Empathy and the Novel

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Empathy and the Novel
Suzanne Keen

3
2007
3
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Keen, Suzanne.
Empathy and the novel / Suzanne Keen.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-19-517576-9
1. Fiction—Psychological aspects. 2. Empathy. 3. Empathy in literature.
I. Title.
PN3352.P7K44 2007
808.301'9—dc22 2006022453

9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Printed in the United States of America
on acid-free paper
for Fran,
soulmate
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 PREFACE

Empathy and the Novel presents a comprehensive account of the relation-

ships among novel reading, empathy, and altruism, exploring the implica-
tions for literary studies of the widely promulgated “empathy-altruism”
hypothesis.1 Social and developmental psychologists, philosophers of vir-
tue ethics, feminist advocates of an ethic of caring, and many defenders of
the humanities believe that empathic emotion motivates altruistic action,
resulting in less aggression, less fickle helping, less blaming of victims for
their misfortunes, increased cooperation in conflict situations, and improved
actions on behalf of needy individuals and members of stigmatized groups.2
The celebration of novel reading as a stimulus to the role-taking imagina-
tion and emotional responsiveness of readers—in countless reading group
guides and books on the virtues of reading, in character education curri-
cula, and in public defenses of humanities funding—augments the empa-
thy-altruism hypothesis, substituting experiences of narrative empathy for
shared feelings with real others. Read Henry James and live well (Love’s
Knowledge 148); become a better world citizen through canonical novels,
philosopher Martha Nussbaum advocates (Cultivating Humanity 90). Dis-
cover compassion through “The Lion and the Mouse” or “The Legend of
the Dipper” writes William J. Bennett (Children’s Book of Virtues 6–7). Shed
your prejudices through novel reading, suggests novelist Sue Monk Kidd
(“Common Heart” 9). Azar Nafisi affirms, “empathy is at the heart of the
novel,” and warns, if you don’t read, you won’t be able to empathize (Read-
ing Lolita 111). Is the attractive and consoling case for fiction implied by
these representative views defensible? Surveying the existing research on
the consequences of reading, I find the case for altruism stemming from
novel reading inconclusive at best and nearly always exaggerated in favor of
the beneficial effects of novel reading.
There is no question, however, that readers feel empathy with (and sym-
pathy for) fictional characters and other aspects of fictional worlds. As this
book demonstrates, readers’ and authors’ empathy certainly contributes
to the emotional resonance of fiction, its success in the marketplace, and
its character-improving reputation. My discussion in chapter 1 of empa-
thy as psychologists understand it and my historical survey in chapter 2 of
viii Preface

the debates about the positive and negative results of feeling with fiction
contextualize the current vogue for empathy, arising from two sources. We
are living in a time when the activation of mirror neurons in the brains of
onlookers can be recorded as they witness another’s actions and emotional
reactions.3 Contemporary neuroscience has brought us much closer to an
understanding of the neural basis for human mind reading and emotion
sharing abilities. The activation of onlookers’ mirror neurons by a coach’s
demonstration of technique or an internal visualization of proper form,
and by representations in television, film, visual art, and pornography, has
already been recorded.4 Simply hearing a description of an absent other’s
actions lights up mirror neuron areas on fMRI imaging of the human brain.5
The possibility that novel reading stimulates mirror neurons’ activation can
now, as never before, undergo neuroscientific investigation.
Neuroscientists have already declared that people scoring high on empa-
thy tests have especially busy mirror neuron systems in their brains.6 For
the first time we might investigate whether human differences in mirror
neuron activity can be altered by exposure to art, to teaching, to litera-
ture. This newly enabled capacity to study empathy at the cellular level
encourages speculation about human empathy’s positive consequences.
These speculations are not new, as any student of eighteenth-century moral
sentimentalism will affirm, but they dovetail with efforts on the part of
present-day virtue ethicists, political philosophers, educators, theologians,
librarians, and interested parties such as authors and publishers to connect
the experience of empathy, including its literary form, with outcomes of
changed attitudes, improved motives, and better care and justice. Thus a
very specific, limited version of empathy located in the neural substrate
meets in the contemporary moment a more broadly and loosely defined,
fuzzier sense of empathy as the feeling precursor to and prerequisite for
liberal aspirations to greater humanitarianism. The sense of crisis stirred up
by reports of stark declines in reading goes into this mix, catalyzing fears
that the evaporation of a reading public leaves behind a population incapa-
ble of feeling with others. Yet the apparently threatened set of links among
novel reading, experiences of narrative empathy, and altruism has not yet
been proven to exist. Empathy robustly enters into affective responses to
fiction, but its role in shaping the behavior of emotional readers has been
debated for three centuries. Chapter 2 surveys those debates, and chapter
6 revisits them by way of considering contemporary critiques of empathy
by false empathy and failed empathy critics.
Unlike these critics, I regard human empathy as a precious quality of
our social natures. Despite the disrepute of generalizations about univer-
sal human traits among postcolonial and feminist theorists, I observe that
women writers and novelists from around the world endorse the notion of
shared human emotions when they overtly call upon their readers’ empa-
thy. I sympathize with their ambition, while remaining skeptical about con-
 Preface ix

sequences beyond immediate feeling responses. However, I hold that narra-

tive empathy need not definitively perform renovations of civic virtue nor
of individual behavior to be recognized as a core component of emotional
response to fiction, the loss of which (for large numbers of nonreaders) is
indeed to be regretted. Understanding the aesthetic effects of narrative
empathy illuminates the responses of feeling brains to the word-wrought
spaces and inhabitants of fictional worlds. The most artful and complex
evocation of shared feeling accomplished by the novelist’s art deserves
attention, not only because the insights of literary analysis may assist psy-
chologists and neuroscientists in the framing of the next layer of questions
about readers, empathy, and altruism. Discoveries about narrative empathy
may also help explain aspects of literary response that have been neglected
or disparaged by scholars even as they have been experienced by millions
of readers.
This brings us to the problem of popular fiction, which has not often been
praised for the beneficial effects attributed to great literature. If immersion
in culturally valued fictional worlds—canonical literature and serious fic-
tion—predisposes readers to good citizenship, then what happens to readers
(most of those who are left in the dwindling tally) who choose mass-market
fiction? Does exposure to attractively rendered vice make readers vicious?
The deleterious effects of violent television and videogames documented in
case law and social psychology do not extend, according to most accounts, to
prose fiction.7 The cultural tendency to value novels and denigrate cartoons
or video games, however, contributes to assumptions about good and bad
forms of narrative. In general, prose fiction benefits from the contrast with
other popular cultural narrative forms. This book scrutinizes the notion,
shared by many librarians, teachers, and millions of participants in book
groups, that reading certain novels is good for people. From its boosters, key
features of the reading experience receive positive emphasis. Limiting the
effects of reading to those enjoyed by highly educated consumers of serious
fiction shifts the emphasis to more rarified qualities of narrative such as defa-
miliarization. However, middlebrow readers tend to value novels offering
opportunities for strong character identification. They report feeling both
empathy with and sympathy for fictional characters. They believe that novel
reading opens their minds to experiences, dilemmas, time periods, places,
and situations that would otherwise be closed to them. They emphasize
the universality of human emotional responses in their reports on reading,
sometimes undervaluing real differences among people of diverse cultures.
They unself-consciously judge the success of novels based on how well they
could identify with characters’ feelings. Though these claims have bearing
on matters of narrative technique and form, readers tend not to adopt the
analytical language of academic literary criticism when they defend the
novel and novel reading. Empathy shapes their recommendations and judg-
ments about fiction.
x Preface

Empathetic reading does differ in some important ways from analytical

reading, though I hope to show that the two modes are not incompatible.
Indeed, they must not be, for if we hope to continue to recruit more people
to the ranks of regular readers, then the ways in which they respond to texts
ought to matter to literary professionals. Publishers, agents, and novelists
themselves do not need to be convinced of this, but disdain for the prefer-
ences of feeling readers pervades academic literary criticism. Despite the
now habitual questioning of the coherence of individual selves in literature,
theory, and literary study, a vigorous notion of character identification entail-
ing readers’ responses to imagined persons persists in contemporary novels.
According to Janice Radway, this quality may be the most common shared
trait of fiction in English that reaches a wide audience. Novels that succeed
in invoking strong character identification are likelier to reach large num-
bers of readers, such as the hundreds of thousands of women who partici-
pated in Oprah’s Book Club. This study takes the experiences and opinions
of these readers seriously. In addition to redressing an implicit gender bias in
research on the effects of novel reading, enumerating the qualities of novels
that elicit empathetic reactions from a broad range of novel readers points
up some of the gaps in research into the effects of narrative techniques.
Narrative theorists, novel critics, and reading specialists have already sin-
gled out a small set of narrative techniques—such as the use of first person
narration and the interior representation of characters’ consciousness and
emotional states—as devices supporting character identification, contribut-
ing to empathetic experiences, opening readers’ minds to others, and even
predisposing readers to altruism. Theorists and teachers often speculate that
these techniques may change readers’ attitudes. In the course of reviewing
the available research on this subject, I point out the gaps in our knowledge
of potentially empathetic narrative techniques. I also ask whether any set
of narrative techniques overrides the resistance to empathizing often dis-
played by members of an in-group regarding the emotional states of others
marked out as different by their age, race, gender, weight, disabilities, and
so forth.8 If empathetic reading experiences start a chain reaction leading
to mature sympathy and altruistic behavior, as many believe, then discover-
ing the narrative techniques involved matters, for it turns out in laboratory
experiments that we humans, like other primates, tend to experience empa-
thy most readily and accurately for those who seem like us, as David Hume
and Adam Smith predicted.9 We may find ourselves regarding the feelings
of those who seem outside the tribe with a range of emotions, but without
empathy.10 If novels do extend readers’ sense of shared humanity beyond
the predictable limitations, then the narrative techniques involved in such
an accomplishment should be especially prized.
In order to pursue these questions, this book sets forth a theory of narra-
tive empathy, based on the reports of real readers. I also explore from a nar-
rative theoretical perspective more fine-grained questions about empathetic
 Preface xi

responses to novels. For instance, consider the commonplace that first-per-

son fiction more readily evokes feeling responsiveness than the whole vari-
ety of third-person narrative situations. Even a college sophomore with a
few weeks’ training in theoretical terms can tell you that within the cat-
egory of first-person narratives, empathy may be enhanced or impeded by
narrative consonance or dissonance, unreliability, discordance, an excess of
narrative levels with multiple narrators, extremes of disorder, or an espe-
cially convoluted plot. Genre, setting, and time period may help or hinder
readers’ empathy. Feeling out of sorts with the implied readership, or fit-
ting it exactly, may make the difference between a dutiful reading and an
experience of emotional fusion.11 Contrasting first person with third person
puts the question too broadly, with too many other variables, to reach a
valid conclusion. Careful use of narrative theory can improve the quality of
research into discourse processing conducted by psychologists.
My approach to narrative empathy draws upon work in several areas
beyond narrative theory. Developmental and social psychology, including
the juncture of affect and social cognition, prove major resources. Philos-
ophy offers provocative treatments of empathy and the intricate puzzle
of our emotional responses to literature.12 Within literary studies, reader-
response criticism, reception theory,13 and literary theories of affect14 con-
tribute insights and analytical methods. This book participates in the grow-
ing interdisciplinary field, cognitive approaches to literary study, but it
emphasizes affect. For many decades, literary study has tacitly obeyed the
strictures of W. K. Wimsatt and Monroe Beardsley in their 1954 essay, “The
Affective Fallacy,” which argued against treatment of readers’ emotional
responses as mere psychologizing. In my home field of narrative studies, the
recent interest in the role of affect in cognition, stimulated by the popular
works of Antonio Damasio and Joseph LeDoux, has brought emotion back
into the critical conversation.15
The developing field of cognitive literary studies recognizes that “literary
works—whether fictional or not—have an emotional and tangible effect on
readers and on the real world in which we live with literature” (Cognitive
152). As Peter Stockwell writes, “Cognitive poetics aims to extend its cover-
age to encompass sensations such as feeling moved by a literary work, feel-
ing immersed in the world of a text that seems almost as real as real life. The
psychologizing of character that has been a prestigious feature of valued
literature for the past two hundred years relies on readerly reconstructions
of character that include identification and empathy, ethical agreement and
sympathy, and other forms of emotional attachment that readers defend
very strongly” (152). Though studying these effects empirically has proven
a challenge, an energetic interdisciplinary group of scholars has begun pro-
ducing fascinating, if preliminary, results. This book examines the findings
of these studies and poses questions that should be of interest to those who
study empathy and reading empirically. Throughout the following chapters,
xii Preface

Empathy and the Novel engages with contemporary psychological research

on empathy, bringing affect to the center of cognitive literary studies’ reex-
amination of narrative fiction. Along the way, I offer a series of hypotheses
about narrative empathy that could be investigated by psychologists as well
as by literature specialists.

A Theory of Narrative Empathy

Character identification often invites empathy, even when the fictional

character and reader differ from each other in all sorts of practical and
obvious ways, but empathy for fictional characters appears to require only
minimal elements of identity, situation, and feeling, not necessarily com-
plex or realistic characterization. Whether a reader’s empathy or her iden-
tification with a character comes first is an open question: spontaneous
empathy for a fictional character’s feelings sometimes opens the way for
character identification. Not all feeling states of characters evoke empathy;
indeed, empathetic responses to fictional characters and situations occur
more readily for negative emotions, whether or not a match in details of
experience exists. Finally, readers’ experiences differ from one another, and
empathy with characters doesn’t always occur as a result of reading an
emotional evocative fiction.
Several observations help explain the differences in readers’ responses.
Most importantly, readers’ empathic dispositions are not identical to one
another. Some humans are more empathetic to real others and some feel
little empathy at all. (Some research suggests that empathizers are bet-
ter readers because their role-taking abilities allow them to more readily
comprehend causal relations in stories.16) The timing and the context of
the reading experience matters: the capacity of novels to invoke readers’
empathy changes over time, and some novels may only activate the empa-
thy of their first, immediate audience, while others must survive to reach a
later generation of readers in order to garner an emotionally resonant read-
ing. Readers’ empathy for situations depicted in fiction may be enhanced
by chance relevance to particular historical, economic, cultural, or social
circumstances, either in the moment of first publication or in later times,
fortuitously anticipated or prophetically foreseen by the novelist.
Novelists do not exert complete control over the responses to their fic-
tion. Empathy for a fictional character does not invariably correspond with
what the author appears to set up or invite. Situational empathy, which
responds primarily to aspects of plot and circumstance, involves less self-
extension in imaginative role taking and more recognition of prior (or cur-
rent) experience. A novelist invoking situational empathy can only hope
to reach readers with appropriately correlating experiences. The generic
and formal choices made by authors in crafting fictional worlds play a role
 Preface xiii

in inviting (or retarding) readers’ empathic responses. This means that for
some readers, the author’s use of the formulaic conventions of a thriller
or a romance novel would increase empathetic resonance, while for other
readers (perhaps better educated and attuned to literary effects), unusual or
striking representations promote foregrounding and open the way to empa-
thetic reading.17
Psychologist Marjorie Taylor has demonstrated that a group of fiction
writers score higher on empathy tests than the general population.18 (Their
high empathy may be innate, or the activity of fiction writing may culti-
vate novelists’ role-taking skills and train them in habits of empathy.) If it
were to be verified beyond the original study, Taylor’s discovery has several
implications for the study of narrative empathy. Most important, it sug-
gests why authors themselves so often vouch for the centrality of empathy
to novel reading and believe in the power of narrative empathy to change
the minds and lives of readers. The belief mirrors their own experiences as
ready empathizers. Yet even the most fervent employers of their empathetic
imaginations realize that this key ingredient of fictional world-making does
not always transmit to readers without interference. Authors’ empathy can
be devoted to socially undesirable ends that may be rejected by a disap-
proving reader. Indeed, empathic distress at feeling with a character whose
actions are at odds with a reader’s moral code may be a result of successfully
exercised authorial empathy. Both authors’ empathy and readers’ empathy
have rhetorical uses, which come more readily to notice when they conflict
in instances of empathic inaccuracy (discordance arising from gaps between
a author’s intention and a reader’s experience of narrative empathy). Expe-
riences of empathic inaccuracy may contribute to a reader’s outraged sense
that the author’s perspective is simply wrong, while strong concord in
authors’ empathy and readers’ empathy can be a motivating force to move
beyond literary response to prosocial action.
Some scholars of discourse processing believe that readers’ empathy
could produce verifiable results in the beliefs and actions of populations
of actual readers. Psychologists such as Martin Hoffman, whose theory of
empathy and altruism is treated in detail in chapter 1, believe that novel
reading may participate in the socialization and moral internalization
required for the transmutation of empathic guilt into prosocial action. In
other words, reading experiences may indirectly lay the groundwork for
real-world transmissions of empathy from fleeting feeling to willed steps
taken on another’s behalf. This would make the effects of reading difficult to
measure because the altruistic actions might be taken at some distance from
the reading experience, a point that emphasizes the need for longitudinal
studies of readers’ lives. My own research suggests that readers’ perception
of a text’s fictionality plays a role in subsequent empathetic response, by
releasing readers from the obligations of self-protection through skepticism
and suspicion. Thus they may respond with greater empathy to an unreal
xiv Preface

situation and characters because of the protective fictionality, but (if Hoff-
man is right) still internalize the experience of empathy in a way that prom-
ises later real-world responsiveness to others’ needs.
While a full-fledged political movement, an appropriately inspiring social
context, or an emergent structure of feeling promoting change may be nec-
essary for efficacious action to arise out of internalized experiences of nar-
rative empathy, readers may respond in those circumstances as a result of
earlier reading. The position of the reader with respect to the author’s stra-
tegic empathizing in fictional world-making limits these potential results.
I theorize that bounded strategic empathy operates with an in-group, stem-
ming from experiences of mutuality and leading to feeling with familiar
others. Ambassadorial strategic empathy addresses chosen others with the
aim of cultivating their empathy for the in-group, often to a specific end.
Broadcast strategic empathy calls upon every reader to feel with members of
a group, by emphasizing common vulnerabilities and hopes through univer-
salizing representations.
In the course of exploring this theory of narrative empathy, I also subject
the existing theories of narrative empathy and its effects, including those
offered by philosophers and psychologists, to critical scrutiny. Too often
these theories have been marred by bias or by a tendency to confound the
effects of teaching with those of reading. So, for instance, I suggest that if
narrative empathy is to be better understood, then women’s reading and
popular fiction must be accorded the respect of experimental inquiry. It
will not do to allow introspective accounts of reading (or teaching) canoni-
cal works of nineteenth-century fiction to substitute for broad inquiry into
the effects of more popular, widely read fiction that succeeds with a female
readership. This is not to say that trained readers’ empathetic experiences
with complex, experimental, difficult, and high literary texts hold no inter-
est, rather that a theory of narrative empathy that cannot explain com-
monplace, frequent, and readily repeated experiences of feeling with fiction
leaves a lot to be desired. While this criticism aims to expand the scope of
inquiry into narrative empathy, another seeks to narrow it. Too often the
discussion of effects of novel reading combines the social and pedagogical
outcomes of group discussion and classroom experiences. If the value of
discussion and the contributions of teachers in the intellectual and moral
growth of readers are to be understood, then these elements must not be
hidden within accounts that claim to study “effects of reading” but actually
conflate reading, discussion, role-taking activities, writing tasks, and teach-
ing. To conclude, as I do, that scant evidence exists for active connections
among novel reading, experiences of narrative empathy, and altruistic action
on behalf of real people only emphasizes the importance of discussion,
directed introspection, and leadership through questioning and providing
examples. Books can’t make change by themselves—and not everyone feels
certain that they ought to. If, however, a society judges that its peoples’
 Preface xv

novel reading ought to invoke empathy that yields in committed action for
others, then it should be willing to invest in the teachers who will help read-
ers make connections between their feeling responses to fiction and their
subsequent behavior as citizens of the world. Rather than jumping to this
conclusion, Empathy and the Novel asks its readers to consider that we have
a great deal more to understand about narrative empathy before we place
the novel in service to social goals, no matter how laudable they appear.

Feeling Good about Fiction

Bold claims have been made for the positive consequences of novel reading,
and these contentions grow more urgent as the practice of literary reading
in Anglo-American culture undergoes startling declines. This book ques-
tions the contemporary truism that novel reading cultivates empathy that
produces good citizens for the world. I affirm the robustness of narrative
empathy, as an affective transaction accomplished through the writing and
reading of fiction, but I hesitate to tether readers’ empathy to certain out-
comes of altruistic action. Still, novel reading does a lot for readers. Few
would doubt that a habit of consuming narrative fiction in prose improves
the vocabulary and informs the reader about subjects, times, people, and
places (real and imagined) in a way that extends knowledge beyond indi-
vidual experience. Some studies of fantasy empathy suggest that people
who readily imagine fictional others’ perspectives also grasp the variety and
individuality of real others, but this discovery about empathetic disposi-
tions may simply explain why certain people gravitate toward novel reading
(Stotland, Empathy 89). Do empathetic people make good readers, or do
good readers become empathetic people? Both may be true without guar-
anteeing that novels routinely do more than entertain, inform, soothe, or
excite their readers.
For immersed readers, entering fictional worlds allows a refreshing escape
from ordinary, everyday pressures and preoccupations.19 Encountering the
routine enigmas that drive fictional plots may enhance a reader’s fluency
and comfort with print communication. Widely read popular novels give
readers something to talk about and can contribute to the formation of
those little ad hoc communities of fellow-feeling that arise when several
who love a particular novel or novelist meet and share their enthusiasm.
The contemporary phenomenon of book groups testifies to the social and
personal benefits of novel reading, mainly enjoyed by women.20
Fictional characters can become mental companions to last a lifetime,
and relationships across generations can be built around affection for a
character or a fictional world. To this list of benefits we might add the
potential for social advancement: the person who can casually chat about
serious fiction may impress employers and those in circles with preten-
xvi Preface

sions to culture. The unusual college student who reads fiction for plea-
sure enjoys not only the books themselves, but also the approbation of her
academic elders. Many an English professor or librarian received encour-
agement to pursue a career path as a result of her enthusiasm for books.
Because of their complexity and thematic links to history, politics, eco-
nomics, and many other aspects of our embodied experience, novels make
good objects of academic study, though one hopes this remains a second-
ary consequence of fiction’s continued existence. Rarely, but vitally for the
continuity of cultural forms, novel readers sometimes become novelists.
What dedicated reader would question the importance of novel reading if
it produces the vocations of writers themselves? That all of these desirable
effects of novel reading fall into jeopardy when a nation stops reading cer-
tainly ought to give us pause.
In the summer of 2004, when I began writing this book, the National
Endowment for the Arts released a sobering report, entitled Reading at Risk.
It describes a nation sliding into a state of indifference to literature, of func-
tional aliteracy. At the behest of the NEA, in 2002, the United States Cen-
sus Bureau interviewed seventeen thousand adult Americans about their
reading habits. They inquired whether these citizens had read a single work
of poetry, drama, or fiction in the prior year. Keeping in mind that a reader
who had turned the pages of a single volume of the Left Behind series would
count as a literature reader by the survey’s definition, the results may even
be considered frightening. The NEA reports that over the past two decades,
both book reading and literature reading have declined sharply. Only 46.7
percent of respondents had read at least a single work of literature, and the
news about men, minorities, and younger people was especially disheart-
ening: only 37.6 percent of males admitted to literary reading (balanced
out by 55.1 percent of females); among Hispanics, only 26.5 percent were
self-declared literary readers; and of 18–24 year-olds (a group that includes
many of the nation’s college students, who may be presumed to read at
least a little under compulsion), only 42.8 percent admitted to recreational
reading. As Dana Gioia, Chairman of the NEA, puts it, the report presents a
“detailed but bleak assessment of the decline in reading’s role in the nation’s
culture.” He goes on to suggest that “anyone who loves literature or values
the cultural, intellectual, and political importance of active and engaged
literacy in American society will respond to this report with grave concern”
(Reading at Risk vii).21
The reaction to the report highlights the benefits believed to accrue to
individuals and the nation as a result of literary reading. Gioia worries about
the increased passivity of Americans, whose short attention spans and desire
for accelerated gratification lead them to video games, the Internet, televi-
sion, and DVDs, rather than to books. According to Gioia, the active atten-
tion, engagement, and practice required by reading are in jeopardy, and the
loss of contemplative engagement with complex works of literature impov-
 Preface xvii

erishes Americans. Cultural continuity, nuanced insights, informed debate,

and independent judgment all suffer as reading declines (Reading at Risk
vii). Though few of these assumptions have been subjected to systematic
investigation, they strike a chord with cultural commentators who observe
with trepidation the changes brought by new technologies of communica-
tion and entertainment. While some critics have reacted to the report as a
jeremiad or as insufficiently attentive to the textual nature of our on-line
activities, most authors, readers, editors, teachers, and librarians respond to
the call to action with heartfelt anecdotes of the importance of reading in
their lives (McLemee, “Literary Reading” A1, A16).
Personal testimony reveals the widespread perception that reading
enriches the lives and stimulates the imaginations of dedicated readers,
but as any bookworm knows, readers can also seem antisocial and indolent.
Novel reading is not a team sport. It not only encourages but also requires
a certain amount of couch time. An immersed reader possesses the irritat-
ing ability to shut out those around her, as my sisters can attest. Historically,
novel reading has not always seemed virtuous. Thus a set of claims linking
reading with other socially desirable activities deserves our attention. Read-
ing at Risk announces that literary reading strongly correlates to other forms
of active civic participation and reports that literary readers are more likely
than nonliterary readers to perform volunteer and charity work, to visit
art museums, and to attend and participate in performing arts and sports
events. Thus, to put it in the negative, as the executive summary does, the
decline in literary reading presages the erosion of cultural and civic partici-
pation (Reading at Risk xii). This logic suggests a causal connection among
reading and volunteerism, charitable activity, and cultural participation
(though other factors, such as education or social class, may better explain
the correlations). The NEA seizes the opportunity to warn the nation about
the consequences of a precipitous reduction in reading, for if literary read-
ers decline further, then active participants in social and cultural events may
also dwindle in number: “It is time to inspire a nationwide renaissance of
literary reading and bring the transformative power of literature into the
lives of all citizens” (xiii).
Paradoxically, the remedy for a populace inclining ever further toward
the isolating behaviors deplored as “bowling alone” may lie in the cultiva-
tion of the mainly solitary activity of reading novels, for fiction comprises
the bulk of the reading of literate Americans.22 Dana Gioia’s emphasis on
employing arts funding to increase access to events and museums (rather
than the traditional approach of funding individual artists or projects) capi-
talizes on the fear that we are becoming a people who fail to read: “We
have a generation of Americans growing up who have never been to the
theater, the symphony, opera, dance, who have never heard live jazz and
who increasingly don’t read. . . . In a country where we’ve lost 40 million
potential readers in the last 20 years,” Gioia questions “whether the prob-
xviii Preface

lem is an insufficient number of new books” (Weber, “Poet Brokers” B1, B5).
The gloomy prognosis and call to action have worked to garner conserva-
tive support and funding for the arts (“Poet Brokers” B1, B5). If Congress
and the public take the report seriously, it is to be hoped that the nation’s
libraries will receive a similarly enriched infusion of support. The rhetorical
groundwork has been laid by a variety of cultural commentators who weigh
in on the importance of reading. Three voices from the fields of philosophy,
psychology, and history represent here the common argument that novel
reading results in civic good.
The influential philosopher Martha Nussbaum sees novel reading as
one of the core strategies for building better world citizens capable of
extending love and compassion to unknown others. Encountering Henry
James or George Eliot (not coincidentally two canonical writers of Leavis’s
Great Tradition) helps the would-be world citizen become “a sensitive and
empathic interpreter” of others.23 Though Nussbaum’s examples in Culti-
vating Humanity (1997) and Poetic Justice (1995) show a bias toward real-
ism and canonical works (she stoops only so low as Dickens), she states
her claims for the exercise of the narrative imagination broadly: “Habits
of empathy and conjecture conduce to a certain type of citizenship and a
certain form of community: one that cultivates a certain kind of responsive-
ness to another’s needs, and understands the way circumstances shape those
needs, while respecting separateness and privacy” (Cultivating 90). One
builds these habits, starting in early childhood, through literary imagining,
which “inspires intense concern with the fate of characters and defines those
characters as containing a rich inner life, not all of which is open to view”
(90). Nussbaum, following the lead of Lionel Trilling, believes that learning
respect for the hidden inner life of fictional characters leads readers “to attri-
bute importance to the material conditions of happiness while respecting
human freedom” (90). This in turn leads to empathy, compassion, and social
justice (91, 94). In the strongest terms, Nussbaum claims that reading must
be consequential: “It is impossible to care about the characters [of Dickens
and Eliot] and their well-being in the way the text invites, without having
some very definite political and moral interests awakened in oneself” (104).
Whether anyone, let alone large numbers of people, actually acts in trace-
able ways as a result of this conscientious prompting Nussbaum does not
wonder: she assumes it must be so. Her strenuous efforts to promote reform
in liberal education emphasize her faith in the efficacy of the right kind of
novel reading.
For Steven Pinker, human beings need not be in school studying canoni-
cal writers to enjoy the benefits of what he names a “moral technology,”
storytelling. The evolutionary psychologist argues in a recent interview in
Seed magazine that storytelling has made the human species “nicer” (“Seed
Salon” 48); Pinker sees moral emotions as evolved traits that account for
the statistical decline in the murder rate from the time of hunter-gatherer
 Preface xix

societies. In Pinker’s rosy long view, “Much of the world has seen an end to
slavery, to genocide for convenience, to torture as a routine form of criminal
punishment for property crimes, to human sacrifice, to rape as the spoils of
war, to the ownership of women. We seem to be turning into a nicer spe-
cies” (“Seed Salon” 48). Most gratifyingly for those of us who spend our
comfortable lives contemplating novels, Pinker attributes to storytelling the
extension of the “moral circle” to include “other clans, other tribes, and other
races” (48). He concedes that our near universal capacity for empathy does
seem to be limited to a narrow compass of relations or villagers, but he holds
that by allowing our projection “into the lives of people of different times
and places and races, in a way that wouldn’t spontaneously occur,” fiction
can change our perspectives on unlike persons “who might otherwise seem
subhuman” (48). Thus fiction offers not only the “cognitive advantages of
seeing how hypothetical scenarios play out,” but also “the emotional plea-
sures of empathizing with a character” (97), and a payoff in understanding
and better behavior.
The distinguished historian Lynn Hunt extrapolates from personal to
political improvements. She argues that eighteenth-century novels played
an important part in advancing the concept of human rights.24 Indeed, if fic-
tion can do what Nussbaum and Pinker believe, then why wouldn’t history
record some pretty dramatic effects of the rise of the novel? Hunt argues
that the novel “disseminated a new psychology and a new social and politi-
cal order” through its narrative form and “made the point that all selves
are fundamentally similar because of their inner psychic processes” (“Para-
doxical” 14). The eighteenth-century novel accomplished this by drawing
readers in and making them feel “passionately” involved in the story. This
new experience of empathy with characters gave new political concepts
purchase: “Reading a novel (in the eighteenth century and not before) a
reader identified with an ordinary person unknown to him or her personally
but with whom the reader empathized thanks to the narrative form itself”
(14). Hunt especially prizes the effect of novels on spreading the notion of
women’s subjectivity, but her conclusions take her beyond the renovation of
opinion of mainly British and European middle-class readers about females
and servants (who were not, she acknowledges, immediately granted full
rights [15]). Novels trained readers to a broader conception of humanity,
through “new forms of empathetic identification with individuals who are
now imagined to be in some fundamental way like you” (13).
Well, it depends. Anyone who has read a fair number of eighteenth-cen-
tury novels will be able to think of examples of stigmatized characters who
are held up for ridicule and humiliation, to the delight of protagonists and
implied readers alike. The elderly, the fat, and the gout-ridden all seem to
be fair game. Eighteenth-century novelists often invite readers to laugh at
rebarbative characters’ misfortunes, often in support of general satiric aims,
but sometimes just for fun. For instance, Frances Burney’s Evelina (1778), a
xx Preface

fiction inviting a sympathetic view of its eponymous heroine, also contains

a sequence in which two aged women are recruited from local villages to
run in a footrace, and one in which the heroine’s vulgar old grandmother
gets dumped in a ditch as the result of a carriage wreck. Hilarious? Do these
scenes sustain a view of fiction as a fount of human sympathy? We don’t in
fact know how eighteenth-century readers responded to jokes that would
be regarded as politically incorrect today, but it does seem a bit of a stretch
to imagine that empathizing with Evelina counteracts all the moral con-
sequences of howling with laughter at the humiliation of elderly females.
Schadenfreude may be as robust an emotional response as compassion to the
fates of eighteenth-century fictional characters.
Hunt concedes the difficulty of proving how eighteenth-century read-
ers actually responded to the novels they had begun reading in large num-
bers. Other views have been offered about the widespread social impact
of fictional representations on, for instance, the rise of nationalism.25 Curi-
ously, though Hunt situates her “imagined empathy” in parallel with Bene-
dict Anderson’s imagined communities (13), she does not address Edward
Said’s converse thesis about the impact of the novel on imperialism. Said
argues that the novel was immensely important in the “formation of impe-
rial attitudes, references, and experiences” (Culture and Imperialism xii),
attitudes that were often at odds with the development of human rights. To
put it baldly, how can we know that readers’ passionate involvement with
fictional others didn’t inspire a desire to collect and control people they
did not personally know? Or, perhaps, closer to the bone, might not novel
reading enable individuals living on incomes from the investment funds
that profited from the slave trade to feel moral indignation on the behalf
of imaginary others brought near by fiction, while indirectly exploiting the
suffering of real people far away?

Sometime during the Bosnian war, I was watching the news in my comfort-
able study. The camera showed refugees picking their way down a rough
path, out of the mountains they had crossed to flee the conflict. I saw a
professionally dressed woman in her thirties carrying a child about eighteen
months old. I suddenly felt the weight of that toddler in my arms, the ten-
sion in my calves that governs slipping feet, and the spinal awareness that I
might suddenly be thrown off balance. I felt not pity, but the apprehension
the woman’s face and movements showed. This was empathy—a sponta-
neous sharing of feelings, including physical sensations in the body, pro-
voked by witnessing or hearing about another’s condition. Human beings
and other primates frequently experience fleeting empathetic sensations,
which can be observed and measured by physical signs, including facial
expressions, decreased heart rate, altered skin conductance, and palm sweat.
These signs can be captured by observation and, in the lab, by electromyo-
graphic (EMG) recordings and even fMRI imagery of brain activity.26 These
 Preface xxi

common experiences may go by too quickly to register in our long-term

memory, but most people, when asked, can recall times when they felt with
another (as opposed to feeling for another, or sympathy).
Not so long after this episode, the bad news about the massacres in
Rwanda began appearing in the paper. Just four days into the 1994 geno-
cide, readers of The New York Times learned that thousands of Tutsis and
moderate Hutus were being killed daily by machete, in systematic attacks
by their Hutu neighbors. It wouldn’t be quite accurate to say that I felt
sympathy for the victims. I felt horror, shock, and, as time passed, disap-
pointment at the tepid response to a faraway genocide. Then I felt a familiar
American emotion—guilt. I wrote a couple of checks. What else could I
do? I lapsed into a feeling of vague unease, as when an important task has
been left unfinished. Among all the feelings that the real events in Rwanda
provoked, empathy I do not recall. There was no moment when I shared
the feelings of a Tutsi victim. I had not seen pictures: unlike the scenes of
ethnic cleansing in the Balkans, the Rwandan genocide was not broadcast on
television.27 I wondered whether the large numbers of victims impeded my
response—a strong possibility. Or perhaps the dearth of white, middle-class,
English-speaking, professional women like me among the victims short-cir-
cuited my empathy. I couldn’t identify with them; they were too unlike me;
their circumstances and their suffering were unimaginable. This despite the
fact that I had read dozens of novels set in African countries during times
of crisis and had felt the strong, spontaneous kind of character identification
that I call reader’s empathy for fictional characters experiencing hunger,
dispossession, rape, humiliation, and exile.
If my novel reading was to have cultivated my sympathetic imagination
for the real people with whom I share existence, it had failed. If feeling bad
and writing checks to relief organizations counted as being a good world
citizen, then perhaps my lifelong novel reading did form something about
my character. (Though now I know, sadly, that those checks probably did
more to support the genocidaires fleeing from justice than to assist the vic-
tims.28) But there were so many other possible explanations for my minimal
money-giving response to the genocide that novel reading scarcely seemed
to rate. I began to wonder how one could ever tell what novel reading does
to a person, for a person, if anything at all. For I have not been alone in my
insufficient responses. Did a nation of book club readers rise up to protest
the recent genocide in the Sudan?29 We did not. Even Martha Nussbaum
concedes, “sympathy inspired by literary imagining does not immediately
effect political change” (Cultivating 97).
It would be comforting to believe that links between novel reading,
empathy, and altruism or committed action in favor of human rights really
exist. The fact that cultural authorities insist upon these connections just
as reading becomes a minority pastime activates my skepticism as much as
my concern, however. In the investigation that follows, I take a wide view
xxii Preface

of contemporary fiction and attend to the testimony of writers themselves.

The purposeful invocation of empathy by many contemporary novelists
attempts to alter readers’ views about the extent of the empathetic circle.
I respectfully observe writers’ conviction that novels can make something
happen, even though I question our certainty about the end results of read-
ing. All over the globe, novelists exercise their empathic imaginations in acts
of world creation, in the hope of reaching readers and changing hearts and
minds. I respond in this book to their invitation to feel with fiction.

Organization of This Book

In chapter 1, “Contemporary Perspectives on Empathy,” readers will find

definitions of key terms, most importantly the related concepts of empathy
and sympathy, and a broad account of the current popular understanding
of empathy. Drawing primarily on the recent psychological literature on
empathy and altruism, this introductory chapter explores some of the open
questions about empathy, including its relationship to real-world “proso-
cial” helping behavior. I offer summaries of the most recent psychological
and neuroscientific research in providing provisional answers to these basic
questions: What is empathy? Who has it? How do psychologists study it?
Does empathy involve emotion, cognition, or both? Finally, I turn to a first
set of questions about readers’ reactions to nonfictional and fictional appeals
to their emotions. The chapter ends with a set of readings of three sample
texts, showing that at least for a small sample of readers, the avowed fiction-
ality of a text opens up the possibility for a feeling response by disarming
suspicion.
Chapter 2, “The Literary Career of Empathy,” traces the reputation of
empathy and feeling responses to literature through three centuries. It dem-
onstrates that significant components of what psychologists today call empa-
thy appear under the label of sympathy in the works of eighteenth-century
philosophers David Hume and Adam Smith. Moving in chronological order
through literary periods to the twentieth century, I survey eighteenth-cen-
tury sympathy and the literature of sensibility, Romantic and Victorian pre-
occupations with sensations and social problems, modern defamiliarization
and estrangement, and the rise of the twentieth-century middlebrow reader.
Each literary period contains voices advocating and contesting the value of
a feeling response to literature. Thus, this chapter emphasizes doubts about
empathy and records some of the gravest charges against empathy as well
as some of the grandest claims for its social value. By the twentieth century,
the end point of this chapter’s brief survey, the reputation of empathetic
response clearly depends upon contexts and genres. I illustrate my account
of the ongoing debate with generous quotations from the original sources,
 Preface xxiii

so that the chapter serves as an anthology of empathy’s controversial liter-

ary career.
In chapter 3, “Readers’ Empathy,” I present testimony collected from a
variety of readers in addition to myself in order to move beyond introspec-
tion in discovering what readers say about the effects of their novel read-
ing. I compare this anecdotal evidence with the few scholarly, empirical
studies of reading, giving special attention to those that address empathy
and changes of attitudes toward people regarded as fundamentally differ-
ent Others. In a thorough examination of narrative techniques or aspects of
the novel that have been identified as empathetic by narrative theorists or
literary cognitivists, I identify the missing pieces of a comprehensive literary
theory of readers’ empathy, and I suggest areas where more careful research
is required before conclusions can be made. Despite the provisional state of
affairs in the area of study focusing on emotional responses to novels, in this
chapter, I offer the first part of a preliminary theory of narrative empathy
(the second part appears in chapter 5, “Authors’ Empathy”).
Chapter 4, “Empathy in the Marketplace,” begins with a cautious assess-
ment of the claim that reading novels extends the empathetic circle. Do
empathetic novels sell better in the world fiction market because they
appeal to female readers, or do women experience extension of their empa-
thy because they read novels? Beginning with these questions, I discuss
gender as a constitutive feature of the middlebrow reader, and I consider
the central role of affect in the construction of the reading-group partici-
pant. Through a case study of the response to Rohinton Mistry’s A Fine
Balance (1995), the only postcolonial novel selected by Oprah Winfrey for
her original book club, I examine the relationship between feeling readers
and contemporary authors. I study how this audience (made up of Oprah’s
Book Club members) constructs ideal texts and characters with whom they
can empathize and takes up the challenge of reading fiction about painful
subjects by making it relevant to their own lives. The emphasis by read-
ers, authors, and the novels themselves on a common emotional heritage
and the universality of human feelings bridges social, cultural, economic,
and geographical gaps that might otherwise impede empathy. However, the
sharing of feeling may not translate into prosocial action on behalf of suf-
fering others, as some authors hope. I speculate here that becoming a reader
of an Oprah book, which is to say joining the vast audience of an instant
bestseller, may activate the psychological response known as diffusion of
responsibility: the assumption on the part of individuals, that because they
are part of a crowd, they need not take responsibility for acting.
In chapter 5, “Authors’ Empathy,” I take up the topic of writers’ inten-
tions and their decisions about craft and content. Like my treatment of read-
ers’ empathy in chapter 3, this discussion ranges widely, deriving proposals
about narrative empathy from the testimony and practice of a large number
xxiv Preface

of contemporary novelists. Though many of the novelists discussed in this

chapter are distinguished prizewinners, less well-known authors, including
the writers of science fiction and novelizations from television series, con-
tribute to the contemporary vogue for and interrogation of empathy. Some,
such as Alice Walker, attempt to use their fiction and fame to effect change
in the real world. Others, such as Keri Hulme, evoke empathy for characters
that ordinary readers would usually find repellent. In this chapter I coin a
term, empathic inaccuracy, meaning a strong conviction of empathy that
incorrectly identifies the feeling of the subject. Authors sometimes succeed
in evoking empathy unintentionally. When they explicitly invoke empathy,
they do not present it as unambiguously beneficial. The contemporary the-
matizing of empathy as a character trait shows that novelists actively par-
ticipate in the debate about the uses and perils of empathy. Indeed, novelists
persist in what I call strategic empathizing, in which their own empathetic
imagining goes out to meet particular audiences, not necessarily composed
of educated Western readers. Authors’ empathy flows in many directions,
meeting the empathy of habitual readers wherever they are.
Chapter 6, “Contesting Empathy,” addresses the most negative repre-
sentations of empathy and explains why academic distrust of empathy has
been so influential. Empathy earns distrust for its apparent directional qual-
ity—an empathetic performance may appear condescending to its object or
to an observer. In addition, feminists, postcolonial theorists, and critical race
scholars in legal studies resist the universalizing of human emotions inherent
in much of the commentary on empathy. Some philosophers and experts
in cultural studies regard the putative ethical consequences of empathy and
reading emotionally evocative literature as impediments to justice. Many
contemporary intellectuals point to the empathetic individual’s erasure of
suffering others in a self-regarding emotional response that affronts others’
separate personhood. These criticisms place empathy in a negative light,
and their authors certainly do not participate in the advocacy for empathy
as an essential ingredient of good citizenship. Indeed, they regard it as a typi-
cal manifestation of Western arrogance, imagining common ground with
the victims of global capitalism and fantasizing relationships of emotional
recognition in place of the unseemly relation of consumers to the exploited.
Empathy, in this light, becomes a delusion of the affluent West, which ought
to be revealed for throwing up impediments to social change. Through dis-
cussion of fiction by Michael Ondaatje and Octavia Butler, I explore some
of the most compelling stances against empathy. I distinguish false empathy
from failed empathy critics and situate their views in relation to the critique
of human universals that underlies some theorists’ distrust of empathy.
Yet, despite this bracing critique, empathetic fiction (much of it written
by women, racial and ethnic minorities, and postcolonial citizens) reaches
a wide readership. In celebrated cases this fiction transcends barriers of dif-
ference represented by race, nation, gender, sexual orientation, and religion,
 Preface xxv

among others. Though the long-term political, social, and ethical conse-
quences of empathetic reading experiences have yet to be demonstrated,
the ardency of readers and the perseverance of novelists give pause to the
skeptic who would argue that literature makes nothing happen. Simple
accounts of the utility of novel reading, I argue, should be replaced by more
nuanced study of the consequences of experiencing aesthetic emotions.30
The affective transaction across boundaries of time, culture, and location
may indeed be one of the intrinsic powers of fiction and the novel a remark-
ably effective device for reminding readers of their own and others’ human-
ity. Narrative empathy is not an inconsiderable element of the creation and
reception of fiction, and it should be resituated to a central place in twenty-
first–century aesthetics.
This book pursues the question of what a habit of novel reading does
to the moral imagination of the immersed reader. Unlike the authorities
mentioned earlier, I do not assume from the outset that empathy for fic-
tional characters necessarily translates into what Stephen Pinker calls “nicer”
human behavior. I ask whether the effort of imagining fictive lives, as George
Eliot believed, can train a reader’s sympathetic imagining of real others in
her actual world, and I inquire how we might be able to tell if it happened.
I acknowledge that it would be gratifying to discover that reading Henry
James makes us better world citizens, but I wonder whether the expen-
diture of shared feeling on fictional characters might not waste what little
attention we have for others on nonexistent entities, or at best reveal that
addicted readers are simply endowed with empathetic dispositions. Like
most professors of literature, I would be delighted to affirm the salutary
effects of novel reading, but I am not prepared to take them on faith. How
might we verify when empathetic reading experiences have shaped our
behavior? We should begin by understanding what psychologists mean by
empathy, a term bedeviled by conflicting definitions.
This page intentionally left blank
 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

A book about what happens to readers when they experience empathy for
fictional characters (or other aspects of novelistic worlds) depends, first and
foremost, on the generosity of readers. One can impose on one’s students
(and believe me, I did!), but the voluntary testimony of a variety of read-
ers, including the pseudonymous posters at Amazon.com, made this project
possible.
Exemplary among my informants were VICTORIA listserv correspon-
dents. Without necessarily knowing me personally, they gamely responded
to my query about empathetic reading experiences. I thank Diana Archibald,
Alison Booth, Sarah Brown, Michel Faber, Richard Fulton, Sheldon Gold-
farb, Kerryn Goldsworthy, Valerie Gorman, Jill Grey, Martha Stoddard Hol-
mes, Susan Hoyle, Jack Kolb, Robert Lapides, David Latane, Mary Lenard,
Anna Lepine, Margot K. Louis, Rohan Maitzen, Timothy Mason, Sara L.
Maurer, Michael Hargreave Mawson, Pat Menon, Kathryn Miele, Ellen
Moody, Deborah Denenholz Morse, Heather Morton, Lee O’Brien, Diana
Ostrander, Meri-Jane Rochelson, Anne B. Rodrick, Heather Schell, June W.
Siegel, Ann Shillinglaw, Suzanne Shumway, Kathleen O’Neill Sims, Beth
Sutton-Ramspeck, Tamara S. Wagner, and Michael Woolf.
Many friends and colleagues supplied “true confessions” about what
novels made them do, asked me those invaluable stumping questions, and
provided ways into the daunting bibliographies of unfamiliar disciplines.
For that and for responses to my work in progress, I thank Edward Adams,
John Armstrong, Claudette Artwick, Theresa Braunschneider, Pam Burish,
Gwyn Campbell, Marc Conner, Elizabeth Heckendorn Cook, Ed Craun,
Kevin Crotty, Doug Cummings, Kelly Boyle Dailey, Scott Dransfield, Fran-
coise Fregnac-Clave, Art Goldsmith, Jim Hentz, Sarah Kennedy, George
Landow, Timothy Lubin, Nancy Margand, Richard Marks, Yolanda Merrill,
David S. Miall, Brian Murchison, Nan Partlett, Domnica Radulescu, Brian
Richardson, Elizabeth Samet, Lad Sessions, Kary Smout, Asali Solomon,
Scott Sundby, Jim Warren, and Lesley Wheeler. I benefited from the public
discussions and private conversations that went on at the Institute for Eng-
lish Studies conference, The Languages of Emotion, in London (October
2004), and at the Cognition in Literary Interpretation and Practice confer-
xxviii Acknowledgments

ence, in Helsinki, Finland (August 2004). Audiences at talks at Southern

Virginia University (Buena Vista, Virginia), University of Alaska Southeast
(Juneau, Alaska), University of Helsinki (Helsinki, Finland), University
of Washington (Seattle, Washington), and R. E. Lee Memorial Episcopal
Church (Lexington, Virginia) made comments and asked questions that
shaped my work.
In order to carry out this project, I had to find my way around several
fields that were new to me, specifically cognitive approaches to literary
study and the psychological study of empathy. Neuroscientist Tyler Lorig
and cognitive scientists David Elmes and Wythe Whiting were kind enough
to welcome me into their classrooms as an auditor. I received invaluable
suggestions and guidance from neuroscientist Len Jarrard, from social psy-
chologists Martha McClintock and Julie Woodzicka, and from developmen-
tal psychologists Nancy Eisenberg and Nancy Margand. Tania Singer of the
Wellcome Institute at University of London was kind enough to respond to
the e-mail queries of a complete stranger. To Nancy Eisenberg I am espe-
cially indebted for expert guidance at the start and finish of this project.
In the field of cognitive approaches to literary study, I am grateful to Alan
Richardson, a generous and helpful reader, and to David Miall and Peter
Stockwell, both of whom offered encouragement and useful suggestions. I
am grateful to James Phelan for permission to publish in scattered chapters
here material that first appeared in an essay, “Narrative Empathy” in Narra-
tive (Fall 2006).
Throughout my time at Washington and Lee University, I have benefited
from generous institutional support, and I owe specific thanks to Interim
Dean Jeanine Stewart, Acting Dean Lad Sessions, Provost Tom Williams,
and the members of the Advisory Committee. A Glenn Grant for summer
work in 2004 and a Class of 1962/Hewlett-Mellon grant augmenting sab-
batical salary in 2004–05 made the actual writing of this book feasible. The
Glenn Grant Publication fund provided timely subvention. Elizabeth Teaff
tirelessly processed my interlibrary loan requests, for which I thank her.
Sandy O’Connell pulled me through a year as Acting Chair and supported
me throughout the writing process.
Good book talk sustains real readers. I’m fortunate to enjoy frank con-
versations with my students, and I particularly thank my Washington and
Lee University undergraduates, especially those who participated in World
Fiction in English, Postcolonial Literature, Literary Approaches to Poverty,
and Children’s Literature courses. For permission to quote their written
responses, I thank them. My graduate students at Bread Loaf in Juneau,
Alaska, deserve special mention. Their experiences as teachers in mid-
dle schools, high schools, and in K–12 schools in the Alaskan bush have
informed and inspired me. Even fleeting conversations with exceptional
readers can have a significant impact on the shape of a project. I am grateful
 Acknowledgments xxix

in this regard to Fakrul Alam, Carolyn Allen, Roy Blount Jr., Ian Duncan,
Amy Elias, Michael Gorra, Jianjun Ma, Franco Moretti, Claude Rawson, and
Robyn Warhol for their suggestions about novels and reading. Needless to
say, the work that appears in these pages (and the inevitable errors) are my
responsibility alone.
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 CONTENTS

1. Contemporary Perspectives on Empathy 3

2. The Literary Career of Empathy 37

3. Readers’ Empathy 65

4. Empathy in the Marketplace 101

5. Authors’ Empathy 121

6. Contesting Empathy 145

Appendix: A Collection of Hypotheses about Narrative Empathy 169

Notes 173

Works Cited 209

Index 235
This page intentionally left blank
Empathy and the Novel
This page intentionally left blank
 1

CONTEMPORARY PERSPECTIVES ON EMPATHY

This chapter establishes a working definition of empathy, details the ques-

tions about empathy that psychologists and philosophers pursue, including
the relation of empathy to altruistic behavior, and charts the representa-
tions of empathy in popular culture. In order to investigate what empathy
invoked by novels might do to and for readers, I begin with the current psy-
chological understanding of what direct experiences of empathy for actual
humans appear to accomplish. While a well-regulated person may experi-
ence empathy that leads to sympathetic concern and altruism in real life,
another individual may become distressed by exposure to another’s condi-
tion. Research in psychology describes individual differences in empathy,
addressing its heritability and its influence by the environment.1 Twin stud-
ies show that genetic factors account for a great deal of the range in dispo-
sitional affective empathy.2 Close and secure family relationships (a major
component of environment) also contribute to individuals’ feeling respon-
siveness to others.3 While an emotional temperament is likely to contrib-
ute to empathy, little is known about the genetic sources or environmental
antecedents of cognitive role taking,4 an ability associated with empathy
小说作为
that may be involved in character identification. If novels can be consid-
读者的环
ered a part of readers’ environment, then fiction may elicit the expression 境，是否
of dispositional empathy, or it may cultivate the sympathetic imagination 可以引发
through the exercise of innate role-taking abilities. Could novel reading 读者的共
help an individual become better regulated and thus more likely to move 情

from empathy to sympathy in real life? Or does the testimony about the
role of fiction reflect the aesthetic preferences of readers already inclined
to respond empathetically? As these questions show, much of the debate
about empathy described in this chapter has relevance for the questions of
narrative ethics raised in the preface, matters of narrative technique treated
in chapter 3, and reader responses discussed throughout the book.
This chapter initiates that project by describing a collection of reactions
to three brief texts that attempt to invoke emotional responses in read-
ers. The discussion here leads to several baseline assertions about narrative
empathy. Empathetic response to fiction is less consistent than it might at
4 Empathy and the Novel

first seem. No one text evokes the same responses in all of its readers, and
not all texts succeed in stimulating readers to feel and act as their authors
apparently wish. I argue here that the very fictionality of novels predisposes
readers to empathize with characters, since a fiction known to be “made up”
does not activate suspicion and wariness as an apparently “real” appeal for
assistance may do.5 I posit that fictional worlds provide safe zones for read-
ers’ feeling empathy without experiencing a resultant demand on real-world
action.6 This freedom from obligation paradoxically opens up the channels
for both empathy and related moral affects such as sympathy, outrage, pity,
righteous indignation, and (not to be underestimated) shared joy and satis-
faction. Before returning to my central topic of narrative empathy, however,
the definitions of empathy and related responses demand attention.7

What Is Empathy?
可通过目睹他人的情感状态，获悉他人的境况和阅读来激发共情。三大途径。
Empathy, a vicarious, spontaneous sharing of affect, can be provoked by
witnessing another’s emotional state, by hearing about another’s condition,
or even by reading. It need not be a conscious response: the neonates who
cry at the sound of other babies’ cries are almost certainly unaware of their
primitive empathy. Equipped with mirror neurons, the human brain appears
to possess a system for automatically sharing feelings, what neuroscientists
call a “shared manifold for intersubjectivity.”8 More complex cognitive
responses to others’ mental states layer atop this initial spontaneous shar-
ing of feelings. Mirroring what a person might be expected to feel in that
condition or context, empathy is thought to be precursor to its semantic
close relative, sympathy.9 Although the word empathy is a relatively young
term, entering English in the early twentieth century as a coined translation
of the German word Einfühlung, aspects of empathy have been described
by philosophers since the days of Adam Smith and David Hume under
the older term sympathy. Throughout this book I distinguish the spontane- 即刻、回
应的适当
ous, responsive sharing of an appropriate feeling as empathy, and the more 情感共享
complex, differentiated feeling for another as sympathy (sometimes called ——共
empathic concern in psychological literature). 情；更复
Personal distress, an aversive emotional response also characterized by 杂、有区
apprehension of another’s emotion, differs from empathy in that it focuses 别的感觉
——同情
on the self and leads not to sympathy but to avoidance.10 The distinction
between empathy and personal distress matters because empathy is associ-
ated with the moral emotion sympathy (also called empathic concern) and 同情=共
情的关心
thus with prosocial or altruistic action. Empathy that leads to sympathy is 是道德情
by definition other-directed, whereas an over-aroused empathic response 感？
that creates personal distress (self-oriented and aversive) causes a turning-
away from the provocative condition of the other. I hazard that personal
distress caused by novel reading leads people to stop reading, to put the
进一步区分personal distress和empathy：前者会让读者放弃阅读，将书丢在一边，不断地略
过或者粗略草草地看。
 Contemporary Perspectives on Empathy 5

book down, or to disengage full attention by skipping and skimming. None

of the philosophers who put stock in the morally improving experience
of narrative empathy include personal distress in their theories. Because
novel reading can be so easily stopped or interrupted by an unpleasant
emotional reaction to a book, however, personal distress has no place in
a literary theory of empathy, though it certainly contributes to aesthetic
emotions, such as those Sianne Ngai describes in her important book Ugly
Feelings (2005).11
本书作者
In this book I rely on an understanding of empathy derived from psy- 借用的是
chology, though not all psychologists agree on the components, processes, 心理学上
and outcomes of empathy. I do not attempt to resolve these disagreements 的共情的
through my use of terminology, but I do mention their differences when 定义。
they are consequential.12 In empathy, sometimes described as an emotion in
its own right,13 we feel what we believe to be the emotions of others.14 This
phenomenon is distinguished in both psychology and philosophy (though
not in popular usage) from sympathy, in which feelings for another occur.
共情与同情之间的区别

Empathy: Sympathy:
I feel what you feel. I feel a supportive emotion about your feelings.
I feel your pain. I feel pity for your pain.

These examples emphasize negative emotions—pain and pity—but it should

be noted from the outset that although psychological and philosophical
studies of empathy have tended to gravitate toward the negative, empathy 共情不止
与消极情
also occurs for positive feelings of happiness, satisfaction, elation, triumph, 感联系，
and sexual arousal.15 All of these positive kinds of empathy play into read- 也与积极
ers’ pleasure, a phenomenon French literary theorists have described with 情感有关
the felicitous term jouissance.16
Experts on emotional contagion, the communication of one’s mood to
others, have done a better job of studying the full range of emotional states
that can be shared through our automatic mimicry of one another.17 Indeed,
primitive emotional contagion, or “the tendency to automatically mimic and
synchronize facial expressions, vocalizations, postures, and movements with
those of another person and consequently, to converge emotionally” (Con-
tagion 81) offers a compelling explanation of a component of our empathy
as arising from our physical and social awareness of one another, from birth.
Inherited traits play an important role in our disposition to experience emo-
tional contagion,18 but our personal histories and cultural contexts affect
the way we understand automatically shared feelings.19
So, for instance, emotional contagion comes into play in our reactions to
narrative, for we are also story-sharing creatures. The same drive to affili-
ate with others for comfort and safety that expresses itself in empathy and
sympathy may also play a role in our species’ enthusiasm for narrative. The
oral storyteller not only takes advantage of our tendency to share feelings
6 Empathy and the Novel

socially by doing the voices and facial expressions of characters, but also tac-
itly trains young children and members of the wider social group to recog-
nize and give priority to culturally valued emotional states.20 This education
does not create our feelings, but renders emotional states legible through
their labels, and activates our expectations about what emotions mean. Nar-
ratives in prose and film infamously manipulate our feelings and call upon
our built-in capacity to feel with others. We need not be present in the
immediate audience to catch the feelings of others, as anyone who watched
the events of 11 September 2001, on television will recall. (Remember also
how many people said of that day, “It was like a movie,” an evaluation that
catches both the intensity of feeling and the sense of unreality that beset us
then.) We humans can “feel with” fictional characters and faraway strangers
when we are exposed to storytelling prose narrative and film fiction, or mass
media broadcasts that call upon our emotions. It makes sense for all citizens
to understand the circumstances and techniques that elicit our shared feel-
ings, especially if an empathetic response does develop into more complex
responses that contribute to (or impede) our moral development and civic
engagement.

Who Has Empathy?

Humans feel empathy. We aren’t the only animals to do so,21 but empathy
seems so basic a human trait that lacking it can be seen as a sign of inhu-
manity. Blade Runner (1982, 1992), Ridley Scott’s film version of Philip K.
Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968), popularizes and trou-
bles a notion of empathy as the one essential, recognizable trait of human-
ity. Blade Runner’s dystopic future world imagines society penetrated by
nearly unidentifiable cyborgs engineered to believe in their wholly invented
human lives, memories, and feelings, which have been supplied by their
maker. These persecuted machines reveal themselves as cyborgs by failing
an empathy test. Lacking empathy in this context means revealing oneself
as a machine.
Popular culture represents empathy as a human and often also as a typi-
cally female trait, understandings to which science contributes. For instance,
Cambridge scientist Simon Baron-Cohen’s The Essential Difference: The Truth
about the Male and Female Brains (2003) advances a theory about female
empathy that confirms contemporary gender stereotypes and has received
widespread coverage in the press due to its speculations about autism rates.22
Baron-Cohen suggests that the capacity for empathy differs between men
and women, specifically, that “the female brain is predominantly hard-wired
for empathy” while “the male brain is predominantly hard-wired for under-
standing and building systems” (Essential 1). Baron-Cohen describes empa-
thy by its behavioral consequences: for him it entails automatically feeling
 Contemporary Perspectives on Empathy 7

concern, wincing, and feeling “a desire to run across and help alleviate” the
victim’s pain (2).23 He proposes that empathy “arises out of natural desire to
care about others,” and he argues that human females spontaneously empa-
thize more than males (on average) (2).24 This is not a new idea in socio-
biology, philosophy, or politics.25 For instance, it is axiomatic that women
generally prefer reparative, humane solutions to social problems, while men
prefer punishment and preventative measures.26 Folk understanding of the
gender gap in politics suggests that emotionality and empathy on the part
of women incline them to caring solutions.
Real differences in the structures of female and male brains might seem
to support this popular view with evidence from neuroscience.27 Some
aspects of emotional response are lateralized differently in men and women,
and some brain areas involved in emotion differ in relative size between
the sexes. Speculations about the evolutionary origin of human empathy
often point toward the caregiver-infant relationship as a source for develop-
ing empathy.28 It is important not to confound underlying structures with
outcomes that may express cultural assumptions rather than biological
fact, however. Some developmental psychologists and cognitive scientists
reviewing the evidence question the assumption that empathy is a “female
trait.” Martin Hoffman believes that “mimicry is probably a hard-wired neu-
rologically based empathy-arousing mechanism whose two steps, imitation
and feedback, are directed by commands from the central nervous system”
(Empathy and Moral Development 44). This means for all of us: human
beings and other animals possess this fundamental “hard-wiring,” evolved
from primitive communication mechanisms that enhance cooperation with
other organisms in the group.
Though some studies have shown gender differences (not all skewing
toward females), in their second comprehensive review of the literature,
Eisenberg and Lennon find that gender differences may arise from the
methods of measurement rather than from genuine differences. Paper and
pencil self-report studies produced large differences; picture/story indices
yielded small differences; and physiological measures resulted in no differ-
ences. To Eisenberg and Lennon, this suggests that the subjects’ assump-
tions about their own gender roles and appropriate emotional responses,
especially when directly reported to a questioner, skewed results toward
showing gender difference.29 They conclude that fine-tuned definitions and
methodology that guard against influence by cultural assumptions must be
developed before any conclusions can be made about gender and empathy.
Writing a decade later, social psychologists Tiffany Graham and William
Ickes agree, although their use of empathy indicates cognitive perspective
taking rather than affective empathy with others’ feelings.30 In their review
of the evidence about “women’s intuition,” Graham and Ickes decide that
“gender differences in empathic skills and dispositions appear to be small
rather than large, and specific rather than general in their scope” (“Intuition”
8 Empathy and the Novel

139–40). Motivation rather than ability accounts for women’s skills in judg-
ing others’ thoughts and feelings.
Humanists and literary scholars are more familiar with feminist and post-
colonial critiques of the essentializing universals that have often been used
to narrow the definition of the human or to allocate traits rated low on a
scale of values to subject races or to groups considered inferior. This per-
spective, too, brings into question any simple assignment of emotional traits
to a gender or other group of humans. Certainly we should want to know
what historical circumstances or social conditions influence the assignment
of “caring” to women and “understanding” to men before we assume that a
biological basis for a distinction exists. Despite critical reservations about
claims such as Baron-Cohen’s, however, the notion of gender difference in
empathy persists in popular cultural representations of empathic individu-
als. Often such claims rely on a notion of the “natural” that does not always
receive confirmation in the laboratory.
One clue that there may not be a biological basis for strong gender
difference in empathy lies in the evidence of empathy among other pri-
mates. Though male and female monkeys may indeed have different sex
roles in some areas, the account of empathy among bonobos published by
Ellen J. Ingmanson about her observations at the San Diego Zoo features
a young male bonobo’s response to an older male’s dejection. Ingmanson
also reports cases in which male bonobos in the wild have taken over infant
care of orphaned or neglected infants.31 Male primates may not have gotten
the social message that empathy is supposed to be a female trait! Recent
work by Stephanie Preston and Frans B. M. de Waal reports many striking
examples of empathy, including apparent cognitive perspective taking and
sympathetic behavior, in both male and female animals. Chimpanzees con-
sole one another, responding to distress; macaques help handicapped group
members; and as dog owners will anticipate, some animals respond to the
distress of individuals from other species (“Communication” 283). Preston
and de Waal regard empathy as “a general class of behavior that exists across
species to different degrees of complexity” (285). Reviewing the experi-
mental and behavioral data of empathy in rodents, monkeys, and apes, they
conclude, “continuous contact and coordinated activities are characteristic
of a bond that develops a physiologically adaptive response to stress, accu-
rate communication of affect with others, and the capacity for empathic
responding” (301). This bond may express itself in caregiver-child relations
or in the coordinated activity of the hunt (though, to be sure, our capacity
to disengage empathetic reaction may stem from the need to avoid feeling
with the prey animal, where empathy would impede success). The uses
to which we put our empathy may be subject to cultural influences, but
the response itself, Preston and de Waal argue, occurs in humans and other
animals. They argue that modern life inhibits the expression of empathy
humans share with our primate and mammal cousins (301–2). Becom-
 Contemporary Perspectives on Empathy 9

ing more like apes would be a gain for disconnected and alienated human
beings, regardless of gender.
Whether or not we feel comfortable with our empathy as an inheri-
tance from our common primate ancestors depends on our attitudes toward
evolution and the degree to which we regard humans as separate, special
beings who are distinguished from the rest of living creatures. To those who
regard empathy as primarily a matter of cognitive perspective taking (a view
treated below), the homologous empathy of apes and humans may seem
more difficult to accept. Apes cannot use language to confirm the motiva-
tions for their behavior. However, Preston and de Waal provide instances of
animal behavior indicating perspective taking as well as affective empathy.
A monkey that provides an appropriate tool to another after observing its
struggles to solve a problem demonstrates perspective taking, and an ape
that holds and strokes an unconscious human child who has fallen into her
enclosure shows caring. That we share instinctive caring with our primate
cousins need not diminish the uses to which humans put their empathetic
responses. As Darwin’s contemporary Herbert Spencer argued in 1855, our
underlying sociality contributes to our group survival. Emotional response
to others’ condition has been seen as providing a basis for mature sympathy,
morality, and social arrangements that seek the common good. Philosophers
since David Hume and Adam Smith have argued this point, and recent evo-
lutionary psychology has embraced the notion of the adaptive function of
reciprocal altruism. A great deal more than shared sensations is attributed
to human empathy.
Deficiencies in empathy impair human relationships and contribute to
psychopathology. The difficulty may stem from a reduced ability to recog-
nize others’ sad, fearful, or distressed emotions.32 Emotionally “tone-deaf”
individuals who recognize neither their own nor others’ feelings, may suf-
fer from alexithymia, a dispositional deficit that shows in their inability to
describe emotions verbally. Alexithymics’ condition can interfere with rela-
tionships and their ability to use their imaginations. Lacking feeling rarely
benefits the individual in popular representations (though the cold-blooded
individualist gets credit for a successful strategy when he ignores others’
feelings). Certainly, a complete freedom from empathy might be admired as
a feature of ruthless competitiveness or hyperrationality, but in popular cul-
ture, characters exhibiting no empathy seem like monsters or machines. At
best they seem odd to ordinary people. Mr. Spock of Star Trek and Data of
Star Trek: the Next Generation represent two widely recognized pop culture
versions of the emotionless being. Tellingly, the sophisticated robot Data
wishes for nothing more than the acquisition of emotions, for he recognizes
his lack of feelings as a cognitive disability that undermines his capacity to
comprehend others’ behavior. In popular culture, lacking empathy often
correlates with sociopathic behavior, with the profiles of serial killers, and
with developmental disorders such as autism.
10 Empathy and the Novel

To place an autistic child in the same list as a sociopath and a serial killer
suggests one of the many disturbing consequences of emphasizing empathy
as an intrinsic human trait. Certainly, suffering from autism does not predict
a career of criminality (several recent novels have in fact emphasized the
autistic child’s gifts as a crime solver or a clever adversary of evil!).33 No one
disputes that autistic children are human beings. It helps to know that every
psychologist studying empathy acknowledges the range of caring disposi-
tions in people. Within every category, men, women, girls, and boys vary in
their disposition to empathize.34 The most serious impairments in empathic
ability indicate disorders. For instance, Lorna Wing places lack of empathy
at the beginning of her list of the main clinical features of Asperger’s syn-
drome, and this problem appears to be at the root of some of its sufferers’
other clinical indications, such as their poor nonverbal communication, dif-
ficulty in forming friendships, and inappropriate or one-sided interactions in
conversation.35 Having no empathy does not necessarily indicate low intel-
ligence, however: Asperger’s sufferers can be exceptionally bright.
Though understanding of Asperger’s syndrome helps mitigate a preju-
dicial view of low-empathy individuals, the popular representation of the
warped master criminal as simultaneously brainy and uncaring dominates
in mass culture. Like many stereotypes, this one has its roots in reality. The
fact that some criminals may be described as suffering from a syndrome
known as antisocial personality disorder, which combines unlawful behav-
ior with lack of remorse, or indifference to the pain, suffering, or material
losses of their victims, reinforces the association of empathy with good
citizens and the lack of it with problem cases. Worst of all are the well-
publicized emotional failings of psychopaths such as serial killers. Psycho-
paths cannot construct mental and emotional facsimiles of other people
effectively, so the feelings of others are of no concern to them.36 This does
not mean that they lack emotion, for these sadists may take joy from the
suffering of their victims, but it underscore their lack of empathy.37 All
these understandings add up in the negative side of the tally. In the popu-
lar cultural view, lack of empathy spells social problems, danger to others,
criminality, and inhumanity.
Being empathetic receives hearty endorsements from diverse voices in
popular culture. The “empath” of popular science fiction represents the far
extreme: unlike her unemotional opposite, she cannot help receiving and
feeling the sensations of those around her. For fictional characters as well as
many real people, empathy provides the basis for vocations in the helping
professions. One can see figures such as Counselor Deanna Troi of Star Trek:
The Next Generation as the direct descendent of real-world client-centered
therapists whose therapeutic versions of empathy are widely diffused in
popular culture.38 As in the negative representations, a legitimate link to
real-life practices exists. The successful psychotherapist needs to be able to
harness empathy, using it to therapeutic ends without being overwhelmed
 Contemporary Perspectives on Empathy 11

by painful fellow feeling.39 The field of narrative medicine emphasizes sto-

rytelling as an empathy-inducing methodology recommended to physi-
cians who wish to practice medicine more efficaciously.40 As Scott Sundby
has argued, defense lawyers who effectively use narrative to call on jurors’
empathy during the sentencing phase of capital convictions can win life sen-
tences rather than the death penalty.41 Perhaps the most compelling exhibit
of empathy’s rise in the contemporary roster of virtues appears in the huge
success of Stephen Covey’s best-selling self-help book, The 7 Habits of
Highly Effective People: Powerful Lessons in Personal Change (1990), whose
most recent cover boasts of over 10 million sales. Covey’s treatment of prin-
ciples of empathic communication (his fifth habit) urges the cultivation of
role taking: “Seek first to understand, then to be understood.”42 CEOs and
business leaders attest that Covey’s renovation of character through empa-
thy improves leadership ability. Covey’s cognitive emphasis (seek to under-
stand, he instructs, not seek to feel) may help make empathy acceptable to
men in a culture that sees its expression as feminine. Yet the professional-
izing of the empath’s skills suggests the widespread cultural valuation of
empathy, regardless of gender.
Even if one does not possess an empathic disposition, these profession-
alizing trends suggest, empathy ought to be cultivated in men and women
to achieve best practices in medicine, business management, social services,
and law enforcement, just to name a few of the targeted fields. The cultural
consensus thus reveals both the importance of empathy and the anxiety
that we may need to be better trained in order to empathize effectively.
Humans empathize naturally, but perhaps we don’t empathize with the
right individuals automatically. Perhaps we feel, but fail to act—our empa-
thy may not impel us toward offering appropriate help.43 The possibility of
changing social norms and teaching all citizens to care about one another
and faraway human sisters and brothers (despite our apparent differences)
motivates many educators, clergy, and human rights activists. All of these
professionals, but teachers in particular, have employed narrative fiction to
steer children toward greater empathy. This widespread practice raises the
question of whether empathy can in fact be taught through reading.44
If empathy can be learned or developed, then novel reading might con-
tribute to the cultivation of empathy. Encouraging thoughtful reading from
an early age might overcome deficits in other areas contributing to empa-
thetic behavior, thus compensating for failings in socialization or disposi-
tion. As chapter 3 will reveal, nearly all the studies on this topic work with
young children, but educational ventures for adults also emphasize empa-
thy. The field of narrative medicine, for example, requires expertise in nar-
rative, as their program description establishes: “the Program attempts to
train physicians and medical students in such narrative skills as close read-
ing of literary and clinical texts, writing about patients in ordinary human
language, and reflective autobiographical writing to reveal the self. . . . Nar-
12 Empathy and the Novel

rative theory and knowledge provide fundamental conceptual frameworks

for all of these dimensions of medicine while narrative skills and methods
provide means of achieving narratively competent care” (narrativemedi-
cine.org). Could training in these traditionally literary analytical skills and
a course of novel reading actually instill empathic concern in a subject
who lacks an empathic disposition? Perhaps it can only enhance empathy
already present in a person. Despite the broad assumptions about the value
of empathy embedded in educational programs such as narrative medicine,
we still have limited knowledge about how well empathy can be taught
through reading.45 If empathy could be learned from fiction, then the tech-
nology of print culture might make up for some of human beings’ alien-
ation from their primate group behavior. The emotion-sharing dynamics
that fostered empathy’s contribution to group survival might be repaired
by reading.

