietjens as an object of this murky colour. He is for her a ‘grey mass’, a ‘grey ball of mist’, a ‘grey badger’ and a ‘grey Eminence’ (AMCSU 29, 200, 201). More than just the behind-the-scenes mind or ‘Éminence gris’ that we know him to be from the previous Parade’s End novels, he is ‘that grey Problem, that revelled ball of grey knitting worsted’ and, perhaps most tellingly, ‘the greyish lacuna of her mind’ (AMCSU 30, 33). Newly returned from France, he is especially ‘grey’ after enduring the ill effects of battle for years. It is clear in A Man Could Stand Up– that one of those ill effects is a lack of fellow feeling at the front. Ford challenges our notions of battlefield camaraderie and solidarity, particularly in the relationship that Tietjens shares with the unstable and infuriating McKechnie. Remembering the traumatic experience they shared in No More Parades – witnessing the gruesome death of Private O Nine Morgan – Tietjens thinks, ‘It ought to have formed a bond between them. It hadn’t’ (AMCSU 120). Just as tellingly, the middle section of A Man Could Stand Up– opens with Tietjens stewing about the constant presence of other people at the front; he has a strong ‘desire for privacy’ and feels victim to an ‘invasion of his privacy’ (AMCSU 68–9). What the other men might be feeling is perhaps the last thing Tietjens would care to know. Indeed, there is evidence throughout Ford’s post-war work that the new violence of modern warfare leaves the returned soldiers with a damaged capacity for fellow feeling. In No Enemy, for example, the veteran Gringoire speculates, ‘Perhaps I am lacking in human sympathy or have no particular cause to love my fellow men’ (Ford 1929:

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16). Ford would also offer such concerns in his own voice years later, writing, We who returned – and more particularly those of us who had gone voluntarily and with enthusiasms – were like wanderers coming back to our own shores to find our settlements occupied by a vindictive and savage tribe. We had no chance. (Ford 1933: 64)

As Haslam elaborates, soldiers returned from the Great War lacked an ‘external and reciprocal echo of that which they had seen and done and felt’ (Haslam 2002: 33). But this process begins before the return to England. In No Enemy, for example, Gringoire explains that while at war all his sympathies were transferred from the civilian population to the land itself: ‘what one feared for was the land – not the people but the menaced earth [. . .] one couldn’t perhaps figure the feelings of ruined, fleeing and martyred populations’ (Ford 1929: 15). Similarly, while at the front, Tietjens thinks of civilians as ‘the outside world’ (AMCSU 164). He feels for the German soldiers, but not the German people: ‘It was the civilian populations and their rulers that one hated with real hatred. Now the swine were starving the poor devils in the trenches’ (AMCSU 164). Clearly, the plural on ‘populations’ indicates that Tietjens’s hatred might also be directed at Britain’s home front. Yet he retains sympathy for at least one Briton – Valentine Wannop – who in addition to being the object of his affection is a pacifist and the sister of a conscientious objector. If Tietjens hates the Germans for any reason, it is because fighting them on the continent denies him the company of Valentine: The beastly Huns! They stood between him and Valentine Wannop. If they would go home he could be sitting talking to her for whole afternoons. That was what a young woman was for. You seduced a young woman in order to be able to finish your talks with her. (AMCSU 165)

If we take this internal interjection at face value (although clearly we might read Tietjens’s desire for conversation as a coded desire for sexual intimacy), we see in Tietjens a strong need for a meaningful relationship with an interlocutor. In this sense he is much like Dowell. The difference is that Tietjens believes he has established a lasting connection with his conversational partner. Swiping away fears that she might have married in his absence, he thinks, ‘And Valentine Wannop, who had listened to his conversation, would never want to mingle intimately with another’s! Their communion was immutable and not to be shaken!’ (AMCSU 172). It is in fact through a literal shaking that the text establishes

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­140    Empathy and the Psychology of Literary Modernism c­ ommunion between the two central characters. The noises that Tietjens is surrounded by at the front recall Valentine’s experience on Armistice Day: ‘In terrific noise; noise like the rushing up of innumerable noises determined not to be late, whilst the earth rocks or bumps or quakes or protests, you cannot be very coherent about your thoughts’ (AMCSU 76). The second instance of terrible noise, which is first chronologically, synchronises their two minds.

Feeling into battle The fact remains, however, that Tietjens’s experience is not directly available to Valentine. But for the reader, that experience comes uncomfortably close. A Man Could Stand Up–, like No More Parades before it, reveals the terrors of the Great War very effectively. In particular, Ford allows the reader to ‘sound’ Tietjens’s experience of battle, to ‘think with’ him as he is shelled. Ford explains his reasons for creating this empathy-inducing text very clearly in the dedicatory letter to Gerald Duckworth that opened the first edition. With this third volume of Parade’s End, he writes, he wants the reader to discover that ‘This is what the late war was like: this is how modern fighting of the organised, scientific type affects the mind’ (AMCSU 3). But far from presenting this work as a means of evoking pity, he frames it as a way of warning the reader, ‘[if] you choose to permit your rulers to embark on another war, this – or something very accentuated along similar lines – is what you will have to put up with!’ (AMCSU 4). To experience Tietjens’s mind is thus not simply to gain vicarious experience; it is rather to understand a clear danger to the social order. In A Man Could Stand Up– we read the battlefield through Tietjens’s conscious experience. This empathic reading is facilitated by a complicated layering of free indirect discourse, metaphor and in some notable cases, onomatopoeia: They began. It had come. Pam . . . Pamperi . . . Pam! Pam! . . . Pa . . . Pamperi . . . Pam! Pam! . . . Pampamperipampampam . . . Pam . . . They were the ones that sound like drums. They continued incessantly. Immensely big drums. The ones that go at it with real zest . . . You know how it is, looking at an opera orchestra when the fellow with the big drum-sticks really begins. Your own heart beats like hell. Tietjens’ heart did. The drummer appears to go mad. (AMCSU 132)

This immersive passage, in which we get a sense of Tietjens’s thoughts (‘It had come’) and hear what he hears (‘Pam! Pam!’), encourages our

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cognitive role taking. But perhaps most striking here is the way in which the orchestral metaphor is introduced: ‘You know how it is’. This sudden use of the second-person address is disorienting and momentarily calls attention to the gap between what the reader knows and what Tietjens knows. Yet as in The Good Soldier, it takes on a performative aspect. Since we do know how it is to respond physically to the strong beat of a drum, we might have some inkling of how ‘it is’ when bombs shake the earth. For Tietjens, the madness in the noise is infectious. What haunts him all through his experience at the front in Parade’s End is the possibility that he is losing his sanity; he ‘imagine[s] that his brain [i]s going’, and frets that he is ‘seeing himself go mad’ (AMCSU 85). As Tietjens’s defining characteristics are his flawless memory and his talent for calculations, the threat of mental incapacity is overwhelming: ‘He considered his mind: it was alarming him. All through the war he had had one dread – that a wound, the physical shock of a wound, would cause his mind to fail’ (AMCSU 73). Subject to the fragmented, confused narrative of the front lines, we also consider his mind and get a sense of that alarm, which is perhaps clearest when Tietjens is ‘blown up’ along with his subordinates Lance-Corporal Duckett and Aranjuez. The shelling takes Tietjens and the reader by surprise. Suddenly, we read, ‘There was so much noise it seemed to grow dark. It was a mental darkness. You could not think. A Dark Age! The earth moved’ (AMCSU 174). We feel into this traumatic moment thanks to the same kind of narrative slow-down and temporal expansion that marks James’s A Small Boy and Others: He was looking at Aranjuez from a considerable height. He was enjoying a considerable view. Aranjuez’s face had a rapt expression – like that of a man composing poetry. Long dollops of liquid mud surrounded them in the air. Like black pancakes being tossed. He thought: ‘Thank God I did not write to her. We are being blown up!’ The earth turned like a weary hippopotamus. It settled down slowly over the face of Lance-Corporal Duckett who lay on his side, and went on in a slow wave. It was slow, slow, slow . . . like a slowed down movie. The earth manoeuvred for an infinite time. He remained suspended in space. (AMCSU 174)

It is fair to say that by reading this passage we come to learn something about Tietjens’s experience. To some extent, we feel with him. But we must ask, what is the mechanism through which we gain this experience? In order to understand our readerly in-feeling here, it is helpful to return to Worringer and Hulme, to the question of empathy and abstraction. Both Worringer and Hulme would argue that this passage functions by means of abstraction. As Tietjens floats in the air during his timeless

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­142    Empathy and the Psychology of Literary Modernism moment, we see how modern warfare creates a literal rupture with the earth. According to Worringer’s theories, such a circumstance renders empathy impossible (Worringer 1908: 15). As Hulme explained in his Quest Society talk, ‘While a naturalistic art is the result of a happy pantheistic relation between man and the outside world, the tendency to abstraction, on the contrary, occurs in races whose attitude to the outside world is the exact contrary of this’ (Hulme 1936: 86). Tietjens’s mind, unable to process the traumatic moment, tries to establish a distance between him and the scene below – he is impossibly suspended in space above the mud and carnage. Yet if Tietjens’s experience is one of abstraction, our readerly experience is thoroughly empathic.17 Worringer saw his thesis as a corrective to the assumption that realistic or naturalistic methods are superior to more longstanding abstractionist forms of expression. In doing so, he leaned heavily on Lipps’s claim that ‘aesthetic enjoyment is objectified self-enjoyment’, which he adopts as the ‘foil’ to his own work (Worringer 1908: 5, 7). This approach leads to some problematic simplification; as Juliet Koss explains, ‘Worringer chose to make rhetorical use of this formula rather than engage more fully with a range of writings about Einfühlung’ (Koss 2006: 146). The dichotomy that Worringer lays out has some unfortunate effects. First, it glosses over modernism’s powerful drive to see with ‘new eyes’, to achieve a fellow feeling that reaches beyond the previously known experience of realist sympathy. Second, it obscures the fact that abstraction is often used in modernism precisely to create empathic experience, as is clearly the case in Ford’s oeuvre. This is only logical – if modernist experience is defined by confusion, unease and fragmentation, abstraction is perhaps the only way into the modernist mind. In the case of Tietjens, to think with him, we must experience his disorienting, distancing, relationship with the world in the moment of shelling that will haunt him afterwards. Eventually, Tietjens returns to the churning ground, which immobilises him: ‘The earth sucked slowly and composedly at his feet. It assimilated his calves, his thighs. It imprisoned him above the waist’ (AMCSU 175). Here Tietjens finds himself at one with the earth, which threatens the integrity of his body, against his will. After freeing himself, he pulls a slime-covered Aranjuez from a horrible womb of ‘liquid mud’, ‘the issuing hole of the spring that made that bog’ (AMCSU 175). He carries Aranjuez to safety under fire, but will be haunted by guilt after the young man loses an eye. More than one reader of Parade’s End has pointed out that despite the alienation of the front, Tietjens’s experience ultimately helps him to appreciate that other people have interiority. Hawkes, echoing Katz’s reading of Dowell, points out that Tietjens

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tends to ‘flatten’ the characters around him but that the war forces him to look at other people as ‘round’ (Hawkes 2012: 159–60). Additionally, as Haslam tellingly writes, Tietjens’s recognition that his men are individuals ‘triggers his cognitive move away from the surface comfort of abstract codes’ (Haslam 2002: 94). The concern for Aranjuez’s lost eye tells us that Tietjens has learned to value Aranjuez as a person with a unique point of view and therefore a unique consciousness and selfhood. Fast behind this newly acquired ability to recognise the interiority of others is a need to merge his own interiority with that of one particular other – the wary Valentine.

Conclusion: Those who do In the third and final section of A Man Could Stand Up– Tietjens returns to a civilian world where even his emotional and psychological partner perceives him as a flattened object that cannot be felt into and understood. For Valentine, Tietjens’s reported madness has rendered his unknowability threatening, transforming him from a grey mass to a ‘grey badger or a bear’ (AMCSU 183). Although she feels compelled to find him and suggest that they live together as a couple, she nevertheless wonders if he is a threat to her safety. Indeed, after he leaves her momentarily on an unclear errand, she thinks, ‘He might come back and murder her. A madness caused by sex obsessions is not infrequently homicidal’ (AMCSU 186). For all Tietjens’s fantasies about their immutable communion of minds, once they are in the same room their conversation falters. One thing that ties them together is that neither one knows what damage his war experience has actually caused. As Tietjens so bluntly thinks after pulling Aranjuez from the mud: ‘There was no knowing what shell shock was or what it did to you’ (AMCSU 177). After the novel’s intensely empathic middle section, which creates the illusion that we see as Tietjens sees, we find the pair at a loss, unable to articulate their own feelings or enquire about the other’s feelings. In a situation typical of the novel of manners, each worries that the other does not share the same sentiments. Valentine thinks, ‘She was in his house. Like a child . . . He had not sent for her . . . Like a child faltering on the sill of a vast black cave’ (AMCSU 184) and Tietjens similarly frets, ‘She hadn’t come, then, because . . . But, of course, she would not have. But she might have wanted them to spend Armistice Day together! She might have! A sense of disappointment went over him’ (AMCSU 196). But despite their inability to communicate, each internally expresses faith that their thoughts are as one. Tietjens thinks, ‘Her

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­144    Empathy and the Psychology of Literary Modernism mind so marches with mine that she will understand’, and his thought reverberates in Valentine’s mind: ‘There was nothing now between them [. . .] Their thoughts marched together; not in the least amazing’ (AMCSU 191, 192). Here, the repetitions of marching mental activity in both of their minds stitch them together. But regardless of what they think in this ephemeral moment of optimism, they are unable to come to an accord without an exterior, mediating voice. It is ultimately through talking by turns to Valentine’s mother on the telephone that they realise the mutuality of their desires. When Tietjens speaks to Mrs Wannop, the widow of his father’s closest friend, he learns that Valentine plans to live with him ‘maritally’. It is only through this confirmation from the mother, who gives a grudging blessing, that Valentine’s motives are confirmed: ‘The word ‘Maritally!’ burst out of the telephone like a blue light [. . .] That girl longed for him as he for her!’ (AMCSU 210). Similarly, while Valentine cannot approach the ‘grey badger’ directly to ask what happened on the field of battle, she can start to glean what his experience might have been when she overhears him talking to her mother. It is in listening to this conversation that she has a major revelation: Hitherto, she had thought of the War as physical suffering only: Now she saw it only as mental torture. Immense miles and miles of anguish in darkened minds. That remained. Men might stand up on hills, but the mental torture could not be expelled. (AMCSU 200)

Here, Mrs Wannop’s voice starts to heal what has been torn apart by the war: she reinstates the communicative power of the telephone that was lost in the first section of the novel and in doing so reinstates communication between Tietjens and Valentine. Their minds are not exactly in step, but here we get the sense that they can pick up their conversation. Perhaps Valentine cannot understand what happened, but at the very least, Tietjens’s grey unknowability has ceased to frighten her. Mrs Wannop also gives them tacit approval to pick up the romantic narrative thread interrupted by Tietjens’s absence and the war’s violence and re-imagine that recovered narrative. He and Valentine are no longer what they were in Some Do Not . . . , the first volume of Parade’s End – that is, they are no longer ‘the sort that . . . do not!’ (Ford 1924a: 344). At the end of that earlier novel, they are exactly like the men and women in Mrs Wannop’s beloved nineteenth-century books: ‘high-minded creatures contracting irregular unions of the mind or of sympathy; but never carrying them to the necessary conclusion’ (AMCSU 202).18 They have instead become the sort that do, which is perhaps what they actually need in order to heal and have a meaningful

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intersubjective exchange. This shift sets up what is to come in Last Post, the final volume of Parade’s End, in which bodies and physical feeling take on a more central role. In that novel, from which Tietjens is largely absent, Valentine’s concerns about him relate far less to cognitive states than to affective states – she cares little for his thoughts, but she does care a great deal about his failures of feeling. A Man Could Stand Up–, like The Good Soldier before it, makes clear the fact that the urge to empathy and the urge to abstraction cannot be disentangled, especially in the context of modernism’s desire to see with ‘new eyes’. Both novels, then, show us empathy as it would be understood later in the twentieth century, as a process in which we think or feel with the other, momentarily losing our sense of self and our subjective stability. Furthermore, the end of A Man Could Stand Up–, after a middle section whose primary purpose is to induce a readerly state of ‘thinking with’ the protagonist, also privileges affective empathy over cognitive empathy. Ford’s novel both reflects Vernon Lee’s belief that cognitive alignment precedes any emotional alignment – we work through the cognitive empathy of the middle section to get to the novel’s affective resolution in the third section – and challenges her belief that empathic oneness keeps apart from sentiment. Valentine and Tietjens, who do not know each other’s thoughts as the novel closes, stop trying to imagine what the other sees. Instead, they surrender to the same affective state, each trusting that the other feels the same way. This privileging of affective empathy over cognitive empathy, of emotional oneness over mental oneness, presages other beliefs about empathy that would develop in the coming years. In particular, A Man Could Stand Up– foreshadows what I explore in the following chapter: Virginia Woolf’s distrust and refusal of cognitive empathy.

