Social Sympathy in Nineteenth-Century British Prose Narratives

This dissertation traces a tradition of social sympathy in nineteenth-century British prose narratives. Sympathy has a long history of affiliation with the natural power of attraction and accordance. In the premodern European literature, sympathy meant gravity and magnetism in the natural world. Eighteenth-century British moral sense philosophers explained sympathy as an innate human aptitude to care about the pain and suffering of other beings. This project examines an alternative tradition that defines sympathy as a socially produced moral sentiment for fellows, hence, more as a society's moral capacity than an individual's. I situate the beginning of this tradition in the late eighteenth-century and follow its trajectory to the end of the nineteenth-century. I emphasize that reforming society not an individual soul was the primary concern of the nineteenth-century British literary imaginations of social sympathy.;My textual analysis opens with Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (1818), which critically continues Mary Wollstonecraft's meditation of sympathy as a learned respect for the equal fellow. By placing sympathy in the realm of culture, not nature, Shelley wards off the possibility of sympathy to function as an exclusive fellowship among a parochial circle of a kinship system. And she opens the potential to expand the boundary of fellow and fellowship to even non-human creatures. Factory reform testimonies written in 1832 and 1841, and Charles Dickens's The Old Curiosity Shop (1841), which my second and third chapters respectively discuss, reveal a vision of sympathy as a social consensus about moral responsibility for certain forms of pain and suffering. These texts suggest that sympathy is a collective ethico-affective boundary that decides whose pain and suffering the society should be emotionally responsive to and morally responsible for. The authors of these texts understand their writings as cultural praxis to negotiate the existing boundary of sympathy and create a new structure of feeling to accommodate previously excluded forms of pain and suffering as a legitimate object of social sympathy. My last chapter on Thomas Hardy's "The Withered Arm" (1888) and Tess of the D'Urbervilles (1891) investigates Hardy's tactile sympathy. In Hardy's works, the social nature of sympathy is highlighted by the tactility between the object and subject of sympathy. With the images of sympathy as a bodily touch and physical labor for connection, Hardy suggests that sympathy is the ontological connection that we live and perform rather than an inward fellow feeling of a subject.;By examining the underappreciated vision of social sympathy in nineteenth-century British prose narratives, my project questions the prevalent tendency in Victorian study to associate sympathy with the idea of a liberal self and its individual moral capacity to overcome egoism. I point out that the texts that this dissertation discusses reveal an awareness of the historicity of morality and the socially constructed nature of our moral sentiment for fellows. I further argue that, with the awareness of the social embeddedness of a self and its ethical relationship to others, these texts' meditations of sympathy engage more with the social reform than the restoration of a soul.