How Do Psychologists Study Empathy?

Though empathy matters to many academic disciplines (art history, edu-

cation, philosophy, narrative medicine, and history, to name only the most
obvious), developmental and social psychologists have studied it in the
most detail. Since the 1980s, psychologists have employed a variety of tools
to come to a better understanding of empathy in human beings. This section
briefly describes the techniques used in empirical investigations of empathy.
Recent trends in literary study, especially the focus on our embodied experi-
ence that has been brought to the fore by feminist theory, disability studies,
cognitive approaches to literature, and ecocriticism, draw English professors
closer to disciplines that accept the use of making measurements, doing
tests and experiments, and interpreting empirical evidence.
Developing the conversation between literature and psychology ought
to benefit both disciplines. Literary critics ask different kinds of questions
than scientists about human behavior, some of which could be submitted to
empirical testing with the collaboration of a colleague in psychology or neu-
roscience. Literary critics also have something to contribute to the empiri-
cal study of empathy by offering observations about the premises or tools
used by psychologists. For instance, it may be of interest to narrative theo-
rists to learn that psychologists often use small fiction as scenarios designed
to elicit results about subjects’ actual reactions or potential behavior. The
use of short realistic fictions (narratives of hypothetical situations, etc.) and
implicitly narrative storyboards is widespread in psychology. Narrative the-
ory has had very little—if any—influence on the design of these small fic-
tions. Results garnered from such studies are not framed as responses to fic-
tion, per se, but perhaps they should be.46 Experiments using fictions as tools
of investigation may have something to say about how humans respond to
 Contemporary Perspectives on Empathy 13

these “true lies.” As I will argue below, narrative fiction may in fact enhance
the potential for subjects to respond feelingly to situations and characters,
disarming them of their customary suspicions and learned caution. Liter-
ature professionals like myself may begin by respectfully comprehending
psychology’s methodologies.
Psychologists test and record empathy in a variety of ways. Physiological
measures, sometimes combined with self-reports, can show the strength
or weakness (or presence and absence) of empathic responses.47 Psycholo-
gists measure changes in heart rate and skin conductance (palm sweat).
They collect data on perceptible and imperceptible facial reactions, the
latter captured by EMG (electromyographic) procedures.48 They ask sub-
jects how they feel or how they would act in certain situations, gathering
responses through self-reports during or immediately after experiments
and through surveys. Specialized surveys known as “empathy scales” are
used to assess subjects’ strength of empathic feeling.49 As Nancy Eisenberg
has repeatedly observed, cultural influences such as sex-role differentiation
show up more in the kinds of tests that rely on surveys and interviews and
much less (or not at all) in tests using physiological methods.50 An unex-
amined bias originating from definition of terms or from methodology can
skew results, and when those results happen to endorse a widely held view
(such as the innate caring disposition of females), they can be hard to dis-
lodge. As new tools come along that revolutionize knowledge by providing
an entirely new way of collecting data, such as Functional Magnetic Reso-
nance Imaging (fMRI), the need for careful analysis of methods and find-
ings does not diminish.51
Understandably new fMRI studies of the brain excite speculation about
empathy. Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging allows dynamic records
of oxygen use in whole brains to be made. The patterns in these records
are associated with the cognitive tasks undertaken by the subjects. Tania
Singer and her colleagues at the Wellcome Department of Neuroimaging at
the University of London recently published a study in Science document-
ing empathetic responses to witnessing another’s pain, supported by fMRI
data. This study broke new ground in demonstrating why a person perceives
that she feels another’s pain, while not literally experiencing the identical
sensation. Singer compared what happened in a subject’s brain when she
was actually shocked, when pain regions in the limbic system (the anterior
cingulate cortex, the insula, the thalamus, and the somatosensory cortices)
lit up on the fMRI, with what the brain looked like during observation of
another’s pain. When watching a loved one in the same room receiving a
sharp shock, subjects showed active responses in the affective parts of the
brain’s pain matrix (in the anterior insula and anterior cingulate cortex, the
lateral cerebellum, and the brainstem), but not in the somatosensory corti-
ces of the brain. The affective brain areas responded to both real and imag-
ined pain. A person not actually experiencing pain but observing a loved one
14 Empathy and the Novel

being shocked showed brain activation of matching emotional areas, though

not the sensory areas. Empathy alone did not light up the sensory areas for
pain. Singer and her colleagues conclude that empathy is mediated by the
part of the pain network associated with pain’s affective qualities, but not
its sensory qualities (“Empathy for Pain” 1157). They observed that subjects
with higher scores on general empathy scales52 “showed stronger activations
in areas significantly activated when the subjects perceived their partner
as being in pain” (1159). They also discovered that the same empathetic
effects could be elicited without an emotional cue—in other words, sub-
jects did not need to see their partners grimacing in pain in order to show
empathic responses. An “arbitrary cue” signaling the feeling state of another
was sufficient to elicit empathy (1158). This set of results affirms what phi-
losophers since David Hume have been saying about empathy for centuries.
For the first time, brain images supporting the long-standing introspective
account of empathy have been recorded. Taking pictures of the brains of
closely tied individuals as they experience or witness the beloved’s pain is
a good starting point, but it would be useful to compare such images with
those made of brains of people regarding strangers’ suffering. Then fMRI
studies could contribute more to the understanding of what philosophers
call POSE, or the Problem of the Other’s Subjective Experience, a problem
at the heart of novelists’ imaginative representations of others’ minds, moti-
vations, and sensations.
The questions of how and why empathy works in the bodies and brains
of human beings can still only be answered with theoretical specula-
tions about the physiological substrate,53 though the fMRI-based research
described above and recent advances in the study of mirror neurons get
researchers closer than they have been before. Stephanie Preston and Frans
de Waal propose that witnessing or imagining another in an emotional
state activates automatic representations of that same state in the onlooker,
including responses in the nervous system and the body. They write, “empa-
thy processes likely contain fast reflexive sub-cortical processes (directly
from sensory cortices to thalamus to amygdala to response) and slower cor-
tical processes (from thalamus to cortex to amygdala to response). These
roughly map onto contagious and cognitive forms of empathy, respectively”
(“Ultimate and Proximate” 12). Tania Singer’s work bears out this hypoth-
esis. The advantages of automatic responses lie in their speediness. Joseph
LeDoux has written about how fear responses in the amygdala provide
a quick and dirty, possibly life-saving response to environmental threats,
which can then be evaluated as the slightly slower cognitive evaluation of
threats kick in.54 What is sometimes called “primitive empathy” may work
in the same way, provided a first, fast, feeling response to seeing or learning
about another’s emotional state, before cognitive evaluation through delib-
erate role taking occurs.55
 Contemporary Perspectives on Empathy 15

Primitive empathy, or the phenomenon of spontaneously matching feel-

ings, suggests that human beings are basically similar to one another, with
a limited range of variations. Martin Hoffman, for instance, believes that
the structural similarities in people’s physiological and cognitive response
systems cause similar feelings to be evoked by similar events (Empathy and
Moral Development 62). However, Hoffman would be the first to concede
that similarity itself is not enough to guarantee an empathic response, and
as I explain in the following section, he actually downplays the importance
of an exact match in the emotion. Singer and her colleagues believe that our
survival depends on effective functioning in social contexts, and that feeling
what others feel, empathizing, contributes to that success. They suggest that
“our ability to empathize has evolved from a system for representing our
internal bodily states and subjective feeling states” to ourselves (“Empathy
for Pain” 1161). In other words, empathy as Singer’s group understands it
participates in a theory of mind that links second-order re-representations
of others to the system that allows us to predict the results of emotional
stimuli for ourselves. Recent research suggests a mechanism at the neural
level that would enable such representations of others’ actions, including
facial expressions and bodily postures that may convey emotional states.56
Singer and her colleagues postulate a system for representation of oth-
ers’ feelings that participates in the task of enabling us to understand the
motives, beliefs, and thoughts of others. This work on empathy thus sup-
ports the theories of evolutionary psychology that emphasize the adaptive
function of our social relations.57
Just because we may be predisposed to care about others through our
genetic inheritance, however, does not mean that we will choose to act on
another’s behalf when our feelings are aroused. We may employ our cogni-
tive role-taking abilities to manipulate others. Empathy expert Mark Davis
describes twin capacities in human beings, parallel affect and perspective
taking, which may interact with each other: “the capacity for empathy-
mediated altruism, to the degree that it indeed prompts behavior benefit-
ing others, might serve to moderate the tendency to exploit others that
accompanies Machiavellian intelligence. That is, instead of role taking abili-
ties being given free rein to exploit one’s social partners without limit, the
tendency to experience negative affect in response to others’ distress may
serve as a countervailing force” (Empathy 36). When we do act altruisti-
cally, empathy and sympathy may not be the only or the most significant
factors in instigating action. In one recent experiment, research conducted
with 643 American college students of diverse backgrounds discovered that
for spurring risky rescuing, “empathic concern made a significant but small
contribution,” while “the tendency for reciprocal altruism and kinship were
the strongest predictors of rescue intentions” (Kruger, “Evolution and Altru-
ism” 118).58 D. J. Kruger argues that expectancy of reciprocation, or the belief
16 Empathy and the Novel

that the beneficiary of helping would assist the helper if the situation were
reversed, has eight times the impact on helping intentions than “the most
powerful traditional predictor, empathic concern” (“Evolution and Altru-
ism” 122). Though this one experiment affirms the “small but significant”
role of empathy in a helping response, it does not address the inhibiting
force of personal distress reactions. It may, however, indirectly clarify why
the link between narrative empathy and altruism is so tenuous.
For a novel reader who experiences either empathy or personal dis-
tress, there can be no expectancy of reciprocation involved in the aesthetic
response. The very nature of fictionality renders social contracts between
people and personlike characters null and void. Unlike the children held
hostage in Beslan who wished that Harry Potter would come to their rescue,
adult readers know that fictional characters cannot offer us aid. Similarly,
we accept that we cannot help them out, much as we may wish to inter-
vene: Don’t marry him, Dorothea! We may feel intense interest in charac-
ters, but incurring obligations toward them violates the terms of fictionality.
Kruger’s results may explain why the intense empathetic experiences of
novel readers do not lead more often to prosocial behavior: the impossibil-
ity of reciprocation may interfere. That is, an empathetic response can be
diverted from a prosocial outcome through interfering cognition.

Does Empathy Lead to Altruism?

Before we are ready to consider the potential effects of narrative empathy,

several questions about human empathy should be examined. What role
does empathy play in the morally desirable outcome of helping? Proso-
cial behavior, or voluntary actions benefiting another, can be motivated by
concern for others, by internalized values, by desire for rewards, or by fear
of punishment.59 Typically only the first two motivations (concern for oth-
ers and internalized values) contribute to altruistic behavior, and empathy
often features as a first step in a process that expresses concern for oth-
ers in voluntary action taken on their behalf. Psychologist Martin Hoffman
has spent several decades studying the relationship between empathy and
morality, especially as empathy contributes to the way we treat others. His
definition of empathy emphasizes his focus on other-directedness: it is “an
affective response that is more appropriate for another’s situation than one’s
own” (Empathy and Moral Development 4). Far from assuming that empa-
thy inevitably results in prosocial responses, he offers a usefully nuanced
account of the possible paths from empathy to mature sympathy, including
the byways that do not lead to constructive helping behavior.60 Hoffman’s
interdisciplinary work connects social and developmental psychology with
philosophers’ conversations about moral development and emphasizes the
 Contemporary Perspectives on Empathy 17

emotional, cognitive, and motivational components of empathy as part of

prosocial moral development.
In Hoffman’s account, empathy may begin in five different ways, each
occurring singly or in combination. Automatic, involuntary feelings of empa-
thy may occur as a result of imitation, either in a simple reaction, as when
a neonate cries at the sound of crying, or in the mimicry described above
as emotional contagion. Hoffman also believes that automatic empathy can
be stimulated as a result of conditioning and direct association: we can be
taught (usually by parents) to respond automatically to another’s feelings.
He also describes two cognitive starting points for empathy, what he calls
“language-mediated” association, or empathy for others one hears about or
reads about, and the active, other-directed imagining, commonly known as
“putting yourself in another’s shoes.”
These five starting points for empathy occur in different degrees in indi-
viduals depending on their age and developmental stage. Fusion of the self
and other occurs in babies. The capacity to recognize the other as a physi-
cally separate being develops in early childhood. The recognition that others
have independent feelings and the faculty of “perspective taking” that this
recognition invites is cultivated in young children of preschool and grade-
school age. Understanding that one’s historically specific personal experi-
ence contrasts with others in different times, groups, or countries is gener-
ally understood as the most mature perspective, though it begins to occur
in grade-school–aged children who are exposed to information about other
cultures, peoples, and times.
When an empathetic reaction occurs in an individual at each of these
stages, Hoffman believes, developmental levels of empathy can be observed.
The crying neonate shows global empathy; the young toddler may focus
more on the emotional effect on herself of another’s feelings (“egocentric
empathy”); the perspective taker should be able to experience empathy
with another individual; and the mature perceiver may show empathy for
an entire group of people, including those whose condition and prospects
differ from hers. Hoffman argues that as soon as global empathy begins to
move toward the more egocentric response, a sympathetic component can
occur. By this logic, the empathy experienced by mature individuals ought
to have a sympathetic element. Yet our position in relation to the victim
also mitigates empathetic effects. We may be innocent bystanders, partici-
pants in the situation (transgressors), virtual transgressors (who feel respon-
sible despite being uninvolved), and we may confront situations in which
multiple claimants make contesting demands on us, or those in which caring
seems to be at odds with justice (Empathy and Moral Development 3–4).
The transformation of empathy into other moral affects does not neces-
sarily lead to a single kind of feeling. Noting in advance that Hoffman refers
only to negative emotions experienced by “victims” explains why his follow-
18 Empathy and the Novel

up emotions skew toward the negative options of guilt, anger, and distress.
Hoffman describes five possibilities for the shaping of empathy into differ-
ent moral affects, each related to the perceiver’s evaluation of causes. If the
victim has caused her own distress, she may no longer seem like a victim,
and empathy may halt right there. If the victim has no control over the dis-
tress he experiences, he may invoke sympathetic distress in the perceiver,
pity for his plight. If the perceiver actually has caused the victim’s distress,
the perceiver’s empathy may morph into guilt; if the observer does nothing
to relieve the suffering individual, she may feel guilt over inaction; and if
the perceiver belongs to a group believed to be responsible for causing suf-
fering, he may feel guilt by association.
These real transformations of empathy into a variety of guilty feelings
may or may not impel a perceiver toward altruism or helping—guilty feel-
ing may in fact incline a perceiver toward a feeling of helplessness in the
face of others’ suffering. Hoffman believes, however, that guilty feeling can
be channeled into patterns of helping, but concedes that without teaching
by parents or others, this outcome is less likely to develop (Empathy and
Moral Development 9). He believes that empathy-based guilt is the key pro-
social motive (113), but he describes a process that requires both socializa-
tion and moral internalization.
A question that I consider later in this book is whether novel reading might
participate in the socialization and moral internalization required to trans-
mute empathic guilt into prosocial action. One option would be to examine
whether induction, as developmental psychologists understand it, plays a role.
Readers might obtain socialization experience through characters’ reactions
to fictive situations, translating recognitions about characters back to their
own lives. The parental strategy of induction, or taking victims’ perspective
and asking children to think about “how they would feel if they were in the
victims’ place” does bear a family resemblance to identification with fictional
characters. Books often tacitly ask readers to step into a character’s shoes.
Induction differs from character identification, however, because induction
occurs after a parent perceives a child’s injury of another. Missing from the
reading situation is the important sense—for induction and the writing of an
internalized moral script—that the reader has somehow wronged the char-
acters whose perspective he takes (cf. Empathy and Moral Development 151).
Parental induction responds to wrongdoing by a child; reading involves volun-
tary imagining by an innocent reader (at least so far as the relationship to the
text is concerned!). The unprompted application of lessons garnered through
reading to the self would support the connection of induction and character
identification, but the contempt in which many readers (including many chil-
dren) hold overtly didactic fiction suggests that resistance also exists.
Hoffman sees two moral affects potentially arising from empathy that
could lead to the outcomes posited by Martha Nussbaum. Empathic anger
 Contemporary Perspectives on Empathy 19

and an empathic sense of injustice can each lead to personal, social, and
ideological responses based on understandings of unfairness or evocation of
righteous indignation on behalf of victims. Yet even here, Hoffman prom-
ises no inevitable leap between the perception and action in the world.
Many people feel others’ distress but do nothing to alleviate it. Limits on
empathy exist: for instance, people feel empathy for family members or for
those who are close, but not to faraway others (Empathy and Moral Devel-
opment 197). Even in circumstances in which helping others is affirmed
as a core activity, as in churches, we can grow so used to appeals that the
very familiarity of the suffering reduces an empathic response. Adults in the
helping professions, whose lives are dedicated to making effective responses
to others’ needs, sometimes report developing compassion fatigue, a kind
of empathy burnout (199–200). People experiencing empathic overarousal
may react with aversion to the source of the negative feelings, as studies of
personal distress indicate.61
Too much empathy can lead to an aversion to the victims or to the source
of information. For instance, my seven-year-old expressed a desire not to
go into the room if the radio was on, because the day before he had heard
an NPR story about the many Russian schoolchildren killed in Beslan after
being held hostage by Chechan militants. His empathetic distress of the day
before had turned into what Hoffman calls empathic overarousal (Empathy
and Moral Development 198). The novel reader discomforted by empathic
overarousal might well simply stop reading and might avoid similar fiction
in the future. If, however, a novel reader persisted in reading a text that ini-
tially caused overarousal and avoided the dead end of an aversive response,
might that reader benefit from reduction of aversive distress in the future?
This hypothesis, like many to be offered in subsequent chapters, could be
subjected to empirical testing.
Experiments in social psychology have already taught us a great deal
about limitations on empathy. Some of them have at their root biases,
or in their strong form, prejudices. Whether it is construed as familiar-
ity, similarity, or “in-group” bias, the reduction of response to those who
seem strange, dissimilar, or outside the tribe has been attributed to human
evolution (Empathy and Moral Development 206). This phenomenon can
be read as prejudice or ethnocentrism or possibly as a practical response to
a social world that makes too many demands on our feelings—we have to
use some kind of sorting mechanism. We tend to choose to respond to the
needs of those who are nearest us—flood victims in the Shenandoah Valley
command my attention more readily than those rendered homeless by a
typhoon in Bangladesh.
However, the “here and now” bias can be complicated by mass media
broadcasting, as in the startling images of the 26 December 2004 tsunami,
which can intermittently focus the nation’s or world’s attention on a par-
20 Empathy and the Novel

ticular group of needy people and create circumstances of “mass empathy.”

The net effect of television Hoffman questions in this way:

With all of television’s faults, has it, by depicting victims close-up, con-
tributed to an enlarged awareness and empathic feeling toward vic-
tims around the world? Or, does exposure to victims repeatedly over
time result in habituation and a lowering of people’s empathic distress
to the point of making them feel indifferent to another’s suffering? Or
. . . does depicting people in one’s primary group as victims of another
group foster ethnic hatred? Possibly all of the above apply and the net
effect of television on “mass empathy” depends on the frequency and
context of one’s exposure. Only research will tell. (Empathy and Moral
Development 214)

Versions of these troubling ideas have been in circulation since the eigh-
teenth century. We should not assume that character identification medi-
ated by video, film, or novels leads directly to empathy, altruism, and a com-
mitment to human rights.
The two biases in empathy of “familiarity” (which impedes response to
strangers) and “here-and-now” (which dilutes responsiveness to faraway or
unseen claimants, sometimes interfering with justice) can be altered by edu-
cation, according to Hoffman, but he and other scientists working on empa-
thy believe that the response is a product of natural selection, and thus
operates most powerfully in humans for those who share more of our genes
(Empathy and Moral Development 4, 13).62 He acknowledges that empathy
may work best in homogeneous groups (216), and that in complex, multi-
cultural, or (if I may extrapolate) global contexts, “empathic morality alone
may not be enough” (original italics, 216). Hoffman believes, however, that
empathy supports both caring and justice when it is embedded in moral
principles adopted by a society.63
If novels do cultivate readers’ empathy, and if empathy undergirds both
caring and justice in society, then fiction apparently has a vital job to do
today. However, the tethering of fiction (or novels, or narrative) to car-
ing also shows a wish to raise the status of fiction and to boost a minority
activity, reading. Linking novel reading to a widely shared moral princi-
ple—caring—without demanding that fiction be about caring allows broad
claims about the medium to exist without evaluating content. This is a
neat trick. Novels, by this logic, do not need to articulate the principle that
people ought to care for one another. Didacticism is not required. Instead,
the very action of reading fiction—any fiction—supposedly trains people
to care for one another. (Martha Nussbaum offers a more canonical set
of recommended readings; though classics, however, her favorite texts shy
away from didacticism.) Then, the relationship among reading, empathy,
 Contemporary Perspectives on Empathy 21

and caring justifies (by back formation) the cultural centrality, even neces-
sity, of novels for a healthy society. These appealing connections may not
be justified, but they clearly have their attractions for defenders of the
humanities.
Fiction becomes even more implicated in socially beneficial processes
when Hoffman demonstrates the evident relationship between empathy
and caring. He writes, apparently of real people, “The link between empathy
and caring is reflected in the prosocial moral reasoning that accompanies
people’s behavior when they encounter someone in distress” (Empathy and
Moral Development 225). This view has been substantiated by psycholo-
gists working on the relationship between empathetic responses and moral
reasoning, especially the judgments people make about moral dilemmas.64
However, Hoffman directs his reader’s attention not to evidence from labo-
ratory studies of prosocial moral judgment, but to exhibits from nineteenth-
century fiction. He recounts anecdotes of fictional characters’ reasoning
about their helping behavior, drawn from Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle
Tom’s Cabin (1852) and Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
(1884–85). Novels themselves thus provide Hoffman’s evidence for affir-
mation of moral development as a result of empathizing, and he does not
acknowledge the fictionality of his examples. Hoffman slides right back to
the real world in his conclusion: “That is, empathizing with particular vic-
tims led to both affirming the caring principle and using the principle as a
premise for judging laws that violate it as morally wrong” (225). This will
not do. Fiction cannot document the effects of empathy as if the events
recorded happened to real people. The evidence Hoffman offers for the
function of empathy in cultivating caring and judgment tells us instead
what two nineteenth-century American novelists hoped for their readers.
True, both novels emphasize how unusual these helpers seem, and they
hold up their exceptional actions for praise and imitation. Regardless of
whether Uncle Tom’s Cabin and Huck Finn changed the hearts and minds of
readers, however, the fictional characters’ testimony simply cannot be con-
sidered evidence about empathy’s real world efficacy. We cannot attribute
both causal effects and evidence of those effects to the same fictional texts,
especially when attempting to describe the grounds for moral development
in living human beings.
Hoffman could well have gone to Stowe’s historical sources for legiti-
mate accounts of real people’s motivations to help fugitive slaves, but he
errs in making fictional characters stand for real people. Nonetheless, his
theory of moral development makes a strong case in favor of empathy’s role
in justice and caring. His work openly acknowledges barriers to expressions
of empathy in prosocial action, barriers not always acknowledged by those
who cite him as an authority on the empathetic sources of altruism. In
addition to Hoffman’s careful qualifications, alternative views weaken the
22 Empathy and the Novel

case for empathy as a fundamental cause of altruism. Not all psychologists

agree with Hoffman’s ambitious brief for empathy. Indeed, some believe
that empathy may directly interfere with fairness and justice, leading to
immoral actions.65
Empathy may precede and lead to sympathy, but as has been amply dem-
onstrated, mature sympathy, pity, and compassion do not necessarily result
from empathy, nor does empathy inevitably lead to helping. Each of these
states, including a disposition to help, can be brought about by cognitive
processes other than empathy. Further, psychologists Nancy Eisenberg and
Janet Strayer, in studying prosocial development, find that “the relationship
between empathy and prosocial behavior is neither direct nor inevitable”
(Empathy and Its Development 11). J. A. Piliavin, J. F. Dovidio, and their col-
leagues, studying bystander intervention in emergencies, suggest that people
upset about witnessing a crisis will sometimes intervene in order to stop
their own distressed feelings. However, they may also calculate the “costs” of
helping and decline to involve themselves.66 This model deemphasizes the
positive correlation between empathic feelings and helping.
Other psychologists believe that empathy does impel us to help oth-
ers. Individuals predisposed to empathy (as measured by various empathy
scales) show higher rates of what social psychologists call prosocial behav-
ior, such as picking up a crying infant, comforting others, or offering help to
a distressed person.67 However, that response to caring may perpetuate or
even create injustices. In a series of studies conducted over the past several
decades, Daniel Batson and his collaborators have investigated the question
of whether empathy can be considered a source for altruistic helping, and
whether it may in fact interfere with just solutions that contribute to the
common good.68 While empathy has been demonstrated to contribute to
moral reasoning and to altered attitudes about members of out-groups, it
does not inevitably lead to just actions undertaken on behalf of others. For
instance, in one study, Batson and his colleagues found that feeling empathy
for another member of the group in a social dilemma created an altruistic
desire to allocate resources to that person as an individual, thus reducing
the collective good (“Collective Good” 619). Another study by Batson and
his group showed that empathy-induced altruism can lead to actions that
violate moral principles of justice. In contrast to Hoffman, Batson and his
colleagues conclude that the two motives, empathy-induced altruism, and
the wish to uphold moral principles of justice, “sometimes cooperate, but
sometimes conflict” (“Immorality” 1042).
The cultural authorities who recommend novel reading as a practice cul-
tivating empathy and leading to the formation of good world citizens (who
volunteer and participate) do not worry that helping may violate principles
of justice. Indeed, it may even seem perverse to point out that the altruis-
tic acts prompted by empathy may conflict with justice. Practical ethicist
Peter Singer offers a dramatic example of this kind of conflict. He contrasts
 Contemporary Perspectives on Empathy 23

the outpouring of support for victims of 9/11 with the lack of response to
UNICEF’s announcement that an estimated 30,000 children died of disease
and malnutrition on 11 September 2001 (One World 151–52). Unjust, cer-
tainly, but understandable. In a world where so many people exhibit indif-
ference to others and respond only to egoistic desires, an increase in altruism
or even simple helping certainly seems like a good thing, even if multitudes
of needy people still experience neglect. Some cast aspersions on voluntary
helpers by suggesting that they donate time, treasure, and talent only to
feel good about themselves, or worse, in an insulting exercise of noblesse
oblige that degrades recipients of charity. (The squeamish may conveniently
avoid these criticisms by not helping at all.) Truly selfless and unrewarded
altruism, though rare, is harder to criticize without seeming churlish. The
special case of holocaust rescuers offers a model of this true altruism, that
is, helping that occurs in situations in which no benefit can accrue to the
helpers, who may even risk their lives and those of their families to respond
to another’s need. Holocaust rescuers couldn’t help every victim equally,
but few would contest the value of their altruistic actions for survivors and
their descendents.
Samuel and Pearl Oliner’s studies of the altruism of holocaust rescuers
offer a description of the personalities and motivations of these unusual
individuals.69 They were in a dramatic minority: less than half of one percent
of the population of those Nazi-occupied European countries the Olin-
ers studied participated in authenticated rescuing (Embracing the Other 6).
Some others were active in the resistance, but the vast majority of people
were bystanders or even collaborators. While we may agree that not every-
one can live up to the example of these heroic rescuers and acknowledge
that their more numerous nonresponding counterparts may have had prac-
tical reasons not to risk helping, rescuers surely exemplify the “good world
citizen” imagined by Nussbaum and others. Did empathy motivate them?
Did novel reading play a part in forming their characters?
The second question should be dealt with up front. The Oliners’ inter-
viewers inquired about education and religion of the rescuers and their par-
ents, but not about reading habits. We may assume that education correlates
with literacy, but no evidence emerges from the Oliners’ study that would
support a judgment about the importance or insignificance of novel read-
ing in cultivating the sympathetic imaginations of people who helped Jews
during the holocaust. Bystanders and active nonrescuers also offer no obser-
vations about the books that may have contributed to their life choices dur-
ing the war years. They were not asked. This lack of information does not
preclude influence through fiction reading, to be sure, but it does warrant
caution when making claims about the formation of these particular good
world citizens. To the Oliners and those who assisted in the research on the
altruistic personality, other factors seemed more central. Prominent among
these were education level, religious conviction, political affiliation, prior
24 Empathy and the Novel

knowledge of Jews, and, most importantly, the example set by parents and
other adults in the household of the future rescuer.70
The Oliners’ work does verify the importance of empathy for some
rescuers, but they did not find it a universal feature of the altruistic per-
sonality. Using an empathy scale to rate rescuers and nonrescuers, the
Oliners found that the two groups did not differ in experiencing primi-
tive emotional contagion when confronted with the feelings of others,
but they differed markedly in terms of their sympathy. We may infer that
widespread personal distress (and fear) account for the lack of altruistic
responsiveness of most of the rescuers’ contemporaries. Among the can-
didates for “rescuer status,” people with substantiated anti-Nazi activities,
the Oliners found striking differences. Those who reacted angrily to the
Nazis were more likely to become active in resistance movements than
in rescuing (Altruistic 148). Rescuers were more aroused by victims’ pain
(174). Rescuers did not show higher or lower levels of self-esteem than
nonrescuers (178), but they were more affected by an internal compul-
sion to help when aroused to sympathy or compassion (169). Rescuers
were more likely to perceive similarities with others, while nonrescuers
reported perceptions of differences (176), and rescuers aroused by the
pain of others also showed a general sense of responsibility and a tendency
to make commitments (175).
More than 90 percent of rescuers assisted at least one person who was a
total stranger (170). Nonetheless, the Oliners found that victims perceived
as attractive and innocent were more likely to receive help than others
(149). Religious affiliation did not distinguish rescuers from nonrescuers
(156), but felt religious conviction correlated weakly to rescuing. A far more
profound marker, the Oliners discovered, lay in egalitarianism and demo-
cratic political beliefs. Whether learned from parents or respected adults,
at church, or from exposure to democratic ideas, the egalitarianism of res-
cuers marked them as different from nonrescuers. Eighty-seven percent of
the rescuers interviewed by the Oliners’ team described their motivations
in terms of equity (fairness) or caring (163). Words expressing caring about
others and terms characterizing victims as fundamentally similar dominate
rescuers’ descriptions of their wartime situations (168, 178).
The Oliners concluded that four different groups contributed rescu-
ers. (1) Some were religious people with strong, cohesive family bonds. (2)
Some found themselves in close contact with Jewish people through work
or living situations. Others (3) had an abstract sense of connectedness or (4)
believed in egalitarian principles (Altruistic 188). These different conditions
contributed to the opportunity to help, but personal disposition also played
a role. Some rescuers acted out of principle; that is, they responded to a situ-
ation that clearly violated a norm that they had internalized as individuals.
Some responded to what they perceived as the breach of a social rule; these
 Contemporary Perspectives on Empathy 25

people believed that as members of a group, they had the obligation to react
to violation of a norm. Some rescuers responded mainly because of their
empathic orientation to others (188).71 If we recall that emotional conta-
gion shows up to a similar degree in rescuers and nonrescuers, this empathic
orientation must combine with other factors to produce a stronger motive
force. For the Oliners, the key trait that combines with prior shared feeling
was egalitarianism.
Does novel reading inculcate egalitarian ideas? As I have already noted,
the Oliners’ team asked no questions about the reading habits of rescuers or
nonrescuers. If they had, their focus might well have been on the sources of
deeply held convictions, for they emphasize models and sources for beliefs
in their questions about family, friends, religion, and politics. Novels can
convey egalitarian ideas (though they may also contain strong represen-
tations of rank, hierarchy, or superiority over others). We should inquire,
rather than assuming, whether novels make effective vehicles for messages
of egalitarianism. This is a very different question from the point about
novel reading and character identification made by Nussbaum, Lynn Hunt,
and others. These theorists emphasize the moral renovation of the reader
through the very experience of novel reading. They argue that the process
of identifying with a fictional character leads to a revised view of other real
human beings. Thus Lynn Hunt links the growth of human rights discourse
to the rise of the novel.
This sort of argument avoids making judgments about the content of fic-
tion. According to Steven Pinker, storytelling has made the human species
nicer. Yet powerful stories about the racial supremacy of Aryans and the
contaminating presence of Jews provided a rationale for genocide. The con-
tent of stories is not a neutral matter. If narrative fiction has the capacity to
alter readers’ characters for the good, it may also possess darker powers. If
we were really to discover the whole impact of novel reading on Europeans
of the Second World War period, we would need to know whether reading,
like religious affiliation, cut across categories, or distinguished them from
one another. Might novels have provided retreats from reality for bystand-
ers? Elizabeth Bowen depicts such an escape into fantasy in her brilliant
wartime short story, “The Happy Autumn Fields,” in which the absorbing
adventures of an imagined Victorian family overcome the reality, for the
main character, of living under bombardment during the London Blitz.72
Bowen’s story offers an extreme case, but becoming absorbed in reading so
far as to enter a trancelike state is not abnormal: Victor Nell describes it as
“ludic reading,” in a study offering a compelling account of the psychology
of pleasure reading (Lost in a Book 73–83). Wartime may make that mental
disappearing act all the more appealing.
Given that less than half of one percent of people living in Nazi-occupied
Europe demonstrated their altruism by rescuing Jews, the impact of novel
26 Empathy and the Novel

reading, even were it to be positively established, might well be statistically

insignificant. Many more people read fiction sixty years ago than today. A
vast majority of them must have been bystanders to the holocaust, and
undoubtedly some participated in carrying out genocide. This might leave
novel reading in a neutral position, neither distinguishing bystanders nor
inspiring altruists. A more disturbing option must be confronted. Could fic-
tion have participated in stirring up race hatred? Does anything guarantee
that the technology of fictional world-making will always be used to good
ends? As Geoffrey Hartman observes, “National Socialism used aesthetic
pleasure”73 to render its ambitions more glamorous, and as far as resisters’
aesthetic experiences go, “there is no hard evidence that the altruistic per-
sonality is enhanced by exposure to higher education or ‘culture’” (“Night
Thoughts” 139). The literature on empathy and altruism, while filled with
inspiring anecdotes of extraordinary individuals, does little to encourage
reliance on empathy as inexorably leading to altruism. About the role of
novel reading in setting individuals on the path to moral development, it
has nothing to say.
We need not find ourselves at an impasse so early in the day, how-
ever. Many actions much milder than rescuing potential genocide victims
constitute valued altruistic behaviors. Eighty-nine percent of Americans,
according to the 2002 National Altruism Study, believe that people should
be willing to help those who are less fortunate. A solid majority of Ameri-
cans report empathic feelings as well as altruistic values. The rubber hits
the road when feelings translate into actions, and the study reports that
a majority of Americans did at least eight of these fifteen altruistic things
in the past year: talked to a depressed person; helped with housework (!);
allowed someone to cut in line; gave directions; gave money to charity;
volunteered; helped the homeless; helped someone find a job; took care
of things for an absent neighbor or coworker; gave up a seat; lent money;
carried others’ belongings; loaned possessions; returned extra change; and
gave blood.74 Though unpaid blood giving was also the least frequent
activity, the prevalence of the other, easier activities among Americans
gives reason to hope that our innate disposition to care may find ways
of coming out. However, one may also regard this list of altruistic activi-
ties as the consequence of manners, principles such as duty, or even self-
interested calculation. Within the moral philosophical and psychological
discussions of empathy, the debate about motivations still goes on.75 For
some critics of empathy, a feeling response conflicts with rational aims.
For others, a reasoned, principled act of altruism does not demonstrate the
authenticity of the helper’s empathy.76 For defenders of empathy, iden-
tificatory emotions have a special role in spurring altruistic action.77 This
debate intersects with another hotly contested area, the relation of the
emotions to cognition.
 Contemporary Perspectives on Empathy 27

Does Empathy Involve Emotion, Cognition, or Both?

The idea that emotion and cognition (or thinking, or reason) oppose each
other has a long history, not quite overlapping the venerable mind/body
distinction, though sometimes confused with it.78 The treatment of emo-
tions and rationality as separate and dichotomous features of our experience
has been challenged in recent decades. Thinking and feeling, for Antonio
R. Damasio, are part of the same package.79 In a series of academic articles
and popular books, he has shown that clinical patients suffering from emo-
tional disorders have cognitive difficulties. Ronald DeSousa has advocated
recognition of the rationality of emotions and Joseph LeDoux’s cognitive
neuroscience focuses on The Emotional Brain.80 Evolutionary psychologists
Leda Cosmides and John Tooby81 speak for a growing group of scientists
who believe that “one cannot sensibly talk about emotion affecting cogni-
tion because ‘cognition’ refers to a language for describing all of the brain’s
operations, including emotions and reasoning (whether deliberative or non-
conscious), and not to any particular subset of operations” (“Evolutionary
Psychology” 98). Some neuroscientists informally refer to “cogmotions” to
emphasize the fusion of the two concepts in their research.82 Nonethe-
less, many experts in cognition carry out their work without regard to the
emotions, and basic textbooks on cognition rarely refer to emotions.83 The
younger hybrid discipline of Social Cognition is more likely to reflect the
understandings of affect and cognition as intertwined.84 In the new field
known as Cognitive Approaches to Literary Studies, in which the work of
LeDoux and Damasio has virtually canonical status, matters of affect are
generally considered to fall under the umbrella of the term cognitive. Few lit-
erary cognitivists acknowledge that a psychologist might not readily accede
to the centrality of emotions to cognition. The subdisciplinary boundaries
within the extremely diverse field of psychology result in different empha-
ses and perspectives on the place of the emotions. Empathy studies have
from the start challenged the division of emotion and cognition.
Human empathy clearly involves both feeling and thinking. Memory,
experience, and the capacity to take another’s perspective (all matters tra-
ditionally considered cognitive) have roles in empathy. Yet the experience
of empathy in the feeling subject involves the emotions, including sensa-
tions in the body. Most experts consider empathy a phenomenon involving
both emotion and cognition, but subtle differences in the phrasing of their
definitions suggest their emphasis of one area over the other. For instance,
philosophers Susan Feagin and E. M. Dadlez stress the role of the imagina-
tion in empathy: in Dadlez’s words, “to empathize is to imagine having the
thoughts and beliefs, the desires and impulses of another” (What’s Hecuba
7). This view, like those of many philosophers’, tilts in the direction of think-
ing or cognition, as the keyword imagination signals. Some psychologists also
28 Empathy and the Novel

emphasize cognition: their key words include role-taking imagination and

empathic accuracy. Psychologist William Ickes sees empathy as a feature of
cognitive awareness and emphasizes empathic accuracy (or its biases and
failures) in his edited collection, Empathic Accuracy (1997). Another group
of developmental psychologists, most importantly Nancy Eisenberg and
Martin Hoffman, acknowledge the role of cognition but regard emotion as
an essential ingredient of empathy. Psychologists such as Martin Hoffman
and Janet Strayer study the process of empathy, in a fashion that blends feel-
ings and thoughts.85 Throughout this book I rely most heavily on the mul-
tidimensional affective-cognitive understanding of empathy employed by
both Janet Strayer and Nancy Eisenberg.86 I frankly de-emphasize accounts
of empathy that minimize the role of emotion, including emotional conta-
gion and quick-match, involuntary sharing of feelings. This does not mean
that I dismiss cognition and the role-taking imagination.
In any case, narrative empathy invoked by reading must involve cognition,
for reading itself relies upon complex cognitive operations. Yet overall, emo-
tional response to reading is the more neglected aspect of what literary cogni-
tivists refer to under the umbrella term cognition. This does not need to be so.
The discipline of aesthetics, which has historical ties both to philosophy and
to psychology, as well as to literary studies, has been interested for over a cen-
tury in empathy as a facet of creativity and an explanation of human response
to artworks. In its strongest form, aesthetics’ empathy describes a projective
fusing with an object—which may be another person or an animal, but may
also be a fictional character made of words, or even, in some accounts, inani-
mate things such as landscapes, artworks, or geological features.87 The acts
of imagination and projection involved in such empathy certainly deserve
the label cognitive, but the sensations, however strange, deserve to be reg-
istered as feelings. Thus, for the purposes of this study, I do not quarantine
narrative empathy in the zone of either affect or cognition: as a process, it
involves both. When texts invite readers to feel, as I shortly show, they also
stimulate readers’ thinking.88 Whether novel reading comprises a significant
enough feature of the environment of literate people to play a critical role in
their prosocial development remains to be seen. Even the leap between read-
ing and empathizing can fall short, impeded by inattention, indifference, or
personal distress. Readers’ cognitive and affective responses do not inevitably
lead to empathizing, but fiction does disarm readers of some of the protective
layers of cautious reasoning that may inhibit empathy in the real world.

Moving Readers’ Empathy

As Victor Nell observes, “we willingly enter the world of fiction because the
skepticism to which our adult sophistication condemns us is wearying: we
long for safe places—a love we can entirely trust, a truth we can entirely
 Contemporary Perspectives on Empathy 29

believe. Fiction meets that need precisely because we know it to be false”

(Lost in a Book 56). An experiment I devised for my students collected their
written responses to three sample texts designed to move readers’ feelings.
I wanted to test my idea that fiction deactivates readers’ suspicions and
opens the way to easier empathy. I had my students read two brief supple-
mentary texts in one uninterrupted session. They had come to class pre-
pared to discuss a third, fictional text, and I directed their attention to the
pages I wished them to review.89 The first text, an unsolicited e-mail I had
received,90 informs the recipient of a business opportunity involving a bank-
ing transaction. Like most people who have an e-mail account, I have gotten
literally dozens of copies of this appeal, in slightly different versions, most
often purporting to come from people in African countries. In both the
United States and the U.K., official warnings have been issued about a type
of fraud commonly known as “West African” or “419” advance fee fraud.
According to the Metropolitan Police in the U.K., all these schemes entail
requests to assist in moving large sums of money for a cash reward.91 The
e-mail appeals to the sympathies of its recipients by claiming to be from a
helpless orphan in a corrupt country, but it also makes a bald attempt to
play on the receiver’s greed. With its first person narration and personal
appeal, but evident fraudulence, I hypothesized that this text would elicit
no empathy or sympathy from my students. The second text had arrived by
post in a hand-addressed envelope. I displayed the original, which was writ-
ten in neat blue ballpoint pen, with a photocopied grade report.92 In it, an
eighteen-year-old named “Noor N.” appealed for financial assistance to con-
tinue her schooling at the St. Timothy Tailoring School in Uganda. Like the
e-mail author, she represented herself as an orphan with sisters, mother, and
grandmother to support after her father’s death from AIDS. Noor writes,
“With this letter I hereby appeal to you to come to my rescue and sponsor
me so that I may complete my course.” I anticipated that my students would
respond favorably to this “stranded student” who had apparently taken the
time to write me a real letter by hand.
The third text consisted of Motholeli’s story from Alexander McCall
Smith’s novel, Morality for Beautiful Girls (2001). A little over the third of
the way into this popular mystery, featuring the empathetic, helpful, and
practical private detective Precious Ramotswe, the novel breaks from its
dominant third-person voice to present a first-person narrative of the “three
lives” of Motholeli, a wheelchair-bound orphan who has been taken in by
Mma Ramotswe (82–86). The girl has rescued her baby brother from a
burial pit and escaped from the bush to a situation of near enslavement.
Bitten by a diseased dog, she loses the use of her legs. Now in a wheelchair,
she is dismissed from her situation and ends up in an orphan farm. From
there Mr. J. L. B. Matekoni and Mma Ramotswe rescue her and her younger
brother. Cheerful, grateful, and optimistic, Motholeli dreams of becoming
an auto mechanic. Because the narrative appears in first person and relates
30 Empathy and the Novel

a harrowing life story, it formally resembles the two documents that appear
above. Generically, it differs: it is not a letter, but a story within a story (an
interpolated tale, embedded within a primary fictional world). Though fans
of Alexander McCall Smith may well know that the orphanage that fea-
tures in Motholeli’s narrative has a real-world counterpart in Botswana, the
appearance of this first-person account within a popular detective novel
makes it easy to read as fictional. However, Motholeli’s story ends with
these words: “This story is true. I have not made any of it up. It is all true”
(Morality for Beautiful Girls 86). I hypothesized that my students would
respond feelingly to McCall Smith’s skilful recreation of an African voice
in his novel.
How did a cluster of real readers respond to the emotional appeals made
by these three texts? To what degree did their fictionality or nonfictional
status alter readers’ ways of evaluating them? One is a lying, fraudulent
appeal for assistance that, appealing to the recipients’ greed, could lead to
their fleecing. Another offers a possibly genuine but unverifiable appeal,
written out by hand, for a fairly modest sum. It is a traditional begging let-
ter. The third, contained inside a novel, claims in a first-person voice to be
a true story and makes no demand on the reader’s pocketbook. This con-
trast dramatizes fiction’s freedom to evoke feeling and readers’ option to
feel without following through with action. In the discussion that follows, I
quote the written reactions of my own college-age students, who read and
then reported how they felt about the three texts. While virtually all the
students rejected the scam e-mail’s appeal, many felt confused by the ball-
point pen letter, and for most readers, the third text seemed most true and
elicited the strongest feelings. Nonetheless, as I suggest below, empathetic
response was uncommon.
My student Caitlin evaluated the texts as follows:93

The e-mail. “Half of me believes that most of the scheme is true since I
know little about the country but the letter seems to go along with the
few stereotypes I am familiar with—that he is poor, his family is gone
and he needs aid from a Western person. When he asked that whoever
set up the account also be his guardian, that made the letter more
believable. But the rational side of me is louder than the compassion-
ate side—I would delete the e-mail.”
The ballpoint pen letter. “The handwriting of the letter and the talk
of parents who died of AIDS rouses some compassion—this I could
believe was true. But my guard is still up, especially with the tran-
script. I’d throw away the letter.”
The excerpt from Morality from Beautiful Girls. “Her story is so
believable, immediately I feel compassion for the young girl. It makes
me feel like no little girl should endure these things. I don’t know
 Contemporary Perspectives on Empathy 31

what I would do other than dwell on her story, when I would not
dwell on the other 2 letters.”

Caitlin’s response captures well how the novel excerpt strikes readers as
truthful, while the appeals from African correspondents puts them on
guard. Martin Hoffman would identify Caitlin’s response to the Motholeli’s
story as exhibiting her sense of empathic injustice. For now, let us note that
Caitlin offers to “dwell on” Motholeli’s story, while planning to discard or
delete the other texts. Fiction demonstrates its capacity to command the
reader’s attention through feelings of compassion. Yet Caitlin’s prospective
actions as a result of reading are limited to ignoring or “dwelling on,” a good
phrase for the daydreaming thought that readers of fiction add to their com-
prehension of narratives.
Ian, one of very few male students in the group, posited more activist
responses to the three texts:

The e-mail. “It just constitutes another reason why my trust in human-
ity has fallen to an all time low. I only wish there was some authority
that I could forward this letter to, so that the perpetrator of this scam
could be prosecuted. Unfortunately that is not an option.”
The ballpoint pen letter. “This one seems even worse because it is so
deceptive. A handwritten note, so seemingly trustworthy, and with
such good intentions, could have such a scam behind the façade.
There is little to do in this case other than ignore this shameless plea
for funds.”
The excerpt from Morality from Beautiful Girls. “It is obviously a
dramatized story, however it almost seemed more genuine than the
other two letters. If it were a real scenario, I would possibly donate
money to the orphanage that took the children in.”

Ian reacts angrily to the e-mail, with irritation to the ballpoint pen letter,
and with slightly more openness and trust to the novel excerpt. The condi-
tional actions Ian imagines include ignoring, like Caitlin, but he also thinks
about donating money (if Motholeli’s story were real) and wishes that he
could bring down the force of the law upon the email scammer. Interest-
ingly, Ian rules out forwarding the e-mail to “some authority,” perhaps not
realizing that the Attorney Generals’ Offices of most states in the United
States operate fraud-alert hotlines and Web sites. Just possibly, if Ian learned
the web address of the fraud prevention Web site or the name of the actual
orphanage, the SOS Children’s Village at Tlokweng, upon which Alexander
McCall Smith bases Mma Potokwane’s fictional orphan farm, then perhaps
his disposition to act would result in responses in the real world.94 His base-
line assumption, however, holds that action is impossible—he rules it out.
32 Empathy and the Novel

Another student articulates the thinking that could lead to a real-world

response to a scenario in a novel, but meets an impediment because of its
fictionality. She feels sympathy for Motholeli, but notes that the character
has already been saved in the story, which is, after all, only a story. Yet she
makes the leap to observe that in real life lots of children are in Motholeli’s
situation, and that few of them will be saved. A student who identifies her-
self as West African (in her response to the e-mail appeal) writes of the
novel, “This excerpt is very heartfelt. It is reminiscent of so many African
Stories. I am not sure what I would do.” (In another part of her response,
this student points out that it is difficult to respond to begging letters when
one is struggling oneself.) Megan, another student, explains why Motholeli’s
story is so touching—“because despite all the hardship the girl has experi-
enced, she does not complain or feel bad for herself. Instead, she is thankful
for all of the good fortune she has been met with. Since she isn’t asking for
help I suppose I wouldn’t do anything—maybe I would consider donating
to an orphanage that helped children with situations like hers.” Megan also
responds favorably and trustingly to the author of the ballpoint pen letter,
commenting, “enlisting outside aid in order to finish one’s education seems
like a very mature and responsible things to do. I would try to help this per-
son.” Judgments about the appealing characters’ motivations and behavior
incline Megan toward imagining herself trying to help. For Meredith, the
novel excerpt is the most touching of the three texts because it comes from
an orphan and because it provides impressive detail that renders Motholeli’s
situation believable. Meredith ignores the text’s fictionality and comments
affirmatively, “I would definitely be more willing to help an individual in
this situation through an orphanage.”
Every student in my small sample responded skeptically to the e-mail
appeal; indeed, some reported having received and deleted e-mails just like
it from their own mailboxes. Most responded to the ballpoint pen letter
cautiously, though just under half felt it could be genuine and the writer
could be a deserving person. Many expressed their hesitancy to help a
stranger who makes contact out of the blue. None responded to Moth-
oleli as a stranger, and only some foregrounded the girl’s fictionality in their
responses. Character identification with a figure presented in a realistic (if
formulaic) frame seemed to disarm suspicion of strangers and open the pos-
sibility for an emotional response to a scenario with a compelling relation
to contemporary reality.
Courtney explains, “Since this excerpt is from a fictional novel, the story
is ‘real’ to the readers (the characters are trustworthy).” Courtney’s response
to this “real” seeming “trustworthy” testimony is to revise her opinion of a
continent and a country: “After reading the book, I have a new perspec-
tive on Africa/Botswana. The country seems more innately ‘good’ whereas
before I only knew of the negative things about it.” The student extrapolates
from an evident fiction to alter her opinion about the real country, recogniz-
 Contemporary Perspectives on Empathy 33

ing that her lack of information had prejudiced her against it in the past. If
reading a single light detective novel can have such a result, then the real-
world effects of novel reading may be considerable.
Two students responded to Motholeli’s story with judgments of them-
selves.95 While Courtney projected outward from the orphan girl to the
continent of Africa, revising her view to emphasize its peoples’ innate good-
ness, Amanda and Paige reflected on what the story revealed about them-
selves and their own inadequacies. Amanda writes, “This letter makes me
angry and at the same time a little ashamed. Supposing this were a real
letter, and I’m getting it for a good reason, I would be angry about her mis-
treatment and also ashamed that I am not able to handle the problems in
my life with such humility and acceptance. The letter doesn’t call for action,
but I guess I would try to keep a better perspective.” Of all the students I
surveyed, only Amanda responded to the character’s abuse by malefactors
clearly described by Alexander McCall Smith. Amanda clearly engages in
perspective taking when she applies a lesson from Motholeli’s response to
her own life. Similarly, Paige puts herself in Motholeli’s shoeless footprints:
“I don’t know what the action would be here,” Paige confesses,

Yet, the letter makes me say: “wow”—for lack of a better word. Here
is this girl, removed from situations of “comfort” 3 times to live what
she calls “3 lives.” If anything happened to me as it happened to her, I
would be so devastated that I probably would be completely helpless.
The fact that such a small girl was able to overcome such hardship
and take care of not only herself, but also her brother at such a young
age really speaks to my heart—and she is not cynical and upset, as I or
many privileged Westerners would be, but she is grateful.

Having just demonstrated her capacity to engage in sophisticated moral

analysis through perspective taking, Paige comments, unconscious of the
irony, “This situation is one I could never put myself in.”
Garnering an empathetic response was harder for the three authors of
the sample texts than might have been predicted. The fact that all three
texts employed first-person narrative situations calls into question many
of the common notions about the special values of “I” narration. Though
apparently some hapless individuals have fallen victim to the e-mail scam,
surrendering their bank account numbers and losing their savings, my stu-
dents recognized this “I” as the front of an untrustworthy spammer. The
ballpoint pen used by the stranded student, “Noor N.,” disarmed some of my
students, since they recognized the letter had to be written out, stamped,
and mailed by an individual person. Their skeptical interpretation of the
accompanying materials (what narrative theorist Gerard Genette calls para-
texts) made them suspicious. The poor quality of the photocopied tran-
script, which looked as if its dates had been crudely altered, undermined
34 Empathy and the Novel

Noor N.’s authenticity. Though nearly half still felt Noor was worth help-
ing, none of my students responded to the explicitly religious content of
Noor’s appeal. The effort made in the letter to connect writer and recipient
through faith made little impact, but the deaths from AIDS and the writer’s
status as a student (albeit a student of tailoring) resonated with these col-
lege students. Chapter 3, “Readers’ Empathy,” discusses in detail the narra-
tive techniques that contribute to empathetic responses from readers. An
important one appears here, in Noor’s construction of her autobiographical
persona as a student whose family members have died. She makes of her-
self what I call a bridge character, with whom faraway readers can feel they
have something in common. Nonetheless, Noor’s appeal received cautiously
compassionate responses, at best, and some students rejected the ballpoint
pen letter as obviously fraudulent.
Fiction, as we know, depends upon its persuasive lies for its world-mak-
ing powers. But fictional world-making is only ever as effective as the partic-
ipatory reader makes it, through active cocreation. The capacity of human
beings to engage intellectually and emotionally with imaginary worlds and
their denizens places narrative empathy at the intersection of aesthetics,
psychology, and philosophy. As the cognitive literary theorist Lisa Zun-
shine speculates, “The enjoyment of fiction may be predicated—at least in
part—upon awareness of our ‘trying on,’ so to speak, mental states (of the
characters) potentially available to us but at a given moment differing from
our own” (“Richardson’s” 132). For Zunshine, Theory of Mind theory sug-
gests that “the very process of making sense of what we read appears to be
grounded in our ability to invest the flimsy verbal constructions that we
generously call ‘characters’ with a potential for a variety of thoughts, feel-
ings, and desires” (132). Vitally for this conception, fictional characters play
a different role for readers than the regard of real others encountered in
the world. While the fact of human others’ perspectives and motivations
activates our caution, the fictiveness of characters’ mental states invites our
participation and playful engagement. This view was borne out by my stu-
dents’ responses. The very fictionality of the excerpt from Alexander McCall
Smith’s Morality for Beautiful Girls overcame the guarded reading habits
of my students and permitted emotional responses to emerge. As we have
seen, the language of sympathy and compassion appeared in several of their
responses. Did Motholeli’s story invoke empathy, however? The novel suc-
ceeded in getting two students to engage in perspective taking. One leapt to
a perception of injustice. One taught herself to regard Africa and Botswana
as good. None of the students wrote anything in the empathetic register of
“I feel what Motholeli feels.” The closest to come to that was the West Afri-
can respondent, who wrote of a sense of recognition: “It is reminiscent of so
many African Stories.”
Does exposure to just a few of the many African stories cultivate the
empathy of readers who might otherwise regard Africans (in all their diver-
 Contemporary Perspectives on Empathy 35

sity) as a single mass of impoverished, disease-stricken, starving, or violence-

prone strangers? As this preliminary survey of the scholarship in empathy
studies has shown, empathy may be innate, it may be felt by most human
beings, and it may be a small factor in our altruistic behavior, but it has not
yet been demonstrated to be as robust a feature of our moral and social lives
as has been posited. Empathy is easy to feel, but like all fleeting emotions,
it passes, and relatively few altruistic actions (or even simple helping) can
be securely linked in a causal chain to our empathic feelings. This has not
impeded authorities such as Martha Nussbaum, Martin Hoffman, and Lynn
Hunt from making large claims for empathy. That the novel should be sin-
gled out as a technology most adept at invoking empathy and shaping moral
behavior challenges what psychologists have been able to discover about
empathy, but it endorses what many people believe about the transforma-
tive power of reading and of reading fiction in particular.96 Perhaps repeated
entrances into fictional worlds must occur to benefit the developing mind.
Possibly the effects on younger readers are stronger than those on mature
consumers of fiction. Personal dispositions toward fantasy empathy—such
as the capacity to project internal visualizations of scenes and imagined
persons—may make some readers more susceptible to influence by fiction
than others.97 These are open questions, for although fantasy empathy has
been identified as a facet of the empathetic disposition,98 little is known
about the process that would transpose experiences of feeling with fictional
beings to actions taken on behalf of real others. The subsequent chapters
of this book strive to bring psychology, philosophy, and narrative theory
to bear upon the matter of how, if at all, human beings can learn empathy
from novels.
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 2

THE LITERARY CAREER OF EMPATHY

The fact that novel reading receives credit from policy makers and bureau-
crats for renovating potential marks a noteworthy development in the his-
tory of a form that has not always been celebrated for its positive influence
on civic life.1 In 1749, the London Magazine suggested that the vogue for
novel reading resulted in the loss of human spirit in the pursuit of a non-
entity, exchanging reasonable delight for “negligence and folly” (Novel and
Romance 127). Many reviewers worried that readers’ appetite for frivolity
would drive out useful and serious (nonfictional) works and that “obscene”
works pouring in from France would corrupt the young (209). In 1791, the
Reverend Edward Barry warned that novel reading ranked among the incen-
tives to seduction. Fiction could prime an explosion of the reader’s inner
bulwarks of virtue and reputation by agitating unrelieved sensations (375).
The official disrepute of the popular form registers in the somewhat defen-
sive claims made by the now-canonical heavyweights of the eighteenth-cen-
tury novel. In his Preface to Robinson Crusoe (1719), Daniel Defoe insists:
“The Story is Told with Modesty, with Seriousness, and with a religious
Application of Events to the Uses to which wise Men always apply them
(viz) to the Instruction of others by this Example, and to justify and honour
the Wisdom of Providence in all the Variety of our Circumstances” (56).
Testimonial advertisements for Samuel Richardson’s Pamela (1740) affirm,
“As to Instruction and Morality, the Piece is full of both. It shews Virtue in
the strongest light and renders the Practice of it amiable and lovely” (96).
The influence of the romantic experiences of fictional females on unmar-
ried women readers was an especially sensitive point, as cultural watchdogs
fretted that novel reading would lead not to the imitation of Pamela’s virtue,
but to unrealistic expectations about marriage. The perverted imagination
would devolve to wasted lives and bitter disappointments. Novels threat-
ened to make readers do too much, stirring up passions that could find sat-
isfaction only in illicit sexual activity, and too little, inducing indolence and
indifference to real life.
These eighteenth-century criticisms of novel reading persisted well into
the Victorian period, receiving a boost from the evangelical distrust of fic-
38 Empathy and the Novel

tion and the religious convictions of librarians such as Mr. Mudie. De facto
censorship of the more licentious aspects of fiction set in as circulating
libraries such as Mudie’s bought most of the print runs of Victorian nov-
els and enforced a representational code that ostensibly prevented a blush
from rising to the cheek of the young person. Editors of family magazines
colluded in the cultural project of cleaning up a form that had the reputa-
tion of tending toward inappropriate, even scandalous, representation. Eigh-
teenth-century novels fell into disrepute as reading for respectable women.
Even a bestseller such as Jane Eyre (1847) received reviews cautioning read-
ers that it was appropriate fare only for grown men and married women.
Sensation fiction of the 1860s freshened the sense that novel reading could
be dangerous and corrupting.
The reinvention of the novel as a form that might do something positive
in the world by swaying readers’ minds rather than activating their passions
we may also date to the Victorian period, particularly to the mid-century
when social-problem novelists used fiction to diagnose the condition of Eng-
land. Charles Dickens’s Oliver Twist (1837–38) permanently tarnished the
image of the New Poor Law and its workhouse system. Benjamin Disraeli’s
now largely unread Coningsby (1844) and Sybil (1845) outlined a political
program and described the division of Britain into two nations. Elizabeth
Gaskell’s Mary Barton (1848) urged well-off Christian readers to bridge
the growing gulf between the rich and the poor in a homiletic fiction that
invoked the fear of revolution as well as the threat of perdition. Gaskell, a
Unitarian minister’s wife, had the credentials to offer her sermon, but the
most eloquent advocate for the moral usefulness of fiction was the unbeliev-
ing and officially immoral George Eliot (Mary Ann Evans lived in sin with
a married man, George Henry Lewes). Eliot’s novels, most especially Adam
Bede (1859) and Middlemarch (1871–72), articulated a project for the cul-
tivation of the reader’s sympathetic imagination. Novel readers might learn,
by extending themselves into the experiences, motives, and emotions of
fictional characters, to sympathize with real others in their everyday lives.
Thomas Hardy notoriously pushed the envelope in the last generation of
Victorian fiction by presenting for sympathetic imagining characters such
as Tess, a fallen woman, and Jude, a member of the disenfranchised working
class. We owe to these Victorian novelists the notion that novel reading can
be a personally improving activity and one that may even, as in the famous
case of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s bestseller Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852), inspire
allegiance to a political cause, in that case the eradication of slavery.2
The appearance in the twentieth century of difficult and relatively inac-
cessible high literary modernist fiction such as James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922)
raised the status of a form whose more ordinary instances still commanded
little respect. By this time, serious fiction had achieved critical sanction as
literature, while the numerous descendents of romance devolved into the
popular subliterary genres that commanded an increasing share of the fic-
 The Literary Career of Empathy 39

tion market after the 1880s. The modes of criticism that followed the iden-
tification of a Great Tradition in English fiction (by F. R. Leavis in 1948)
enforced the process of separating the novel from its origins as a consumer
product sustained by buyers (or paying borrowers) in a commercial mar-
ketplace. The novel’s reputation and generic status had risen higher by mid-
century, in part as a result of the academic study of English literature. Yet
popular fiction—and writing lives sustained by its sale—persisted. Despite
the remaining distinctions of (higher, more culturally valued) literary fiction
and (lower, mass market) genre fiction and the serious challenge posed by
film and television, the novel has made it to the twenty-first century, during
which it has become a global commodity, thanks in part to the European
empires that spread both languages and cultural forms worldwide. Even
though the number of readers continues its lamented decline, the novel as
a form currently enjoys the best press of its three-century career. Novels get
credit for the character-building renovation of readers into open-minded,
generous citizens.
The key term in the transformation of novel reading from a morally sus-
pect waste of time to an activity cultivating the role-taking imagination,
empathy, appeared in English as a translation of Einfühlung in the early twen-
tieth century.3 Since then, its verb form, “to empathize,” and its interchange-
able adjectival spin-offs “empathic” and “empathetic,” have passed into com-
mon parlance. In the twenty-first century, real human empathy enjoys good
press as a concept and a desirable character trait (given the improved cul-
tural status of emotional intelligence [Goleman, Emotional Intelligence 96–
110]). Its application in representational empathy, through the invocation
of shared feelings through words, sounds, and images, leaps forward with
the newer entertainment technologies. Film effectively exploits empathy—
it is at least a happy coincidence that the invention of motion pictures and
the modern term empathy occurred in the same decades.4 Imax theatres are
wonderful places to observe people engaged in motor mimicry, especially
while they watch 3-D films. Empathy’s lexical spread in the realms of high-
tech gear, gaming, and fantasy and science fiction reaches its apotheosis in
virtual reality machinery. In popular fictions of virtual reality, and even in
the real world, commercially available goggle and glove sets make it possible
for consumers to replace their own experiences and sensations with sensory
inputs that construct entirely computer-generated worlds. This extreme
case of voluntary exchange of one’s own reality for the sensations of another
takes to its furthest logical extension the fusing with another object that
aesthetics’ Einfühlung set out to describe in the 1890s. It also raises worrying
questions about the purposes of fictive representation: does virtual reality’s
evident usefulness in training jet pilots or producing green screen animation
make up for the unseemly pornographic possibilities foreseen by science
fiction? The reputation of narrative empathy is tainted by association with
popular technologies for sharing feelings. This goes a ways toward explain-
40 Empathy and the Novel

ing why advocates of the ethical benefits of novel reading nearly always
insist that great literature—Greek tragedies, Shakespeare’s plays, canonical
novels, and serious literary fiction—best stimulates literary empathy.

Sharing Good and Bad Sensations

Virtual reality and pornography render empathy legible as a commercially

exploitable quality of consumers. To discover which representational devices
most commonly invoke strong sensations of “feeling with” another, the stu-
dent of empathy might well turn to the market’s most successful vehicle for
rendering feelings in a stimulating way: porn. Pornography depends upon
reliably conjuring physical sensations in the bodies of its consumers and
appears to activate mirror neurons in the brains of its consumers (Blakeslee,
“Cells That Read Minds” F4). It need not be realistic. Porn can be a cartoon;
it can feature protagonists with fantastical proportions and superhuman
abilities. It revels in stereotypical characterization and unabashedly ludi-
crous plotting. All that is required for porn’s success is an effective trans-
fer of the arousal and gratification of the protagonist to the bodies of its
viewers. Vicious representations play on our human proneness to emotional
contagion and motor mimicry just as readily as innocent or even socially
beneficial world-making.
If fictions can move our feelings, then they can push us in degrading and
dangerous directions. As Cristina Nehring rightly observes in the New York
Times Book Review, “you can learn anything from a book—or nothing. You
can learn to be a suicide bomber, a religious fanatic. . . . You can acquire
unrealistic expectations of love . . . you can float forever like driftwood on
the current of text; you can be as passive as a person in an all-day movie the-
ater, as antisocial as a kid holed up with a video game . . .” (“Books Make You
a Boring Person” 23). Fiction might be bad for readers. This view coexists
comfortably with the positive view of reading advanced by ethical theorists,
justifying as it does the work of cultural guardians who sort worthy novels
from mass-market trash. Arguments in favor of censorship (or regulation by
labeling) of television and film depend upon public fears of corruption and a
widely shared belief that vicious narratives have baleful influences on those
who so avidly seek to consume them. (Indeed, the prohibition against harm-
ful fictions and their makers goes back at least as far as Plato.) Too rarely do
the celebrators of reading concede that, as Mark Edmundson writes, “the
force of reading, the power of words, is not always a force for good” (“Risk
of Reading” 11). Deleterious emotional responses to vicious narratives also
activate the neural shared manifold for intersubjectivity.
Like novels, empathy itself also receives disproportionate credit for
encouraging positive and commendable emotions, especially fellow feeling
with suffering others. Popular versions of empathy de-emphasize its poten-
 The Literary Career of Empathy 41

tial to spread sensations such as sexual arousal. The dominant concern

with the effects of negative emotions in empathy studies reflects research-
ers’ beliefs that empathy with pain moves us more surely toward sympathy
and altruism than shared joy does. Over two hundred and fifty years ago,
Adam Smith noted that although fellow feeling applies to the whole range
of human feelings, our sympathy is more fully engaged by the negative
emotions: “the agreeable passions of love and joy can satisfy and support
the heart without any auxiliary pleasure. The bitter and painful emotions
of grief and resentment more strongly require the healing consolation of
sympathy” (Moral Sentiments 15). To be sure, Smith also imagined a social
role for positive sympathy, in that our private benevolent affections ren-
der us more capable of being good citizens (Moral Sentiments 227–29).
Focusing on empathy with ecstatic, joyful, or sexually aroused emotional
states of others can swerve in the direction of hedonism, and any con-
cessions involving novels’ titillating or corrupting influences can raise the
specter of censorship. It is therefore not surprising that from Adam Smith
onward, the power of negative feelings has received the main emphasis:
“Our sympathy,” Smith writes “with deep distress is very strong and very
sincere . . . we weep even at the feigned representation of a tragedy” (43).
Though questions have persisted about the disturbing element of plea-
sure onlookers take in the representations of another’s suffering,5 empathy
with negative emotional states has dignity and a pedigree that goes back
to Aristotle.6
If we were to trace the terms that appear in empathy’s family tree, its
relations would include fellow feeling, pity, compassion, and benevolence.
Aspects of empathy can be discerned in theories of the sublime.7 Love and
affection contribute traits, but by far the most influential source for the
English tradition lies in the concept of sympathy, as elaborated by eigh-
teenth-century thinkers. As the following narrative of the literary career of
empathy suggests, each period that has seen a positive role for spontaneous
sharing of emotional states has also witnessed the expression of reserva-
tions about its efficacy and its contribution to morality. The consequences
of reading or viewing works that engage the emotions have also been con-
tested in each literary period celebrating the cultivation of feeling readers.
Attitudes about the social class, gender, maturity, and generic preferences of
readers in turn contribute to the reputation of literature that invokes shared
emotional responses.
While poetry rides high as an appropriate vehicle for conveying feelings
to the sympathetic and refined reader, the novel often arouses suspicion in
the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, so effectively does it provoke emo-
tional responses in women, servants, and the poor. By the twentieth century,
the end point of this chapter’s survey, the reputation of empathetic response
depends upon contexts and genres. While the rise of the middlebrow (often
female) readership for the novel makes empathetic character identification
42 Empathy and the Novel

a central feature of most fiction reaching a large number of readers, some

varieties of avante garde literary practice eschew empathy in favor of shock
and defamiliarization. Thus, I argue here, an underlying disagreement about
the moral consequences of reading, persisting from the eighteenth century
to the present day, reappears whenever critics except popular fiction and
women’s writing from their optimistic visions of the benefits of the role-
taking imagination. The account that follows illustrates the ongoing debate
with copious extracts from the critical sources in which aspects of empathy
appear, even under the historically precedent term sympathy.