Notes  1. The Good Soldier was originally published under the name Ford Madox Hueffer. For the sake of continuity, I use the name Ford Madox Ford, which both readers and critics are accustomed to using today.   2. See Introduction (4–8).   3. Originally published in Ford (1909a: 488).   4. Originally published in Ford (1909b: 667).   5. See H. James (1884: 9). Critical understanding of impressionism overlaps critical understanding of Richardson’s work significantly. As Jesse Matz writes, critics have long thought that for writers like James, Ford and Proust, ‘Impressionism meant rendering life as it really seemed to individual subjective experience. It meant making fiction “plunge into consciousness”’ (Matz 2001: 13). See Chapter 2 (81–2); Beresford (1921: vii) and Mendilow (1952: 84).

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­146    Empathy and the Psychology of Literary Modernism   6. Originally published in Ford (1909a: 488).   7. See Chapter 1 (42–4) for my readings of James’s later New York stories.   8. Vernon Lee was the pen-name of Violet Paget. Readers of modernist literature might recognise her name from Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own, where she is credited as one of a few female writers making inroads in the male-dominated world of books (ROO 79). Her work on aesthetics was widely known at the end of the nineteenth century and her contributions to art and literary theory were held in high regard in the early twentieth century (Zorn 2003: 10; Maxwell and Pulham 2006: 1–2).   9. Here Lee echoes Henry James’s words about character representation in his Preface to The American. See Chapter 1 (33) and H. James (1934: 37). This echo may have been intentional. Lee knew and respected James in her youth, but they had a falling out in the 1890s. 10. What literary critics often refer to as epistemological crises are often more closely related to the conceptual problem of other minds than the strictly epistemological problem of other minds. 11. Interestingly, a passage Virginia Woolf’s ‘A sketch of the past’, written in 1939 and 1940, bears a jarring resemblance to Dowell’s words: ‘But Jack Hills? He had been at Eton with George. He stands in my mind’s picture gallery for a type – and a desirable type; the English country gentleman type, I might call it, by way of running a line round it; and I add, it is a type I have seldom been intimate with; perhaps no one is ever intimate with the country gentleman type; yet for nine years I was intimate with Jack Hills’ (Woolf 1989: 101). 12. To carry this line of thinking to its logical end, let us remember that at the time of Dowell’s writing there was no sonar device or other means by which to truly ‘know’ the ocean’s depths. 13. Ford himself recognised this tie to futurist painting, explaining that the impressionist method ‘attain[s] to the sort of odd vibration that scenes in real life really have’ and give the reader ‘the impression that he was witnessing something real, that he was passing through an experience . . . You will observe also that you will have produced something very like a futurist picture [. . .] one of those canvases that show you in one corner a pair of stays, in another a bit of the foyer of a music hall, in another a fragment of early morning landscape, and in the middle a pair of eyes, the whole bearing the title of “A Night Out”’ (Ford 1913: 42). 14. Ford actually argues that the imaginative writer should never have such a motive: ‘But one point is very important. The artist can never write to satisfy himself – to get, as the saying is, something off the chest’ (ibid.: 54). 15. See Hynes (1991: xiii). 16. Notably, Ford renders Edith Ethel’s garbled sentences with frequent use of ellipses – the effect is rather like the ellipses-heavy free indirect discourse of Dorothy Richardson (see Chapter 2). 17. We might productively compare the competing notions of empathy and abstraction to the competing notions of penetration and extension that Michael Levenson identifies in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (Levenson 1991: 8–9). Both sets of seemingly dichotomous movement ultimately work in unison. As Levenson notes, the crux of Conrad’s confounding

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journey ‘is that movement outward and movement inward coincide’ (ibid.: 10). 18. These ‘irregular unions of the mind’ never carried ‘to the necessary conclusion’ should remind us of Mansfield’s ‘Psychology’ – see Chapter 3 (102–6).

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Chapter 5

Virginia Woolf and the Limits of Empathy

A few years after the 1904 death of her father, Leslie Stephen, Virginia Woolf wrote about the devastation he suffered when her mother, Julia Stephen, died in 1895: he was like one who, by failure of some stay, reels staggering blindly about the world, and fills it with his woe. But no words of mine can convey what he felt, or even the energy of the visible expression of it. (Woolf 1989: 47–8)1

As Woolf paints her father here, in his terrible grief he is both open and closed to the world around him. His feelings flow out of his body, flooding his surroundings and subjecting his family to the kind of emotional infection that Max Scheler describes in The Nature of Sympathy. Yet his daughter cannot say what those feelings were like for him, inside his own mind. Her trouble here illustrates one of Stephen’s own points in The Science of Ethics: despite our ability to read the bodily signs that express thoughts and feelings, we must always struggle to understand the inner goings-on of others, even those closest to us. Woolf wrote these words years before she published any fiction, but they presage her celebrated career, which is famously marked by efforts to convey what is felt with words. Throughout this book, I have looked at modernist texts that seek to push the limits of sympathetic representation, producing experimental forms of empathic representation. I understand Woolf’s novels to be an integral part of this empathic modernism, which is marked by effects of ‘feeling with’. There is perhaps no other English-language writer so closely associated with ‘getting inside’ fictional heads – and few so vocal about the need to break with past methods of representing interiority. She famously set herself against the Edwardian generation in ‘Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown’, charging Arnold Bennett and his peers with failing to create believable character minds. Still, as others have pointed

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out in recent years, we cannot look at Woolf only in terms of interiority. James Harker, for example, argues that for Woolf, ‘the modern literary experience derives from the nature of the faculties of perception, the tenuous points of connection between the inner and the outer worlds’ (Harker 2011: 2). Like Harker, I would ask that we turn our attention to the play between the inner and outer worlds in Woolf’s work. There we will find considerable resistance to the kind of empathy I have examined in this book. Each of my previous chapters has shown how the modernist texts I class as empathic nevertheless exhibit deep scepticism about fellow feeling. This scepticism manifests in a number of ways: in James’s ghostly language in A Small Boy and Others, in Miriam’s distrust of sympathy in Pilgrimage, in female desire for emotional privacy in Mansfield’s short stories, and in the violent linguistic breakdowns of The Good Soldier. While Woolf is a central participant in the empathic modernism that I have examined, I believe her political writing and her later novels work to further destabilise the already unstable empathic project at play in literary modernism. It is in Woolf that we see most clearly the entropic nature of empathic structures of feeling. In the last decade of Woolf’s writing we see how latent scepticism matures into a disruption of empathic narrative – a disruption that the history of empathy indicates is inevitable. Woolf’s work resolves back into what I would class as sympathetic structures, troubling and sometimes even rejecting the kind of fellow feeling that aims primarily for ‘feeling into’, ‘feeling with’, or oneness. Since Woolf’s understanding of fellow feeling is deeply relevant to her political thought, in this chapter I examine both her classic feminist text A Room of One’s Own (1929) and her anti-war meditation Three Guineas (1938). In both works, I find her pushing against the experience of foreign consciousness. While any of Woolf’s novels could provide rich material for this chapter, I confine my reading of her fiction to The Waves (1931) and Between the Acts (1941). Both novels, I argue, disrupt empathic representation. The work of Edmund Husserl and his student Edith Stein, which was crucial to disseminating an understanding of empathy as ‘the experience of foreign consciousness’ in the 1920s and 1930s, informs my reading of these texts. By ending with this twentieth-century phenomenological thought, I am not only looking beyond empathy as strictly understood by Vischer, Lipps, Titchener and Lee; I am also returning to where I began, with late nineteenth-century thought on the problem of other minds. Husserl started developing his phenomenology when he was the student of Franz Brentano, whose Psychology from an Empiricist Standpoint (1874) was so influential in

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­150    Empathy and the Psychology of Literary Modernism the early days of empiricist psychology. Furthermore, the ideas of both Husserl and Stein echo some of Leslie Stephen’s comments on sympathy in The Science of Ethics, which he published in 1882, the very year in which Virginia Woolf was born. In the half-century between Stephen’s text and Husserl’s Cartesian Meditations (1931), empathy came to replace sympathy as the standard philosophical solution to the problem of other minds. In previous chapters, I have argued that the empathic structures of feeling theorised in psychological aesthetics are present in modernist fiction. But although Titchener, Lipps and Lee understood empathy as something that could go on between people, much of their work on the subject did not touch on intersubjective experience. Stein and Husserl, however, have a firm understanding of empathy as that which connects two individuals. For Husserl, empathy is the ‘theory of experiencing someone else’ (CM 146). Stein provides a far-reaching definition of empathy, calling it ‘the experience of foreign consciousness in general, irrespective of the kind of experiencing subject or of the subject whose consciousness is experienced [. . .] This is how human beings comprehend the psychic life of their fellows’ (OPE 11). Husserl takes on the problem of intersubjectivity in the fifth and final section of his Cartesian Meditations in order to defend phenomenology against the charge that it is a solipsistic system of knowledge. He argues that a transcendental theory of experiencing someone else, in other words ‘a transcendental theory of so-called empathy’, helps found ‘a transcendental theory of the Objective world’ (CM 92). He also understands empathy as a process that might help us grasp specific thoughts rather than just general feelings: ‘It is quite comprehensible that [. . .] an “empathizing” of definite contents belonging to the “higher psychic sphere” arises’ (CM 120). Both Stein and Husserl are interested in empathy as a cognitive process through which we can understand how other people see the world. Notably, they deviate from the Lippsian tradition that posits empathy as a feeling of oneness. Stein is far less known today than her ‘respected Professor Husserl’ (OPE 2), but her work on intersubjective experience is just as important in the history of empathy. Her 1917 dissertation, On the Problem of Empathy, was the first major work to treat empathy specifically as an intersubjective, human-to-human, process rather than as an aesthetic, human-to-object, process that might sometimes be applied to human interaction.2 This impressive text, finished when the author was only twenty-five years old, sought to correct what Stein saw as flaws in previous elucidations of fellow feeling, particularly those of Lipps and Scheler.

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Essential for Stein’s theory of empathy is her understanding of what is and is not ‘primordial’ experience. One’s own experiences in the present, she tells us, are primordial. Memory and fantasy, on the other hand, are non-primordial (OPE 7). Empathy, like our experience of our past or possible experiences, is not primordial: ‘while I am living in the other’s joy, I do not feel primordial joy. It does not issue from my “I”’ (OPE 11). In this belief Stein clearly differs with Lee before her, who insists that empathic feeling happens within the in-feeler herself. Stein concludes that because empathy takes place concurrently with our primordial, present experience but is not itself primordial, it is an ‘act of perceiving sui generis’ (OPE 11). This understanding of empathy puts her in conflict with Scheler, Lipps and John Stuart Mill. In the early sections of On the Problem of Empathy, Scheler’s objections to empathy are speedily dispatched for not being directed ‘against what we would call empathy’ (OPE 27). Similarly, Stein calls Lipps’s idea of empathic unity an experience that is ‘no longer’ empathy (OPE 16). Finally, she dismisses Mill’s earlier theory of inference by analogy because it arises to solve the epistemological problem of other minds, in which she has no interest: ‘This theory maintains that we see nothing around us but physical soulless and lifeless bodies’ (OPE 26).3 In staking out her own view of empathy, Stein is particularly clear on one thing: empathy makes the feeling of oneness and ‘the enrichment of our experience’ possible, but it is not itself a feeling of oneness (OPE 18). Here she gives voice to anxieties about empathy that I have noted bubbling up in modernist texts – experience of foreign consciousness may be possible, but it does not make two into one. Moreover, for Stein such oneness is not the ultimate good of empathy; rather, empathy only yields value when it is coupled with subjective experience.

