Teaching Sympathy in Rural Places: Readers’ Moral Education in Nineteenth-Century British Literature

TEACHING SYMPATHY IN RURAL PLACES: READERS’ MORAL EDUCATION IN NINETEENTH-CENTURY BRITISH LITERATURE DISSERTATION Presented in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate School of The Ohio State University By Kyoung-Min Han, M.A. * * * * * The Ohio State University 2006 Dissertation Committee: Professor Clare Simmons, Adviser Approved by Professor David G. Riede Professor Marlene Longenecker __________________________ Professor Amanpal Garcha Adviser Graduate Program in English ABSTRACT My dissertation explores nineteenth-century British authors’ views of the moral and educational function of literature, focusing specifically on how William Wordsworth, George Eliot, and Thomas Hardy addressed in literary forms the issues of sympathy and reading raised in the eighteenth century. In addition to making a similar claim about sympathy and reading—a central function of literature is to extend the readers’ capacities for sympathy through reading experience—all these authors attach major importance to rural life as subject matter in their sympathetic education of readers. By considering these authors’ representations of sympathetic relations in rural settings in relation to eighteenth-century thoughts on sympathy and reading, this dissertation aims to reach a more balanced and productive understanding of their “didactic” attempts to teach strategies of sympathy to readers. With the advent of liberalism and the emergence of the concept of a modern individual, the eighteenth century witnessed an enormous preoccupation with the issues of self-representation and sympathetic imagination, bringing up the idea that sympathy is not an immediate identification but only an imagined representation. The complicated epistemological and ethical questions about a sympathetic experience raised by eighteenth-century thinkers shed light on the approaches that Wordsworth, Eliot, and Hardy take to their sympathetic education of readers: by preventing their readers from indulging in superficial and painless feelings of sympathy, these authors seek to make ii readers conscious of the problems of the improper use of sympathetic imagination. In order to illustrate the specific methods that Wordsworth, Eliot, and Hardy employ to expand readers’ sympathetic minds, I focus on how they problematize the commonly accepted notions of sympathy through their representations of rural life or rural people. As the individual chapters of my dissertation show, each author wrote in different historical contexts and had different amounts of faith in the possibility of restoring the foundations of morality upon which meaningful human relations can be built. Nevertheless, all three authors continued in their efforts to interrogate the moral and educational possibilities of literature. iii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS This project has been a very long time in the making, and many people have offered me invaluable assistance and encouragement along the way. I am grateful to my adviser, Clare Simmons, for her extensive help conceptualizing how this project might work and for her invaluable advice on its various stages. I cannot imagine how I could have finished this long journey without her patience and support. I thank David G. Riede for his unfailingly incisive observations as well as his special interest in sympathy. I would like to thank Marlene Longenecker for her faith in this project and her careful reading of my drafts. I thank Amanpal Garcha for his intellectual stimulation and his help in constructing the theoretical frame. There is no way I can ever thank any of this wonderfully supportive committee enough. I would like to note my gratitude towards Lisa Kiser and all the graduate students in her Dissertation Reading Group. I am greatly indebted to the comments they made on various drafts of this project. I also need to thank my parents, my brother, and my sister for the many years of support they have provided and for the abundance of patience they have continually displayed. An extra special thanks to my husband, Yonghwa Lee, with whom I have argued, consulted, and conferred, for seeing me through this from start to finish, for reading innumerable drafts, for never tiring of hearing me complain. Finally, I thank God for guiding me through everything. iv VITA September 5, 1973 . Born - Cheonju, Korea 1996 . B.A. Seoul National University, Seoul, Korea 1999 . M.A. Seoul National University, Seoul, Korea 1999 – 2001 . M.A. Graduate Student The Ohio State University 2001 – present . Graduate Teaching Assistant and Lecturer, The Ohio State University PUBLICATION Research publication Kyoung-Min Han. “Hope Leslie: Novelistic Rewriting of American History.” Native Women in the Arts, Education, and Leadership: Proceedings of the Sixth Native American Symposium. Durant, OK: Southeastern Oklahoma State U, 2006. FIELDS OF STUDY Major Field: English v TABLE OF CONTENTS Page Abstract....................................................................................................................... ii Acknowledgments....................................................................................................... iv Vita.............................................................................................................................. v Chapters: 1. Introduction............................................................................................................. 1 2. Wordsworth’s Poetics of Sympathy: Pain, Pleasure, and Pity................................ 26 2.1 The Rural Poor in Lyrical Ballads and in “The Old Cumberland Beggar”...... 34 2.2 “Resolution and Independence”: A Study of Poetic Sympathy........................ 50 3. Wordsworth’s Poetics of Sympathy: Readers’ Education...................................... 58 3.1 Sympathetic Chains in The Ruined Cottage...................................................... 58 3.2 The Channeling of Sympathetic Lessons in The Prelude................................. 85 4. The Still, Sad, Music of Common Humanity.......................................................... 102 4.1 Re-reading “Hetty Sorrel’s story” in Adam Bede.............................................. 109 4.2 The Mill on the Floss: The River Strikes Back................................................. 130 5. Sympathy in Tragedy.............................................................................................. 157 5.1 Far from the Madding Crowd: a Pastoral Novel?............................................. 163 5.2“A general drama of pain”: Desire Ungratified in The Mayor of Casterbridge 185 6. Conclusion............................................................................................................... 216 Bibliography................................................................................................................. 221 vi CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION I hate books. They only teach one to talk about what one does not know. (184) —Jean-Jacques Rousseau Emile, or on Education Low and rustic life was generally chosen, because in that condition, the essential passions of the heart find a better soil in which they can attain their maturity, are less under restraint, and speak a plainer and more emphatic language. (356-57) —William Wordsworth Preface to Lyrical Ballads In his treatise Emile, or on Education (1762), Jean-Jacques Rousseau insists on a long delay in the introduction of books into Emile’s educational process. In his hatred of books, especially books of imaginative literature, Rousseau makes one exception for Robinson Crusoe, which he regards as “the most felicitous treatise on natural education” (184). Rousseau’s favorable view of Robinson Crusoe stems from the fact that the absence of any description of the state of social man in the novel protects Emile from exposure to “all notions of social relations which are not within his reach” (Emile 185). For Rousseau, Emile’s premature acquisition of knowledge of social relations is dangerous and unfit for his education because “the chain of knowledge forces you to show him the mutual dependence of men, instead of showing it to him from the moral side, turn all his attention at first toward industry and mechanical arts which make men 1 useful to one another” (185-86). Simply put, Rousseau is opposed to Emile’s reading of imaginative literature because he believes it promotes a misdirected understanding of human relationships, thereby presenting serious obstacles to Emile’s development of moral sensibility. Although it is not exactly an account of the negative force of books, Rousseau’s analysis of the corrupting influence of theater in Letter to M. d’Alembert on the Theater (1758) provides a more elaborate explanation for how Emile’s contact with imaginative literature can be detrimental to his moral growth when he is not ready: In giving our tears to these fictions, we have satisfied all the rights of humanity without having to give anything more of ourselves. In the final accounting, when a man has gone to admire fine actions in stories[fables] and to cry for imaginary miseries, what more can be asked of him? Is he not satisfied with himself? . Has he not acquitted himself of all that he owes to virtue by the homage which he has just rendered it? What more could one want of him? That he practice it himself? He has no role to play; he is no actor. (25) In this description of the negative effects of a theater viewing experience on one’s development of imaginative faculty, Rousseau is concerned especially about the influence

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