Eighteenth-Century Sympathy and Sensibility

In eighteenth-century usage, the reaction modern psychology calls empa-

thizing was covered by the verb form of sympathy. Samuel Johnson’s Dic-
tionary of the English Language (1755) defines “to sympathize” as “to feel
with another; to feel in consequence of what another feels; to feel mutually.”
A contributor to moral sentiments, the basis of benevolent affection, sympa-
thy is a valued quality of human nature for both David Hume in A Treatise
of Human Nature (1739) and Adam Smith in his Theory of Moral Sentiments
(1759). Their accounts of sympathy include clearly recognizable aspects
of empathy, though neither philosopher uses that term. Hume’s sympathy
includes an empathic first stage of what contemporary psychologists would
call emotional contagion: “the minds of men are mirrors to one another,” he
writes, “not only because they reflect each other’s emotion, but also because
those rays of passions, sentiments, and opinions may often be reverberated”
(Human Nature 365). “No quality of human nature is more remarkable,”
Hume writes (316), though he observes sympathy “thro’ the whole animal
creation” (353), especially among social animals.8 Similarity facilitates the
desire for the company of one another (318), so the resemblance of men
to one another underlies sympathy, especially in men of the same nation
(317, 359). Hume notices the biases toward familiar and “here and now”
claimants: “The sentiments of others have little influence, when far remov’d
from us, and require the relation of contiguity, to make them communicate
themselves entirely” (318). When people are close enough together, how-
ever, their feelings strike upon one another’s souls. Hume employs physical
metaphors and analogies drawn from music to explain motor mimicry and
emotional contagion: “As in strings equally wound up, the motion of one
communicates itself to the rest; so all the affections readily pass from one
person to another, and beget correspondent movements in every human
creature” (576).
However, Hume also speculates about the cognitive elements that con-
tribute to these transmissions of emotion:
 The Literary Career of Empathy 43

When I see the effects of passion in the voice and gesture of any per-
son, my mind immediately passes from these effects to their causes,
and forms such a lively idea of the passion, as is presently converted
into the passion itself. In like manner, when I perceive the causes of
any emotion, my mind is convey’d to the effects, and is actuated with
a like emotion. Were I present at any of the more terrible operations
of surgery, ’tis certain, that even before it began, the preparation of
the instruments, the laying of the bandages in order, the heating of
the irons, with all the signs of anxiety and concern in the patient and
assistants, wou’d have a great effect upon my mind, and excite the
strongest sentiments of pity and terror. No passion of another discov-
ers itself immediately to the mind. We are only sensible of its causes
or effects. From these we infer the passion: And consequently these give
rise to our sympathy. (Human Nature 576, italics in original)

Rejecting clairvoyance, Hume emphasizes the actions of the imagination

that lead to the excitation of feeling in a beholder. As Adela Pinch notes,
Hume characterizes feelings not as individual possessions, but as “transper-
sonal,” as “autonomous entities that . . . wander extravagantly from one
person to another” (Strange Fits of Passion 3).9 The feelings people catch
from one another may seem as if they undermine our individual auton-
omy, but for Hume, this human capacity vouches for our fundamentally
social nature.
Adam Smith’s 1759 Theory of Moral Sentiments offers a complemen-
tary account of imaginative transport under the term sympathy.10 Since the
eighteenth century, the responsive and imitative phenomena that Smith
described have been differentiated and given separate labels, whereas in
Smith’s treatise, we find a good description of empathy under the label “fel-
low feeling.” Smith writes, “whatever is the passion which arises from any
object in the person principally concerned, an analogous emotion springs
up, at the thought of his situation, in the breast of every attentive specta-
tor” (Moral Sentiments 10). Smith also notices the human propensity to
motor mimicry that leads to an empathetic response: “When we see a stroke
aimed, and just ready to fall upon the leg or arm of another person, we natu-
rally shrink and draw back our own leg or our own arm; and when it does
fall, we feel it in some measure, and are hurt by it as well as the sufferer”
(10). Emotional contagion in crowds does not escape Smith’s notice: “The
mob, when they are gazing at a dancer on the slack rope, naturally writhe
and twist and balance their own bodies as they see him do, and as they
feel that they themselves must do in his situation” (10). Smith posits that
perspective taking enables humans to feel copies of others’ sense impres-
sions: “by the imagination we place ourselves in his situation, we conceive
ourselves enduring all the same torments, we enter as it were into his body,
44 Empathy and the Novel

and become in some measure the same person with him, and thence form
some idea of his sensations, and even feel something which, though weaker
in degree, is not altogether unlike them” (9). Smith even anticipates the
problem of projection, writing, “we sometimes feel for another, a passion of
which he himself seems to be altogether incapable; because, when we put
ourselves in his case, that passion arises in our breast from the imagination,
though it does not in his from the reality” (12).
Both Smith and Hume link sympathy to the organizational principles
of society. Smith believed our sympathy made us good citizens, and Hume
insisted that our sympathy tempered our self-interest: “Thus self-interest is
the original motive to the establishment of justice: but a sympathy with pub-
lic interest is the source of the moral approbation, which attends that virtue”
(Human Nature 499–500, emphasis in original). The sympathy and social
feeling for fellow creatures described by Hume and Smith constitute core
elements of subsequent English utilitarian philosophy, and they are linked
through that tradition with aims of social reform. The nearly automatic
association of spontaneously shared feelings with socially beneficial action
in the world owes a great deal to this transmission from the eighteenth
century to the Victorians, who were to develop the romantic idea of the
sympathetic imagination into a device for personal and social renovation.
As we will see, some Victorians especially prized the novel as a popular
narrative form well suited to cultivate the feelings of readers and instruct
them in political and social issues. Though their fiction—and indeed the late
twentieth-century fiction fiction that is the subject of this book—employs
very different representational strategies than the eighteenth-century novel,
the novel of sensibility contributes an important positive vision of the moral
force of reading.
Sensibility refers to responsiveness both to others’ emotions and to inan-
imate features, such as sublime landscapes. The novel of sensibility was
regarded by its appreciators as sowing the seeds of virtue in the hearts of
responsive readers.11 Between the time of Hume and Smith’s two philo-
sophical treatises, the English novel had made a good start in gaining its first
wide audience, including many women readers. Sympathy features promi-
nently in the themes and effects of the literature of sensibility. Novels that
invoked strong feelings enjoyed widespread popularity,12 in part because
such fellow feeling was esteemed as the source of social bonds: sensibility
was believed to lead to compassion and active benevolence. Sensibility in a
reader showed in her feeling responses; in a fictional work, sensibility sug-
gested its capacity to invoke feeling reactions.
Fiction was especially esteemed for its capacity to extend a reader’s imagi-
native capacity beyond a narrow circle of acquaintance, as in Henry Home,
Lord Kames’s observations about the emotions caused by fiction from his Ele-
ments of Criticism (1762).13 Henry Lord Kames appreciates the power of lan-
guage to call up ideal representations that lead to readers’ virtuous actions:
 The Literary Career of Empathy 45

That extensive influence which language hath over the heart; an influ-
ence, which, more than any other means, strengthens the bond of soci-
ety, and attracts individuals from their private system to perform acts
of generosity and benevolence. Matters of fact, it is true, and truth in
general, may be inculcated without taking advantage of ideal presence;
but without it, the finest speaker or writer would in vain attempt to
move any passion: our sympathy would be confined to objects that
are really present; and language would lose entirely its signal power
of making us sympathize with the beings removed at the greatest dis-
tance of time as well as of place. Nor is the influence of language, by
means of ideal presence confined to the heart; it reacheth also the
understanding and contributes to belief. (“Emotions Caused by Fic-
tion” v. 1. 74)

Kames regards language as enabling the creation of ideal presences, that

is, the persons and situations of fiction. From these representations both
the feelings and the intellect receive instructions that would otherwise be
impossible, given our limited experiences. Kames celebrates the power of
fiction to move sympathy, and he believes that both social bonds and benev-
olent actions occur as a result of sympathetic feelings.14
Yet not all contemporaries believed that reading Pamela (1741) or other
novels of sensibility would lead to benevolent behavior. Delusional hopes,
corrupted desires, and a damaging unawareness of the real world were nega-
tive consequences of reading fiction according to novels’ detractors. By the
late eighteenth century, cultural watchdogs had begun to worry about the
kinds of fictional representations that excited readers’ sensations. Romances
had been condemned in similar terms in an earlier period, but far fewer
people read them. By the late eighteenth century, circulating libraries had
become widespread in London and provincial towns, and most of what they
offered for rent was novels. This change made fiction affordable for working
people, a phenomenon that did not meet with universal approbation. John
Tinnon Taylor quotes an anonymous commentator of 1795, who complains
in the pages of The Sylph that “I have actually seen mothers, in miserable
garrets, crying for the imaginary distress of an heroine, while their children
were crying for bread” (quoted in Taylor, Early Opposition 53). Clearly the
baseline social class for sympathy and sensibility ordinarily cut off far above
these impoverished mothers; the affront Taylor records in this comment
derives from a neglectful poor person revealing herself as both a sympathizer
and a novel reader. For this representative late eighteenth-century voice, to
be an appropriate person of sensibility, one must be at least a respectable
consumer, not a likely recipient of charity.
Sensibility operated in a market for fictions and feelings in which poor
people’s place was to be felt for rather than to feel. Raymond Williams
notes that sensibility comes close to sentimentality in this period, for both
46 Empathy and the Novel

entailed “a conscious openness to feelings, and also a conscious consumption

of feelings” (Keywords 281). Sentimental literature exploited its consumers’
appetites for feeling, taking on a pedagogical role and training its readers in
emotional responses through exemplary responses of characters. As Janet
Todd explains, sentimental literature assumes that “life and literature are
directly linked, not through any notion of a mimetic depiction of reality,
but through the belief that the literary experience can intimately affect the
living one” (Sensibility 4). Even for the respectable middle classes and their
social superiors, however, enthusiasm and sentimentality were not univer-
sally esteemed. Sentimentality was condemned by eighteenth-century crit-
ics who regarded readers’ appetite for feelings morally suspect, especially
if immersion in the literature of sensibility failed to alter the conduct of its
consumers. The novelist Henry Mackenzie (author of The Man of Feeling
[1771]) had his doubts about the underlying premises of the literature of
sensibility.15 He writes damningly in a Lounger essay of 1785 of

refined sentimentalists, who are contented with talking of virtues

which they never practise, who pay in words what they owe in actions;
or perhaps, what is fully as dangerous, who open their minds to impres-
sions which never have any effect upon their conduct, but are con-
sidered as something foreign to and distinct from it. This separation
of conscience from feeling is a depravity of the most pernicious sort;
it eludes the strongest obligation to rectitude, it blunts the strongest
incitement to virtue; when the ties of the first bind the sentiment and
not the will, and the rewards of the latter crown not the heart but the
imagination. (Works 183–84)

Mackenzie sees even well-regarded high-quality novels (not just circulating

library trash) as potentially debilitating, especially for young people. With
novelists themselves doubting the results of the literature of sensibility,
apologists for the promulgation of benevolence through reading had their
work cut out for them.
In 1773, Anna Laetitia Aiken (later Mrs. Barbauld, the abolitionist poet)
was not convinced that feelings invoked by distressing reading material
would in fact lead to social change. She writes:

Much has been said in favour of [such representations], and they are
generally thought to improve the tender and humane feelings; but
this, I own, appears to me very dubious. That they exercise sensibil-
ity is true, but sensibility does not increase with exercise. By the con-
stitution of our frame our habits increase, our emotions decrease, by
repeated acts; and thus a wise provision is made, that as our compas-
sion grows weaker, its place should be supplied by habitual benev-
olence. But in these writings our sensibility is strongly called forth
 The Literary Career of Empathy 47

without any possibility of exerting itself in virtuous action, and those

emotions, which we shall never feel again with equal force, are wasted
without advantage. Nothing is more dangerous than to let virtuous
impressions of any kind pass through the mind without producing
their proper effect. The awakenings of remorse, virtuous shame and
indignation, the glow of moral approbation, if they do not lead to
action, grow less and less vivid every time they occur, till at length
the mind grows absolutely callous. The being affected with a pathetic
story is undoubtedly a sign of an amiable disposition, but perhaps no
means of increasing it. On the contrary, young people, by a course
of this kind of reading, often acquire something of that apathy and
indifference which the experience of real life would have given them,
without its advantages. (An Enquiry 289)

Aiken’s critique echoes down through the centuries to the present day,
when it has become a critical commonplace in some schools of thought to
see the novel as dulling readers’ sense of responsibility to real people, either
by habituating them to the idea of faraway others’ suffering, or by providing
representative fictional characters who replace real others, and (being fic-
tional) make no demands on readers.16 Other eighteenth-century detractors
of sympathy saw different risks because they felt, in contrast to Aiken, that
sympathy was all too effective: it spread alarmingly from person to person.
For the influential William Godwin of An Enquiry Concerning Political Jus-
tice (1798 edition), the social nature of sympathy conflicts with individu-
ality. The enthusiasm generated by crowds spontaneously sharing feelings
evokes the spectre of the out-of-control mob or the contagious disease.17
Though Godwin felt that the fleeting moods of sensibility that resulted in
momentary tearful reactions had no staying power, he still wrote propagan-
distic fiction that attempted to channel human sympathy of readers into
useful courses of action.
Twentieth- and twenty-first–century readers tend to notice additional
bothersome features of sympathy and the literature of sensibility. While
sympathy in Hume and Smith emphasizes mutuality of feeling, for later
readers, the fiction of sensibility presents excessive scenes of compassion
and pity that can seem condescending to the suffering recipient. Sympathy
becomes tainted with a sense of social as well as moral superiority, and the
suspicion that it exists only to shore up middle-class identity taints its exer-
cise.18 Empathic scenes of shared feeling can seem vampiric, as if the person
of sensibility feeds on the pain of others. It gets worse. A recent historical
rereading of the late eighteenth-century literature of abolition sees the rep-
resentations of suffering slaves as pornographic, appealing to the sadomas-
ochistic appetites of persons of sensibility. In a direct confutation of the
claim that empathy for fictional characters started human rights discourse,
Marcus Wood writes that “the dirtiest thing the Western imagination ever
48 Empathy and the Novel

did, and it does it compulsively still, is to believe in the aesthetically healing

powers of empathetic fiction” (Slavery 36).
These views from the turn of the millennium bring us to the far extreme
of the case against sympathy. Though under suspicious interrogation today,
the eighteenth-century idea of sympathetic role taking as the highest moral
and aesthetic exertion of the imagination19 has a robust legacy in nine-
teenth-century literature (especially in Romantic poetry and Victorian
fiction). The effects of novelistic invitations to sympathy were still ques-
tioned in the nineteenth century, but the explosion of both social fiction
and sensation fiction in the Victorian period attests to the novelists’ sus-
tained belief in their ability to move the feelings, and even the convictions,
of their readers.20

Nineteenth-Century Sensations and Social Problems

The Romantic poets not only believed in the powers of sympathy, but they
also attempted to bring their readers into contact with others, animate and
inanimate, in order to guarantee the conversion of feeling into benevolent
action. Though some Romantic writers felt qualms about the conversion
of others’ suffering into aesthetic pleasures for readers, they emphasized
the beneficial opportunity to engage in imaginative transport beyond the
bounds of the self.21 Despite their oppositional stance toward the earlier
generation of poets, the Romantics belonged still to a philosophical tradi-
tion that linked self-love to love of community and regarded the human
race as an extended family:

Self-love but serves the virtuous mind to wake,

As the small pebble stirs the peaceful lake;
The centre moved, a circle straight succeeds,
Another still, and still another spreads,
Friend, parent, neighbour, first it will embrace,
His country next; and next the human race,
Wide and more wide, the o’erflowings of the mind
Take ev’ry creature in, of ev’ry kind;
(Essay on Man, 4, lines 363–70)

Though the closed couplets of Alexander Pope would be eschewed after

1798, most early nineteenth-century writers agreed in general with his
argument that self-love yields social benefits.
William Hazlitt, for instance, argues in his 1805 Essay on the Principles
of Human Action that the human mind “is naturally interested in the wel-
fare of others” (“Human Action” 3), that the imagination carries the per-
son out of himself into the feelings of others, and that self-love entirely
 The Literary Career of Empathy 49

depends upon the experience of loving others (4–5). Hazlitt sees sympa-
thetic imagining as the more persuasive account of self-knowledge (over
self-interest), writing

a sentiment of general benevolence can only arise from an habitual

cultivation of the natural disposition of the mind to sympathize with
the feelings of others by constantly taking an interest in those which
we know, and imagining others that we do not know, as the other feel-
ing of abstract self-interest . . . must be caused by a long narrowing of
the mind to our own particular feelings and interests, and a voluntary
insensibility to everything which does not immediately concern our-
selves. (14–15)

For Hazlitt, insensibility requires practice and willful disregard of others’

feelings, against the natural tendency of humans to sympathize, particu-
larly with others’ pain. However, in Hazlitt’s essay, one may also find a rare
acknowledgment of the role of pleasurable sympathy in human sexuality,
for “the gratification of the same passion in another is the means of gratify-
ing our own, that our physical sensibility stimulates our sympathy with the
desires of the other sex, and on the other hand this feeling of mutual sympa-
thy increases the physical desires of both” (41). Hazlitt regards this physical
sensibility as the “chief foundation of the sexual passion” (41), in a positive
account that sharply contrasts with later Victorian fears about the perils
of stirring up passionate sensations. Hazlitt anticipates recent psychology’s
understanding of physical and emotional attunement in lovemaking (Daniel
Stern, Interpersonal World 30).
Hazlitt’s younger contemporary and acquaintance Percy Shelley regards
the effects of disinterested benevolence as less automatic, but for Shel-
ley this only heightens the imperative nature of sympathy. While Hazlitt
regards sympathy as a basic human trait, Shelley requires its cultivation in
order to be good. In his Defence of Poetry (1821), Shelley writes that a good
man “must imagine intensely and comprehensively; he must put himself
in the place of another and of many others; the pains and pleasures of his
species must become his own” (Defence 487–88). In this cultivation of role-
taking imaginative engagement with the pleasures and suffering of others,
poetry assists.
The passage from private affections to broader social bonds that Hume
and Smith assume receives special emphasis from Romantic writers who
attempt to ensure that personal feelings develop in the proper direction. In
1795, Coleridge writes, “Jesus knew our Nature—and that expands like the
circles of a Lake—the Love of our Friends, parents and neighbours lead[s]
us to the love of our Country to the love of all Mankind. The intensity
of private attachments encourages, not prevents, universal philanthropy”
(“Lecture 3” 163). Coleridge defined active benevolence in 1796 as “Natu-
50 Empathy and the Novel

ral Sympathy made permanent by an acquired Conviction, that the Inter-

ests of each and all are one and the same” (Watchman 4 132), though he
also worried, in concert with Anna Laetitia Aiken, that novels of sensibil-
ity could impede the development of benevolence. Imagining a sweet tea–
drinker who reads a novel unconscious that her sugar consumption supports
slavery, Coleridge deplores the fine lady who “sips a beverage sweetened
with human blood, even while she is weeping over the refined sorrows of
Werter or Clementina.” Sensibility, or susceptibility to feelings, “by mak-
ing us tremblingly alive to trifling misfortunes” often prevents benevolence
and “induces effeminate and cowardly selfishness” (Watchman 4 139). Still,
emotional responsiveness was not therefore to be eschewed: according to
Coleridge, he and Wordsworth agreed in their collaboration on the Lyrical
Ballads (1798) that the first of two cardinal principals of poetry was “the
power of exciting the sympathy of the reader by a faithful adherence to the
truth of nature” (Biographia Literaria 5). Shelley concurred about the civi-
lizing effects of reading poetry, though he expressed himself more chauvin-
istically and emphasized the egoistic gratification of sympathy:

Every one has experience of the fact, that to sympathize with the suf-
ferings of another, is to enjoy a transitory oblivion of his own. . . . The
inhabitant of a highly civilized community will more acutely sympa-
thize with the sufferings and enjoyments of others, than the inhab-
itant of a society of a less degree of civilization. He who shall have
cultivated his intellectual powers by familiarity with the highest speci-
mens of poetry and philosophy, will usually sympathize more than
one engaged in the less refined functions of manual labour. . . . The
only distinction between the selfish man and the virtuous man is that
the imagination of the former is confined within a narrow limit, while
that of the latter embraces a comprehensive circumference. (“Treatise
on Morals” 188–89)

For Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Shelley, poetry did the best job of the
varieties of available literature in extending the sympathetic circle and cul-
tivating the capacity to feel with others, in what is now described as empa-
thetic connection. Though my account of early nineteenth-century ideas
has observed the convention of using the contemporary terminology, ele-
ments of empathy embedded within nineteenth-century sympathy (as in
the eighteenth-century sources) should be clear: the spontaneous overflow
of powerful feeling, prompted by memory, landscape, or personal encoun-
ters, involves what contemporary psychologists call emotional contagion.
The questionable accuracy of the empathetic projections of Wordsworth,
in poetic conversation with his sister, laborers, or vagrants, should not
obscure the centrality of spontaneous emotional sharing to the Romantics’
 The Literary Career of Empathy 51

thought.22 For Wordsworth, exercising this faculty aided moral growth and
repaired the wounded soul.
For the Romantics, the emotionally involved reader and the sympatheti-
cally imagining writer joined in a mutually reinforcing process of cultivating
feeling selves.23 Indeed, because of the powerful invocation of sympathetic
responses to people and scenes in Romantic poetry, literary texts (particu-
larly poetry) become the preeminent place of sympathy in the early nine-
teenth century. This is not to say that real individuals living in the 1800s
ceased to experience the psychological phenomena of spontaneous shared
emotion, fellow feeling, sympathy, or pity for real people—quite the con-
trary—but that literary representations of sympathetic encounters became
so influential in the culture at large that the evidence of textual and real-
world sympathy become difficult to disentangle. A lyric poem offering an
account of sympathy on the part of the speaker that also records the poet’s
sympathy (and elicits it from readers) offers a complex of sympathies, some
of which continue to operate outside of their original historical moment.
This fusion and ongoing transmission of sympathies complicates our view
of nineteenth-century sympathy in many ways, not only because we rely
on textual sources as records of real (but no longer living) people’s feel-
ings. Texts articulating theories of emotional connections between self and
other become erstwhile records of moments of sympathy in history. Yet the
status of a poem as a record of a lived feeling depends in part on a theory
of poetry, still vigorous today, that emerges in the Romantic period through
intertwined poetic and emotional practices.
The circulation of sympathy through author, reader, real world, and text
still underwrites most of the boldest claims for the consequences of read-
ing and writing. This legacy of romanticism passes directly to theories of
Victorian fiction. By the Romantics’ logic, writers invite readers to fuse with
themselves and with the objects of their representation. Readers feel with
writers and with characters or representations, and readers in the real world
regard the objects of their gaze as if they were representations. Writers in the
real world do the same thing with their subjects, recognizing and represent-
ing them as material for sympathetic identification—the loop goes on. In
testifying to the effects of fiction, readers’ responses to characters in novels
often elide the difference between fictive constructions and actual experi-
ence: the training in sensibility offered by fiction often becomes evidence of
its own efficacy. Whether one judges the net effect of this aesthetic practice
as the stimulus for the changes of heart that accompanied or brought about
the social changes of the nineteenth century, or as a phenomenon ultimately
isolating, selfish, and dehumanizing to others, depends on temperament and
opinion, not established fact.
There is no doubt that Victorians had high hopes for the moral con-
sequences of novel reading, though editors, publishers, and proprietors of
52 Empathy and the Novel

libraries also presided over an informal censorship that kept fiction safe
for young people. Raised in status by the productive career of the popular
poet Walter Scott, novels in the Victorian period dominated the collections
of circulating libraries and were widely disseminated through weekly and
monthly periodical publications. Serialized fiction appeared in the com-
pany of nonfictional essays in many of the magazines of the day, and editors
exploited the connections between fictional representations and the topics
or issues they raised. Sympathy for fictional characters (including animals)
could be turned to persuasive advantage by editors advancing causes of the
day, or so they believed.24
By the end of the Victorian period and the first 150 years of the novel,
slavery had been abolished, child labor had been curtailed, free public edu-
cation had been established, factories had been made safer for workers, the
franchise had been extended, and a host of other reforms had occurred.
Literary representations calling upon the sympathetic imaginations of
readers had been marshaled to these and other causes in an outpouring
of didactic and sensational fictions. Both the social-problem novels of the
earlier part of the Victorian period (up until the 1848 climax of the Char-
tist movement) and the sensation fiction of the 1860s–70s depended upon
moving readers’ feelings about topical problems. The earlier industrial or
social-problem fiction gravitated toward the plight of workers or the rift
between the two nations of the rich and the poor, while sensation fiction
drew its lurid topics of bigamy, false imprisonment, madness, and divorce
from scandals of the day.
Whether the fiction on these topics appealed because it connected
to concerns of the present or recent past, confirming readers’ previously
formed opinions, or because it offered new ways of thinking that chal-
lenged complacency, it is difficult to know. Literary critics and novelists of
the day often deplored open didacticism (a legacy of the use of fiction in
tracts and pamphlets produced by various reform-minded societies), but
successful forms of didacticism included those that exemplified political or
religious arguments through convincing characters.25 Thus, Harriet Beecher
Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, condemning slavery, and Elizabeth Gaskell’s
Ruth (1853), about a fallen woman, both received approving reviews
even from periodicals otherwise hostile to fiction of overt didactic pur-
pose (Stang Theory 70). The contemporary reviews offer at least a record
of paid opinion. Whether novels-with-a-purpose actually swayed readers,
changed minds, and resulted in different behavior is difficult to ascertain
at a far remove. On the one hand, strong claims of efficacy include the
critical commonplace that Charles Dickens’s condemnation of the New
Poor Law’s workhouse system in Oliver Twist (1837–38) prevented the full
implementation of the law, so prejudiced against the system were his read-
ers. Further, the depiction of a Yorkshire orphanage, Dotheboys Hall, and
its sadistic headmaster, Wackford Squeers, in Dicken’s Nicholas Nickleby
 The Literary Career of Empathy 53

(1839) provoked threats of libel suits from Yorkshire schoolmasters. Dick-

ens had indeed exaggerated, but within a few years many of the allegedly
abusive establishments had closed down.26 Dickens had a lively sense of
the power of his celebrity and large circulation and believed that he could
influence public opinion. On the other hand, countless sensation fictions
evoked strong but ephemeral reactions that cannot be causally linked to
legislation or shifts in popular opinion.27 Out of the tens of thousands of
Victorian novels avidly consumed by circulating library patrons, only a few
can be causally linked to documented consequences, and serve better as
records of Victorian assumptions and anxieties than as proofs of the suc-
cesses of purposeful representation.28
It may then seem too portentous a question to put to Victorian fiction:
what effects did it have, and does it continue to have, on its readers? That
sympathy, specifically sympathy evoked by the situations of fictional char-
acters, was at the center of novelistic practice few contemporaries would
have disputed. The term “sympathy” appears with predictable frequency in
reviews of Victorian fiction (as well as in the novels themselves), and novel-
ists’ success or failure in rendering characters that could invoke sympathetic
reactions played a significant role in reviewers’ responses. Occasionally a
writer earns a rebuke for inviting sympathy for a character judged unworthy
by a reviewer, but in most cases, for Victorian reviewers, fictional charac-
ters either garner sympathy or they fail. The capacity to create sympathetic
characters, justly rewarded, becomes a basic test of a novelist’s competence.
Novelists were expected to affirm readers’ emotional reactions to their
characters with appropriate plots of poetic justice, so the development of
psychological realism only tells part of the story.
For one of the greatest of the Victorians, the cultivation of the reader’s
sympathetic imagination lay at the center of her art. To be sure, George
Eliot had a notion of character-construction as calling forth “tolerant judg-
ment, pity, and sympathy” in her readers (Eliot to John Blackwood, 18 Feb-
ruary 1857; Letters 2, 299). Yet she also hoped that the activity of reading
would renovate the reader, in Wordsworthian fashion. She writes in an 1855
review of Charles Kingsley’s Westward Ho! that a successful author may
teach “by giving us his higher sensibility as a medium, a delicate acoustic or
optical instrument, bringing home to our coarser senses what would other-
wise be unperceived by us” (Essays 126). She warns that open didacticism,
preachiness, and the riding of hobbyhorses all mar the effectiveness of sym-
pathetic composition. Extending readers’ sympathies is hard to achieve, and
authors fail when they make false assumptions about the psychology of the
objects of their representations. Eliot relies on her own empathy for her
creations in rendering what she “feel[s] to be true” in mixed characters (Eliot
to John Blackwood, 18 February 1857; Letters 2, 299).
Eliot’s famous 1856 essay, “The Natural History of German Life,” written
at a time when Eliot was readying herself as a fiction writer, articulates the
54 Empathy and the Novel

role of art and letters in actively shaping the reader’s imaginative capacity.
The views of Wordsworth about the renovating virtue of extended sympa-
thies receive in Eliot’s version a reworking that applies to narrative fiction,
as this extract makes plain:

The greatest benefit we owe to the artist, whether painter, poet, or

novelist, is the extension of our sympathies. Appeals founded on gen-
eralizations and statistics require a sympathy ready-made, a moral sen-
timent already in activity; but a picture of human life such as a great
artist can give, surprises even the trivial and the selfish into that atten-
tion to what is apart from themselves, which may be called the raw
material of moral sentiment. When Scott takes us into Luckie Muckle-
backit’s cottage, or tells the story of “The Two Drovers,”—when Word-
sworth sings to us the reverie of “Poor Susan,”—when Kingsley shows
us Alton Locke gazing yearningly over the gate which leads from the
highway into the first wood he ever saw,—when Hornung paints a
group of chimney-sweepers,—more is done towards linking the higher
classes with the lower, towards obliterating the vulgarity of exclusive-
ness, than by hundreds of sermons and philosophical dissertations. Art
is the nearest thing to life; it is a mode of amplifying experience and
extending our contact with our fellow-men beyond the bounds of our
personal lot. (“Natural History” 270–71)

The moral consequences of response to works of art thus animate Eliot’s

career. Her sense of her own contribution to her readers’ moral develop-
ment comes through in one of her letters to Charles Bray, in which she
writes that “the only effect I ardently long to produce by my writings, is that
those who read them should be better able to imagine and to feel the pains
and joys of those who differ from themselves in everything but the broad
fact of being struggling erring human creatures” (Eliot to Charles Bray, 5
July 1859; Letters 3, 111). Importantly, Eliot’s stated goals lay in the exten-
sion of readers’ feelings, not necessarily in any particular real-world action
to follow.
The assumption that feelings so cultivated by exposure to great fiction
will lead to active good citizenship underlies Martha Nussbaum’s strenuous
recommendation of a diet of canonical novels (Dickens, James, Stowe, and
Eliot herself). The great English Marxist critic Raymond Williams takes the
opposite view of the long-term effects of sympathetic fiction. Williams sug-
gests in his influential account of the Victorian industrial novels that readers
feeling sympathy for a character in a book (for instance, an impoverished
worker) experience a general structure of feeling that leads not to good citi-
zenship, but to apathy and inaction in the real world: “Recognition of evil
was balanced by fear of becoming involved. Sympathy was transformed, not
into action, but into withdrawal” (Culture and Society 109). This conviction
 The Literary Career of Empathy 55

has permeated subsequent novel criticism, casting doubt on the effects of

the sympathetic imagination that major realist writers so assiduously sought
to cultivate. Not that they were entirely naïve about sympathy—they knew
it could be abused, especially by charlatans who preyed on charitable indi-
viduals.29 Because they deliberately invoked it in support of favorite causes,
they were also aware of its manipulation.30 That missionaries and colonizers
deliberately employed sympathy to political ends in what we now call their
discourses of power would not have surprised Victorians. Fictive represen-
tations of sympathy-inducing subjects competed for the attention of the
public, so perhaps indifference to the plight of Williams’s industrial workers
actually reflected the fickleness of sympathy, which could be swayed by a
new and fresh appeal on behalf of another group, such as Hindu widows or
animal victims of vivisection. Distraction, rather than withdrawal, might be
a fairer explanation of the disconnection of art and action.
The notion that great art ought to do anything at all through sympathetic
connection with readers, or by exerting moral influence on them through
their emotions, was about to receive a serious and lasting challenge. At the
end of the Victorian period, just as the modern concepts of Einfühlung and
empathy began to emerge in German aesthetics and psychology, several
influential writers changed the terms of the debate by eschewing sensibil-
ity and empathetic connection.31 At least from an academic perspective,
the emotional bases of moral sentimentalism would never recover from
the blow.

Modern Defamiliarization and Estrangement

In the beginning of the twentieth century, the English novelist Vernon Lee
brought Einfühlung and empathy to a broader literary audience. In a public
lecture followed by a magazine piece in a popular journal,32 she advanced
a theory of aesthetic perception of form involving empathy, though not
(at first) so named. Originally Lee’s aesthetics focused on bodily sensations
and muscular adjustments made by beholders of works of art and architec-
ture and downplayed emotional responsiveness. By the time she revised and
expanded her ideas for presentation in book form as The Beautiful (1913),
Lee had adapted Lipps’s understanding of empathy, a parallel development
from common sources in German aesthetics. Defining the purpose of art as,
in part, “the awakening, intensifying, or maintaining of definite emotional
states” (Beautiful 99–100), Lee makes empathy a central feature of our col-
laborative responsiveness (128). In an account that combines motor mim-
icry, memory, and psychological responsiveness to inanimate objects, Lee
argues that empathy enters into “imagination, sympathy, and also into that
inference from our own inner experience which has shaped all our concep-
tions of an outer world, and given to the intermittent and heterogeneous
56 Empathy and the Novel

sensations received from without the framework of our constant and highly
unified inner experience, that is to say, of our own activities and aims” (68).
An explanation for our figurative language (62), empathy for Lee is ubiq-
uitous, a matter of cognition. She remarks, “If Empathy is so recent a dis-
covery, this may be due to its being part and parcel of our thinking; so that
we are surprised to learn of its existence, as Molière’s good man was to hear
that he talked in prose” (69). 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.
Literary modernism took on sympathy, empathy, and sensibility not by
questioning the claims of social and personal benefit that earlier writers
ascribed to these psychological experiences of emotion. Instead, it sought
to break with the aims that Philip Sidney framed in the Renaissance, Henry
Lord Kames recast in the eighteenth century, and the Romantic poets and
Victorian novelists such as Dickens, Gaskell, and Eliot sought to implement
in the nineteenth century. Modernists revised the purposes of art, broadly
conceived. Appeals to sentiment and feeling fell out of favor as merely con-
ventional. Poets eschewed empty phrasing. Experimental techniques dis-
rupted the surface of discourse so that it could not be read by getting “lost in
a book,” with the reader submerged in an unchallenging, absorbing, reading
trance. Inducing readers to work as strenuously thinking collaborators meant
depriving them of the emotional effects they had come to rely upon get-
ting from literature.33 To see how the critical evaluation of empathy changes
just as the term itself begins to gain an audience in the fields of aesthetics
and psychology, we turn to the areas of poetry and drama, where highbrow
cultural arbiters expressed disdain for the empathetic effects of character
identification and crude appeals to emotion.
Perhaps the best known assault on empathy as an aspect of artistic recep-
tion in the modern period comes from Bertolt Brecht’s so-called alienation
effect, a translation of the Verfremsdungseffekt (V-effekt), which can be bet-
ter rendered as an estrangement effect.34 Brecht offered his theory in essays
and interviews, but critics have also singled out aspects of his theatrical
practice that reach for the defamiliarization or making strange that would
promote a rational response and deflect viewers’ emotional reactions. In
particular, Brecht sought to discourage his audience from identifying with
characters. He took an interest in plays from non-Aristotelian traditions that
were “not dependent on empathy” (“Chinese Acting” 91). Brecht wanted
playgoers to experience detachment, rather than absorbed suspension of
disbelief. His techniques included the rejection of both the illusion of the
fourth wall and Stanislavskian acting. By reversing the conventions in both
these areas of dramaturgy, Brecht attempted to interfere with “the auto-
matic transfer of the emotions to the spectator,” a phenomenon Brecht
deplored as “emotional infection” (94). He wished instead for the presenta-
tion of dramatic figures “quite coldly, classically and objectively. For they are
 The Literary Career of Empathy 57

not matter for empathy; they are there to be understood” (“Conversation”

15). Brecht’s own examples of the V-effekt emphasize the disruption of
ordinary affective ties and attitudes (“Short Description” 144) and his tech-
nique, rendering character and action alien, remote, and strange to view-
ers, attempts to make the audience see things afresh, separated from their
ordinary, expected appearances. The effort to block a viewer’s role-taking
fusion with dramatic characters makes the anti-empathetic thrust of the
V-effekt clear.35 Brecht regarded the universalizing tendencies of viewers
experiencing empathy as an affront to the historical specificity of experi-
ence. Emotions, he felt, “have a quite definite class basis; the form they take
at any time is historical, restricted and limited in specific ways” and were
“in no sense universally human and timeless” (“New Technique” 145). Fur-
thermore, a recent example of the uses of the emotions discredited them
in Brecht’s eyes. He recalled with disgust “Fascism’s grotesque emphasizing
of the emotions” (145). Far better, he felt, to invite estrangement and defa-
miliarization:

The old A-effects quite remove the object represented from the spec-
tator’s grasp, turning it into something that cannot be altered; the new
are not odd in themselves, though the unscientific eye stamps anything
strange as odd. The new alienations are only designed to free socially-
conditioned phenomena from that stamp of familiarity which protects
them against our grasp today. (“Short Organum,” section 43, 192)

The legacy of Brecht’s anti-empathetic aesthetics can be plainly seen in Marx-

ist-descended postcolonial theory and criticism, in which the implausibility
of universal emotions makes empathy a suspect end of representation.
If Brecht’s drama rejects empathy outright, modernist poetic theory
laments the layers of convention and failures of perception that interfere
with a direct and fresh poetry.36 Admiration for poets who look “into a
great deal more than the heart” underlies a second influential modernist
evaluation of literary empathy. T. S. Eliot’s famous phrase, “the dissocia-
tion of sensibility,” comes from his 1921 essay “The Metaphysical Poets,”
which describes a lamentable loss of “the direct sensuous apprehension of
thought, or a recreation of thought into feeling” (“Metaphysical Poets” 246).
T. S. Eliot admired those early seventeenth-century poets whose emulation
would require that one “look into the cerebral cortex, the nervous system,
and the digestive tracts” (250). Eliot especially prized the empathetic con-
nection between poet and reader that he discovered in the Metaphysical
poets, and he regarded the crude appeals to emotion and the consciously
elevated language of later poets as a falling off from the achievements of the
seventeenth century. Eliot’s criticism played an important role in the deni-
gration of the Romantic poets, whose emphasis on empathetic connections
with readers and subjects comprised a central part of their poetic theory
58 Empathy and the Novel

and practice. This change in taste (celebrating seventeenth-century poets

and downgrading more emotionally expressive writers such as Percy Shel-
ley) had an enormous impact on the teaching of literature, through practical
criticism and the New Criticism.37 W. K. Wimsatt and Monroe Beardsley’s
condemnation of the mere psychologizing they associated with “the affec-
tive fallacy” owes a great deal to Eliot’s rewriting of the hierarchy of literary
values (Verbal Icon 21–39).
However, the fate of empathy as a representational goal in the early
twentieth century looks quite a bit different when one approaches it from
the perspective of the novel. Suzanne Clark has persuasively argued that
the change in fashion took the form of a gender division: “from the point
of view of literary modernism, sentimentality was both a past to be out-
grown and a present tendency to be despised. The gendered character of
this condemnation seemed natural: women writers were entangled in sen-
sibility, were romantic and sentimental by nature, and so even the best
might not altogether escape this romantic indulgence in emotion and sub-
limity” (Sentimental Modernism 2). It also depended upon the separation
of the more difficult, high literary modernist novel from the mainstream
of literary fiction, which continued to rely upon evocation of character
identification and other techniques that seek empathetically responding
readers. As I argue below, the rise of the middlebrow (often female) reader
sustains empathy as a goal of literary representation even while fragmenta-
tion, difficulty, deliberate obscurity, and exploitation of alienation effects
enjoyed their vogue. This does not mean, however, that modernist experi-
mental fiction eschewed empathy, rather that it recast the representation
of consciousness and feelings as one of the primary tasks of novels rejecting
conventional representation.
The thrust of experimentation in modernist fiction (with some nota-
ble exceptions38) emphasized techniques that would render character and
consciousness more vividly. E. M. Forster proclaimed in his 1927 lectures,
published as Aspects of the Novel, that “it is the function of the novelist to
reveal the hidden life at its source” (Aspects 45). Though humorously criti-
cal of novelists for neglecting the main facts of human life (birth, death,
food, sleep, sex), Forster celebrates the capacity of fiction to allow read-
ers to “know people perfectly” (63), for fictional characters are “people
whose secret lives are visible” (64). Henry James’s “centers of consciousness”
eschewed the old-fashioned authorial narrator for a figural narration rooted
in the lovingly rendered perceptions of a central observer.39 Virginia Woolf,
criticizing the conventionality and materialism of her contemporaries H.
G. Wells, Arnold Bennett, and John Galsworthy in her 1919 essay “Modern
Fiction,” called for a different kind of psychological realism, one that she
would perfect in her own novels. Woolf regarded James Joyce as one of
the few “spiritual” writers, “concerned at all costs to reveal the flickerings
of that innermost flame that flashes its messages through the brain, and in
 The Literary Career of Empathy 59

order to preserve it he disregards with complete courage whatever seems

to him adventitious, whether it be probability, or coherence, or any other
of these signposts which for generations have served to support the imagi-
nation of a reader when called upon to imagine what he can neither touch
nor see” (“Modern Fiction” 214). Woolf saw Joyce’s rendering of Bloom in
the Hades episode as “undoubtedly” coming close “to the quick of the mind”
(214), and many subsequent critics would agree that Joyce’s wandering Jew
of Dublin represents a triumph of the novelistic sympathetic imagination.
Joyce’s rendering of internal, bodily, and psychological states of mind and
feeling challenged the conventional boundaries of representation (as did
D. H. Lawrence’s frank representations of sexuality) by developing forms of
inwardness that opened characters up in a new way.
For Woolf, the matter and manner both required renovation. A spiritual
fiction, in Woolf’s terms, redresses the failures of earlier materialist fiction,
about which she asks, “Is it due to the method that we feel neither jovial
nor magnanimous, but centred in a self which, in spite of its tremor of sus-
ceptibility, never embraces or creates what is outside itself and beyond?”
(“Modern Fiction” 215). In other words, a writer’s empathetic exertions
must extend to both “the dark places of psychology” and the broad field
of other peoples’ experiences, for no material is barred (215). “Everything
is the proper stuff of fiction, every feeling, every thought,” writes Woolf,
“every quality of brain and spirit is drawn upon; no perception comes amiss”
(218). The challenge for the common reader she addresses is to adjust both
to the new techniques (a guiding, authorial comment on characters’ states
of minds was less likely to be provided) and to welcome representation of
unfamiliar, disconcerting, and even frightening thoughts and feelings. From
this combination comes the common belief, noticed by Wayne Booth, that
literature can and ought to “challenge” readers. (The same critics who would
vehemently resist the legitimacy of an openly didactic or polemical work
of literature will often implicitly endorse the capacity of difficult writing
to improve the reader who struggles with it.) Woolf’s classic statement of
the novelist’s task demands empathetic work on the part of both author
and reader, transmitted through the rendering of the ordinary mind of a
character:

Examine for a moment an ordinary mind on an ordinary day. The

mind receives a myriad impressions—trivial, fantastic, evanescent, or
engraved with the sharpness of steel. From all sides they come, an
incessant shower of innumerable atoms; and as they fall, as they shape
themselves into the life on Monday or Tuesday, the accent falls differ-
ently from of old; the moment of importance came not here but there;
so that if a writer were a free man and not a slave, if he could write
what he chose and not what he must, he could base his work upon
his own feeling and not upon convention, there would be no plot, no
60 Empathy and the Novel

comedy, no tragedy, no love interest or catastrophe in the accepted

style, and perhaps not a single button sewn on as the Bond Street
tailors would have it. Life is not a series of gig lamps symmetrically
arranged; but a luminous halo, a semi-transparent envelope surround-
ing us from the beginning of consciousness to the end. Is it not the task
of the novelist to convey this varying, this unknown and uncircum-
scribed spirit? (212–13)

Arguably, Woolf makes the rendering of a mind, empathetically conceived

by the novelist and recognized by the reader, a priority over all the usual
aims of narrative fiction, including telling a story (E. M. Forster sighed, “oh
dear, yes— the novel tells a story . . .” [Aspects, 26]).
As we will see in the last section of this chapter, character identification,
which may be enhanced by representations such as the one Woolf imag-
ines, remains the single most important facet of response to fiction articu-
lated by middlebrow readers. Even authors now considered difficult often
strove to reach that broad readership with representations generated out of
sympathetic imagining that George Eliot would have recognized. Joseph
Conrad’s 1912 credo “A Familiar Preface” sounds the hopeful note: “I would
fain claim for myself the faculty of so much insight as can be expressed in a
voice of sympathy and compassion” (Personal Record xvii). Modernist reac-
tion against it never eliminated empathy from the novel as a part of com-
position or a goal of representation: modern novelists considered it part of
their craft and an ingredient in their relationships to both their inventions
and their readers.

The Rise of the Middlebrow Reader

In the twentieth century, a large group of educated general readers some-

times known as common readers (Woolf) or as middlebrow readers devel-
oped influence in the market for English-language fiction. Neither the
lowbrow consumers of mass-market fiction (who have now gone over com-
pletely to television, film, and video), nor the expensively educated trained
highbrows who embraced the hard work of interpreting complex, experi-
mental modernist fiction, middlebrow readers tended to be educated people
who wished to read the right thing, and were happy to be told which books
would suit them by book reviewers. Many of them were women.40 Empow-
ered by education and informed by Oprah, book reviews, word-of-mouth,
and Readers’ Guides, the descendents of these middlebrow readers popu-
late the informal book clubs that make up such an important feature of
the reading landscape in the twenty-first century, while publishers depend
upon them to buy books as fewer and fewer people read literature at all.41
A number of factors influenced the growth in middlebrow readership from
 The Literary Career of Empathy 61

the late 1920s onward. First, the demanding nature of high modernist liter-
ary fiction meant that novel reading (and novel writing) became a more dig-
nified activity. This change in the status of fiction accompanied the growth
of a new category, literary fiction, which split off from the mass of publica-
tions in areas now labeled as subliterary “genres.”42 A person such as Virginia
Woolf could be a celebrity, with her picture in Vogue, even if her novels
were read by relatively few. Eager to read for pleasure and edification, but
insufficiently invested in the strenuous interpretative work to make a steady
diet of high literary modernism, middlebrow readers patronized bookshops
and circulating libraries in large numbers. They read excellent short fiction
in popular magazines, especially in the United States. They read the advice
of book reviewers writing for the weeklies and dailies. Despite the disdain
of cultural arbiters, best-seller lists became powerful devices for the rec-
ommendation of reading material, fictional and nonfictional, to numerous
middlebrows attentive to fashion.
Several publishing houses, such as the Modern Library and Penguin
Books, were founded to reach this readership. Book clubs such as the
National Book League, the Literary Guild, and the Book of the Month Club
capitalized on middlebrow readers’ willingness to have their reading cho-
sen for them, particularly as books became part of the appropriate furnish-
ings of the middle-class home. Advertisers emphasized novels as consumer
products. In the meantime, literary criticism split off from book reviewing
as a newly professionalized class of interpreters trained university students
(including growing numbers of women and working-class students) in the
technical analysis and judgment of literature. Women had always made up
a large part of the audience for novels, but now more college-educated and
professional women brought their disposable income to the bookshop or
to the automatic billing subscription service. For these middlebrow read-
ers, aims of escapist pleasure reading needed not conflict with the desire to
stretch a little intellectually, so long as the work was not so demanding as
to interfere with immersion reading habits. Aims of self-improvement and
social awareness were not absent from the middlebrows’ vision of what
reading might do for them.43 Fiction was valued for introducing readers to
new worlds and experiences. Indeed, the use of literature in the secondary
schools as a vehicle for teaching values, history, heritage, and civics laid the
groundwork for a later generation’s use of fiction to promulgate values of
tolerance and cultural understanding (Pinsent, Children’s Literature 5).
Reading fiction was esteemed throughout the century, especially as it was
regarded as a personally improving activity. Writing in 1926, just around the
time when Virginia Woolf’s first volume of Common Reader essays brought
her work for the periodicals and her vision for a spiritual modernism to a
wider audience, the American professor Frank Luther Mott articulated the
value of novels for ordinary readers in his Rewards of Reading. Thought-
ful men, according to Mott, benefited in practical fashion from the empa-
62 Empathy and the Novel

thetic experience of immersion reading. Novels offered insight into human

motives, as well the friendship of characters such as David Copperfield.
Wholeheartedly recommending both canonical fiction, historical fiction,
and selections of the popular writers of the day (such as Booth Tarkington),
Mott praises the egalitarian zone created for the fiction reader: “all classes,
and more than that, all races, meet us in fiction’s pages” (Rewards 23). Fic-
tion overcomes the challenges of cultural, national, and racial difference
by offering opportunities for empathetic identification: “We dramatize the
events of the novels in our own persons. . . . we are there; we are caught up
into the whirl of things; the whole aggregate mass of emotions, social con-
ditions, characters, influences, environment, takes hold of us and becomes
personal to us; and we emerge from it, when we close the book, bigger,
stronger, richer in personality, because we have experienced these phases
of life, however vicariously” (28). Even for this enthusiastic popularizer of
reading, however, the old worry about the moral peril of vicarious emotion
(as in the novel of sensibility) remains; tellingly, Mott’s victim of fiction is
the idle female: “A housewife who sits down in her rocker after breakfast,
morning-cap over uncombed hair, leaving dishes standing in the sink and
beds unmade, to read the latest novel about impossible loves of impossible
people till she gets into a glow of false emotion, is a pitiable figure” (20).
The danger of the self-improving motive for reading devolving into such
masturbatory scenes haunts apologies for fiction. Who is to guarantee that
the feelings-for-sharing offered by novels will result in the robust forms of
self-help imagined by Mott, or the expansion of the perceptive capacities
implied by Woolf?
Late in the century, as novel reading no longer seems such a certain part
of the cultural, intellectual, and pleasure-seeking practices of literate people
(even middlebrows), its valued social consequences have become ever more
overdetermined. Empathy offers an almost magical guarantee of fiction’s
worthiness. Martha Nussbaum assesses the situation in terms of the chal-
lenge we face in realizing and respecting others’ consciousness and expe-
rience, in a passage with clear links to Virginia Woolf: “We see personlike
shapes all around us: but how do we relate to them? All too often, we
see them as just shapes, or physical objects in motion. What storytelling
in childhood teaches us to do is to ask questions about the life behind the
mask, the inner world concealed by the shape. It gets us into the habit of
understanding that that inner world is differently shaped by different social
circumstances.”44 For Nussbaum, the reading practices of the middlebrow
are more likely to result in good ethical effects, while highbrow (analyti-
cal) professional readers are least likely to benefit, a sad message for English
professors: “Reading can only have the good effects we claim for it if one
reads with immersion, not just as a painful duty. Professors of literature are
often jaded and detached; they don’t read with the freshness and respon-
siveness of ordinary readers” (“Exactly” 353). For the distinguished theorist
 The Literary Career of Empathy 63

and literary critic Robert Scholes, the task at hand is to persuade his readers
(mainly those benighted, jaded professors) to teach literature in such a way
that readers make connections with their real lives and actions: “reading,
though it may be a kind of action, is not the whole action but a part of it,
remaining incomplete unless and until it is absorbed and transformed in the
thoughts and deeds of readers” (Protocols x). Scholes believes that “reading
can and should answer to social and ethical concerns” (x). Wayne Booth
puts faith in what he calls the coduction enacted by readers discussing their
appraisals of literary works. The comparative, communal evaluation of the
work, “a thoroughgoing particular engagement with this narrative, consid-
ered neither as based on nor leading to general rules but as an ever-growing
awareness of what is humanly possible” could make novel reading and even
literary criticism ethical activities (Company 76). Booth also believes that
novel reading can have moral consequences. He collects dozens of examples
of witnesses who testify to the power of fiction to change lives, from the
Austen reader who learned to stand up for herself by reading Mansfield
Park (1814), to the repentant racist brought to guilty consciousness by Toni
Morrison’s Song of Solomon (1977), to those who treated Jews, or female
academics, or Africans, or Southerners, differently because they’d taken to
heart a novel (Company 278–79). Booth candidly points out the inherent
untrustworthiness of such reports (though they are legion), and he does not
censor the regrettable effects of fiction—those Ayn Rand readers, swearing
off charitable giving!—but he believes, at least, that the reports of real read-
ers about the effects of novels on their lives deserve critical reflection.
As each literary period treated in this brief survey of the effects of
empathetic reading experiences has had its skeptics, let not the recent past
be represented only by those who see, or wish for, a defense of fiction in
terms of its virtuous actions. Writing in the 1980s, novelist Elizabeth Hard-
wick observed that the emphasis on resonance with readers’ experiences
might in fact narrow the reach of literature: “the personalization of fiction,
the reduction of it to the boundaries of the reading self, often one who
has lived for only a few decades in the twentieth century, is an intensive
democratization not quite so felicitous for the spread of literature as one
might have predicted” (“Reading” 15). This is not simply a version of the
antiegalitarian sentiments that often undermine the arguments of defend-
ers of literature, as in this extract from the late Victorian Andrew Lang:
“People who deserved to be able to read, did read, and now that every
one can read, few people deserve to do so, for few go beyond a newspa-
per. It is but a small minority who even aspire to study a novel. What is
the result? The result is that authors endeavour to reach that vast public
which, in no age and in no country, has cared for the pleasures of literature.
We hear it said of a book that it does not appeal to a man on an omnibus,
or to a man lunching in a public-house. That condemns a book, therefore
authors debase their wares, to captivate indolent women, and the man on
64 Empathy and the Novel

the omnibus” (“Introduction” 9–10). Lang participates in the long tradi-

tion of hand-wringing about the power of reader-consumers to debase the
novel through their purchasing power. This kind of criticism is alive and
kicking in the late twentieth and early twenty-first century, as the churlish
response to Oprah Winfrey’s power to move books through her television
book club more than demonstrates.45
Hardwick, in contrast to Lang and his fretting about novelists selling out
to readers, worries more about the way we (teachers, authorities) recom-
mend reading. By advertising novels as so relevant, personally beneficial,
and immediately useful to self and society, do we not render unpalatable the
very product we wish to place in the hands of the young? Even if empathy
for fictional characters were to be demonstrated a short cut to altruism and
compassion, should novel reading be asked to bear that heavy freight? Hard-
wick wonders, “so, perhaps we should not solicit, insist, badger, embarrass,
on behalf of this almost free pleasure” (“Reading” 18). Perhaps the guerilla
promoters of literacy who offer a shag to anyone spotted reading a novel are
on the right track. Novels, surely, can still be sexy, time wasting, and subver-
sive—or do they have to be vitamin-enriched bowls conveying good-for-you
moral fiber? It is helpful to recall that the very centuries in which novels
were frequently condemned as corrupting influences on the young enjoyed
burgeoning growth in the numbers of novels and novel readers. Bring on the
prohibitions; print the warning labels. Novels can be dangerous. They con-
vey disturbing ideas. They awake strange desires. They invite identification
with criminals and prostitutes and assassins. They give people, not just chil-
dren, nightmares that they can’t forget. Years ago my parents put the hard-
cover first editions inside the bookcases with leaded glass doors. These were
banned books, the Updike with the three-way sex, the signed Isaac Singers,
the valuable collection of Horatio Algers. You bet I read them.
 3

READERS’ EMPATHY

The distinguished novel critic Wayne Booth troubled to ask a variety of

readers of different ages and backgrounds about the novels that had led
them to do something specific: to make a change in their behavior or beliefs
(Company 278–79). In this chapter, I follow Booth’s lead, giving priority to
several different kinds of evidence about reactions to reading fiction. First
and most important, I describe and liberally quote what other readers have
told me about their experiences of narrative empathy. Though this proce-
dure does not render my research empirical, it significantly broadens the
scope of my inquiry, certainly beyond my own personal responses to fiction.
From these reports by other readers I distill a set of working hypotheses
about the qualities of novels that evoke empathy in readers, hypotheses that
in turn contribute to a working theory of narrative empathy. Subsequently,
I examine the empirical studies on the effects of reading, and I collect the
ideas about readers’ empathy that feature in that scholarly literature. This
prepares the way for consideration, in chapter 4, of potential impact in the
marketplace of reading materials deemed likely to evoke empathy. Though
this project has formalist qualities, in that it seeks to identify narrative tech-
niques that tend to evoke empathetic responses, its inevitable emphasis on
what readers feel about novels departs from the purely textual focus of
New Criticism and much of narratology. Professional readers will recognize
the influence not only of Booth, but also of Louise Rosenblatt’s Literature
as Exploration (1938), in which she explores readers’ transactions of texts
into fully realized literary works. Chicago School rhetorical criticism is also
a major influence. My interest in readers’ feelings participates in the project
of assuring that the umbrella of cognitive literary studies arches over the
affective dimensions of literary response, but it departs from much of that
literature in one way: I do not assume that social good necessarily comes
of empathetic reading.1 Novels’ intellectual and emotional influences may
certainly lead to socially consequential results, but good effects of novel
reading ought to be analyzed in context with neutral and negative effects.
Empathetic reading experiences that confirm the empathy-altruism theory,
I argue, are exceptional, not routine.
66 Empathy and the Novel

Wayne Booth inquired of his interlocutors, “Name fictions that changed

your character—or made you want to change your conduct,” an imperative
instruction that implies fictions ought to do both things. When I took the
early versions of this book around as talks to a variety of different venues
(including church groups, friends of the local library, book clubs, as well as
university audiences), I found that a majority of my interlocutors agreed with
Booth’s premise—reading fiction ought to change your character or make
you want to alter your conduct. When asked my more neutral version of
the question, however, they often confessed, “I just read to relax,” or “Novels
are just for fun, to get away from things for a while.” Adult women readers
in particular resisted the sense that novels were supposed to be doing any-
thing more than interesting or entertaining them. They often commented
quite appropriately and analytically about particular novels that had made
a strong impression on them, but demurred when asked if the strong char-
acter identification or immersion in a fictional world that they reported had
any specific results in their real lives. My question didn’t imply that novels
ought to do anything—I just inquired, “Can you think of any time where a
novel made you do something specific in the world, something you might
not have done or thought of if you hadn’t read the novel?” This way of ask-
ing the question gave many readers the permission to answer no.
Nonetheless, some readers confided (privately, or by e-mail) instances
of their influence by a novel. One member of my Bread Loaf audience in
Juneau, Alaska, told me that reading a number of novels by the popular
South Asian writers made her less shy around subcontinental Indian people:
she struck up a conversation with a woman in a sari who had sat down
next to her on the bus. A colleague reported, only partly facetiously, that he
had started making Spanish rice because Perry Smith, the murderer in Tru-
man Capote’s In Cold Blood (1965), especially liked the dish. A beautifully
turned out octogenarian Episcopalian lady won the attention of her peers
when she spoke out in response to my question, “Has a novel ever made you
do anything differently?” “Ye-es,” she announced in a genteel drawl, “Lady
Chatterley’s Lover,” and she let our imaginations take it from there.
The example of D. H. Lawrence, so positive for my informant, brings
us once again to the topic of the possible negative consequences of novel
reading. A. S. Byatt blames Lawrence for misleading an entire generation
of women readers into false expectations about sex and poor choices of
sex partners.2 If these topics raise the spectre of fiction’s often condemned
tendency to misinform, titillate, or even corrupt readers, other testimony
appears to confirm the novel’s relationship to consumerism. Writers and
publishers have an obvious financial interest in getting readers to purchase
another novel in the series, or one in the same genre, or by the same author.
For better or for worse, the novel is a commodity, whose relationship to
other products in the marketplace matters when the effects of reading are
under investigation. Acquiring particular accessories, garments, and other
 Readers’ Empathy 67

purchasable tokens of a desired identity can be the direct result of novel

reading. The toy industry capitalizes on this phenomenon when it offers
action figures, costumes, party decorations, and updated versions of old
games as thematic tie-ins to movies, cartoons, and even books. Adults are
not immune to being influenced as consumers by their exposure to fic-
tional worlds and their denizens. Some late Victorian relative of mine col-
lected a set of Dickens plates, decorated with well-known characters from
the fiction: the heroes and villains appear in the dining room, emerging
from under the dessert. Using these plates acknowledges the tackiness of
celebrity knick-knackery, but also inevitably announces a degree of erudi-
tion—everyone knows Little Nell and Bill Sikes, but Captain Cuttle? (He’s
in Dombey and Son [1848].) As the displays in the Dickens House suggest,
Dickens was a celebrity, a figure more like Madonna than Stephen King, and
his fictional universe compares to George Lucas’s Star Wars in its cultural
iconicity. Thus, perhaps buying Dickens plates indicates enthusiasm for a
fashion rather than direct influence by a novel.
Contemporary evidence suggests, however, that books can indeed make
us buy things. The jewelry company Bulgari believes so: it recently commis-
sioned a novel from Fay Weldon, complete with embedded references to its
products. The Bulgari Connection (2001) was at first privately printed by the
company before being reissued by a commercial publisher. A friend reports
purchasing a three-piece Italian wool tweed Polo suit under the influence of
Patricia Highsmith’s The Talented Mr. Ripley (1955). (In his own defense, he
observes that the suit was on sale, 40 percent off.) Before I swore off D. H.
Lawrence, I sought out colorful tights, inspired by Gudrun’s stockings. In
the same period (my teenaged years), a friend of mine more influenced by
Victorian fiction wore form-fitting grey dresses in emulation of Jane Eyre. If
it were not so embarrassing to admit, we might have more evidence of the
effects of reading if we were to scrutinize records of our purchases. Typi-
cally, a reader called upon to reflect upon the ethical effects of her reading
will suppress the knowledge that her scarlet winter cape pays homage to
the descriptive power of scenes of consumer desire in Elizabeth Gaskell’s
Sylvia’s Lovers (1863). It is one thing to concur that the novel (historically
speaking) participates in the formation of the bourgeois subject, and quite
another to notice proof of that thesis in one’s own behavior in the market-
place.
Before going on to examine the commonly held assumptions about the
effects of reading, I tackle in the immediately following section my primary
subject—the phenomenon of readers’ experiencing empathy with fictional
characters and with other aspects of novels.3 Nine proposals about read-
ers’ empathy emerge from this discussion. In the second full section of this
chapter, six more proposals emerge as I examine the scholarship on the
effects of reading. I show there that this research reflects an intention to
reveal positive effects of reading in the world, as well as bias in favor of
68 Empathy and the Novel

culturally sanctioned literary texts (including poetry). The researchers in

this area have been more curious about the good that reading quality fiction
may do, and less assiduous in tracing possibly disreputable consequences of
reading or in evaluating the ethical effects of reading popular fiction (the
books most novel readers choose). While I certainly do not think that novels
have a primarily negative influence on readers, I observe that their impact
is considerably more unruly than advocates of narrative ethics would lead
us to believe.

Readers on Empathy for Fiction

When large numbers of readers are consulted about their empathetic read-
ing experiences, a strong pattern emerges supporting the notion that char-
acter identification lies at the heart of readers’ empathy. These characters
need not be human:

The first novel that came to my mind was Black Beauty. Some might
see it as problematic to claim that one can feel empathy with an ani-
mal (real or fictional), but I think it is very possible to do so.4

As a child, my favourite book was Black Beauty, which I read six times.
I fear this means I identified with a horse, albeit a highly anthropomor-
phized horse who greatly resembled a powerless child.5

Novels and stories featuring animals, miniaturized figures such as Tolkien’s

hobbits, and toys come to life provoke empathetic reactions of readers who
report ready identification with nonhuman figures. This suggests that char-
acter identification and empathy felt for fictional characters requires certain
traits (such as a name, a recognizable situation, and at least implicit feelings)
but dispenses with other requirements associated with realistic representa-
tion. Readers’ tendency to anthropomorphize nonhuman characters even in
texts strongly resistant to normalizing character, such as the early stories in
Italo Calvino’s Cosmicomics (1965, trans. 1968), persists well beyond their
attainment of the developmental sophistication that enables humans to dis-
tinguish between people and unconscious or inanimate others. The literature
and orature of most cultures feature talking animals, and anthropomorphism,
sometimes disapproved of by educators, has proven difficult to stamp out.
Tricksters alone present a compelling body of material from widely dispersed
cultures: Anansi, Raven, Reynard the Fox, Coyote, Brer Rabbit, and their
adversaries need not be human in order to invite character identification.6
If character identification routinely overcomes the significant barrier of
species difference, as it appears to do, then readers’ empathy may be swiftly
activated by a simple sign of an active agent. Merely naming a character may
 Readers’ Empathy 69

set readers’ empathy in motion; indeed information leading to precise place-

ment of a character in terms of species, race, age, gender, and other aspects
of status often appears after an emotional hook has connected reader and
character. Thus I propose that empathy for fictional characters may require
only minimal elements of identity, situation, and feeling, not necessarily complex
or realistic characterization. This first hypothesis, which has been observed
in experiments with real readers as they begin reading a story,7 runs counter
to common assumptions about complexity and realism as prized elements
of canonical fiction. Two possibilities that undergird this hypothesis deserve
special emphasis. First, if the very start of a narrative can evoke empathy at
the mere gesture of naming and quick situating, then readers may be primed
by the story-receiving circumstance to get ready to empathize. The mirror-
neuron manifold for shared intersubjectivity may be activated by simple
cues announcing the existence of another being. Second, something about
the signal alerting readers or listeners to a text or performance’s fictionality
apparently permits identification to occur regardless of factuality or verisi-
militude, though the first reaction may later be revised. Whether mature,
experienced readers show a similar degree of swift emotional responsive-
ness to just-introduced characters as children (not yet habituated to the
conventions of psychological realism) would make an interesting research
question. At stake is the basic question of whether our fiction habit plays
upon our human empathic disposition, develops it, or possibly even trains
us in delaying or disengaging it. Human empathy may arise from a set of
responses so swift and automatic that cognition, including lessons learned
from stories, functions to limit it.
Childhood reading, recalled across the decades, provides examples of
many readers’ most memorable (or admissible) empathetic reactions to fic-
tion. It may be that early, striking reading experiences occurring before a
reader has been socialized into the kinds of responses that win praise at
school stand out, even in academic readers’ memories. A question remains
as to whether mature readers feel differently about fictional characters as
they grow up, or whether they learn to assess and present their responses
differently. (As we will shortly see, the notion that a badly written book or
stereotyped character can invoke empathetic response particularly both-
ers trained readers, for whom quality matters.) Whatever authorizes their
disclosures, many readers report that novels in which child characters are
subjected to cruel or unfair treatment evoke empathy, as these exemplary
reports suggest:

I also deeply identified with Jane Eyre, especially during her child-
hood. I also identified with the young David Copperfield, when my
mother read that book aloud to me when I was about twelve. In both
cases my strongest empathetic responses were aroused by the scenes
of abuse by cruel relatives and abusive school teachers, even though
70 Empathy and the Novel

I was a happy lovingly-nurtured child who adored my teachers and

school. Perhaps there’s something about the fundamental powerless-
ness of childhood that explains the continuing appeal of suffering
characters, from the March girls to Jane and David, to all those other
orphans and fairy tale victims.8
Certainly when I first read Jane Eyre at 14 I felt in complete empa-
thy with Jane through her early experiences—the narrative voice, the
intensity of the passion, the experience of isolation and injustice and
lability and rage she evokes.9
Jane Eyre is a magnet for reader empathy—encouraging anyone who
has ever felt victimized as a child by more powerful adults to identify
with her (a small subset being girls who attended boarding schools up
to and including the nineteen fifties as I can personally attest). The
choice of first person narration also contributes to increase the reader’s
empathetic reaction in this novel and in others.10
I doubt whether anyone who has read Tom Brown’s Schooldays, and who
has himself attended an English Public School as a boarder, has failed to
empathise with at least one of the characters—probably Tom. I boarded
in the late 1970s and early 1980s, and, as unbelievable as it may sound,
there were many parallels in both emotions and experiences.11

All four readers emphasize the cruelty, injustice, and victimization of the
children in their reports, though only one directly identifies with the fic-
tional character’s experiences. These mature readers remember strong fel-
low feeling even as they acknowledge differences from characters’ situa-
tions. They testify that a reader does not have to be an orphan, a maltreated
victim, or a beaten animal to experience a strong empathetic response
through character identification. My second hypothesis can be drawn from
these readers’ observation: character identification often invites empathy, even
when the character and reader differ from each other in all sorts of practical
and obvious ways. Indeed, the opportunity to share feelings underwrites
character identification that transcends difference: I am not an orphan, but I
feel with Jane Eyre. This nearly ubiquitous readerly experience suggests that
the opposite hypothesis also deserves exploration: spontaneous empathy for a
fictional character’s feelings opens the way for character identification (even in
the face of strong differences, e.g.: the protagonist is a rabbit). This chicken-
and-egg pair of proposals has important implications for the way teachers
and narrative ethicists understand the consequences of reading fiction. If,
on the one hand, empathy precedes (and invites) character identification,
then empathy may be better understood as a faculty that readers bring to
their imaginative engagement with texts—a human default setting—rather
than as a quality gained from or cultivated by encounters with fiction. (The
 Readers’ Empathy 71

absence of interest Apsberger’s syndrome sufferers and high-functioning

autistics show in fictional worlds, made up stories, and characters may con-
nect to their lack of normal human empathy.) If, on the other hand, charac-
ter identification opens the opportunity for empathy (this is the more com-
mon and more widely disseminated assumption), then representation of
characters with strong differences might be used didactically, to develop a
reader’s moral sense. Of course, readers of different dispositions may experi-
ence character identification and empathy in varying orders, and their expe-
riences of both phenomena may change depending on the novel, the author,
or their age and condition while reading.12
Looking at college students’ reports about empathetic characters verifies
the sense that a character’s negative affective states, such as those provoked
by undergoing persecution, suffering, grieving, and experiencing painful
obstacles, make a reader’s empathizing more likely.13 College students and
precocious young readers’ experiences also confirm the observation that
a sense of empathetic connection with a character or situation can be felt
without an exact match in identity. Texts eliciting readers’ deeply held fears
seem especially successful in provoking empathy:

Although I have never been in a situation in which I was charged with

murder, I have experienced empathy for Vernon, the 15–16 year old
boy in Vernon God Little. In my reading I have been overcome with
stress and frustration for him as he has been ignored by the “grown-
ups,” wrongly accused, and tricked.14
I experienced empathy with Jimmy/Snowman in Oryx and Crake.
Although I do not share his dystopic environment, his sense of loss,
confusion, and inability to retain some pieces of knowledge are consis-
tent with everyday life: it is bewildering and nobody shares our exact
history to remind us what we’ve lost.15
Age of Innocence, Little Women, any novel where the father or younger
brother dies—I cry in all of these books because, although my dad or
mom or little brother are still obviously with me, I am so protective of
them that these events always make me extremely upset.16
I think I felt empathy for Jimmy in Oryx and Crake. He felt bad about
being an “art person” as opposed to Crake the “science person.” My
boyfriend is a science person—sometimes I feel that my major is less
important.17
I think if anything at all I felt empathy with Edwidge Danticat’s Krik?
Krak! Coming from a war-torn country myself, I could honestly feel
what the characters were feeling. The story that sticks out to me the
most is the one where the woman finds an abandoned child which we
discover is dead.18
72 Empathy and the Novel

In this sequence of comments from articulate teenaged readers, the effort to

connect a response to personal experience or familiar feelings ranges from
the assertion that reader and character have nothing in common, all the way
to a close match in personal history. The match contributes to a sense of
certainty (“I could honestly feel . . .”) but does not constitute a requirement
for empathetic reactions. Instead, a continuum of degrees of emotional rec-
ognition can be observed in these and other readers’ reports. Many assert
shared feelings despite different experiences. Many report strong identifica-
tion with the character. Some discover aspects of their own identity through
imaginative fusion with a character. Each of these background states can be
accompanied by an empathetic reaction, in these cases, to characters expe-
riencing negative feelings. The students were at liberty to mention any text
that came to mind, but they did not choose upbeat novels and short stories
with joyful or comical characters. A fourth hypothesis may thus be added to
the tally: empathetic responses to fictional characters and situations occur more
readily for negative feeling states, whether or not a match in details of experience
exists. The emphasis on shared negative feelings is a striking feature of the
voluntary responses I have collected—readers could certainly have reported
sharing feelings of joy or pleasure, but they tend not to, or not to recognize
those readerly sensations as empathy.19 Perhaps the circumstances of fic-
tionality enable exploration of negative feeling states that might otherwise
be avoided or repressed for personal or social reasons.
My fifth hypothesis, based on readers’ testimony, points out that nar-
rative empathy cannot be expected invariably to work, for empathy with
characters doesn’t always occur as a result of reading an emotional evocative
fiction. What causes this variation in response to a fixed text may be readers’
individual dispositions, aspects of their identity, their age and experiences,
their location in a remote culture or historical period, their knowledge, their
fluency in genres and conventions, or even the quality of the attention they
give to reading. Negative factors such as prejudice, bias, impatience with a
particular literary style, or feeling rushed or pressured might also account
for unresponsive reading. Indeed, there are so many possible reasons for
interference with intended emotional effects that great care must be taken
not to confound causes: if lack of familiarity with generic conventions corre-
sponds roughly to gender in a group of readers, which factor would account
for the lack of an empathetic response? An alternative way of phrasing this
proposal would state the obvious truism that no one novel evokes empathy
in all its readers, but that formulation would downplay the fact that some
readers seem less disposed to empathize with fiction than others. Readers’
dispositions matter: as Michael Steig observes in Stories of Reading: Subjec-
tivity and Literary Understanding (1989), “Because of personality and expe-
rience, some readers are capable of more original and deeper understanding
of emotionally puzzling aspects of particular literary works than are others;
and such understandings can be conceptualized by such a reader through a
 Readers’ Empathy 73

reflection upon the emotions experienced and upon personal associations

with those emotions” (xiv).
A few readers assert that they never empathize with fiction (though a
subset of these volunteer that autobiography moves them). Real readers
also confess to occasions when something about a text blocks empathy or
invites a different response from the one the central character apparently
feels. For instance, one of my students observes that she experienced “differ-
ent feelings with the mother’s view of the daughter’s marriage to a non-Hai-
tian man” in Edwidge Danticat’s Krik? Krak! (1995): “I was angry whereas
the daughter simply let her mother’s protests roll off her back.”20 Arguably,
this response belongs to the range of appropriate emotions invited by Dan-
ticat’s close-to-the-bone representation of intergenerational conflict. Much
of what we feel while reading depends upon responding to differences
between a character’s reaction and what we believe to be the narrator’s or
implied author’s point about a situation. A reader who especially appreci-
ates ironic effects may be less likely to experience spontaneous emotional
sharing with a character. This sort of resistance to empathy is cultivated by
academic modes of analysis that privilege critical distance and observations
about style. Paradoxically, professionals often disguise their own passion-
ate reading habits from their students. These young avid readers are often
rewarded most generously for their argumentative brio and technical analy-
sis (regardless of how they feel about the texts), while they learn to suppress
discussion of certain emotional responses—outrage and indignation can still
be mentioned, while “gushy” feelings cannot.
While readers who dissent from an authorized reaction to a text some-
times suppress this fact, some readers invited to meet and match an author-
ity’s endorsement of particular feelings evoked by fiction outspokenly rebel.
Any ardent recommender of novels well knows that the recommending
formula, “you’ll love this book,” encodes a wish rather than a prediction.
Despite the popularity of some particular texts among cohorts of read-
ers, my correspondents honestly reflected on the fact that an empathetic
response of one’s own might well not be shared by other readers, even
(especially) one’s children:

And then there’s the salutary (bracing) experience of trying to share

your empathetic experience with a child, say a daughter. When my
daughters . . . reached an age where they could read Little Women,
Jane Eyre, Heidi (a little earlier), I presented these books to them in
the full expectation they would like them. They didn’t. Heidi was a
bore. The Secret Garden was barely tolerated; both preferred The Little
Princess. When we got to Jane Eyre (the process took several years—I
never presented more than one book at a time), the older one turned
round and said to me, Mom, what is it that you liked [about] these
punished goody characters? . . . I’ve wondered if the difference my two
74 Empathy and the Novel

daughters (very different in character) both displayed is a generational

change. Why read about abused children? I almost take this as a good
sign, as showing my pair were somehow healthier than me at their
age, didn’t expect to be punished and would not buy into the ideas
implicit in these scenes.21

We witness generational changes of taste in character types and situations as

well as in genre, and these large shifts can have an impact on a classic text’s
empathetic potential. Vernon Lee’s theory of aesthetic empathy stresses the
sensitiveness of people living in particular times and periods to shapes to
which they have been habituated: “Nothing is so routinist as imagination
and emotion,” she writes, “ and empathy, which partakes of both, is therefore
more dependent on familiarity than is the perception by which it is started”
(The Beautiful 134–35). The hypothesis that comes out of this observation
confutes the notion of a timeless classic: The capacity of a particular novel
to invoke readers’ empathy may change over time (and some texts may only
activate the empathy of their first, immediate audience). Evidence of an earlier
empathetic reaction to novels that no longer reach readers emotionally may
be useful to both literary and cultural historians, as well as to teachers hop-
ing to bring classics to life for a new generation of readers.
Another kind of dissent from mainstream empathy occurs when a reader
connects emotionally with the “wrong” character. Readers such as this listserv
discussant embrace the emotional stretching—to include the perspectives
of unsavory characters— that this kind of empathizing seems to demand:

Isn’t the whole point of empathy to find it in ourselves to feel for

others we wouldn’t ordinarily identify with? . . . Isn’t it our empathy
for fools, villains and other unattractive types that deepens our under-
standing, in that, against our inclinations, we identify certain aspects
of their humanity with our own?22

This interpretation recuperates empathy for nasty characters to the broad

project of character education for tolerance, by emphasizing the humanity of
the vicious or the risible. A more complicated circumstance occurs for read-
ers who respond against the grain and know (as this reader does) that their
feelings are anomalous. In private correspondence, readers confessed not only
to disliking certain popular characters, but to empathizing with or identify-
ing with despised characters apparently held up for scorn by authors:

I also identified with and thus empathized with many unattractive

characters whose mistakes isolated them, like Dombey and Mr. Dor-
rit. . . . I have felt empathetic to Fagin, the hook-nosed caricature,
especially in his last scene, alone in the condemned cell. Though I
was still a boy in the late 1940s, when I first read Oliver Twist, I had
 Readers’ Empathy 75

already begun to think that being an outlaw was a reasonable response

to persecution.23
Secretly, I also empathize with Rosamond in Middlemarch, Gwendo-
lyn . . . all the nasty, frivolous self absorbed types! I think they tap into
one’s self-critical streak . . .
This is a little embarrassing, but I had a strong empathetic reaction to
the character of Casaubon in Middlemarch. I read the novel for the
first time in graduate school, when I was struggling to regain a sense
of purpose for my life. . . . I was also convinced—and this conviction
still occasionally torments me—that I was just on the verge of pull-
ing together all my ideas into some grand cultural unified field theory,
which would not only unite the very disparate chapters of my dis-
sertation but also explain the world in some transformative way. And
there’s Casaubon, patient, pathetic pedant, working on his Key to All
Mythologies. As a reader, I could recognize that his goal was a phan-
tasm, that his life was barren, that he was doomed to ruin his only
chance at happiness, and that his whole career would be, to an out-
sider, an object of ridicule. At the same time, I thought, “Yes, he’s right!
That’s exactly it—the Key to All Mythologies!” The sense of recogni-
tion was visceral. I had faith in the same ridiculous thing, and I could
resist neither the idea nor the scholar. I picture Casaubon, rejecting
Eliot’s portrayal, as an attractive, enticing figure, tragically misplaced
in his community. At the same time, my disgust is just as real. I love
Casaubon (so exclusively that all the novel’s other characters made
almost no imprint in my memory) and I loathe him.