The exquisite balm of fellow feeling Like Richardson and Mansfield, Woolf distrusts male desire for female sympathy. More than one of her novels depicts men who seek sympathy from women in order to bolster a fragile sense of self. Louis, the perennial outsider of The Waves, dreams that Jinny will extend to him ‘the exquisite balm of her sympathy’ (TW 96), perhaps healing his psychological wounds. Such male desire for female sympathy, which we have seen Miriam so vehemently reject in Richardson’s Pilgrimage, also plays a prominent role in Woolf’s 1927 novel To the Lighthouse. In that novel, Mr Ramsay has a constant need to be nourished by his wife’s sympathy. He is, from his young son’s point of view, ­‘the e­gotistical

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­152    Empathy and the Psychology of Literary Modernism man, plunged and smote, demanding sympathy’ (Woolf 1927: 38). Noting the parallels between Mr Ramsay and Leslie Stephen, Bernice Carroll argues, ‘Woolf saw this male need for sympathy as a consuming and stifling force in women’s lives’ (Carroll 1978: 112). Indeed, after Mr Ramsay demands sympathy from his wife because he is ‘a failure’, she feels ‘not only exhausted in body’, but also tinged with ‘some faintly disagreeable sensation with another origin’ (Woolf 1927: 38, 39). Such gendered sympathy can only ever be ‘feeling for’ since it travels in just one direction. Women, Woolf implies, do not receive this healing balm. The one-way functioning of sympathy is due in part to the fact that men, in Woolf’s estimation, don’t know much about women. One of the most striking thoughts in A Room of One’s Own comes during a reflection on the work of the fictional female novelist Mary Charmichael. Her contribution to literature, Woolf’s narrator tells us, is to depict two women in friendship: ‘Chloe liked Olivia perhaps for the first time in literature’ (ROO 74). This fact is important for Woolf in the first place because, as she points out, women spend most of their time with other women, interacting with each other. Yet, ‘almost without exception they are shown in their relation to men [. . .] And how small a part of a woman’s life is that; and how little can a man know even of that when he observes it through the black or rosy spectacles which sex puts upon his nose’ (ROO 75). No amount of literary talent or supposedly feminine behaviour will rid a man of these tinted lenses; as Woolf writes, ‘it remains obvious, even in the writing of Proust, that a man is terribly hampered and partial in his knowledge of women, as a woman in her knowledge of men’ (ROO 75). Looking at Woolf’s thoughts here, the value of Mansfield’s work comes into sharper focus: many of her stories either show women interacting without a man to mediate their relationship or show how oppressive a male presence in the home can be for women.4 In one particularly memorable scene in ‘At the bay’, for example, the women in the family feel a great sense of relief when Stanley Burnell leaves for work (CFKM-II 348). What he sees of the many feminine lives in his house is a performance. But neither Mansfield nor Woolf is merely celebrating the female sphere as a space of camaraderie and fellow feeling. Each is showing us the extra barriers that any structure of fellow feeling must work around to connect male and female minds. Woolf famously opens A Room of One’s Own with anecdotes of being told to get off the grass and being locked out of the library, embittering experiences that remind one ‘how unpleasant it is to be locked out’ (ROO 21). But just as unpleasant, Woolf implies, is being locked in. The great tragedy of Shakespeare’s sister, as Woolf imagines her, is that

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‘her genius was for fiction and lusted to feed abundantly upon the lives of men and women and the study of their ways’ (ROO 44). We see here an echo of Henry James’s idea that to make fiction is to ‘take life’.5 Yet Woolf would not be able to agree with another of James’s sentiments – that a ‘young lady living in a village has only to be a damsel upon whom nothing is lost’ to be able to imagine the world beyond her sphere of experience (H. James 1884: 188). Yes, Woolf tells us, a remarkable woman could write excellent books, but the subject matter of those books would be confined to what one could see in the drawing room, as was the case with Jane Austen: ‘Then again, all the literary training that a woman had in the early nineteenth century was training in the observation of character, in the analysis of emotion’ (ROO 61). The result is that women are better trained to feel with others than are men.6 But if women excel at imagining what it is to be another, it is because they cannot be other kinds of people in the wider world. Despite the fact that women have been locked out of professional, academic and political life, they have frequently been ‘in’ male minds. Such resonant reception of other emotions and perspectives, Woolf implies, is not necessarily a boon for women. This empathic, female way of seeing can be painful: Again if one is a woman one is often surprised by a sudden splitting off of consciousness, say in walking down Whitehall, when from being the natural inheritor of that civilization, she becomes, on the contrary, outside of it, alien and critical. Clearly the mind is always altering its focus, and bringing the world into different perspectives. But some of these states of mind seem, even if adopted spontaneously, to be less comfortable than others. (ROO 88)

What Woolf describes here is a case of Lipps’s negative empathy, in which we feel ourselves into an object and feel discomfort instead of joy.7 As we have seen in the case of Richardson’s Pilgrimage, empathy can happen even when we do not feel sympathetic toward the other and his point of view. Through empathy, one can feel very much ‘in’ an experience, even if one is uncomfortable. It is this Lippsian fact that Woolf is trying to make clear. To ‘feel with’ a perspective that is stifling or painful is to be subject to psychological violence. We find an especially strong rejection of acts of seeing from the dominant male perspective in Woolf’s ‘A sketch of the past’, which was unpublished in her lifetime. In this piece, Woolf recalls her half-brother George Duckworth and his dedication to Victorian England: In a thousand ways he made me feel that he believed in society. A belief which is so commonly accepted, as his was by all his friends, had depth, swiftness,

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­154    Empathy and the Psychology of Literary Modernism inevitability. It impresses even the outsider by the sweep of its current. Sometimes when I hear God Save the King I too feel a current belief but almost directly I consider my own splits asunder and one side of me criticises the other. (Woolf 1989: 167–8)

Something in Woolf opposes this belief, but only after she has felt herself ‘with’ the patriotic mindset. It is the moment of being swept into the other, dominant way of seeing that is so painful. This psychological violence is what makes Woolf end A Room of One’s Own with a particular request to young women, ‘I would ask you to write all kinds of books’ (ROO 98). Her narrator wants to see history, science, biography and literature through states of mind that are more comfortable for her – states that would not induce a split asunder after a forced experience of oneness. Yet despite recognising the danger inherent in Lippsian empathy, Woolf sees a social value in empathy. This social value aligns with Stein’s understanding of empathy’s proper role in the world. If it is painful for a woman to take on the male perspective, as Woolf suggests it often is, it follows that gender differences do matter in fellow feeling. Stein brings up this mater in On the Problem of Empathy, where she addresses the matter of ‘personal type’. She concedes that ‘Age, sex, occupation, station, nationality, generation are the kind of general experiential structures to which the individual is subordinate’ and tells us that when confronted with another person ‘How much of his experiential structure I can bring to my fulfilling intuition depends on my own structure’ (OPE 115). But these facts, according to Stein, do not mean that we cannot empathise with those categorically unlike us. In fact, empathy is precisely that which allows us to overcome these limitations and ‘run into ranges of value closed to us’ (OPE 116). Empathy is thus valuable because it broadens our experience of the world and makes us better able to ‘assess ourselves correctly’ (OPE 116). The issue of correct self-assessment is in turn crucial for Woolf in A Room of One’s Own, particularly after her narrator peruses the shelves of the British Museum to find out what men have written about women. She explains with some amusement that this body of writing is so vast that it induces ‘stupefaction, wonder, and bewilderment’ (ROO 24). Yet all of these books are ultimately ‘worthless’ (ROO 29) because, as Woolf indicates, they look on women only from a limited, male perspective. This singularity of perspective not only stifles a fuller male understanding of women, it is also indicative of a limited male self-understanding. Woolf explains, For there is a spot the size of a shilling at the back of the head which one can never see for oneself. It is one of the good offices that sex can discharge

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for sex – to describe that spot the size of a shilling at the back of the head [. . .] A true picture of man as whole can never be painted until a woman has described that spot the size of a shilling. (ROO 82)

Woolf has, throughout A Room of One’s Own, already been sketching out that shilling-sized spot on men’s heads by challenging male intellectual authority. When describing the many frustrating books on women by men, for example, she writes of a general ‘he’ who stands in for the parade of powerful male voices on the library shelves: ‘he seemed to control everything. Yet he was angry. I knew that he was angry by this token. When I read what he wrote about women I thought, not of what he was saying, but of himself’ (ROO 31). To reveal the representative man’s anger is clearly to invalidate his implicit claims about his own rationality and intelligence. It is to show him, as Stein points out, that inner perception can be mistaken. If one could truly show such a man how he appears to the critical eye of the other sex, he might understand that he does not see himself with the clear eyes of objectivity. According to Stein, this end must be achieved through empathy, which allows us to obtain the ‘images’ other people see, including the image they have of us (OPE 88). The social and personal value of empathy, in Stein’s understanding, is that it can team up with inner perception ‘as a corrective’ so we can better know and evaluate ourselves. If we are able to feel into the non-primordial images of ourselves that exist in other minds, ‘empathy and inner perception work hand in hand to give me myself to myself’ (OPE 89). Indeed, it is this gift that Woolf suggests is the exquisite balm of fellow feeling. If a layering of male and female perspectives is beneficial, we must surely wonder if the ideal healing perspective would be an androgynous one that sees the back of every head, male or female. Indeed, over the years many critics have understood artistic androgyny as the core tenet of Woolf’s work in A Room of One’s Own – one that she perhaps moves beyond in later years. Michèle Barrett, for example, understands ­androgyny as the centrepiece of Woolf’s early political and aesthetic outlook, arguing that between A Room of One’s Own and Three Guineas Woolf’s emphasis ‘moved from upholding an ideal of androgyny in art to a recognition of the power of difference – notably in her insistence that women were social “outsiders”’ (Barrett 1993: x). In this account, it is only after A Room of One’s Own that Woolf looks at difference as something that is potentially productive and worth maintaining. But A Room of One’s Own has been understood differently according to the prevailing political and intellectual winds. Since the third wave of feminism, some scholars have reinterpreted the

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­156    Empathy and the Psychology of Literary Modernism text’s r­ elationship to androgyny. Frances Restuccia, for example, writes of Room, ‘In the androgynous promised land, one would have guessed, differences dissolve: but the fact is that in Woolf’s vision they do not’ (Restuccia 1985: 254). Pushing against what had been the typical interpretation of Room until the 1980s, Restuccia argues that Woolf’s text ‘actually places more emphasis on the difference between the sexes than on their androgynous mergence’ (ibid.: 255). As I understand A Room of One’s Own, Woolf does indeed value androgyny. But hers is an androgyny defined by being open to other ‘ranges of value’; it is not an intermediate range of value between two gendered poles. Certainly, if Woolf is advocating an androgynous approach to art, her sense of androgyny is not a simple one. The androgynous male, for example, does not necessarily ‘feel for’ his female counterparts or even care about their hardships: ‘Coleridge certainly did not mean, when he said that a great mind is androgynous, that it is a mind that has any special sympathy with women; a mind that takes up their cause or devotes itself to their interpretation’ (ROO 89). Nor is the androgynous mind that of a feminine man or masculine woman: ‘In our time Proust was wholly androgynous, if not perhaps a little too much of a woman’ (ROO 93). Indeed, we have to wonder what it would take for Woolf to believe a man could truly feel himself into a woman’s perspective. Laying aside the troubling matter of what makes Proust ‘too much of a woman’, we start to see clearly that Woolf’s ideal is not one in which the female artist drifts away from her specifically female point of view. Rather, it lies in that artist’s ability to open herself to the masculine perspective that can see the spot on the back of her head. As Woolf ultimately suggests, ‘the androgynous mind is resonant and porous [. . .] it transmits emotion without impediment’ (ROO 89). The androgynous mind is one that can soak up the thoughts and feelings of others, but can also maintain its own shape and contours. It is a mind that empathises, but not in order to attain a feeling of oneness. Rather, it takes what is learned in the moment of empathy and uses it to examine the self in relation to the other. This larger structure of fellow feeling, which acknowledges the other’s difference, is for Woolf preferable to a Lippsian experience of oneness.

Different eyes Woolf ultimately understands male and female perspectives to be complementary in A Room of One’s Own. Her wariness about women’s sympathy for men arises because if fellow feeling only goes in one

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direction, male and female viewpoints have lopsided representation in society at large and cannot complement each other effectively. In Three Guineas, she is less concerned with cultivating that balance and more concerned with analysing the psychological gaps that cannot be bridged. Three Guineas was published during the Spanish Civil War, as another large-scale conflict between European nations was beginning to look inevitable. It is a classic of both feminist and pacifist thought in which Woolf offers a compelling rejection of violence mere months after the death of her nephew Julian Bell in Spain, where he had been serving as an ambulance driver in support of the Republican forces. Woolf’s text appears at first glance to be the record of a quest for empathy. It seems that throughout the text, Woolf pushes her male addressee to see life in England from her female perspective. Indeed, she is confident that some men, at least, are porous enough to feel the frustration of being locked out that she addressed in A Room of One’s Own: ‘You are feeling in your own persons what your mothers felt when they were shut out, when they were shut up, because they were women’ (TG 228). We might easily understand this cultivation of male empathy with the female mind as the key to Woolf’s political agenda. As Carroll writes, ‘That Woolf yearned for harmony, wholeness, equilibrium, and that she identified these with peace and an end to discord and violence is also undoubtedly true’ (Carroll 1978: 126). Intersubjectivity, then, is tied to real-world, political goals. Indeed, in Woolf’s painstaking elucidation of the connection between patriarchal oppression and warfare, which is directed at a male addressee, we can see a desire for a mixed-gender version of what Husserl calls ‘intermonadic community’: in the sense of a community of men and in that of man – who, even as solitary, has the sense: member of a community – there is implicit a mutual being for one another, which entails an Objectivating equalization of my existence with that of all others – consequently: I or anyone else, as a man among other men. (CM 129)

Woolf, however, is not sure that our ability to establish intersubjective connections trumps the difficulties of communication that exist between those who have lived radically different lives. Perhaps ‘a man among other men’ can feel mutual being for others, but Woolf doubts that such a comfortable sensation is available for a woman among men. While her father could confidently claim, ‘We may say that we think about other men by becoming other men’ (Stephen 1882: 227), she has little faith that even a forward-thinking man of her own generation could ‘become’ a woman in imagination. In her scepticism, she shies away

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­158    Empathy and the Psychology of Literary Modernism from ­implicating herself and other women in a mutual being with men. Indeed, as Carroll continues, ‘the keynote of Woolf’s politics is not harmony but struggle, not wholeness and equilibrium but confrontation’ (Carroll 1978: 126). That is, she does not let her addressee maintain the belief that he can actually feel what his mother felt. This male addressee is perhaps the most notable difference between A Room of One’s Own and Three Guineas. In the former text, Woolf’s speaker addresses the students of a women’s college; in the latter text, she speaks to an unnamed man of law whom she claims wrote to her three years earlier to ask, ‘How in your opinion are we to prevent war?’ (TG 117).8 Woolf notes that in many ways she and her silent interlocutor are similar. They are of the same class, they speak the same way and they both earn their livings. In a decade marked by the polarisation of its politics, they are both on the same, liberal, side of the table. Woolf admits that they would have an easy time conversing. As she makes clear with an explanatory qualification, however, conversation does not necessarily guarantee communication or understanding: ‘But . . . those three dots mark a precipice, a gulf so deeply cut between us that for three years I have been sitting on my side of it wondering whether it is any use to try to speak across it’ (TG 118). Though many critics, such as Brenda R. Silver, have noted the importance of Woolf’s insistence that ‘the male correspondent hear her as a woman’ (Silver 1991: 345), I believe that Woolf is more determined that he should understand how difficult it will be for him to do so. Ultimately, Woolf paints herself as unavailable for either cognitive or affective empathy. Elaborating on the themes she discussed in A Room of One’s Own, Woolf points out to her male addressee that he has the benefit of formal learning while she does not. That difference of education, she explains, creates ‘the first difficulty of communication between us’ (TG 118). The fact that he was provided with the elite education customary for men of his social class has a radical effect on their respective horizons – not only do they have vastly different opportunities, they also have vastly different ways of seeing the world as a result. Additionally, as Richardson’s Pointed Roofs indicates, even those women privileged enough to get a ‘male’ education at the turn of the century did not have access to such social or professional networks – in that novel, Miriam must still work as a poorly paid teacher in another country. Woolf points out in Three Guineas that although the professional world has opened for women, it does not offer them the same power that it offers men. Civil service salaries, Woolf notes, are significantly lower for women than for men (TG 291 note 6). This situation means that while women have been let into some areas of privilege, they still have incomplete access to that privilege

