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Vicarious Narratives: A Literary History
of Sympathy Jeanne M. Britton

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Vicarious Narratives
Vicarious Narratives
A Literary History of Sympathy,
1750–1850
JEANNE M. BRITTON
1
3
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First Edition published in 2019
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DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198846697.001.0001
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for my parents
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Acknowledgments
From its first incarnation as a dissertation at the University of Chicago and

through its transformations elsewhere, this book has benefitted from the
guidance, encouragement, and support of many people. My ideas about
sympathy were profoundly influenced by James Chandler. I am also grateful
to Thomas Pavel for nudging me to think more about characters in fictional
sympathetic encounters and Robert Morrissey for pushing me to think more
about the French Revolution. At the University of Chicago, I also benefitted
from the insights of Elaine Hadley, Sandra Macpherson, Robin Valenza, and
discussions of the Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Reading Group.
Generous support from the Franke Institute of Humanities propelled the
original project to completion. Early versions of portions of this book have
previously appeared in “Novelistic Sympathy in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein,”
Studies in Romanticism 48.1 (2009): 3–22; and “Translating Sympathy by
the Letter: Henry Mackenzie, Sophie de Condorcet, and Adam Smith,”
Eighteenth-Century Fiction 22.2 (2009): 71–98. I am grateful to the publishers
for their permission to use this material here.
At various points in this process, I have relied on the following people
for their advice, questions, generosity, and humor: Rachel Ablow, Sarah
Berry, Claire Colebrook, Danielle Coriale, Eurie Dahn, Susan Edmunds,
Paula Feldman, Mike Goode, Emily Harrington, Tony Jarrells, Nicholas
Joukovsky, Claudia Klaver, Patricia Roylance, Robin Schulze, Lisa Sternlieb,
and Linda Shires. Thanks to an Emerson Fellowship at Syracuse University,
I was able to devote substantial time to reformulating the book’s methods
and argument. I would also like to thank members of the Faculty Writing
Group at Syracuse University and the Upstate New York 19c Reading Group
as well as students in my graduate courses at Penn State University and the
University of South Carolina for their questions and conversation.
I am thrilled to have completed this book at USC, my alma mater, as a
member of the library faculty in the Irvin Department of Rare Books and
Special Collections. In addition to working among first editions of novels
I discuss in this book, I have been very fortunate to work alongside Jessica
Crouch and Michael Weisenburg and under the leadership of Associate
Dean Elizabeth Sudduth and Dean Thomas McNally. At Oxford University
viii 
Press, I am grateful to Robert Faber, Stephanie Ireland, Eleanor Collins, and

Aimee Wright. The informed comments and insightful questions of two
anonymous readers reshaped the book’s argument and strengthened its
details.
My most heartfelt thanks are for my tireless supporters: my parents John
and Kathy Britton, and my husband and best friend Jody Fowler. Their
unwavering confidence has sustained me and this book. Completing it—a
book about resemblance and fraternity—as a mother of identical twin boys
has, to say the least, altered my understanding of some of its central
concepts. Thanks to Simon and Oliver, I can look forward to many years
of being an eager witness to the frequent happiness and occasional strife of
brotherhood.
Contents
Introduction: Defining Sympathy 1

Smith’s Sympathy and the History of the Novel 10
Sympathy, Literary Form, and History 14
1. 1759 and 1794: Moral Sentiments, Political Revolution,

and Narrative Form 22
Historical Torture and Fictional Imagination 26
Adam Smith’s “Our Brother . . . upon the Rack” in
Post-Revolutionary France 30
Bodies and Persons in Sympathy’s Grammar of Vicarious
Experience 37
“Things as They Are” or “As If They Were My Own” in
Caleb Williams 41
Kinship in Smith’s Sympathy 56
Through Smith’s Window: From Visual Perception to
Imaginative Perspective 59
2. Letters in the Novel and the Novel in Letters: Henry

Mackenzie’s Julia de Roubigné and the Afterlife of the
Epistolary Novel 70
Sympathy and the Epistolary Novel 72
Correspondence, Soliloquy, and Mackenzie’s Novelistic
Voices 79
Mackenzie’s Reformulation of Epistolary Perspectives 84
Shared Language and Racial Difference 89
3. Laurence Sterne in the Romantic Anthology 93

Literary Anthologies: Sentimental Extracts and Reading
Strategies 97
Sterne’s Starling and the Mechanics of Citation 102
“The Negro Girl” of Tristram Shandy 108
Torture, Kinship, and the Jewish Body in Tristram
Shandy 117
Animal Minds and Perspectival Sympathy 122
x 
4. The Ends of Kinship in the French Romantic Novel 126