The keywords of this third reader’s response to Casaubon—the visceral rec-

ognition of a pictured character, his goals, and his situation; the love and
loathing; the attraction and disgust—speak eloquently to the complex of
feelings that can be activated by an empathetic connection with a character,
even a risible one. One of the many contributions that the study of narrative
empathy can make to the study of human empathy lies in the complicated
combinations of different affects, as in this report, that comprise an empa-
thetic response.
These candid accounts also point up the fact that empathy for a fictional
character need not correspond with what the author appears to set up or invite
(a seventh hypothesis). Self-reported readers’ empathy appears to be unpre-
dictable and sporadic. Readers accustomed to discussing their reactions to
books with others will recognize the phenomenon of being surprised by the
ways other readers feel about, or judge, negatively portrayed figures. Though
earlier I use the word “wrong” to label these empathetic surprises, instances
of anomalous readerly identification are only wayward in so far as readers
feel uncomfortable disclosing them. The phenomenon of empathy for unat-
76 Empathy and the Novel

tractive characters actually strengthens the case for the idea of minimal
requirements for identification: a name (or a pronoun), a situation, and an
implicit feeling might be all that is required to spark empathy. The character
need not be admirable. The characterization may indeed be quite sketchy.
The author need not like the character nor lavish representational attention
on the character’s state of mind to invoke a reader’s empathy.
By no means do authors completely control the range of available reac-
tions to their fictional people, nor should readers feel limited to identifying
with a central character (either a center of consciousness in a third-person
fiction or a self-narrator in first person). A participant in the VICTORIA-L
online discussion correctly observes:

It’s interesting to me to take note of identifications with the sisters in

Little Women—not everyone goes for Jo. My mother came around to
Jo but told me she started out with Beth; one of my sisters liked Meg
best, though she traveled further than any of us from the domestic
sphere; I always liked Amy, possibly because Jo got on my nerves as
the clear center of the story and the one I was “supposed” to travel
with. And Amy, though spoiled when we meet her, grows: and she
stood up to Jo more than the others, as well as being the other overtly
creative sister.24

Even when the narrative technique employed by the author says, “I’m
Pip—travel with me,” real readers may waywardly feel with Estella, or Miss
Havisham, or (as Peter Carey demonstrates) Magwitch. Indeed, a vigorous
subgenre of contemporary fiction takes a misunderstood, disreputable, or
demonized character from an earlier writer’s novel and recenters a revi-
sionist fiction upon the marginalized other.25 This imaginative procedure is
honored as a creative practice, but for a regular reader, identifying or feeling
with the “wrong” character may produce discomfort, shame, or self-censor-
ship. In the twenty-first century, our book talk often takes place in class-
rooms, libraries, auditoriums, and online chatrooms: spaces of the public
sphere that invite performance of our most admirable guises.
Under these circumstances, self-consciousness about being judged for
having a naïve, sentimental, or socially unacceptable reaction to a novel can
alter readers’ self reports about reading. One member of the VICTORIA-L
listserv discussion noticed this phenomenon:

I’m also interested that there were a few people on the list who felt
the need to “apologize” for having been moved by characters like Beth
in Little Women. Why apologize? Why cling to the remnants of the
New Critical hostility to sentimentality? Surely it’s that hostility—
I. A. Richards went so far as to compare sympathetic emotional reac-
tions to a disease—that has resulted in the degradation of so much of
 Readers’ Empathy 77

Victorian women’s literature. . . .[and] the anti-sentimentality reaction

obviously affected Dickens’ critical reputation as well. When are we
going to stop apologizing for liking books that “Jones at the Club” (see
Thackeray’s Vanity Fair) sneers at down his oh-so-intellectual noses?
Down with Jones!!!26

This strong comment draws attention to the social aspect of novel talk: we
say who we are, and we reveal our training and taste, when we confess our
feelings about characters. David Bleich, an early advocate of reader-response
criticism, believes that “when tastes are publicly presented on the basis of
response statements, it is possible to distinguish between tastes based on
motives for compliance or for self-satisfaction” (Subjective Criticism 166).
Mary Lenard’s challenge to the listserv discussion members suggests that
our different kinds of taste and the social aspirations that shape them do
show and that we share them fully conscious that we will be judged by
others. Bleich offers what I regard as a utopian account of what will hap-
pen when real readers disclose their true likes and dislikes. He believes that
if motives of self-pleasing are “taken seriously in public, the principles of
public taste-formation are altered, since the element of compliance is sig-
nificantly reduced” (166). Lenard’s comment suggests that thirty years of
reader-oriented criticism has not brought about this change, at least not yet.
Bleich’s subjective paradigm puts a great deal of weight on “collective simi-
larity of response” to a symbolic object, which, he acknowledges, depends
upon “each individual’s announcement of his response and subsequent com-
munally motivated negotiative comparison” (98). Bleich concludes that the
“investigation of the nature of popularity in this way is likely to change what
is considered popular,” and this may turn out to be true, over time (166). In
the short term, public disclosure about our feelings for fictions still places
us into categories, generic, gendered, and marked by education and social
class. This phenomenon becomes all the more personal and revealing when
we admit sharing feelings with fictional characters.
Certain fictional characters even possess the power to resist professional
technical analysis, so strongly do readers identify with them. One teacher
reflects:

For sheer intensity of the readerly relationships she inspires, Jane Eyre
stands by herself, among my students. They are expert at explaining
her motivations, defending her faults, applauding her decisions, and
analyzing her romances. There’s something generously empathetic in
the work they do to protect Jane from the professor who wants to
talk about her as just an effect of a literary work. None of my stu-
dents, by the way, are British orphans facing a world in which edu-
cated women have precious few channels for making money or acting
independently.27
78 Empathy and the Novel

Individual readers do dissent from the critical consensus, and in this class-
room they clearly feel empowered to articulate their own positions. Often
discussion situations move toward a shared interpretation; sussing out the
implied author’s intentions is a common strategy for arriving at a reading
acceptable to a group. Those presented with a received interpretation may
resist professional literary analytical explanations for their feelings about a
character or an author. These readers may be encouraged to speak up, but
they may also fall silent in the face of an authoritative interpretation offered
by a teacher, a critic, or an articulate participant in a discussion. A caution
to researchers pursuing information about readers’ responses through their
self reports (the methodology of this chapter) would be: discussion of fiction
that takes place in public settings, while extremely valuable in itself, may not
be the most reliable source of evidence for emotional responses to fiction. The
effects of conscious or unconscious desires to please can even occur when
anonymity and privacy are guaranteed. As Nancy Eisenberg and her collab-
orators observe about research on gender difference in empathy, question-
naire and interview methods that allow subjects conscious control of their
performance appear to skew results toward cultural norms (see 7–8 above).
A challenge for future scholars of emotional response to literature will be
to develop, in collaboration with colleagues in psychology, methodologies
that can overcome the effects of social expectations on reports about read-
ing experiences. As reader’s empathy is valorized by our culture at large and
connected (whether justifiably or not) with social goods such as tolerance,
volunteerism, and altruism, the pressure to respond acceptably to a fictional
character may increase. In a worst-case scenario modeled by Blade Runner,
identifying and empathizing with a featured character could become a test,
in which readers who gravitate toward other textual features (or simply
dislike the novel!) reveal their moral failings or inhumanity. This sort of
adjudication of right empathy and wrong empathy should be avoided, if we
hope to learn how empathy for characters and other textual features works
in real readers.
Professionally trained readers are more likely than regular readers to
recount experiences of empathy with other aspects of fictional worlds: the
projected “implied author,” particular situations, settings, atmosphere, and
(much more rarely) the language or style of a novel. Authors (the real
people or the imaginary figures that readers construct out of the effects
of their works) command empathy as if they were characters, even when
colossal differences between text and creator exist. Ellen Moody describes
this well:

Readers “empathize” with c19th novels . . . through their imagined

identification with what they think is true of the author’s mental life
. . . how we feel about the author as a presence in his or her work as a
 Readers’ Empathy 79

projected personality and as revealed in the text’s apparent belief-sys-

tem is central to our experience of empathy with the characters. I have
loved Fanny Price and Elinor Dashwood because Austen-in-the-novel
makes me feel she loves them too—even if she can treat them with
irony and distance at moments.28

This macro view of empathy with an author’s mind is counterbalanced by a

reader’s testimony of empathy with brief moments in the depiction of par-
ticular characters, in which a situation becomes so compelling that empathy
overcomes distance or dislike. Despite finding the character Anna Karenina
“mostly annoying,” Kerryn Goldsworthy experiences “moments of feeling
with” her . . . the unreasonable, unjustified jealousy and fear that eventu-
ally destroy both her and Vronsky.”29 Empathy with a situation responds to
plot as much as to character, though it often finds its focus in a character’s
feelings. Narrative theorists know how difficult it is to disentangle plot from
character, for without events, the agents of fiction are inert. Reading for
plot certainly involves attention to character, but it engages with action-
sequences, development of complex circumstances, and the hoped-for reso-
lution of suspenseful enigmas. As psychologist Richard J. Gerrig observes,
“to a large extent, a theory of suspense must include within it a theory of
empathy,” since the motivation for caring about the consequences of actions
is bound up in “active thought” about characters’ fates (Experiencing 80). Yet
liking or approving of the characters may not be a requirement for the situ-
ational empathy that occurs for some readers.
Empathy with situations tends to zero in on episodes, circumstances, or
states of relationship at points of irresolution. That is, empathy with plot
situation gravitates toward middles of plots, when problems and enigmas
have not yet been solved or brought to closure. Thus, a twenty-first cen-
tury student who is separated from her illegal alien husband can react with
tearful recognition to Catherine Earnshaw’s doom, loving the screwed up
Heathcliff, unable to escape by making a better choice.30 The ongoingness
of a fictional situation (never really over because never really occurring)
lends itself to empathetic engagement. Empathy with situations resembles
(and may feed into) empathy with characters with whom close identifica-
tion can be made, but huge character-reader differences do not interfere
with situational empathy. Thus a middle-class divorced American woman
may tremble in recognition of the fear, invoked by Amy Tan in The Kitchen
God’s Wife (1991), that a despised first husband might turn up to wreck her
happiness. This kind of reader’s empathy may appear more egocentric than
empathy for characters, since it requires much less effort in role taking and
imaginative extension. It is also extremely idiosyncratic: if you haven’t been
divorced, or diagnosed with a fatal disease, or shamed as an unwanted child,
you may simply not feel it when those circumstances turn up in a story. A
80 Empathy and the Novel

summary hypothesis suggests that situational empathy, which responds pri-

marily to aspects of plot and circumstance, involves less self-extension in imagi-
native role taking and more recognition of prior (or current) experience.
This kind of empathy is particularly vulnerable to criticism as a form of
easy egotism, such as these listserv discussants describe:

Where does empathy stray into narcissism? When does the mir-
ror cease to be a magic portal into another life, another dimension,
another view, and become merely a self-serving portrait of our own
desires and aspirations?31
It is possible for readers—even relatively discerning readers—to feel
empathy with characters in poorly written books. All that’s necessary
is that the characters go through experiences resembling (or symboli-
cally encapsulating) the reader’s own. . . . The literary characters with
whom we feel empathetic thus reveal more about our own psychol-
ogy and our own personal histories than they do about the author’s
conceptions or skills.32

One theorist of character identification who studies the reading autobiog-

raphies of “motivated” readers like the listserv discussants actually distin-
guishes “wish identification” and “similarity identification” from empathy in
her rubric of relationships between readers and the realms of fiction.33 This
neatly solves the problem of potentially discreditable, selfish-seeming expe-
riences of empathy by calling them by another name. However, situational
empathy can have a social dimension that may redeem it from charges of
narcissism. So, for instance, the Thackeray scholar Sheldon Goldfarb sees
a moment of situational empathy in Vanity Fair (1847–48), “where Thac-
keray conjures up the fearful side of high society and I think inspires fear
in us, or at least reminds us of our fears.”34 This connection closes the gap
between Becky Sharp’s world and the actual world of twenty-first–century
readers, as empathy transcends historical and contextual differences.
While experiencing empathy for a character placed against a remote or
unfamiliar backdrop may be partly responsible for the sense that reading
fiction extends the imagination over barriers of unfamiliarity, sometimes
a chance resemblance of circumstances does the trick. Some of the empa-
thy-inspiring situations readers recall point to particular historical moments
that render fictional characters’ dilemmas especially affecting. For instance,
the children in Heidi (1885) and The Secret Garden (1911) who learned to
walk again moved a reader who encountered these characters before the
development of the polio vaccine:

I suppose I identified with headstrong little girls who hoped neverthe-

less to help people somehow—and what could be more dramatic in the
age of polio than the miracle of wasted limbs becoming strong again?35
 Readers’ Empathy 81

A moment of relevance may heighten the empathetic opportunities pre-

sented by a novel, only to diminish as the cure for polio (in 2007 nearly
eradicated worldwide) reduces the chances of spontaneous recognition.
This phenomenon suggests that the study of narrative empathy ought
to be attuned to historical and social contexts in the period of reception.
Rigorous historicizing of the nature of human feelings in different peri-
ods should counter the psychologists’ tendency to generalize from results
garnered from the study of the present generations to all humans in all
times.36 Even if basic human emotions remain the same, the situations that
provoke empathetic recognition of complex blends of feeling are quite
likely to differ in tone, mixture, and intensity in different contexts. Thus, a
hypothesis emerges: Readers’ empathy for situations depicted in fiction may
be enhanced by chance relevance to particular historical, economic, cultural,
or social circumstances. Both successes and failures of empathy may arise
as much from the specific context and conditions of the reader as from
the representation itself. Preliminary confirmation comes from the com-
parative experiment of János László, in which responses of Danish and
Hungarian readers, elicited by an emotionally-charged story about Nazis
(by contemporary Hungarian writer Ferenc Sánta), showed a more pas-
sionate engagement on the part of more culturally knowledgeable Hun-
garian readers. László’s experiment showed that Danish readers felt empa-
thy, apparently on the basis of “universal emotions,” while Hungarians
resonated more strongly with the protagonist’s dilemmas, especially the
“unpleasant and aggressive aspects” of it, “because it related to a number
of personal experiences” (“Cognition” 140).37 It remains unclear whether
a reader’s deliberate attempt to live up to a novel’s demands (thus joining
what Peter J. Rabinowitz calls the authorial audience) can alter the likeli-
hood of situational empathy occurring.38
Where, the professional literary critic may wonder, does this leave the
teachers and scholars who have spent their lives practicing the elucidation
of texts and contexts, theories and interpretations? Does attending to read-
ers’ empathy mean valuing the reports of what Virginia Woolf called com-
mon readers over the reactions of trained novel critics?39 I believe that an
emphasis on readers’ empathy allows an important role for literary criti-
cism, if psychologists are willing to engage themselves with the complex
structures of feeling embedded in texts and embodied in the attuned reader.
An excerpt from an e-mail to the VICTORIA-L discussion group provides
an exhibit of what elucidation of empathy might look like as an element of
interpretation:

Now one Dickens scene has been teasing me ever since I read the
question: the wonderfully rich and terrible scene in Little Dorrit in
which Mr. Dorrit, at the height of his fortune and social success, cracks
and goes into a delusion, before all his guests, that he’s back in the
82 Empathy and the Novel

Marshalsea [a prison]. Reading that I feel an agonized, tormentingly

embarrassed empathy with someone, but whom? Not him—he’s not
sane enough to be aware of how ill he is; not Little Dorrit, who’s far
too concerned about him to feel the social embarrassment; not the
guests, who don’t really understand . . . can it be Dickens? The whole
scene seems to shimmer and writhe with complex feelings that none
of the characters on the spot seems big enough to hold—so who else
could it be? Dickens, then, or the narrator: whoever’s floating over the
scene feeling that wonderfully controlled mixture of love, raw social
anguish, visceral horror at the sudden inbreak of madness, angry yet
clear-eyed and compassionate condemnation of Mr. Dorrit’s terrible
emotional mistakes, angry contempt for the class represented by the
guests, and along with it all an intense aesthetic satisfaction as the
novel reaches its perfect symbolic crisis—the feelings are there, I feel
them, yet I feel reasonably sure I wasn’t big enough to conceive them
in the first place! So it must be empathy. . . .40

Though composed in a casual mode as a contribution to a listserv discussion

in the informal medium of e-mail, this analysis of empathetic feeling with a
complex of emotional currents evoked by Dickens’s great novel Little Dorrit
(1857) strikes me as an exemplary use of professional analytical skill. The
questions of where cues to empathy reside in a text, and with whom (or
with what) a reader might be empathizing can provide sufficient starting
points for guided discussion and critical analysis. While it is difficult at the
moment to envision the discourse analysis experiment that would get at the
complex of feelings with which this reader resonated, the challenge should
at least be posed as a goal of narrative empathy studies.
Nonetheless, it must be acknowledged that discussion of readers’ empa-
thy levels the playing field in a way that some professional critics may find
unnerving or simply unacceptable. If the reactions of any feeling reader
count as evidence of a novel’s effectiveness, then suddenly all sorts of popu-
lar fiction, including formulaic romance novels, demand attention. If the
exercise of professional judgment means weeding out the worthwhile fic-
tion from ephemera (as it does for book critics and teachers of contemporary
fiction, who work without the armature of a teaching canon), then readers’
empathy may be a positive feature assisting critical judgment, or it may
be an annoying reminder of the power of popularity. For instance, millions
of readers resonated empathetically with the protagonist of Robert James
Waller’s The Bridges of Madison County (1992), but the MLA Bibliography
reports only a single peer-reviewed journal article on the novel.41 The book
stayed on The New York Times’ Bestseller list for nearly three years, and its
publisher TimeWarner characterizes Bridges as the best-selling novel of all
time. As far as I can tell, the novel is not taught in colleges or university lit-
 Readers’ Empathy 83

erature courses, though it has a presence in communications, composition,

and print-to-film courses. Though the critical consensus appears to be that
the film improved on the novel, ordinary readers’ enthusiasm for Francesca’s
love story propelled the success of this novel. Copies of the authentic first
edition of the novel now go for hundreds of dollars to collectors, and over
a decade later, readers still endorse the novel on the pages of Amazon.com
and Barnes and Noble.com, where it is available as a downloadable e-book
and an audiobook, as well as in hardcover and paper. At a basic level, novels
that enjoy such phenomenal popularity are self-discrediting to most profes-
sionals in literary studies (agents, would-be-authors of bestsellers, and edi-
tors obviously feel differently). The success of novels such as The Bridges of
Madison County demands attention if readers’ empathy is to be understood,
and certainly should compel respect if the empathy of readers could actu-
ally be turned to socially desirable ends. An empathy-inducing blockbuster
would be a powerful tool, if feeling readers acted upon their sensations as
Martha Nussbaum believes readers of Henry James, Charles Dickens, and
George Eliot do. However, literary studies and philosophy (including novel
criticism and narrative ethics) have a largely unexamined vexed—often
openly contemptuous—relationship with popular fiction.
I take up this subject at greater length in the following chapter (“Empa-
thy in the Marketplace”), but I mention it here because many educated
readers believe that the quality of a novel somehow inheres in the empathy
it evokes. This widespread conviction represents a continuation of the Vic-
torian critical standard, expressed in countless book reviews, that successful
fictional characters command readers’ sympathies. Though the twenty-first–
century style replaces Victorian sympathetic feeling for with contemporary
empathetic feeling with, teaching at the primary and secondary level incul-
cates the view that readers vicariously experience novels by identifying with
characters. In the prevailing circular logic, good novels invite empathy and
empathetic responses verify the quality of the novel. A typical comment of
this sort uses empathy as a test of literary greatness: “I wonder if most, if not
all, great works inspire empathy, otherwise readers wouldn’t take an interest
in them?”42 Another reader emphasizes how great writing can evoke empa-
thy for a wide range of fictional characters, regardless of gender or position
of the character in the story.43 Greatness, embodied in the author, the tech-
nique, or the works themselves, registers as both a cause and consequence
of empathy.
Unfortunately, in order to diminish the power of the evidence suggesting
that lowbrow fiction evokes empathy more reliably than treasured classics,
some critics end up denigrating the readers who respond to popular, mass-
market texts. This seems to me a counterproductive strategy in an era of
diminishing reading. Better to admit, as this reader notices, that personal
bias may be the foundation for much of our estimations of greatness:
84 Empathy and the Novel

I suppose everyone wants to believe that the books they love most
passionately are great works of literature. As adults, we don’t like to
think that we have been “taken in” by shoddy, perfunctory fictions for
no better reason than that we could relate to the characters/situations.
However, it may be helpful to remember that all literature “takes us
in.” Every author seeks to manipulate us with artificial inventions.
It’s not as though bad authors seek to deceive us into empathy while
good authors channel real life for us, unmediated and pure. Fiction is
a crafty business and most writers, whether they’re good or bad, will
use “every trick in the book.”44

The question of quality, or of the relationship of empathy to literariness,

may well prove a stumbling block to the understanding of empathy and
the novel as a phenomenon. The traditional critical task of distinguishing
great works from worthless trash is a useful practice—no one has time to
read everything and critics help readers choose. However, carrying over the
critical habit of elimination of unworthy texts may obscure more than it
reveals about human empathy and our appetite for narrative. Thus I con-
clude this section with a caution, that readers’ empathy may have little to
do with the quality of fiction as acclaimed by professionals. Understanding
readers’ empathy almost certainly requires attending to the novels that real
readers choose for themselves and may demand a discomforting de-empha-
sis of prized qualities of literariness.

Scholarship on the Effects of Reading

Empathy figures prominently in the investigations of recent empiri-

cal research on the effects of reading, conducted primarily by psycholo-
gists, discourse processing experts, and education specialists. Despite weak
results for the causal relationships among reading, empathy, and prosocial
action, empathy continues to loom large as an element of reading theories
under empirical investigation.45 The forms of inquiry employed by schol-
ars of reading vary from surveys or questionnaires administered to large or
small numbers of readers, to controlled reading-speed experiments in which
short stories are broken up into bits to be read in sequence on a computer
screen.46 Some researchers, including many reader-response critics, ask read-
ers to write out personal responses after completing reading,47 while others
record the comments made aloud as reading takes place. Both methods in
effect study verbal responses rather than reading itself. Arguably, reading
changes when it is interrupted to provide intermittent commentary aloud,
while surveys or written responses elicited after reading emphasize the
completed experience over the dynamic process. Statistical methods, such
as the U.S. Census Bureau’s survey of 17,000 adult Americans, Reading at
 Readers’ Empathy 85

Risk, produce the broadest kind of study of reading habits, but these ques-
tionnaires are necessarily retrospective and tell us nothing directly about
either the experience or effects of reading. Studying reading “online,” espe-
cially with long texts like novels, has proven a challenge. A small number
of experiments conducted in the 1970s measured skin conductance (read-
ers’ sweating) as works about racial others were perused.48 Computers have
enabled eye movements to be measured and reading speeds quantified. Vic-
tor Nell observed subjects in a laboratory setting as they immersed them-
selves in self-selected pleasure reading and combined his observations with
interviews of subjects. Though new brain imaging techniques (fMRI and
diffusion tensor imaging) hold out the promise of understanding the read-
ing brain better, such a research program has not been a priority among
neuroscientists.49 What little is known about the neural networks involved
in symbolic text processing has yet to be correlated with questions about
emotions evoked by reading.50 In particular, the question of whether read-
ers’ empathy resembles fMRI images of the empathetic brain (activated in
the anterior insula and anterior cingulate cortex, the lateral cerebellum, and
the brainstem) remains to be investigated. Because this body of work rarely
receives attention from post-secondary literature specialists, I review it in
some detail here.
To represent empirical approaches to literary reading, which typically
blend basic concepts from literary study with social-psychological methods
(including questionnaires and self-reports, delivered aloud or composed in
writing), I draw here on the work of several of its most respected practi-
tioners. These include David S. Miall and Don Kuiken of the University of
Alberta (in literature and psychology, respectively) and the Utrecht Uni-
versity scholar Jèmeljan Hakemulder, whose research into the effects of
reading treats both social perceptions and morality. I augment this group
with a report on the work of Tammy Bourg, a psychologist at California
State University at Sacramento, for Bourg focuses tightly on empathy. Miall,
Kuiken, and Hakemulder pursue broader research programs, each of which
addresses the role empathy plays in literary reading.51 In this section I review
their insights about empathy and point out some of the assumptions that
underlie each researcher’s questions and methodology.
A primary assumption, with implications for the study of fiction, holds
that reading literature differs from reading generally. I argue above that
readers’ empathy may have little to do with the quality of fiction as affirmed
by professionals, that is, on the distinction of serious from popular fiction
(including the often-dismissed categories of “junk reading,” “trash,” “airport
books,” and genre fiction such as romances). This does not eliminate kinds
of fiction from consideration, for testimony of readers suggests that generic
differences are likely to play a role in inviting (or retarding) empathic response.
Certain fictional genres should not be equated with higher literary status
if empathy is to be a factor in value. The scholars who study literary read-
86 Empathy and the Novel

ing often assume and sometimes describe this kind of distinction in level or
quality.52 To some extent their assumption mirrors commonsense under-
standings of literature as qualitatively different from texts in general. Few
would contest the observation that a modernist lyric poem makes special
demands on a reader, compared, say, to the ads on the back of a cereal
box. There are lots of different kinds of reading other than perusing literary
texts. Reading, for the fluent literate person, ranges from automatic com-
prehension of instructions and signs, to scanning for specific information, to
speedy consumption of narrative, to slower, more meditative engagement
with texts.
Two kinds of reading seem especially desirable to specialists: slow, care-
ful reading represents one ideal (once the halting pace of the beginner is
no longer necessary); and the trancelike absorption of the immersed reader
(when not being disparaged as an advanced form of idleness) often results
in a faster page-turning pace. These practices make possible literary reading.
However, as Leah Price has described beautifully in The Anthology and the
Rise of the Novel (2000), even literary reading involves a great deal of skip-
ping and skimming. In contrast, reading literature analytically, with an aim
of sharing or comparing insights with others or producing interpretations,
is a highly specialized activity that (for most people) requires training. This
education disrupts students’ habitual reading patterns with new demands—
attention to privileged details and patterns, to symbolic objects, to loose
ends, to contextually relevant information—depending on the approach.
The rarified form, academic reading, moves beyond appreciation to analysis
in its now quite various modes. Nonetheless, this last kind of reading, “read-
ing” as analytical interpreting, is what most literature specialists mean when
they use the word.
The scholars whose work I describe here focus on reading defined more
broadly than literary interpreting, but their location in universities, their
reliance on college students as research subjects, and to some extent their
research agendas conspire to preserve literary reading’s position in the hier-
archy of types of reading. The role of interpretation and the importance of
training students to interpret literature more acutely receive challenges in a
body of work that focuses more directly on reading, but the values of liter-
ary reading are very much embedded in this scholarship.53 Whether it stands
out from ordinary reading because it defies convention, employs defamiliar-
izing techniques, slows the reader’s pace, or flirts with open-endedness or
indeterminacy, “literature” seems to these researchers a legitimate category
of its own.54 If we were able to agree where the boundary between trash
and literary fiction lies (a line ignored by the National Endowment for the
Arts’ Reading at Risk), it might well be worthwhile to investigate readers’
emotional responses to see if the assumptions about the values of quality
literature indeed hold up under empirical scrutiny.
 Readers’ Empathy 87

David S. Miall and Don Kuiken have an interest in discerning the effects
of literary reading through empirical studies, and to that end Miall in partic-
ular has sought to define the qualities of literariness.55 Indeed, most research-
ers in the field distinguish the effects of particular kinds of texts from oth-
ers (literary from nonliterary texts; narratives from descriptive prose) in an
effort to establish the consequences of reading culturally valued literature,
or to understand how that reading differs from reading in general. Since my
concern is empathy in particular, not literariness, I focus here on the role
of empathy as Miall and Kuiken’s work invokes it: a central feature of their
experiments and a key trait of literary experience in their accounts. Miall
writes that the two principal features responsible for the reader’s engage-
ment (through imagery and emotion) with a literary text “appear to be the
dehabituating power of literary forms, and empathic projection into the lives
of others through narrative” (“Necessity” 50). This pairing, which makes of
empathy a companion to defamiliarization (Miall’s “dehabituating power”),
brings formal traits into conversation with readers’ behavior. Supported by
experiments done in collaboration with Don Kuiken, Miall sees foreground-
ing as a means for slowing the reader’s pace, gaining his or her attention,
and allowing for empathy as well as other insights into texts to transpire. In
essence, following Miall, unusual or striking representations in the literary text
promote foregrounding and open the way to empathetic reading.
This thesis might imply that the more difficult and discontinuous texts
promote empathy more effectively than their simpler relatives. Miall and
Kuiken take care to avoid this assertion, and indeed investigation of the range
of responses evoked by works arranged on a scale of difficulty (particularly
longer works) remains to be done. Virtually all of the empirical research
on actual readers’ responses uses literary short stories, very brief excerpts
from novels, or lyric poetry. The application of findings from this research
to the experience of immersion novel reading makes a leap that may not
be substantiated by research in the future. Nonetheless, some findings may
suggest relevant questions to pose about novel reading. For instance, on the
question of difficulty’s relation to empathy, one might ask whether it ever
acts as a barrier to empathy? Is there a point at which alienation effects
impede empathetic response, as Brecht believed. Some research reveals that
a reader’s ability to understand cause and effect precedes role taking and
empathizing with characters.56 This suggests that relatively basic aspects of
narrative (coherent plot units and/or the relation between characterization
and characters’ actions) must be met for empathy to occur.
Psychologist Tammy Bourg proposes that comprehension of causal rela-
tions in literary stories assists cognitive empathy and that empathy with fic-
tional characters leads to greater comprehension. Her experimental results
from work with both adults and children confirm what others have also
observed in studies of children, that empathizers make better readers in
88 Empathy and the Novel

the first place than nonempathetic people. Not only does empathic ability
at eight to nine years predict reading achievement at ten to eleven years,57
but also sixth graders instructed in role-taking strategies better comprehend
literary short stories. This research suggests that readers’ innate or cultivated
capacity for empathy helps their reading succeed and that obstacles to com-
prehension may be overcome by employing empathetic strategies. Further,
individual dispositional differences among readers will affect which ones
achieve narrative empathy during particular reading experiences and which
ones do not. Some texts may be too strange to invite empathy in many read-
ers. Defamiliarization may, as Brecht intuited, throw up obstacles to empa-
thizing if it blocks or delays comprehension. The habitual role taker, or suc-
cessful empathic reader, may possess the means to overcome these obstacles,
but the techniques may not work: hence the reaction, “I just couldn’t get
into this story.” Thus empathy in this research looks less like a phenomenon
arising from readers’ response to texts and more like a disposition that may
be employed as a reading strategy. Tammy Bourg’s research supports David
S. Miall’s contention in “Beyond the Schema Given” that emotional respon-
siveness enables understanding, but it also suggests that overall, texts may
do more to get in the way of most readers’ innate empathic tendencies than
the other way around.
Human empathy, with its roots in primate behavior, developed long
before we began mediating emotions through inscribed symbols. Indeed,
as Paul Ekman observes, “Although there is no doubt that we can become
emotional by reading about a stranger, it is amazing that something that
came so late in the history of our species—written language—can generate
emotions.”58 Ekman hypothesizes that written language changes into sensa-
tions, pictures, sounds, smells, and even tastes in our brains, subsequently
to be “treated like any other event by the automatic-appraisal mechanisms
to arouse emotions” (Emotions Revealed 35).59 This is only one view of
many on the highly contentious subject of the literary emotions.60 It is
important to keep in mind as we review the research on readers’ emotional
responses to literature that the underlying brain processes accounting for
both empathic disposition and emotional responsiveness to fiction are still
little understood.
Writing is a fairly recent development in human history, but our propen-
sity for narrative and fiction may run nearly as deep as our use of language.
As I argue earlier, readers’ perception of a text’s fictionality plays a role in
subsequent empathetic response, by releasing readers from the obligations of self-
protection through skepticism and suspicion. David Miall has noticed a similar
effect. The fiction reader who suspends disbelief, Miall argues, encounters
devices that vouch for a novel’s fictionality and that are “capable of elicit-
ing the decentering response of empathic projection” (“Necessity” 54). As
a consequence of this fusion of fictional technique and reader response,
novels and short stories have a special role in theories about readers’ empa-
 Readers’ Empathy 89

thy. Miall and Kuiken have developed the Literary Response Questionnaire
(LRQ) to discover the role of empathy, among seven features, in readers’
orientation toward narrative fictional texts.61 The questions rating empathy
of the reader all focus on character identification and indicate the reader’s
strength of projective identification:

Sometimes I feel like I’ve almost “become” a character I’ve read about
in fiction.
I sometimes have imaginary dialogues with people in fiction.
When I read fiction I often think about myself as one of the people
in the story.
I sometimes wonder whether I have really experienced something
or whether I have read about it in a book.
I actively try to project myself into the role of fictional characters,
almost as if I were preparing to act in a play.
Sometimes characters in novels almost become like real people in
my life.
After reading a novel or story that I enjoyed, I continue to won-
der about the characters almost as though they were real people.
(LRQ 56)

These survey questions allow a researcher to discover dispositional differ-

ences among individual readers (with the caveat that self-reports may be
biased by the subjects’ perceptions of desirable answers). They place aspects
of empathy (role taking) in a continuum with fantasy projection and behav-
iors that in other circumstances might be regarded as signs of mental ill-
ness. These questions might be used to ascertain the degree of a subject’s
empathic disposition and compared to reading comprehension. In the con-
text of Miall and Kuiken’s orientation toward the evaluation of textual fea-
tures and their interaction with readers’ feelings, an empathic response to
fictional character contributes to a positive evaluation of the function of
literary fiction. Miall approvingly cites studies of the influence of work-
ing-class writers on working-class readers62 as well as present-day programs
employed by localities to reduce criminal recidivism by encouraging literary
and philosophical reading (“Necessity” 48–49). He concedes that the empir-
ical evidence for good effects on novel readers is “too little known” and “so
far lacks paradigmatic status” but believes that further empirical research
will bear out the positive links between reading, experiencing empathy, and
garnering socially beneficial results from literature’s “innate power” (“Neces-
sity” 55). Miall implies that readers’ empathy could produce verifiable results
in the beliefs and actions of populations of actual readers.
The Dutch scholar Jèmeljan Hakemulder has gone the furthest in review-
ing the available experimental evidence and conducting his own studies on
effects of literary reading, both of which he reports in his book, The Moral
90 Empathy and the Novel

Laboratory (2000).63 Hakemulder’s work is valuable not only because he

reports some success in improving readers’ role-taking skills with respect to
culturally marginalized others, but also because he dispassionately reports
the results of many studies. He avoids cherry-picking for positive ethical
outcomes and frankly admits that the evidence for links between readers’
empathy and even rudimentary forms of altruistic behavior is mixed at best.
This does not prevent him from taking an upbeat position on the signifi-
cance of positive results, even those garnered from studies of preschool chil-
dren. Because Hakemulder breaks each contention down to a manageable
dimension and examines the evidence for each, I present his judgments in
selective sequence, emphasizing those that pertain to readers’ empathy.
Observing Richard Rorty and other philosophers’ arguments that read-
ing narrative fiction “enhances the ability to make psychological inferences
about the emotions, thoughts, and motives others have in certain situa-
tions” (Moral Laboratory 13), Hakemulder finds some supporting evidence
and conducts experiments with students confirming that “enhancement of
insight into human thoughts and emotions may bridge individual as well
as cultural differences” (13). Like others working in this field, Hakemul-
der shares the bias against popular genres, especially women’s romances.
He feels that the role-taking effort required of romance readers “does not
demand much reflection or imagination” (15). Thus only a certain kind of
reading, complex enough to require imaginative effort on the readers’ part,
yields the valued difference-bridging insight. Indeed, following the lead
of Allan Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind (1987), Hakemulder
entertains the notion that “a diet of texts that offer oversimplified and shal-
low prototypes of emotional life may hamper the development of readers’
imagination about or their view of other peoples’ emotions” and “may even
impair the development of their own emotions” (15). However, he reports
that empirical work confirming the special power of complex literary char-
acters over simple stereotypes in increasing readers’ sophistication about
others’ emotions does not exist (15, 52). When it comes to literary texts
that represent ethical problems “related to contemporary developments in
society,” Hakemulder finds some evidence of alterations in readers’ norms
and values (22, 53), but for the use of defamiliarization or foregrounding to
enhance open-minded ethical reflection, or for readers’ acquaintance with a
wider range of moral perspectives on issues, Hakemulder finds no evidence
yet (23, 53).64
Reviewing four studies65 on the effects of reading narrative on aspects of
empathy (including subsequent prosocial behavior), Hakemulder concludes
that “reading narratives may enhance awareness of others’ emotions and
motives, but that it does not seem to stimulate self-denying behavior” (Moral
Laboratory 32–33, 36). Specifically, two empathy studies showed character
identification enhancing comprehension of others’ feelings (57). However,
the one study looking into effects on altruism found no changes as a result
 Readers’ Empathy 91

of encountering narratives (57). All of the empathy studies judged reliable

by Hakemulder present by his own account “confounded” results because
the experiments included activities other than reading, as for instance, role-
taking games (38). More recent work by C. Daniel Batson and his collabora-
tors affirms Hakemulder’s belief that reading narratives can induce empathy
for members of stigmatized groups, even when the individual is fictional.66
Batson argues, “the belief that inducing empathy for a fictional character
can be used to improve attitudes and stimulate concern for a stigmatized
group may well be valid” (“Empathy, Attitudes, and Action” 1666). His
observations come from an experimental situation in which research sub-
jects exposed to an empathy-inducing interview with a drug addict were
asked immediately afterward to allocate funds from a charitable student
group (not real money from their own pockets) to organizations including
an addiction counseling service. Like the confounded results in the research
Hakemulder examines, the experimental design at least implies that there
ought to a correlation between reading and giving, a condition that does not
pertain to normal fiction reading circumstances.
This point raises a question seldom addressed by advocates of literature
as a method for developing empathy. Reading alone (without accompany-
ing discussion, writing, or teacherly direction) may not produce the same
results as the enhanced reading that involves the subsequent discussion
(what Wayne Booth calls coduction). As Hakemulder has it, “it remains to be
seen whether empathic effects, moral development, and the enhancement
of critical thinking can be achieved by reading, or whether these effects
are due to a combination of reading and post-reading tasks” (49). Despite
these mixed or inconclusive results, for Hakemulder, “readers’ empathy
forms the centerpiece of the Moral Laboratory, because . . . it is essential to
the effects of reading narratives” (68). Hakemulder speculates that “read-
ers may empathize with morally good characters and inhibit their empa-
thy for morally bad characters”—a model in which readers’ self-concept
guides empathic response—and he also opines that “an engaged, empathic
response to characters may cause changes in a [reader’s] self-concept” (72,
84).67 He acknowledges, however, that direct evidence of such changes is
missing and that “effects of stories are probably marginal compared to other
social influences” (84). A point he de-emphasizes is that most of the existing
research features the empathetic responses of very young children, some of
them not yet readers.
Hakemulder’s own research focuses on adults, who may be assumed to
be somewhat less malleable than young children engaged in role-taking
exercises. Hakemulder finds good evidence that “reading stories with posi-
tive portrayals of outgroups leads to a reduction of social distance” (Moral
Laboratory 98) and that a “narrative presentation causes stronger effects on
our beliefs about the emotions and thoughts of others” than nonnarrative
presentation of the same content (56, 107). Even though he concedes that
92 Empathy and the Novel

reading stories may also introduce biases into social perceptions (54, 143,
162), invite cruel (unjust) responses to those perceived as harming victims
(54), or teach incorrect beliefs about others (162), Hakemulder maintains
that readers’ empathy stimulates moral reflection and the adoption of a
“habitual empathic attitude towards fellow humans” (154). Hakemulder
keeps readers’ empathy at the center of his Moral Laboratory by exagger-
ating the conclusiveness of the link between human empathy and altruis-
tic behavior (93, 167). Even psychologist Martin Hoffman and others who
investigate the empathy-altruism thesis describe a variety of responses to
others’ feeling states that often fail to lead to prosocial action. Hoffman
does suggest in Empathy and Its Development that a particular subvariety
of empathy, empathic guilt, may be excited by readers’ exposure to fic-
tion, making actual responsiveness to real people in need more likely. Hoff-
man thus argues that novel reading may participate in the socialization and
moral internalization required for transmutation of empathic guilt into proso-
cial action. Hakemulder takes his inspiration not only from psychology, but
also from philosopher Martha Nussbaum’s endorsement of literary reading
(167). Hakemulder’s empirical approach checks his enthusiasm for Nuss-
baum’s project, however, and he quite rightly calls for an effort to falsify
theories of literature that promise positive outcomes (167). Scrutiny of the
available research on the specific narrative techniques associated by theo-
rists and actual readers with empathetic responses carries the project of
cautious evaluation of the causes and consequences of readers’ empathy a
step further.

Empathetic Narrative Techniques

A variety of narrative techniques has been associated with empathy by nar-

rative theorists and by discourse processing experts carrying out empirical
research into literary reading. This section enumerates specific techniques
or aspects of narrative fiction that receive emphasis in discussions of nar-
rative empathy by scholars. The formal devices themselves are regarded as
empathic in nature by some theorists and researchers, while for others the
disposition of the reader toward the text can be measured by inquiring
about particular consequences of literary reading. The observations made by
this latter group often lead to speculations about narrative technique. Gath-
ering the formal qualities and techniques of narrative fiction emphasized in
the existing literature permits comparison with the strategies employed by
authors attempting, by their own account, to evoke empathy in readers or
to address the idea of empathy in their fiction. Mapping ostensibly empa-
thetic narrative techniques also draws attention to the many aspects of nar-
rative form that have not yet been associated with readers’ empathy, but
which ought not to be ruled out without careful consideration.
 Readers’ Empathy 93

The most commonly nominated feature of narrative fiction to be associ-

ated with empathy is character identification. Specific aspects of characteriza-
tion, such as naming, description, indirect implication of traits, reliance on
types, relative flatness or roundness, depicted actions, roles in plot trajecto-
ries, quality of attributed speech, and mode of representation of conscious-
ness, may be assumed to contribute to the potential for character identifica-
tion and thus for empathy.68 The link between readers’ reports of character
identification and their experiences of narrative empathy has not yet been
explained. Furthermore, the nature of emotions invoked by fiction is hotly
contested by philosophers (I hold a Deweyan view).69 A close second for
formal quality most often associated with empathy would be what narratol-
ogists call narrative situation (including point of view and perspective): the
nature of the mediation between author and reader, including the person of
the narration, the implicit location of the narrator, the relation of the narra-
tor to the characters, and the internal or external perspective on characters,
including in some cases the style of representation of characters’ conscious-
ness.70 Many other elements of fiction have been supposed to contribute to
readers’ empathy, including the repetitions of works in series,71 the length
of novels,72 genre expectations,73 vivid use of settings,74 metanarrative com-
mentary,75 and aspects of the discourse that slow readers’ pace (foreground-
ing, uses of disorder, etc.).76 The confirmation of many of the hypotheses
about specific narrative techniques and empathy has yet to be undertaken
in most cases, but the work that has been done as often fails fully to support
the commonplaces of narratology as it authenticates them.77 Whether this
has to do with faulty experimental design, insufficient grasp of the nuances
of narrative theory, or verifiable confutations of theory has yet to be dis-
covered. The following paragraphs fill out a catalog of commonplaces with
formal possibilities less often believed to elicit empathetic responses.

Character Identification
To begin with the necessary clarification, character identification is not a
narrative technique (it occurs in the reader, not in the text), but a conse-
quence of reading that may be precipitated by the use of particular tech-
niques of characterization, as listed above.78 These qualities have not been
investigated in a comprehensive fashion. Marisa Bortolussi and Peter Dixon
emphasize aesthetic qualities of narrative that open the way to personal
involvement.79 In contrast, Jèmeljan Hakemulder suggests that readers
experiencing strong admiration of an author’s writing style may engage less
readily with the fictional world and its inhabitants (Moral Laboratory 73–
74). Readers’ personal involvement with a fictional character may (or may
not) be contingent upon the use of a particular technique or the presence
of certain representational elements that meet with their approval.80 Keith
Oatley believes that readers’ personal experiences of patterns of emotional
94 Empathy and the Novel

response provoke sympathy for characters, especially as readers identify

with characters’ goals and plans.81 David S. Miall and Don Kuiken argue that
emotional experiences of literature depend upon the engagement of the lit-
erary text with the reader’s experiences,82 but they emphasize foreground-
ing effects at the level of literary style that shake up conventions, slow the
pace, and invite more active reading that opens the way for empathy.83 Don
Kuiken’s research shows that readers who linked themselves to story char-
acters through personal experiences were more likely to report changes in
self-perception, if not actual empathy.84 Max Louwerese and Kuiken sug-
gest that empathy may work as a gap-filling mechanism, by which a reader
supplements given character traits with a fuller psychologically resonant
portrait.85 Readers’ judgments about the realism of the characters are sup-
posed to have an impact on identification,86 and the similarity of the reader
to the character is widely believed to promote identification.87 None of
these phenomena, however, inhere in particular narrative techniques con-
tributing to character identification.
A few techniques of characterization have actually been tested for their
relation to readers’ emotional responsiveness or empathy. Characters’ involve-
ment in a suspenseful situation provokes physiological responses of arousal
in readers even when they disdain the quality of the narrative.88 Plot-laden
action stories have been shown to promote faster reading than narratives
focusing on characters’ inner lives,89 which (if the assumptions about slower
pace and greater empathy are accepted) may suggest greater reflectiveness on
the part of character-focused readers, as Hakemulder supposes (Moral Labo-
ratory 74). However, this does not account for the quick, apparently involun-
tary responses to particular plot situations inspired by trashy novels. Speedy
reading may be a token of involvement in a character’s fate, identification, and
even empathy. With the exception of appraisal of causality, virtually nothing
about the role of plot structure has been associated with readers’ empathetic
responses or tested in controlled settings.90 Aspects of plot structure and nar-
ration that might have a role in invoking readers’ empathy include the control
of timing (pace), order (anachronies), the use of nested levels of narrative
(stories within stories),91 serial narrative, strong or weak closure, the use of
subsidiary (supplementary, satellite) plot events, repetition, and gaps. Since
each one of these structural categories contains an array of possibilities for
characterization, their neglect leaves us with an incomplete picture of the
devices whose use makes character identification possible.
Many aspects of characterization have not yet been tested in controlled
experiments, despite their nomination by theorists. The naming of char-
acters (including the withholding of a name, the use of an abbreviation or
a role title in place of a full name, or allegorical or symbolic naming, etc.)
may play a role in the potential for character identification. The descriptive
language through which readers encounter characters is assumed to make
a difference (content matters!), but what about grammar and syntax? Does
 Readers’ Empathy 95

the use of present tense (over the usual past tense) really create effects of
immediacy and direct connection, as many contemporary authors believe?
The old “show, don’t tell” shibboleth of creative writing class remains to
be verified: direct description of a character’s emotional state or circum-
stances by a third-person narrator may produce empathy in readers just
as effectively as indirect implication of emotional states through actions
and context.92 David S. Miall has suggested that characters’ motives, rather
than their traits, account for the affective engagement and self-projection
of readers into characters,93 though it remains unclear when, and at which
cues, readers’ emotional self-involvement jump-starts the process of inter-
pretation. Bortolussi and Dixon believe that “transparency,” or the judgment
of characters’ behavior as sensible and practical, contributes to identification
(Psychonarratology 240). This may be too simple: even traditional novels are
complex, polyvocal, and various, and Wayne Booth offers this sensible cau-
tion: “What we call ‘involvement’ or ‘sympathy’ or ‘identification,’ is usually
made up of many reactions to author, narrators, observers, and other charac-
ters” (Rhetoric 158, my emphasis). Some way of accounting for the multi-
plicity of reactions making up a normal novel-reading experience needs to
be devised in order to study the transition from distributed characterization
in narrative fiction and readers’ everyday synthesis of their reactions into an
experience of character identification.94
This may require setting aside some common value judgments about
techniques. For instance, E. M. Forster’s famous distinction between flat and
round characters operates within virtually every fictional world populated
by more than one character. The typical critical preference for psychological
depth expressed by roundness, in those characters ‘capable of surprising in a
convincing way’ (Aspects 78), does not preclude empathetic response to flat
characters, minor characters, or (as we have seen in the earlier discussion)
stereotyped villains and antagonists. Drawing on the literature of cognitive
social psychology, Richard J. Gerrig has suggested that readers are likely to
make category-based judgments about fictional characters and to empha-
size attributed dispositions of characters over their actual behavior in situa-
tions.95 This theory suggests, as Forster intuited, that flat characters—easily
comprehended and recalled—may play a greater role in readers’ engage-
ment in novels than is usually understood. Fast and easy character identi-
fication suffers in theorists’ accounts of the reading process, which often
privilege more arduous self-extension and analogical reasoning.
Patrick Colm Hogan, for instance, regards categorical empathy (with
characters matching a reader’s group identity) as the more prevalent form,
while situational empathy, the more ethically desirable role taking, depends
upon a reader’s having a memory of a comparable experience, which is
never guaranteed.96 If situational empathy alone, as Hogan argues, leads
to the ethics of compassion, then quick-match categorical empathy looks
weaker and more vulnerable to bias through ethnocentrism or exclusion-
96 Empathy and the Novel

ary thinking. We do not know, however, that categorical empathy does not
lead to compassion, no more than we know the ethical results of situational
empathy for fictional characters. Neither hypothesis has yet been tested.
While literary critics and professionals value novels that unsettle convic-
tions and contest norms, readers’ reactions to familiar situations and for-
mulaic plot trajectories may underlie their genuinely empathetic reactions
to predictable plot events and to the stereotyped figures that enact them.97
The fullness and fashion by which speech, thoughts, and feelings of char-
acters reach the reader are very often supposed by narrative theorists to
enhance character identification, as I discuss below, but relatively external-
ized and brief statements about a character’s experiences and mental state
may be sufficient to invoke empathy in a reader. Novelists do not need to
be reminded of the rhetorical power of understatement, or indeed of the
peril of revealing too much. Indeed, sometimes the potential for character
identification and readers’ empathy decreases with sustained exposure to a
particular figure’s thoughts or voice.98

Narrative Situation
A commonplace of narrative theory suggests that an internal perspective
best promotes character identification and readers’ empathy. Achieved
through first-person self-narration, figural narration (in which the third-per-
son narrator stays covert and reports only on a single, focal center of con-
sciouness located in a main character), or authorial narration that moves
omnisciently inside many characters’ minds, an inside view should increase
the chance of character identification. Wayne Booth, for instance, writes, “If
an author wants intense sympathy for characters who do not have strong
virtues to recommend them, then the psychic vividness of prolonged inside
views will help him (Rhetoric 377–78, emphasis in original). Of course, the
technique also works for characters in which readers have a natural rooting
interest, and Booth’s detailed account of how Jane Austen uses the inside
view to promote sympathy for the flawed Emma is a classic of narrative the-
ory (245–56). Booth asserts, “By showing most of the story through Emma’s
eyes, the author insures that we will travel with Emma rather than stand
against her” (245). It is not an accident that Austen is one of the early mas-
ters of the technique of representation of characters’ consciousness, nar-
rated monologue, to allow smooth transitions between the narrator’s gener-
alizations about characters’ mental states and transcriptions of their inner
thoughts.99 Also called free indirect discourse, narrated monologue presents
the character’s mental discourse in the grammatical tense and person of the
narrator’s discourse.
Subsequent theorists have agreed that narrated monologue has a strong
effect on readers’ responses to characters. David Miall specifically men-
tions free indirect discourse as a means of providing “privileged informa-
 Readers’ Empathy 97

tion about a character’s mind” likely to cue literariness and invite empathic
decentering (“Necessity” 54). Sylvia Adamson arrives independently at a
similar point, arguing that narrated monologue should be understood as
“empathetic narrative.”100 In Adamson’s language, the representational tech-
nique and its ostensible effects fuse. Quoted monologue (also called interior
monologue, the direct presentation of characters’ thoughts in the person
and tense of their speech) also has its champions, who regard the move into
first person as invariably more authentic and direct than the more medi-
ated or double-voiced narrated monologue. Psycho-narration, or the nar-
rator’s generalizations about the mental states or thoughts of a character,
has fewer advocates perhaps because it is associated with traditional narra-
tives such as epics. However, both Wayne Booth and Dorrit Cohn suggest
that psycho-narration can powerfully invoke character identification, and
Cohn points out that both poetic analogies and metaphors for feeling states
(as Virginia Woolf often employs) require the use of psycho-narration.101
Despite the frequent mention of narrated monologue as the most likely to
produce empathy,102 quoted monologue and psycho-narration also give a
reader access to the inner life of characters. Most theorists agree that purely
externalized narration tends not to invite readers’ empathy.103
In addition to these speculations about modes of representing inner life,
the person of the narration often seems likely to effect readers’ responses
to narrative fiction and its inhabitants. In particular, first-person fiction, in
which the narrator self-narrates his or her own experiences and perceptions,
is thought to invite an especially close relationship between reader and nar-
rative voice. For instance, Franz Stanzel (a major theorist of narrative situa-
tion) believes that the choice of internal representation of the thoughts and
feelings of a character in third-person fiction and the use of first-person self-
narration have a particularly strong effect on readers.104 Novelist and literary
theorist David Lodge speculates that historical and philosophical contexts
may explain the preference for first-person or figural third-person narrative
voice: “In a world where nothing is certain, in which transcendental belief
has been undermined by scientific materialism, and even the objectivity of
science is qualified by relativity and uncertainty, the single human voice,
telling its own story, can seem the only authentic way of rendering con-
sciousness” (Consciousness 87).
However, the existing experimental results for such an association of
technique and reaction are not robust. In several studies of Dutch teenagers,
W. van Peer and H. Pander Maat tested the notion that first-person narration
creates a “greater illusion of closeness . . . allowing the reader a greater and
better fusion with the world of the character.”105 It did not. They conclude
“it remains unclear why point of view has no more powerful and no more
overall effect on readers, given the effort devoted by authors in order to
create these devices that produce a point of view” (“Perspectivation” 152).
While noting that readers certainly express preferences about point of view
98 Empathy and the Novel

and prefer consistency over inconsistency, they found that enhancement

of sympathy for protagonists through positive internal focalization actually
weakened as teenagers matured (152–54). David Lodge concedes that the
first-person voice “is just as artful, or artificial, a method as writing about
a character in the third person,” but he insists that it “creates an illusion
of reality, it commands the willing suspension of the reader’s disbelief, by
modeling itself on the discourses of personal witness: the confession, the
diary, autobiography, the memoir, the deposition” (Consciousness 87–88). I
have been pursuing the opposite argument, that paratexts cuing readers to
understand a work as fictional unleash their emotional responsiveness, in
spite of fiction’s historical mimicry of nonfictional, testimonial forms. For
Lodge, the fact that first-person narration provides writers with the great-
est opportunity for the creation of unreliable or discordant narrators plays
on the practically automatic trust readers are assumed to bring to their part
of the fiction-reading project,106 but the effect of narrative unreliability can
be added to the long list of techniques not yet tested for effects on readers’
emotional responses.
To that list a further set of questions about narrative situation accrues.
What effect (if any) does consonance (relative closeness to the related
events) and dissonance (greater distance between the happening and the
telling) have on readers of first-person, self-narrated fictions? Does a plural,
communal narrative voice, a “we” narration, bring the reader into a percep-
tive circle in which empathetic reactions are more readily available? Does
the use of second-person “you” narration, enhance the intimacy of the read-
ing experience by drawing the reader and narrator close, or does it empha-
size dissonance as it becomes clear that “you” can’t include the reader?107
In third-person fiction, does the use of a figural reflector, rather than an
authorial (omniscient) narrator, make any difference in readers’ emotional
responsiveness to situations and character?108 Does the location of the nar-
rator inside (or outside) the story world affect readers’ reactions to the con-
tent of the narration? Does a covert narrator, who scarcely does more than
provide cues about characters’ movements and speech, disinvite empathy
for those characters, or invite readers to see the action with a greater sense of
immediacy, as if it were a play, as Bortolussi and Dixon suggest (Psychonar-
ratology 202)? In the most fully polyphonic novels, in which a single narra-
tive perspective is simply not available to the reader, does readers’ empathy
increase, dwindle, or vary according to the page they are on? Finally, to bring
the questions back to what happens in actual readers, if a narrative situation
devised to evoke empathy fails to do so, does the fault lie in the reader or in
the overestimation of the efficacy of the technique? While I am inclined to
agree with Wayne Booth that no one ethical effect inheres in a single nar-
rative device, the commentary on narrative form often asserts (or assumes)
that a specific technique inevitably results in particular effects—political,
 Readers’ Empathy 99

ethical, emotional—in readers. These views, in my opinion, should be sub-

jected to careful empirical testing before any aspect of narrative technique
earns the label of “empathetic.”
Real readers believe that they have legitimate empathetic experiences
as a result of their encounters with fictional characters and the imagined
worlds they move in. Indeed, when questioned, readers report a wide range
of emotional responses to novels, not only the culturally sanctioned feel-
ings of catharsis and compassion. Scholars studying the effects of reading
using controlled experiments seek to verify their beliefs that fiction reading
evokes empathy, which in turn results in improved attitudes toward oth-
ers and prosocial action in the real world. Though the evidence for these
effects is still scanty, the faith in the relationship between reading narrative
and moral or social benefits is so strong and pervasive that it remains a bed-
rock assumption of many scholars, philosophers, critics, and cultural com-
mentators. Real readers are more hesitant about the results that reading has
worked in them, however. Most readers value empathy as one of the desired
experiences brought about by reading, and to that end they seek out novels
that will allow imaginative identification with characters and immersion in
vividly rendered fictional worlds so that they can feel with fiction. The mass
appeal of empathetic fiction may not translate directly into altruism, but its
very success in the marketplace demands attention.
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 4

EMPATHY IN THE MARKETPLACE

Generations of novel readers have believed that books open up to them the
perspectives of others who are markedly different, to their enrichment, and
this belief has been woven into the literary history of the novel.1 In a typical
recent example, Mark Edmundson writes, “The rise of the novel coincides
with a realization expressed, or perhaps created, by the development of
democracy. That realization is of the great span of individuals to be found
in the world, of the sheer proliferation of divergent beings” (Why Read?
69). The fiction reader, who in Edmundson’s formulation is likely to be a
citizen of a democratic state, develops virtuous understandings of otherness
and diversity. Certainly, a reader uninterested in people will be unlikely
to develop a habit of novel reading. Through fictional characters, we can
imaginatively inhabit the circumstances, dilemmas, and desires of person-
like figures, some of whom represent socially or temporally remote people.
We often respond to characters as if they were human beings like us, and we
have to learn the professional convention of treating them as “word masses”
rather than as people.2 Some, of course, like the characters of fantasy, don’t
even resemble humans, but that seems to prove no obstacle to our imagin-
ing and feeling for them.
The range of fictional characters (synthetic, thematic, and mimetic,
according to James Phelan) affords readers many different kinds of oppor-
tunity to stretch imaginatively.3 I argue in the preceding chapter that char-
acters need not be realistic, particularly lifelike, or even fully rounded to
invite engagement on the part of readers. Whether we feel with characters
in the emotional accord of empathy, identify with them through deliberate
role taking, or experience spontaneous character identification, we come
away from engrossed reading with the sense of knowing more about others,
and sometimes also about the alien cultures and times called up by fictional
worlds. I recall feeling that way in different decades of my reading career
about Arthur Golden’s The Memoirs of a Geisha (1997), Nevil Shute’s The
Pied Piper (1942), and Henry Treece’s Horned Helmet (1963), so I associate
the sensation with historical fiction, a hybrid of realism and romance. For
my mother, an avid reader, nineteenth-century Russian novels in translation
102 Empathy and the Novel

created a lifelong sense of connection to a country and people remote from

her experience. Readers’ testimony documents the power of fiction to per-
suade us, contrary to fact, that we really understand individuals and worlds
of which we have no direct knowledge.
Needless to say, the insights and convictions that we garner from read-
ing fiction may be dead wrong. We may learn prejudices from fiction as we
share others’ biased perspectives. Philosophers interested in narrative ethics
have tended to emphasize the positive effects of imaginative extension, and
they have also repeatedly endorsed the worthiness of canonical realistic fic-
tion. As chapter 2 documents, however, worries about the consequences of
character identification and the vicarious emotional experiences offered by
fiction trouble the literary history of the novel from the eighteenth century
to contemporary condemnations of women’s light romances. A common
way of attempting to regulate readers’ unruly responses to fiction has been
to distinguish “good” or “serious” literature from popular fiction, especially
genre fiction.4 However, no empirical research yet demonstrates that the
effects of reading “highbrow” serious literary fiction differ from the results
of immersion in “middlebrow” or even “lowbrow” mass-market fiction.5 In
fact, it would be difficult to say for certain which fictional works exemplify
these categories of taste, though that hasn’t stopped the disparagement of
certain genres and their readers.
What drives the desire to limit the positive consequences of reading to
literary fiction? Do we wish to promote or sequester valued books because
we believe in the good they do? Or do we wish to curtail the deleterious
effects of reading popular fiction? Could our arguments about merit reflect
our reading preferences, dressed up to represent “tradition” or “innovation”?
How do we account for the many texts (such as the work of Dickens) that
have migrated from popular fiction to canonical literature? Trends in the
academy play a role, but how much influence on regular readers’ behavior
can really be attributed to the opinions and teaching of literature profes-
sors like myself, or an earlier generation of professors whose taste differed?
These and other questions trouble the effort to verify the merits of novel
reading through prophylactic categorization.
Rather than assuming that some genres promote desirable changes in
readers while others debase them, we should ask whether a relationship
between kind and effect could be confirmed. Genre may enhance or play
down the effect of connecting with characters that seem like alien others.
Certain genres of fiction may depend upon readers’ strong recognitions
of sameness or contemporary relevance. What do we crave more, real-
ism or romance? We may find in fiction confirmation of our sense of self
and social experiences in novels that invite comfortable recognition per-
turbed only by plot, or we may escape from reality into a richly furnished
alternative world whose characters’ strivings strike heroic notes. These are
 Empathy in the Marketplace 103

not the only alternatives, but the descendents of romance (fantasy, sci-
ence fiction, thrillers, horror, westerns, many mysteries and historical nov-
els, and of course women’s romances) vie with varieties of realism, and
with hybrid forms in which elements of romance and realism mix, for the
attention of readers.6
It is not beyond us to know that success in the marketplace more often
correlates with lowbrow status, that respectful reviews and small sales to
educated readers suggest highbrow status, and that widespread adoption by
book groups labels a novel as middlebrow. Even in a commercial context in
which a significant percentage of books bought are works of fiction, a very
tiny percentage of all the books published receive the official approbation
of a review in a magazine, journal, or paper.7 Gender inflects estimations
of cultural status, with male majorities among both book reviewers and
authors of books reviewed in the major weeklies and dailies.8 Sales figures
and library circulation data provide us with a rough sense of adult fiction
readers’ preferences: in Great Britain, general fiction is the most popular
category overall, with mystery and detective stories and light romances fol-
lowing, and historical fiction coming in a more distant fourth.9 These cat-
egories of borrowing accounted for about 93 percent of the total of fiction
checked out in the U.K. (according to statistics compiled in 1999). In order
of their significantly lesser popularity, war stories, science fiction, westerns,
horror fiction, humor, and short stories made up the remaining 7 percent
(Bestsellers 247). These statistics do not separate ambitious literary fiction
and canonical novels from “general fiction,” but very few books of these
kinds become bestsellers.
The exceptions to this general rule deserve attention. Film adaptations can
propel literary fiction, including classics, onto best-seller lists. For instance,
Michael Cunningham’s novel The Hours, which had won several prestigious
awards and had been enthusiastically reviewed when it came out in 1998,
sold 636,000 copies in 2003. A year earlier, the celebrated 2002 film version
of The Hours, starring Meryl Streep and Nicole Kidman, had collected half
a dozen Oscar nominations (Kidman won for best actress). Perhaps even
more impressively, the film version of Virginia Woolf’s life contained within
The Hours sent 425,000 buyers back to Woolf’s 1925 novel Mrs. Dalloway
(McEvoy and Maryles, “Paperback Bestsellers” 584). I speculate that many
book groups and college students read the two novels back-to-back in 2003,
but Amazon.com’s automated recommendation system, which pairs books
and offers a discount on joint purchases, may well have played a role in
boosting Woolf’s sales. The annual Booker Prize winner normally sells very
well, but not always well enough to reach the top 10 in the paperback best-
seller list.10 Other prizes, early notices in mass-market outlets such as Good
Morning America, and adoption by Book of the Month Club can give a novel
a chance to catch on: Alice Sebold’s The Lovely Bones (2002) and Sue Monk
104 Empathy and the Novel

Kidd’s The Secret Life of Bees (2002) went from modest first print runs to
million sellers in just a year.11 Exceptionally, Oprah Winfrey’s selection of
a novel for her Book Club can propel even a quite difficult literary novel
(such as Toni Morrison’s Beloved [1987] and Song of Solomon [1977]) right
to the top the best-seller lists. Winfrey’s imprimatur grants middlebrow
status to works that would otherwise seem either too difficult or beneath
notice.12 However, as Jonathan Franzen notoriously emphasized when he
wished to keep Oprah’s signature sticker off the cover of his novel The Cor-
rections (2001), becoming an Oprah book also brands a work as especially
suitable for female readers. For a DeLillo manqué, increased readership does
not necessarily compensate for the association with the topicality and emo-
tional invitation that Oprah books promise their empathetic readership.
No individual has more influenced the book purchasing and reading of
adult Americans in recent years than Oprah Winfrey.13 At a conservative
estimate, she was responsible for the purchase and reading of twenty-one
million copies of works of adult fiction in the United States, between 1996
and 2002. The figure soars when one adds library patrons and international
buyers to the tally. Now that Oprah’s Book Club has returned after a brief
hiatus, in a new form featuring backlisted books by dead authors, the evi-
dence of Winfrey’s power to shape Americans’ reading has become clearer
than ever. When she selected John Steinbeck’s 1952 novel East of Eden, it
immediately shot to the #1 spot on the best-seller list and sold 1.6 mil-
lion copies in 2003 (McEvoy and Maryles, “Paperback Bestsellers” 584). A
less dramatic but still impressive result occurred when Winfrey chose Alan
Paton’s Cry, the Beloved Country (1948), a novel that had sold a respect-
able 80,000 copies in 2002, no doubt as a result of its presence on school
and university syllabi. With Winfrey’s attention, Paton’s novel sold 617,000
copies in 2003 (584). Sales figures and television ratings combine to suggest
that around half a million adults, mostly women, read each of her selec-
tions. An astonishing thirteen million viewers tuned in to her book club
segments, and anecdotal evidence suggests that Winfrey influenced some
of these viewers to resume reading or to become novel readers for the first
time (Rooney, Reading with Oprah 126).
Given the dramatic drop in the number of novel readers, especially
among men, rational inquiry into the effects of reading ought not to be lim-
ited to the putative effects of serious literary fiction, a thin slice of the action
by any measure. Attention to the interests of the middlebrow reader, who
populates the book clubs and buys most of the fiction sold in the United
States and Great Britain, suggests that she seeks empathetic reading expe-
riences.14 I propose that novels inviting empathy do better in the market-
place (perhaps because they get better word-of-mouth recommendations)
and that empathetic reading habits make up a core element of middlebrow
readers’ self-image. This self-reinforcing pair of observations (empathy sells
 Empathy in the Marketplace 105

books; empathetic readers seek books that will allow them to feel with char-
acters) complicates the attempt to discover what novel reading does to and
for readers. Narrative empathy may be less influential as an effect of reading
and more important as a sought-after experience—tantamount to a pre-
condition for success with a large segment of the book-buying and novel-
reading public. The opportunity to read empathetically certainly seems to
matter to tastemaker Oprah Winfrey.
Before turning to a case study of one of the last of the original Oprah
Book Club selections, Rohinton Mistry’s novel A Fine Balance (1995,
selected in 2002), this chapter examines a belief about fiction that is nor-
mally presented as a baseline assumption: Does novel reading really extend
the empathetic circle? The emphasis by readers, authors, and the novels
themselves on a common emotional heritage and the universality of human
feelings promises that novel reading can bridge social, cultural, economic,
and geographical gaps that might otherwise impede empathy. Though the
sharing of feeling with fictional characters may not translate into verifiable
prosocial action on behalf of suffering others, as some authors and psycholo-
gists hope,15 people validate their reading by honoring novels’ renovating
virtue, which is understood to operate through imaginative extension. The
potential of fiction to open readers’ hearts and minds to markedly different
others invites an understanding of storytelling as a moral technology. Does
it work?