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and therefore do not function as part of the ‘we’ that Woolf’s addressee so casually constructs. From the beginning of Three Guineas, Woolf resists that larger ‘we’ that includes both women and men. From the opening pages, she refers to a female ‘us’, speaking back to her correspondent as part of a collective female voice. She implies that her addressee, by writing to her, is effectively making a supplication to a much larger group of women: ‘Had you not believed that human nature, the reasons, the emotions of the ordinary man and woman, lead to war, you would not have written asking for our help’ (TG 120). This striking use of ‘our’ communicates the fact that Woolf is not just an ‘I’ who can answer a ‘you’. She explains, for example, that even if she takes the utmost care to express clearly her point of view, ‘there would still remain some difficulties so fundamental that it may well prove impossible for you to understand or for us to explain’ (TG 117). The implied gender of this plural pronoun tells her male addressee that they are, in fact, speaking across a considerable divide. It is precisely this kind of divide that Husserl thinks demands empathy: To me and to those who share in my culture, an alien culture is accessible only by a kind of ‘experience of someone else’, a kind of ‘empathy’, by which we project ourselves into the alien cultural community and its culture. (CM 135)

Woolf wants to establish the fact that she and her addressee are ‘alien’ to each other and show that her community has its own cultural mindset. Notably, she does not claim that her female community is that of all women. The specific community she names as her own is that of ‘the daughters of educated men who have enough to live upon’ (TG 22). It is a group that straddles the border between privilege and privation. Despite growing up in homes marked by intellect and erudition, most of this group’s members have had severely limited access to education. These Englishwomen, whom Woolf implies are citizens of their nation in name only, have watched their brothers flourish. Of the educated man’s sister, Woolf asks, ‘Has she been “greatly blessed” in England?’ (TG 123). No, Woolf responds, for her rightful share was apportioned to her brother’s education fund. Later, Woolf follows up more explicitly: It would seem to follow then as an indisputable fact that ‘we’ – meaning by ‘we’ a whole made up of body, brain and spirit influenced by memory and tradition – must still differ in some essential respects from ‘you,’ whose body, brain and spirit have been so differently influenced by memory and tradition. Though we see the same world, we see it through different eyes. (TG 132–3)

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­160    Empathy and the Psychology of Literary Modernism Here, Woolf is giving the male addressee a lesson in that central modernist concern, apperception, which ‘explains why identical things can be perceived differently by different people’ (Jahn 2007: 101). We have seen how apperceptive difference guides the aesthetic method of a text like Mansfield’s Prelude; in Woolf’s work we see the role it plays in political thought. This insistence on the importance of apperception is, I believe, a political stand that grows out of the ethical question Three Guineas implicitly asks: whom can one presume to understand? Woolf denies her addressee admittance to her ‘we’, or perhaps more accurately, reveals to him that admittance is not possible for any man, no matter how forward-thinking he may be. This stand, however, prompts some questions about the make-up of her ‘we’. Although ‘we’ makes room for the comfort and political influence that solidarity can offer, there is something distinctly non-pacifist about speaking as one of many, which often means speaking for others. To speak as ‘we’ rather than ‘I’ always carries the threat of invasion, annexation or appropriation. It carries the threat of the violent, presumptuous empathy that we see in Ford’s The Good Soldier. This might, perhaps, explain the exclusivity of the ‘we’ that Woolf’s narrator reluctantly represents in Three Guineas. Making the transition from ‘I’ to ‘we’ is always a complicated and dangerous manoeuvre. There is always a possibility that ‘I’ will damage the ‘you’ who is an ‘I’ in her own right. Pacifism depends on a respect for the other as an other – to practice pacifism means refusing to invade the other’s borders or subsume the contents of the other’s interior, even for the sake of empathy. The preservation of the ‘I’, and respect for other ‘I’s is, I believe, what leads Woolf to posit a ‘we’ that has so few potential members. Woolf has been criticised for what has been perceived as a lack of empathy with women who are not ‘daughters of educated men’ like herself. As Laura Marcus explains, Interestingly, both Three Guineas and ‘Memories of a Working Women’s Guild’ are the Woolf texts which have raised the most questions about the class identifications and limitations of Woolf’s feminism. ‘Memories of a Working Women’s Guild’ refuses to imagine cross-class knowledge and empathy: ‘One could not be Mrs Giles because one’s body had never stood at the wash-tub; one’s hands had never wrung and scrubbed and chopped up whatever the meat may be that makes a miner’s dinner.’ Three Guineas makes its specific address to the ‘daughters of educated men’: Woolf seemed deliberately to have rejected the ‘pro-proletarian spectacles’ of many of her contemporaries. (Marcus 2010: 156)

Three Guineas does indeed reveal a refusal to empathise. But as Marcus suggests, we need not read that refusal as merely a manifestation of

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Woolf’s snobbery. It is, I believe, an ethical treatment of the class other that mirrors the treatment that Woolf demands from the gendered other. Woolf refuses to speak for others who are not part of the small ‘we’ from which she can expect empathy without doing considerable violence. Here, in Three Guineas, Woolf follows her earlier claim that nothing can grow in the shadow of ‘I’ (ROO 90) with a demonstration that the shadow of ‘we’ can be equally harmful. Woolf’s rejection of fellow feeling as a guiding principle for ethical action becomes even clearer when she makes her ‘seeing with different eyes’ trope literal. With a stack of photos from the Spanish Civil War in front of her, she writes, ‘Let us see then whether when we look at the same photographs we see the same things’ (TG 125). Woolf admits that they do feel the same emotions – horror and disgust – when looking at the photographs (TG 125).9 But feeling the same category of emotion is far from having the same inner experience as another person, especially when that person is from another community of feeling. As Maggie Humm argues, Woolf mentions these atrocity photos to highlight experiential gaps between men and women: ‘While these photographs are not gendered in essence, although they do feature the domestic and children, the narrator’s memory and her own bodily responses to the photographs are marked by gender difference’ (Humm 2003: 647). Lily Hsieh also questions the idea that Woolf’s description of these photos is meant to induce fellow feeling. She writes, ‘it seems that Woolf summons these horrid images to appeal to empathy or sympathy’, but goes on to say, ‘That Woolf’s politics in Three Guineas, espoused with her rhetorical use of the “spectacular” war images, is one which relies on sympathy is a common misreading’ (Hsieh 2006: 32–3). In accordance with Hsieh, I believe that Woolf’s rhetorical strategy relies on critiques and rejections of empathic feeling. In the case of the war photos, Woolf immediately follows her statement that ‘we are seeing with you’ and feeling the same things (TG 126) with an elaboration of the differences between them (TG 127). This insistence that ‘seeing with’ somebody does not help them understand each other indicates that empathy can do little to close the gap of psychological distance between women and men. Closing that gap, for women, would mean occupying the uncomfortable perspectives that Woolf discusses in A Room of One’s Own. It would mean inviting an experience of painful negative empathy with the dominant group, an act of violence against the self. Woolf maintains that for women to have a positive influence on the world they must maintain their difference and their outsider’s status: ‘Different we are, as facts have proved, both in sex and in education. And it is from that difference, as we have already said, that our help

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­162    Empathy and the Psychology of Literary Modernism can come, if help we can, to protect liberty, to prevent war’ (TG 229). Notably, it is when speaking as a hypothetical ‘I’ rather than as a ‘we’ that Woolf makes her most compelling pacifist argument. In order to effect change, the outsider must remain outside, she must maintain the belief that ‘as a woman, I have no country. As a woman I want no country. As a woman my country is the whole world’ (TG 234). Here, Woolf takes what was already a common feminist slogan, ‘woman has no country’ (Park 2005: 124), and mobilises it to maintain psychological distance. Thus Woolf’s Outsider’s Society disavows nationality-based identity (TG 232), and in the words of Julia Briggs, ‘rejects group solidarity in favour of the individual conscience’ (Briggs 2005: 328). It is a society whose main benefit is that it allows the constituent members of its ‘we’ to remain individual ‘I’s. Throughout Three Guineas, Woolf is saying directly what her fellow inward-turning modernists have only implied indirectly: empathy, ‘feeling with’, is in the strictest sense not possible. This stance becomes quite clear when Woolf explains that for a woman, the question of how to stop war will not produce an answer intelligible to a man, for she does not understand the urge to fight in the first place: ‘Complete understanding could only be achieved by blood transfusion and memory transfusion – a miracle still beyond the reach of science’ (TG 121). Though Woolf takes a teasing tone, her quip about ‘memory transfusions’ should turn our thoughts to William James and his search for a psychical solution to the problem of other minds (PP 349–50). True empathy, if we are to find it, will come only through the shadowy channels of supernatural phenomena. Her words are also an echo of her own father’s thoughts on sympathy in 1882: So far as I sympathise with you I annex your consciousness. I act as though my nerves could somehow be made continuous with yours in such a way that a blow which fell upon your frame would convey a sensation to my brain. Undoubtedly we must add that this current, so transmitted, is greatly enfeebled in almost all cases. (Stephen 1882: 227)

What Woolf shows us is that such a connection is not only enfeebled, it is also enfeebling. She tells her male addressee in Three Guineas that ‘it seems both wrong for us rationally and impossible for us emotionally to fill up your form and join your society. For by so doing we should merge our identity with yours’ (TG 231). The ‘form’ Woolf mentions is a membership form, a paper document. But it also represents the form of the male mind. By refusing to ‘fill up’ that form, she refuses to empathise in the terms that Lipps set out. She will not send her ego outward into a male body to experience the painful oneness of negative empathy.

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The empathising monad As I read Woolf’s oeuvre, what is even more noteworthy than the way she resists filling up the male ‘form’ in her political writing is the way her novels gradually become more resistant to being ‘filled up’ by the reader’s empathic thinking. What they ultimately make clear is that empathic literary experience cannot be maintained – the mediation that empathic narrative hopes to disguise reasserts its presence and what appear to be communities of feeling dissolve ambiguously. Woolf’s novels thus illustrate what Jesse Matz understands as a commonplace of literary modernism: its bid for immediacy ‘ends up only featuring the by-products of its failure to get it’ (Matz 2001: 11). This dissolution is present even in her 1931 novel The Waves, which we might easily identify as her most empathic work. Few novels, in fact, are more invested in matters and structures of ‘feeling with’. Indeed, The Waves is deeply empathic in Husserl’s terms. Those terms, however, ultimately disrupt the particular ‘feeling with’ that I have identified with exemplary ‘inward-turning’ modernist novels. It is in this text that Woolf famously explores the possibility of describing ‘the world seen without a self’ (TW 221) and asks if we can escape ‘the burden of individual life’ (TW 84). Like Mansfield’s Prelude, The Waves reveals a network of minds as they consider themselves in connection to others. The rotating set of speakers – Bernard, Jinny, Neville, Susan, Louis and Rhoda – is forever wondering what makes each one ‘I’ and what kind of ‘we’ they form together. Meanwhile, the reader (particularly the first-time reader) must work hard to disentangle the six. As M. Keith Booker writes, ‘the continual switching from one speaker to another acts to problematise the association of the “I” of the text with any specific speaking subject’ (Booker 1993: 43–4). In fact, the speakers themselves seem to find the matter of ‘I’ problematic. More than one repeats the first person singular pronoun as if to discover its meaning or harness its power: Bernard calls himself ‘I, I, I’ and Louis signs his name ‘I, and again I, and again I’ (TW 227, 127). As Henry James hoped would be the case with Isabel Archer in The Portrait of a Lady, we see them primarily in the act of self-reflection, pondering ‘I’.10 Indeed, we might describe Woolf’s novel as a representation of the lifelong process of becoming ‘I’. Accordingly, the novel opens by revealing each character during early childhood, in what Husserl calls ‘the stream of subjective processes’ (CM 134). All six children see or hear something, so that we first know them through their senses: ‘I see a ring’, ‘I see a slab of pale yellow’, ‘I hear a sound’, ‘I see a globe’, ‘I see a crimson tassel’, ‘I hear something stamping’ (TW 5). This cycle of

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­164    Empathy and the Psychology of Literary Modernism focalisation is marked by attention to particular senses, revealing each character through what William Nelles has called ocularisation and auricularisation (Jahn 2007: 99). They are just learning to articulate how their bodies relate to the world. Here, in the early years of life, each child is in what Husserl calls the first ‘immanent’ world of his or her own subjective experience. Woolf catches them at an early stage of cognitive development – they are beginning to move beyond what they see and hear and are starting to sort out who they are and what makes them different from each other. Louis, for example, recites a number of salient details about himself and his fellows in the novel’s opening pages: I speak with an Australian accent. I will wait and copy Bernard. He is English. They are all English. Susan’s father is a clergyman. Rhoda has no father. Bernard and Neville are the sons of gentlemen. Jinny lives with her grandmother in London. (TW 13)

Harker describes such facts as ‘ropes’ that allow the reader to assemble a rudimentary storyline, arguing, ‘The need for such ropes suggests that the project of The Waves is deliberately one of disorientation with only occasional elements for alleviation through a connection to the external world’ (Harker 2011: 16). This disorientation is particularly acute in the earlier sections of the novel, where the children are, like Kezia in Mansfield’s Prelude, just emerging from a stream of communal life. As Husserl explains it, our move beyond the most rudimentary sensory experience involves precisely the kind of recognition of the other that we see in Louis’s young thoughts: Constitution of the existence-sense, ‘Objective world’, on the basis of my primordial ‘world’, involves a number of levels. As the first of these, there is to be distinguished the constitutional level pertaining to the ‘other ego’ or to any ‘other egos’ whatever – that is: to egos excluded from my own concrete being (from me as the ‘primordial ego’). (CM 107)

As our vision aligns with each child in turn, we see that they all look at the others precisely to know what separates them from the group, as when Rhoda realises that the others comprehend the addition problem that stymies her: ‘The others look; they look with understanding’ (TW 14). The other five children, Rhoda sees, have minds unlike her own. They see the world, to borrow Woolf’s terminology in Three Guineas, with different eyes. This process of individuation clearly comes with a certain amount of confusion and pain. As Bernard muses many decades later while considering this early stage of life, ‘We suffered terribly as we became separate bodies’ (TW 186).

