| In many of his most powerfully-emotional scenes, Charles Dickens employs and adapts conventions from the Gothic and sentimental genres (which I call the "affective genres"). These same scenes often concern Dickens's social vision of a society bound by affection and sympathy. I argue that Dickens uses the affective genres to craft his reader's emotional responses to the text in an ethically-productive manner. For my understanding of ethics, I rely on Emmanuel Levinas in two ways. First, his description of the ethical encounter between persons as an event within but independent of the drama of being argues against the reduction of the ethical to the political or to a philosophy of power. Second, his analysis of the idea of the Infinite in Descartes helps to place his own ideas within a history of ethical thought since the Enlightenment concerning the dignity of individuals. This analysis also discovers the Desire for the other that Levinas calls "goodness," and I suggest that "ethics" names an account of how the world is or could be made hospitable to goodness. The Gothic and sentimental arise, in part, as expressions of hopes and anxieties about goodness with respect to the autonomous modern self: the Gothic fears the self will be consumed by the other; the sentimental hopes that some positive connection can be made with others. I trace Dickens's use of these genres from Pickwick Papers to Hard Times, showing how he becomes more sophisticated and subtle in his understanding of their potential to move the reader out of his or her autonomy and into affective relationships with others. |