Does Novel Reading Extend the Empathetic Circle?

When we read novels, we often experience empathic reactions to charac-

ters and their situations. The analogy with the way real people invoke our
emotional responses inspires the idea that we may learn how to respond
to those who are different from us through the safe trial runs of fiction
reading.16 Jèmeljan Hakemulder reports that some studies show reading
enhances the ability to make inferences about others’ thoughts, feelings,
and motives, which confirms both commonsense assumptions and evolu-
tionary biological arguments about the uses of fiction (Hakemulder, Moral
Laboratory 13, 50–52). Making accurate inferences about others’ thoughts,
feelings, and motives does not at all guarantee that a reader shares, sup-
ports, or regards them as anything but tools to be employed in gaining the
upper hand over others, however. Empathy may be used as Robert Mac-
Namara presents it in Errol Morris’s 2004 documentary The Fog of War:
“empathize with your enemy.” MacNamara states in the film, “We must try
to put ourselves inside their skin and look at us through their eyes, just to
understand the thoughts that lie behind their decisions and their actions.”
Though MacNamara claims that successful empathizing led to a peaceful
106 Empathy and the Novel

resolution to the Cuban Missile Crisis, this kind of empathy exercised for
strategic purposes differs from the socially beneficial imaginative exten-
sion as a source of altered attitudes, upon which Hakemulder focuses in
The Moral Laboratory. Hakemulder’s own experiments suggest that read-
ing stories featuring positive depictions of members of “outgroups” leads to
a reduction of social distance. Like the empathy studies he discusses, how-
ever, his own work complicates literary response by engaging subjects in
role-taking tasks, which may in fact cause the reductions in social distance
he records (Moral Laboratory 98–100). Hakemulder’s study of the empa-
thetic effects of story reading, in which he employs standardized empathy
tests and omits role-taking exercises, produced no evidence of a correla-
tion, though it did suggest that stories can introduce biases into social per-
ceptions (143). Empathy with persecuted victims can increase hatred of
their tormenters, which may then be extended wholesale to a whole group,
including to innocent members.
A positive way of putting Hakemulder’s findings emphasizes the boost
that the incorporation of role-taking exercises into the teaching of fiction
gives (“Foregrounding” 195). Reading alone, or reading brief extracts or short
stories, may well be insufficient to extend the empathetic circle to include
members of outgroups. Hakemulder found that reading short (translated)
excerpts from Salman Rushdie’s novel The Satanic Verses (1988) (and para-
phrases that deleted Rushdie’s baroque language) failed to influence a group
of sociology students’ opinions about immigrants (“Foregrounding” 204).
Literature students showed different responses to the literary version (as
opposed to the manipulated summary), but their scores on scales measur-
ing perceptions of immigrants’ adaptation problems, experiences of intoler-
ance and low acceptance, and motivation by necessity were not altered by
reading Rushdie (206). An earlier study conducted by Canadian education
specialists John Kehoe and Charles Ungerleider found neither reduction
in dogmatism nor increase in empathy as a result of reading passages from
John Marlyn’s novel Under the Ribs of Death (1957), a book about the expe-
riences of Hungarian immigrants in Winnipeg (“Effects of Role Exchange”
48–52). Changing students’ empathic perceptiveness to include ethnically
diverse others, and reducing their discriminatory attitudes and intolerance
seem to require more than simple novel reading. These preliminary stud-
ies do not disprove the widely held belief that novel reading extends read-
ers’ sense of the humanity of members of outgroups, but they fail to lend
empirical support to the popular theory.
Other kinds of evidence may be brought to bear on the question, how-
ever. I have suggested above that the very fictionality of novels licenses our
feeling responsiveness because it frees us from responsibility to protect our-
selves through skepticism and suspicion. Fiction may evoke empathy in part
because it cannot make direct demands for action. We readers find ourselves
 Empathy in the Marketplace 107

in a position even less implicated than real-world bystanders. We may ask,

with the philosophers, how strong and authentic are our reactions under
these special, fictional circumstances? Can we say that fleeting shared feel-
ing matters if it does not result in changed attitudes or deliberate actions? To
begin to answer this question, I turn to the testimony of readers, gathered
from my own students.
While a majority of my students believe that “if everyone still actually
read, there would be a lot more awareness of people’s feelings and needs,”17
and some report reinforcement of beliefs through reading, very few are
able to report actual effects of reading on their behavior. The effects, when
discernable, rarely impel the reader far beyond their comfort zones. For
instance, one student writes, “After reading [Bharati Mukherjee’s] Desirable
Daughters I was reminded that no matter our backgrounds or appearances
we all have similar emotions and concerns. It really made me want even
more to be sure that I looked everyone in the eye as I walked by and said
hello.”18 On a small rural campus that prides itself on its friendly Speak-
ing Tradition, this resolution could be carried out easily, and I hope that
the student acted on her impulse. Another student reports, “Whenever I
read works that emphasize family (like [Edwidge Danticat’s] Krik? Krak!
or [Mukherjee’s] Desirable Daughters) I always make sure to call my parents
immediately. Especially since I now live so far from home, our family time is
limited and easily pushed down the list.”19 Like the first comment, this one
reports a good side effect of reading, but not one that directly alters behav-
ior to those outside the community or family circle. Both cases record the
opposite directionality from empathetic extension, in fact. Reading texts
about characters from distinctively different cultures brings to the surface
these readers’ desires to make human contact with people in their immedi-
ate community or kinship network.
While older adults often mention being inspired to travel to a faraway
place by a novel, the second most common view among my college-aged
students emphasizes internal changes, as opposed to outward actions: “Nov-
els often make me think very hard for days on a certain subject. I often
change my views according to novels and adopt views from novels into
the mix of my own but I can’t say that any particular novel has moved me
to any direct or specific course of action. Yet I have been moved to adopt
stances on issues/feelings that have indirectly changed my outlooks/behav-
iors.”20 The most common opinion among college-aged readers affirms that
while an empathetic reading experience might make a reader do something,
it hasn’t done so as far they can recall. This anecdotal gathering of opin-
ions confirms a surprising result in a recent empathy study conducted by
psychologists Krystina A. Finlay and Walter G. Stephan.21 While discover-
ing that reading about commonplace discrimination or receiving empathy
instructions improved attitudes toward both in-group and out-group mem-
108 Empathy and the Novel

bers, they unexpectedly discovered that neither manipulation affected the

reactive empathy “usually associated with an increased willingness to help
others or with more positive attitudes toward others” (“Improving” 1731).
As my review of Hakemulder’s work has already suggested, reading by itself
may be insufficient to extend the empathetic circle beyond its predictable
reach of family, community, and tribe.
The explanation for this underperformance of fiction may lie in the
very textuality of novels. Psychologist Martin Hoffman believes that ver-
bally mediated empathic arousal should be expected to evoke a weaker
response than when we witness another’s emotions in person. He attri-
butes this weakness to three differences. First, the act of reading (actu-
ally processing, comprehending, and picturing the text’s contents) takes
a longer time than seeing someone in distress. Second, reading requires
more mental effort; and third, the technology of prose puts psychological
distance between sender and receiver (Empathy and Moral Development
50). However, Hoffman also speculates that exposure to films and novels
such as The Grapes of Wrath (1939) or Les Miserables (1862) could add
an “empathy-charged, need-based component to one’s distributive justice
principles” (259). In other words, a reader might find a moving novel alter-
ing her values about how rewards and punishments should be allocated.22
Hoffman points out that film and novelistic narrative have the advantage of
offering a reader the opportunity to empathize with another’s “entire life
(hard work, expectations, disappointment) and respond, where appropri-
ate, with empathic feelings of injustice” (259). This comment suggests that
fiction in the Bildungsroman tradition (novels of development relating a
whole life story), naturalist fiction (emphasizing the inexorable determina-
tion of experience by environment), and realistic social fiction (focusing on
identifiable social problems) may have a special role to play in cultivating
empathy. Not all genres of narrative emphasize the plot trajectory implied
by Hoffman’s telegraphic “hard work, expectations, disappointment,” how-
ever. Would novels in other genres offer readers comparable opportuni-
ties? Did Rushdie’s novel fail to alter Dutch students’ opinions of immi-
grants because of its phantasmagoria, its ornate prose style, its irony, or its
unrealistic conventions?23 Studies comparing the effects on the opinions of
readers could be designed to discover if particular genres garner stronger
empathetic effects (or alteration of readers’ opinions) than others. So far,
these studies do not exist.24 The testimony of readers and their behavior in
real and virtual bookstores (and libraries), however, suggest some avenues
for future investigation.
One direction would be to examine the disproportionate gendering of
novel reading as a female activity as aliteracy rates accelerate. I have already
commented on the gender gap in fiction reading: women outnumber men
among novel readers in western countries (not just in the United States: in
the European community, an average of 45 percent of citizens described
 Empathy in the Marketplace 109

themselves as book readers, not necessarily fiction readers; but 65 percent

of the book buyers are women, and they do prefer fiction).25 Reading has
declined in Europe and North America in terms of both numbers of read-
ers and in numbers of hours spent reading, but the decline has been sharper
among men, making women a greater majority of the remaining readers.
One result of this phenomenon may be summarized this way: in the early
twenty-first century, female gender has become a constitutive feature of the
middlebrow reader.26
Since publishers and book professionals, equipped with market research
data, claim that women do 70 percent or more of the book purchasing, the
shift in demographics may be assumed to have an influence on which nov-
els get published, promoted, and widely distributed.27 Choosing a future
bestseller or even solid mid-list performer is not an exact science, however,
so the desires of reading public cannot be regarded as dictating the qualities
of published fiction. The way an audience represents its taste in books or its
reading habits may nonetheless influence the market over time. One nota-
ble development that indicates publishers’ responsiveness to middlebrow
readers can be spotted in the availability of reading-group guides (online
and in special edition paperbacks aimed at reading group members) for a
wide range of fiction from popular bestsellers to canonical classics.
At Oprah.com, a curious reader can find queries, suggestions, and expert
answers to frequently asked questions about her featured novel. While some
of these materials inevitably carry a whiff of academic instruction, they also
reveal the contours of Oprah Winfrey’s interests and the preferences of her
readers. Typical Oprah reading-group questions ask for evaluations of char-
acters, delve into their qualities and feelings, and pose role-taking scenarios.
Asking readers to compare or contrast their real-world experiences with the
novel’s representation augments the role-taking exercises with elaboration
of human connections despite different circumstances. Finally, the ques-
tions often invite readers to apportion blame for the social ills or unfortu-
nate events of the story. Winfrey’s readers are invited to make moral evalu-
ations of the real-world issues embedded in novels, not just the actions of
characters within fictional worlds. Though other questions focus on images
and symbols, Winfrey’s discussion cleaves quite closely to stages of empa-
thetic response and often dramatizes for viewers the effects of reading, rep-
resented by readers who have written in and have been selected to appear
on the show or have dinner with the author. This emphasis endorses Win-
frey’s evident belief that reading fiction promotes positive changes in her
viewers’ lives. Looking closely at the appreciation and analysis of a single
book chosen by Winfrey can only reveal a part of the complex profile of
the new middlebrow readership, but their emphases confirm the percep-
tion that empathy matters to many novel readers. In the section that fol-
lows, I consider the central role of empathetic response for Oprah’s read-
ing-group participants.
110 Empathy and the Novel

A Fine Balance and Oprah’s Book Club:

Breaking Us Out of Our Comfort Zones

Oprah: Has anybody read a book like this before? I’ve never encoun-
tered pages that took me so far, and removed me from my own way
of life and way of thinking the way A Fine Balance did.28

Rohinton Mistry’s novel, A Fine Balance, may at first glance appear an

unlikely choice for Oprah’s Book Club, which most often featured women
writers’ books.29 Though Winfrey does not shy away from tough subjects
or difficult prose, by her own account, she responded to the book as an
unusual reading experience. By 2002, many readers were already enjoying
the craze for works by South Asian writers (“Indo-chic”), which received a
boost from the celebration of fifty years of Indian independence in 1997.
Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things (1997), Vikram Seth’s A Suitable
Boy (1993), and Jhumpa Lahiri’s Interpreter of Maladies (1999) were just
the most widely read of a rich field of fiction including the works of Salman
Rushdie, Anita Desai, R. K. Narayan, and many others. Few of these nov-
els or collections of short stories presented such a stark representation of
poverty and exploitation as Rohinton Mistry’s A Fine Balance. A critically
acclaimed, very long novel, A Fine Balance had already won the Giller Prize,
the Commonwealth Writers Prize, and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize
for Fiction, and had been shortlisted for the Booker Prize, the International
IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, and the Irish Times International Fiction
Prize by the time Winfrey announced its selection on November 30, 2001.
In short, it had been marked as a highbrow’s novel, a modern-day Hardy or
Zola, before Winfrey resituated it and brought it to a broader middlebrow
audience.
A Fine Balance holds the distinction of being the only postcolonial novel
from outside the Americas that Winfrey selected for her readers.30 Contrary
to the impression that reading the likes of Salman Rushdie is a highbrow
pursuit, many novels by writers from all around the globe fit the bill for
middlebrow pleasure reading.31 Postcolonial novels differ from the usual
reading group fare only in the degree to which they invite readers to far-
away worlds and unfamiliar cultures. As Nico Israel has observed, many
postcolonial writers “shun the low affect irony associated with postmod-
ernism” (“Globalization” 4). Wide readers of world fiction will be able to
think of many contemporary postcolonial novels that seem suitable for dis-
cussion by Winfrey: Keri Hulme’s the bone people (1983), Sunetra Gupta’s
Memories of Rain (1992), Bharati Mukherjee’s Jasmine (1989), Anita Desai’s
Fire on the Mountain (1977), and Tsitsi Dangarembga’s Nervous Conditions
(1988) immediately spring to mind. She appears to prefer American fiction,
but by her own account, Winfrey made the selection of A Fine Balance at
what seemed like an unusually appropriate time for reflection about a wider
 Empathy in the Marketplace 111

world: “After September 11, I started taking more time for myself. I read [A
Fine Balance] and thought ‘This will do, in some ways, what September 11
has done. Take us out of our own little shell. Expose us to a whole other
world out there going on beyond our backyards.’ And it did exactly that”
(“Discussion”).
A Fine Balance provides an unremittingly grim depiction of life in an
unnamed Indian seaside city (recognizably Bombay) during the 1975–1977
State of Emergency. This disruption of democratic governance occurred
when Indira Gandhi, having been convicted of election fraud, ruled by dic-
tatorship, suspended civil liberties, and dealt with overpopulation by steril-
izing eleven million people, many of them by force. Most Americans do not
recall this traumatic period for India. As Winfrey comments on the show,
“That’s the year I graduated from college . . . we were all in our own little
worlds in 1975 . . .” (“Discussion”). A Fine Balance’s confronting of contem-
porary events that transpired during many of her viewers’ lifetimes, but
failed to make a lasting impression, assists in Winfrey’s goal of “breaking
us out of our comfort zones.” Winfrey’s treatment of the novel emphasizes
role taking with its sympathetic characters and the difficult search for an
adequate moral judgment about social evils affecting those characters. Her
show also elucidates the realities lying behind Mistry’s representation of
poverty, violence, and caste prejudice.
Mistry’s narrator provides an overarching perspective on the period of
the Emergency through focus on four major characters, the widow Dina,
the student Maneck, and the tailors Ishvar and Om. Within individual sec-
tions, the third-person narrative reflects a tighter focus on the perspective of
a particular character or pair, so the novel provides a variety of opportuni-
ties for character identification. Dina, who struggles against cultural expec-
tations for widows, and Maneck, who strives to justify his parents’ sacrifice
in sending him to school, make fairly accessible bridges for American read-
ers. However, the two untouchable tailors and their acquaintances on the
street push these readers to extend the empathetic circle to suffering oth-
ers who would normally seem remote and incomprehensible. Mistry insists
on linking the four lives he narrates, and he uses the emblem of a quilt to
make their connection vivid. Dina creates this frugal artwork out of scraps,
recording the friends’ good times and bad, and defying the barriers of caste
that would normally separate them. She intends it to give it as a wedding
present to Om. Unfortunately, when Ishvar and Om get rounded up in a
sweep of the slums, Om is not given a simple vasectomy in the sterilization
camp. Instead, he suffers castration. Ishvar, who has only been sterilized,
gets infected and loses his legs. Mistry’s last mention of the hopeful emblem
of the quilt occurs when it can be glimpsed cushioning the legless beggar
on his wheeled cart.
In A Fine Balance, Mistry’s claustrophobic determinism leaves its lov-
ingly depicted central characters Ishvar and Om no escape routes. Mistry
112 Empathy and the Novel

relates their attempt to improve their lot from leatherworking, the task
of the untouchable caste to which they are born. Ishvar and Om succeed
for a while, but true to the naturalist logic that governs Mistry’s story, they
get pounded down into degraded conditions and end the novel as maimed
beggars. We read on, horrified, as Mistry loads yet another tragedy, gleaned
from newspaper accounts of atrocities, abuses, corruption, and crime, onto
Ishvar and Om’s frail shoulders. This runs a risk of compromising the novel’s
realism, as a contributer to a SASIALIST listserv discussion complains: “The
novel telescopes dozens of experiences suffered by many from the disad-
vantaged groups into the lives of two people, and by making it all happen to
the two, it transforms the tale into melodrama. It made the suffering appear
so commonplace as to be dismal.”32 Another contributor to the SASIALIST
discussion laments that the powerful representation of suffering emphasizes
how little has changed in over two decades: “What bothers me is that these
things happened, and unfortunately still happen. . . . Nothing has changed,
no lesson has been learnt due to the ‘emergency.’ That is what I find to
be extremely disturbing, because it nullifies any hope I would have other-
wise had.”33 These readers, knowledgeable about India and familiar with its
modern history, respond to the novel’s ambitious representation of injustice
with ambivalence. Both complaints, that hope suffers nullification and that
melodrama mutes the response to suffering, assume that successful repre-
sentation might do something positive with readers’ emotional responses,
but deny that A Fine Balance achieves that goal.
For Oprah viewers, the show anticipates a different kind of response:
simple disbelief. In film sequences of the slums of Bombay and in discus-
sions of the condition of India’s poorest citizens, the show insists upon the
verisimilitude of Mistry’s novel. Discussions with participants chosen for
their first-hand knowledge of India pass on to Winfrey’s viewers some of the
nitty-gritty details about caste prejudice, for instance, and forcible steriliza-
tion during the internal Emergency. The task that remains is to forge a mean-
ingful response to this unwelcome knowledge. The characters may have no
escape routes, but Winfrey emphasizes the moral value of struggling to feel
kinship with despised others. In a discussion with Mistry, Winfrey exclaims,
“It’s different, though, when you have to open your home, your porch, your
veranda, to someone who you didn’t even think was in your touching zone.
That’s a whole bigger thing.” Rohinton Mistry responds with a gloss of his
intentions, “It’s a big stretch, what you just mentioned. It’s a big stretch. And
many big stretches will reduce the amount of injustice in the world. There’s
no other way than making the big stretch” (Oprah and Rohinton, “Discus-
sion”). Winfrey’s presentation of A Fine Balance thus enables the viewer to
connect the dots between an emotional response through character identi-
fication and the goal of reducing injustice in the real world. Her represen-
tative readers, featured on the show in conversation with Winfrey and the
author, strive to make that connection, with varied results.
 Empathy in the Marketplace 113

Among Winfrey’s featured readers, “Madhavi” has the closest ties to India
and struggles with the difficulty of assigning blame or finding solutions to
the problems Mistry describes: “This book was really hard for me. I felt like
everyone who struggled and tried in this book failed. And I had a hard time
understanding, because I can’t get through my day thinking that no mat-
ter what you do, it isn’t going to help in the end. . . . And the fact that no
one is responsible. There’s no clear villain!” (Madhavi, “Discussion”). Mad-
havi’s original letter to Winfrey emphasizes the difficulty of pinning down
right and wrong. The letter shows a strong sense of shared humanity but
honestly comments on the impulse to distance oneself from others’ suf-
fering: “Every page was emotionally exhausting. . . . This book opened my
eyes to how difficult it is to define wrong and right on an individual level.
It showed me the remarkable interconnectedness of everyone and every-
thing and the complex, multifaceted nature of human beings, particularly
where there is rampant poverty, with religious and social norms that allow
human suffering to be reasoned away. But maybe that’s what one needs to
be able to [do to] survive” (Madhavi, “Discussion”). Perhaps because Mad-
havi feels closer to the country and culture being described, the pressure to
understand root causes and address real suffering results in an impasse. The
empathetic response of this reader reaches the mature phase that Martin
Hoffman describes as an empathic sense of injustice, but it does not result
in a clear program for action. Ironically, the compelling representation of
injustice frustrates this reader’s wish to blame a villain.
For “Mohammed,” a second participant in Oprah’s show on A Fine Bal-
ance, the novel’s scene was familiar as a result of four periods of service in
the slums of Bombay. Having actually met and worked with real people like
the characters in the novel, Mohammed asserts confidently, “I know them
intimately. They are real. They are still there” (Mohammed, “Discussion”).
Mohammed also shies away from a prosocial response to the novel, perhaps
because he has already given of himself in earlier years, as his original let-
ter suggests. Mohammed’s particular experience of the realism of Mistry’s
representation leads him to insist, in that letter, on the universality of the
emotions experienced by the characters: “The book is deeply entrenched
in Indian themes, peppered with Indian slang and set in contemporary and
local political events indigenous to the Indian sub-continent. Yet the appeal
of the book is universal. Look at its worldwide sales. . . . Human emo-
tions, regardless of nationalities, are universal. Grief, joy, hope and despair
know no cultural boundaries. Herein lies Mistry’s skill. Though the events
may be foreign and some linguistic references incomprehensible, the reader
rarely stumbles, because the emotions that the characters elicit are intui-
tively recognizable, thus making the characters archetypal” (Mohammed,
“Discussion”). For Mohammed, the novel succeeds because it presents rec-
ognizable, verisimilar characters in situations that not only resonate with his
experience, but also reach out to a wider audience through feelings that any
114 Empathy and the Novel

reader would know. The representation of the characters’ emotions achieves

universality though the book itself is “entrenched” in an India Mohammed
knows firsthand.
In the context of Oprah’s Book Club, the possibility of universal feelings,
shared by humankind, is a baseline assumption. This popular belief echoes
the attitude of many psychologists toward human emotion, but it differs
markedly from the view of emotion as culturally constructed that holds
sway in many academic disciplines. (I take up this debate at greater length
in chapter 6, “Contesting Empathy.”) In support of the sort of universal-
ity of feeling that Mohammed notes, we may consider what psychologist
Dylan Evans writes about our reading: “When we read poems and novels
written by authors from different cultures, we recognize the emotions they
describe. If emotions were cultural inventions, changing as swiftly as lan-
guage, these texts would seem alien and impenetrable” (Emotion 8). The
logic of this statement may be reversed in order to illuminate Mohammed’s
insistence on the archetypal emotions evoked by A Fine Balance: were we
not to find recognizable feelings, then whole cultures and peoples, not just
texts, might seem alien and impenetrable. Certainly many people do find
other cultures, countries, and individuals alien, strange, and threatening.
This fact only increases the importance of recognizing universal feelings,
as a second excerpt from Dylan Evans suggests: “Our common emotional
heritage binds humanity together, then, in a way that transcends cultural
difference. In all places, and at all times, human beings have shared the same
basic emotional repertoire. Different cultures have elaborated on this rep-
ertoire, exalting different emotions, downgrading others, and embellishing
the common feelings with cultural nuances, but these differences are more
like those between two interpretations of the same musical work, rather
than those between different compositions” (Emotions 8). We find a not
very subtle recipe for achieving universal harmony embedded in Evans’s
metaphors. Whether or not human emotions are universal, the expression
of belief in universality carries with it an optimistic program for transcending
cultural differences.
For readers with no direct connection to India, the emotional demands
made by the novel did not, however, lead to an effort to overcome differ-
ence. Their responses pointed back to their own situations and contexts.34
Participant “Carlyn” seeks books that “enrich the spirit” and reveal “emotions
that the reader didn’t know were possible.” Stretching to comprehend the
pain of Mistry’s characters, and questioning how well she would endure this
pain, led Carlyn to a cathartic process regarding the trauma of the terrorist
attacks of September 11, 2001. Caryln writes, “For the first time, I began
really feeling for the effects and implications of the September 11 attacks
on America. I watched from a screen, imagining the terror and loss. And in
this sense, the circle has become complete for me through the reading of
 Empathy in the Marketplace 115

Mistry’s book. A Fine Balance serves as a gateway for me to walk through

with these feelings” (Carlyn, “Discussion”). Carlyn comes to the realization
that the human family is interconnected, and she takes as a challenge the
message that “we have to open our hearts to one another, or all of us will per-
ish in the face of poverty, terrorism or violence toward each other” (Carlyn,
“Discussion”). We do not learn what steps Carlyn takes in order to achieve
this goal, but her conviction resonates with Winfrey’s intentions of getting
beyond our comfort zones. For “Patty,” a fourth featured reader, the forging
of bonds of friendship in the face of misery also inspires reflection on the
indomitable human spirit. The result of reading for Patty is more practical,
but also in keeping with Winfrey’s emphases on self-actualization. Patty
writes, “I came away with a powerful reminder of some valuable life lessons,
that you, Oprah, have stated many times over. ‘Strive to live your best life,
stand within your truth and keep your own counsel.’ Since finishing the
book, I was inspired to launch my own management consultancy and con-
tinue my career development” (Patty, “Discussion”). From a novel about the
bravery of the suffering poor, Patty takes the impetus to risk a career change.
As Kathleen Rooney has recently observed, Oprah’s show imposes its own
narratives of self-improvement on the novels, explicitly inviting readers to
garner “life lessons” from reading. Patty’s response, though far from tradi-
tional literary criticism, fits Winfrey’s formula neatly (Oprah 142–46), and
indeed she comes the closest to representing the typical Oprah reader, even
when responding to this atypical novel.35 In this case, Winfrey’s featured
readers all struggle with their heartfelt reactions to Mistry’s novel. Each one
expresses empathetic feelings, but each one ends up in a different place as
a result of the reading experience. This readerly phenomenon echoes in the
writer’s comments about his intentions. Though Mistry invokes the spread
of justice as his writerly intention, in an interview he confesses that, like
Camus, he believes that “one can redeem oneself by writing.” He comments,
“I think that is why I began to write. I wasn’t sure how redemption would
come through writing but I’m still writing” (“Rohinton Mistry with Robert
Mclay” 206). The motivation to write fiction may involve a reaching out to
readers as brothers and sisters for the benefit of the writer, and empathetic
effects may then play a different role in the emotional transaction between
author and readers than inspiring prosocial action.
It is not at all surprising to find empathy and its potential effects fore-
grounded in an Oprah book discussion. Empathy is an Oprah touchstone.
As an admirable trait it links the show and Web site’s presentation of Barack
Obama, the Dalai Lama, Pearl S. Buck, and Mary-Louise Parker, all of whom
apparently possess it and recommend it to Winfrey’s viewers. Empathy
plays a central role in the show’s recommendations about love, “marriage
repair,” child rearing, grieving, and “lifestyle makeover.” As a quality of a
book, the Web site attributes empathy to Andre Dubus’s House of Sand and
116 Empathy and the Novel

Fog (1999), Sol T. Plaatje’s Mhudi (1930), Tolstoi’s Anna Karenina (1878),
and Lalita Tademy’s Cane River (2001). Winfrey encourages her audience to
employ empathy in their life-improving efforts, including in their reading.36
In turn, the Oprah audience constructs an ideal author with whom they can
empathize and seeks a way of understanding the challenge of reading pain-
ful fiction by empathizing with characters. That they do not inevitably reach
the desirable end point of prosocial action, engaging in altruistic helping or
working to end injustice, does not diminish the centrality of empathetic
feeling as an aspect of a fulfilling emotional life. Feeling with others, includ-
ing fictional others, can be an end in itself. It draws some of its power from
the analogous experience of compassion, experienced in a religious context,
for Oprah’s show owes a great deal to the forms and function of testimonial
religion.
Oprah Winfrey’s very influential guidance on how to read a novel contrib-
utes to the contemporary scene’s unprecedented cultural valuation of empa-
thy, which in turn participates in an optimistic understanding of the process
of social formation. This emphasis has become widespread in the cultural
commentary on books. The choices that readers make for themselves, and
perhaps even more importantly, for children, are felt to contribute to social
renovations that stem from empathy. We find this emphasis even in the
religious press, in which compassion, forgiveness, and loving one’s neighbor
might be considered the more traditional goals (Donnelly, “Studies Abroad”
22–24). One may ask whether this social formation through reading reaches
everyone. If novel reading does open readers up to the perspectives of mark-
edly different others, as many teachers believe, then women and girls may
disproportionately benefit from this exercise of their sympathetic imagina-
tions. Though Oprah Winfrey does not exclude men from the beneficial
effects of empathetic reading, her audience is mainly female. This matches
up to the well-documented observation that women do most of the novel
reading today.
Does women’s novel reading then exaggerate the culturally sanctioned
gender roles of “feeling women” and “thinking men”? If so, then the efforts of
individuals such as Oprah Winfrey exercise considerable cultural influence
by bringing particular texts to the attention of a broad potential readership
and reminding that readership how to use the novel-reading experience.
Winfrey acts as a teacher in her Book Club segments, encouraging role tak-
ing, judgment making, and application of life lessons from novels to the real
lives of her viewers. Whether novels on their own can actually extend read-
ers’ empathetic imagination and make prosocial action more likely remains
uncertain, but Winfrey’s advocacy for the force of fiction creates the cir-
cumstances that have been shown to increase empathetic understanding of
others. By dignifying empathetic response to fiction, Winfrey may increase
the role-taking efforts of her considerable readership, and that may change
attitudes, if not actions.
 Empathy in the Marketplace 117

Bestsellers and the Diffusion of Responsibility

When a reader commits herself to an Oprah book, she joins a vast audience.
If she heeds Winfrey’s recommendations on how to read, she may feel that
the novel presses her to respond in the real world. In the case of Rohinton
Mistry’s A Fine Balance, the emotions invoked may impel a reader to feel-
ings of helplessness in the face of insuperable injustices, as we have seen
above. More positively, it may provoke self-evaluation that leads to action in
a purely personal realm. It may provide an opportunity for cathartic healing
and expanded understanding. However, social psychology suggests another
possibility. Becoming a reader of a bestseller means joining a crowd, though
not the kind of throng that surrounds a person physically. The best recent
example of this phenomenon occurs when J. K. Rowling issues one of her
Harry Potter books: readers all over the world simultaneously obtain and
then read the novel together, conscious that millions of others are doing
the same thing. Harry Potter books, engrossing and excellent as they are,
make few direct demands on readers’ behavior.37 When Winfrey chooses a
novel that centrally addresses questions of injustice, she opens the way for
socially committed responses. However, joining the crowd of readers of A
Fine Balance may also activate the psychological response known as diffusion
of responsibility: the assumption on the part of individuals, that because they
are part of a crowd, that they need not take responsibility for acting. By this
logic, if everyone else—hundreds of thousands of other readers, and millions
of other viewers—becomes aware of caste prejudice, oppression of the poor,
and the cruel treatment of widows in India, then surely someone else must
already be doing something.
Researchers on altruism in the real world have already demonstrated the
rarity of a truly risk-taking altruistic response to others’ needs (see 22–23
above). Latane and Darley’s classic research on “diffusion of responsibil-
ity,” or bystander apathy, suggests that in some circumstances, being part
of a crowd reduces the speed of response to another in need, and in some
cases thwarts responding at all.38 A bestseller that galvanized a large group
into taking action would confute this observation. To the degree that liter-
ary history ever notices bestsellers, it honors a scant few novels with hav-
ing made a significant impact on public opinion and subsequent legislation.
The locus classicus for a bestseller “changing the world” would be the out-
cry against food impurity in the wake of Upton Sinclair’s novel The Jun-
gle (1906). Though Sinclair hoped to sway his readers’ political views, his
graphic descriptions of the meatpacking industry had the unintended effect
of spurring lawmakers to regulate the purity of food. His readers, after all,
were also eaters. Nowadays, investigative journalists and documentary film-
makers aspire to reach a wide public in order to effect change, but very few
novelists attempt to use their medium to sway the opinions of a mass read-
ership. (I treat Alice Walker, a provocative exception to this generalization,
118 Empathy and the Novel

in the following chapter.) After all, very few fiction bestsellers can live up
to the oft-cited exemplars, The Jungle, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, and Oliver Twist.
The number of bestsellers that have distinguished themselves simply by
selling extremely well suggests that most readers do not look to their fiction
reading to suggest programs for action in the real world.
When a novel does make explicit demands on its readers, as I believe
Rohinton Mistry’s A Fine Balance does, the responses of those readers do
not necessarily oblige the author by channeling into the fight against injus-
tice. At the end of January 2005, 411 readers had spontaneously shared
their responses to A Fine Balance through Amazon.com’s Web site. Accom-
panied by a rating in numbers of stars, readers wrote in their reasons for
recommending (or much more rarely, not recommending) the novel to
other readers. All of the responses are in English (like the novel), but the
readers write from all over the world. A significant proportion comes from
American readers. Approximately one third of the responses provide a
simple recommendation. The remaining two thirds are more expansive,
elaborating on their reactions to the novel. Forty-six percent of all respon-
dents emphasize the emotional experience of reading the novel, frequently
describing empathetic responses and even tears. Twenty-eight write about
their improved comprehension of the historical circumstances of Mistry’s
characters; in other words, they testify to an intellectual expansion of sym-
pathetic understanding. Ten percent come to moralized conclusions about
the message of the novel (as when one reader condemns moral relativism
and urges Christian faith on other Amazon users).39 Two reviewers, both
writing after 11 September 2001, feel inspired by Mistry’s depiction of the
suspension of civil rights during the Emergency to comment on the fragil-
ity of the rights that American citizens enjoy. Many come to the conclusion
that privileged readers ought to “count their blessings,” the most common
of the moralizing responses. Not a single soul reports doing something spe-
cific in the real world as a result of reading the book, other than recom-
mending the novel to others, reading more about India, or seeking out
other works by Rohinton Mistry.
Just because more than four hundred readers omit mention of the spe-
cific prosocial actions they have taken as a result of reading an extremely
moving, absorbing, and eye-opening novel does not prove that A Fine Bal-
ance fails to inspire altruism. Modesty may be a factor. Readers of Mistry’s
novel may be more likely to give money to tsunami victims. They may be
more likely to extend a hand to someone outside their “touching zone,” as
Winfrey puts it. They may react with compassion rather than indifference
to the next indigent person who asks them for spare change on the street.
They may indeed already be the kind of people who routinely do all these
things, in which case their affinities may predispose them to the novel’s invi-
tation to feel and even act. We must confront the possibility, however, that
an experience with a book leads most readily to other bookish activities,
 Empathy in the Marketplace 119

as study of the impact of Oprah’s Book Club reveals (Oprah 126–33). No

less prominent an authority than Harold Bloom argues that “the pleasures
of reading indeed are selfish rather than social. You cannot directly improve
anyone else’s life by reading better or more deeply” (How to Read and Why
22). Bloom expresses skepticism about “the traditional social hope that care
for others may be stimulated by the growth of individual imagination” and
wariness about arguments that “connect the pleasures of solitary reading to
the public good” (22). Bloom’s readers may search for another work that
absorbs them so completely and makes them feel so intensely. Oprah Win-
frey’s readers may seek out others who have emerged from a novel desper-
ate to talk about it. These readers, who may even be the same readers, dem-
onstrate their appetite for narrative empathy in the marketplace, when they
purchase and read more novels that allow them to feel with fiction. The
next chapter turns to the authors who produce empathetic fiction, in hopes
of reaching this significant proportion of the novel-buying public. For like
Oprah and her readers, many contemporary novelists believe that fiction
can make something happen through empathetic representation.
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 5

AUTHORS’ EMPATHY
We laymen have always been intensely curious to know . . . from what sources that
strange being, the creative writer, draws his material, and how he manages to make
such an impression on us with it and to arouse in us emotions of which, perhaps, we
had not even thought ourselves capable.
—Sigmund Freud, “Creative Writers and Day-Dreaming” (1907)

The relationship of empathy to novelists’ craft of fiction presents puz-

zles just as intriguing as the conundrums of readers’ empathy discussed
in the previous two chapters. Contemporary novelists frequently connect
fiction with empathy in their comments on creativity and the effects of
novel reading.1 Writers themselves may in fact be the primary source of this
widespread belief, so often do they repeat it. Despite the apparent popu-
lar consensus that fiction develops readers’ empathy, however, contempo-
rary novelists approach empathy from a variety of angles. Representations
of empathy in contemporary fiction run the gamut from moral approval
to subversive deconstruction. (The following chapter, “Contesting Empa-
thy,” discusses several contemporary novelists who represent empathy most
negatively.) While this chapter can only selectively mention some of the
copious examples of textually rendered empathy, it does so with an aim of
mapping the variety of techniques and attitudes embodied in contemporary
fiction’s versions of empathy. A lively debate about the uses and value of
empathy emerges, as well as an additional set of proposals about narrative
empathy.
Many novelists call up empathy as a representational goal by mirroring
it within their texts: they present empathetic connections between charac-
ters or thematize empathy explicitly in fiction meditating on the vagaries
of social relations. This ubiquitous form of empathy depends heavily on
character identification and on reading habits that emphasize the feeling
connection of readers to imagined beings in novels. Despite the disdain of
some literary theory for such a traditional notion of character, this kind of
felt connection should be acknowledged as the normative version of nar-
rative empathy, one that persists even when novels engage in surface-level
postmodern play that undermines certainties.
For instance, Margaret Atwood’s feminist dystopia, The Handmaid’s Tale
(1985), purports to be transcriptions of a series of tapes, recovered and reas-
sembled in the distant future, by a remote civilization looking back with
dispassionate academic curiosity on an earlier North American society (sub-
sequent to our own) that savagely represses women and dissenters through
122 Empathy and the Novel

an alliance of fundamentalist religion and radical feminism. A careful reader

attuned to postmodern technique recognizes that, by the end, Atwood has
destabilized the foundations of her fictional world. Nonetheless, the alter-
nating first- and third-person segments that comprise the novel, despite
their gaps and uncertainties and the implausibility of Atwood’s extreme
scenario, evoke strong feeling responses of empathy with Offred, as well
as outrage, pity, shock, and horror. Readers of The Handmaid’s Tale readily
make connections between Atwood’s fictional world and parts of the real
world in which women are similarly exploited. This kind of novel doesn’t
need to mention empathy directly in order to provoke vicarious emotional
response in readers, some of whom go so far as to report physical symptoms
such as pounding hearts and breathlessness.2 In spite of Atwood’s deliberate
emphasis on the constructedness of her characters, readers persist in feeling
with the titular handmaid and hating her oppressors.
When empathy receives direct reference by a contemporary novelist, it
most often appears as a character trait or as a feature of relationships. This
does not mean that empathy is always figured as purely positive or benefi-
cial. Indeed, it sometimes marks a character as especially vulnerable or a
relationship as unhealthy. For instance, in Sarah Schulman’s novel Empa-
thy (1992), a lesbian character who has undergone a dissociative personal-
ity split into male therapist and female client diagnoses the state of mind
that cripples her female side: “You’re suffering from empathy” (31). Under-
standing that one’s own happiness may not be the central fact in a situa-
tion sometimes leads empaths to self-sacrifice. A character in a young adult
novelization by Ellen Steiber spontaneously bleeds in the blood type of a
kidnap victim who shares her experience of abduction. Empathetic fusion
results in death for the empath. In Parable of the Sower (1993), Octavia
Butler’s hyperempath Lauren Olamina suffers debilitating pain when she
witnesses others’ suffering, a trait that makes her and other “sharers” espe-
cially vulnerable to enslavement. In Lois Lowry’s dystopian children’s book,
The Giver (1993), a society that mutes its citizens’ human feelings with
mandatory drugs chooses one person to do the feeling for all of them. The
official empath receives the memories of an entire culture, including all of
its experiences of pain. Not surprisingly, he flees for his life, demonstrating
the possibility of empathy swerving in the direction of personal distress.
Some figurations of empathy work more positively, even miraculously. In
contemporary romances of the archive,3 empathy becomes a magical device
for solving mysteries of the past, as when a character dons virtual reality
gear and steps back in time, entering the body, consciousness, and memory
of a long-dead historical figure. In Bharati Mukherjee’s version of techno-
logically assisted historical empathy in The Holder of the World (1993), the
full surrender of the quester’s personality results in the finding of a long-lost
treasure (Keen, Romances of the Archive 227–29). Other romances of the
archive, such as Stevie Davies’s Impassioned Clay (1999), celebrate the con-
 Authors’ Empathy 123

nections of personal identity that transcend huge differences in historical

context to permit understanding. Historical fiction as a genre is particularly
reliant on empathetic imagining, not only in women’s historical romances,
which often thematize empathy explicitly. While science fiction valorizes
empathy as a form of advanced knowing, and depicts empaths as canny
strategists (as, for instance, in Orson Scott Card’s Ender’s Game [1985]), it
also advances the depiction of cold, monstrously rational, or cyborg char-
acters that lack empathy. Paradoxically, some recent fiction sets about to
evoke sympathy for characters who themselves lack empathetic skills, as in
Mark Haddon’s The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time (2003).
A more didactic version of textual empathy explicitly recommends
empathy by way of a character’s expressed personal philosophy. Alexan-
der McCall Smith has his Botswanan detective, Mma Ramotswe, comment
directly on the social value of empathy in Morality for Beautiful Girls (2001):
“If you knew how a person was feeling, if you could imagine yourself in her
position, then surely it would be impossible to inflict further pain” (77). The
naiveté of this view brings Mma Ramotswe to no grief in the sunny detec-
tive series, that testifies to the fundamental humanity of African people. As
the more traditionally realistic determinism of Rohinton Mistry’s A Fine
Balance suggests, however, some cruel individuals feel sadistic pleasure in
imagining others’ pain. A few novelists, such as Rohinton Mistry and Alice
Walker, attempt to employ empathy to spur prosocial action on behalf of
suffering others.
In sum, while the popular genres of science fiction, gothic horror, and
detective fiction all frequently involve plots of empathetic connection and
empaths as characters, contemporary fiction considered more broadly proves
a site of contestation, where the meaning and value of empathy receive a
thorough going-over. Representations explicitly valuing empathy cannot be
guaranteed to appear in all or even most works of recent fiction, but few
manage to avoid alluding to it or eliciting it from readers. When authors
dedicate their empathetic imaginations to the creation of characters and
fictional worlds, it is perhaps not surprising that they so frequently embed
representations of empathy and empathizing within their works. Like the
scenes of reading that have been so assiduously sought out and interpreted
in the past several decades of literary criticism, scenes of empathy can also
be read metatextually, as slightly disguised commentary on the art of fic-
tional world-making as understood by its makers.

The Empathy of Authors

A wealth of anecdotal testimony suggests that novelists themselves most

frequently celebrate the value of narrative empathy. Women writers very
often promote the positive consequences of empathic reading experiences,
124 Empathy and the Novel

not only for women readers. Sue Monk Kidd, author of the best-selling The
Secret Life of Bees (2002), writes, “While, as a writer, I want to affect the
reader’s mind—to educate and enlighten—what I wish for even more is to
jolt the reader’s heart. I want my words to open a portal through which the
reader may leave the self, migrate to some other human sky and return ‘dis-
posed’ to otherness” (“Common Heart” 9). For Kidd, the Emersonian quest
for the common heart motivates fiction that “creates empathy” in even the
most resistant (male) readers (9). She cites with pride an encounter in a
bookstore with a well-dressed forty-nine-year-old business executive. A
reluctant reader of The Secret Life of Bees, he told Kidd that he now feels
“disposed to the South, to black women and to white girls who need their
mothers” (9). For Kidd, this encounter epitomizes the value of “seeing the
world through someone else’s eyes, feeling it with someone else’s heart” (9).
For novelist Jane Smiley, the loss of male readers by the sidelining of the
novel to “the seraglio” threatens to brutalize and coarsen our society (13
Ways 177). She writes, “When we talk about the death of the novel, what
we are really talking about is the possibility that empathy, however mini-
mal, would no longer be attainable by those for whom the novel has died”
(176). Men in particular lose access to the “inner lives of their friends and
family members” if the novel dies for them (176–77). For Smiley, the loss
of empathetic reading experiences threatens apocalypse: “In a world where
weapons of mass destruction are permanent features of the landscape, I can-
not help believing that a lively sense of the reality of other consciousnesses
on the part of those whose fingers are on the trigger is essential to human
survival” (176).4
Male novelists also participate in the celebration of narrative empa-
thy. David Lodge, a prolific novelist as well as a respected literary theorist,
writes, “One might suggest that the ability novelists have to create charac-
ters, characters often very different from themselves, and to give a plausible
account of their consciousnesses, is a special application of Theory of Mind.
It is one that helps us develop powers of sympathy and empathy in real
life” (Consciousness 42). Like many novelists, Lodge equates the value of
advanced role-taking imagining on the part of writers with the end result
garnered by readers: authors’ use of their imagination to create fictional
beings with persuasive inner lives somehow helps “us”—readers operating
in “real life”—develop sympathy and empathy. By now it should be clear
that the empirical evidence for causal links between fiction reading and
the development of empathy in readers does not yet exist, though inge-
nious studies are underway to shore up the case that novel reading assists in
moral development by training readers in empathy. Lodge’s statement can
be chalked up alongside Smiley’s jeremiad and Kidd’s hopes for the com-
mon heart as evidence of a still unsubstantiated but prevalent belief in a link
between fiction reading and the cultivation of the empathetic imagination.
 Authors’ Empathy 125

Another interpretation of Lodge’s words leads us to a more defensible

assertion. Lodge supposes that “the ability novelists have to create charac-
ters . . . helps us develop powers of sympathy and empathy in real life” (Con-
sciousness 42). If his observation about effects on “us” can be interpreted as
referring to processes internal to novelists, those special people who spend
their lives imagining unreal persons and events for the entertainment and
edification of others, then, indeed it may be true. Novelists may emphasize
aspects of empathy as part of the creative process and as a goal of their fic-
tion writing in part because they are more empathetic themselves than the
average person, as we will see.5 Their empathy may spur imaginative inven-
tion that finds valued expression in a writing career. Qualities of empathetic
responsiveness and imaginative role taking may be cultivated most assidu-
ously by novelists as a matter of craft, and they may indeed experience
“real-life” improvements in their abilities to feel with others as a result of
their long practice with imagined beings. This scenario has recently received
support from an unexpected quarter: developmental psychology, in which
the study of young children’s imaginary friends transpires.
Nearly a century ago, Sigmund Freud suggested that there might be a
link between the creativity of adult fiction writers and the imaginary play
of children (“Creative Writers” 141–54). Developmental psychologist Mar-
jorie Taylor of the University of Oregon, in Imaginary Companions and the
Children Who Create Them (1999), has helped rehabilitate children’s prac-
tice of talking and playing with invisible friends, previously seen as a sign
of psychological or social problems. Taylor recasts imaginary companions as
a healthy part of children’s emotional and cognitive development. Taylor
and her collaborators have recently extended research into the “illusion of
independent agency” frequently reported by children about their imaginary
companions, into the area of adult creativity. Accounts of this illusion, in
which fictional characters seem to their creators to have minds and wills of
their own, can be discovered in the interviews, memoirs, and casual com-
mentary of many writers. Taylor specifically mentions Alice Walker, J. K.
Rowling, Sara Paretsky, Philip Pullman, John Fowles, and E. M. Forster’s
comments reporting the illusion of characters’ independent agency, but this
sampling should not be taken as an unusual group.
Perhaps the most famous literary rendering of this very common creative
experience occurs in playwright Luigi Pirandello’s Six Characters in Search
of an Author (1922), a play that dramatizes the notion of the independent
existence of characters from their creator. Pirandello writes in his preface, “I
can only say that, without having made any effort to seek them out, I found
before me, alive—you could touch them and even hear them breathe—the
six characters now seen on the stage. And they stayed there in my presence,
each with his secret torment and all bound together by the one common
origin and mutual entanglement of their affairs, while I had them enter
126 Empathy and the Novel

the world of art, constructing from their persons, their passions, and their
adventures a novel, a drama, or at least a story” (preface). Though his status
as an innovative dramatist whose work anticipates aspects of theater of the
absurd may impede such a reading, Taylor’s research emboldens us to take
Pirandello’s report at face value. He may indeed have been reporting an
imaginative experience as much as a frame-breaking invention.
Literary history records many such remarks of authors regarding the ori-
gins and fates of their fictional characters. Long before her Alzheimer’s dis-
ease set in, Iris Murdoch was well known for referring to the continued
post-novel existences of her creations and would sometimes inform her visi-
tors or correspondents about what the characters had been up to recently.
Because Pirandello and Murdoch are reputable writers, their self-reports of
what might otherwise seem to be delusions or hallucinations are taken as
perfectly normal. Indeed, the experience of “having a character in your head
who won’t go away” is widely regarded as a common reason for writing fic-
tion in the first place.6 Not only famous writers feel this way, although suc-
cess as a fiction writer may be in part dependent on experiencing inspiration
by way of characters who appear in the mind’s eye, demanding attention.
That they “go on existing” after the author finishes the books helps explain
the drive to write sequels, as well as Murdoch’s counterfactual assertions.
In a remarkable study of fifty fiction writers, Taylor and her collaborators
discovered not only that 92 percent of the authors reported some experi-
ence of the illusion of independent agency, but also that the more suc-
cessful writers (those who had published their fiction) had more frequent
and more intense experiences of it. Taylor and her group hypothesize that
the illusion of independent agency could be related to writers’ expertise in
fantasy production (“Illusion” 361, 376–77), suggesting that it occurs more
easily and spontaneously with practice, or that writers naturally endowed
with creative gifts may experience it more readily. Writers report looking at
and eavesdropping on their characters, engaging in conversations with them,
struggling with them over their actions, bargaining with them, and feeling
for them. Taylor writes, “The essence of this conceptual illusion is the sense
that the characters are independent agents not directly under the author’s
control” (366). Though clearly novelists still do exercise their authority by
choosing the words that end up on the page, they may experience the cre-
ative process as akin to involuntarily empathizing with a person out there,
separate from themselves. Several tests administered by Taylor to her sub-
jects support this connection.
Taylor found that the writers as a group scored higher than the norm (in
the general population) in empathy (“Illusion” 361). Using Davis’s Inter-
personal Reactivity Index (IRI), a frequently used empathy scale, Taylor
and her colleagues measured her subjects’ tendency to fantasize, to feel
empathic concern for others, to experience personal distress in the face of
others’ suffering, and to engage in perspective taking (369–70). Both men
 Authors’ Empathy 127

and women in her sample of fiction writers scored significantly higher than
Davis’s reported norms for the general population, with females scoring
higher in all four areas than males. Writers of both genders stood out on all
four subscales of Davis’s IRI, but they were “particularly off the charts” for
fantasy and perspective taking. Taylor speculates that “these two subscales
tap the components of empathy that seem most conceptually related to IIA
[the Illusion of Independent Agency] and might be seen as ‘grown-up’ ver-
sions of variables associated with children who have imaginary companions
(pretend play and theory of mind skills)” (377). The work of Taylor and
her group leads to the first hypothesis about narrative empathy from the
authors’ side: novelists as a group may be more empathetic than the general
population. A second hypothesis must follow immediately, acknowledging
the difficulty of pinning down the difference between innate dispositions
and results of practice and habitual use in groups of people: the activity of
fiction writing may cultivate novelists’ role-taking skills and make them more
habitually empathetic.
These proposals do not imply that the actual behavior of novelists is any
better than the population at large. Even the most ardent advocates of nar-
rative ethics hesitate to argue that being a novelist correlates with being a
better person. Literary biographies provide too many counterexamples to
risk going down that path. Novelists known to be nice people may exer-
cise their empathy on behalf of nonexistent beings and indeed on behalf of
nasty characters. Furthermore, nasty people may become novelists! Noth-
ing prevents a novelist with appalling personal convictions from employing
his creative empathy to render, for instance, the plight of white suprema-
cists in a fashion designed to stir the feelings of those who fear having their
guns taken away. This is precisely what William Pierce, founder of the white
supremacist organization The National Alliance, did when he published a
novel under the pseudonym Andrew MacDonald. The Turner Diaries (1978)
is credited by the FBI and the Anti-Defamation League for having stirred up
race hatred and anti-Semitic activities in the United States.7 Most notably,
Timothy McVeigh, the bomber of the Federal Building in Oklahoma City
(in 1995), had apparently made a careful study of The Turner Diaries and
emulated its protagonist by building a fertilizer bomb to explode a govern-
ment building. The novel provides a careful account of how such a bomb
might be made and deployed in a small truck.
Pierce’s hateful representations of blacks, Jews, homosexuals, and so-
called mud people, all of whom face extermination in his paranoid near-
future world, have all but obscured his representational success in cre-
ating a long-suffering white revolutionary character, to whom a certain
kind of reader (in all likelihood much more passive than McVeigh) clearly
responds.8 These readers report being thrilled by the novel, even when
they disagree with some of the attitudes it expresses. As F. R. Conway, an
Amazon reviewer observes, “The target audience for this book is a person,
128 Empathy and the Novel

usually young, who’s already on the edge. . . . Take a kid that’s already angry
at the world, at the government, show him this book with these things
that already tick him off, highly exaggerated and he’ll feel a connection
with it. Then the story is an engaging and empowering one with a fright-
ening message.”9 Though William Pierce (who died in 2002) was not a
violent criminal like Timothy McVeigh, he indulged his genocidal revenge
fantasies in a future-world thriller that clearly has the capacity to stir the
feelings of some readers. The notion that empathy could not be involved in
such an act of creation should be treated with skepticism, for empathy and
ethnocentrism have often been fellow travelers. This unpleasant example
prompts the observation that authors’ empathy can be devoted to socially
undesirable ends. Even then, it takes a McVeigh to transform a novel into
an action plan for terrorism. Most readers recognize the novel, whether or
not it appeals to them, as fiction and therefore see it as exempt from attri-
butions of cause-and-effect agency. It may be especially an author’s fantasy
to believe that readers will be prone to implement the programs embedded
within fiction.
Intriguingly, in the same research project described above, Taylor and
her collaborators also discovered that fiction writers as a group showed
higher scores of dissociation than the norms for the general population.
Dissociation, in psychological terms, means an abnormal separation of men-
tal processes from conscious awareness and can be involved in an array of
disorders, including amnesia, memory loss, and schizophrenia. In its least
pathological forms, dissociation takes place during intense daydreaming,
especially the kind during which the absorbed subject loses track of time
and bodily awareness. Taylor and her team used a standard questionnaire,10
as in the empathy component of her study, and discovered that the fiction
writers scored significantly higher than the average, due especially to high
scores on daydreaming and absorption. Taylor comments that the writers’
scores are closer to the average Dissociative Experiences Scale (DES) score
for a sample of schizophrenics (“Illusion” 373–74) but hastens to reassure
readers that scoring in this range does not constitute a diagnosis of a disso-
ciative disorder. Indeed, she and her colleagues conclude that “the profile of
our writers . . . is that of a group of people who readily adopt other people’s
perspectives, and who revel in the imaginative worlds of fictional characters,
fantasy, and daydreams” (377). Fantasies and daydreams, delightful though
they may be, however, do not inevitably contribute to the social good, and
they may sometimes allow a person to indulge in imagined actions that
would be judged criminal, immoral, or dangerous if carried out. This is part
of the attraction of fiction for many readers, even sophisticated ones, and
should not be dismissed from a broader consideration of narrative ethics.
The comments of authors about their craft of character creation affirm
the connections discovered by Taylor and in the process highlight more
problems with authors’ empathy. First among these problems is the neces-
 Authors’ Empathy 129

sity of empathizing with unlikable characters, the readerly counterpart of

which I have discussed earlier (see 74–75 above). Native American novelist
and poet Leslie Marmon Silko puts it this way: “My second novel has some
pretty outrageous villainous characters, and I have to admit, I was right
inside them. I have to own up to saying that everything that they imagined
and felt, I imagined and felt. I think that if a writer can’t put herself inside
the skin of all of her characters, if she’s not sympathetic with them or doesn’t
like them enough, it will show, and the readers will feel a distance. And so
I just imagine that I’m standing right there. I’m there doing it.”11 In this
case, Silko describes her conviction that the creation will suffer if she fails
to exercise her own empathetic imagining on their part. Like Silko, other
novelists regard role taking as a fundamental part of the craft of fiction. This
aspect of writers’ practice crosses significant boundaries of difference, not
just the borders between good and evil characters. The ability on the part
of a male author to create a convincing female character is often remarked
as if it were an unusual attainment, but authors who have accomplished it,
such as Arthur Golden, author of Memoirs of a Geisha (1997), treat role-
taking imagining more matter-of-factly, as a basic requirement of the craft.
Golden comments, “There are differences between the genders. But I think
that a fiction writer’s job is to put himself into the mind of someone differ-
ent from him or her.”12 This chapter considers the effort of a female writer,
Keri Hulme, to portray a male child abuser in a fashion that evokes empathy
as well as horror, employing the representation of interiority to cross barri-
ers of otherness more extreme than race and gender. Like Silko and Golden,
Hulme uses her empathetic skills to craft a character whose reprehensible
behavior becomes shockingly understandable.
One of the reasons that authorial intentions can be so tricky to discover
lies in the automaticity of expert writing. Novelists frequently claim “not
to know” how or why their representations turned out the way they did,
and they are not always being coy or hiding their sources. In keeping with
Taylor’s findings, novelists in the flow of creation may engage in empathetic
role taking with an imagined projection without realizing how much of the
writer’s self has been projected into that fictive being. Sometimes a novelist
will admit to discovering after the fact that an inadvertent act of empathetic
sharing has occurred in the course of writing. J. K. Rowling, who has also
described discovering her character Harry Potter as an image complete with
his lightning-bolt–shaped scar in a clear example of the illusion of indepen-
dent agency, also admits to discovering unintended empathetic projection
in her writing. Rowling comments,

There’s a part of Book One where Harry sees his stepparents in an

enchanted mirror. I was quite taken aback when I re-read that chapter
to see how much I had directly given Harry my own feelings because I
wasn’t aware of that as I was writing. As I was writing, I mean, I’m try-
130 Empathy and the Novel

ing to do the thing properly that needed to happen for plot reasons. If
people have read the book, they will know Harry had to find out how
that mirror worked. But when I re-read the chapter, it became very
clear to me that I had given Harry almost entirely my own feelings
about my mother’s death.13

In the context of authors’ empathy, the discovery that writers unconsciously

lend characters their feelings highlights what has often proved a worrisome
aspect of imaginative role taking for those who theorize empathy. What if
our empathy with others is only egoism, recognition of the self, painted over
the other’s true experience? The contemporary disparagement of empathy
(a minority view, to be sure) often focuses on this possibility.
If empathy demonstrates only egoism and fantasy projection, then accu-
rate apprehension of another’s feelings will be difficult to achieve. Most
theories of narrative empathy, though sketchy, assume that empathy can
be transacted accurately from author to reader by way of a literary text.
Thus, in J. K. Rowling’s example, she gives her character her own feelings,
allowing a reader to share grief with Harry and herself in a triangulated
empathic bond. Though in the case of a fictional character such as Harry
Potter no one is being deprived of his true feelings by his creator’s empathy,
real people—for instance, objects of pity presented by charitable organiza-
tions—might find their position in that empathic triangle discomforting.
The transaction of feeling might result in sensations of misunderstanding or
even erasure. The following chapter takes up the political critique of empa-
thy that inheres in this notion. For now, the issue of empathic accuracy (and
the struggle against what I term “empathic inaccuracy”) belongs to a discus-
sion of authors’ empathy, in this hypothetical form: Though a key ingredient
of successful fictional world-making, authors’ empathy does not always transmit
to readers without interference. As this chapter goes on to discuss in a section
on Flora Nwapa’s novel Efuru (1966), authors sometimes represent a prac-
tice or experience that evokes empathy in readers, against authors’ apparent
or proclaimed representational goals.
The opposite situation, in which authors set about deliberately to manip-
ulate readers’ emotional responses in hopes of provoking altruistic action
in the real world, raises questions of whether success should be measured
either by readers’ feelings or by their subsequent actions. Arts of persuasion
are commonly evaluated by their success in motivating people; we judge
whether a political candidate has won or lost a debate, or whether a leader
has swayed public opinion. As Aristotle observed, the evocation of a feeling
response serves as a rhetorical tool. Most novelists who employ narrative
empathy rhetorically do not make a mark. Despite the difficulty of influ-
encing readers’ behavior, many authors, including authors from postcolonial
nations, report world-changing intentions. For politically engaged writers,
the worry that experiencing narrative empathy short-circuits the impulse
 Authors’ Empathy 131

to act compassionately or to respond with political engagement does not

discourage their effort to evoke it in readers. Though an author’s didactic
use of empathy may invite critics’ suspicion, for offering “a kind of cannibal-
istic pleasure in consuming the suffering of others” (Rooney, Reading with
Oprah 137–38), many novelists persist in purposeful empathetic represen-
tation. The fearful view of authors’ empathy as corrupting readers by offer-
ing them others’ feelings for callous consumption leads in some quarters to
the depiction of empathy itself as a quality that weakens humans and makes
them vulnerable to others’ cruelest manipulations.

Feeling with Villains

In the earlier chapter “Readers’ Empathy,” I cited several cases in which

readers confessed to feeling with negatively portrayed characters. This sort
of readers’ empathy may have its roots in the empathetic process of char-
acter creation as described above by Leslie Marmon Silko. If an author has
felt with all her creations as she imagines them, not just reserving emotional
investment for favored protagonists, then the opportunity for readers to
bond temporarily with monsters, madmen, and villains can be regarded not
as anomalous, but as a standard feature of fiction. Indeed, this kind of risk-
mitigating opportunity to think and feel with those from whom we might
ordinarily recoil in horror provides one of the much-touted advantages of
fictional world-making. Novels can provide safe spaces within which to
see through the eyes of the psychopath, to occupy the subject position of
the oppressive racist, to share the brutalizing past of the condemned out-
cast. Don DeLillo’s Libra (1988), Nadine Gordimer’s The Conservationist
(1974), and Peter Carey’s Jack Maggs (1997) all offer versions of this fictive
extension of role-taking imagination. Such serious literary experimentation
with inhabiting the perspective of stigmatized or repulsive others may play
on readers’ appetites for vicious imagery or play with taboos, but it has not
been generally understood as a corrupting aspect of narrative.
Feeling with villains has been recuperated as an aspect of ethical read-
ing practices through its opportunity to warn, caution, instruct, and safely
defuse social tensions through carnivalesque inversions of norms. Consider-
ably more social anxiety accrues to texts judged crude and simple enough
to appeal to young people. In the past, William Ainsworth’s racy, melodra-
matic novel Jack Sheppard (1839) was regarded as a dangerous text that
glamorized criminality. In more recent times, the Anti-Defamation League
warns its readers about National Vanguard Books’ New World Order Comix,
featuring “White Will” and aimed at white high school students (“Q and
A”). The lower the cultural estimation of the form under consideration, the
more likely it is to receive condemnation for inciting consumers to imita-
tive violence or expression of anger and hatred. Thus, the gory narratives
132 Empathy and the Novel

of video games, which require advanced gaming skill even fully to preview,
are assumed to have a corrupting influence on the young people who play
them, but few literary fictions, no matter how transgressive, achieve the
spotlight of public reprobation.
Keri Hulme’s Booker Prize–wining novel the bone people (1983)14 makes
a useful case study of a work that violates taboos in its empathetic presen-
tation of a child abuser. The novel’s violence has attracted quite a lot of
comment, not all of it disapproving,15 for out of the breakdown of her three
central characters, Hulme forges a new beginning and way of living, which
she labels commensalism (bone people 434). Hulme goes so far as to suggest
that the victim of child abuse, a mute European child (Simon), invites his
beatings from his adoptive alcoholic Maori father (Joe). Her representa-
tion goes far beyond contemporary understandings of codependency, imply-
ing that the child victim incites violence against himself in order to bring
peace, healing, and reconciliation to the wounded adults who harm and love
him. Her brief glimpses into Simon’s consciousness show him intention-
ally provoking fights, and her depiction of his behavior (he is a sneak thief
and disobedient to the point of self-endangerment) suggests how he drives
his caregiver to distraction, then to assault. Hulme naturally also plays up
Simon as a sympathetic character, gradually revealing the layers in his his-
tory of abuse, from the funny marks he has on him already, as a half-drowned
toddler, when his foster parents take him in, to his near obliteration at Joe’s
hands late in the novel. Abandoned by his natural parents, drugged-out aris-
tocratic Eurotrash, Simon serves as a self-sacrificial catalyst of Maori healing
through reconstitution of (nonbiological) family.
As one might expect from this bald summary, the novel has received
some negative criticism, though it won both the Pegasus Prize (1984) and
the Booker Prize (1985). Responding to the fact that Keri Hulme is one
eighth Maori, C. K. Stead took her to task for speaking inauthentically about
Maori legends and practices and for receiving an award designated for Maori
writers.16 This ham-handed appraisal of the novelist’s identity and authority
has all but obscured the rest of Stead’s critique. In the same article, Stead
identifies the novel’s “bitter aftertaste, something black and negative deeply
ingrained in its imaginative fabric” (“Pegasus” 107) with the bone people’s
representation of “extreme violence against a child” (108). The failure of the
novelist adequately to punish the child abuser (he does serve a brief prison
term after nearly killing Simon) provokes some readers: Stephen Fox of
Gallaudet University reports that “in classes or discussion groups the usual
reaction is horror and anger at the situation, the hope that Simon (the vic-
tim) will be allowed to escape his tormentor, and the expectation that Joe
will eventually be punished. When no such outcome occurs, readers can
become quite upset, as I know from having used this book in college lit-
erature classes” (“Beneficial” 46). Amazingly, very few professional critics
after Stead have explored the extent to which Hulme’s representation of
 Authors’ Empathy 133

violence invites the reader to inhabit the position of the abusive adults.17
An exceptional view comes from Mark Williams, who notices that “we are
made to identify emotionally with the victim of an evil” (“Negative” 86),
but also to understand Simon’s abuser Joe sympathetically. Williams argues,
“At this point the novel’s relation to the social evil it dramatises comes dan-
gerously close to complicity” (108). I acknowledge that the scarcity of crit-
ics who agree with Stead and Williams suggests that empathizing with Joe
may well not be a common response, but the author’s evident empathy for
Joe certainly plays a role in scripting one of the most disturbing novel-read-
ing experiences that I can recall encountering in my adult life. I didn’t like
it, but I felt with Joe.
At the time of Simon’s most vicious beating at the hands of Joe, the child
has just broken all the plate glass shop windows in town. Just prior to this
act of destruction, Kerewin has hit him, after he attacks her. He has stolen
a precious knife from Kerewin and damaged her guitar. Arguably, being hit
by Kerewin sets off his window-breaking spree. In any case, she is still angry
when the authorities hand Simon over to Joe. Over the phone, Kerewin
communicates her disgust to Simon:

She has finished having anything to do with him.