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It is Bernard who suffers the most in this separation; it is he who has the strongest desire for empathic experience with his fellows. His ideal existence is one in which other egos are not excluded from his own: ‘I do not believe in separation. We are not single’ (TW 49–50). According to James Naremore, this refusal to admit separation is a quality that all of Woolf’s characters in The Waves share. He writes, ‘in those hypnotic moments when they seem to lose personality and come to the verge of death, they are empowered to see “the world without a self”, without any division between “I” and “thou”’ (Naremore 1973: 188). But throughout their lives, none of the others is as invested in empathic, intersubjective experience as Bernard is. Some of them actively resist it. Indeed, Bernard’s rejection of singularity accompanies his realisation that Neville and Louis feel separation from others quite strongly: ‘Both feel the presence of other people as a separating wall’ (TW 49). The characters thus offer competing intersubjective values. It is also clear that Susan, like Richardson’s Miriam, has little desire to become as one with her fellows. Instead, while at school she dreams of returning to the unpopulated countryside and pouring herself into the landscape: ‘I shall there unfold and take out whatever it is I have made here; something hard. For something has grown in me here’ (TW 39). What empathic desire she has is for the non-human world. Neville, too, resists integration into the group, refusing to understand identity on a collective model. For example, while out with Bernard at college, he insists, ‘I am one person – myself’ (TW 65). Even as he ages and moves well past the first ‘immanent world’, Neville continues to define himself by his differences, as when he thinks of Louis: ‘I have no accent. I do not finick about fearing what people think of my father a banker at Brisbane like Louis’ (TW 52). For him, thinking about the way other people see the world is useful or desirable only insofar as it reveals his own difference and affirms the psychological distance that keeps his own mind a private space. Bernard, in contrast, feels that singularity is a restrictive state imposed from outside. He follows Neville by saying, ‘To be contracted by another person into a single being – how strange’ (TW 66). He understands himself to be immanently porous, open to the world in a constant state of sympathetic imagination. While still a student, he believes that he ‘sympathise[s] effusively’ (TW 57). Later, as he excitedly thinks about his recent engagement, he asks ‘Am I not, as I walk, trembling with strange oscillations and vibrations of sympathy [. . .]?’ (TW 85). But Bernard not only needs to feel with others; more specifically, he needs to see himself from the perspective of others. From a young age he likes to turn his attention to Louis, the outsider: ‘I seeking contrasts often

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­166    Empathy and the Psychology of Literary Modernism feel his eye upon us’ (TW 68). He is inclined, then, to use the images gathered in empathic thought to give himself to himself, as Stein would say. His need to enact this structure sticks with him and intensifies throughout his life. We often find him craving the experience of looking at the self from outside of the self. On his way to Percival’s going-away dinner, for example, the newly engaged Bernard says, ‘To be myself (I note) I need the illumination of other people’s eyes, and therefore cannot be entirely sure what is my self’ (TW 87). Years later, he will echo this thought, saying to himself, ‘My being only glitters when all its facets are exposed to many people’ (TW 142). What becomes continually apparent is that it is indeed Bernard, rather than any of his fellows, who ‘glitters’ in this exchange. His illumination through others makes clear Husserl’s oft-repeated statement that empathy happens in our own subjective sphere: ‘“In” myself I experience and know the Other; in me he becomes constituted – appresentatively mirrored, not constituted as the original’ (CM 149). As Vernon Lee would tell us, empathic thought does not project outward, but rather inward.11 Bernard’s empathic need is tied to his lifelong desire to craft stories – he is always, in his head, narrating the lives around him in relation to himself. More than one critic has understood Bernard to be representative of Woolf’s own novelistic ideals. Tony E. Jackson, for example, writes, ‘The figure of Bernard in fact becomes a paradigmatic representation of the modernist writer’ (Jackson 1994: 139). Booker makes a similar claim and comments on Bernard’s relation to others: ‘Bernard is an observer, not an object of observation [. . .] This ability to observe life without dominating the observations with the projections of his own personality makes Bernard in many ways Woolf’s ideal of the artist’ (Booker 1993: 64). In Booker’s view, then, Bernard escapes what is so often understood to be the danger of empathy – ego projection. If this claim is true, then Bernard avoids the mistake Lee, Stein and Husserl all identify; he does not understand his own mental activity to be taking place in the others with whom he hopes to feel. But Neville, for one, distrusts Bernard’s empathic desires. As Neville understands it, Bernard’s need for story material is ravenous and predatory: ‘Bernard says there is always a story. I am a story. Louis is a story. There is the story of the boot-boy, the story of the man with one eye, the story of the woman who sells winkles’ (TW 38). Later, he thinks with annoyance, ‘We are all phrases in Bernard’s story, things he writes down in his notebook under A or under B’ (TW 51). Ultimately, what Neville thinks turns out to be true. In the final section of the novel, five of the six speakers recede, leaving only Bernard to tell their six stories. In his words, it is his task ‘to sum up’ (TW 183). Matz understands this

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final section as the realisation of Bernard’s empathic desires, writing, ‘Bernard ultimately transcends individualised consciousness’ (Matz 2001: 179). Certainly, he does appear to have felt into other lives here at the novel’s end. Indeed, there is a neat symmetry in the novel’s resolution, as the single sensory streams that separate from each other in the first section merge into Bernard’s one stream of thought. As Alice Van Buren Kelley explains, Bernard ‘feels on his forehead the blow that killed Percival, on his neck the kiss Jinny gave Louis, in his eyes Susan’s tears, in his mind the dream Rhoda leaped toward in her death’ (Kelley 1971: 197). This gathering of foreign sensory experience within his own mind answers Bernard’s earlier belief in his multiplicity: ‘I am not one and simple, but complex and many’ (TW 56). Looking back at his lifetime of becoming Bernard, of becoming an ‘I’, he thinks, ‘what I call “my life”, it is not one life that I look back upon; I am not one person; I am many people; I do not altogether know who I am – Jinny, Susan, Neville, Rhoda, or Louis: or how to distinguish my life from theirs’ (TW 212). For Pamela L. Caughie, this final section of The Waves relinquishes the concepts of a central self and a stable world (Caughie 1991: 49). Michael Levenson has made a similar argument about the work of Joseph Conrad, saying it features ‘a radical disorientation that obliterates any stable relation between the self and the world, and that raises the question of whether there is a world to which the self belongs’ (Levenson 1991: 5). A destabilised self and world, then, would seem to be at the heart of literary modernism, from its earliest days to its peak. Certainly, Bernard’s self becomes ‘decentralised’ in that it is shown integrated in a network of selves, which are joined by an act of empathic thinking. Here, on the verge of death, Bernard seems to confirm Husserl’s claim that ‘the constitution of the world essentially involves a “harmony” of the monads’ (CM 108). But I would argue that Bernard remains an ‘I’ – he does not truly escape his individual consciousness. We need not, in fact, insist that Woolf’s novel gives up the notion of a stable world. As Husserl explains, empathy with others is what makes a stable world available for our comprehension: ‘the otherness of “someone else” becomes extended to the whole world, as its “Objectivity”, giving it this sense in the first place’ (CM 147). Here again, Husserl echoes the much earlier thoughts of Leslie Stephen, who writes, ‘the recognition that there are other centres of consciousness besides my own is bound up in the closest way with the recognition of what is called an objective world’ (Stephen 1882: 219). So while Bernard’s end goal is empathy, we cannot say the same for the novel

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­168    Empathy and the Psychology of Literary Modernism as a whole. As in A Room of One’s Own, empathy only matters in The Waves insofar as it opens another ‘aspect of surrounding realities’ (Stephen 1882: 219) and allows the monad, in this case Bernard, to construct a more stable ‘reality’ informed by those additional aspects. Put another way, Bernard understands the world and his role in it only insofar as he has experienced other people.

Disruptions of empathic narrative It is clear that The Waves is not empathic in the sense that Henry James’s A Small Boy and Others or Richardson’s Pilgrimage are empathic; that is, Woolf’s novel does not try to pull the reader into a single stream of thought. We might say, however, that The Waves is empathic in the tradition of Mansfield’s Prelude. At first glance, Woolf’s novel might even appear to be the more empathic piece of writing, since the reader spends more time immersed in each represented mind. But the ghostly narrative agent of Prelude brings us closer to its collective stream of consciousness than The Waves brings us to the web of intersubjective experience radiating out from Bernard. Ultimately, Woolf’s novel makes sure that the reader remains outside whatever community of feeling is established in its carousel of focalisers. While we do read the thoughts of each character, Woolf does not hide the psychological distance between reader and character – in fact, she highlights it. To begin, the interstitial descriptions of the sun over the sea periodically disrupt our access to the six focalising minds. As Jackson explains, these interludes serve as a kind of narrator (Jackson 1994: 139), guiding the minds of The Waves through their lifelong process of individuation and reintegration in Bernard’s final act of imagination. Even the main sections of The Waves do not adhere strictly to the notion that ‘life [does] not narrate’ that we have seen in the work of Richardson, Mansfield and Ford.12 Some readers have, however, understood it to be just such a ‘non-narrated’ text. Lawrence Bowling, writing at the mid-century, understood Woolf’s novel to be ‘rendered exclusively in the form of interior monologues’ (Bowling 1950: 339–40). What we read throughout The Waves is certainly a form of inner speech, but to call it interior monologue is not quite accurate. Here, I am following Seymour Chatman’s five ‘criterial features’ of interior monologue: first, the character’s self-reference is first-person; second, the discourse happens as the story happens; third, the language is identifiably that of the character; fourth, there are no allusions unnecessary outside the character’s own thinking; and fifth, there is no presumptive audience

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with expository needs (Chatman 1978: 182–3). The Waves violates at least three of these. First, the speech of each character does not seem to have been captured at the particular moments that are represented in the text. Jackson, for one, has suggested that the words the characters speak as children are actually adult reconstructions of childhood memories (Jackson 1994: 140). Indeed, their vocabulary seems to support Jackson’s interpretation; a young Neville, for example, calls a dead man’s body ‘this stricture, this rigidity’ (TW 17). Second, no single character has a recognisable speech pattern. As Julia Briggs notes in her reading of the six voices of The Waves, ‘their speech patterns are scarcely differentiated’ (Briggs 2005: 249). Additionally, much of what the six ‘say’, especially in the first section, has a clear expository function. However, as I noted earlier, those expository comments can be understood as internal attempts to understand the self in relation to others. Finally, first-person internal speech is to some extent disrupted in The Waves, as each ‘I’ is recorded as dialogue introduced by ‘he said’ and ‘she said’ clauses. These little tags serve as subtle disruptions to our empathic experience as readers, skewing any cognitive overlap that sets in. Woolf’s method has probably been best named by Gabrielle Schwab, who calls it ‘interior dialogue’ (Schwab 1994: 83). Throughout the novel, these subtle hints that the character minds are indeed mediated and indirectly given persist, suggesting that we might understand life not as Ford understood it, but rather as a constant state of narration. This highlighting of the novel’s mediation foreshadows what was to come with Woolf’s final novel, Between the Acts. One thing we definitely do not get in Between the Acts is a sustained look at any particular psychological world. As Galia Benziman explains, ‘There is no elaborate, steady inquiry into the consciousness of any particular character, only glimpses; individual subjectivities seem to operate in the text chiefly as constituents and emblems of a larger whole’ (Benziman 2006: 54). In other words, the reader who comes to Woolf’s last novel looking for a new Bernard will be disappointed. But this fact does not mean that Between the Acts is simply a fictional analogue to Three Guineas, another text seeking the voice of a particular ‘we’ rather than the voice of an ‘I’. Benziman is decidedly against such an interpretation, writing, ‘Between the Acts exposes the extent to which – even in one of the most political moments of her career – Woolf can imagine and perceive collectivity only in terms of the subjective mind’ (ibid.). Woolf, then, is in many ways still mirroring Husserl, who tells us that the self needs others to experience the world fully, but also reminds us that we will always experience others in relation to the singular self:

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­170    Empathy and the Psychology of Literary Modernism A priori, my ego, given to me apodictically – the only thing I can posit in absolute apodicticity as existing – can be a world-experiencing ego only by being in communion with others like himself: a member of a community of monads, which is given orientedly, starting from himself. (CM 139)

But unlike The Waves, Woolf’s final novel does not have a particular monad whose attempts to constellate the world through a community of other monads show up as sustained thought on the page. In fact, Between the Acts does not encourage the kind of ‘feeling oneself into’ that is so apparent in the other modernist narratives I have examined in this book. While Woolf is exploring some of the same problems in Between the Acts that she confronts in The Waves, her method starts to lose what we might recognise as its empathic character. Between the Acts, written after the peak of high modernism, is asking what role empathy and ‘feeling with’ can play in the novel of the future.

Conclusion: moving beyond empathy? Since I began this book with Henry James and his proto-modernist A Small Boy and Others, it is fitting that I close with Woolf’s Between the Acts. Readers of Woolf have long pondered the question of where her final novel sits in the modernist canon. Is it a late modernist flourish, we might ask, or is it, as Marilyn L. Brownstein tells us, a novel of postmodern mystery? (Brownstein 1985: 77). Following Brownstein, Pamela L. Caughie compares Between the Acts to Beckett’s drama, John Cage’s compositions and Italo Calvino’s classic 1979 work of metafiction, If On a Winter’s Night a Traveller. Noting the self-reflexivity of both Woolf’s and Calvino’s novels, Caughie writes, ‘both Woolf and Calvino force us to consider our own needs and desires as readers’ (Caughie 1991: 56). Of course, self-conscious fictions do not belong exclusively to postmodernism. Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, for example, shows clear signs of self-awareness. So to say that Between the Acts makes us think about our own readerly activity hardly places it outside the realm of modernist fiction. Ultimately, we can only say that like A Small Boy and Others, Woolf’s last novel is a text on the margin of modernism; one could credibly argue that it belongs on either side of a fuzzy divide. I would say, however, that Between the Acts does show Woolf pushing the limits of a particular kind of modernism: the empathic modernism that seeks to promote and represent ‘feeling with’. The form of Between the Acts, a hybrid of narrative prose and drama, complicates the empathic readerly drive to ‘feel oneself into’ the text.