Narrative Exchange and Sympathetic Experience in
Prévost’s Manon Lescaut 128
Fostering Family Ties in Paul et Virginie 131
Atala and René: From Fraternity to Difference 139
Kinship Structures and Narrative Forms 146
5. Novelistic Sympathy in Frankenstein 152

Redefining Sympathy: Social Failure and Narrative
Promise 155
Shifting Genres and Shifting Speakers 159
Copied Letters 168
“Similar, yet . . . Strangely Unlike”: Forms of Difference 172
6. Wuthering Heights and the Relics of the Epistolary Novel 180

Transforming Lockwood’s “Sympathetic Chord” 183
“I am Heathcliff”: Sibling and Stranger 187
Lockwood’s Vicarious Narrative 195
A “Relic of the Dead”: Reframing the Epistolary Novel 200
Coda 209
Bibliography 213
Index 231
Introduction
Defining Sympathy
Novels have long been enjoyed for the sympathetic responses they elicit. For
twenty-first century audiences, sympathetic identification is, as it was for
many of the genre’s earliest critics, a defining feature of reading novels.
Today, reading fiction is frequently discussed as a cultural activity with
positive ethical, social, and neurological consequences. But when, rather
than the sympathetic responses that living readers have for fictional char-
acters, we consider instead the experiences of sympathy that literary char-
acters share with each other, different consequences come to light. These
consequences, which are the subject of this book, lie in the intertwined
histories of fiction and sympathy. In depicting rather than eliciting sympa-
thetic response, certain novels reshape sympathy’s shared sentiments and
mingled tears into an emphatically structural feature of fiction, and they
generate a novelistic version of sympathy that aims to accommodate human
difference through the experience of narrative. While sympathy is, as early
and recent readers of novels attest, a defining feature of the novel’s cultural
value, my contention is that, in the years of the genre’s development between
1750 and 1850, key works of British and French fiction fundamentally
redefine sympathy.
This redefinition entails fiction’s transformation of philosophical models
of sympathy into elements of narrative form. Defining “sympathy,” though,
has a long interdisciplinary history that continues today.¹ Rooted in human
neurology by current scientific research and differentiated from empathy in
early twentieth-century aesthetics and psychology, “sympathy” most
broadly refers, during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, to a
¹ Defining emotion is a central task in the field of the history of emotions, which has
identified the turn of the nineteenth century as a crucial period. See Thomas Dixon, From
Passions to Emotions: The Creation of a Secular Psychological Category (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2003) and William M. Reddy, Navigations of Feeling: A Framework for the
History of Emotions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001).
Vicarious Narratives: A Literary History of Sympathy, 1750–1850. Jeanne M. Britton, Oxford

University Press (2019). © Jeanne M. Britton.
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198846697.001.0001
2  
primarily emotional experience that is to some extent shared between

people.² Its wide range of meaning encompasses emotional, cognitive,
physiological, and mystical transmissions of feeling; self-projection and
identification with another person; the contagious, automatic spread of
emotions among groups of people; and the labored exchange of feeling
between two individuals.³ Distinctive within this range is Adam Smith’s
The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759), which characterizes sympathy as a
process of shifting perspectives—of seeing, essentially, from another per-
son’s point of view. At a time when “sympathy” more commonly describes
easy, inevitable, and sometimes dangerous movements of emotions among
people, Smith’s abstract conception of feelings that are shared between two
individuals is unique.
His version of sympathy is also uniquely amenable to the forms of fiction.
The narrative aspects of Smith’s Theory itself have been highlighted in
various ways.⁴ But novels also adapt aspects of Smith’s definition as they
redefine sympathy through their formal structures—shifting perspectives or
“stories within stories” in which one character assumes the perspective and
voice of another. In this way, key works of fiction follow Smith’s emphasis
on imaginative abstraction and the shifting perspectives that, for him,
² For a popular overview of neurological studies on empathy, see Marco Iacoboni, Mirroring
People: The Science of Empathy and How We Connect with Others (New York: Picador, 2009).
“Empathy” is derived from the German term “Einfühlung,” which approximates “feeling with”
or, more strictly, “feeling into.” See Rae Greiner, “1909: The Introduction of ‘Empathy’ into
English,” BRANCH: Britain, Representation, and Nineteenth-Century History, ed. Dino Franco
Felluga. Extension of Romanticism and Victorianism on the Net. Accessed July 22, 2014. While
I specify the significance of “sympathy,” I agree with Derek Attridge’s urging that readers not be
dogmatic in distinguishing among “emotion,” “sentiment,” “feeling,” and “affect.” The Work of
Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), p. 261.
³ Jonathan Lamb provides a comprehensive view of the concept’s varied permutations. The
Evolution of Sympathy in the Long Eighteenth Century (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2009),
esp. pp. 67, 115. On sympathy’s medical meanings, see Anne Jessie van Sant, Eighteenth-Century
Sensibility and the Novel: The Senses in Social Context (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2004) and Christopher Lawrence, “The Nervous System and Society in the Scottish
Enlightenment,” in Natural Order: Historical Studies of Scientific Culture, ed. Barry Barnes
and Steven Shapin (Beverly Hills: Sage Publications, 1979). On its metaphysical uses, see Seth
Lobis, The Virtue of Sympathy: Magic, Philosophy, and Literature in Seventeenth-Century
England (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2015).
⁴ Charles Griswold, for example, has noted in his discussion of Smith that “[t]he sympathetic
imagination is not solely representational or reproductive. It is also narrative, always seeking to
flow into and fill up another situation and to draw things together into a coherent story.” Adam
Smith and the Virtues of Enlightenment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), p. 116.
More recently, Stephanie DeGooyer has argued that sentimental fiction “reproduces Smith’s
triangulated, formal structure of sympathy” through its representations of “distance, time, and
reflection.” “ ‘The Eyes of Other People’: Adam Smith’s Triangular Sympathy and the Senti-
mental Novel,” English Literary History 85.3 (2018), pp. 685, 686.
 3
constitute sympathetic response. This formal echo coincides, though, with a