She hates him.
She loathes every particle of his being.
Did he know what that guitar meant to her?
Did he know what that knife meant to her?
Did he know what he had wrecked?
She hopes his father knocks him sillier than he is now.
She has every sympathy for his father.
She didn’t realize what a vicious little reptile he had to endure.
(bone people 307–8)

In effect, Kerewin gives Joe permission to beat Simon, as she later real-
izes (325).
In this excruciating brief scenes that follow, Hulme conveys in terse, lyri-
cal lines the consciousness of Simon as he receives a nearly fatal beating,
which he brings to an end by stabbing his assailant Joe with a shard of glass.
Among the most difficult pages of the entire novel, these passages con-
vey the anger and pain of a triple-bound situation. Hulme not only invites
empathy for the victim, Simon, but also brings her readers close to the infu-
riated adults in the triangle. While the character Kerewin ostensibly “has
every sympathy” for the long-suffering Joe, the author Hulme asks not just
for sympathy but for a more painful sharing in the emotions that drive Joe
to violence. She charts the escalation from exasperation to shame to money
anxiety (“you have ruined me”) to unleashed rage. As other critics have
observed, she describes Joe’s racial and socioeconomic position in such a
134 Empathy and the Novel

way virtually to determine his violent response.18 Hulme explains this at a

public reading, when she remarked, “I think he’s an astoundingly nice per-
son, in his own way, given his warped background” (“Reconsidering” 139).
In case any doubt remains about where the novelist hopes to bring her
readers, her central character Kerewin makes this speech to Joe just before
he is convicted and imprisoned for the assault:

I’ve been fascinated by you two these past few months. You’ve got,
you had genuine love between you. You’ve given him a solid base of
love to grow from, for all the hardship you’ve put him through. You’ve
been mother and father and home to him. And probably tomorrow
they’ll read you a smug little homily, castigating you for ill-treatment
and neglect. And they’ll congratulate themselves quite publicly for
rescuing the poor urchin from this callous ogre, this nightmare of a
parent. . . . (bone people 325)

Though it may seem impossible to fathom from this abbreviated account

of the novel’s content, Hulme succeeds in bringing readers into temporary
congruence with this perspective, in which social welfare officers and the
justice system actively impede the spiritual healing of the novel’s quest by
jailing Joe. While no reader I have met will agree with the argument the
author makes here, they will admit to the sickening feeling of being made to
see a child abuser in a sympathetic light and the even more upsetting sensa-
tion of temporarily feeling with him (always still feeling with his victim at
the same time). The word many readers use to describe the book’s evoca-
tion of this complex of feelings is “manipulative.” This term of disapproval
embeds within it the sense that an author has somehow employed craft to
get her readers to feel things that they don’t at all wish to feel. I hazard that
Hulme’s depiction of the rich interiority of intersecting characters involves
narrative empathy in the making and invites readers’ empathic distress. The
hypothesis I draw from this example registers that empathic distress at feeling
with a character whose actions are at odds with a reader’s moral code may be
a result of successfully exercised authorial empathy.
In the case of Keri Hulme’s the bone people, internal references within the
novel strongly suggest that a reader intent on following the writer’s cues
will arrive at an experience of empathic distress as I have described above.
This reaction strongly correlates to Hulme’s own experience of the illusion
of independent agency (as described by Taylor), a view that receives extra-
textual support from remarks made in some of the reclusive author’s infre-
quent interviews. To the charge of manipulating readers she would accede,
acknowledging that she communicates by “trapping your mind, eyes, and
inner ear” (Spiritcarvers 57). Hulme explicitly connects her style of trapping
or netting readers with her experience of the illusion of independent agency.
Just as readers must listen to her, she must listen to her characters: “Some-
 Authors’ Empathy 135

times they tell me things I didn’t actually want to hear. . . . Not infrequently,
I see my characters as much as I hear them; but I don’t hear words—the
trick for me is putting it into words” (59). Hulme recognizes the alarming
congruence of this writerly experience and mental illness in her description
of her worries about the illusion as a “private nightmare”:

What would you say if one of your characters came to the door? Would
you say “piss off, I killed you ages ago”?—because some of my charac-
ters seem to come from nowhere, and they are very real. I’m delighted
to hear that other writers think this too; you wonder if you’re making
it up or not. You get to live with them—once they inhabit you for a
long while, they become as real as anybody else. I once got jumped on
quite heavily by a person who belonged to a Schizophrenia Fellow-
ship, by saying that Schizophrenia is a writers’ disease. But actually,
quite seriously, it is. I have met writers who no longer maintain the
borders and are no longer sure of what’s real and what’s not. (65)

The unsettling feeling of invasion by unwelcome characters who won’t obey

or go away is then passed on to the reader. Communicating a private night-
mare through fiction to a group of unwitting readers may seem more like
the compulsive storytelling of Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner than the exer-
cise of constructive imagining. Hulme comments, “you actually can, if you
like, induce that reading trance” (“Reconsidering” 145). For all the fantasy
woven through the bone people, however, Hulme’s comments on the novel
suggest that she sees it as an intervention in the real world. In addition to
the novel’s recommendation of an uncompetitive commensalism as a model
for relations among contemporary New Zealanders (Maori and Pakeha), the
bone people also attempts to alert a society to the plight of abused chil-
dren. To that end, Hulme told an interviewer, “I made it as real as I could’
(“Reconsidering” 153).
What readers swept up in empathic distress for both Simon and his
abuser Joe are to do with their reactions remains unclear: the confusion of
fictional world-making with social criticism in ex post facto interviews does
not settle the question of why Hulme makes violence so real to her readers.
If they feel sick as they share Simon’s feelings during the beating, then per-
haps they are okay. But what about readers who shudder with recognition
at Joe’s wrath? C. K. Stead records his uneasiness with the representation of
abuse in the bone people, which “demands sympathy and understanding for
the man who commits it. In principle such charity is admirable. In fact, the
line between charity and imaginative complicity is very fine indeed” (“Pega-
sus” 108). Readers finding themselves responding charitably (or not) with
their embroiling in Joe’s situation may be victims of emotional contagion
communicated through a text. Narrative empathy may in fact involve a
darker aspect of emotional contagion, by which an author inflicts feeling on
136 Empathy and the Novel

readers in order to exorcise her involuntary empathic experiences of feeling

with and being inhabited by fictional characters.

“Empathic Inaccuracy” and Authorial Intentions

My discussion of readers’ empathy in chapter 3 includes the following

observations about the variability of response to potentially empathetic fic-
tion. (1) Empathy with characters doesn’t always occur as a result of read-
ing an emotionally evocative fiction. (2) The capacity of novels to invoke
readers’ empathy may change over time (and some novels may only activate
the empathy of their first, immediate audience). (3) Empathy for a fictional
character need not correspond with what the author appears to set up or
invite. All three premises become involved when the question of empathic
accuracy is brought to bear on the novel-reading experience. Empathic
accuracy matters to those who study it because its obverse, false empathy
can be a result of bias or egocentrism. From the failures of empathetic indi-
viduals to question whether their assessments of the other’s feelings could
be off base comes a great deal of the negative reputation of empathy as a
particularly invasive form of selfishness. (I impose my feelings on you and
call them your feelings. Your feelings, whatever they were, undergo erasure.)
Contrary to this fearful scenario, the psychological research on empathic
accuracy records the remarkable degree of rightness in human empathy,
though to be sure more cross-cultural verification of these findings would
be welcome.19 Whether from expert reading of facial cues, body language,
tone of voice, context, or effective role taking on the part of the empathizer,
ordinary subjects tend to do pretty well in laboratory tests of empathic
accuracy. Verification can be achieved readily enough through interviews
cross-checked with physical measurements and observations.
When we respond empathetically to a novel, we do not have the luxury
of questioning the character: we cannot ask, Is that how you really felt?
The text, however, may verify our reactions even as it elicits them. Some
narrators employ psycho-narration, or generalizations about the characters’
inner states, including thoughts and feelings, with the result that the text
itself announces how the character feels. First-person narration (self-narra-
tion) may also allow for direct confirmation of a shared feeling, as may the
inclusion of quoted monologue (interior monologue), like Keri Hulme’s
representation of Simon’s feelings during his beating, quoted above. Nar-
rated monologue (free indirect discourse) may combine with psycho-nar-
ration to suggest the character’s thought stream in the narrator’s language.
For characters represented externally, dialogue and action may provide
clues, but no one of these techniques assures us that our empathetic reac-
tion precisely catches the feelings embedded in the fictional characters. For
this reason, extratextual sources, such as interviews with authors, become
 Authors’ Empathy 137

important tools in assessing literary empathic accuracy. “Empathic inac-

curacy,” a term I coin here, describes a potential effect of narrative empa-
thy: a strong conviction of empathy that incorrectly identifies the feeling
of a literary persona. Empathic inaccuracy occurs when a reader responds
empathetically to a fictional character at cross-purposes with an author’s
intentions. Authors sometimes evoke empathy unintentionally. This acci-
dent contributes to empathic inaccuracy. Unlike in real-world, face-to-face
circumstances, the novel-reading situation allows empathic inaccuracy to
persist because neither author nor fictional character directly confutes it.
Indeed, literary study privileges against-the-grain interpretations of fiction
that may be founded on deliberate acts of role taking that subvert the
authors’ apparent intentions.
Authors are not helpless in the face of empathic inaccuracy. Their com-
mentary can guide readers’ responses. When my students and I discuss Opal
Palmer Adisa’s novel, It Begins with Tears (1997), for instance, I can be fairly
sure that the female students nervously crossing their legs are responding
empathetically to the scene in which a group of women punish Monica, a
prostitute and “man-stealer,” by tying her to a bed and stuffing fiery chopped
red pepper into her nose and vagina (Tears 131–32). The novel firmly dis-
avows Monica’s assailants’ perspective by keeping them anonymous during
the attack and by quoting her rescuer, Miss Cotton: “No one deserve dat, no
one” (132). Adisa further verifies the empathetic horror of readers in direct
phrasing— “she lay tied to her pain” (132), “the lips of her vagina were
swollen and blistered” (133), and “When they managed to force the spout
of their improvised douche into her vagina, Monica’s scream cut through
the night” (136). Finally, Adisa cues readers to the appropriate response by
marking the rescuers with the symptoms of emotional contagion: “They
all ached. The crime was too violent for words. The lips of their vaginas
throbbed in sympathy, their wombs ached, and their salty tears left stain
marks on their faces” (136).
How male readers respond to this sequence in the novel, beyond being
disturbed at having to talk about it in mixed company, I have not been
able to discover. It may be that, as Beryl explains when she summons the
group of women who will tend Monica, “is oman business dis” (133); even
sympathetic men are disinvited. By opening the world of the novel to any
reader, however, Adisa shares the healing art of her fiction with a broader
array of people, and she uses the scene of healing and reconciliation at the
river to build community (212–19). Pain, if survived, offers the opportunity
for healing and creativity, as Adisa emphasizes in an early statement of ars
poetica, “She Scrape She Knee.” Adisa describes her writing as a curative pro-
cess, “I am the work, and the work is womanish. . . . female, spirited, spong-
ing Winnie Mandela’s feet, rubbing the shoulders of the basket women in
Kenya, raising the backs of Indian women; my writing is an introduction
into the world of womanism” (“Scrape” 150). Adisa sets up the wounding of
138 Empathy and the Novel

her character Monica at the hands of jealous wives in order to stage a com-
munal healing ritual of reintegration near the end of the novel. This healing
extends beyond the circle of women (a point to which some feminist critics
have objected, arguing that Adisa lets complicitous males off too easily).20
Adisa comments in an interview:

My first objective in this novel was to look at healing and try to under-
stand why there is so much pain among black people apart from the
issue of slavery. What I realized is that we have not healed from slavery
because we have not done any rituals. . . . In all cultures, not just Afri-
can cultures, whenever there is some kind of trauma there is a ritual
performed to bring back balance to the community.21

The aftermath for the perpetrators (expulsion, pain, and death) and the
positive turns in community life leave no room for doubt that Adisa aligns
herself with traumatized black people generally (and their healers). This
novel leaves no room for empathic inaccuracy.
My reading of empathic cues in Adisa’s fiction may appear to essentialize
female readers as especially capable of accurate response; this is a function
of my gender and the relative comfort of my female students in discussing
the novel. I assume that most male readers would also follow Adisa’s direc-
tions in reading the novel, though they might feel offended by or impli-
cated in the novel’s attack on patriarchal values. One must take care not to
reinscribe gender distinctions with respect to the capacities of imaginative
extension, just because the social circumstances of book discussion favor
the contributions of one gender over the other. Female and male readers
sometimes differ in their tastes, and this may have an impact on publicly
confessed empathetic responses. No work yet verifies, however, that adult
female readers are better readers than their male counterparts, though in
the United States, Europe, and the United Kingdom, women apparently
like reading fiction more than men do. Liking to read emotionally evocative
fiction does not guarantee that an individual reader responds accurately to
a novel’s invitation to feel. Female readers, myself included, can still be ter-
ribly mistaken in their empathy.
Empathic inaccuracy can be an effect of cultural background as well as
gender. Flora Nwapa’s Efuru provides an example of a novel almost certain
to create confusion through the empathic inaccuracy of Western readers.
Nwapa’s text presents the experience of genital cutting in preparation for
childbearing in a positive light.22 This “bath,” as Nwapa refers to the Female
Genital Cutting of her central character, does carry the risk of excessive
bleeding (Efuru 13), but the female elders emphasize the graver risks of
childlessness or child mortality associated with the failure to undergo the
ritual surgery. Nwapa does not deny the pain involved in the straight razor
 Authors’ Empathy 139

operation (on the clitoris and sometimes the labia).23 The description of
the event invites the reader to join with Efuru to share the agony: “Efuru
screamed and screamed” and “Efuru’s husband was in his room. He felt all
the pain. It seemed as if he was the one being circumcised” (14). Thus far
any readers who recognize what the surgery involves may flinch in tan-
dem with the feelings of the fictional characters. However, the novel rapidly
moves to convey the benefits of undergoing “circumcision.” Efuru grows
plump and beautiful with the feasting and grooming that follows the pain-
ful genital cutting. She enjoys the admiration of those in her society. Efuru
goes out with the other circumcised women, dressed in the honorable outfit
of the mature females: “They were objects of attraction; men, women and
children stopped to watch and to admire them” (17). At this point in the
narrative, readers who have joined with the suffering Efuru several pages
earlier are not always ready to make the rapid transition to follow her into
the states of happiness and pride so clearly signaled by the text. Indeed,
they sometimes react with outrage at what they regard as an unjustifiable
or implausible turn of events in the emotion cues offered by the novel.
Some readers resort to ironic explanations, as indeed Efuru later enters the
despised state of childlessness against which the ritual is supposed to guard
a woman.
Nwapa herself does not make the point ironically, choosing instead to
celebrate Efuru’s dedication of herself to the childless goddess of the lake.24
Nwapa’s message in this novel and others concerns the value of economic
independence for all adult women (Nwapa and Umeh, “Poetics” 22–30). She
does not directly contest practices (such as female circumcision and polyg-
amy) that many Western readers would regard as interfering with women’s
rights in traditional societies. Understandably, students in the United States
find themselves empathizing inaccurately, for their own cultural context
condemns female genital cutting (FGC). Indeed, the United States has leg-
islated against the practice of FGC as child abuse or torture. It is illegal to
perform FGC on an American girl under the age of eighteen.25 The histo-
rian Sandra E. Greene, who teaches Nwapa’s Efuru, confirms my sense of
the difficulties emerging from students’ responses. Greene writes, “How are
we to understand a novel that so resolutely challenges a culture yet also
takes for granted certain practices—female circumcision, bridewealth, and
polygyny—that most of my students understand as degrading to women and
therefore anti-female?” (“Flora Nwapa’s” 220). Greene struggles to bring her
students to the point at which they may “contend with the fact that there is
no one legitimate perspective on these issues” (223).26 Experiences of nar-
rative empathy, accurate or inaccurate, may make such a relativist insight
more difficult to achieve, if it is indeed the goal of instruction. Empathy
often underwrites readers’ convictions about the universality of human
nature, as the case study of Oprah’s readers shows. A reader persuaded that
140 Empathy and the Novel

she has felt with a fictional character may defy the stated or implicit inten-
tions of an author, as we have seen in an earlier chapter. When the author’s
intention matches the reader’s feelings and the agreement resonates with
empathic accord, then the introduction of alternative perspectives on the
matter at hand may meet with disbelief or outrage. Empathic inaccuracy, to
craft a hypothesis out of this circumstance, may then contribute to a strong
sense that the author’s perspective is simply wrong.
Rather than attempting to eliminate empathic inaccuracy by arguing
with readers’ feeling responses, recognizing the conflict between author’s
empathy and reader’s empathy opens the way to an understanding of nar-
rative empathy as rhetorical: both authors’ empathy and readers’ empa-
thy have rhetorical uses, which may be more noticeable when they conflict
in instances of empathic inaccuracy. By using their powers of empathetic
projection, authors may attempt to persuade readers to feel with them
on politically charged subjects. Readers, in turn, may experience narrative
empathy in ways not anticipated or intended by authors, as we have seen
earlier. When those readers articulate their differences with a text’s and
author’s apparent claims, they may call upon their empathetic response as
a sort of witness to an alternative perspective. Arguments over empathic
differences between authors and readers, or among readers with different
emotional reactions to a shared text, give feeling responsiveness to fiction
a status it has not often been granted in academic analysis of literature.
Feeling responsiveness can impede or assist arguments about an issue that
transpire in the public sphere. The existence of an empathetic novel-read-
ing experience, whether accurate or not, can enter into debates without
even being identified as a response to fiction. These untraceable influences
upon readers’ passions cannot be documented, but every so often, a novel
leaves a mark.
Occasionally, a text so resonates with its readers and their knowledge of
the author’s intentions that it has the power to draw the world’s attention
to an issue or problem. Throughout this book I have emphasized the rela-
tive rarity of such occurrences. The impressive social and political impact of
Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin and Dickens’s Oliver Twist, for instance, should
be set against the sixty thousand or more works of fiction published in Brit-
ain alone in the Victorian period. Few would nominate the nineteenth-cen-
tury novel en masse for the honors heaped on the unusual representatives
by Stowe and Dickens. Documented examples of successful interventions
in the public sphere by novelists are cherished but scarce. In the few cases
that literary history documents, the novelist appears to succeed by evoking
empathy for suffering characters while delivering salient information to the
reading public. Personal celebrity on the part of the author may also be an
essential ingredient. This was certainly the case when Alice Walker turned
her attention to the practice of Female Genital Mutilation (FGM, the term
Walker uses for FGC).
 Authors’ Empathy 141

By the time that Alice Walker published Possessing the Secret of Joy (1992),
she was already the world famous author of The Color Purple (1982). Linked
to that earlier text by a character in common (Tashi), Walker’s Possessing the
Secret of Joy makes a direct plea to readers, in an afterword, on behalf of the
millions of women and girls who have been subjected to genital mutilation.
Walker assists readers in informing themselves by providing bibliography
and announces that a portion of the profits of the novel will be “used to
educate women and girls, men and boys, about the hazardous effects of
genital mutilation, not simple on the health and happiness of individuals,
but on the whole society in which it is practiced, and the world” (Possess-
ing 283). Within a few years of publication, Walker’s stated intention of
publicizing FGM had been realized, though the practice of genital cutting
still persists. Walker used her novel to raise the Western world’s awareness.
Since the publication of Possessing the Secret of Joy, Amnesty International
has emphasized FGM as torture, the World Health Organization and UNI-
CEF have taken steps to eradicate FGM, and both state and federal laws in
the United States have been enacted banning the practice. Walker’s novel
has also been vigorously criticized for its very success when African activists
were ignored27 and for the elitist representation of an imaginary Africa,28
apparently in need of an external messiah,29 but its impact remains indis-
putable.
Preston N. Williams, a legal scholar, recalls how the novel raised his con-
sciousness of the issue: “A reading of Alice Walker’s Possessing the Secret of
Joy shortly after its publication persuaded me that the custom of female cir-
cumcision should no longer be considered the possession of any one people
or continent. Travel, migration, immigration, and a host of other interac-
tions among peoples, cultures, and traditions have made female circumci-
sion a matter of international concern” (“Personal” 491). Even her critics
concede that Walker has brought the world’s attention to the issue: “By vir-
tue of Alice Walker’s accomplishments as a powerful, well known feminist
writer—taken seriously by most people who read her writings across the
globe—her views on female ‘genital mutilation’ have come to constitute the
last word of the subject of female circumcision” (“Elitist” 464). Walker’s sen-
sational novel may persuade Western readers to take her version of genital
cutting as authoritative, and criticism of its inaccuracies and exaggerations
may never reach as broad an audience. This situation can be a frustrating one
for activists, who want the world’s attention and recognize that Walker has
brought them that but hope to inform the world without interference from
a fictional character. This case shows that concord in authors’ empathy and
readers’ empathy can be a motivating force to push beyond literary response to
prosocial action (if the potential for change exists). It also draws attention to
the irritation caused by empathic inaccuracy on the one hand (no, that’s not
how we feel about it at all!) and the imposition of Western values on other
cultures in the name of a universalizing feeling response on the other.
142 Empathy and the Novel

Strategic Empathizing

Empathy intersects with identities in problematic ways. Do we respond

because we belong to an in-group, or can narrative empathy call to us
across boundaries of difference? Even this formulation could be read as
participating in a hierarchical model of empathy. The habit of making
the reactions of white, Western, educated readers “home base” for con-
sideration of reader response has not yet been corrected by transnational
studies of readers, though narrative theorists such as Peter J. Rabinowitz
offer subtle ways of understanding the various audiences narrative fic-
tion may simultaneously address. When the subject positions of empa-
thizer and object of empathetic identification are removed from the sus-
pect arrangement that privileges white Western responses to subaltern
suffering, the apparent condescension of empathy can be transformed
by its strategic use. Strategic empathy is a variety of authors’ empathy,
by which authors attempt to direct an emotional transaction through
a fictional work aimed at a particular audience, not necessarily includ-
ing every reader who happens upon the text. Three varieties of strategic
empathizing may be observed at work in contemporary fiction, though
I feel sure they also pertain to the hopes of authors in earlier periods as
well. First, bounded strategic empathy occurs within an in-group, stemming
from experiences of mutuality, and leading to feeling with familiar others.
This kind of empathy can be called upon by the bards of the in-group,
and it may indeed prevent outsiders from joining the empathetic circle.
Certainly some experiences of empathic inaccuracy can be accounted
for by recognizing that a reader does not belong to the group invited to
share bounded strategic empathy. Second, ambassadorial strategic empa-
thy addresses chosen others with the aim of cultivating their empathy for
the in-group, often to a specific end. Appeals for justice, recognition, and
assistance often take this form. Mulk Raj Anand’s Untouchable (1935)
provides a good example of ambassadorial strategic empathy in a novel.
Third, broadcast strategic empathy calls upon every reader to feel with mem-
bers of a group, by emphasizing our common vulnerabilities and hopes. The
Kenyan novelist Ngugi wa Thiongo has deliberately employed broadcast
strategic empathy in his fiction, provocatively embracing the universality
so often rejected by contemporary champions of difference.
In the next and last chapter, I take up critiques of empathy from femi-
nist, postcolonial, and critical race legal perspectives. They run counter to
the case for empathy and sympathy as sources of social bonds and altru-
ism. To those who contest its value, empathy occludes the others’ true feel-
ings by imposing Western ideas about what ought to be felt. For these crit-
ics, empathy erases the subjectivity of the other, disables effective political
responses, and demonstrates the egotistical (and even perverse) motivations
 Authors’ Empathy 143

of privileged Westerners as they regard suffering others. As I establish in an

earlier chapter, every period that celebrates empathy as a starting point for
personal morality, the basis for healthy civic relations, or as a source of altru-
ism, also records dissenting voices. Our own period proves no exception to
this pattern of contestation.
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 6

CONTESTING EMPATHY

Up until this point, I have been making the case that the evidence for a rela-
tionship between narrative empathy and the prosocial motivation of actual
readers does not support the grand claims often made on behalf of empathy.
Far from denying the centrality of empathy to an accurate description of
emotional responsiveness to fiction, however, I have described in detail the
factors that appear to evoke readers’ empathy. These may be dispositional,
contextual, keyed to knowledge or experience, or they may hinge on mat-
ters of literary taste. I have placed my exploration of potentially empathetic
narrative techniques in the contemporary context, in which narrative empa-
thy is typically highly valued; but women’s reading and subgenres associated
with female readerships are often devalued. I have suggested that if narra-
tive empathy is to be understood, all genres of fiction and all kinds of read-
ers should be taken into consideration. A theory of the prosocial value of
empathetic response to A Portrait of a Lady (1881) that cannot also account
for the consequences of far more numerous empathetic readings of The
Bridges of Madison County (1992) should be regarded with wariness.
It will not suffice, I have argued, to rely on the assertions of authors,
on introspection, or on personal conviction to prove that reading certain
canonical works of fiction inevitably yields the cultural and civic good of
altruism and engaged world citizenship. Indeed, I note that even advo-
cates of the empathy-altruism hypothesis, who see less fickle helping, less
aggression, more cooperation, and improved attitudes toward outgroups as
benefits of empathy-induced altruism, also document its liabilities, such as
harming the target of help, addressing some needs better than others, and
inducing empathy-avoidance. Most seriously of all, empathy-induced altru-
ism can lead to actions showing partiality rather than care for the common
good and can result in injustice and immorality (Batson, “Empathy-Induced
Altruism” 380). These studies concern real-world empathy; the evidence for
effects of literary empathy, I have argued, appears even weaker. By drawing
on empirical studies conducted by psychologists and experts in discourse
analysis, I have sought to mitigate the effects of exaggerating the proso-
cial value of narrative empathy. Unlike most of the critics discussed in the
146 Empathy and the Novel

ensuing pages, however, I do not quarrel with the intrinsic value of human
empathy, nor do I regard narrative empathy as a cheat or a fake. Readers’
empathy clearly exists and quite likely contributes to the success of emo-
tionally evocative fiction in the marketplace. Through strategic empathiz-
ing, authors’ empathy may join with readers’ empathy to raise awareness
of issues through resonant feeling responses. Especially when literary texts
explicitly recommend empathetic procedures, as the character Atticus Finch
does in Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird (1960), some readers respond
to the importance of being urged to climb inside another’s skin and walk
around a bit. Most empathetic fiction calls less didactically for emotional
engagement, and many novels stir the emotions of readers without having
an explicit message. These novels, too, result in feeling responses that by no
means always or even often lead to prosocial actions in the real world. When
a novel becomes a popular bestseller, I have suggested, the psychological
effect of diffusion of responsibility may deter readers from acting upon their
empathetic reading. The link between feeling with fictional characters and
acting on behalf of real people, I have argued, is extremely tenuous and has
yet to be substantiated either through empirical research into the effects of
reading or through analysis of demonstrable causal relationships between
novel reading as a cultural phenomenon and historical changes in societies
in which novel reading flourishes.
Though novel reading certainly involves role-taking imagination, for nov-
els to change attitudes about others and inspire prosocial action requires
more than just reading. Larry P. Nucci’s research, summarized in Educa-
tion in the Moral Domain (2001), reveals that the development of social
and moral understanding requires discussion (173). This conclusion echoes
the narrative ethics of Wayne Booth, who regards the active coduction that
follows reading as a valuable step in connecting novel reading with the for-
mation of readers’ characters. The affirmation and challenge to convictions
that can occur when readers discuss fiction, especially with the guidance of
a teacher who connects the dots between reactions to fiction and options
for action in the real world, can be considerable. The belief in the power of
a teacher to influence at least those of her students who arrive in a state of
readiness to the task of reading animates both the moralists who hope to
teach through literature1 and the cultural conservatives who fear that politi-
cally correct indoctrination occurs in the literature classroom. Indeed, argu-
ments about the contemporary canon often thinly disguise interventions on
one side or another of the culture wars. The reading list can embody a wish
to win the hearts and minds of readers to a favored cause. In the culture
wars, books, including novels, apparently possess extraordinary persuasive
and motivational power, but without passionate teachers (parents, librar-
ians, and other book lovers) even classics remain inert.
I suggest that when we set the rare narratives of autodidacts who report
conversions that came about through private reading into a broader context
 Contesting Empathy 147

of all literary readers, the strongest testimony about the influence of books
arises from circumstances during which teaching or active discussion accom-
panies reading. Even the remarkable working-class readers—Welsh miners,
English weavers, and Scottish mechanics—who sought to educate them-
selves through books did so in social networks of mutual improvement.2
This does not mean that reading circles result in unanimous responses to
books: indeed, a group discussion may come closer to eliciting what Paul B.
Armstrong calls the disjunctive tension between readers’ experiences and
the assertions of a fictional world (Play and the Politics of Reading xi). We
respond to novels differently; novels do not subject us to uniform conclu-
sions. Armstrong sees reading as an exercise in “nonconsensual reciprocity,”
which may help model peaceful, rational, democratic interactions among
citizens. Larry P. Nucci argues that “effective educational use of . . . fictional
characters depends on the engagement of students in reflective activities”
such as writing, oral analysis, and especially discussion (Education 209).
Fostering the development of moral selves in readers requires more than
offering a reading list of novels and stories embodying specific character
traits or virtues (including empathetic responsiveness!). What empathetic
reading by itself may not accomplish, however, a teacher or guide may still
achieve, if one considers the link between novel reading and active steps on
behalf of real others desirable. Thus, while fiction reading alone may not
form citizens committed to justice, democracy, and nuanced understandings
of other cultures, pedagogical practices could respond to narrative empathy
as an opportunity to transform “ideological and cultural conflicts into mutu-
ally beneficial and enlightening exchanges,” as Armstrong puts his call for
reformed language arts instruction (177). Conscious cultivation of narra-
tive empathy by teachers and discussion leaders could at least point toward
the potential for novel reading to help citizens respond to real others with
greater openness and consciousness of their shared humanity.
Critics of empathy and, to a lesser extent, of empathetic reading quarrel
with that very goal. For these critics, empathy is amoral (Posner, “Against”
19), a weak form of appeal to humanity in the face of organized hatred,3 an
obstacle to agitation for racial justice (Delgado, Race War? 4–36), a waste of
sentiment and encouragement of withdrawal (Raymond Williams, Culture
and Society 109), and even a pornographic indulgence of sensation acquired
at the expense of suffering others (Wood, Slavery 36). To some feminist
and postcolonial critics, empathy loses credence the moment it appears to
depend on a notion of universal human emotions, a cost too great to bear
even if basic human rights depend upon it.4 Indeed, the suspicion of uni-
versalizing or essentializing concepts explains a great deal of the resistance
to empirical disciplines (such as psychology) in the humanities and in some
social sciences. “Empathy” becomes yet another example of the Western
imagination’s imposition of its own values on cultures and peoples that it
scarcely knows, but presumes to “feel with,” in a cultural imperialism of the
148 Empathy and the Novel

emotions. Each of the sentences of this paragraph refers to rich debates,

to which I cannot do justice in a short chapter, though I return below to
the key areas of contestation: the relationship of empathy to altruism and
community building; the hazards of empathy; the commonalities of human
bodies; and the putative universality of the emotions. To further illustrate
the point made in the preceding chapter, that contemporary fiction partici-
pates in the interrogation of empathy as a core value of novels, I approach
these topics through the fiction of African American science fiction novelist
Octavia Butler and Canadian Booker Prize winner Michael Ondaatje, who
left his native Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) as a child.

Hyperempathy

In Octavia Butler’s dystopic near-future California, fifteen-year-old Lau-

ren Olamina lives a protected life within a walled community outside Los
Angeles. Neighborhood walls keep marauders and drug-addicted pyroma-
niacs on the outside, where only the vestiges of civil society remain. Parable
of the Sower (1993) relates in first-person diarylike entries the destruction
of that safe haven and the journey of Olamina and a band of followers to a
remote area where she founds a new faith, Earthseed. Butler’s central char-
acter suffers from a brain disorder caused by her biological mother’s drug
abuse during pregnancy. She has the “organic delusional syndrome” hyper-
empathy (Sower 11), a condition that renders her helpless in shared sensa-
tion when she witnesses another’s pain. Olamina’s hyperempathy resembles
real human empathy in a number of particulars: seeing (but not hearing
about) another’s wound sets it off; suffering animals as well as humans can
evoke it (43); a fake injury can call it up as well as accurate perceptions of
suffering (10). Butler exacerbates the gap between empathy’s involuntary
responsiveness and sympathy’s more mature and deliberate channeling of
feelings when she pushes Olamina’s hyperempathy toward personal dis-
tress.5 However, the sensations of hyperempathy are not only painful: like
Hazlitt’s sympathy, Olamina’s hyperempathy intensifies the pleasure of sex
(12), but that is just about the only good side effect of what Butler presents
unstintingly as a disability and a closely guarded secret (162). If others knew
of her empathy, the narrator explains, she would be vulnerable to incapaci-
tation, exploitation, even enslavement.
Late in the novel, Olamina meets a family of fellow “sharers” and dis-
covers that they have just escaped slavery, which after all has not been
eliminated by the conclusion of the American Civil War. Their experiences,
and Butler’s expansion upon them in a concentration-camp episode in the
sequel, Parable of the Talents (1998), demonstrate the hazards of hyper-
empathy.6 Bosses pay more for “feelers,” especially children with the syn-
drome, who can be effectively rendered docile without risk to the bodily
 Contesting Empathy 149

health of the slave (Sower 278). Olamina is exceptional not only because
she can hide her debility (it shows in the others sharers’ cringing behavior),
but also because she can push violent actions further than typical hyper-
empaths. They cannot even engage in self-defense, but Olamina can shoot.
We learn through Olamina’s unusual experiences that “sharing” feelings of
being shot and even dying does not destroy the hyperempath, though it
knocks her out. Olamina can kill those who attack her (142, 215), but she
consequently undergoes their agony. Her empathy has ironically made her
a more effective fighter, for she cannot afford merely to injure her oppo-
nent (256). She shoots (stabs, bludgeons) to kill. This ruthlessness on the
part of Butler’s protagonist makes her survival on the road plausible, but
it would be missing a major part of Butler’s defamiliarizing treatment of
empathy to link it too easily with survival. Olamina survives in spite of her
hyperempathetic feelings for suffering of others, some of whom she kills
with her own hands.
Mitigating Olamina’s violence (always in self-defense) is her persistent
community building. Having perceived the risks of being in a group locked
in behind walls, Olamina does not react by lighting out for the territory on
her own. She judges people well through the fine-tuned skills of the habit-
ual perspective taker, and she compensates for her lack of survival skills
by recruiting companions. Cultivating trust in order to achieve improved
safety through numbers, Olamina gathers a multiracial band of travelers
around her. Deliberate acts of altruism often result in members joining the
group.7 Carrying out altruistic rescues exposes Olamina to hyperempathic
agony, but the moral obligation to help victims and the pragmatic goal of
making the whole group safer override the perils of empathy. The survivors
become the core of the first Earthseed community, whose story Butler tells
in the sequel, Parable of the Talents. Though Butler does not explicitly link
Olamina’s empathy to her success in reforging social bonds, the account of
community arising in negative reaction to a state of anarchy is consistent
with a Humean view of empathy, and Butler has asserted that the novel is
“fundamentally about social power” (Potts, “We Keep Playing” 334).
While some critics of the novel have hastened to assure readers that But-
ler makes Olamina’s hyperempathy the source of her “deep sense of solidar-
ity with others” (Miller, “Octavia Butler’s Vision” 357), in fact, Butler con-
sistently represents it as an obstacle to relationships, an alienating personal
quality that is as likely to result in anger, hatred, distrust, resentment, and
despair, as more positive emotions. The personal distress-suffering hyper-
empath takes to heart the violence done to others, and she learns suspicion
as a first strategy for survival. That the practical ethics of the road lead to
the formation of a protective band emphasizes the dangers posed by others.
There is no solidarity with predatory humans, whom Butler represents as
ruthless individuals or members of barbaric gangs who can only imperil the
weak, the careless, and the isolated. In a public lecture given at MIT, Butler
150 Empathy and the Novel

explains that she intended to explore the negative possibilities of extreme

empathy: “I remember talking to some people who thought this would be
the perfect affliction to make us a better people because it’s a kind of bio-
logical conscience, and you wouldn’t be able to hurt people without feeling
it. And I immediately began to think about ways in which that wouldn’t be
true and ways in which that would be disastrous” (Butler, “Devil-Girl”). Like
Richard Posner, who argues that empathy may lead us into contact with
the minds of “a torturer, a sadist, even a Hitler” (“Against” 19–20), Butler
sees empathy as amoral and subject to abuse. Narrative empathy, as Posner
observes, “may improve our skills in manipulating people to our own selfish
ends” (20). By no means does it inevitably lead to better behavior, though
the hyperempath Lauren Olamina admirably survives, which is the sort of
selfish outcome that readers with a rooting interest in a self-narrating char-
acter tend to appreciate.
In juxtaposition to the perils of hyperempathy, Butler places two destruc-
tive alternatives, both addictions that play on human somatosensory vulner-
abilities. By 2024, when the novel opens, television has become, for those
who can afford it, a fully virtual experience. One enters other worlds in vir-
tual reality gear through wall windows that a desperate government keeps
going even as water supplies disappear and coastlines crumble. Olamina,
like her creator Butler, is a voracious reader, but others cluster around the
TVs until the signals fail. Television effectively immobilizes the middle class
behind their walls, while the rich either seize power in the emerging fascist
state or suffer the fates of affluent first adopters, dying of the drugs that
only they can afford. An alternative to high-tech escapism is the street drug
“pyro,” a next-generation chemical that provides an ecstatic high, better than
sex, when watching fires. The shaved and painted barbarians who terrorize
the denizens of Butler’s California spout a cheap Robin Hood rhetoric of
class warfare, but theirs is no merry band in the greenwood. They literally
torch the ground they stand on and dance in a frenzy of pleasure as their
own fellow addicts die ablaze.
Butler’s point, I believe, is that the very faculties of emotional contagion
that make empathy possible can be hijacked all too readily by chemicals
and sensory stimulation. Resistance is the extraordinary exception, like real-
life altruism. Rare circumstances provide the crucible for the forging of a
savior-leader such as Olamina. Most people fall victim to emotional weak-
nesses and don’t even do a very canny job of surviving. It may help to be too
poor for technology or drugs, but to her credit, Butler does not romanticize
the poor as either abstainers or as victims. In one sense they have a survival
advantage over those who have more to lose through inaction or addiction.
Poverty provides a small protection, unless, like Olamina’s ill-fated brother
Keith, one gets swept into a temporarily lucrative life on the streets. Yet the
desperate poor also endanger everyone else on the street. Butler depicts
countless characters in states of grief, denial, numbness, and moral stupid-
 Contesting Empathy 151

ity—competing for entrance to a town owned by a multinational corpo-

ration, for instance, in which inhabitants will shortly be ensnared in debt
slavery. The few who will survive to found a new community Butler explic-
itly links to nineteenth-century fugitive slaves, fleeing north through hostile
territory inhabited by racists, opportunists, and zealots.8 This historical anal-
ogy certainly demands sympathy from the reader, but Butler estranges the
reader from the usual associations of empathy with natural human bonds.
Olamina and her community cannot afford to risk such an idealized view
of the role of feelings.
Butler’s comments in interviews illuminate her dissent from the main-
stream notion of both empathy and the efficacy of fiction. Like students of
human behavior during genocides, Butler sees empathy as a relatively weak
form of appeal to common humanity.9 She regards the desire for dominance,
division, and hierarchal relationships as human beings’ fatal weaknesses;
further, “here on Earth, the worst behavior is rewarded” (“Persistence” 4).
Butler worries about “the trivialization of empathy” (76) and reflects on the
basis of her own experience that hurting other people exacts a price from
empathic individuals and makes them hesitant to protect themselves.10 This
means that an empathic person is likely to be perceived as weak, as “some
bleeding heart idiot” (“Persistence” 76). Butler rejects easy associations
between empathy, understanding, and social good. In an early unpublished
story, Butler reports, she depicted a group of telepaths constantly at one
anothers’ throats: “They were fighting because they understood each other.
You know, we always feel that if we could just understand each other, we’d
be fine. But the problem here was they couldn’t conceal their disagreements
and animosities and contempt, and they were killing each other” (Butler,
“Devil Girl”).
Despite her well-documented utopian imagination, Butler presents the
obstacles to improvement in the human species vividly: sometimes hybrid-
ization with aliens is the only hope. About Parable of the Sower, Butler com-
ments that it is a cautionary tale (“Devil Girl”), warning readers about an
all-too-possible future. She remains skeptical about efficacy of fiction in
improving human chances for flourishing amicably on earth. Parable of the
Sower itself does not, as Madhu Dubey aptly observes, “invest any special
redemptive power in the literary or fictional imagination as such,” though
it emphasizes the power of literacy (“Folk and Urban” 120). When inter-
viewers Marilyn Mehaffy and AnaLouise Keating asked Butler whether she
believed that “textual innovation and struggle” could be “politically, posi-
tively effective,” Butler replied, “Can be, but there’s no guarantee” (“Radio”
66). This is not to say that Butler has no ambitions to influence her readers;
certainly the genre of dystopia in which she works depends upon extrapo-
lations from present-day phenomena (walled communities, global warm-
ing, water shortages, debt slavery, and drug addiction) into their worst-case-
scenario outcomes. She intends to warn readers, using the traditional vehicle
152 Empathy and the Novel

of character identification to make us care about the fate of a black teenage

girl who has ended up on the streets in a time of social upheaval. She just
doesn’t count on narrative empathy to achieve what real-life empathy fails
to do, and she assesses the costs of overconfidence in the ethical, social,
and political consequences of feeling with others. In this sense, she is in
accord with Raymond Williams, whose argument against (literary) sympa-
thetic engagement depends on the historical judgment that interventions
on behalf of workers did not occur as a result of reading industrial fiction.
Because she is a novelist and not a theorist, Butler keeps on writing fiction
that offers an affective bridge between her imaginings and her diverse read-
ership’s desires. It will be an important aspect of the remaining argument to
see how a novelist denies the cultural values attributed to empathy while
establishing commonalities of brain and behavior that may cross borders
and temporal lines. As I will suggest below, the consequence of this apparent
paradox can be resolved by resituating empathy where it came from in the
first place, in the realm of aesthetics.

“That False Empathy and Blame”

Michael Ondaatje’s novel Anil’s Ghost (2000) presents in shards and frag-
ments aspects of a postcolonial problem: what (if anything) can a Western
observer of a hybrid transnational identity discover when a human rights
organization sends her into a place like Sri Lanka during its ongoing civil
war? Can she employ her academically authorized empiricism in the task
of truth seeking for the purposes of achieving justice, or is her very mission
a product of a Western fantasy of drop-in intervention, as characters in the
novel suggest? Do the feelings of the individuals involved matter at all?
Michael Ondaatje complicates his task by refusing to create in Anil a heroic
individual who might make an effectual response to crisis and in the pro-
cess buoy the spirits of readers who also look on, through her fictional eyes.
Structurally, Ondaatje’s novel resists the empathetic invitation to character
identification. Early reviewers decried its coolness and its apparently apoliti-
cal stance toward the Sri Lankan situation.11 I argue that Ondaatje rebuffs
readers who seek either an easy bridge character with whom to travel for
a voyeuristic thrill, or a thinly fictionalized work of investigative journal-
ism that can be harnessed for political use. These features participate in
Ondaatje’s skeptical interrogation of empathy and its uses.
Anil’s Ghost, though a recent novel, has already been subjected to search-
ing, intelligent critique by critics of Canadian and postcolonial literature,
but none have zeroed in on the specific criticism that Ondaatje’s novel
makes of empathy and universal human emotions, especially fear, in their
putative relations to justice.12 Some background on a complex text will be
helpful. Anil, the eponymous apparent protagonist, turns out to be one of a
 Contesting Empathy 153

handful of characters, professionals whose modes of truth seeking or repa-

ration Ondaatje holds up to scrutiny. They include: Anil Tissera, a forensic
pathologist, who investigates human rights abuses from skeletal remains;
Linus Corea, a kidnapped physician, who treats guerilla rebels in one of
the factions; the brothers Sarath and Gamini, one an archaelogist and the
other a physician; and Ananda, a drunken former gem miner who practices
the hereditary ritual profession of eye painting. All of the characters have
endured their own losses: Anil’s parents die in an accident, and her best
friend suffers from early-onset Alzheimer’s; Linus Corea has been violently
separated from his family; Sarath’s wife has committed suicide, a death that
also grieves his brother, Gamini, who is emaciated from overwork and drug
abuse; and Ananda’s wife is among the disappeared, like “Sailor,” the anony-
mous skeletal remains of a political murder victim. Just as the novel pro-
vides grief to go around, it also parcels out culpability. No one’s clothes are
without blood (Anil’s Ghost 48), which (along with the destruction of evi-
dence) makes the affixing of blame problematic (17).
Ondaatje’s presentation of his characters’ actions, memories, and motives
distances readers from easy pity or satisfaction on their behalf, and it also
engenders suspicion of the answers or truths that might be reached through
the investigations carried out within the novel. As Margaret Scanlan per-
suasively argues about this atypical novel of contemporary terrorism, it
“reproduces no political rhetoric, adjudicates no political claims, projects
no political solutions” (“Terrorism’s Time” 302). In Anil’s Ghost, Scanlan
observes, we find “no master narratives, no organic psychologies, no resolu-
tion and no moral” (302). Perhaps only fear, routed through the amygdala,
a brain structure with a Sri Lankan–sounding name (Anil’s Ghost 135), can
effectively overcome cultural differences in order to permit characters to
respond humanely to one another. Even this proposition requires a collapse
in distance, so that the sharer comes close to the fearful one’s circumstances.
But how can we come closer, and what tools do we take up in order to reach
one another, Ondaatje asks. Although he resists the easily recovered truth
of the romance of the archive, Ondaatje still represents the various crafts
of healing and recovery with a degree of hopefulness. The proving of Anil’s
conclusions, however, Ondaatje displaces beyond the end of the story time,
which shifts the focus of the novel to the activities of those left on the
ground after Anil escapes Sri Lanka.
Anil’s fascination with the “almond knot” (Anil’s Ghost 135) of the
amygdala, sought out in the autopsies she performs, embeds her suspicion
of shared feeling in soft tissue, which she probes with a scalpel. Anil dis-
trusts “weepers” like her Sri Lankan ex-husband, who spends “all his spare
energy on empathy” (143). A global or transnational identity correlates with
an assumption of stylish cool, and Anil’s career choice encourages distanc-
ing from her emotions. She enjoys the gallows humor of the autopsy room
and cuts off her relationship with her married lover Cullis with a knife. The
154 Empathy and the Novel

wobble into personal responsiveness Anil shows when she comes back to
her country of origin and confronts the corpse of a political murder victim
in a master-class with Sri Lankan medical students suggests that a return
to home turf may restore Anil’s emotions. Which emotions can be shared,
though, in a country that has endured so much grief and routine horror that
a crucifixion (of a truck driver onto a road using builders’ nails) can seem
relatively benign? (130). Indeed, as Sarath points out, Anil cannot help shar-
ing the pervasive fear that everyone else on the island lives with daily—she
whispers as if she can be overheard even when they have gone far from the
capitol (53). This might seem a hopeful development, except that fear so
often leads to paralysis, paranoia, disengagement, and broken trust. Anil her-
self falls victim to her own fear. She effectively betrays herself to the gov-
ernment because she cannot quell her suspicions of her collaborator Sarath.
He responds altruistically, in an act of selfless rescue of both Anil and the
skeletal remains that will provide evidence to pin one murder on the gov-
ernment that swiftly retaliates for his intervention by killing him. Prosocial
action proves a dead end for this good world citizen.
Ondaatje’s novel obliquely presents the concepts, empathy, altruism,
and justice, but shatters the relationships among them. Ondaatje also
arrays fragments of bone, rock, pencil erasers and clay in a celebration of
material objects and artisans’ skill that points toward putting back together.
The novel ends on an up note, with Ananda painting the animating eyes
on the reconstructed statue of a Buddha, but it qualifies aesthetic solutions
to the larger-scale traumas that it depicts. The penultimate scene depicts a
bomber’s assassination of the Sri Lankan president, and one feels that the
destruction and reconstruction could just as well be reversed. Though he
cannot present them simultaneously, Ondaatje’s juxtapositions enjoin the
reader who wishes to emphasize the last words, on human contact with the
artist as, “This sweet touch from the world” (Anil’s Ghost 307), to admit
the limited efficacy of an aesthetic response to carnage. Yet the crafting of
a novel out of the materials of recent Sri Lankan history inevitably replaces
the real irrevocable experiences of the silenced and disappeared with the
creations of fictional representation. The necessary exercise of authorial
empathy (which may accompany the most effective fictional world-mak-
ing) produces a dilemma in a novel that disavows easy connections and
solutions.
Guilty already of having escaped to the west, the author and his alter
ego Anil meditate on the limits of an empirical truth quest. Like her maker
Michael Ondaatje, Anil exits the country as a teenager. She returns in a pro-
fessional capacity as a forensic investigator, sponsored by a human rights
agency based in Geneva. Ondaatje’s return journeys took place for less
politically charged purposes than Anil’s, but he concedes that the project
of the novel still runs the risk of indulging in literary tourism, remarking in
an interview with Maya Jaggi that “it’s a real problem. I’m sure I’m as guilty
 Contesting Empathy 155

as anyone. That’s why I didn’t want to make assured judgments about what
should be done—which is often incendiary and facile. . . . I was very careful
to try and avoid the easy solutions” (Writing across Worlds 253). The expa-
triate author indicts himself, as well as his character, when the archaeolo-
gist Sarath chides Anil: “You know, I’d believe your arguments more if you
lived here. . . . You can’t just slip in, make a discovery and leave’” (Anil’s
Ghost 44).
Anil has discovered a modern skeleton, a likely victim of a government-
sponsored murder, among historical remains gathered from an archaeologi-
cal site. The quest to put a name to the victim, to find his village, repre-
sents a larger project. One victim, one village—these stand in for hundreds
of unidentified others (176), according to the logic of Anil’s profession,
which is necessarily synecdochic. If you are to examine only one bone, her
teachers tell her, “the bone of choice would be the femur” (140, emphasis in
original). The soft tissues that hold memories and emotions elude forensic
investigation, so that inferences from the states of bones emphasize nar-
ratives of death. Anil is fortunate to have the entire skeleton, so she dates
“Sailor” and locates him geographically by means of the subtle marks on his
bones, made by larvae after his death, and by his posture at work while still
living. Indeed, by the end of the novel, Anil and her Sri Lankan collabo-
rator, the archaeologist Sarath, find witnesses to his abduction and learn
“Sailor’s” real name.
The discovery is anticlimactic, however. Sarath cautions Anil at the out-
set about the risks of such extrapolation, even when successful: “I want you
to understand the archaeological surround of a fact. Or you’ll be like one
of those journalists who file reports about flies and scabs while staying at
the Galle Face Hotel. That false empathy and blame” (Anil’s Ghost 44).
Ondaatje poses the question of whether narrative fiction, historically kin
to journalism, can make itself more like archaeology, providing the dispas-
sionate surround for the fact, rather than crafting a saleable tale for Western
consumption. Is the novel as an art form too much devoted to the evoca-
tion of feeling and the invitation to character identification to provide such
a rich and contextual understanding? Ondaatje’s formal choices underscore
his suspicion of illusory wholeness. The narration of Anil’s Ghost Ondaatje
breaks up and scatters in multiple centers of consciousness. Anil recedes
from view in whole swaths of the book, though the goal of reassembling
the picture, as in forensic bone gathering and art restoration work, still sug-
gests a grid that may be of use in filling in. The order of events suggests that
the methodology of recovering the past informs the process of repairing
destruction, but Ananda makes the aesthetic decision, as far as the recon-
structed Buddha goes, not to conceal the scars. Ondaatje sets process and
objects in the foreground, with results and discoveries in the background.
Individuals survive or don’t make it, and their outcomes Ondaatje places
in the complicated broader context that repels a sense of satisfaction or
156 Empathy and the Novel

even connection. All of these estranging moves place obstacles in the way of
empathy-seeking novel-readers, who report with puzzlement their experi-
ence of not liking Anil very much.13
I have already suggested that Ondaatje eschews the emotional effects
of a character-centered psychological novel in Anil’s Ghost. Ondaatje also
throws out the usual moves of the character-driven research thriller, with
which Anil’s Ghost has something in common. As Margaret Scanlan observes,
Anil’s Ghost does not participate in the celebration of a recoverable truth
that typifies romances of the archives (“Terrorism’s Time” 310). Specifically,
Ondaatje provides no strong closure to the conclusion of Anil’s research
quest. Anil receives no reward for her efforts, and Sarath pays a severe pen-
alty for his role. The characters abjure pleasurable experiences, including
aesthetic ones, in a novel that idealizes asceticism. The usual research tools
(United Nations and Amnesty reports, atlases, encyclopedias, and newspa-
pers) are revealed as patchy and unreliable. Instead, scientific expertise, local
knowledge, and a knack for improvisation during times of scarcity receive
Ondaatje’s emphasis. Peculiarly, the creation of something approximating
an archaeological surround for a fact in fiction requires jettisoning history
and politics. The novel provides very little detail on the recent strife in Sri
Lanka; though informed readers will recognize Ondaatje’s fictionalized ver-
sions of some events, he leaves much deliberately vague. Ondaatje resists
the generic pressure to provide a researcher hero or to reveal a heroic vic-
tim, a silenced life brought to voice by recovery. I have argued elsewhere
that romances of the archive often place empathy at the center of a research
quester’s work, as a special form of recognition that permits the unlocking
of mysteries.14 Though the novel offers a brief portrait of an epigraphist
(Palipana, Sarath’s mentor) who makes up the evidence that ought to be
there, Ondaatje does not endorse the maker’s trance as a way through to
truth. Similarly, Ananda’s facial reconstruction of “Sailor,” apparently fol-
lowing the Manchester protocol for rebuilding a face up from the skull, fails
in accuracy because it becomes a portrait of the artist’s dead wife, a work of
mourning rather than of recovery. Though she experiences flashes of insight
as she gains knowledge of her surroundings, Anil does not reach the truth
about Sailor through feeling. Dispassionate recognition of the meaning of
evidence replaces empathy, whose leaps to certainty Ondaatje places under
skeptical scrutiny.
False empathy receives explicit condemnation in Anil’s Ghost, as in cri-
tiques such as critical race theorist Richard Delgado’s work. In The Coming
Race War, Delgado creates characters that discover through dialogue how
true empathy is in “shorter and shorter supply” (Race War 8). Whites in par-
ticular are prone to false empathy, a term Delgado relates to Gramsci’s false
consciousness: “False empathy, a sentimental, breast-beating kind, is com-
mon among white liberals, and is the mirror opposite of false consciousness,
Gramsci’s notion” (12). Whether one knows that he or she is faking or not, a
 Contesting Empathy 157

white enjoying false empathy “pretends to understand and sympathize with

a black” (13). From this grim assessment comes the inevitable disavowal of
empathy itself, for “the most unsympathetic thing you can do is think you
have empathized with those of a radically different background. You can
easily end up hurting them” (13). As Thom Gunn’s speaker in the poem
“Save the word” counsels, “Think you can/ syphon yourself / into another
human[?] . . ./ / Don’t try it” (Boss Cupid 71). The task is too likely to
end in self-delusion and, according to Delagdo, worse: empathy reproduces
hierarchy and power relations (Race War 14, 15). Although Delgado and
Ondaatje both hold out the possibility that true empathy exists, white or
Western delusion discredits the claim of empathetic understanding before it
can even be made. Since false empathy is worse than none at all, worse even
than indifference (31), Delgado eschews empathy altogether: “We must
realize,” his character opines, “that persons of radically different background
and race cannot be made vicariously to identify with us to any significant
extent” (31). Instead, Delgado advocates, sympathetic whites should reject
racial privilege, act in solidarity with minorities, and work to subvert the
system from within.
Ondaatje’s suspicion of empathy resembles Delgado’s in many particu-
lars, despite differences of historical situation. The Western observer—even
the returned Sri Lankan who has been absent for the crucial years—must
not presume to an understanding she, as an outsider, cannot possess. As
Heike Härting aptly observes, the privilege of Anil’s mobility “marks her as
a cosmopolitan traveler in the postnational world” and her efforts after exit-
ing Sri Lanka receive neither description nor guarantee (“Diasporic Cross-
Currents” 46). While engaged in research, Anil’s enjoyment of decent lodg-
ings, professional respect, and a brief from an international agency discredit
her insights as potentially engaging in false empathy (Anil’s Ghost 41). Her
Sri Lankan background does not go far to assuage doubts about her sincer-
ity. She has been away too long and does not share the experience of the
civil war. Because she has lost her ability to speak her native language (Sin-
hala), Anil cannot blend in with her countrymen, even those belonging to
the same ethnic background. Her education sets her apart. The charge from
Geneva may be interpreted (certainly by the Sri Lankan government and
possibly also by the rebel groups) as an attempt at subversion, though Anil
is officially an “invited” guest of the nation.
Nonetheless, Anil works in solidarity with that most silent of minorities,
the dead, and that makes her position especially precarious, for they cannot
defend her. In the end, Sarath helps her escape the country with the skel-
eton that will enable her to pin one crime on the government perpetrators.
Perhaps he does it because Anil finally identifies herself, in a moment of
life-risking public accusation, as a Sri Lankan herself: “I think you murdered
hundreds of us” (Anil’s Ghost 272). Sarath notes that “us” of belonging, after
fifteen years away. Until this climactic scene, Anil, who bears a masculine
158 Empathy and the Novel

name bartered from her brother, strenuously resists attempts to place her
own identity: not the swimmer, not married, not Sri Lankan anymore. Yet
professionally accustomed to placing the dead, Anil routinely turns “bod-
ies into representatives of race and age and place” (55). Being fully alive
embraces particularities of experience, memory, and emotion that elude the
categories that contain the dead. (Hence Ondaatje depicts Leaf’s descent
into early-onset Alzheimer’s disease as embedding the true meaning of
death.) Defying fixed identity entails other distancing gestures, as in Anil’s
characteristic defense against the demand for a personal response to trauma:
“there could never be any logic to the human violence without the distance
of time. For now it could be reported, filed in Geneva, but no one could give
meaning to it. . . . She saw that those who were slammed and stained by vio-
lence lost the power of language and logic” (55). Anil’s expressed solidarity
with the dead, about whom readers learn little, stems from her privilege to
fly away from the scene and to regain her position in Europe or America.
Judgments are to be left to history, conspicuously absent from the text.
Anil’s effort has the virtue of retaining language and logic employed on the
dead’s behalf, but it is disconnected from fellow feeling.
Eventually Anil gets past her fear of emotional responsiveness to arrive
at what Martin Hoffman would call empathic injustice—by which the psy-
chologist means an empathic recognition of injustice suffered by others (see
19 above). Anil finally lays blame on the government, allying herself with
justice. Yet a pallid justice renders its verdicts from the safety of Geneva.
On the ground in Ondaatje’s Sri Lanka a starker reality rules, in which
approaching justice endangers life, perhaps not the best choice in the cir-
cumstances. One victim who might be identified, one monument repaired:
Ondaatje places these works of craft in stark juxtaposition to the healing
arts of the novel’s two doctors, who continue to strive for the wounded
and sick. Ondaatje brings Anil into close proximity with the physicians on
several occasions, as if to chart her cure from dispassion and her induction
into professional caring through actions rather than through narration of
psychological renovation. The conclusion of the novel, in which Ananda
restores sight to the Buddha and receives the companionable gesture of a
child, could not come about without Anil’s swift medical intervention when
Ananda attempts suicide. Gunesena, the man who drives Anil to the air-
port for her last-minute escape to the West, is the crucifixion victim whom
she earlier rescues. If one cares about human rights, Ondaatje suggests, one
could do worse than caring for living persons and human bodies.
Embodied human characters, for both Octavia Butler and Michael
Ondaatje, present fearful dangers to one another. The extreme risk entailed
in empathizing or identifying with others underscores the problems of
empathic inaccuracy and the amorality of empathetic responsiveness to suf-
fering. The victim with whom the empath resonates emotionally may be an
 Contesting Empathy 159

assassin, an assailant, a person with blood on his hands. According to both

writers, not until the archaeological surround of a fact can be established
could one begin to know whether to trust an empathetic impulse. That pro-
cess may require too much time—even the distance of historical regard—to
be of any use in the immediate moment. In this sense it may be a consoling
fact to know that empathy rarely leads directly to altruism.15 For Butler,
deliberate altruistic actions offer others the opportunity to overcome their
distrust and join the utopian community; for Ondaatje, altruism costs lives,
producing yet another corpse of a government-sponsored murder to replace
the one that has been spirited away. Both Butler and Ondaatje suggest cau-
tion in matters of trust and put limits on the usefulness of universal human
emotions. Using empathy to get at supposed commonalities or to reach
certain judgments about complex events exposes the empathizer to risks of
oversimplification, misunderstanding, and inadvertent harm.

Failed Empathy, False Empathy,

and Universal Human Emotions

For a significant subset of empathy’s critics, the implausibility of universal

human emotions makes empathetic response a suspect end of literary rep-
resentation. This differs from what we may call the failed empathy and false
empathy critics’ views. While failed empathy critics lament the inefficiency
of shared feelings in provoking action that would lead to positive social
or political change, false empathy critics emphasize the self-congratulatory
delusions of those who incorrectly believe that they have caught the feel-
ings of suffering others from a different culture, gender, race, or class. (Those
who take the Hobbesian view that empathy is really only egoism and self-
regard enhanced by means of a suffering other offer a variant of false empa-
thy criticism.) Failed empathy critics focus on empathic inefficacy16; false
empathy critics predict and deplore empathic inaccuracy.17 A very small
subset of false empathy critics construe empathy as antipathy under the
guise of compassion; for these individuals, some of whom are Freudians, a
sense of shared feeling does violence to the object of one’s regard and hurts
the object through aggressive identification or projection.
False empathy critics and failed empathy critics offer limited commen-
tary on narrative empathy, by which readers experience sensations of empa-
thetic identification with fictional representations. The worst a failed empa-
thy critic could say would be a version of what Raymond Williams argues,
that reading about fictional characters in pitiable situations actually leads
to apathy. Catherine Gallagher explains the mechanisms at work (using the
term sympathy), with an emphasis on the special contribution of fictional
characters as “potential objects of universal identification”:
160 Empathy and the Novel

Fiction, then, stimulates sympathy because, with very few excep-

tions, it is easier to identify with nobody’s story and share nobody’s
sentiments than to identify with anybody else’s story and share any-
body else’s sentiments. But, paradoxically, we can always claim to be
expanding our capacity for sympathy by reading fiction, because, after
all, if we can sympathize with nobody, then we can sympathize with
anybody. Or so it would seem, but such sympathy remains on that
level of abstraction where anybody is “nobody in particular” (the very
definition of a novel character). Nobody was eligible to be the univer-
sally preferred anybody because nobody, unlike somebody, was never
anybody else. (Nobody’s Story 172)

Thus the salutary effects of fiction reading fail, in inaction. The worst a false
empathy critic could say can be represented by cultural historian Marcus
Wood’s condemnation of the liberal imagination, as offering onanistic indul-
gence of feeling at the expense of the enslaved (Slavery 36). There, con-
sumption of the pitiable representation as pornography ostensibly makes
something happen, but the wrong thing (certainly not abolition, according
to Wood).
Both false empathy and failed empathy critics dislike the emotions that
empathizers enjoy, but, in a central irony, they confidently predict the
existence and effects of the feelings that they criticize. Their moralizing
depends upon the certainty that pride, disdain, or condescension related to
the empathizer’s position in a social hierarchy truly undergirds any claim
of empathic resonance with another real or fictional being. While the same
critics who express false empathy or failed empathy views may also doubt
the existence of universal human emotions, their conclusions about the del-
eterious effects of empathy endorse a view of human nature (or at least of
white, Western, privileged human nature) as gravitating toward pleasurable
sensations of superiority over others. Some regard this as hardwired, espe-
cially in the male of the species.18 Octavia Butler, for instance, believes that
a genetic tendency toward hierarchical behavior is the species’ most nega-
tive and self-endangering trait (Mehaffey and Keating, “Radio Imagination”
54–55). Not all false empathy or failed empathy critics are biological deter-
minists, however, and they consistently emphasize the significance of rec-
ognizing and responding to cultural differences as a priority over any easy
assumption of understanding based on human universals.
For those whose main object of critique is the notion of universal human
emotion, the failure or falsity of empathy stems from the conviction that
humans do not share basic emotions, neither in the culturally diverse con-
temporary world, nor back in time, nor yet in prehistory on the savannah.
They would regard as risible reductionism a statement such as this, from
two psychologists: “Because humans share similar receptor mechanisms and
brains that are organized in roughly the same way, there is bound to be con-
 Contesting Empathy 161

siderable overlap between their experiences” (Gallup and Platek, “Cogni-

tive Empathy” 36). This association of physiology with experience neglects
the highly various cultural matrices in which humans develop social under-
standings. Schemes of universal emotions such as those described by Paul
Ekman in his studies of facial expressions (including sadness, anger, surprise,
fear, disgust, contempt, and enjoyment) run into semantic difficulties at the
outset because even those who believe in their existence disagree about
how many basic emotions exist and what to name them. However, contem-
porary psychologists consider the universal basis for emotional expression
a cross-culture feature of psychological functioning in people and primates.
Psychologists also recognize that cultures alter the display rules that gov-
ern emotional expressions, but they insist on the underlying basis for emo-
tions. As putative human universals, however, a psychobiological view of
the emotions also comes under attack as essentialism.19
Critiques of universality (or human universals) come in a variety of
forms, shaped by the disciplines from which they emerge: history, anthro-
pology, some feminist criticism, and most postcolonial theory. An excerpt
from a handbook from the most recent of those fields, postcolonial studies,
suggests the gist of the objection to human universals. Bill Ashcroft, Gareth
Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin define “universalism/universality” as:

The assumption that there are irreducible features of human life and
experience that exist beyond the constitutive effects of local cultural
conditions. Universalism offers a hegemonic view of existence by
which the experiences, values and expectations of a dominant cul-
ture are held to be true for all humanity. For this reason, it is a crucial
feature of imperial hegemony, because its assumption (or assertion)
of a common humanity—its failure to acknowledge or value cultural
difference—underlies the promulgation of imperial discourse for the
“advancement” or “improvement” of the colonized, goals that thus
mask the extensive and multifaceted exploitation of the colony. (Key
Concepts 235, emphasis in original)

Deigning not to define human rights or capabilities (two empowering dis-

courses that retain a commitment to some human universals20) allows the
postcolonial theorists quoted here to eschew any generalizations about val-
ues, experiences, and expectations that might be shared by most human
beings. Such generalizations, in the view of many postcolonial theorists, only
serve the interests of those in power, recently the architects of the British and
American empires. Unwitting participants in the exploitation of the colo-
nized thus include those who efface their particular emotional experiences
under the presumptuous belief in a common psychobiological inheritance.
Literary expressions of shared humanity are not exempt from this criti-
cism, for, as Ashcroft, Griffiths, and Tiffin remark in another definition,
162 Empathy and the Novel

“Euro-centrism is masked in literary study by such concepts as literary uni-

versality” (Key Concepts 92). Not the only, but an influential source, for this
idea can be found in the writings of the Nigerian novelist Chinua Achebe,
whose essay “Colonialist Criticism” acerbically remarks,

In the nature of things the work of a western writer is automatically

informed by universality. It is only others who must strain to achieve
it. So and so’s work is universal; he has truly arrived! As though uni-
versality were some distant bend in the road which you may take if
you travel out far enough in the direction of Europe or America, if you
put adequate distance between you and your home. I should like to
see the word universal banned altogether from discussions of African
literature until such a time as people cease to use it as a synonym for
the narrow, self-serving parochialism of Europe, until their horizon
extends to include all the world. (Morning Yet 9)

Under the rule of the prohibitions articulated by postcolonial theory and

its antecedent disciplines, then, empathy violates a sequence of taboos.
First, empathy as understood by psychology depends upon generalizations
about universal human traits (not that psychology describes all individuals
as equally empathic). Second, a significant subvariant of this critique points
out that psychology undertakes far too little cross-cultural comparison and
generalizes too hastily from studies of college-aged Americans to human
beings in general. Third, for those who regard emotion as culturally con-
structed, claims about human empathy (perhaps especially those based on
studies of other primates) offend a fundamental notion of difference. If one
disagrees that a shared neurophysiological makeup among human beings
determines our possible range of feelings (and recognition of them in oth-
ers), then empathy arising from the firing of mirror neurons gives short shrift
to both cognition and culture.21 Fourth, the directional quality of empathy
offends because an empathizer feels with a subject who may or may not be
empowered to speak for herself, to correct misconceptions about her feel-
ings, and to refuse the pitying gaze. Finally, the threat that empathy justifies
and precedes the imposition of “improving” programs that may or may not
benefit the recipient or respond to a real need also makes it suspect.
These complaints about empathy raise several questions, some of which
could be investigated through empirical studies. Does cross-cultural research
reveal empathy to be an esteemed concept in a variety of world cultures?22
Do people in a variety of cultures value empathy with one another (and
do they have a word to label it, or exemplary case to illustrate it)? Do peo-
ple in worldwide cultures empathize with, or express an emotional obliga-
tion toward, individuals that they would construe as outsiders? Do people
generally welcome or disdain the notion of empathy as a source of help-
ing and altruism? Most important for the subject of narrative empathy, do
 Contesting Empathy 163

they connect novel reading (or narrative consumption) with the cultivation
of the role-taking imagination? If so, is this association an artifact of post-
Enlightenment liberal humanism, or is it too subject to vigorous reforming
and hybridization, those celebrated qualities of postcolonial literature? In
many parts of the postcolonial world, novel writing is a twentieth-century
phenomenon. Does adoption of the novel as a form of narrative expression
import recent Western expectations about empathy and character identifi-
cation, or can the postcolonial novel accommodate narrative invocation of
preexistent cultural understandings about empathy?
Examining texts from other cultures for signs of empathy or its close
cognates (sympathy, compassion, fellow-feeling) reassures us that they can-
not simply be newfangled notions that come in on the coattails of the
novel. According to Patrick Colm Hogan, Sanskrit literary theorists (third
century) describe rasa, or aesthetic feelings, as entailing empathic versions
of emotions,23 and Arabic Aristotelian theorists name rahmah, compas-
sion or beneficence, as one of the “primary ethical emotions operating in
literature.”24 Hogan rightly calls for attention to the literary theories and
primary imaginative texts of non-Western traditions, and he finds in a vari-
ety of cultures significant evidence of literary universals, including empa-
thy.25 Contributions to this understanding come from many disciplinary
approaches and interdisciplinary conversations. For instance, Richard J.
Davidson and Anne Harrington gather the conversations of scientists and
Buddhist monks in their collection, Visions of Compassion: Western Scien-
tists and Tibetan Buddhists Examine Human Nature (2002). The Buddhist
moral virtue karuna combines love and compassion in order to resist greed
and hatred. More important, the practice of karuna models the movement
toward sympathy and altruism, in Nancy Eisenberg’s paraphrase, helping
“a person to overcome indifference” and providing “an understanding of
the suffering of others and a willingness to go out of one’s way to help
those in distress” (“Empathy-Related” 133).26 All major world religions, it is
sometimes claimed, have a version of the Golden Rule at the heart of their
ethical codes. The Hebrew Bible enjoins the faithful to love their neigh-
bors as themselves (Leviticus 19:18), and Jesus’s gloss of Leviticus in the
Sermon on the Mount insists that his followers go further, loving even their
enemies (Matthew 5:44). The Golden Rule, to do unto others as you would
have them do to you (Matthew 7:12; Luke 6:31), emphasizes the principle
of reciprocity, as it comes down from the law and the prophets. The exis-
tence of versions of the Golden Rule (in Buddhist, Brahmin, Confucian,
Sikh, and Hindu religious texts, as well as in ancient Greek philosophi-
cal writing, among others) suggests both the advantages of reciprocity and
the relative weakness of compassion, especially when involving individuals
marked as other.27 In other words, the presence of Golden Rule variants
may show a near universal worry that humans tend not to treat others as
they would themselves.
164 Empathy and the Novel

Hogan’s description of categorical empathy suggests that the ethics of

group protection rules empathy through identity. Both identity and empa-
thy are governed by “collective self-definition of an in-group, and opposi-
tion to an out-group” (Mind and Its Stories 141). This limits the extension
of empathy to all human beings on the basis of perceived otherness. For
instance, Paul Gilroy laments the obstacle of racial difference:

Racial difference obstructs empathy and makes ethnocentrism ines-

capable. It becomes impossible even to imagine what it is like to be
somebody else. . . . we are all sealed up inside our frozen cultural hab-
its, and there seems to be no workable precedent for adopting a more
generous and creative view of how human beings might communicate
or act in concert across racial, ethnic, or civilizational divisions. (Post-
colonial Melancholia 63)

The tendency of humans to exhibit ethnocentrism in their empathic

responses has often been noted (sometimes approvingly, as in political phi-
losophy that extrapolates from love of family to love of nation and ruler).28
In some cases, as in Gilroy’s complaint, noting the phenomenon precedes an
ethical charge to go beyond the bounds of similarity. Indeed, good actions
confined to taking care of members of the in-group may be regarded as a
weaker or even deleterious form of prosocial action. Patrick Colm Hogan
believes that only situational empathy, which involves personal memory
and role taking, leads to the ethics of compassion (142). This austere posi-
tion discounts the ethical effects of altruistic action undertaken on behalf
of those sharing our categorical identity. The only community large enough
to foster truly moral virtues in Hogan’s scheme would be the whole world.
One could argue, then, that the many parallels of the Golden Rule exist
in order to compensate for a human tendency to tribalism, which makes
of those outside the group enemies and strangers not obviously deserving
mercy or compassion. A proposal derived from Hogan’s theory, then, sug-
gests that empathy for group members emerging from categorical identity with a
group does not, on its own, lead to an ethics of compassion.
Religious instruction often urges believers to move beyond these limita-
tions. Certainly, a selection of world religious texts urges believers to extend
good treatment to all others, even to enemies and members of stigmatized
groups. For this reason, the parable of the good Samaritan occupies an
important place in a Christian understanding of the obligation to love one’s
neighbor, for it shames those who fail to help the beaten robbery victim as
much as it honors the altruistic Samaritan (Luke 10: 25–37). A man learned
in the law hears the parable from Jesus after seeking clarification—who
is the neighbor that the law requires him to love? Jesus’s reply extends
the definition of neighbor beyond the neighborhood. If Hogan is correct,
the commonness of categorical empathy (and the ubiquitous experience
 Contesting Empathy 165

of feeling more intensely with our family members than with strangers)
lends credence to the charges of failed empathy critics. Indeed, Jesus himself
could be regarded as a failed empathy critic, though he sees a way through
the impasse when he singles out for emulation the unusually “good” Samari-
tan, who acts on his compassionate feeling rather than hurrying by.
Clearly, many cultures value compassion, but their philosophers often
observe the weakness of fellow-feeling in moving people to action on behalf
of others. Religious teaching has sometimes (though by no means always)
addressed this problem by attempting to get people to think of others in
terms of similarities rather than differences, through attribution of universal
traits. Belief in innate qualities, including virtues and vices, often accom-
panies attempts to define the nature of humanity. Though this does not
always result in emphasis on positive qualities such as compassion, it can,
and not only in the West. In the fourth century BCE, the Chinese philoso-
pher Mencius places a concept close to empathy at the heart of his descrip-
tion of humanity. “No man,” Mencius writes, “is devoid of a heart sensitive
to the sufferings of others.” The philosopher illustrates his observation with
an example and an analysis of the authenticity of spontaneous empathetic
responsiveness: “Suppose a man were, all of a sudden, to see a young child
on the verge of falling into a well. He would certainly be moved to compas-
sion, not because he wanted to get in the good graces of the parents, nor
because he wished to win the praise of his fellow villagers or friends, nor
yet because he disliked the cry of the child. From this it can be seen that
whoever is devoid of the heart of compassion is not human” (Mencius 2.6,
82). Further, the “heart of compassion is the germ of benevolence,” or Jen
(sometimes translated as love), one of four fundamental virtues that embed
the potential for good in human beings (83). Indeed, for Mencius, denying
the existence of any one of these virtues in oneself is tantamount to robbing
oneself of one’s humanity.29 The motivation to act upon one’s empathic
responses, in Mencius’s philosophy, then becomes linked to the desire to
remain inside the boundaries of the human group.
Our contemporary celebration of our diversity and our differences may
make the call to recognize our similarities more difficult to heed, though
advocates of virtue ethics and ethics of care hope not.30 We should recall,
however, what the Oliners found when they interviewed holocaust rescuers:
those who had learned to see Jews as human beings like themselves were
more likely to engage in rescuing than those who had been trained to focus
on differences (Altruistic Personality 176). Ihab Hassan, an atypical theo-
rist of postcoloniality and postmodernity, articulates some of the possible
consequences of focusing on otherness to the exclusion of commonalities:
“It can discourage mutual obligation, cripple empathy, defeat transcultural
judgments, leaving only raw power to resolve human conflicts. It can lead
to hostility, exclusiveness, less respect for others than solidarity with our-
selves. . . . Still, the intractable question remains: How and when, pragmati-
166 Empathy and the Novel

cally, do we honor differences, ignore them, negotiate them?” (“Queries” 335,

italics in original). Acknowledging near universals, for Hassan, represents a
more hopeful direction: “many principles serve as working generalizations
or soft universals. I do not mean only biological facts like death, hunger, or
sexual reproduction. I also mean, empirically, some transcultural practices
like languages, rituals, taboos, spirits, social organizations of marriage, hier-
archy, and status. These, we know, vary immensely according to time, place
and tribe. Yet as human practices, they pervade the earth. Can postcolonial
studies qualify, discriminate, contextualize the idea of universals, give it texture
and nuance, instead of rejecting it outright?” (336, italics in original). For Has-
san, the goals of a cultivated role-taking empathy could follow upon rec-
ognition of commonalities to our common good: “is it not possible that by
transcending both ourselves and our cultures we can project ourselves into
other selves and other cultures . . .?” (341).
Azar Nafisi, writing of her years of teaching novels to women students in
Iran, agrees that the activity of entering fictional worlds and experiencing
imaginative transport matters. She regards the practice of what Hogan calls
situational empathy through novel reading as an essential step in charac-
ter formation as well as understanding. Nafisi recalls how she exhorted her
students, “It is only through literature that one can put oneself in someone
else’s shoes and understand the other’s different and contradictory sides and
refrain from becoming too ruthless. Outside the sphere of literature only
one aspect of individuals is revealed. But if you understand their different
dimensions you cannot easily murder them . . .” (Reading Lolita 118). When
an admirable individual such as Nafisi (who persisted in teaching in her
home after the Iranian government made continued work at the university
impossible) testifies to the ethical and political consequences of novel read-
ing, the connection of empathy and the novel becomes harder to question.
However, research on character education shows that reading alone results
neither in reliable extraction of moral themes nor in traceable moral devel-
opment.31 The missing piece in Nafisi’s account is her own role as a teacher
who promoted the reflective connections between fiction and world that so
influenced her students. Nafisi discounts the effect of her own charisma and
gives all the credit to the books and her resilient students, which is certainly
her prerogative. Looking in from the outside, we may be inclined to bestow
our admiration on Nafisi as a teacher. Because she makes the cultivation of
empathy through literature a central tenet of her teaching, Nafisi makes it
more likely that her students will search for connections between litera-
ture and life. She writes, “A novel . . . is the sensual experience of another
world. If you don’t enter that world, hold your breath with the characters
and become involved in their destiny, you won’t be able to empathize, and
empathy is at the heart of the novel” (111). Her students could not fail to
learn this credo.
 Contesting Empathy 167

Since she writes about a context in which the act of novel reading stood
in opposition to a regime that deprived citizens of basic freedoms, Nafi-
si’s case for empathy through reading may seem more compelling than the
common American and English versions that I have subjected to scrutiny
in this study. This testimony from outside the Anglo-American academy
(though Nafisi is now a professor at Johns Hopkins) suggests that we should
not be quick to discount the symbolic importance of novel reading as a
sign of one’s empathy and one’s commitments to humane principles. When
announcing oneself as a reader of Nabokov and Fitzgerald runs the risk of
censure by agents of a totalitarian state, then siding with imaginative trans-
port looks more like courage than escapism. Nafisi’s testimony also reminds
us that before we discount the universal importance of empathy simply
because it bears the label of a “universal,” that we should attempt to put
ourselves in the shoes of those who see value in the emotional transactions
across time and culture that may be assisted by novel reading.
Nonetheless, the validity of claims about the relationship of empathy to
altruism or good world citizenship should still be tested. These pervasive
beliefs about the efficacy of fiction, advanced in many cases by novelists
themselves, should be investigated in multiple historical contexts, with sen-
sitivity to cultural differences. Striking similarities should also be collected
and questioned. Nafisi’s warning does not differ substantially from the Eng-
lish critic John Carey’s comment, “The imaginative power reading uniquely
demands is clearly linked, psychologically, with a capacity for individual
judgement and with the ability to empathize with other people. Without
reading, these faculties may atrophy” (Pure Pleasure xi). Nafisi and Carey
stand in here for the thousands of similar utterances of teachers, librarians,
and book-lovers all around the world who fear the consequences of an end
to novel reading. This position deserves the respect of critical scrutiny.
The atrophy of faculties of judgment and empathy would certainly
impoverish humans. The replacement of the novel with other forms of nar-
rative may already be underway, and I am sure I am not alone in feeling that
its total abandonment would be a loss. However, I strongly resist the notion
that the decline of a novel-reading population among global citizens would
inevitably result in stultified imaginations and civic lives ruled by antipathy
or apathy. I also doubt that novels alone can cure what ails us: can novel
reading really restore to vitality nearly extinguished civic virtues in a culture
like my own, in which torture and routine violations of international law
and human rights are carried out daily on our behalf? Can novel reading
avert the course of genocide or rouse a torpid public to activism? Of course,
no one goes so far. More modest expressions of hope invest fiction with the
power to reverse the course of apathy and indifference to others. The evi-
dence for such effects, I have argued, is not robust, and we will be bitterly
disappointed if we expect novel reading to accomplish the work of forming
168 Empathy and the Novel

world citizens for us. This is our responsibility as parents, teachers, writers,
and, indeed, as novel readers. We should not fob it off on fiction and risk
spoiling a great source of aesthetic pleasure, refreshing escape, and edifica-
tion with a task it cannot accomplish.
In my judgment, readers themselves, especially those who discuss books
and bring others into conversation about the implications of fiction, pos-
sess the power that they so often attribute to novels. We ought to take care
not to confound the effect of teaching with the effects of reading, when
it has been demonstrated that even a simple perspective-taking game can
inspire altruism where reading alone does not. Readers, which is to say liv-
ing people, bring empathy to the novel, and they alone have the capac-
ity to convert their emotional fusion with the denizens of make-believe
worlds into actions on behalf of real others. That they rarely decide to do so
should not be taken as a sign of fiction’s failings. I have argued throughout
this study that the perception of fictionality releases novel-readers from
the normal state of alert suspicion of others’ motives that often acts as a
barrier to empathy. This means that the contract of fictionality offers a no-
strings-attached opportunity for emotional transactions of great intensity.
A novel-reader may enjoy empathy freely without paying society back in
altruism. Indeed, the appetite for such experiences of imaginative transport
significantly diminishes when they become vehicles for arriving at improv-
ing ends. New ways of analyzing the lives of readers, especially longitudinal
studies that might catch delayed or cumulative effects of novel reading,
ought to be devised.
Further, the fiction that novel-readers actually choose and recommend to
one another ought to command our attention, whether or not it passes criti-
cal tests of significance or literariness. If narrative empathy can be shown
to spill over into prosocial action, then great care ought to be exerted to
identify the full range of novels that make changes in the world. Even there
we should proceed cautiously. A society that insists on receiving immediate
ethical and political yields from the recreational reading of its citizens puts
too great a burden on both empathy and the novel.
 APPENDIX

A COLLECTION OF HYPOTHESES
ABOUT NARRATIVE EMPATHY

While several of the hypotheses confute one another (as for instance in
the directionality of empathy and character identification), I include both
formulations to indicate possible directions for research. In its specific-
ity, this collection of possibilities marks a significant advance over earlier
broad assertions about narrative empathy that take the form of un-testable
generalizations.

