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Narrative Empathy for “The Other” in American Literature, 1845-1945

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Narrative Empathy for “The Other” in American Literature, 1845-1945 NARRATIVE EMPATHY FOR “THE OTHER” IN AMERICAN LITERATURE, 1845-1945 Patrick Emmet Horn A dissertation submitted to the faculty of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Department of English and Comparative Literature. Chapel Hill 2013 Approved by: Rebecka Rutledge Fisher Minrose Gwin Jennifer Ho Fred C. Hobson Timothy Marr ABSTRACT PATRICK E. HORN: Narrative Empathy for “the Other” in American Literature, 1845-1945 (Under the direction of Rebecka Rutledge Fisher) “Empathy” is a relatively new word in the English language, dating back to the early twentieth century as a translation of the German term Einfühlung (“in-feeling” or “feeling into” a work of art or another being). Yet the interpersonal relations that “empathy” encompasses are as old as human history, and literary depictions of empathy are as old as human narratives. Narrative empathy is a central trope of American literature because in a nation of immigrants and enslaved subjects who became fully recognized citizens—not to mention the native peoples who had always lived here—imaginative identification with unfamiliar “Others” became a constant necessity. Narrative empathy encompasses both diegetic empathy, or empathic relations between narrators and characters (or between multiple characters), and readerly empathy, or empathic relations between readers and narrators or characters within the text. Readerly empathy results from a complicated interplay between formal qualities, personal factors, and authorial information. Considering literary narratives as rhetorical situations reveals that narratives are conceived and received as interactions between authors, texts, and readers. Narrative judgments about how characters think, feel, and behave within the context of their particular storyworlds become more influential than any categorical identifications that we forge—either with or against characters—based on personal similarities or differences. Whereas “the Other” is perceived through a lens of radical and/or categorical alterity, empathy works against the logic of Otherness as an imaginative identification with an/other. ii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I am deeply indebted to the brilliant and generous members of my dissertation committee: Fred Hobson, Minrose Gwin, Timothy Marr, Jennifer Ho, and Rebecka Rutledge Fisher. Fred showed me how one scholar’s mentorship can produce a veritable field of academic offspring. Minrose exemplified the intellectual rigor of a subject matter expert who expects young scholars to engage carefully with the ideas of those who paved the way for their research. Tim encouraged me to think more expansively about how academic arguments can engage meaningfully with the real world beyond university walls, while also warning against asym- metrical engagements with the Other. Jennifer broadened the scope of my project, moving it beyond a binary black-and-white approach to American literature and critical race theory. And Rebecka worked tirelessly to help me grow into a more sophisticated critical reader—of American literature, of literary theory and criticism, and of my own work. To these talented and inspiring scholars I will always remain grateful. Much of my research has supported the notion that empathy is learned first and foremost in the context of one’s immediate family, and my own large family (which now includes a host of in-laws) has offered many opportunities for challenging and expanding my views on the subject. I was fortunate to have two loving and encouraging parents, who always supported my academic efforts and often charged me to “be the best!” Thank you, Mom and Dad, from the bottom of my heart. And to the rest of the Horns (including Rapisardos, Browns, Browders, and future family members), my love to you all. iii I was lucky to attend graduate school with a cohort of witty and wonderful colleagues, who are too many to name here. Special gratitude is due to my “Collective”—Jess Martell, Zack Vernon, and Sarah Marsh. We have studied together, traveled together, taught and tutored together, conducted archival research together, delivered conference panels together—with the Collective assembled, all things are possible! Through The Southern Literary Journal, I was also blessed to encounter an inspiring graduate mentor in Kristina Bobo, as well as a wise friend and coeditor in Jameela Dallis. If graduate school can be experienced with such wonderful fellow- travelers, it is bound to be a pleasure. My project has been supported and enriched by many other generous scholars, including Bill Ferris, Mary Floyd-Wilson, Jane Thrailkill, Bill Andrews, Tyler Curtain, Eliza