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As Ann Yanko Wilkinson points out, Between the Acts fulfils Woolf’s 1927 vision of ‘the novel to come’ – this would be a novel that had devoured other forms, a novel that was poetic and dramatic, but was neither a poem nor a play (Wilkinson 1966: 54).13 True to this promise, Between the Acts shows an entire town watching the annual community pageant at the home of the Oliver family. We see both what happens before, after and between the acts of the play, and the play itself as performed to the audience. Perhaps the most salient feature of Woolf’s ‘novel to come’ as manifested in Between the Acts is the sense of hypermediation that its form produces. Beyond the fact that a play is woven into the novel, the play itself represents different eras of English history by mimicking the literature of the era. It cycles through mock medieval poetry (‘The valiant Rhoderick, / Armed and valiant’), a seemingly endless restoration comedy about Sir Spaniel Lilyliver, and a lampoon of Victorian morals, ending with the unveiling of a fragmented modernist ‘mirror’ composed of dozens of reflective items (BA 49, 76–89, 96–103, 109–12). This concluding mirror might well remind us of Bernard’s glittering soul in The Waves, revealed through the reflection of his fellows. The play’s lesson on the history of British literature should make us consider how the novel’s metafictionality not only points to the future, but also to the past – to Shakespeare’s plays within plays, to Laurence Sterne’s self-conscious fiction and indeed to literature before the era dominated by structures of fellow feeling. In terms of readerly empathy, Between the Acts is perhaps as far from a text like Richardson’s Pilgrimage as possible. While Richardson’s series operates on the ideal of hidden mediation, Woolf’s novel constantly exposes mediation, particularly by setting up an experience of multiple spectatorship for the reader. As the pageant begins, for example, we see the play’s director, Miss La Trobe, hidden behind a tree, watching the action unfold: ‘A long line of villagers in shirts made of sacking began passing in and out in single file behind her between the trees. They were singing, but not a word reached the audience’ (BA 48). Here, we get a triangulated scene of spectatorship – the audience watches the play, Miss La Trobe watches the audience watching the play and watches her unpractised players as they stumble through the piece. We must ask if this multiple spectatorship makes room for any immersive form of ‘feeling with’, or if it completely prevents the reader from ‘filling up’ its form. What we learn about the characters in Between the Acts, we learn by watching them interact with the play – the play ‘comments’ on them while they literally comment on it, speaking to themselves and to their fellows. As Wilkinson explains, it is the play that shows us how the group functions as a collection of interacting individuals:

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­172    Empathy and the Psychology of Literary Modernism The form of the drama itself does away with the beast-of-burden work of arranging, explaining and describing these relationships: they all occur within the pattern of the dramatic conflict, worked out as the ‘play’ proceeds. Because of this, the author is able to stand back further. (Wilkinson 1966: 56)

More important is the fact that the reader must step back further – to feel ourselves into any individual mind would render the novel ineffectual. We do, however, occasionally feel the tug of character consciousness, catching glimpses of particular pageant-goer thoughts throughout the novel, as when Etty Springett ponders her own displeased reaction to the Victorian scene: ‘Yet children did draw trucks in mines; there was the basement; yet Papa read Walter Scott aloud after dinner; and divorced ladies were not received in court. How difficult to come to any conclusion!’ (BA 98). David McWhirter has noted this conflict, explaining that Between the Acts ‘positions us as empathetic readers and as detached spectators’ (McWhirter 1993: 792). As we are forced to switch between these opposing roles, our acts of ‘feeling with’ become exposed and limited. Clearly, it is too simple to say that because our readerly gaze is split, Woolf’s novel precludes any fellow feeling with the text. As this book has shown, modernist empathy manifests in a number of ways. Indeed, we do find fellow feeling in Between the Acts – it is simply unlike that which we experience when reading the internal thoughts of a character like Miriam Henderson in Pilgrimage or Christopher Tietjens in A Man Could Stand Up–. Michele Pridmore-Brown’s understanding of the novel, which recalls the work of both William and Henry James, might help us understand how the reader ‘feels with’ Between the Acts: Woolf’s readers – the audience of the audience – jump disjointedly among ontological levels ranging from reveries and fantasy to newspaper articles to events on the Continent to the play and the actual summer afternoon. In the end, it becomes apparent that everything – the actual and the imagined, the public and the private – is interconnected by wires and waves of association radiating from the present. (Pridmore-Brown 1998: 409)

Pridmore-Brown’s interpretation here echoes both Henry James’s delight in the memories that rush to fill the present when he squeezes ‘the sponge of memory’ and William James’s claim that thought and matter are interchangeable.14 Certainly, we see in Mrs Swithin a desire for just such an interconnected world. Just before the pageant begins, she expresses this sentiment: ‘“But we have other lives, I think, I hope”, she murmured. “We live in others, Mr. . . . We live in things”’ (BA 44). Perhaps our reading experience lets us connect all of these people and things in one web, one stream of consciousness, as in Mansfield’s Prelude.

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Perhaps. But if so, it depends on us seeing the harmony of monads, to borrow Husserl’s term, from a sympathetic distance. This fact is most clear when we consider how Woolf represents time in Between the Acts. It features none of the empathic anachrony I have noted in all of my previous chapters. Let us recall how Henry James’s work fulfils the promise of empathic in-feeling by filling up his represented world with words, by slowing down experience.15 Let us think also of Prelude, in which we revisit scenes from new perspectives, going back into moments, fleshing them out with new information. Between the Acts, unlike The Waves and Woolf’s other fiction, seems to happen in real time – no mind slows for us, the play does not pause as we overhear the conversations of the spectators, and we do not see anything afresh through new focalising filters. Within this narrative space, the structures of ‘feeling oneself into’ cannot cohere. Such inward-moving readerly tendencies are constantly interrupted by the novel’s need to keep up with the play as it is performed. The play itself is subject to interruptions, both for the spectators and for the reader – Mr and Mrs Rupert Haines arrive late (BA 50), people whisper to each other throughout, costumes come undone, and, most notably, the actors consistently fail to maintain any sense of illusion: ‘For the ruff had become unpinned and the great Eliza had forgotten her lines. But the audience laughed so loud that it did not matter’ (BA 53). This communal laughter, at least, shows the audience joined in one feeling. Perhaps, then, the empathy of Woolf’s novel is not meant for the reader, but only for the represented community. Reading such moments of group action, Melba Cuddy-Keane takes a rosy view of the pageant’s effects: ‘In the final merging of voices there is no longer any distinction of performance from life, of the intervals between the acts from the acts; all voices are part of one choric voice, all action is equally central’ (Cuddy-Keane 1990: 283). Indeed, at the end of Between the Acts, multiple people become a singular ‘someone’: ‘I do think,’ someone was saying, ‘Miss Whatshername should have come forward and not left it to the rector . . . After all, she wrote it . . . I thought it brilliantly clever . . . O my dear, I thought it utter bosh. Did you understand the meaning? [. . .]’ (BA 117)

This recorded speech, marked by ellipses, is clearly reminiscent of Richardson’s work. By 1941, such use of ellipses was a standard, even traditional, method of indicating the internal thought process of a single mind. Here, Woolf appropriates that method to give the entire community of Between the Acts a singular voice, a singular stream of consciousness.

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­174    Empathy and the Psychology of Literary Modernism But this singular voice is not the loudest voice in Between the Acts. Rather, the loudest voice belongs to the gramophone, Miss La Trobe’s narrator and audience wrangler. And it is in the gramophone that we recognise most clearly the instability and ephemerality of empathic structures in Between the Acts. From its first stuttering sounds, the gramophone confuses and disorients: Then the play began. Was it, or was it not, the play? Chuff, chuff, chuff sounded from the bushes. It was the noise a machine makes when something has gone wrong. Some sat down hastily; others stopped talking guiltily. For the stage was empty. Chuff, chuff, chuff the machine buzzed in the bushes. (BA 47–8)

The chuff chuff chuff is the sound of the gramophone trying to work, the sound of the needle having missed its mark. The gramophone broadcasts its own mechanical operations – it buzzes white noise from its speaker and its needle ticks. It is the sound of a missed connection, the sound of a gap that has not been bridged. It is a sound that announces the end of oneness: ‘To the valediction of the gramophone hid in the bushes the audience departed. Dispersed, it wailed, Dispersed are we’ (BA 60). This mechanical voice of history announces both the coming dispersal of World War II, the end of which Woolf would not live to see, and the dispersal of modernist fellow feeling. Yet the gramophone also fights this dispersal, calling the crowd back after each intermission with its music. The gramophone, at last, is a voice of empathic ambivalence: ‘The gramophone was affirming in tones there was no denying, triumphant yet valedictory: Dispersed are we; who have come together. But, the gramophone asserted, let us retain whatever made that harmony’ (BA 116). Unsure of what has created the town’s harmony of monads, the gramophone can only affirm that dispersal does not mean all community of feeling is lost. Dispersal, as I have implied throughout this book, is always immanent in empathic modernism, even when it is just cohering, as in A Small Boy and Others. We can read the gramophone as the unstable voice of modernism, telling us to disperse and cohere, ordering us to empathise while revealing that we cannot possibly do so. In fact, empathic modernism is always only just beginning to cohere, and in its ambivalence and anxiety about the dangers of fellow feeling, never solidifying. From the ghostly voices of James’s remembered others to Woolf’s refusal to fill up the male form in Three Guineas, the literary modernism that maps interiority lets us know that the ideal of ‘feeling with’ is always beyond our grasp, but nevertheless worthy of our reach.

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Notes   1. This passage is from Woolf’s ‘Reminiscences’, which was begun in 1907 but not finished until 1908 (Schulkind 1976: 31).   2. In a tragic twist of irony, Stein later died in Auschwitz, a victim of the twentieth century’s largest systematic suppression of empathic impulses.   3. Husserl agrees that inference by analogy is not the solution to the problem of other minds (CM 111).   4. See ‘The daughters of the late colonel’ (1920) (CFKM-II 266–83) or ‘The voyage’ (1921) (CFKM-II 327–9).   5. See Chapter 1 (33) and H. James, SB 163.   6. This belief is widespread. Women’s supposed ability to empathise or sympathise better than men is usually framed as an inherent ability, often as one that stems from ‘maternal instinct’. Recent research casts doubt on this assumption, however. See Graham and Ickes (1997).   7. See Chapter 2 (86) and Lipps, EAP 408.   8. Some of Woolf’s critics refer to ‘the narrator’ rather than to ‘Woolf’ when writing about Three Guineas (Black 2004: 79). But as the speaker here is not, at least to my mind, a character in the sense that the speaker of A Room of One’s Own is, I consider her to be a fictionalised version of Woolf and refer to her as ‘Woolf’.  9. While the original edition of Three Guineas did feature several photographs of educated Englishmen going about the business of church, state and university education, it did not include any of the war photos that Woolf describes. 10. See Chapter 1 (40). 11. See Chapter 4 (122). 12. See Ford (1924b: 73) and Chapter 4 (120). 13. Wilkinson is discussing Woolf’s essay ‘The narrow bridge of fiction’, which appeared in the New York Herald Tribune on 14 August 1927. 14. See Chapter 1 (55). 15. See Chapter 1 (48–9).

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Coda

New Structures of Fellow Feeling

Woolf’s Between the Acts ends on a haunting note. Isa and Giles, who have spent the day as an unhappy, distant couple, find themselves alone when evening comes, sitting silently together in the family library: Before they slept, they must fight; after they had fought, they would embrace. From that embrace another life might be born. But first they must fight, as the dog fox fights with the vixen, in the heart of darkness, in the fields of night [. . .] The house had lost its shelter. It was night before roads were made, or houses. It was the night that dwellers in caves had watched from some high place among the rocks. Then the curtain rose. They spoke. (BA 129–30)

Here, the pulse of history that throbbed throughout Miss La Trobe’s play reaches back to both the prehistoric origin of communal human life and the beginnings of modernist literature, referencing Joseph Conrad’s 1899 novel Heart of Darkness. With their nation and community on the precipice of a new break in history, the coming war, Isa and Giles rejoin each other. Whether or not their fighting and embracing will produce fellow feeling, we do not know. Whatever words they share are beyond us. The curtain rises and Isa and Giles speak, but we are not witnesses to what comes next. This final performance in Between the Acts has no audience: there is ‘nobody there to describe them’ and ‘life does not narrate’ them. Ultimately, in Between the Acts, Woolf is asking us to give up any comforting illusion that we can feel our way into characters without a heavy representational apparatus. Throughout this book, my goal has been to map the presence of empathic structures and concerns in literary modernism. My work here could only ever be a beginning, for the constellation of literary, psychological, historical and cultural developments in which we find modernist empathy is, to say the least, a complicated one. I hope that by drawing out the connections between Henry James, Richardson, Mansfield, Ford and Woolf on one side, and William James, Titchener, Vischer, Lipps,

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Scheler, Lee, Hulme, Stein and Husserl on the other, I have been able to illuminate some bright spots in that constellation. I have tried to avoid presenting my arguments here as a reductionist view of a monolithic modernism. It bears repeating that not all modernism is essentially empathic. I do believe, however, that the way I have treated inward-looking modernist literature here, as a shift from sympathetic models to empathic models, is both critically productive and historically legitimate. The texts I have examined in this book, when grouped together, reveal a decided desire to find new ways of overcoming the problem of other minds that shrink sympathetic distance. Perhaps one can even argue that the change in ‘human character’ that Virginia Woolf suggests happened ‘about the year 1910’ (Woolf 1923: 320–1) stems from a desire to harness more fully the faculty of sympathetic imagination that had just been renamed ‘empathy’. But as I have stated since the outset of my work here, modernist empathy is part of a long historical arc that begins well before the twentieth century. Romanticism, realism, naturalism and modernism could all be classed as literatures of fellow feeling; that is, as literatures deeply concerned with overcoming the conceptual problem of other minds and establishing points of connection between separate subjective entities. Modernism, as the empathic stage of that long historical arc, is also the decadent stage, which, in its attempts to establish a more complete fellow feeling, is always under threat of destabilisation. At least, that is how I have understood it. There is a certain neatness here, however, that makes me hesitate to close Empathy and the Psychology of Literary Modernism on such a claim. For what, then, are we to say about fellow feeling in literature after modernism? Woolf’s final novel might suggest that modernism uses empathy up, after which postmodernism develops. It would be easy to suggest that the kind of hypermediation we see in many postmodernist texts precludes empathy. But if, as I argued in my reading of Ford’s A Man Could Stand Up–, abstraction helps us feel into a modernist mind, it might be the case that hypermediation is what helps us feel into a postmodern mind. Furthermore, all the empathic forms I have examined in Empathy and the Psychology of Literary Modernism – James’s slowdown and verbal accretion, Richardson’s stream-of-consciousness style, Mansfield’s shifting focalisation, Ford’s abstraction – are still in use today. But are these forms, to borrow again from Raymond Williams, just residual structures of feeling? While it is tempting to believe in the exceptionalism of the era that I study, my answer to that question must be an emphatic ‘no’. I started the project that would eventually become Empathy and the

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­178    Empathy and the Psychology of Literary Modernism Psychology of Literary Modernism after reading the words of William James that I cited in Chapter 1: [n]either contemporaneity, nor proximity in space, nor similarity of quality and content are able to fuse thoughts together which are sundered by this barrier of belonging to different personal minds. The breaches between such thoughts are the most absolute breaches in nature. (PP 226)

When I first read those words from 1890, I felt an instant flash of ­recognition – it seemed that what had been true in James’s lifetime was still manifestly true in my own. Yet it is a truth whose value is to be found in the way we fight it. Our methods are flawed – as my peek at modernist empathy here shows, those methods produce their own fears and anxieties. And those methods grow tired. But such exhaustion, as is the case in Mansfield’s ‘The tiredness of Rosabel’, can prompt an imaginative leap, a mutation in form, a new structure of fellow feeling. Exactly which postmodern structures of fellow feeling develop to replace specifically modernist empathy is beyond the scope of this book. I am confident, however, that scholars working in the emerging field of empathy studies will have plenty to say about it in the coming years. Indeed, I hope that we will see increasing attention to literary empathy studies, not only in my own field of British modernism, but also across other national literatures, eras and genres. Postcolonial studies, I believe, is especially fertile ground for work on narrative empathy. While I chose to focus my reading of Katherine Mansfield here on the conceptual ties between her narrative style and the theories of Max Scheler, a more biographical approach would yield a productive reading of the way her status as a colonial subject interacts with her understanding of fellow feeling. Discussions of empathy can only be enriched by looking at literature concerned with problems of otherness, hybridity and doubleconsciousness. Recent scholarship on global modernism like Rebecca Walkowitz’s Cosmopolitan Style (2006) and Christopher GoGwilt’s The Passage of Literature (2011) have opened our understanding of modernist literature in much the same way that Bonnie Kime Scott’s The Gender of Modernism did nearly twenty-five years ago in the context of women’s writing. The work I have done here will hopefully be useful to those scholars who are mapping colonial networks of feeling in the modernist era, asking how those networks are in fact central to the conceptual and literary development of empathy in the early twentieth century. Additionally, I suspect that our understanding of empathy as ‘feeling with’ and sympathy as ‘feeling for’, after being initially aided by modernist structures of feeling, becomes solidified in the late twentieth century at least in part because of postcolonial discourses that reject unidirec-

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tional, condescending and psychologically damaging sympathetic pity. I, for one, will look forward to reading that part of empathy’s history when somebody writes it. Related work on the dangers of objectifying empathy in twentieth-century American literature, influenced by the ideas of Lauren Berlant and others, has already opened this rich vein of scholarly enquiry. Karen Steigman, for example, has recently examined problematic transnational empathy in the work of Joan Didion.1 Furthermore, an important body of work on empathy in contemporary global literature is currently emerging. Notable examples include Sue J. Kim’s reading of empathy in novels by women from developing countries and Theresa Kulbaga’s look at the rhetoric of empathy in Azar Nafisi’s Reading Lolita in Tehran.2 Since I started Empathy and the Psychology of Literary Modernism, I have seen both scholarly and public interest in the relationship between reading and empathy grow. One newly published psychological study by David Kidd and Emanuele Castano received worldwide media attention in late 2013, as I was finishing this manuscript. Based on their findings, Kidd and Castano argue that ‘the modern literary novel’ is particularly good at cultivating empathic Theory of Mind in readers (Kidd and Castano 2013: 1). After spending the past few years investigating literary modernism’s ambivalence about empathy, I am both deeply interested in and cautiously sceptical about such claims. I hope the work I have done here will serve as an important contextualising partner to studies such as Kidd and Castano’s, which I’m sure will appear quite regularly in the coming years. If we are to truly understand empathy’s relationship to literature, we must surely pay special attention to the years when both ‘empathy’ and ‘the modern literary novel’ were taking shape.