Proposals about Narrative Empathy

• Empathy for fictional characters may require only minimal ele-

ments of identity, situation, and feeling, not necessarily complex or
realistic characterization;
• Character identification often invites empathy, even when the char-
acter and reader differ from each other in all sorts of practical and
obvious ways;
• Spontaneous empathy for a fictional character’s feelings opens the
way for character identification;
• Empathetic responses to fictional characters and situations occur
more readily for negative feeling states, whether or not a match in
details of experience exists;
• Empathy with characters doesn’t always occur as a result of reading
an emotionally evocative fiction;
• The capacity of novels to invoke readers’ empathy may change over
time (and some novels may only activate the empathy of their first,
immediate audience);
• Empathy for a fictional character need not correspond with what
the author appears to set up or invite;
170 Appendix

• Situational empathy, which responds primarily to aspects of plot

and circumstance, involves less self-extension in imaginative role
taking and more recognition of prior (or current) experience;
• Readers’ empathy for situations depicted in fiction may be enhanced
by chance relevance to particular historical, economic, cultural, or
social circumstances;
• Generic differences are likely to play a role in inviting (or retarding)
readers’ empathic responses;
• (Miall and Kuiken) Unusual or striking representations in the liter-
ary text promote foregrounding and open the way to empathetic
reading;
• (Bourg) Empathizers are better readers, because their role-taking
abilities allow them to comprehend causal relations in stories;
• Readers’ perception of a text’s fictionality plays a role in subsequent
empathetic response, by releasing readers from the obligations of
self-protection through skepticism and suspicion;
• (Miall) Readers’ empathy could producer verifiable results in the
beliefs and actions of populations of actual readers;
• (Hoffman) Novel reading may participate in the socialization and
moral internalization required for the transmutation of empathic
guilt into prosocial action;
• Though a key ingredient of successful fictional world-making, authors’
empathy does not always transmit to readers without interference;
• (Taylor) Novelists as a group may be more empathetic than the
general population;
• Fiction writing may cultivate novelists’ role-taking skills and make
them more habitually empathetic;
• Authors’ empathy can be devoted to socially undesirable ends;
• Empathic distress at feeling with a character whose actions are at
odds with a reader’s moral code may be a result of successfully exer-
cised authorial empathy;
• Empathic inaccuracy may contribute to a reader’s strong sense that
the author’s perspective is simply wrong;
• Both authors’ empathy and readers’ empathy have rhetorical uses,
which become more readily to notice when they conflict in instances
of empathic inaccuracy;
• Concord in authors’ empathy and readers’ empathy could be a moti-
vating force to move beyond literary response to prosocial action;
• Bounded strategic empathy operates with an in-group, stemming
from experiences of mutuality, and leading to feeling with familiar
others;
• Ambassadorial strategic empathy addresses chosen others with the
aim of cultivating their empathy for the in-group, often to a specif-
ic end;
 Appendix 171

• Broadcast strategic empathy calls upon every reader to feel with

members of a group, by emphasizing common vulnerabilities and
hopes (universalizing);
• (Hogan) Empathy for group members emerging from categorical
identity with a group does not, on its own, lead to an ethics of com-
passion.
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 NOTES

Preface

1. To those who advance the empathy-altruism hypothesis, such as developmen-

tal psychologist Nancy Eisenberg, empathy means an “affective response that stems
from the apprehension or comprehension of another’s emotional state or condition,
and which is identical or very similar to what the other person is feeling or would be
expected to feel.” Prosocial action is voluntary behavior intended to benefit another.
A specialized form of prosocial behavior is altruism, “acts motivated by concern for
others or by internalized values, goals, and self-rewards rather than by the expecta-
tion of concrete or social rewards or the avoidance of punishment” (Eisenberg, Fabes,
and Spinrad, “Prosocial Development” [2006]) 647. Full discussions of empathy and
related emotions (sympathy, personal distress), follow in chapter 1.
2. See C. Daniel Batson et al., “Benefits and Liabilities of Empathy-Induced Altru-
ism” (2004), 360–70 for a discussion of the recent research on each of these results
of empathy. For a warm, agent-based virtue ethics view of empathy and sympathy,
see Michael Slote, Morals from Motives (2001), 47, 109–10.
3. See Christian Keysers et al., “Demystifying Social Cognition” (2004), 501
and Vittorio Gallese et al., “A Unifying View of the Basis of Social Cognition”
(2004), 396.
4. For an overview of this research, see Vittorio Gallese, “‘Being Like Me’: Self-
Other Identity, Mirror Neurons, and Empathy” (2005), 101–18.
5. See Marco Tettamanti, “Listening to Action-Related Sentences” (2005), 273.
Though most neuroscientists working on mirror neurons agree that the effects are
strongest in real-life, face-to-face interactions, the “shared manifold for intersub-
jectivity” still operates when subjects see videos, experience virtual reality through
computer interfaces, and simply hear narration about others (Blakeslee, “Cells That
Read Minds” (2006), F1, F4).
6. Christian Keysers, cited in Blakeslee, “Cells That Read Minds” F1, F4.
7. See for instance Daniel G. Linz et al., “Effects of Long-Term Exposure to Vio-
lent and Sexually Degrading Depictions of Women” (1988) and Brad J. Bushman
and L. Rowell Huesmann, “Effects of Televised Violence on Aggression” (2001).
8. Some studies suggest that people with very empathetic dispositions respond
more positively to members of out-groups than less empathetic people do, but for
most people, perceived similarity encourages empathy. A classic study affirming sim-
174 Notes to Pages x–xiii

ilarity’s relationship to higher empathy scores is Dennis Krebs, “Empathy and Altru-
ism” (1975). On out-groups, see E. P. Sheehan et al., “Reactions to AIDS and Other
Illnesses: Reported Interactions in the Workplace” (1989). On similarity, see the lit-
erature review in Mark H. Davis, Empathy: A Social Psychological Approach (1994),
15, 96–99, 105–6, 109, 116–18.
9. I treat Hume and Smith in detail in chapter 2. On evolutionary bases for empa-
thy for those who are like us, see D. J. Kruger, “Evolution and Altruism: Combining
Psychological Mediators with Naturally Selected Tendencies,” Evolution and Human
Behavior 24 (2003) and Martin Hoffman, Empathy and Moral Development: Implica-
tions for Caring and Justice (2000), 4, 13, 206.
10. See the account of empathy’s potential to replace egocentrism with ethno-
centrism in Nancy Sherman, “Empathy and Imagination” (1998).
11. For this catalog of helps and impediments to empathetic reading of first-per-
son fiction, I draw upon the in-class essays of the students in English 232, The Novel,
composed on 20 February 2006, answering this question: “How does your recent
reading experience in this course square with the notion that first-person narration
is especially productive of empathetic reading? What differences in technique in the
variety of first-person narrative situations might alter readers’ responses?”
12. For starting points in philosophy, see Susan L. Feagin’s Reading with Feeling:
The Aesthetics of Appreciation (1996) and E. M. Dadlez’s, What’s Hecuba to Him?
Fictional Events and Actual Emotions (1997). Psychological critic Norman Holland
deserves attention, not only to his original The Dynamics of Literary Response (1968),
but also to his recent “Where Is a Text? A Neurological View” (2002). Two literary
cognitivists who attend (atypically) to the role of emotion in literary response are
David S. Miall, “Anticipation and Feeling in Literary Response: A Neuropsychologi-
cal Perspective,” Poetics 23 (1995), 275–98 and Keith Oatley, “A Taxonomy of the
Emotions of Literary Response and a Theory of Identification in Fictional Narrative”
(1994). Robyn Warhol’s Having a Good Cry: Effeminate Feelings and Pop-Culture
Forms (2003) models the discussion of embodied emotional responses (other than
the individual critic’s feelings) for narrative theory and literary criticism. Profes-
sional readers will have already discerned the profound influence of Wayne Booth on
this project. His The Company We Keep: An Ethics of Fiction (1988) shows the way.
13. For reception theory and reader-response criticism, see (respectively) Wolf-
gang Iser, The Act of Reading (1978) and Jane Tompkins’s collection, Reader-Response
Criticism: From Formalism to Post-Structuralism (1980).
14. For some of the finest in this burgeoning area, see, variously, Charles Altieri,
The Particulars of Rapture: An Aesthetics of the Affects (2003); Isobel Armstrong, The
Radical Aesthetic (2000); Brian Massumi, Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect,
Sensation (2002); Sianne Ngai, Ugly Feelings (2005); and Rei Terada, Feeling in The-
ory: Emotion after “The Death of the Subject” (2001).
15. See Antonio R. Damasio, Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human
Brain (1994) and Joseph LeDoux, The Emotional Brain: The Mysterious Underpin-
nings of Emotional Life (1996).
16. See Tammy Bourg, “The Role of Emotion, Empathy, and Text Structure in
Children’s and Adults’ Narrative Text Comprehension” (1996).
17. See David S. Miall and Don Kuiken, “What Is Literariness?” (1999) and Miall,
“Beyond the Schema Given” (1989).
 Notes to Pages xiii–xx 175

18. See Marjorie Taylor et al., “The Illusion of Independent Agency: Do Adult
Fiction Writers Experience Their Characters as Having Minds of Their Own?”
(2002/2003).
19. For the best study of the experience of immersion reading, see Victor Nell,
Lost in a Book: The Psychology of Reading for Pleasure (1988).
20. See both Azar Nafisi’s moving memoir, Reading Lolita in Tehran (2003) and
Elizabeth Long’s superb sociological study, Book Clubs: Women and the Uses of Read-
ing in Everyday Life (2003).
21. David Miall reports that a 1992 pilot survey of adult readers in Canada yields
an 8 percent rate of “regular readers of literary texts,” but the definition of a “literary
text” in the study he cites most likely rules out popular fiction readers. See “Empow-
ering the Reader: Literary Response and Classroom Learning” (1996), 464. On the
Canadian situation, see ABC Canada, http://www.abc-canada.org/literacy_facts/
(accessed 19 November 2004). These recent North American findings are matched
by survey data for the United Kingdom. See the U.K. National Literacy Trust, http://
www.literacytrust.org.uk (accessed 7 September 2004). The sources gathered at this
site suggest that 40 percent of British adults do not read at all, with women reading
more than men. See also Michail Skaliotis’s “Key Figures on Cultural Participation
in the European Union” (October 2002), available online at www.readingeurope.
org/observatory.nsf/ (accessed 7 September 2004).
22. See Robert D. Putnam, Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of Ameri-
can Community (2000). On rates of novel reading contrasted with other genres, see
Reading at Risk (2004), 16–17.
23. Martha C. Nussbaum, Cultivating Humanity: A Classical Defense of Reform in
Liberal Education (1997), 63. See also Love’s Knowledge: Essays on Philosophy and
Literature (1990) and Poetic Justice: The Literary Imagination and Public Life (1995).
24. See John Sanford, “Human Rights: A Novel Idea?” http://news-service
.stanford.edu/news/2002/april17/hunt-417.html (accessed 10 September 2004),
concerning Lynn Hunt’s presidential lecture, “The Novel and the Origins of Human
Rights: The Intersection of History, Psychology and Literature” (8 April 2004). See
also Lynn Hunt, “The Paradoxical Origins of Human Rights” (2000).
25. Canonically, see Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the
Origin and Spread of Nationalism (1983), 25–36.
26. Physiological measures have the advantage of being unaffected by the sub-
jects’ desire to present themselves favorably, as may occur in surveys, interviews, or
self-reports. See Nancy Eisenberg et al., “Physiological Indices of Empathy” (1987).
On deceleration of heart rate in response to negative experiences of others, see K. D.
Craig, “Physiological Arousal as a Function of Imagined, Vicarious, and Direct Stress
Experiences” (1968). On the measurement of palmar skin conductance and heart
rate in response to images of people in pain, see R. S. Lazarus et al., “A Labora-
tory Study of Psychological Stress Produced by a Motion Picture Film” (1962). This
study relies upon people’s tendency to identify with “characters” in a nonfiction film
(3). For a skin conductance study suggesting that empathetic arousal occurs when
subjects believe a person is receiving a painful shock, see J. H. Geer and L. Jarmecky,
“The Effect of Being Responsible for Reducing Another’s Pain on Subject’s Response
and Arousal” (1973). On facial or gestural responses as indications of empathy, see
the evaluation of Robert F. Marcus, “Somatic Indices of Empathy” (1987). See also
176 Notes to Pages xxi–4

Martin Hoffman, “The Measurement of Empathy” (1982). On EMG and other

physiological measurements of emotional responses, see J. T. Cacioppo and R. E.
Petty, Social Psychophysiology (1983). On the fMRI imaging of empathy, see Tania
Singer et al., “Empathy for Pain Involves the Affective but Not Sensory Components
of Pain” (2004).
27. On the impact of photography on its viewers, see Susan Sontag’s Regarding
the Pain of Others (2003).
28. For the full grim tale, see Philip Gourevitch, We Wish to Inform You That
Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our Families: Stories from Rwanda (1998).
29. Arguably, a book (though not a novel) has altered American public policy for
responding to genocide. Samantha Powers’s chilling “A Problem from Hell”: America
and the Age of Genocide (2002) has made American leaders more willing at least to
condemn perpetrators of genocide.
30. This book does not attempt to relate the arguments about the paradox
of fiction (its elicitation of emotional responses to nonexistent beings) that pre-
occupy contemporary aesthetics. For a superb resource on this problem, see the
essays collected in Mette Hjort and Sue Laver, Emotion and the Arts (1997). For the
record, I take what Jerrold Levinson calls an antijudgmentalist stance (“Emotion in
Response” (1997) 24), since I do not see that emotional responses to fiction logically
require belief in those objects’ existence. Indeed, I argue that paratexts announcing
a text as fictional enhance the work’s opportunity to evoke emotion, by relieving
readers of any sense of real-world obligation to act, while they engage in fictional
world-making. In this I am in solid agreement with Keith Oatley and Mitra Ghola-
main, in “Emotions and Identification” (1997), on the constructed dream of fiction
(264–65). As for the emotions themselves, I regard them as essentially the same as
“real” emotions—sometimes less or more intense. Fiction enables us to experience
our full emotional registers in risk-free, no-obligations mental simulations. The neu-
roscientists are getting quite close to an explanation of the neural shared manifold
for intersubjectivity that makes this use of our brains as theaters for fictive projec-
tions possible. For a start on contemporary aesthetics featuring empathy, see Ellen
Dissanayake, Homo Aestheticus: Where Art Comes From and Why (1992).

Chapter 1

1. See Davis, Empathy: A Social Psychological Approach (1994), 62–81 for a survey
of this research.
2. See Carolyn Zahn-Waxler et al., “The Development of Empathy in Twins”
(1992).
3. See R. Koestenbaum et al., “Individual Differences in Empathy among Pre-
schoolers: Relation to Attachment History” (1989).
4. See Mark H. Davis et al., “The Heritability of Characteristics Associated with
Dispositional Empathy” (1994).
5. See my treatment of the contextual and paratextual factors that govern read-
ers’ assumptions about the shifting boundary between fiction and nonfiction in
Keen, Narrative Form (2003), 128–39. The literary historical evidence suggests that
cultural assumptions about fictionality and factuality change over time. Thus, the
 Notes to Pages 4–5 177

salient point is readers’ belief that a work is fictional, activated as the work of cocre-
ation begins. My contention here is congruent with the claims of Richard J. Gerrig
and David N. Rapp, who argue that “readers must construct disbelief: literature will
have an impact unless readers expend specific effort to forestall that consequence.”
See “Psychological Processes Underlying Literary Impact” (2004), 280. Gerrig and
Rapp observe that “the probability that readers will construct disbelief is affected
by the extent to which they are transported to narrative worlds. . . . the more viv-
idly a work of literature carries its readers off, the more they will be affected by the
journey” (280).
6. Daniel Batson and his group have shown that exposure to the testimony of a
single member of a stigmatized group can improve attitudes toward those groups
through induced empathy. See C. Daniel Batson et al., “Empathy and Attitudes:
Can Feeling for a Member of a Stigmatized Group Improve Feelings Toward the
Group?” (1997). Batson emphasizes the ease with which novels and films induce
empathy and theorizes that the low-cost, low-risk situation may contribute to the
effect: “Rather than the disruption of normal patterns of behavior required to create
direct, equal-status, cooperative personal contact, we can be led to feel empathy for
a stigmatized group member as we sit comfortably in our living room” (106).
7. Social psychologist Mark H. Davis’s Empathy (1994) provides an excellent
and accessible introduction to the subject. For a philosophical account of the role of
empathy in the art of understanding (and the arts generally), see Karl F. Morrison,
“I Am You”: The Hermeneutics of Empathy in Western Literature, Theology, and Art
(1988).
8. See Vittorio Gallese et al., “The Mirror Matching System: A Shared Manifold
for Intersubjectivity” (2002), 35–36.
9. In chapter 2, I trace the fascinating literary careers of the related concepts,
observing the convention of using the terminology actually employed by writers in
the past.
10. See C. Daniel Batson, The Altruism Question: Toward a Social-Psychological
Answer (1991), 56–57 and “Altruism and Prosocial Behavior” (1998), 282–316; see
also Nancy Eisenberg, “Emotion, Regulation, and Moral Development” (2000), 671–
72 and “The Development of Empathy-Related Responding” (2005), 73–117.
11. Students who read under compulsion in order to gain credit for a course may
indeed experience personal distress and still soldier on in their reading. I regard this
situation (and its results) as an extension of teaching, not to be attributed directly
to the novel. Personal distress might contribute to a description of the obstacles to
immersion (including disposition or emotional temperament) for reluctant readers.
12. For instance, the congruent theories of Batson and Eisenberg feature differ-
ent uses of the terms sympathy and empathy and distinct positions on whether pure
empathy precedes other-related sympathy or is defined by its orientation toward the
other. See Eisenberg, “Emotion, Regulation, and Moral Development,” 671–72. For
an excellent recent summary of the different schools of thought about empathy, see
Stephanie D. Preston and Frans B. M. de Waal, “Empathy: Its Ultimate and Proxi-
mate Bases” (2002).
13. Charles Darwin’s treatment of sympathy clearly includes empathy, though
he does not use the term. See The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals
(1872). Paul Ekman, the leading authority on facial expressions as indicators of
178 Notes to Page 5

universal human emotions, does not treat empathy as a core emotion, but as one
of the nine starting points for emotional reactions (when we feel what others feel).
See Ekman, Emotions Revealed: Recognizing Faces and Feelings to Improve Commu-
nication and Emotional Life (2003), 34, 37. Neuroscientist Jaak Panksepp argues
that emotional systems in the brain involve central affective programs composed of
neural anatomy, physiology, and chemicals. Panksepp considers empathy one of the
higher sentiments (mixing lower reflexive affects and higher cognitive processes),
emerging out of the recent evolutionary expansion of the forebrain. See “Emo-
tions as Natural Kinds in the Brain,” (2000), 142–43. For philosopher Martha C.
Nussbaum, empathy comes into play as a part of compassion, which she treats as a
human emotion. See Nussbaum, Upheaveals of Thought: The Intelligence of Emotions
(2001), 327–35. For John Deigh and those working at the intersection of ethics and
cognitive science, empathy is one of the moral emotions. See Deigh, “Empathy and
Universalizability” (1995), 743–63. Social scientist Jon Elster, by way of contrast,
does not treat empathy in his Alchemies of the Mind: Rationality and the Emotions
(1999). This array of views reflects the current state of empathy studies: experts
have not agreed whether it is primarily emotional, cognitive, or both: their judg-
ments usually reflect their position on the rationality of the emotions or the emo-
tionality of cognition.
14. See, for instance, the working definitions of different vicariously induced
emotional states in Nancy Eisenberg and Richard A. Fabes, “Children’s Disclosure of
Vicariously Induced Emotions” (1995), 111. I follow Nancy Eisenberg in differenti-
ating empathy, aversive personal distress, and sympathy. Empathic response includes
the possibility of personal distress, but personal distress (unlike empathy) is less
likely to lead to sympathy, if it proceeds beyond evanescent shared feeling.
15. Positive forms of empathy are drastically underemphasized in the literature.
As recently as 2002, psychologists George Ainslie and John Monterosso call for
more attention to the full range of emotions involved in empathy. See “Hyperbolic
Discounting Lets Empathy Be a Motivated Process” (2002).
16. Jouissance is a nearly orgasmic pleasure to be experienced through reading,
combining bodily pleasure with intellectual joy in finding meaning. See Roland
Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text (1973, trans. 1975), in which Barthes distinguishes
the relatively easy pleasure of the readerly text from the bliss that comes when the
demanding writerly text helps readers break out of their subject positions. See also
Julia Kristeva, Revolution in Poetic Language (1974, trans. 1984).
17. See, for instance, the treatment of happiness, joy, and love in Elaine Hat-
field, John T. Cacioppo, and Richard L. Rapson, Emotional Contagion (1994). The-
odor Lipps, an important early theorist of empathy, proposed motor mimicry as an
automatic response to another’s expression of emotion. See Lipps, “Das Wissen von
Fremden Ichen” (1906).
18. See Carolyn Zahn-Waxler et al., “Empathy and Prosocial Patterns in Young
MZ and DZ Twins: Development and Genetic and Environmental Influences”
(2001). Zahn-Waxler reports genetic influences on prosocial acts and empathic con-
cern, found across the time points studied.
19. Cultural differences implicate differences in the nature of emotional expe-
rience. Our understanding of what it means to be a person in our cultural con-
text affects the way we experience, for instance, daily emotions of pleasantness
 Notes to Pages 5–7 179

and unpleasantness, or whether we feel entitled as individuals to express a par-

ticular emotion. See Stephanie A. Shields, Speaking from the Heart: Gender and
the Social Meaning of Emotion (2002) and Betja Mesquita and Mayumi Karasawa’s
cross-cultural comparison in “Different Emotional Lives” (2004). Some psycholo-
gists acknowledge cultural differences while emphasizing commonalities. See, for
instance, Dylan Evans, Emotions: A Very Short Introduction (2001), 8.
20. Oral storytelling is not isolated to preliterate cultures. Children in literate
cultures also absorb cultural values and narrative styles through collaborative story-
telling. See the comments on rapport and empathy in Masahiko Minami and Alyssa
McCabe, “Rice Balls and Bear Hunts: Japanese and North American Family Narra-
tive Patterns” (1995), 443.
21. Other primates demonstrate empathy, with the apes in particular exhibiting
consoling behavior and role-taking imagining. See Preston and de Waal, “Empathy:
Its Ultimate and Proximate Bases,” 7, 12–13. Other group-living mammals such
as wolves and dolphins may also possess a version of empathy. See Marc Bekoff,
“Empathy: Common Sense, Science Sense, Wolves, and Well-being” (2002).
22. Simon Baron-Cohen, The Essential Difference: The Truth about the Male and
Female Brains (2003). Autism afflicts one in every 250 American children, most of
them boys.
23. Dennis Krebs’s work on empathy and altruism showed that high empathiz-
ers (who believed themselves to be similar to the performer in his experiment)
did indeed behave most altruistically in a reward task. See “Empathy and Altruism”
(1975), 1134–46.
24. For a recent survey of the evidence of modest gender differences in kindness,
considerateness, and helping, see Nancy Eisenberg, Richard A. Fabes, and Tracy L.
Spinrad “Prosocial Development” (2006), 646–718.
25. Among others, Rousseau, Hegel, Freud, Nancy Chodorow, and Carol Gilligan
all argue in different ways that females possess innately caring natures. For a tren-
chant critique of the tendency to study male and female emotions by enumerating
differences and similarities, see Shields, Speaking from the Heart (2002).
26. See Barbara A. Gault and John Sabini, “The Roles of Empathy, Anger, and
Gender in Predicting Attitudes toward Punitive, Reparative, and Preventative Public
Policies” (2000).
27. See for instance, Larry Cahill et al., “Sex-Related Hemispheric Lateralization
of Amygdala Function in Emotionally Influenced Memory: An fMRI Investigation”
(2004).
28. Developmental psychologist Carolyn Zahn-Waxler argues that “biological
factors as well as socialization experiences undoubtedly contribute to heightened
empathy in females seen even in the first years of life,” but she also notes that “rela-
tively few individuals are constitutionally incapable of caring in the early years of life
and malleability is possible.” See Zahn-Waxler, “Caregiving, Emotion, and Concern
for Others” (2002), 48–49.
29. “When demand characteristics were high and participants had conscious con-
trol of their responses, gender differences were large; when demand characteristics
were more subtle, gender differences were smaller. Finally, when demand character-
istics were subtle and subjects were unlikely to exercise conscious control over their
responding (e.g., physiological and somatic indices), no gender differences were
180 Notes to Pages 7–11

obtained.” Randy Lennon and Nancy Eisenberg, “Gender/Age Differences in Empa-

thy/Sympathy” (1987), 197, 203.
30. See Tiffany Graham and William Ickes, “When Women’s Intuition Isn’t
Greater Than Men’s” (1997).
31. See Ellen J. Ingmansan, “Empathy in a Bonobo” (2002). See also Stephanie
D. Preston and Frans B. M. de Waal, “The Communication of Emotions and the Pos-
sibility of Empathy in Animals” (2002).
32. The sources of psychopaths’ impaired empathy are still under investigation.
Experiments conducted by R. J. R. Blair and his collaborators show that children
with psychopathic tendencies are less sensitive to both fearful and sad facial expres-
sions on others’ faces, which may contribute to impaired empathy. Adult psycho-
paths and children with psychopathic tendencies show reduced responses to distress
cues, as measured by skin conductance. See R. J. R. Blair et al., “A Selective Impair-
ment in the Processing of Sad and Fearful Expressions in Children with Psycho-
pathic Tendencies” (2001); R. J. R. Blair et al., “The Psychopathic Individual: A Lack
of Responsiveness to Distress Cues?” (1997); Blair et al., “Responsiveness to Distress
Cues in the Child with Psychopathic Tendencies” (1999).
33. See Diane Duane, A Wizard Alone (2002) and Mark Haddon, The Curious
Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time (2003).
34. See for example R. L. Katz, Empathy: Its Nature and Uses (1963), 57–58.
35. See Lorna Wing, “Asperger’s Syndrome: A Clinical Account” (1981). Asperg-
er’s syndrome is sometimes labeled high functioning autism. See Lisa Capps et al.,
“Understanding of Simple and Complex Emotions in Non-retarded Children with
Autism” (1992). See also Tony Attwood, Asperger’s Syndrome: A Guide for Parents
and Professionals (1998), 11, 15–17 and Oliver Sacks’s portrait of Temple Grandin,
An Anthropologist on Mars (1995), 269.
36. See Brent E. Turvey, “Psychopathy and Sadism” (1999) and Vernon J. Geberth,
“Antisocial Personality Disorder, Sexual Sadism, Malignant Narcissism, and Serial
Murder” (1997).
37. For a full consideration of issues in the study of psychopaths, including their
emotional dispositions, see David J. Cooke et al. Psychopathy: Theory, Research and
Implications for Society (1998). For the philosophical significance of the behavior of
psychopaths, see John Deigh, “Empathy and Universalizability.”
38. For an overview of empathy in a therapeutic context, see Changming Duan
and Clara E. Hill, “The Current State of Empathy Research” (1996). See also Edwin
Kahn and Arnold W. Rachman, “Carl Rogers and Heinz Kohut: A Historical Perspec-
tive” (2000). Rogers’s self-actualizing therapy depends upon empathy as a method
for nonjudgmentally entering the private perceptual world of the other. See Carl
Rogers, “Empathic: An Unappreciated Way of Being” (1975), 2–10. Hans Kohut’s
psychoanalytic emphasis on vicarious introspection also emphasized empathy as a
basic human trait. See his “Introspection, Empathy, and Psychoanalysis” (1959).
39. See Haim Omer, “Narrative Empathy ” (1997).
40. See Rita Charon, “Narrative Medicine: A Model for Empathy, Reflection,
Profession, and Trust” (2001). See also the Web site for the Program in Narrative
Medicine at Columbia University. It aims to “fortify medicine with ways of knowing
about singular persons available through a study of humanities, especially literary
studies and creative writing.” The program articulates several goals, the most impor-
 Notes to Pages 11–13 181

tant of which is developing “the individual patient-doctor relationship, which can

be fortified with accuracy and empathy through narrative methods.” http://www
.narrativemedicine.org/about.html (accessed 5 October 2004).
41. See Scott Sundby, A Life and Death Decision: A Jury Weighs the Death Penalty
(2005).
42. See Stephen R. Covey, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People: Powerful Lessons
in Personal Change (1990), 235–60.
43. While Daniel Batson and his collaborators have shown that empathy induced
for a member of a stigmatized group does improve attitude toward that group (in
“Empathy and Attitudes” [1997]) and that more positive attitudes toward a stig-
matized group positively alter motivations to help that group (by voting to allocate
funds that have already been gathered to the similarly afflicted), they also document
defensive resistance to empathy and the negative effects of believing in a victim’s
responsibility for his condition. See “Empathy, Attitudes, and Action: Can Feeling
for a Member of a Stigmatized Group Motivate One to Help the Group?” (2002).
Other work by Batson and his colleagues in which empathy influences helping and
impedes justice when rival claims for help are made is discussed below.
44. Two views from psychology support the notion that empathy can be taught.
First, a behaviorist view: classical conditioning can inculcate a caring response to
another’s plight, as has been demonstrated with lab animals. See R. M. Church,
“Emotional Reactions of Rats to the Pain of Others” (1959). Second, a developmen-
tal view: repeat occurrences or exposure can build a sense of familiarity that can
overcome the bias against feeling for those who are dissimilar. See Carolyn Zahn-
Waxler et al., “Development of Concern for Others” (1992).
45. I treat this question in chapter 3, “Readers’ Empathy.” See also S. Tötösy de
Zepetnek and I. Sywenky, eds., The Systematic and Empirical Approach to Literature
and Culture as Theory and Application (1997).
46. For an atypical acknowledgment of the impact of fictionality on psychological
study of empathic emotional appraisal, see Becky Lynn Omdahl, Cognitive Appraisal,
Emotion, and Empathy (1995), 170.
47. Evaluation of patients who show changes in behavior as a result of brain
injuries, ailments, or surgery contributes to the understanding of empathy. See, for
instance, Lynn M. Gratton and Paul J. Elsinger, “High Cognition and Social Behavior:
Changes in Cognitive Flexibility and Empathy after Cerebral Lesions” (1989).
48. See note 26 to the preface (175–76) for references to physiological measures
of empathy and emotional responsiveness.
49. The earliest empathy test is R. Dymond’s “A Scale for the Measurement of
Empathy Ability” (1949), 127–33; for another early empathy test, see W. A. Kerr
and B. J. Speroff, The Empathy Test (1951). The Sherman-Stotland scale includes a
factor (VI) measuring “fantasy empathy” for fictional characters in stories, plays, and
films. See Ezra Stotland et al., Empathy, Fantasy and Helping (1978), 135–56. More
recent tests of emotional intelligence include the Balanced Emotional Empathy
Scale (BEES) and Davis’s Interpersonal Reactivity Index (IRI). On BEES, see Albert
Mehrabian, “Relations among Personality Scales of Aggression, Violence, and Empa-
thy: Validational Evidence Bearing on the Risk of Violence Scale” (1997) and Man-
ual for the Balanced Emotional Empathy Scale (BEES) (1996; available from Albert
Mehrabian, 1130 Alta Mesa Road, Monterey, CA, USA 93940). For the IRI, which
182 Notes to Pages 13–15

has subscales in Empathic Concern, Perspective Taking, Fantasy (including narrative

empathy), and Personal Distress, see Interpersonal Reactivity Index, M. H. Davis, “A
Multidimensional Approach to Individual Differences in Empathy” (1980), 85 and
“Measuring Individual Differences in Empathy: Evidence for a Multidimensional
Approach” (1983). See also Davis, Empathy (1994), 55–58. Measuring empathy in
children has contributed to developmental psychology. For scales in addition to those
already cited, see H. J. Eysenck and S. B. G. Eysenck, “Impulsiveness-Venturesome-
ness-Empathy Scale,” Manual of the Eysenck Personality Scales (EPS adult) (1996).
Hall and Rosenthal’s Profile of Nonverbal Sensitivity (PONS) measures emotional
identification that operates without language mediation. See Judith Hall and Robert
Rosenthal et al., “Profile of Nonverbal Sensitivity” (1977) and Hall’s recent reassess-
ment, “The PONS Test and the Psychometric Approach to Measuring Interpersonal
Sensitivity” (2001). Identifying emotions can be a component of perspective tak-
ing. More specialized empathy scales examine empathy toward those suffering from
particular conditions. See, for instance, M. Wagner et al., “The AIDS Empathy Scale:
Construction and Correlates” (2001) and S. Deitz et al., “Measurement of Empathy
Toward Rape Victims and Rapists” (1982).
50. For a recent overview, see Nancy Eisenberg, “Empathy and Sympathy”
(2000).
51. For a salutary caution on the interpretation of these fMRI studies, which
feature such dazzling pictures and often receive quite credulous promotion in the
press, see John T. Cacioppo et al., “Just Because You’re Imaging the Brain Doesn’t
Mean You Can Stop Using Your Head: A Primer and Set of First Principles” (2003).
New methods of brain imaging may alter or shore up the scientific understanding
of empathy. For instance, Diffusion Tensor Imaging (DTI) reveals the directionality
of brain activity by recording the activity in white matter connecting different parts
of the brain.
52. Singer and her colleagues employed two empathy scales, Mehrabian’s Bal-
anced Emotional Empathy Scale and Davis’s Empathic Concern Scale (“Empathy
for Pain,” 1159).
53. The amygdala, anterior temporal cortex, and orbital frontal cortex (as well
as physiological synchrony of the autonomic nervous system) are probably involved
in empathy, as the evidence of emotional impairment in brain-damaged or diseased
patients suggests. See Leslie Brothers, “A Biological Perspective on Empathy” (1989),
Robert Levenson and Anna Ruef, “Physiological Aspects of Emotional Knowledge
and Papport” (1997), and Howard J. Rosen et al., “Emotion Comprehension in the
Temporal Variant of Frontotemporal Dementia,” Brain (2002).
54. See LeDoux, The Emotional Brain (1996), 168–78.
55. This account is consistent with the emotion theory of neuroscientist Edmund
T. Rolls, who hypothesizes that human brain mechanisms provide two routes to
action, one a quick, unconscious prompt for a behavioral response (which we share
with other mammals) and the other a slower, language-mediated, rational planning
faculty. According to Rolls, the two routes can produce conflicting results. See Rolls,
“A Theory of Emotion, Its Functions, and Its Adaptive Value” (2002).
56. Mirror neurons fire not only when carrying out an action but also when
observing another carrying out the same action. They provide a basis for understand-
ing primates’ mind reading, including human empathy. See Vittorio Gallese et al.,
 Notes to Pages 15–22 183

“The Mirror Matching System: A Shared Manifold for Intersubjectivity” (2002) and
M. Iacoboni et al., “Cortical Mechanisms of Human Imitation” (1999).
57. See, for instance, Leda Cosmides and John Tooby, “Cognitive Adaptations for
Social Exchange” (1992).
58. D. J. Kruger, “Evolution and Altruism” (2003), 118–25. Cross-cultural research
suggests that Westerners may differ from members of traditional societies in their
emphasis on personal choice that mitigates the obligation to offer a caring response.
See J. G. Miller and D. M. Bersoff, “Cultural Influences on the Moral Status of Reci-
procity and the Discounting of Endogenous Motivation” (1994).
59. See Eisenberg, Fabes, and Spinrad, “Prosocial Development.” 1.
60. See Martin L. Hoffman’s table “Scheme for the development and transforma-
tion of empathic distress” (1987). See also his compressed version of his theory in
the chapter “Toward a Comprehensive Empathy-Based Theory of Prosocial Moral
Development” (2001), 61–86 and his earlier “Empathy, Its Limitations and Its Role
in a Comprehensive Moral Theory” (1984).
61. See C. Daniel Batson, The Altruism Question (1991) and “Altruism and Pro-
social Behavior” (1998); Eisenberg, Fabes, and Spinrad, “Prosocial Development.”
See also Nancy Eisenberg, “Emotion, Regulation, and Moral Development” (2000),
671–72.
62. For his evolutionary argument, see Martin L. Hoffman, “Is Altruism Part of
Human Nature?” (1981). For a full-scale philosophical treatment of evolutionary
altruism, see Elliot Sober and David Sloan Wilson, Unto Others: The Evolution and
Psychology of Unselfish Behavior (1998). Mark Davis provides a concise summary of
the sociobiological and psychological theories in Empathy (1994), 23–45.
63. By connecting caring and justice, Hoffman argues with John Rawls’s influen-
tial Theory of Justice (1971). As Peter Singer notes, even in Rawls’s more recent The
Law of Peoples (1999), Rawls neglects “obligations towards individuals . . . currently
destitute in other countries” (Singer, One World [2002], 176).
64. See Nancy Eisenberg, “Development of Empathy-Related Responding,”
78–83.
65. Psychologists are not the only ones to offer critiques of empathy. Legal the-
orist Richard Posner considers empathy “amoral.” See “Against Ethical Criticism”
(1997), 19. Richard Delgado believes the cultivation of empathy should be rejected
as poor strategy. See his The Coming Race War? And Other Apocalyptic Tales of Amer-
ica after Affirmative Action and Welfare (1996), 4–36. I discuss these and other criti-
cisms of empathy in chapter 6, “Contesting Empathy.”
66. See J. A. Piliavin et al., Emergency Intervention (1981).
67. See the summary of studies involving questionnaires administered to adults,
in Nancy Eisenberg and Paul Miller, “Empathy, Sympathy, and Altruism” (1997).
68. See C. Daniel Batson, The Altruism Question (1991); C. Daniel Batson et
al., “Empathic Joy and the Empathy-Altruism Hypothesis” (1991); “Empathy and
the Collective Good: Caring for One of the Others in a Social Dilemma” (1995);
“Immorality from Empathy-Induced Altruism: When Compassion and Justice Con-
flict” (1995); and “Influence of Self-Reported Distress and Empathy on Egoistic
Versus Altruistic Motivation to Help” (1983). For a response to Batson’s work, see
Steven L. Neuberg et al., “Does Empathy Lead to Anything More Than Superficial
Helping? Comment on Batson et al. (1997)” (1997).
184 Notes to Pages 23–28

69. See Samuel P. and Pearl M. Oliner, The Altruistic Personality: Rescuers of Jews
in Nazi Europe (1988) and their edited collection, Embracing the Other: Philosophi-
cal, Psychological, and Historical Perspectives on Altruism (1992).
70. For the full questionnaire, see Appendix C of The Altruistic Personality (1988),
331–56.
71. See The Altruistic Personality (1988), 189–99, for accounts of several different
empathic rescuers. For a positive view of the correlation of empathy and altruism,
see John F. Dovidio et al., “Specificity of Empathy-Induced Helping: Evidence for
Altruistic Motivation” (1990).
72. See Elizabeth Bowen, The Collected Stories of Elizabeth Bowen (1981),
671–85.
73. See Geoffrey H. Hartman, “Is an Aesthetic Ethos Possible? Night Thoughts
after Auschwitz” (1994), 135–55, 137–38.
74. See Tom W. Smith, “Altruism in Contemporary America: A Report from the
National Altruism Study” (2003).
75. See the variety of views in Altruism, edited by Ellen Frankel Paul, Fred D.
Miller, and Jeffrey Paul (1993).
76. For instance, in Unto Others (1998), Sober and Wilson argue that social psy-
chology has not explained away the role of egoism (seeking internal rewards) in
altruism. They advance an evolutionary argument as an alternative.
77. See Patricia Greenspan, Emotions and Reasons: An Inquiry into Emotional Jus-
tification (1988).
78. For a historical survey, see Nico H. Frijda, “The Psychologists’ Point of View”
(2000), 70–71. Philosopher Patricia Greenspan offers a nuanced critique of psycho-
logical arguments in “Emotions, Rationality and Mind/Body” (2003).
79. See, for instance, Antonio Damasio et al., “Somatic Markers and the Guidance
of Behavior: Theory and Preliminary Testing” (1991). Damasio’s works for general
readers have resulted in wide dissemination of his theories. See Descartes’ Error:
Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain (1994), The Feeling of What Happens: Body
and Emotion in the Making of Consciousness (1999), and Looking for Spinoza: Joy, Sor-
row and the Feeling Brain (2003).
80. See Ronald deSousa, The Rationality of the Emotions (1987) and LeDoux, The
Emotional Brain.
81. See Leda Cosmides and John Tooby, “Evolutionary Psychology and the Emo-
tions” (2000).
82. My informant is neuroscientist Tyler S. Lorig.
83. See, for instance, Stephen K. Reed’s introductory college text, Cognition: The-
ory and Applications, 6th ed. (2004). Emotional states receive fleeting mention on
just three pages of this text.
84. See, for instance, Joseph P. Forgas, ed., Handbook of Affect and Social Cogni-
tion (2001).
85. Hoffman is less concerned with the matching of feelings as an end result of
empathy, and more interested in the empathic process that may lead a person to
feel, for instance, empathic anger on behalf of someone else’s sadness. See Empathy
and Moral Development (2000), 30.
86. See Janet Strayer and Marianne Schroeder, “Children’s Helping Strategies:
Influences of Emotion, Empathy, and Age” (1989), 86.
 Notes to Pages 28–35 185

87. Novelist and critic Vernon Lee’s (Violet Paget) 1895 lecture and 1897 essay
“Beauty and Ugliness” contain early mentions of Einfühlung, integrated as empathy
into her book-length aesthetic theory, The Beautiful (1913). The core elements of
the modern concept of empathy can legitimately be traced to Lee, who was also
a novelist. As with several key dates in psychology, rival claimants to earliest usage
appear. Late nineteenth-century German aesthetics makes a claim. Theodor Lipps’s
Einfühlung (1897, in book form Äesthetik [1903]), was translated in 1909 by experi-
mental psychologist E. B. Titchener as empathy. Lee drew on Lipps’ work for The
Beautiful. Freud also had Lipps’s books in his library and adopted the term Einfüh-
lung. See Lauren Wispé, “History of the Concept of Empathy” (1987). For specu-
lations on the role of aesthetics in human evolution, see Leda Cosmides and John
Tooby, “Does Beauty Build Adapted Minds? Toward an Evolutionary Theory of Aes-
thetics, Fiction and the Arts” (2001).
88. Philosopher Lawrence Blum believes that insofar as emotions of sympa-
thy and empathy promote perspective taking, they may result in better prosocial
responses than rationality alone. See Blum, Friendship, Altruism and Morality (1980),
122–39.
89. Alexander McCall Smith, Morality for Beautiful Girls (2001).
90. Received from “USMAM BELLO” [email protected] on 24 Feb-
ruary 2004.
91. On the 419 advance fee fraud, see the London Metropolitan Police Web site,
http://www.met.police.uk/fraudalert/419.htm (accessed 16 September 2004).
92. Personal collection of the author. Letter from Noor Nazziwa to Suzanne
Keen, no date (received in February 2004).
93. Washington and Lee University students’ responses were gathered by Suzanne
Keen in a postcolonial literature course in 2003. Students were asked of each docu-
ment, “What does it make you feel?” and “What would you do?” Everyone quoted in
the subsequent discussion gave me permission to reproduce his or her words.
94. http://www.soschildrensvillages.org.uk/ (accessed 7 October 2004). Alter-
natively, contact the SOS Children’s Village Association in Botswana at P.O. Box
30396, Gaborone, Botswana, tel. +267-395 32 20; fax +267-395 32 20. Ordi-
narily, the notion of intervention on behalf of a fictional character is considered
“absurd,” as Susan L. Feagin has it (“Imagining Emotions and Appreciating Fiction”
[1997], 54).
95. David S. Miall argues that literary reading characteristically “provides a forum
within which the concerns of the self are mediated” and results in strong differences
among readers (as opposed to nonliterary reading, in which a consensus about mean-
ing tends to emerge). I note that only two students made the move of self-applica-
tion. See David S. Miall, “Anticipation and Feeling in Literary Response: A Neuro-
psychological Perspective” (1995), 294.
96. For a useful interrogation of the uses to which moral philosophy puts the
novel, see Peter Johnson, Moral Philosophers and the Novel: A Study of Winch, Nuss-
baum and Rorty (2004).
97. See Ellen J. Esrock, The Reader’s Eye: Visual Imaging as Reader Response
(1994).
98. See Davis, Empathy (1994) and Stotland, ed., Empathy, Fantasy, and Helping
(1978).
186 Notes to Pages 37–42

Chapter 2

1. For a collection of responses from the early days of the form, see Novel and
Romance 1700–1800: A Documentary Record, edited by Ioan Williams (1970).
2. Stowe’s novel was not the only American narrative of the nineteenth century
to make an impact on reform movements. Richard Henry Dana’s autobiographical
Two Years before the Mast: A Personal Narrative of Life at Sea (1840) brought the
abuse of sailors to public attention and may have influenced congressional debate
over the following decade. Some celebrated cases of fiction related to reform, such as
Herman Melville’s White Jacket (1850), which also condemned flogging, accompany
rather than directly influence legislation. T. S. Arthur’s temperance novel Ten Nights
in a Bar-Room and What I Saw There (1854) rivaled even Uncle Tom’s Cabin for pop-
ularity in its time and may have assisted in the spread of temperance sentiment.
3. In 1909, the experimental psychologist E. B. Titchener translated as “empathy”
aesthetician Theodor Lipps’s term Einfühlung (which meant the process of “feeling
one’s way into” an art object or another person). See Experimental Psychology of the
Thought Processes (1909), 181–85. Notably, Titchener’s 1915 elaboration of the con-
cept in Beginner’s Psychology exemplifies empathy through a description of a reading
experience: “We have a natural tendency to feel ourselves into what we perceive or
imagine. As we read about the forest, we may, as it were, become the explorer; we
feel for ourselves the gloom, the silence, the humidity, the oppression, the sense of
lurking danger; everything is strange, but it is to us that strange experience has come”
(198). For Einfühlung, see Theodor Lipps, Ästhetik (1903, 1906).
4. On film, see Alex Neill, “Empathy and (Film) Fiction” (1996). A negative view
of empathetic effects in film occurs in film theory employing the Lacanian psycho-
analytic term suture to describe impositions of identifications on film viewers. See
Jean-Pierre Oudart, “Suture (elements of the logic of the signifier)” (1969). See Kaja
Silverman’s assessment of suture (1983), excerpted in Narrative, Apparatus, Ideol-
ogy: A Film Theory Reader (1986). For a critique of suture theory, see Noel Carroll,
Mystifying Movies: Fads and Fallacies in Contemporary Film Theory (1988), 196–97.
5. Edmund Burke, for example, writes of sympathy’s paradoxical role in aesthetic
response: “It is by this principle that poetry, painting, and other affecting arts, trans-
fuse their passions from one breast to another, and are often capable of grafting a
delight on wretchedness, misery, and death itself.” See A Philosophical Enquiry into
the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757), 41.
6. See Aristotle’s Rhetoric, Book 3, 2. On Rhetoric: A Theory of Civic Discourse
(1991), 38, 152–53. Aristotle treats emotions as an aspect of the art of persuasion,
mentioning the arousal of the audience’s emotion (by inviting role taking) and the
refutation of the audience’s sympathy for an opponent’s view. Elements of empathy
appear in his brief accounts of pity and pathos.
7. For instance, Henry Home, Lord Kames’s treatment of the topics “Grandeur
and Sublimity” (in the chapter so named) includes aspects of motor mimicry, as
when a tall object inspires stretching in the beholder, or when a broad prospect of
land or sea causes a feeling of expansiveness that Kames links to an enlargement of
mind. See Henry Home, Lord Kames, Elements of Criticism (1762), 150–78.
8. For a contemporary psychological update of Hume’s insight, see Leslie Broth-
ers, Friday’s Footprint: How Society Shapes the Human Mind (2001), in which social
 Notes to Pages 43–48 187

neuroscientist Brothers argues that the human brain has evolved a specialized capac-
ity for exchanging signals with other brains. In common with primate brains, our
brains have evolved to be social, as their sensitive attunement to facial expressions
and physical gestures (the basis for emotional contagion) and their way of assigning
mental life to animate and inanimate others demonstrate.
9. See also Adela Pinch’s subtle reading of Hume’s sympathy, Strange Fits of Pas-
sion (1996), 24–44.
10. They do differ: Hume accentuates the automatic nature of sympathy; in
Smith, the harmonious connection between feeling spectator and the object of his
gaze receives emphasis.
11. See Ann Jessie Van Sant, Eighteenth-century Sensibility and the Novel: The
Senses in Social Context (1993) and the discussion of sympathy in Catherine Galla-
gher, Nobody’s Story: The Vanishing Acts of Women Writers in the Marketplace 1670–
1820 (1994), 162–75.
12. Of course, this phenomenon was not confined to the British Isles, as the
responses to Goethe’s Sorrows of Young Werther (1774) and Rousseau’s La Nouvelle
Héloïse (1761) demonstrate. For a cultural reading of the latter case, see Robert
Darnton, The Great Cat Massacre and Other Episodes of French Cultural History
(1984), 215–56.
13. Henry Home, Lord Kames, “Emotions Caused by Fiction,” Elements of Criti-
cism (1762), 66–77.
14. For one of the few recent treatments of sensibility to entertain a version of the
positive, activist view represented here by Kames, see Markman Ellis, The Politics of
Sensibility: Race, Gender, and Commerce in the Sentimental Novel (1996).
15. Henry Mackenzie, paper from The Lounger 20 (18 June 1785), reprinted in
The Works of Henry Mackenzie (1996), 176–87.
16. For an important version of this critique, see Raymond Williams’s criticism of
the structure of feeling of industrial fiction, in Culture and Society, 1780–1950 (rpt.
1983), 88–109.
17. See William Godwin, An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice (1798 edition),
vol. 2. 499–500. For suspicion of sympathy as instigating contagious panic, see Shaft-
esbury, Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times, etc. (1711), 10. A magis-
trate’s sympathy, in contrast, can absorb and calm the people’s panic.
18. See Audrey Jaffe, Scenes of Sympathy: Identity and Representation in Victo-
rian Fiction (2000). For Jaffe, modern sympathy is inseparable from representations.
She usefully comments on the dynamics of projection, displacement, and imagined
exchange that characterize sympathy: “Thus the distinction between sympathy for
fictional characters and sympathy for actual people dissolves into . . . the difference
between the pleasurable sympathetic feelings fiction invites and the potential threat
of an encounter with an actual person. Pleasure, here, coincides with an absence
of reciprocity: a fictional character cannot look back” (7). Contrast this view with
Catherine Gallagher, Nobody’s Story, which emphasizes the difference between fic-
tional characters (“nobodies”) and real people (171).
19. For a classic statement of this legacy, see Walter Jackson Bate, “The Sympa-
thetic Imagination in Eighteenth-Century Criticism” (1945), 144, 159.
20. On the sentimental novel as political, see Markman Ellis’s excellent The Poli-
tics of Sensibility (1996).
188 Notes to Pages 48–53

21. For a view emphasizing the disconcerting effects of sympathy, especially loss
of self, indulgence in voyeurism, and the dangers of mistaking the feelings of others,
see David Marshall, The Surprising Effects of Sympathy (1988).
22. When in the early twentieth century the concepts of Einfühlung and empa-
thy became semantically separate from sympathy, the Romantic poets (and Shake-
speare) seemed obvious places to turn to detect representational empathy at work.
Richard Harter Fogle describes poetic empathy as the “presence of motor, kines-
thetic, or organic imagery, so powerful in effect as to evoke kindred impulses in
the reader” (“Empathetic Imagery” 149). For Fogle, poetic empathy begins with
physiological response and culminates in a psychological effect, the sensory fusion
of body and spirit: “If this fusion is perfect the total effect is not merely of physical
and emotional self-projection, but of imaginative projection balanced and tem-
pered by an objective self-possession born of intense contemplation” (Imagery 151).
The best examples of empathic poetic imagery Fogle locates in the work of Keats.
Projecting himself into the inanimate realm, while preserving the sense of embod-
ied perception results, Keats exercises empathy as the “best and most complete
means of contemplation” (151). Fogle sees poetic empathy as exercised by Keats
and Keats’s attuned reader as “a kind of sensuous imagination, which bases percep-
tion firmly upon our muscular, nervous, and organic processes” (151). Fogle’s views
of the physical and affective functions of romantic imagery took issue with the
then-dominant school of thought known as the New Criticism and perhaps for this
reason they were never widely accepted. A very different attitude toward empathy
and sympathy prevailed in the modern period, and the New Critics derived many
of their attitudes toward affect from the modern rather than the Romantic writers.
Taking the long view afforded by twenty-first-century interests in the embodied
mind and metaphor, Fogle can perhaps now be appreciated as a perceptive stu-
dent of metaphor and empathy. On metaphor as a product of embodied minds,
see canonically George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Metaphors We Live By (1980);
George Lakoff, Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things: What Categories Reveal about
the Mind (1987); and George Lakoff and Mark Turner, More Than Cool Reason: A
Field Guide to Poetic Metaphor (1989).
23. For an exhaustive treatment of this topic, see Thomas J. McCarthy, Relation-
ships of Sympathy: The Writer and the Reader in British Romanticism (1997), which
trawls through the poetry, prose, and the voluminous correspondence of writers of
the period.
24. For a brilliant and exhaustive account of the topicality of Victorian fiction,
see Richard D. Altick’s The Presence of the Present: Topics of the Day in the Victorian
Novel (1991).
25. See both the account and extensive bibliography of the periodical literature
in Richard Stang’s useful The Theory of the Novel in England, 1850–1870 (1959),
67–72, 228–41.
26. For details of these events, see Peter Ackroyd’s Dickens (1990), 255–57.
27. Sensation fiction records changing attitudes about domestic violence as the
marriage laws undergo reform. See Marlene Tromp, The Private Rod: Marital Vio-
lence, Sensation, and the Law in Victorian Britain (2000).
28. For an extended treatment of the narrative strategies employed by Victo-
rian novelists as they tackled ostensibly forbidden or impossible topics, see Suzanne
 Notes to Pages 55–60 189

Keen, Victorian Renovations of the Novel: Narrative Annexes and the Boundaries of
Representation (1998).
29. See, for instance, Wilkie Collins’s depiction of the moral agriculturalist Cap-
tain Wragge in No Name (1862). This con man cultivates sympathy in order to
harvest cash.
30. Dickens’s great favorite type for satirizing, the moral hypocrite, invariably
attempts to cultivate sympathy, though he doesn’t deserve it.
31. For a lucid account of the philosophical differences between German aes-
thetics and British associationism, as they effect the development of the notion of
empathy, see Charles Edward Gauss, “Empathy” (1973–74), vol. 2, 86–9.
32. For the original essays, see Vernon Lee and C. Anstruther-Thomson, “Beauty
and Ugliness,” Contemporary Review 72 (October 1897): 544–69 and (November
1897): 669–88. Lee subjects this material to revision in her later book, The Beauti-
ful (1913).
33. See Suzanne Clark’s account of the reversal of values in modernism, stressing
disruption and experiment over sentiment, in Sentimental Modernism: Women Writ-
ers and the Revolution of the Word (1991).
34. Brecht’s statements about the V-effekt appear in many different interviews
and essays. See, for instance, “Alienation Effects in Chinese Acting” (1964), 91–99.
35. Brecht’s word for empathy was of course the German Einfühlung. V-effekt is
sometimes rendered A-effect in translation. As I discuss in the next chapter, defamil-
iarization and estrangement have not been demonstrated to cause alienation. Indeed,
some theorists of reading response suggest that defamiliarization, or foregrounding,
can slow the reader’s pace and invite empathetic identification. See, for instance,
David S. Miall and Donald Kuiken, “The Form of Reading: Empirical Studies of Lit-
erariness” (1998).
36. See, for instance, Ezra Pound’s brief manifesto, “A Few Don’ts by an Imagiste”
(1913), 5.
37. For an account of how empathy fell out of favor as a consequence of the shift
from romantic theories of the imagination to modern theories of form, see Ellen
Dissanayake, Homo Aestheticus (1992), 142–47.
38. Exceptions among modernists: some of Hemingway’s stories and virtually all
of Ivy Compton-Burnett’s novels focus on an externalized view of characters, relying
on the readers’ ability to infer psychological states from plain reports of dialogue.
Wyndham Lewis notoriously created abstract characters whose traits would work
against readers’ efforts to recuperate believable fictional worlds and confute what he
regarded as a noxious tradition of English individualism.
39. See Percy Lubbock, The Craft of Fiction (1926) for an early and influen-
tial elaboration of the implications of James’s narrative technique. Henry James’s
brother, the psychologist William James, contributed the term stream of conscious-
ness to his discipline in his Principles of Psychology (1890, 1892). See Dorrit Cohn’s
account in Transparent Minds: Narrative Modes for Presenting Consciousness in Fiction
(1978), 87.
40. For a good historical treatment of this trend, see Nicola Humble, The Femi-
nine Middlebrow Novel, 1920s to 1950s (2001), 7–56.
41. For demographics and details about selections, see Elizabeth Long, Book
Clubs (2003).
190 Notes to Pages 61–70

42. For my treatment of the changing reputation of one of those subgenres and
the relationship of the gender of a subgenre’s readership to its status, see Suzanne
Keen, “The Historical Turn” (2006).
43. My account is indebted to Janice A. Radway, A Feeling for Books (1997). See
also Joan Shelley Rubin, The Making of Middle/brow Culture (1992).
44. Martha Nussbaum, “Exactly and Responsibly: A Defense of Ethical Criticism”
(1998), 350. Not all empathy results in compassion, she concedes in this essay. For
Nussbaum, empathy is “thinner” than compassion (351).
45. For a summary of critical responses to Oprah Winfrey’s Book Club, see Kath-
leen Rooney, Reading with Oprah: The Book Club That Changed America (2005).