significant challenge to the role that resemblance plays in philosophical
definitions of sympathy. Despite David Hume’s claims in A Treatise of
Human Nature (1738–40) that all human beings resemble each other, he
specifies that “We sympathize more with persons contiguous to us, than
with persons remote from us: With our acquaintance, than with strangers:
With our countrymen, than with foreigners.”⁵ Similarly, Smith explains that,
if we are in a state of distress, we “expect less sympathy from a common
acquaintance than from a friend” and “expect still less sympathy from an
assembly of strangers.”⁶ Even as they aspire to universal inclusivity, Enlight-
enment theories of sympathy tend to flourish in the closed circles of kinship
and familiarity.
In the novels I discuss, by contrast, characters who are separated by
differences of class, race, or species experience a version of sympathy that
struggles to accommodate precisely such differences by greeting strangers as
siblings and welcoming foreigners as family members. Encounters between
these characters produce shifts in narrative perspective and cited, framed, or
inset tales as one character sympathizes with another and begins to tell his
story. At these moments, fiction redefines sympathy as the struggle to
overcome difference through the active engagement with narrative—
through hearing, retelling, and transcribing the stories of others. I use the
phrase “vicarious narratives” to identify intersections between second-hand
emotions, or feeling another person’s emotions as if they were one’s own,
and second-hand narratives, or telling another person’s story as if it were
one’s own. British and French novels published between 1750 and 1850
generate a specific version of sympathy by manipulating traditional narra-
tive forms (epistolary fiction, embedded tales) and new publication practices
(the anthology, the novelistic extract) in response to Enlightenment theories
of shared feeling.
Gabrielle Starr has noted the curious absence of any theorization about
sympathy’s relationship to narrative in eighteenth-century aesthetics or
philosophy, an absence that seems especially odd given that the period is
⁵ David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, ed. David Fate Norton and Mary J. Norton
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), p. 371. Lord Kames, a mentor of Smith’s, offers a
similar view: “Our relations in distress claim this duty from us, and even our neighbors; but
distant distress, where there is no particular connection, scarce rouses our sympathy, and never
is an object of duty.” Principles of Equity (London: A. Millar, 1767), p. 15.
⁶ Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, ed. Knud Haakonssen (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2002), p. 28. Subsequent references to this edition will be noted
parenthetically.
4  
so rich in embedded tales that elicit sympathetic response.⁷ This book