Richards, Inger Brodie, Trudier Harris, Megan Matchinske, Fritz Breithaupt, Melanie Green, Jordan Carpenter, Ed Fisher, Mike Millner, Natalia Smith, Ralph Savarese, Vicki Russell, and Alex Ruch. I am very grateful to you all. And this work would never have been possible without my brilliant, beautiful, and patient wife, Sarah Rapisardo Horn, who trusted and tolerated me throughout the daunting and probably ill-advised process of pursuing doctorates together while raising a family. We survived! To Kaitlyn, Sophia, and Maris Mae, I thank you for not coloring in my books, and for reminding me that “work” and “life” should not be synonymous. iv TABLE OF CONTENTS INTRODUCTION………………………………………………………………………….1 Chapter I. A CRITICAL (PRE)HISTORY OF NARRATIVE EMPATHY.…………………….39 Narratology, Reader-Response Theory, and Cognitive Studies ……………...40 Representation, Identification, and “Pity” in Ancient Greek Philosophy……..53 Updating the Ancients: Eighteenth-Century Theories of Emotion……………57 Darwinian Evolution and the Expression of Emotions………………………..62 William James, Emotions, and the Question of Truth………………………...72 Twentieth-Century Pragmatism: Dewey on Emotional Experience…………..78 The Prehistory, in Hindsight…………………………………………………..82 Contemporary Science(s) of Empathy……………………………………...…85 II. INVITATIONS TO EMPATHY AND SYMPATHY IN ABOLITIONIST NARRATIVES……...………………………………………………………………..91 Stowe’s Stereotypes and the Possibility of Empathy…………………………92 Models of Manly Empathy in The Heroic Slave…………………………….104 Insidious Alterity and Unreliable Narration in Benito Cereno……………....116 Jacobs’s Direct Appeal for Empathy……………………..………………….122 III. EYEING THE OTHER: TRANSGRESSIVE LOVE AND AUTHORIAL EMPATHY IN TURN-OF-THE-CENTURY FICTION……………………………133 Racialism, Empathy, and Romance in Ramona ……………………………..135 The Look of Love: Eyes, Empathy, and Oxytocin …………………………..145 v Embattled Empathy in The Squatter and the Don …………………………...149 Ethnic Others and Transgressive Desire in My Ántonia……………………...161 Authorial Empathy and the Narrative Other………………………………….176 IV. NARRATIVE EMPATHY IN PROGRESSIVE ERA AUTOBIOGRAPHIES: THE LIVES OF OTHERS ………………………………..194 “A Man Among Men”: Implicit Appeals for Empathy in Douglass’s Autobiographies………………………………………………………………201 Reliving Dislocation: “Leaves from the Mental Portfolio of an Eurasian”…..211 Othering the Self and Turning the Tables: The Promised Land……………...224 V. EMPATHY, PERSPECTIVE, AND (MIS)JUDGMENTS IN MODERNIST FICTION……………………………………………………………..241 Judgment, Empathy, and Fantasy in The Great Gatsby………………………247 Empathy Through Deracialization and Focalization: Their Eyes Were Watching God…………………………………………………………………258 Misreading “the Other” as a Strategy of Narrative Empathy in Go Down, Moses………………………………………………………………268 CONCLUSION…………………………………………………………………………….285 WORKS CITED……………………………………………………………………………291 vi Introduction FEELING THEIR PAIN: NARRATIVE EMPATHY AND “OTHERS” IN AMERICAN LITERATURE AND THE WESTERN PHILOSOPHICAL TRADITION Conversations across boundaries of identity—whether national, religious, or something else—begin with the sort of imaginative engagement you get when you read a novel or watch a movie or attend to a work of art that speaks from some place other than your own. —K. Anthony Appiah, Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers (2006) In the opening chapters of Moby-Dick, when the white, male, native-born, and ostensibly Christian protagonist submits to sharing a bed with a “head-peddling savage” named Queequeg and subsequently resolves to “try a pagan friend,” Ishmael attempts to focus on the shared qualities of a fellow human, despite the radical and categorical differences between the two (34, 56). “The man’s a human being just as I am,” Ishmael considers. “Better [to] sleep with a sober cannibal than a drunken Christian” (36). This school of thought might be called narrative empathy for “the Other.” Queequeg is a foreigner by birth; he speaks in heavily accented English (when he speaks the language at all); he practices a religion that Ishmael does not understand; his athletic prowess borders on the bestial, and his culinary preferences (raw meat, whenever possible) hint darkly toward cannibalism. Ishmael’s attempts to overlook these differences—which his first-person narrative presents as noble and earnest gestures—allow him to praise Queequeg’s unselfishness, courage, and tact, and to imagine their mutual fates tethered together, just as their bodies become linked by the eponymous “monkey-rope” of Chapter 72. 1 But Ishmael’s imaginative identification with his strange bedfellow is not fully sustained throughout his narrative; as he grows more confident aboard the Pequod, his need for a “pagan friend” gradually diminishes (as do Queequeg’s appearances in the text). Over the course of the novel, Queequeg grows increasingly silent
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