Chapter 3

1. See Alan Richardson’s overview of the role of affect in “Studies in Literature

and Cognition: A Field Map” (2004), 8–11.
2. For a fictional version, see the discussion in A. S. Byatt, Babel Tower (1996),
307–18.
3. Acknowledging that features other than literary character can be involved in
empathy distinguishes my approach from that of Ed S. Tan, whose Emotion and the
Structure of Narrative Film: Film as an Emotion Machine (1996) argues that emo-
tions determined by fictional events are nonempathetic: “An empathetic emotion
is characterized by the valence of the events in relation to the concerns of the
protagonist” (171). My research suggests that while readers feel narrative empa-
thy primarily with characters, other features of narrative also evoke empathetic
responses.
4. Kathryn Miele, “empathetic readings of Victorian novels,” VICTORIA-L (Tues-
day, 16 November 2004). This response is one of sixty archived responses to a query
on the topic that I posted on 12 November 2004 to the 1500-plus subscribers on
the VICTORIA-L listserv. See the archives at https://listserv.indiana.edu/archives/
victoria.html for the full public discussion. The pages that follow also contain
excerpts from private e-mail responses to my query, during the same period of 12
November–3 December 2004.
5. Sheldon Goldfarb, “empathetic reading experiences of c19 novels,” VICTO-
RIA-L (Monday, 15 Movember 2004).
6. British objects relations theory is informative on the developmental role ani-
mals (real and imaginary) play in a child’s growth. See, for instance, D. W. Winn-
icott’s treatment of transitional objects in Playing and Reality (1971). Psychoanalytic
critic Norman Holland regards literary works themselves as transitional objects, but
his adoption of the term erases the developmental context vital to Winnicott. See
Holland, Five Readers Reading (1975), 286–88. On anthropomorphism as an inter-
pretive signal to the reader, see Hans Robert Jauss’s brief account of animal tales in
“The Identity of the Poetic Text in the Changing Horizon of Understanding” (1985),
146–74.
7. David Miall, private correspondence (12 May 2005).
8. Beth Sutton-Ramspeck, “empathetic reading experiences of c19 novels,” VIC-
TORIA-L (Monday, 15 November 2004).
 Notes to Pages 71–77 191

9. Margot K. Louis, “empathetic reading experiences of c19 novels,” VICTORIA-L

(Sunday, 14 November 2004).
10. Pat Menon, “empathetic reading experiences of c19 novels,” VICTORIA-L
(Sunday, 14 November 2004).
11. Michael Hargreave Mawson, “empathetic reading experiences of c19 novels,”
VICTORIA-L (Monday, 15 November 2004).
12. Ralf Schneider idealistically suggests that the term character identification,
with its Freudian baggage, ought to be avoided and replaced with the term empathy.
Ralf Schneider, “Emotion and Narrative” (2005), 136–37.
13. To gather this particular set of responses, I administered a six-question survey
eliciting hand-written prose responses in the tenth week of the course World Fiction
in English (10 March 2004). The subsequently quoted replies were elicited by the
question: “Have you experienced empathy (feeling with a character, as opposed to
pity, in which your feeling is different from the character’s) at any point while doing
the course reading? If so, which book(s) and character(s)?
14. Meredith Walker, survey (10 March 2004).
15. Amanda Lueders, survey (10 March 2004).
16. Paige Halter, survey (10 March 2004).
17. Megan Brooks, survey (10 March 2004).
18. Anonymous respondent, survey (10 March 2004).
19. For every generalization there is an exception. Richard Fulton writes of such
positive empathy: “looking through my old collection of books from my childhood,
I was flooded with memories of certain characters that I not only empathized with,
but pretended to be: Joe Hardy, Tom Quest, Red Randall, Chip Hilton, Dave Daw-
son of the Air Force, and, more to the point of this discussion, Jim Hawkins and Rob
Roy (and maybe Ivanhoe, just a little bit).” Richard Fulton, “empathy for literary
characters,” VICTORIA-L (Friday, 19 November 2004).
20. Lindsay Pace, survey (10 March 2004).
21. Ellen Moody, “empathetic reading experience of c19 novels,” VICTORIA-L
(Tuesday, 16 November 2004).
22. Robert Lapides, “Rethinking empathy,” VICTORIA-L (Sunday, 21 November
2004).
23. Robert Lapides, “empathetic reading experiences of c19 novels,” VICTO-
RIA-L (Sunday, 14 November 2004). The subsequent quotations in this section
come from private correspondents, answering the same query in November 2004,
whose anonymity I have agreed to preserve and whose permission to quote I have
secured.
24. Maria, “empathetic reading experiences of c19 novels,” VICTORIA-L (Friday,
19 November 2004).
25. Jean Rhys’s The Wide Sargasso Sea (1966) initiates this tradition for the
Anglophone postcolonial novel. It remains a frequently used strategy in feminist
fiction and contemporary historical fiction, as well as in the popular generation of
sequels to classic texts. Peter Carey’s Jack Maggs (1997), which reimagines Dickens’s
returned convict Magwitch, is a recent excellent example.
26. Mary Lenard, “empathy for literary characters,” VICTORIA-L (Thursday, 18
November 2004). For her scholarly elaboration of this position, see Mary Lenard’s
Preaching Pity: Dickens, Gaskell, and Sentimentalism in Victorian Culture (1999) and
192 Notes to Pages 77–84

“‘Mr. Popular Sentiment’: Dickens and the Gender Politics of Sentimentalism and
Social Reform Literature” (1998).
27. Sara L. Maurer, “empathetic reading experiences of c19 novels,” VICTORIA-L
(Monday, 15 November 2004).
28. Ellen Moody, “empathetic reading experiences of c19 novels,” VICTORIA-L
(Friday, 19 November 2004).
29. Kerryn Goldsworthy, “empathy for literary characters,” VICTORIA-L (Satur-
day, 20 November 2004).
30. Private correspondence (14 November 2004).
31. Kathleen O’Neill Sims, “empathy (and sympathy) for literary characters,”
VICTORIA-L (Saturday, 20 November 2004).
32. Michel Faber, “empathy (and sympathy) for literary characters,” VICTORIA-L
(Friday, 19 November 2004).
33. Els Andringa, “The Interface between Fiction and Life: Patterns of Identifica-
tion in Reading Autobiographies” (2004).
34. Sheldon Goldfarb, “empathetic reading experiences of c19 novels,” VICTO-
RIA-L (Monday, 15 November 2004).
35. Deborah D. Morse, “empathy, again,” VICTORIA-L (Monday, 15 November
2004).
36. For an excellent recent work historicizing emotions relevant to the history of
empathy, see Julie Ellison, Cato’s Tears and the Making of Anglo-American Emotion
(1999).
37. Cross-cultural studies of this kind are uncommon. See W. F. Brewer and K.
Ohtsuka, “Story Structure, Characterization, Just World Organization, and Reader
Affect in American and Hungarian Short Stories” (1988).
38. See Peter J. Rabinowitz, Before Reading: Narrative Conventions and the Politics
of Interpretation (1987). Rabinowitz offers a nuanced account of the different kinds
of narrative audiences to which an individual reader may belong.
39. Both Michael Steig and David Bleich emphasize the meaning making of read-
ers over authoritative, professional critical interpretation. That feature of reader-
response criticism provoked concern in the 1970s and 1980s, as literary theorists
worried about what would happen to interpretation. Today, interpretation is more
threatened by aliteracy than by empowered meaning-making readers.
40. Margot K. Louis, “empathetic reading experiences of c19 novels,” VICTO-
RIA-L (Sunday, 14 November 2004).
41. See Bonnie Brennan, “Bridging the Backlash: A Cultural Material Reading of
The Bridges of Madison County” (1996). Most of the critical commentary concerns
the film, dignified by association with Clint Eastwood and Meryl Streep.
42. Diana Ostrander, “empathetic reading experience of c19 novels,” VICTORIA-L
(Monday, 15 November, 2004).
43. June Siegel, “empathetic reading experiences of c19 novels,” VICTORIA-L
(Monday, 15 November 2004).
44. Michel Faber, “empathy (and sympathy) for literary characters,” VICTORIA-L
(Saturday, 20 November 2004).
45. See Don Kuiken et al., “Forms of Self-Implication in Literary Reading” (2004).
Though empathy is important for the theories of Kuiken and Miall, they concede
 Notes to Pages 84–86 193

here, “the effects of empathy, identification, and their associated narrative feelings
have not been systematically examined in empirical studies” (175 n).
46. Victor Nell studied larger numbers of readers; Norman Holland drew conclu-
sions from study of just five readers. David S. Miall and Don Kuiken break stories
into segments.
47. By no means all reader-response criticism involves experiments with actual
readers. The methods of introspection and philosophical speculation about reading
often feature an abstract single “reader,” bearing closest resemblance to the author.
See, for instance, Stanley Fish’s early intervention in this area, “Literature in the
Reader: Affective Stylistics” (1970).
48. See, for example, C. D. Brisbin’s unpublished dissertation, “An Experimental
Application of the Galvanic Skin Response to the Measurement of Effects of Litera-
ture on Attitudes of Fifth Grade Students towards Blacks” (1971).
49. Understandably, medical research is the dominant application of neuroimag-
ing. The subfields of psycholinguistics, cognition, and developmental psychology and
the related field of education feature a great deal of work on reading.
50. See the recent article by W. D. Gaillard et al., “fMRI Identifies Regional Spe-
cialization of Neural Networks for Reading in Young Children” (2003). This group
ascertains that the neural networks processing reading are strongly lateralized (in
most subjects, in the left brain, associated with language) and are similar in early
readers and in adults.
51. I treat Patrick Colm Hogan’s cognitive theory of aesthetic empathy in chap-
ter 6. His interesting theories draw on wide reading of world literature, including
Arab and Indian aesthetic treatises, and support a general argument about literary
universals. He does not conduct empirical research on reading. Similarly, philoso-
pher Susan L. Feagin’s Reading with Feeling: The Aesthetics of Appreciation (1996)
theorizes a role for emotion in reading but does not study actual readers empirically.
Several literary critics treat empathy as a thematic element of fiction. These include
J. Brooks Bouson, whose book, The Empathic Reader: A Study of the Narcissistic Char-
acter and the Drama of the Self (1989), draws reader-response theory into dialogue
with psychoanalytic theory of Heinz Kohut. As a result, the study focuses on narcis-
sistic characters and contributes little to the understanding of readers’ empathy. An
influence on the concerns of the present study, Judith Kegan Gardiner’s Rhys, Stead,
Lessing, and the Politics of Empathy (1989) traces thematics of empathy in three
postcolonial women writers. Gardiner gestures toward the impact of empathic rep-
resentations or intentions on readers.
52. Despite its subtitle, János László’s Cognition and Representation in Literature:
The Psychology of Literary Narratives (1999) proves an exception to the general
trend. László treats the notion of distinctive literariness with more skepticism than
his colleagues in the field.
53. Few go as far as David S. Miall in openly advocating moving “beyond inter-
pretation,” as in his lecture “Beyond Interpretation: The Cognitive Significance of
Reading” (2004).
54. Perhaps the possibility of observing beneficial results from reading mass-mar-
ket junk fiction deters professionals from designing experiments that might suggest
the redundancy of postsecondary literary education. Miall, however, is an exact-
194 Notes to Pages 87–91

ing critic of literary education as it is carried out in the United States and Canada.
He sees it as interfering with or even destroying the pleasure of reading. See his
“Empowering the Reader: Literary Response and Classroom Learning” (1996).
55. See, for instance, David S. Miall, “On the Necessity of Empirical Studies of
Literary Reading” (2000); David S. Miall and Don Kuiken, “What Is Literariness?
Three Components of Literary Reading” (1999); and David S. Miall, “Beyond the
Schema Given: Affective Comprehension of Literary Narratives” (1989).
56. See Tammy Bourg, “The Role of Emotion, Empathy, and Text Structure in
Children’s and Adults’ Narrative Text Comprehension” (1996). See also Tammy
Bourg et al., “The Effects of an Empathy-Building Strategy on 6th-graders’ Causal
Inferencing in Narrative Text Comprehension” (1993), 117–33.
57. See Norma D. Feshbach and Seymour Feshbach, “Affective Processes and
Academic Achievement” (1987).
58. Paul Ekman, Emotions Revealed (2003), 35. For David S. Miall’s speculative
treatment of the neurophysiology of literary response, see “Anticipation and Feeling
in Literary Response” (1995).
59. For experimental support of this claim, see Rolf A. Zwaan, “The Immersed
Experiencer: Toward an Embodied Theory of Language Comprehension” (2004).
60. A common view coming out of the Artificial Intelligence area of cognitive
science holds that literature enables humans to run simulations that may provoke
revisions of our models of self. See Keith Oatley, Best Laid Schemes: The Psychology of
Emotions (1992), 225–61. For experimental results substantiating aspects of Oatley’s
theories, see G. C. Chupchik, Keith Oatley, and L. Vorderer, “Emotional Effects of
Reading Excerpts from Short Stories by James Joyce” (1998).
61. David S. Miall and Don Kuiken, “Aspects of Literary Response: A New Ques-
tionnaire” (1995). Subsequently cited as LRQ.
62. On this topic, see Jonathan Rose’s magisterial The Intellectual Life of the British
Working Classes (2001). Rose details the reading habits, attitudes, and preferences
of ordinary British readers.
63. Jèmeljan Hakemulder, The Moral Laboratory: Experiments Examining the
Effects of Reading Literature on Social Perception and Moral Self-Concept (2000). See
also Jèmeljan Hakemulder, “Foregrounding and Its Effect on Readers’ Perception”
(2004), 193–96. Here Hakemulder efficiently surveys the assumptions and existing
research, conceding that few studies showing positive effects for reading literature
establish the particularity of those effects to literature or a positive correlation to
literariness.
64. Hakemulder’s own research after The Moral Laboratory contributes to the
literature on foregrounding, but his focus is on the relationship between textual
features and literary reading experiences. See his “Foregrounding and Its Effect on
Readers’ Perception” (2004).
65. The four studies examined by Hakemulder include three dissertations, two of
which focus on preschool children, a drawback he de-emphasizes.
66. See C. Daniel Batson et al. “Empathy, Attitudes, and Action” (2002), 1658–61.
While Batson regards fiction reading as the equivalent of the high empathy condi-
tion (in which subjects are instructed to engage in perspective taking), he finds that
empathic feelings are lower among those who believe the experiment’s interviewee
Jared, a heroin addict and dealer, is a fictional character (1661).
 Notes to Pages 91–93 195

67. For a fantasy empathy measure that could be used to study such questions,
see Mark H. Davis, Empathy (1994), 55–58 and “Measuring Individual Differences
in Empathy: Evidence for a Multidimensional Approach” (1983), 113–26.
68. Very little empirical research has been attempted to verify the theoretical
speculations about aspects of characterization that operate in readers’ character
identification. Marisa Bortolussi and Peter Dixon’s pioneering study Psychonarratol-
ogy (2003) report their findings that character actions contribute to readers’ assess-
ments of character traits, while self-evaluations provided by the narrator (descrip-
tion) do not. However, the test stories employed first-person narrators, so narrators’
evaluations of characters in third-person fiction cannot be included in this prelimi-
nary conclusion. See Psychonarratology, 160–65.
69. For John Dewey, “esthetic emotion is native emotion transformed through
the objective material to which it has committed its development and consum-
mation.” See Art as Experience (1985), 85. E. M. Dadlez surveys the controversy
about the status of aesthetic emotions in What’s Hecuba to Him? Fictional Events and
Actual Emotions (1997), a lively area of debate. In addition to the works of Martha
Nussbaum, most recently Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of Emotions (2001),
see the following: Charles Altieri, The Particulars of Rapture: An Aesthetics of the
Affects (2003); Susan L. Feagin, Reading with Feeling (1996); Patrick Colm Hogan,
“From Mind to Matter: Art, Empathy, and the Brain,” in his Cognitive Science, Litera-
ture, and the Arts (2003), 166–90; Peter Lamarque and Stein Haugum Olsen, Truth,
Fiction, and Literature: A Philosophical Perspective (1994); Alex Neill, “Fiction and the
Emotions” (1993); Keith Oatley, Best Laid Schemes (1992); Robert C. Solomon, ed.,
Thinking about Feeling: Contemporary Philosophers on Emotions (2004); Rei Terada,
Feeling in Theory: Emotion after “The Death of the Subject” (2001); Kendall Walton,
Mimesis as Make-Believe: On the Foundations of the Representational Arts (1990); and
L. S. Vygotsky, The Psychology of Art (1925). The recent revival of Silvan Tomkins has
enlivened the literary study of negative affects such as shame and disgust: see Shame
and Its Sisters: A Silvan Tomkins Reader (1995).
70. For a summary of major ideas about and theorists of narrative situation, see
Keen, Narrative Form (2003), 30–50. Ralf Schneider represents narrative situation
as a factor in eliciting readers’ empathy and lack of representation of inner life as
a likely inhibitor of it, in “Toward a Cognitive Theory of Literary Character: The
Dynamics of Mental-Model Construction” (2001).
71. See Robyn R. Warhol on affective responses to serial fiction in Having a Good
Cry (2003), 71–72. See also Hakemulder, The Moral Laboratory ([2000], 93, 143),
drawing on N. D. Feshbach’s observations of the effects of repetitive role taking in
“Studies of Empathic Behavior in Children” (1978).
72. Martha Nussbaum’s empathy-inducing novels are invariably long, though not
always the longest works by the authors she mentions. Writing about the reading
habits of the character David Copperfield in Dickens’s novel of that name (1849–
50), Nussbaum comments, “he remains with [books] for hours in an intense, inti-
mate, and loving relationship. As he imagines, dreams, and desires in their com-
pany, he becomes a certain sort of person.” Nussbaum believes that novels, as David
Copperfield highlights, have the effect of making readers perceive “the social world
around them with a new freshness and sympathy.” For Nussbaum, the length of the
immersion (in what Victor Nell describes as ludic reading) is a vital component of
196 Notes to Page 93

the process, permitting intensity, dreaming, and desiring that develops the reader’s
loving heart. See Martha C. Nussbaum, Love’s Knowledge: Essays on Philosophy and
Literature (1990), 230–31.
73. Canonically, see Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a
Socially Symbolic Act (1981). See also Rolf Zwaan, “Effect of Genre Expectations
on Text Comprehension” (1994), which compares readers’ behavior when pro-
cessing texts labeled as “news stories” or “narratives.” In Psychonarratology (2003),
Bortolussi and Dixon caution that research in discourse processing has focused on
broad generic distinctions rather than on narrative fiction’s subgenres (253–54).
However, a body of work on emotional responses to fictional subgenres in televi-
sion exists in the field of mass communications, as in the essays collected in Jen-
nings Bryant and Dolf Zillmann’s Responding to the Screen: Reception and Reaction
Processes (1991). Literary genre critics have been reluctant to adopt findings from
mass communications research, perhaps because audiovisual (iconic) representa-
tions are assumed to be more emotionally stimulating than the verbal representa-
tions of prose narrative fiction. This assumption, however, has not been investi-
gated systematically.
74. Feminist criticism often celebrates the power of women’s writing’s viv-
idly represented spaces and places, in tandem with identity themes, to work out
boundary-crossing potentials for connection, communication, and change. See, for
instance, Susan Stanford Friedman’s Mappings: Feminism and the Cultural Geogra-
phies of Encounter (1998).
75. See Monika Fludernik’s account of Ansgar Nünning’s remarks on empathy-
inducing functions of metanarration in “Metanarrative and Metafictional Commen-
tary: From Metadiscursivity to Metanarration and Metafiction” (2003), 39.
76. On slower pace as potentially fostering empathy, see Dolf Zillmann, “Empa-
thy: Affect from Bearing Witness to the Emotions of Others” (1991), 160–61. Zill-
mann hypothesizes that the fast pace of television news stories and dramas may
impede empathetic response. David S. Miall’s previously mentioned work on fore-
grounding and empathy in literary texts correlates a slower reading pace with
enhanced empathy.
77. See, for instance, Willie van Peer’s judgment that the notion of perspective
influencing empathy is due for a shake-up in his “Justice in Perspective” (2001).
78. Character identification is thus an example of what Marisa Bortolussi and
Peter Dixon identify as readers’ mental constructions, as opposed to textual fea-
tures (Psychonarratology 28). They systematically measure how particular readers
process specific textual features in narratives, but the experimental results bridging
disciplines of discourse processing and narrative theory are still quite scanty, and the
accuracy of Bortolussi and Dixon’s narratology has been questioned. See Nilli Dien-
gott, “Some Problems with the Concept of the Narrator in Bortolussi and Dixon’s
Psychonarratology” (2004).
79. See Peter Dixon, et al., “Literary Processing and Interpretation: Towards
Empirical Foundations” (1993).
80. See Dolf Zillman, “Mechanisms of Emotional Involvement with Drama”
(1994). Writing about identification with dramatic characters rather than narra-
tive personae, Zillman argues that the audience members’ disposition precipitates
empathic and counterempathic reactions and suggests that audiences must be made
 Notes to Pages 94–95 197

to care about characters one way or another. He believes that enactment of good
or evil deeds by protagonists and antagonists, in circumstances that prompt moral
appraisal of their actions, promotes strong emotional reactions.
81. See Keith Oatley, “A Taxonomy of the Emotions of Literary Response and a
Theory of Identification in Fictional Narrative” (1994).
82. In this respect, Miall and Kuiken are in accord with earlier work that demon-
strates a relationship between a subject’s prior similar experiences and empathy felt
for another in the same situation. See Ezra Stotland, Empathy, Fantasy and Helping
(1978), 52.
83. See Miall and Kuiken, “What Is Literariness?” (1999) and Miall, “Beyond the
Schema Given” (1989).
84. See Don Kuiken et al., “Locating Self-Modifying Feelings within Literary
Reading” (2004).
85. Max Louwerse and Don Kuiken, “The Effects of Personal Involvement in
Narrative Discourse” (2004), 170. This research confirms some of what Wolfgang
Iser proposes about active reading as gap filling, in The Act of Reading: A Theory of
Aesthetic Response (1978), 168–69.
86. For good critiques of this assumption from different disciplinary bases, see
Elly A. Konijn and Johan F. Hoorn, “Reality-based Genre Preferences Do Not Direct
Personal Involvement” (2004) and Richard Walsh, “Why We Wept for Little Nell:
Character and Emotional Involvement” (1997).
87. See Edith Klemenz-Belgardt, “American Research of Response to Literature”
(1981), 368 and P. E. Jose and W. F. Brewer, “Development of Story Liking: Charac-
ter Identification, Suspense, and Outcome Resolution” (1984). In The Moral Labora-
tory, Hakemulder reports on recent studies confirming the importance of personal
relevance for intensity of reader response (71).
88. M. Wünsch (1981), cited in Hakemulder (Moral Laboratory 73).
89. G. C. Chupchik and János László, “The Landscape of Time in Literary Recep-
tion: Character Experience and Narrative Action” (1994).
90. Research into the empathy evoked by various genres of television adver-
tisements suggests that discontinuous, nonlinear “vignette” ads discourage empathy,
whereas classical, character-centered dramatic form in ads evokes viewers’ empathy.
See Barbara B. Stern, “Classical and Vignette Television Advertising Dramas: Struc-
tural Models, Formal Analysis, and Consumer Effects” (1994).
91. For a good application of cognitive theory on levels of embedding to readers’
capacity to comprehend embedded accounts of characters’ mental states, see Lisa
Zunshine, “Theory of Mind and Experimental Representations of Fictional Con-
sciousness” (2003).
92. For a subtle treatment of the variety of techniques by which sympathy for
characters may be cultivated, see Wayne C. Booth, The Rhetoric of Fiction, 2nd. ed.
(1983), 129–33, 243–66, 274–82, and 379–91. Ultimately Booth prefers the use
of an “inside view” for invoking sympathy, but he describes the full range of strate-
gies that authors from the classical period to the modernists actually employ. For
an excellent recent look at how cognitive science can revise narratological views of
representation of consciousness, see Alan Palmer, Fictional Minds (2004).
93. See David S. Miall, “Affect and Narrative: A Model of Responses to Stories”
(1988).
198 Notes to Pages 95–97

94. For the best description of how readers imaginatively construct characters,
see Steven Cohan, “Figures Beyond the Text: A Theory of Readable Character in the
Novel” (1983).
95. See Richard J. Gerrig, “The Construction of Literary Character: A View from
Cognitive Psychology” (1990). See also his account of participatory responses to
fiction in his book Experiencing Narrative Worlds: On the Psychological Activities of
Reading (1993).
96. See Patrick Colm Hogan, “The Epilogue of Suffering: Heroism, Empathy,
Ethics” (2001). Though this article suggests a preference for the cognitive role taking
Hogan associates with situational empathy, his later, very brief treatment of read-
ers’ empathy in Cognitive Science, Literature, and the Arts improves on his theory by
describing how emotion triggers invoke quick-and-dirty responses, as well as imag-
inative role taking, neither of which need be denigrated as egocentric (186–87).
Work confirming the role of lived experience in spontaneous situational empathy
with characters on film has been carried out by Barry Sapolsky and Dolf Zillmann,
“Experience and Empathy: Affective Reactions to Witnessing Childbirth” (1978).
Women who had given birth who responded to a medical film of actual childbirth
showed more intense physiological reactions; otherwise, gender and related experi-
ences had a negligible effect on empathy. Note that the film was not fictional.
97. See Hans Robert Jauss, Aesthetic Experience and Literary Hermeneutics (1982),
152–88, especially his summary figure, “Interaction Patterns of Identification with
the Hero,” 159. See also Patrick Colm Hogan on emotions and prototypes in narra-
tive, in The Mind and Its Stories: Narrative Universals and Human Emotion (2003).
98. This insight has received preliminary confirmation from studies of the effect
of point of view and voice-over in film. See Els Andringa, Q et al., “Point of View and
Viewer Empathy in Film” (2001), 154–55.
99. See the definitions of narrated monologue, psycho-narration, and quoted
monologue in Dorrit Cohn, Transparent Minds (1978), 14. Parallel terminology
exists for the representation of consciousness in first-person narration.
100. See Sylvia Adamson, “The Rise and Fall of Empathetic Narrative: A Histori-
cal Perspective on Perspective” (2001).
101. See Wayne Booth’s discussing of traditional literature’s use of “telling” in
The Rhetoric of Fiction, 3–16 and Dorrit Cohn on psycho-narration in Transparent
Minds, 46–57.
102. For a subtle exploration of the intersection between cognitive science and
narratology on this point, see Alan Palmer, Fictional Minds (2004), 49, 170–204.
103. Three good starting points for recent work on the representation of con-
sciousness include: Monika Fludernik’s magisterial The Fictions of Language and the
Languages of Fiction (1993); the essays of Lisa Zunshine, “Theory of Mind” (2003)
and “Richardson’s Clarissa and a Theory of Mind” (2004); and the phenomenological
theory of George Butte, I Know That You Know That I Know (2004).
104. See F. K. Stanzel, Narrative Situation in the Novel (1971) and A Theory of
Narrative (1984).
105. See Willie van Peer and H. Pander Maat, “Perspectivation and Sympathy:
Effects of Narrative Point of View” (1996). They designed experiments using five
versions of stories, rewritten to allow them to test the relationship between positive
internal focalization and readers’ allocation of sympathy (145).
 Notes to Pages 98–103 199

106. For a thorough investigation of the issues raised here, see Monika Fludernik,
Towards a “Natural” Narratology (1996).
107. See Keen, Narrative Form, 45–47, 171.
108. Bertolussi and Dixon have done the best work on this subject, though
they phrase the question differently (Psychonarratology 166–99). They are inter-
ested in the degree to which readers fuse narrators and characters as a result of
perceptual access to a particular character’s perspective, and thus develop a root-
ing interest in that character and making assumptions about the narrator’s and
author’s gender.

Chapter 4

1. See Don Kuiken et al., “Forms of Self-Implication in Literary Reading” for a

fascinating exploration, replete with testimony from individual readers, of how read-
ing deepens self-understanding.
2. E. M. Forster used the term word-masses for members of the species homo fictus
(Aspects 44, 55–6). Roland Barthes emphasizes the textual nature of characters by
calling them “paper beings” in his essay “Introduction to the Structural Analysis of
Narratives” ([1977], 111); Catherine Gallagher labels them “Nobodies” in Nobody’s
Story (1995), xiii. On the other side of the argument, stressing the humanlike qual-
ity of character, see W. J. Harvey, Character and the Novel (1965) and Martin Price,
Forms of Life: Character and Moral Imagination in the Novel (1983). See Baruch
Hochman’s Character in Literature (1985) for a treatment of both critical positions
and a flexible taxonomy that takes into account both mimetic and more stylized,
nonnaturalistic kinds of character.
3. For a full treatment of this paradigm, see James Phelan, Reading People, Reading
Plots: Character, Progression, and the Interpretation of Narrative (1989).
4. See, for instance, Frank Palmer, Literature and Moral Understanding (1992). He
opines, “good literary works provide the opportunity for knowledge by acquaintance,
and . . . the educative power of literature is linked with its artistic merit” (220).
5. The ubiquity of this belief has had an effect on experimental design, which
tends to emphasize quality literature over mass-market fiction. Some work in dis-
course processing directly investigates traits of literariness. For both subjects, see
chapter 3, 85–87
6. For a bracing reconsideration of what female readers seek in the fiction they
choose, see Holly Virginia Blackford, Out of This World: Why Literature Matters to
Girls (2004). Blackford argues that for the thirty-three racially, socioeconomically,
and geographically diverse girls she studied, a good story that “looks nothing like the
life they know” was consistently preferred (6).
7. The number of books produced and the number of books sold tell different
stories. Although it is a growing segment of the market, with some titles breaking
sales barriers, fiction still accounts for a little over 10 percent of the books produced
annually in the U.S. See U.S. Book Production (All Hardback and Paperback), com-
piled by Andrew Grabois (accessed 28 January 2004). Fiction accounts for 26 per-
cent of books sold in the United Kingdom, according to statistics for 1999–2000. See
Simon Howitt, ed., Bookselling: 2000 Market Report (2000), 12.
200 Notes to Pages 103–5

8. See the compilation of data in Appendix 10 of Clive Bloom’s Bestsellers: Popu-

lar Fiction Since 1900 (2002), 252–53.
9. Biweekly data on the fifteen most frequently borrowed library books in the
United States has been provided since 2004 by Library Journal at http://www
.libraryjournal.com/. Mysteries and thrillers dominate the lists, with works of
general fiction (mainly fiction aimed at women) appearing occasionally. Focus-
ing on best sellers and most-requested library books obviously does not tell the
whole story about adults’ reading preferences; but given that the average Ameri-
can now spends only 109 hours per year reading (a figure that has steadily dimin-
ished even as television watching increases: 1661 hours on average per person per
year), best-seller statistics do suggest what most readers spend most of their time
on. U.S. Census Bureau, Statistical Abstract of the United States (2003), No. 1125.
Media Usage and Consumer Spending: 1998 to 2006, Information and Commu-
nications, 720.
10. Yann Martel’s The Life of Pi (2001) sold 903,268 copies in 2003 after winning
the 2002 Booker Prize. Not all Booker winners enjoy such longevity in sales, but The
Life of Pi has been taken up as a book club selection and as a teaching text in col-
leges, universities, and some secondary schools. See McEvoy and Maryles, “Paperback
Bestsellers” (2004), 585.
11. The Secret Life of Bees, endorsed on Good Morning America, sold 1,852,721
copies in paperback in 2003 (“Paperback Bestsellers” 585). The Lovely Bones, a Book
of the Month Club selection, sold 2,815,900 copies in hardcover in 2002 and 2003
combined. See Daisy Maryles and Laurele Riippa, “Bestsellers of 2003: Hardcover
Bestsellers; The Stakes Rise for Chart Toppers” (2004), 576.
12. Cecilia Konchar Farr persuasively argues that Winfrey cleverly oscillated
between easier and more challenging works in order to draw readers in and teach
them how to approach more demanding fiction. See Reading Oprah: How Oprah’s
Book Club Changed the Way America Reads (2005).
13. For a full account, see Kathleen Rooney, Reading with Oprah: The Book Club
That Changed America (2005).
14. Els Andringa’s research into the reading preferences of Dutch students con-
firms this notion. She found two times the amount of words indicating character
identification among the female readers in her sample. See “The Interface between
Fiction and Life” (2004), 226.
15. For recent research on the empathy-altruism thesis, see C. Daniel Batson et
al. “Empathy, Attitudes, and Action” (2002). Batson believes that empathy felt for
a fictional character can improve attitudes and stimulate concern for members of a
stigmatized group (1666). However, in the resource-allocation task by which Batson
measures subjects’ willingness to act to help members of the group represented by
drug addict Jared, allocations by those in the group believing Jared is fictional lagged
behind the allocations made by high-empathy perspective takers who believed he
was real. The differences in this component of the experiment did not reach the
threshold of statistical significance (1662).
16. Two aspects of the analogy deserve attention: that emotional reaction to fic-
tion, like human empathy, takes us out of ourselves, and that we recognize through
role taking (practiced through reading) that others are different from us but still
“real humans.” This emphasis defends the spontaneous sharing of empathy’s “feel-
 Notes to Pages 107–9 201

ing with” against charges of egoism and bolsters the case for the effects of reading
without explaining how readers actually transpose the experience of empathy for
fictional characters from a fictive context to empathy for real people in the actual
world. Philosopher Frank Palmer writes, “to be moved in the way that great art can
move us is to be put in touch with something that in a way dwarfs our own little
concerns, which is a step nearer to being sensitive to the ‘reality’ of other people. . . .
But to appreciate the ‘reality’ of another person involves not just an act of identifica-
tion with him, but a sense of his ‘otherness.’” Note how Palmer slides from respon-
siveness to art to understanding of real people (Literature and Moral Understanding
(1992), 240).
17. Lindsay Pace, survey (10 March 2004).
18. Meredith Walker, survey (10 March 2004).
19. Courtney Fitzgerald, survey (10 March 2004).
20. Paige Halter, survey (10 March 2004).
21. See Krystina A. Finlay and Walter G. Stephan, “Improving Intergroup Rela-
tions: The Effects of Empathy on Racial Attitudes” (2000). Of the students in this
experiment who read, some received realistic “scenarios” that were presented to
them as nonfictional first-person accounts of African Americans, and some read the
same accounts framed as American students’ reports about their experiences study-
ing abroad in Hong Kong. Neither manipulation changed rates of reactive empathy
associated with helping.
22. Psychologist C. Daniel Batson and his collaborators argue that empathy may
indeed spur prosocial action, but they also show that empathy can hinder justice.
See “Immorality from Empathy-Induced Altruism: When Compassion and Justice
Conflict” (1995), 1042–54.
23. Hakemulder believes that the novel excerpts’ ironic tone may have cued
literature students to the intention of the study (“Foregrounding” [2004], 206).
It is also possible that the use of short extracts, while essential for fine-grained
analysis of discourse processing, interferes with the study of the effects of read-
ing long works that ordinarily invite hours and hours of involved reading. Since
the grandest claims for fictions’ beneficial role in society inevitably refer to long
novels, it would make sense to devise ways of studying them as they are actual-
ly read.
24. Research on television-viewing habits shows that empathy with characters of
comedies and dramas increases the likelihood of watching reruns. See P. H. Tannen-
baum, “Entertainment as Vicarious Emotional Experience” (1980).
25. See Skaliotis (2002), cited in Wim Knulst and Andries van den Broek, “The
Readership of Books in Times of De-Reading” (2003), 233. Exceptionally, Knulst
and van den Broek examine the relative popularity of different genres of reading,
using data on Dutch readers. As I have already shown, most of the theorizing and
empirical research on effects of reading has focused on literary fiction and has set
aside the effects of a diet of subliterary kinds of mass-market fiction.
26. This has not always been the case. In the past, middlebrow reading marked
individuals as aspirant middle-class professionals. See Janice Radway, A Feeling for
Books (1997), 221–60.
27. For the most up-to-date statistics, see Book Retailing—US (2004). In the U.K.,
the percentage of books bought by women is slightly lower than in the U.S. but
202 Notes to Pages 110–21

still accounts for 65 percent or more of consumer book purchases. See Bookselling
(2004), tables 18, 19, 20. For summary European data, see Publishing Market Watch.
Sectoral Report 2: Book Publishing (2004), 9.
28. Online excerpted transcript, “A Fine Balance Discussion,” Oprah’s Book Club
(accessed 15 February 2002). Currently accessible at http://www.oprah.com/obc/
pastbooks/rohinton_mistry/obc_20020124_discussion.jhtml.
29. Seventy-three percent of Oprah’s books were written by women. She selected
books by ten men between 1996 and 2002. Her new book club reverses this trend,
with Steinbeck, Paton, Garcia Marquez, and Tolstoy outnumbering McCullers and
Pearl S. Buck.
30. Winfrey recently included Alan Paton’s Cry the Beloved Country in her new
club’s selections.
31. See the discussion of the vogue for “Commonwealth” authors in Elizabeth
Long, Book Clubs (2003).
32. Salil, SASIALIST listserv discussion group (accessed 2 April 1998).
33. Chandra, SASIALIST listserv discussion group (accessed 3 April 1998).
34. This is neither a callow nor an abnormal response. See Kuiken et al., “Forms
of Self-Implication,” in which the authors argue that the “search for concepts that
potentially subsume narrative particulars will sometimes involve self-relevant con-
cepts, especially those that represent personal strivings” (177).
35. Rooney sees this pattern of response as debasing and oversimplifying the
literary texts, but she also admires Winfrey for establishing “practical protocols”
for reading that have contributed to the enlargement of the audience for fiction
(Oprah xii).
36. On Winfrey’s emphasis on empathetic reading practices, juxtaposed to “more
reflective” habits, see Farr, Reading Oprah, 61. Farr embraces the social function of
the novel as a genre and admires Winfrey’s way of integrating fiction into readers’
“talking life,” a phrase borrowed from Toni Morrison (Reading Oprah 45–51, 60).
37. Though it would be interesting to study changes in attitude toward bullying
or rule breaking, in groups of Harry Potter readers.
38. See B. Latane and J. M. Darley, The Unresponsive Bystander—Why Doesn’t
He Help? (1970). This famous research was spurred by the 1964 murder of Kitty
Genovese, in which dozens of people within earshot of the victim’s cries failed to
intervene. See Darley’s recent summary of three decades’ worth of work in this field,
in “Bystander Phenomena” (2000), 493–95.
39. These numbers add up to 118 percent because I tallied emotion, understand-
ing, and moralizing separately. Eighteen percent of responses mentioned both emo-
tional intensity and improved understanding.

Chapter 5

1. What novelists hope to do in writing fiction has not, of course, remained con-
sistent over the centuries, nor do writers of a single tradition or generation agree
in their aims. Though subjected to criticism for decades since they put it forth in
1946 in the Sewanee Review, Wimsatt and Beardsley’s “intentional fallacy” (which
sought to move the literary critic’s role toward evaluation and away from subjec-
 Notes to Pages 122–32 203

tive response) has never been completely dislodged. While I concur that scrutiny of
texts must be literary critics’ first task, that much of an author’s intentions cannot
be recovered, and also that authors often do more in texts than they can explain or
understand, my perspective as a narrative theorist leads me to believe that writers
craft narratives using tools in order to accomplish ends that they can, and often do,
articulate.
2. Though once again I draw upon my experience as a teacher of fiction in making
this generalization, see for documented cases the Amazon.com’s readers’ reviews of
The Handmaid’s Tale.
3. See “Envisioning the Past,” in Keen, Romances of the Archive in Contemporary
British Fiction (2001), for the romance of the archive’s cultivation of the sympa-
thetic historical imagination (181–207).
4. Smiley defines empathy cognitively, as “perceiving with” or “seeing through” a
character (13 Ways [2005], 76, 118), but despite her disavowal of the affective com-
ponent of empathy, she argues that “the novel has made a world in which people are
fairly adept at both feeling and thinking, and at thinking about feeling” (176).
5. “High fantasizers,” or individuals who score high on a Fantasy-Empathy scale,
tend to assume that people in general are more altruistic than low scorers assume.
See Ezra Stotland et al., Empathy, Fantasy and Helping (1978), 88–9, 107. If novelists
are likely to score as high fantasizers, then they may also be prone to believe in the
power of empathy because they positively estimate the altruism of others.
6. See, for example, Caro Clarke, ed., “Writing Advice,” http://www.caroclarke.
com/ (accessed 10 February 2005).
7. Anti-Defamation League press release, “Q and A on the Turner Diaries” (16
May 1996) http://www.adl.org/PresRele/Militi_71/2737_71.asp (accessed 22 Feb-
ruary 2005).
8. Nancy Eisenberg argues that “it is more often cognitively-based processes like
perspective taking, and, to a lesser degree, empathy, that can be devoted to socially
undesirable ends.” These readers might share the perspective or feel with Pierce’s
protagonist. However, according to Eisenberg, “one would seldom expect sympathy
to be related to undesirable ends.” Personal correspondence with the author.
9. F. R. Conway, Amazon.com review of The Turner Diaries (posted 6 March
2002).
10. The twenty-eight-item Bernstein and Putnam’s Dissociative Experiences
Scale (DES) asks subjects to rate the percentage of time they spend having fantasies
and daydreams (absorption) and the frequency of their gaps in episodic memory
(amnesia) and experiences of derealization and depersonalization.
11. Leslie Marmon Silko, interviewed on In Search of the Novel, http://www
.learner.org/channel/workshops/isonovel/Pages/subpage7.html (accessed 14 Febru-
ary 2005).
12. Arthur Golden, interviewed on In Search of the Novel, http://www.learner.org/
channel/workshops/isonovel/Pages/subpage7.html (accessed 14 February 2005).
13. J. K. Rowling, interviewed on In Search of the Novel, http://www.learner.org/
channel/workshops/isonovel/Pages/subpage7.html (accessed 15 February 2005).
14. The first edition of this novel (Spiral, 1983) is so scarce that I provide instead
page number references to the most widely disseminated version, the 1986 Penguin
paperback.
204 Notes to Pages 132–39

15. See, for instance, Mary Ann Hughes, “Transgressing Boundaries” (1994).
Hughes argues that Hulme “chooses to upset our idea of corporeal boundaries in her
ambivalent attitude to violence with The Bone People. While the assaults upon Simon
are deplored and regretted, they are also glorified as the transgression of the bound-
ary between internal and external, spiritual and material, one human and another”
(“Transgressing” 57).
16. Stead faults the prize more than the winner. See C. K. Stead, “Keri Hulme’s
The Bone People and the Pegasus Award for Maori Literature” (1985). See also Mar-
gery Fee’s rejoinder, “Why C. K. Stead Didn’t Like Keri Hulme’s the bone people:
Who Can Write as Other?” (1989).
17. Ato Quayson notices the novel’s discursive nervousness but attributes that
to Hulme’s unresolved feelings about disabilities. Though Quayson describes the
scene of beating, he misses Kerewin’s clear judgment of Joe, or perhaps he forgets
it, because it is not the negative judgment his argument would predict. This critical
aversion from the novel’s statements bespeaks the exquisite difficulty of facing the
implications of Hulme’s representation. See Ato Quayson, “Looking Awry: Tropes of
Disability in Post-colonial Writing” (1999).
18. See, for instance, Philip Armstrong’s nuanced article, “Good Eating: Ethics and
Biculturalism in Reading “The Bone People” (2001) and Gay Wilentz, “Instruments of
Change: Healing Cultural Dis-ease in Keri Hulme’s the bone people” (1995).
19. On empathic accuracy, see the research reported in William Ickes, ed.,
Empathic Accuracy (1997).
20. See Suzette A. Spencer, “Shall We Gather at the River? Ritual, Benign Forms
of Injury, and the Wounds of Displaced Women in Opal Palmer Adisa’s It Begins with
Tears” (2001).
21. Opal Palmer Adisa, interviewed by Suzette A. Spencer (quoted in Spencer’s
“Shall We Gather at the River?” 108). See also Opal Palmer Adisa, “A Writer/Healer:
Literature, a Blueprint for Healing” (2001).
22. The most neutral term currently in favor, Female Genital Cutting (FGC),
describes a range of practices from reduction of the clitoris to the removal of parts
of the labia (infibulation). Amnesty International sticks with Female Genital Muti-
lation (FGM) in order to emphasize its decision to treat these practices as torture
and as human rights violations. Terms used by those who wish to indicate respect
for cultural practices include female circumcision and excision. Nwapa’s term “bath”
emphasizes FGC’s role in a purification ritual.
23. Nwapa does not specify which form of circumcision is performed, but it
seems likely from the geographical and cultural locations, as well as from the later
narration of childbirth, that Efuru has undergone excision of her clitoris rather than
the more radical infibulation. See U. Megafu, “Female Ritual Circumcision in Africa:
An Investigation of the Presumed Benefits among Ibos of Nigeria” (1983).
24. A later novelist, Buchi Emecheta, takes up Nwapa’s phrase, “the joys of moth-
erhood,” and gives it a darkly ironic reworking in her novel of that name.
25. See the summary, “Female Genital Cutting,” at http://www.4woman.gov/
faq/fgc.htm#11 (accessed 8 March 2005). The U.K., several European nations, and
indeed some African countries have similar laws. Whether they can be enforced is
another matter.
 Notes to Pages 139–48 205

26. For an exploration of insider and outsider views of the practice, see Ellen
Gruenbaum, The Female Circumcision Controversy: An Anthropological Perspective
(2001).
27. See Isabelle R. Gunning, “Uneasy Alliances and Solid Sisterhood: A Response
to Professor Obiora’s Bridges and Barricades” (1997). Gunning reports that “it is not
an accident that it is [Walker’s] work that has been frequently identified as having
elevated the surgeries in the popular consciousness of Western feminists; African
activists whose concern and activity preceded Walker’s were not heard” (452–53).
See also Elisabeth Bekers, “Daughters of Africa W/Riting Change: Female Genital
Excision in Two African Short-Stories and in Alice Walker’s Possessing the Secret of
Joy” (1999), in which Bekers argues that Walker creates “the impression that African
women are not able to fight their battles completely by themselves” (267).
28. Micere Githae Mugo, “Elitist Ant-Circumcision Discourse as Mutilating and
Anti-Feminist” (1997). Mugo criticizes Walker for her depiction of Africa as “con-
descending and touristic,” arguing that Walker’s “philosophical outlook is informed
by colonial and missionary conceptions of Africa” and that Walker’s denunciation of
female genital cutting silences and vilifies the victims of the practice (464).
29. On the external messiah syndrome exemplified by Alice Walker, see L. Amede
Obiora, “The Issue of Female Circumcision: Bridges and Barricades, Rethinking
Polemics and Intransigence in the Campaign against Female Circumcision” (1997).

Chapter 6

1. See, for instance, the teaching anthology edited by Peter and Renata Singer, The
Moral of the Story: An Anthology of Ethics Through Literature (2005).
2. See Jonathan Rose, The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes (2001),
76. Solitary reading and private study were distrusted, Rose discovers, as “selfish and
unneighborly” (86).
3. See Philip Gourevitch, who not only writes of the hard-hearted responses to
the pleas of Rwandan victims, but also offers an explanation: “Genocide, after all, is
an exercise in community building.” We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will
Be Killed with Our Families (1998), 95. See also Batson, “Empathy-Induced Altru-
ism” (2004) on the limitations of empathy in dealing with large-scale problems of
long duration (372–73).
4. Indeed, human rights are not exempted from criticism. Some regard “the
whole idea of ‘universal’ human rights” as a “gigantic fraud, where Western imperial-
ist or excolonial powers try to pass off their own, very specific and localized idea of
what ‘rights’ should be as universal, trampling roughly over everyone elses’s beliefs
and traditions.” See Stephen Howe, Empire: A Very Short Introduction (2002), 3. For
a good starting point on this debate, see Mary Williams’s collection, Human Rights:
Opposing Viewpoints (1998).
5. See 3–4 above for the distinction between personal distress, a nonmoral emo-
tional reaction that is not likely to lead to prosocial behavior, and empathy (or
sympathy). See Nancy Eisenberg, “Emotion, Regulation, and Moral Development”
(2000) for a review of the current research on the role of emotion in morality.
206 Notes to Pages 148–59

6. On this point, see also Patricia Melzer, “‘All that you touch you change’”
(2002), 45.
7. See also Peter G. Stillman, “Dystopian Critiques, Utopian Possibilities, and
Human Purposes in Octavia Butler’s Parables” (2003), 23.
8. On Parable of the Sower as slave narrative, see Raffaela Baccollini, “Gender and
Genre in the Feminist Critical Dystopias of Katharine Burdekin, Margaret Atwood,
and Octavia Butler” (2000); on race, see Jerry Phillips, “The Intuition of the Future:
Utopia and Catastrophe in Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower” (2002).
9. See Samuel and Pearl Oliner, The Altruistic Personality (1988), 188 and Goure-
vitch’s account of failed appeals from genocide victims in We Wish to Inform You
(1998), 42–43, 135, 141–42. Butler would probably concur with Richard Delgado’s
character Roderigo’s assessment that empathy for racial minorities is on the decline
(Coming Race War? 8). She depicts mixed race and minority characters as especially
vulnerable to persecution, robbery, rape, and murder.
10. For extrapolation of these views, see Charles Rowell’s interview with Butler,
“An Interview with Octavia E. Butler” (1997), 47–66.
11. See, for examples, Tom Le Clair, “The Sri Lankan Patients” (2000), 31 and the
unsigned review “Brrr!” (2000), 14.
12. Among the finest articles are those by Teresa Derrickson, on the narratives of
justice that global human rights discourse produces and Ondaatje’s oblique inter-
vention in the debate about globalization; and Antoinette Burton, on the evidence
of bones in the archives of twentieth-century violence. See Teresa Derrickson, “Will
the ‘Un-Truth’ Set You Free? A Critical Look at Global Human Rights Discourse in
Michael Ondaatje’s Anil’s Ghost” (2004) and Antoinette Burton, “Archive of Bones:
Anil’s Ghost and the Ends of History” (2004).
13. Novel readers in this case include my college-aged students and a group of
mature readers with whom I discussed Anil’s Ghost at the Rockbridge Regional
Library, Lexington, Virginia, in 2001. See also the reviews posted by readers at Ama-
zon.com.
14. For a list of the qualities that define the subgenre of archival research quests,
see Keen, Romances of the Archive (2001), 35. For the role of empathy in realistic
narratives of archival research, see 183–207.
15. Surveying the recent studies, Nancy Eisenberg concludes that a “real, albeit
sometimes modest” relation between situational sympathetic concern and proso-
cial responses exists in children. The leap between the original empathetic response
and sympathy does not invariably occur if, for instance, personal distress provokes
an aversive emotional state rather than an other-oriented emotion. See Eisenberg,
“Emotion, Regulation, and Moral Development,” 671–73.
16. In social psychology, this problem is investigated under the term moral dis-
engagement, by which people take restraints and self-judgments offline. Deficient
empathy explains inhumanity more widespread than can be explained by the exis-
tence of sociopaths. See Albert Bandura, “Moral Disengagement in the Perpetuation
of Inhumanities” (1999) and “Reflexive Empathy: On Predicting More Than Has
Ever Been Observed” (2002).
17. These critics assume that empathy will be inaccurate and that misunder-
standing and harm will result from the misunderstanding. Psychologists who work
on empathic accuracy agree that incorrect empathetic assessments can have bad
 Notes to Pages 160–65 207

results in human relations and communication, but they emphasize the relative rar-
ity of failures of empathy. For my discussion of what I term empathic inaccuracy, see
136–41 above.
18. The reverse statement of this gender determinism praises females for their
empathy while noticing the dominating habits of males.
19. See, for instance, Lila Abu-Lughod and Catherine A. Lutz, “Introduction:
Emotion, Discourse, and the Politics of Everyday Life” (1990). For a survey of recent
cross-cultural work on the emotions, see David Matsumoto, “Culture and Emotion”
(2001).
20. See, for instance, the text of the United Nations’ Universal Declaration of
Human Rights (1948) at the UN’s Web site, http://www.un.org/Overview/rights
.html (accessed 5 May 2005); on human capabilities, see Amartya Sen, Inequality
Reexamined (1992).
21. Developmental psychologists, as we have earlier seen, regard empathy as a
faculty that develops in individuals over time, from simple emotional contagion
to mature sympathy. Some thus criticize as mechanistic the overemphasis on neu-
roanatomical explanations of empathy. See, for example, Phillipe Rochat, “Various
Kinds of Empathy as Revealed by the Developing Child, Not the Monkey’s Brain”
(2002).
22. One recent study of advertising shows that “other-focused” appeals lead to
more favorable attitudes in members of individualist cultures, while “ego-focused”
appeals garner better responses from members of collectivist cultures (based on
a comparison of the responses of American and Chinese students). See Jennifer
L. Aaker and Patti Williams, “Empathy Versus Pride: The Influence of Emotional
Appeals across Cultures” (1998).
23. See Patrick Colm Hogan, The Mind and Its Stories (2003), 46, 66, 74–75, 81.
24. See Patrick Colm Hogan, “Stories and Morals: Emotion, Cognitive Exempla,
and the Arabic Aristotelians” (2004), 43.
25. Absolute universals need not recur in all works, but in all traditions; statistical
universals occur across traditions with greater frequency than chance alone predicts
(Hogan, Mind and Its Stories 19).
26. On mahakaruna, or great compassion, see Hammalawa Saddhatissa, Buddhist
Ethics (1997) 27–29, 136–37.
27. For an array of views and subtle interrogations of compassion, see Laren Ber-
lant, ed., Compassion: The Culture and Politics of an Emotion (2004).
28. Often, in recent years, disapprovingly. A typical strong case against what
Hogan calls categorical identity and empathy appears in Audrey Jaffe, Scenes of Sym-
pathy (2000), 22.
29. See I. A. Richards’s gloss in Mencius on the Mind: Experiments in Multiple Defi-
nition (1932), 20.
30. On the imperatives of warm, agent-based virtue ethics regarding the treat-
ments of others, including sentient nonhumans such as dolphins and chimpanzees,
see Slote, Morals from Motives (2001), 37. Slote writes, “If we assume that human
beings have a basic capacity for empathy and sympathy with others (an assumption
the moral sentimentalists tended to make . . . ), then making someone vividly aware
of the effects of certain kinds of actions (or attitudes) on people’s welfare can change
the way that person feels about those actions (or attitudes) and make a difference, for
208 Notes to Page 166

good, to her act-effecting motives.” On caring, see in addition to Slote, Nel Noddings,
Caring: A Feminine Approach to Ethics and Moral Education (1984).
31. On the limitations of reading alone, see Darcia Narvaez, “Does Reading Moral
Stories Build Moral Character” (2002). Narvaez finds that children do not predict-
ably understand the themes of moral stories as intended by the author (or by the
adult presenting them).
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 INDEX

Accuracy, empathic, 28, 136–7 not related to empathetic reading,

Achebe, Chinua, 162 90–2, 99, 116, 145
Action, prosocial, see behavior, prosocial rarity of, 150, 159
Adamson, Sylvia, 97 reciprocal, 9, 15–6 (see also recipro-
Adisa, Opal Palmer, 137–8 cation, expectancy of)
Aesthetics, 28, 34 (see also pleasure, resulting in injustice, 145 (see also
aesthetic) injustice, empathic)
German, 185 n. 87, 189 n. 31, 55–6 studies of readers’ empathy and,
(see also Lee, Vernon) 90–2
Romantic, 188 n. 22 Amygdala, 14, 153
status of emotions in, ix, xxv, 28, Anand, Mulk Raj, 142
55–6, 74, 176 n. 30, 195 n. 69 Anderson, Benedict, xx
Agency, illusion of independent (IIA) Aristotelians, Arabic, 163
125–6, 127, 129, 134–5 Aristotle, 41, 56, 130, 186
Aiken, Anna Laetitia, 46–7, 50 Armstrong, Paul B., 147
Ainsworth, William Harrison, 131 Arthur, T. S., 186
Alcott, Louisa May 71, 73, 76 Ashcroft, Bill, 161–2
Alexithymia, 9 Attunement, 49
Alienation, see V-effekt Atwood, Margaret, 71, 121–2
Aliteracy, xvi–xviii, 108–9, 192 n. 39 Austen, Jane, 63, 79, 96
Altruism Autism, 6, 9–10, 71
authors’ efforts to provoke, 130 (see
also empathizing, strategic) Baron-Cohen, Simon, 6–7, 8
community-building and, 148, 149 Barry, the Reverend Edward, 37
critiques of, 154, 162, 164 Batson, C. Daniel, 22, 91
as evidenced in prosocial behavior, Beardsley, Monroe, xi, 58, 202–3 n. 1
xxii, 4 Behavior, prosocial
historical cases of, 23–6 ambition of authors to inspire, 141
as impeded by diffusion of responsi- as correlating to literary reading, xvii,
bility, 117 84, 168
as motivated by empathic emotion, depicted in fiction, 21, 154
vii, x, xxii, 22, 143, 162 (see also as evidencing the empathy-altruism
hypothesis, empathy-altruism) hypothesis, xxii, 18–26
as motivated by novel reading, xiii, limitations of narrative empathy in
20–2, 25, 78, 118 producing, xxiii, 4, 16, 105, 113,
as motivated by perspective-taking, 115–9, 146
90–2, 168 as a result of empathic guilt, xiii
236 Index

Bennett, Arnold, 58 Coduction, 63, 91, 146

Bennett, William J., vii Cognition
Bias as an aspect of empathetic response,
familiarity, xi, xix, xxi, 14, 19–20, xxii, 26–8
42 Brecht’s rejection of empathy in
gender, x, xiv, 13, 41–2, 58, 90, 103 favor of, 56–7
“here and now,” xxi, 19–20, 42 in Hume’s A Treatise of Human
Blackwood, John, 53 Nature, 42–3
Bleich, David, 77 as involved in narrative empathy,
Bloom, Allan, 90 26–8
Bloom, Harold, 119 as limiting empathic responsiveness,
Blum, Lawrence, 185 n. 88 69
Booth, Wayne in perspective-taking, 9, 14–6
on challenging readers for their bet- Cognitivism, literary, xi, 27, 34, 65
terment, 59 Cohn, Dorrit, 97
on coduction, 63, 91, 146 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 49–50, 135
on complexity of readers’ responses, Companions, imaginary, 125, 127
95 Compton-Burnett, Ivy, 189
conversations with readers, 63, 65–6 Conrad, Joseph, 60
on inside views of characters, 96–7 Contagion, emotional
on narrative ethics and narrative as an element of empathy, 28
techniques, 98 in Hume’s A Treatise of Human
Bortolussi, Marisa, 93, 95, 98 Nature, 42–3
Bourg, Tammy, 85, 87–8, 170 as involving mirror neurons, 40
Bowen, Elizabeth, 25 as motor mimicry, 5–6
Bray, Charles, 54 in narrative empathy, 135–6, 137
Brecht, Bertholt, 56–7, 87, 88, 189 in neonates, 17
Brontë, Charlotte, 38, 67, 69–70, 73, 77 as primitive empathy, 14
Brontë, Emily, 79 in rescuers and bystanders, 24
Buck, Pearl S., 115 in Romantic poetic theory, 50
Burke, Edmund, 186 n. 5 vulnerability of, 150
Burnett, Frances Hodgson, 73, 80 Conway, F. R., 127–8
Burney, Frances, xix–xx Cosmides, Leda, 27
Butler, Octavia, xxiv, 122, 148–52, 158, Covey, Stephen, 11
160 Cunningham, Michael, 103
Byatt, A. S., 66
Bystanders, 17, 22, 23–5, 117–8 Dadlez, E. M., 27
Dalai Lama, 115
Calvino, Italo, 68 Damasio, Antonio, xi, 27
Capote, Truman, 66 Dana, Richard Henry, 186 n. 2
Card, Orson Scott, 123 Dangarembga, Tsitsi, 110
Carey, John, 167 Danticat, Edwidge, 71, 73, 107
Carey, Peter, 76, 131, 191 Darley, J. M., 117
Charon, Rita, 180–1 n. 40 Darwin, Charles, 9, 177
Circumcision, female, see FGC Davidson, Richard J., 163
Clark, Suzanne, 58 Davies, Stevie, 122–3
Clubs, book, see groups, book Davis, Mark, 15, 126–7, 182
 Index 237

Defamiliarization, ix, xxii, 55–7, 86–8, Edmundson, Mark, 40, 101

90 Egalitarianism, 24–5, 62, 63–4
Defoe, Daniel, 37 Einfühlung, 4, 39, 55–6, 185 n. 87, 188
Delgado, Richard, 147, 156–7 n. 22
DeLillo, Don, 104, 131 Eisenberg, Nancy
Desai, Anita, 110 on empathy-altruism hypothesis, 22
de Sousa, Ronald, 27 (see also hypothesis, empathy-
de Waal, Frans B. M., 8, 14 altruism)
Dewey, John, 93, 195 n. 69 on empathy as affective and cogni-
Dick, Philip K., 6, 78 tive, 28
Dickens, Charles on gender and empathy, 7, 13, 78
celebrity of, 67 on karuna, 163
characters of, 62, 67 Ekman, Paul, 88, 161
modernist break with aims of, 56 Eliot, George
as popular novelist, 67, 102 modernist break with aims of, 56
readers’ empathy for, 81–2 readers’ empathy for characters of, 75
readers’ empathy for characters of, recommended by Martha Nussbaum,
69, 74, 76 xviii, 83
recommended by Martha Nussbaum, on the sympathetic imagination, xxv,
xviii, 54, 83 38, 53–4
success in swaying public opinion, 38, Eliot, T. S., 57–8
52–3, 118, 140 Elster, Jon, 178
Discussion, importance of, xiv, 146–7 Emotions
(see also coduction) negative, xii, 5, 18, 41, 71–2, 150–1
Disengagement, moral, 45–6, 54–5, paradox of fictional, 176 n. 30
147, 152, 159 universal human, viii, ix, xxiii, xxiv,
Disorder, antisocial personality, 10 8, 57, 81, 113–4, 141, 147, 152,
Dispositions, range of human empa- 159–63
thetic, xii, xv, xxv, 3, 10, 35, Empaths, 10, 122, 123, 148–52
88–9 Empathy
Disraeli, Benjamin, 38 categorical, 95–6, 164–5
Dissociation, 89, 122, 128 definitions of, xx, 4–5
Distress, personal failed, xxiv, 19–20, 54–5, 159–60,
authors’ tendency to experience, 165
126 false, xxiv, 156–7, 159–60
defined, 4 fantasy, xv, 35, 126–7, 128
depicted in fiction, 148, 149 females’ capacity for, 6–8, 116
as a form of empathic responsive- mass, 20
ness, 19 narrative
an impediment to altruism, 24 abjured, 150, 152
as a result of reading, xiii, 4–5, 134, of authors, 121, 123–4, 130–1,
135, 177 n. 11 135–6
Dixon, Peter, 93, 94, 98 cognitive elements of, 28
Dovidio, J. F., 22 critique of, 162–3
Duane, Diane, 180 n. 33 inaccuracy of, 139–40 (see also
Dubey, Madhu, 151 inaccuracy, empathic)
Dubus, Andre, 115–6 in narrative medicine, 11–12
238 Index

Empathy (continued) social-problem, xxii, 38, 48, 52, 54,

narrative 152
narrative techniques involved in, Fictionality, perception of
90–99 as a contribution to readers’ empathy,
perception of fictionality and, xii–xiv, 4, 69, 168
88–9 as eliminating expectancy of recipro-
proposals about, 169–71 cation, 16
readers’ experiences of, 35, 65–84, paratexts role in, 98, 176 n. 5
88–9 research on readers’, xxii, 28–35, 89,
in relation to empathy-altruism 106–7
hypothesis, 18, 20–1, 90–2, 105, and suspension of disbelief, 88–9,
108, 145–7, 150 176–7 n. 5
theory of, xii–xv, xxiii–xxv, 168, Finlay, Krystina A., 107–8
169–71 Fitzgerald, F. Scott, 167
and virtual reality, 39–40 Fogle, Richard Harter, 188 n. 22
physiological measures of, xx–xxi, Foregrounding, xiii, 93, 94
13–15, 136, 175–6 n. 26 Forster, E. M., 58, 60, 95, 125
primitive, 4, 14–15, 24 Fowles, John, 125
research on gender difference in, 6–9, Fox, Stephen, 132
13 Franzen, Jonathan, 104
situational, xii, 79–81, 95–6, 164, Freud, Sigmund, 121, 125, 159, 185 n.
198 n. 96 87
strategic, xiv, xxiv, 142–3, 146
ambassadorial, xiv, 142 Gallagher, Catherine, 159–60
bounded, xiv, 142 Gallup, Gordon G., 160–1
broadcast, xiv, 142 Galsworthy, John, 58
tests, xiii, 6, 7, 13–5, 89, 126–7, 136, Gandhi, Indira, 111
181–2 n. 49 Gaskell, Elizabeth, 38, 52, 56, 67
Evans, Dylan, 114 Genocide, xix, xxi, 23–5, 167, 205
Evans, Mary Ann, see Eliot, George Genovese, Kitty, 202 n. 38
Excision, see FGC Gerrig, Richard J., 79, 95, 177 n. 5
Gilroy, Paul,
Fallacy Gioia, Dana, xvi–xviii
affective, xi, 58 Godwin, William, 47
intentional, 202–3 n. 1 Golden, Arthur, 101, 129
Feagin, Susan, 27 Goldfarb, Sheldon, 80
FGC (Female Genital Cutting), 138– Goldsworthy, Kerryn, 79
41, 204 n. 22 Gordimer, Nadine, 131
FGM, see FGC Graham, Tiffany, 7
Fiction Gramsci, Antonio, 156
detective, 123 Greene, Sandra E., 139
didactic, 18, 20, 52, 53, 59 Griffiths, Gareth, 161–2
historical, 101, 123 Groups, book, x, xv, xxi, 60, 104–5,
paradox of, 176–7 n. 30 109–16, 147
psychologists’ use of, 12–13 Guilt, empathic, xiii, 18, 92
science, 10, 123, 148 Gunn, Thom, 157
sensation, xxii, 38, 48, 52–3 Gupta, Sunetra, 110
 Index 239

Haddon, Mark, 123, 180 research on narrative empathy and,

Hakemulder, Jèmeljan, 85, 89–92, 93, 84, 90–2
94, 105–6, 108
Hardwick, Elizabeth, 63–4 Ickes, William, 7, 28
Hardy, Thomas, 38, 110 Inaccuracy, empathic, xiii, xxiv, 130,
Harrington, Anne, 163 136–40, 141, 158, 159
Härting, Heike, 157 Index, Interpersonal Reactivity (IRI),
Hartman, Geoffrey, 26 126–7, 182
Hassan, Ihab, 165–6 Induction, 18
Hazlitt, William, 48–9 In-groups, attitudes of, x, 142–3, 164
Hemingway, Ernest, 189 Injustice, empathic
Highsmith, Patricia, 67 as empathic consciousness of injus-
Hobbes, Thomas, 159 tice, 19, 34, 70, 113, 142, 158
Hoffman, Martin as unfairness resulting from empathy,
on emotion and cognition in 17, 22–3, 145
empathic processes, 28, 184 n. Israel, Nico, 110
85
on empathic injustice, 31, 113, 158 Jaffe, Audrey, 187, n. 18
(see also injustice, empathic) Jaggi, Maya, 154
on empathy-altruism hypothesis, James, Henry
92, 170 (see also hypothesis, “centers of consciousness,” 58
empathy-altruism) ethical effects of reading, xxv, 83,
on empathy and moral development, 145
xiii–xiv, 16–22, 35 A Portrait of a Lady, 145
on human dispositions, 15 recommended by Martha Nussbaum,
on mimicry, 7 vii, xviii, 54
on narrative empathy, 108, 170 James, William, 189 n. 39
on primitive empathy, 7, 15 Jen, 165
Hogan, Patrick Colm, 95–6, 163–4, Johnson, Samuel, 42
171, 193 n. 51, 198 n. 96 Jouissance, 5
Home, Henry Lord Kames, 44–5, 56, Joyce, James, 38, 58–9
186 n. 7 Justice
Hughes, Thomas, 70 as a consequence of empathy, vii,
Hugo, Victor, 108 xviii, 20–2, 108, 112, 115, 152,
Hulme, Keri, xxiv, 110, 129, 132–5, 154
136 impeded by narrative empathy,
Hume, David, x, xxii, 4, 14, 42–4, 49, xxiv, 147–8 (see also injustice,
149 empathic)
Hunt, Lynn, xix–xx, 25, 35
Hypothesis, empathy-altruism, vii, 3, Karuna, 163
16–26, 145–6, 148 Keating, AnaLouise, 151
adaptive explanation of, 9, 15 Keats, John, 188 n. 22
critique of, 35, 145, 159 Kehoe, John, 106
extended to effects of novel reading, Kidd, Sue Monk, vii, 103–4, 124
xiv, 63–4, 105 Kidman, Nicole, 103
not a consequence of novel reading, King, Stephen, 67
65, 90–2, 99, 167–8 Kingsley, Charles, 53
240 Index

Kruger, D. J., 15–16 on literariness, 87, 96–7

Kuiken, Don, 85, 87, 89, 94, 170 Literary Response Questionnaire
(LRQ), 89
Lahiri, Jhumpa, 110 on prosocial behavior of readers,
Lang, Andrew, 63, 64 88–9, 170
László, János, 81 on readers’ engagement, 94, 95, 170
Latane, B., 117 Mimicry, motor, 5, 7, 17, 39, 40, 42–3,
Lawrence, D. H., 59, 66, 67 55
Leavis, F. R., xviii, 39 Mistry, Rohinton, 105, 110–5, 117–9,
LeDoux, Joseph, xi, 14, 27 123
Lee, Harper, 146 Moody, Ellen, 78–9
Lee, Vernon, 55–6, 74, 185 n. 87 Morris, Errol, 105–6
Lenard, Mary, 77 Morrison, Toni, 63, 104
Lennon, Randy, 7 Mott, Frank Luther, 61–2
Lewes, George Henry, 38 Mukherjee, Bharati, 107, 110, 122
Lewis, Wyndham, 189 n. 38 Murdoch, Iris, 126
Libraries, circulating, 38, 45, 46, 52, Mutilation, female genital, see FGC
53, 61
Lipps, Theodor, 55, 178 n. 17, 185 n. Nabokov, Vladimir, 167
87, 186 n. 3 Nafisi, Azar, vii, 166–7
Literariness, 87, 96–7 Narayan, R. K., 110
Lodge, David, 97–8, 124–5 Nehring, Cristina, 40
Louwerese, Max, 94 Nell, Victor, 25, 28–9, 85, 195
Lowry, Lois, 122 Neurons, mirror, viii, 4, 40, 69, 162,
Lucas, George, 67 182–3 n. 56
Neuroscience, viii, 7, 13–15, 27, 85,
Maat, H. Pander, 97–8, 198 Ngai, Sianne, 5
MacDonald, Andrew, see Pierce, Dr. Nucci, Larry P., 146, 147
William Nussbaum, Martha, xviii
Mackenzie, Henry, 46 canonical novelists valued by, xviii,
MacNamara, Robert, 105–6 20, 54, 83
Madonna, 67 on empathy, xviii, 25, 35
Mandela, Winnie, 137 on ethical effects of reading, vii, xviii,
Marlin, John, 106 xxi, 25, 62
Martel, Yann, 200 falsifiable claims of, 92
McVeigh, Timothy, 127–8 on formation of “good world citizens,”
Medicine, narrative, 11–12, 180–1 vii, xviii, 23
Mehaffy, Marilyn, 151 Nwapa, Flora, 130, 138–9
Melville, Herman, 186
Mencius, 165 Oatley, Keith, 93–4, 176 n. 30, 194 n.
Miall, David S. 60
on decline of literary reading, 175 n. Obama, Barack, 115
21, 193–4 n. 54 Oliner, Pearl, 23–5, 165
on dehabituation, 87, 96–7 Oliner, Samuel, 23–5, 165
on empathy in literary reading, 85, Ondaatje, Michael, xxiv, 152–9
88–89, 170 Out-groups, attitudes to
on foregrounding effects, 94 negative, 142–3
 Index 241

possibility of changing, 22, 91–2, Reading at Risk, xvi–xviii, 84–5, 86

105–8, 145, 162–66 Reality, virtual, 39, 40, 122, 150
reading a source of more positive, Reciprocation, expectancy of, 15–16,
xix, xxiii, 111–5 22, 26
Rescuers, holocaust, 23–5
Paget, Violet, see Lee, Vernon Responsibility, diffusion of, xxiii, 117,
Palmer, Frank, 201 146
Panksepp, Jaak, 178 n. 13 Rhys, Jean, 191
Paretsky, Sara, 125 Richards, I. A., 76
Parker, Mary-Louise, 115 Richardson, Samuel, 37, 45
Paton, Alan, 104 Rights, human, 158
Phelan, James, 101 discourse
Pierce, Dr. William, 127–8 critique of empathy’s role in, 47,
Pierre, DBC, 71 147
Piliavin, J. A., 22 as dependent on essentializing,
Pinch, Adela, 43 147, 161
Pinker, Steven, xviii, xxv, 25 origins of, xix–xx, 25
Pirandello, Luigi, 125–6 representations of abuses of, 153–4
Plaatje, Sol T., 116 Rolls, Edmund T., 182 n. 55
Platek, Steven M., 160–1 Rooney, Kathleen, 115
Pleasure, aesthetic, 168 Rosenblatt, Louise, 65
abjured, 47–8, 156 Rowling, J. K., 117, 125, 129–30
limitations of, 154, 155 Roy, Arundhati, 110
as a precursor to involvement, 55–6, Rule, the Golden, 163, 164
93 Rushdie, Salman, 106, 108, 110
Pope, Alexander, 48
Pornography, 39–40, 47–8 Said, Edward, xx
POSE (Problem of the Other’s Subjec- Samaritan, parable of the good, 164–5
tive Experience), 14 Sánta, Ferenc, 81
Posner, Richard, 147, 150 Scale, Dissociative Experiences (DES)
Powers, Samantha, 176 n. 29 128
Preston, Stephanie, 8, 14 Scanlan, Margaret, 153, 156
Price, Leah, 86 Schadenfreude, xx
Psychopaths, 10, 131 Scholes, Robert, 63
Psychotherapy, client-centered, 10–11, Schulman, Sarah, 122
180 n. 38 Scott, Ridley, 6, 78
Pullman, Philip, 125 Scott, Walter, 52
Sebold, Alice, 103
Questionnaire, Literary Response Sensibility, literature of, xxii, 44–8,
(LRQ), 89 50–1, 53, 62
Sentimentalism, moral, viii, 41, 42–55
Rabinowitz, Peter J., 81, 142 Sentimentality, 45–6
Rahmah, 163 Seth, Vikram, 110
Rand, Ayn, 63 Sewall, Anna, 68
Rasa, 163 Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 49–50, 58
Rawls, John, 183 Shields, Stephanie, 178–9
Reading, research on, xvi–xviii, 84–92 Shute, Nevil, 101
242 Index

Sidney, Philip, 56 Titchener, E. B., 185 n. 87, 186 n. 3

Silko, Leslie Marmon, 129, 131 Todd, Janet, 46
Sinclair, Upton, 117, 118 Tolkien, J. R. R., 68
Singer, Peter, 22–3, 183 Tolstoi, Leo, 79, 116
Singer, Tania, 13–15 Tooby, John, 27
Smiley, Jane, 124 Treece, Henry, 101
Smith, Adam, x, xxii, 4, 41, 42–4, 49 Trilling, Lionel, xviii
Smith, Alexander McCall, 29–34, 123 Twain, Mark, 21
Sociopaths, 9–10
Spencer, Herbert, 9 Ungerleider, Charles, 106
Spyri, Johanna, 73, 80 Universality, critique of
Stanzel, Franz, 97 as essentializing, 8, 141
Stead, C. K., 132–3, 135 with respect to emotions, xxiv,
Steiber, Ellen, 122 147–8, 159–66
Steig, Michael, 72 with respect to human traits, viii,
Steinbeck, John, 104, 108 141
Stephan, Walter G., 107–8
Stockwell, Peter, xi van Peer, Willie, 97–8
Stowe, Harriet Beecher V-effekt (Verfremsdungseffekt), 56–7,
altruism depicted by, 21 189 n. 35
cause of abolition advanced by, 38,
52, 140 Walker, Alice, xxiv, 117–8, 123, 125,
recommended by Martha Nussbaum, 140–1
54 Waller, Robert James, 82–3, 145
success in swaying public opinion, Weldon, Fay, 67
118, 140 Wells, H. G., 58
Strayer, Janet, 22, 28 Wharton, Edith, 71
Streep, Meryl, 103 Williams, Mark, 133
Sublime, the, 41 Williams, Preston N., 141
Sundby, Scott, 11 Williams, Raymond, 45–6, 54–5, 147,
Suture, 186 152, 159
Sympathy, xxi, 4–5, 41–4, 50 Wimsatt, W. K., xi, 58, 202–3 n. 1
Syndrome, Asperger’s, 10, 70–1 Winfrey, Oprah, x, xxiii, 60, 64, 104–5,
109–19
Tademy, Lalita, 116 Wing, Lorna, 10
Tan, Amy, 79 Winnicott, D. W., 190 n. 6
Tan, Ed S., 190 n. 3 Wood, Marcus, 47–8, 147, 160
Tarkington, Booth, 62 Woolf, Virginia, 58–60, 61, 62, 81, 97,
Taylor, John Tinnon, 45 103
Taylor, Marjorie, xiii, 125–9, 170 Wordsworth, William, 50–1, 54
Techniques, empathetic narrative, 92–9
Thackeray, William Makepeace, 77, 80 Zillman, Dolf, 196–7 n. 80, 198 n. 96
Thiongo, Ngugi wa, 142 Zola, Émile, 110
Tiffin, Helen, 161–2 Zunshine, Lisa, 34, 197, 198