Notes 1. See Steigman (2014). 2. See Kim (forthcoming) and Kulbaga (2012). Kim’s article, ‘Empathy and 1970s novels by third world women’, will appear in a forthcoming collection on queer and feminist narratologies, edited by Robyn Warhol and Susan S. Lanser (Ohio State University Press).

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Bibliography    ­195 Zunshine, Lisa (2006), Why We Read Fiction: Theory of Mind and the Novel, Columbus: The Ohio State University Press. Zwerdling, Alex (2003), ‘Mastering the memoir: Woolf and the family legacy’, Modernism/Modernity, 10.1, pp. 165–88.

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Index

Adamson, Sylvia, 24, 62 Aloe, The see Mansfield, Katherine alterity see otherness American Scene, The see James, Henry anachrony, 4, 173 repetition, 112 temporal slow-downs, 25, 48–9, 141–2, 173, 177 Anstruther-Thomson, Catherine, 121 apperception, 111–15, 160 Armstrong, Paul B., 40 Aschenbrenner, Karl, 73 ‘At the bay’ see Mansfield, Katherine autobiography, 15, 24, 28, 34, 42, 46, 48, 52–3, 56–8, 61, 106, 135 Avramides, Anita, 9, 53–4 Bachner, Sally, 127, 130–1 Backwater see Richardson, Dorothy Barrett, Michèle, 155 Beginner’s Psychology, A see Titchener, Edward Bradford Bell, Millicent, 46 Benziman, Galia, 169 Bergson, Henri, 3, 59n, 61 Bernard (character, The Waves), 163, 164–8, 169, 171 Between the Acts see Woolf, Virginia Booker, M. Keith, 163, 166 Bowling, Lawrence, 82, 168 Brentano, Franz, 3, 12, 14–16, 30–1n, 65, 149–50 Briggs, Julia, 162, 169 Brooker, Peter, 120 Brooks, Peter, 39 Brownstein, Marilyn L., 170 Burdett, Carolyn, 7, 121–2 Burnell, Kezia (character, Prelude), 107, 116

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development of consciousness, 112 privacy of mind, 109–10 sensory experience, 112 similarity to mother, 115 Burnell, Linda (character, Prelude) dreams, 108, 116 emotional distance, 107 role as mother, 108 Cameron, Sharon, 41, 45 Carroll, Bernice A., 152, 157, 158 Cartesian dualism see mind-body dualism Castano, Emanuele, 179 Caughie, Pamela L., 167, 170 Chatman, Seymour criterial features of interior monologue, 168–9 mediation of character thought, 84 narrative filters, 113 stream-of-consciousness narration, 82 Chismar, Douglas, 71 Cianci, Giovanni, 131 cognitive alignment, 3–4, 24, 25, 114, 145 cognitive consonance, 84 cognitive overlap, 56, 92, 169 cognitive cultural studies, 8, 14, 18 Collister, Peter, 45, 47 Colombino, Laura, 131 Comentale, Edward P., 123 Conrad, Joseph, 120, 145, 146–7n, 167, 176 consciousness aesthetic empathy and consciousness, 71–2 class consciousness, 94 collective consciousness, 115, 165, 167–8

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Index    ­197 decentralised consciousness, 41, 44 development of a child’s consciousness, 112 double-consciousness, 178 early psychology and consciousness, 12, 14–17 existence of, 54–5 foreign consciousness, 9, 25, 50, 119, 143, 149–51, 153 interaction of consciousnesses, 38, 42, 57, 162 isolation of individual consciousnesses, 32–3, 37, 67, 70, 79–80, 134, 167 past consciousness, 43, 46, 48, 49 representing consciousness, 27, 34, 40–2, 47, 57, 64, 75, 81, 88, 138, 145n, 169, 172 see also stream of consciousness ‘Crapy Cornelia’ see James, Henry Cross, Victoria (Annie Sophie Cory), 95 Cuddy-Keane, Melba, 173 De Quincey, Thomas, 7 Deer, Patrick, 136 Descartes, René, 9–10 Dowell, John (character, The Good Soldier), 24, 116, 118, 135, 139, 142, 146n Ashburnham, Edward, relation to, 127, 130–1 literary impressionism, 126–7 metaphor 127–9, 131 paralepsis, 129–30, 132–3 repetitive language, 131–4 violence, 130–1, 132–4 Eakin, Paul John, 52 Einfühlung see empathy Eisenberg, Nancy, 6–7, 30n Eliot, George, 38, 39, 63, 124 Ellmann, Maud, 17–18 empathy abstraction and empathy, 25, 26, 29, 124–6, 131–4, 141–2, 145, 146n, 177 aesthetic empathy, 25, 28, 62, 64–75, 93, 95–7, 119, 121–6, 128, 142 affective empathy, 5, 8, 9, 29, 63, 106, 145, 158 ambivalence about empathy, 4–5, 11, 12, 28, 33–5, 118, 174, 179 bodies and empathy, 18, 65, 69,

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72–3, 85, 87, 93, 94, 96, 101, 109, 142, 145, 148 cognitive empathy, 5, 8, 9, 18, 29, 33, 44, 46, 63, 64, 91, 127, 133, 141, 145, 150, 158 collective empathy, 28, 116, 165 community of feeling, 43, 97, 99, 100, 112, 161, 168, 174 dangers of empathy, 4–5, 21, 22, 28–9, 44, 77, 93, 96, 116, 130, 154, 160, 166, 174, 179 defining empathy, 1, 5–9 Einfühlung, 5, 7, 8–9, 18, 25, 26, 30n, 38, 58, 62, 64–74, 83, 86, 89n, 93, 96, 119, 121–4, 142 emotional infection, 97, 104, 148 empathic narrative, 2, 24, 92, 149, 163, 168–70 empathic turn of literary modernism, 1–2, 4, 19–20, 24–7, 28, 39–40, 62, 124, 126, 177 empathy studies, 5, 8, 178 feeling oneself into, 5, 8, 30n, 38, 55, 65, 66, 119, 122, 130, 170, 173 feeling with, 4, 6–8, 20, 27, 28, 29, 30n, 33, 41, 46, 51, 56, 58, 63, 75, 91, 97, 114, 119, 123, 148, 149, 162, 163, 170, 171, 172, 174, 178 forgetting and empathy, 64, 67, 71–2 history of the word ‘empathy’, 5–8 inner imitation, 74, 89n instability of modernist empathy, 29, 58, 149, 174 lexical shift from ‘sympathy’ to ‘empathy’, 3, 4–9, 26–7 negative empathy, 86, 153, 161, 162 oneness, 29, 56, 74, 106, 145, 149, 150–1, 154, 156, 162, 174 postcolonial literature and, 178–9 scepticism about, 8, 20, 24, 28, 34, 76, 93, 124, 149, 157–8, 179 separating ‘sympathy’ and ‘empathy’, 1, 19, 93 thinking with, 8, 18, 44, 63, 84, 86, 110, 131, 145 violence and empathy, 4, 23, 24, 68, 119, 133, 153–4, 161 see also fellow feeling English Review see Ford, Ford Madox Fairfield, Beryl (character, Prelude), 95, 107, 112, 116 imagination, 110 understanding of self, 110–11

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­198    Empathy and the Psychology of Literary Modernism feeling with see empathy fellow feeling, 6 affective empathy see under empathy ambivalence about, 12, 20 cognitive empathy see under empathy different forms of, 8, 20, 86, 124, 142, 149, 178 Ford, Ford Madox, in the work of, 127, 136, 138 history of, 7, 83, 93, 118, 150 James, Henry, in the work of, 46, 51 limits of, 42, 97 literature, in, 18, 26, 28, 134, 171, 177 Mansfield, Katherine, in the work of, 90, 91, 94, 96, 98, 100–1, 102, 104, 111, 116 narrative fellow feeling, 27 problems of, 18, 106 Richardson, Dorothy, in the work of, 63, 67, 68, 76, 83, 86 scepticism about, 24, 149 Scheler’s categories of, 97, 99, 102, 104 Victorian art, in, 22 Woolf, Virginia, in the work of, 151–6, 161, 172, 174, 176 feminism, 16, 28, 149, 155, 157, 160, 162 focalisation, 82, 83 shifting focalisation, 4, 25, 41, 106, 111–15, 163–4, 168, 173, 177 Ford, Ford Madox abstraction in his work, 25, 29, 133–4, 142, 145, 177 affective empathy in his work, 145 avant-garde, relation to, 124, 125 English Review, 23, 41, 119, 120–1, 124, 134 Good Solider, The, 24, 25, 28–9, 41, 116, 118, 125–34, 135, 141, 145, 149, 160 It Was the Nightingale, 135 Last Post, 134, 145 literary impressionism, 113–14, 120–1, 126–7, 146n Man Could Stand Up–, A, 28–9, 118, 134, 136–45 Modernist painting, 131–2 No Enemy, A Tale of Reconstruction, 136, 138–9 Parade’s End, 118, 134, 136–45 representation of war, 118–19, 134–44

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Saddest Story, The, 125 shell-shock, 135, 137, 141, 143 Some Do Not . . ., 137 sympathy in his work, 119, 126, 139, 144–5 war experience, 118–19, 134–5, 137 Forster, E. M., 27 fragmentation, 4, 45, 57–8, 138, 141–2, 171 free direct discourse, 24, 83, 84, 92 free indirect discourse, 19, 24, 83, 92, 110, 140, 146n Freud, Sigmund, 13, 18, 59n, 61, 88n, 104 Fromm, Gloria G., 82–3 Fussell, Paul, 136 Gallese, Vittorio, 64–5, 72–3 Galsworthy, John, 22–4 ‘Garden party, The’ see Mansfield, Katherine Gasiorek, Andrzej, 2, 123 Gillies, Mary Ann, 85 Golden Bowl, The see James, Henry Good Soldier, The see Ford, Ford Madox Greiner, Rae, 4, 19, 20, 31n, 63, 66, 88n Hardy, Thomas, 21–2, 120 Harker, James, 149, 164 Haslam, Sara, 136, 139, 143 Hawkes, Rob, 142–3 Hawkins, Ethel Wallace, 92 Hawkins, Stephanie, 35, 38 heart see interiority Henderson, Miriam (character, Pilgrimage), 60, 61 empathic tendencies, 28, 62, 69, 86–8 literature, thoughts on, 67 men, understanding of, 78–80 reader’s lack of sympathy for, 84–6 reader’s relation to her consciousness, 64, 68, 72, 75, 80–4, 85–6 sympathetic imagination, lack of, 76–8 sympathy, scepticism about, 28, 67 Honeycomb see Richardson, Dorothy Horne, Philip, 138 Hsieh, Lily, 161 Hubble, Nick, 96 Hulme, T. E., 25, 28, 118, 123, 126, 133, 141–2, 177 Quest Society talk, 124–5, 142

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Index    ­199 Worringer’s empathy theories, use of, 29, 124–5 Humm, Maggie, 161 Husserl, Edmund, 9, 25, 29, 149, 159, 166, 169–70 Cartesian Meditations, 150 empathy and objectivity, 167 harmony of monads, 167, 173 intermonadic community, 157 stream of subjective processes, 163–4 Hynes, Samuel, 136 hypermediation, 171, 177 Ikonomou, Eleftherios, 65, 67 imagination, 22, 51–2, 53, 55, 58, 65–6, 68–9, 95–6, 110, 112, 128, 131–4, 135–6, 157, 168; see also sympathetic imagination inference by analogy, 10, 19, 22, 109, 151, 175n inner experience see interiority inner imitation see empathy interior dialogue, 169 interior/internal monologue, 4, 20, 82, 84, 89n, 92, 168 interiority, 9, 24, 29, 40, 41, 63, 64, 68, 79, 82, 88n, 89n, 92, 96, 101–2, 108–9, 127–8, 132, 142–3, 149, 161, 174 heart, 23–4, 101, 127–30, 132 networked interiority, 112, 163, 167 privacy, interior, 40, 68, 79, 93–4, 95, 103, 109, 138, 149 ‘International episode, An’ see James, Henry intersubjective distance see psychological distance intersubjectivity, 4, 7, 9, 14, 27, 33, 40, 41, 49, 64, 72, 73, 91, 93, 94, 96, 102, 104, 106, 136, 145, 150, 157, 165, 168 introspection, 9, 19, 90 It Was the Nightingale see Ford, Ford Madox Jackson, Tony E., 166, 168, 169 Jahn, Manfred, 3, 25, 26 Jahoda, Gustav, 5 James, David, 2, 120 James, Henry American Scene, The, 42, 44–6, 47, 48

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anachrony, 25 citizenship, 46 consciousness, 34, 39–41, 44, 56 ‘Crapy Cornelia’, 42, 43–4 density of prose, 45, 46–8, 49 dictation of later work, 46 empathy, ambivalence about, 4, 28, 34 expatriate life, 42 experience, spatialisation of, 49 fiction, thoughts on, 33, 38 ghostly language, 56–7, 58 Golden Bowl, The, 41 immigrants, thoughts on, 45 ‘International episode, An’, 39 ‘Jolly corner, The’, 42, 43, 44 memory, 46, 48, 49, 50–2 Middle Years, The, 46 modernism, 34, 45, 46–7, 58 New York, 42–6, 48 New York Edition, 33, 42 Notes of a Son and Brother, 46 past self, 46, 48, 50, 52, 53, 55–6 Portrait of a Lady, The, 40 psychology, knowledge of, 13, 27 Sacred Fount, The, 41 Small Boy and Others, A, 33, 46, 47–9, 50, 53, 55–6, 57, 58 twentieth-century America, alienation from, 42–3 What Maisie Knew, 32, 40 James, William consciousness, 32, 34, 37, 38, 42, 44, 49, 54 death of, 46 dislike of the PhD, 35–6 history of psychology, role in, 12, 14, 19, 34–6 memory, 49–50 mind-body dualism, 34, 54, 55 Principles of Psychology, The, 32–3, 37 psychical research, 33, 34–5, 36–7 Psychology: Briefer Course, 58n pure experience, 55, 56, 115 radical empiricism, 28, 44, 54, 58 stream of consciousness, 40–1, 52–3, 54 Jameson, Fredric, 13, 26 Jay, Martin, 3 ‘Je ne parle pas français . . .’ see Mansfield, Katherine Jinny (character, The Waves), 151, 163, 164, 167

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­200    Empathy and the Psychology of Literary Modernism ‘Jolly corner, The’ see James, Henry Joyce, James, 61, 81, 113 Kaplan, Sydney Janet, 96, 102, 113, 116n Katz, Robert L., 6, 88n Katz, Tamar, 120, 129, 142 Keen, Susan, 25 Empathy and the Novel, 8, 18 Kern, Stephen, 91 Kidd, David, 179 Kohut, Heinz, 18, 30n Kokot, Joanna, 102, 111, 113 Koss, Juliet, 26, 142 Lanzoni, Susan, 7 Last Post see Ford, Ford Madox Lawtoo, Nidesh, 13 Lee, Vernon, 3, 13, 25, 118, 146n, 149, 150, 151, 166, 177 aesthetic empathy, 28, 30n, 61, 70, 121–4 difference between empathy and sympathy, 5, 7–8, 145 figurative language, 128, 134 projection, 122, 166 publications, 121 Levenson, Michael, 14, 47, 77, 120, 126, 137, 146n, 167 Lewis, Wyndham, 77, 124, 125 ‘Life of Ma Parker’ see Mansfield, Katherine Lipps, Theodor, 25, 28, 70–5, 76, 78, 79, 82, 83, 87, 88, 107, 109, 123, 149, 150, 151, 154, 156, 162, 176 bodies and empathy, 72 definitions of Einfühlung, 71, 89n empathy as hybrid experience, 73–4 influence, 5, 62, 70 inner imitation, 74, 89n negative empathy, 86, 153 objectivated self-enjoyment, 95, 142 Raumästhetik, 70, 122 Scheler’s critiques of, 93, 96 Longworth, Deborah, 61, 79, 81, 87 Louis (character, The Waves), 151, 163, 164, 165, 166, 167 Lowe, Brigid, 7 Mach, Ernst, 14, 19, 31n, 65 The Analysis of Sensations, 16–17, 129 McWhirter, David, 172 Mallgrave, Harry Francis, 65, 67

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Man Could Stand Up– see Ford, Ford Madox Mansfield, Katherine Aloe, The, 106–7, 113, 115, 117n ‘At the bay’, 92, 95, 106, 108, 111, 152 Dorothy Richardson, thoughts on, 90 fantasy, 95, 96, 110 ‘Garden party, The’, 97–100, 102, 116 hats in her work, 95, 98, 99 ‘Je ne parle pas français . . .’, 101–2, 103, 116 ‘Life of Ma Parker’, 94, 100–1, 102 literary canon, place in, 91, 116n London in her work, 94, 100 Middleton Murry, John, 105 New Zealand, 2, 91, 94, 106 Prelude, 94, 95, 106–16, 160, 163, 164, 168, 172, 173 ‘Psychology’, 102–6, 111, 116 secret self, 102–3, 105, 111 social class, 92, 94–6, 97–9, 100, 102, 103 stream-of-consciousness narrative, 92, 94, 106, 110, 112, 114–16 ‘Tiredness of Rosabel, The’, 92, 94–7, 99, 102, 116–17n, 178 Marcus, Laura, 160 Marshall, Adré, 39–40, 41 Marshall, David, 18 Matz, Jesse, 120, 145n, 163, 166–7 Mediation of fictional minds, 23, 25, 38, 56, 64, 81, 84, 89n, 116, 163, 169, 171, 177 ‘unmediated’/’immediate’ fictional minds, 4, 25, 64, 81, 84, 87–8, 163 Meisel, Perry, 13, 14, 17, 101, 127 Micale, Mark, 3 Middle Years, The see James, Henry Mill, John Stuart, 10, 11, 22, 38, 109, 151 Miller, J. Hillis, 20–1 Millgate, Michael, 51–2 mind-body dualism, 11–12, 25, 34, 53–5, 115, 128 Miss LaTrobe (character, Between the Acts), 174, 176 Mitchell, Rebecca, 4, 18–19, 20, 22, 59n modernism defining modernism, 1–2, 26 development of, 3, 61, 62, 123, 124, 170

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Index    ­201 early psychology and literary modernism, 12–18 empathy and literary modernism, 24–7 international modernism, 2, 91 inward turn of, 2, 3, 92, 126 realism and modernism, 24, 31n, 120, 142 tensions within, 4, 27, 34, 77, 90–1, 127, 149, 163, 174 Murry, John Middleton, 105 Nagel, Thomas, 10, 30n Naremore, James, 165 Natsoulas, Thomas, 66–7, 82 Neville (character, The Waves), 163, 164, 165, 166, 167, 169 Nicholls, Peter, 2, 77, 125, 131 No Enemy, A Tale of Reconstruction see Ford, Ford Madox Notes of a Son and Brother see James, Henry omniscient narration, 20, 38, 41, 129 O’Sullivan, Vincent, 106–7, 113, 115, 116n otherness between individuals, 4, 20, 22, 67, 178 within the self, 56, 58 see also psychological distance Palmer, Alan, 18 Parade’s End see Ford, Ford Madox Paralepsis see Dowell, John perspective gendered, 153–4, 155–7, 159, 161 individual, 15, 16–17, 41, 127, 143, 154 inner v. outer, 41, 53, 83–4, 110, 113 narrator’s, 26, 129, 131–3 others’, 43, 63, 65, 95, 119, 130, 131–3, 153, 165 past self’s, 51 primary character’s, 22, 41, 75, 79, 81, 108, 109 secondary characters’, 40, 116, 151 sharing of, 92, 119, 134 shifts of, 112–13, 173 writers’, 27, 63, 120 phenomenology, 3, 15, 25, 29, 99, 149, 150 Piaget, Violet see Lee, Vernon Pilgrimage see Richardson, Dorothy

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Pinch, Adela, 20, 21 point of view see perspective Pointed Roofs see Richardson, Dorothy Portrait of a Lady, The see James, Henry Posnock, Ross, 3 postmodernism, 170, 177, 178 Pound, Ezra, 47, 124, 125 Prelude see Mansfield, Katherine Pridmore-Brown, Michele, 172 Principles of Psychology, The see James, William problem of other minds, 3, 9–12, 14, 17, 20, 22, 27, 28, 32, 37, 39, 40, 41, 63, 67, 73, 74, 96, 102, 107, 114–15, 119–21, 131, 149, 150, 151, 162, 177 conceptual problem of other minds, 9, 11, 14, 30n, 32, 39, 40, 73, 96, 146n, 177 epistemological problem of other minds, 9, 32, 127, 146n, 151 history of, 9–10 problem of imagining others, 21 projection, 65–6, 69, 71–2, 93, 94–7, 111, 122, 124, 159, 166 Proust, Marcel, 46, 152, 156 Przybylowicz, Donna, 43, 49 psychical research, 3, 33, 35, 59n, 162 psychoanalysis, 3, 13, 17–18, 61 psychological distance, 3, 4, 5, 6, 9, 15–17, 19–23, 25, 27, 35, 37, 41, 53, 54–6, 58, 63, 64, 78, 92, 94, 96, 99, 105, 108, 111, 122, 131, 134, 161, 162, 165, 168 psychological novel, 4, 103–4 psychological turn of western literature, 3, 26 psychology data gathering, 14–16, 63–4 disciplinary history of, 12–17, 34–8 early psychology, 19–20, 37, 49, 67 empiricist psychology, 3, 12, 14, 16–19, 27, 30–1n, 34, 35, 37, 63–4, 73, 149–50 experimental psychology, 3, 12, 14, 17, 28, 30n, 32, 34–6, 38, 103, 123 modern psychology, 1, 3, 8, 12 pre-Freudian psychology, 13, 88n psychological aesthetics, 3, 28, 58, 61, 122, 150 psychological discourses associated with modernism, 2–3

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­202    Empathy and the Psychology of Literary Modernism ‘Psychology’ see Mansfield, Katherine public self, 101, 111 radical empiricism see James, William realism, 19, 26, 31n, 45, 63–4, 66, 76, 83, 120, 124–6, 177 psychological realism, 38–9, 41, 45 sympathetic realism, 24 Restuccia, Frances, 156 Rhoda (character, The Waves), 163, 164, 167 Richardson, Dorothy Backwater, 62, 75, 76, 78, 86–7 critical reception of Pilgrimage, 80–1 critique of realism, 64 education, 60–1 German language, knowledge of, 61, 71 Honeycomb, 62, 67, 75, 79, 87 narrative style, 80–6 Pilgrimage, 28, 60–2, 64, 68, 70, 74–7, 79–86, 88, 90, 92, 94, 114, 149, 151, 153, 168, 171, 172 Pointed Roofs, 62, 71, 74, 75, 76–7, 80, 83, 84, 158 psychology, knowledge of, 60–1 stream of consciousness, 62, 75, 82–3, 86 sympathetic imagination, 76 sympathy, 67, 75–80, 85 Tunnel, The, 62, 75, 87, 90, 98 Rimmon-Kenan, Shlomith, 80, 82–3, 89n Robinson, Roger, 91 Room of One’s Own, A see Woolf, Virginia Ryan, Judith, 3, 14, 19, 25, 27, 30–1n Rylance, Rick, 14, 59n Sacred Fount, The see James, Henry Saddest Story, The see Ford, Ford Madox Saunders, Max, 119, 137 Scarry, Elaine, 21 Scheler, Max, 11–12, 25, 28, 70, 93, 96, 100–1, 105, 109, 114–15, 148, 150, 151, 177, 178 categories of sympathy, 97, 99, 102, 104, 117n family, 112 flow of sympathy, 100 identification, 104 maternal instinct, 108 sexual intercourse, 106

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Schwab, Gabrielle, 169 Shiach, Morag, 2 short story, 23–4, 42–4, 91, 92, 94–7, 97–100, 100–1, 101–2, 102–6 Sinclair, May, 75, 81–2, 111 Small Boy and Others, A see James, Henry Smith, Angela, 101 solipsism, 12, 16–17, 37, 65, 74, 90, 106, 111, 113, 120, 127, 129, 150 Some Do Not . . . see Ford, Ford Madox Stein, Edith, 9, 25, 29, 70, 149, 166 breaks with earlier notions of empathy, 150–1 personal type and empathy, 154 primordial experience, 151, 155 self-understanding, 155, 166 Stephen, Leslie, 6, 8, 10–11, 19, 22, 29, 30n, 64, 91, 148, 150, 152, 162, 167 Strayer, Janet, 6–7, 8, 30n stream of consciousness, 14, 40–1, 44, 52–3, 54, 58n, 137 collective stream of consciousness, 17, 94, 106, 112–16, 164, 168, 172, 173 stream-of-consciousness narration, 4, 25, 28, 46, 49, 62, 75, 82–3, 86, 92, 110, 167, 177 subjectivity see also intersubjectivity, 53, 57, 63, 131 Susan (character, The Waves), 163, 164, 165, 167 sympathetic imagination, 1, 4, 6, 8, 24, 76, 96, 119–20, 122, 126, 165 sympathy bodies and sympathy, 10, 101, 109 gender and sympathy, 78–80, 151–2, 156, 161 history of the word ‘sympathy’, 5–8 sympathetic distance, 19, 27, 28, 29, 38, 56, 58, 80, 173, 177 sympathetic representation, 1, 148 sympathetic understanding, 1, 8, 22 sympathetic vibration, 1, 165 Victorian novel, role in, 4, 18–22, 66 Text-Book of Psychology, A see Titchener, Edward Bradford Three Guineas see Woolf, Virginia Tietjens, Christopher empathy, desire for, 143–5 grey metaphor, 137–8, 143–4

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Index    ­203 madness, 137, 141, 143 memory, 137, 141 privacy, 138 Wannop, Valentine, relationship with, 137, 139–40, 144–5 war experiences, 134, 138–9, 140–3 Tintner, Adeline, 46 Titchener, Edward Bradford, 3, 13, 28, 34, 60, 61, 149, 150, 176 Beginner’s Psychology, A, 89n, 93 consciousness, 38, 41, 58, 91 emotion, 100–1 ‘Empathy’, coining of, 1, 5, 30n, 58n, 70, 74 first-person singular, thoughts on, 52 history of psychology, role in, 35 imagination, 51–2 in-feeling, 107 intellectual equals, empathy between, 103, 104 intermittence of individual consciousness, 89n, 114 memory, 49, 50, 51–2 mind-body dualism, critique of, 25, 34, 54 professional values, 36 Text-Book of Psychology, A, 93, 17 William James, rivalry with, 33, 36–7, 59n To The Lighthouse see Woolf, Virginia Tratner, Michael, 90 Trotter, David, 3, 86, 130, 133 Tunnel, The see Richardson, Dorothy Van Buren Kelley, Alice, 167 Van Gunsteren, Julia, 92 Victorian Literature, 4, 7, 19–22, 32, 66, 92 Vincent, Timothy C., 26 violence see empathy Vischer, Robert Einfühlung, 25, 26, 62, 64–70, 71, 72, 73, 93, 121, 149 imagination, 69 literature, connections of his theories to, 74, 79, 82, 83, 85, 87 ‘On the optical sense of form: a contribution to aesthetics’, 5, 64, 67, 69, 128 otherness of nature, 67

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psychological aesthetics, 28 subject-object confusion, 65–7, 122 Volkelt, Johannes, 69–70 Wannop, Valentine (character, Parade’s End) Armistice experience, 137–8, 140 fear of Christopher Tietjens, 143 fellow feeling with Christopher Tietjens, 139, 144–5 Waves, The see Woolf, Virginia Wells, H. G., 75 Wilkinson, Ann Yanko, 171–2 Williams, Raymond, 30, 177 Wispé, Lauren, 69–70 Woolf, Virginia androgyny, 155–6 Between the Acts, 29, 149, 169–74, 176 Edwardians, thoughts on, 148 empathy, painful, 153–4, 161–2 gender and sympathy, 151–2, 156–7, 162 George Duckworth, thoughts on, 153–4 gramophone (Between the Acts), 174 Leslie Stephen (father), thoughts on, 148 memory transfusion, 162 men’s knowledge of women, 152 outsider’s Society (Three Guineas), 162 patriotism, 154 Room of One’s Own, A, 146n, 149, 152–6, 157, 158, 161, 168, 175n ‘Sketch of the past, A’, 146n, 153 Spectatorship (Between the Acts), 171–3 Three Guineas, 29, 149, 155, 157–62, 164, 169, 174 To the Lighthouse, 151–2 Waves, The, 29, 149, 151, 163–70, 171, 173 women’s lack of opportunity and resources, 158–9 Worringer, Wilhelm, 29, 70, 118, 123–6, 133, 141–2 Wundt, Wilhelm, 12, 36, 60, 61 Zunshine, Lisa, 8, 18, 79

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