identifies connections between works of British and French fiction and
philosophy that begin to fill that absence. The relationship between shared
feelings and shared stories has a conceptual origin in the most iconic
Enlightenment definition of sympathy, the opening scene of Smith’s Theory:
“Though our brother is upon the rack,” he begins, “as long as we ourselves
are at our ease, our senses will never inform us of what he suffers, . . . and it is
by the imagination only that we can form any conception of what are his
sensations.” The imagination, he continues, grants access to another per-
son’s sensations only “by representing to us what would be our own, if we
were in his case” (11). With this “brother,” Smith makes sympathy rely,
whether figuratively or literally, on the bonds of kinship. With the rack, he
describes the process of imagining another person’s emotions by referring to
an outdated torture device used to inflict extreme physical pain in pursuit of
a criminal confession. He does so only to specify, however, that it is the
representational capacity of the imagination, not sensory experience, that
tells us about another person’s feelings. To submit a suspected criminal to
the agonies of the rack is to make the physical display of bodily pain signal
buried truth and concealed narrative. This implicit correlation between the
experience of sympathy and the pursuit of narrative pervades Smith’s
Theory, and its elaboration in works of fiction clarifies the under-theorized
relationship between sympathy and narrative in this period.⁸
Smith further explains the role the imagination plays in sympathetic
response with his figure of the “impartial spectator,” an imagined third
party to a sympathetic encounter whose perspectives on both the sufferer
and sympathizer encourage those two parties to moderate their own reac-
tions. Smith tests the perspectival labor that constitutes his version of
sympathy when he posits, instead of a family member on the rack, a mass
of people suffering from an earthquake in China. In this scenario, Smith
initiates a movement beyond his familial notion of sympathy towards a
conception of sympathy that might accommodate difference. He also traces
a key feature of his notion of sympathy that has particular ramifications for
⁷ G. Gabrielle Starr, Lyric Generations: Poetry and the Novel in the Long Eighteenth Century
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004), pp. 190, 269–70.
⁸ On the connection of criminal confessions to fiction, see Peter Brooks, Troubling
Confessions: Speaking Guilt in Law and Literature (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000),
pp. 8–34; Lennard J. Davis, Factual Fictions: The Origins of the English Novel (Philadelphia:
University of Pennsylvania Press, 1996); and Philip Rawlings, Drunks, Whores and Idle
Apprentices: Criminal Biographies of the Eighteenth Century (New York: Routledge, 1992).
 5
narrative—the transition from visual perception to imaginative perspective.

For Smith, sympathetic response does not necessarily require the operation
of the senses; instead, visual perception must give way to the abstraction of
cognitive perspective. Unlike other writers for whom sympathy is immedi-
ate, inevitable, and contagious, Smith focuses on the strain or obstacles that,
by challenging and limiting sympathetic response, give rise to an imagina-
tive form that is spatial, geometric, and structural. In the effort or inability to
overcome the obstacle of human difference—indexed in the Theory by the
distinction between the tortured brother and suffering foreigners—his con-
ception of perspective anticipates a novelistic version of sympathy that
struggles to accommodate difference through the shifting perspectives
entailed in acts of narrative transmission.
The much-discussed “rise of the novel” seems to stray off course at certain
stages during the Romantic period, troubled by odd gothic forms and
category-defying “quasi-novels,” torn between Jane Austen’s domesticity
and Walter Scott’s historicism.⁹ Attention to sympathy’s formal dynamics
across this study’s expansive chronology of “the Romantic century” reframes
some of these questions of literary history and generic classification. Sym-
pathy is most commonly associated with a particular kind of realist, psy-
chological fiction, especially the works of Austen or Henry James, but it is
both prominently experienced and profoundly redefined in sentimental and
gothic fiction, in epistolary novels and frame tales. The works I discuss by
Laurence Sterne, William Godwin, François-René de Chateaubriand, Ber-
nardin de Saint-Pierre, Mary Shelley, and Emily Brontë redefine sympathy
as a novelistic phenomenon by staging scenes of sympathy between charac-
ters whose affinities suggest figurative kinships but whose differences stretch
the limits of resemblance. The inset or framed tales that follow or precede
such sympathetic encounters suggest that the experience of narrative can
temporarily suspend difference by allowing one character to speak and feel
for another. These novels redefine sympathy as the intersubjective experi-
ence of narrative that replaces lived experiences of sympathy that remain
unsustainable or impossible between characters separated by difference.
Without privileging either the lived experience of sympathy or its narrative
approximation, these works suggest that when sensory experience tells
characters little about each other’s pasts and emotions, the shifts in perspec-
tive by which one character narrates another’s story more reliably allow the
⁹ The term “quasi-novel” is from Gary Kelly, English Fiction of the Romantic Period:
1789–1830 (Harlow: Longman, 1989), p. 253.
6  
imagination to represent and simulate the emotions and experiences of

another person.
Most broadly, this redefinition of sympathy grants certain novels an
active role in sympathy’s cultural history. More specifically, it sheds new
light on two sub-plots in the story of the novel’s rise—the decline of the
epistolary novel at the end of the eighteenth century and the increasing
popularity and revisionary effects of novelistic extracts during the Romantic
period. In tracing the first of these sub-plots, I offer fictional revisions of
sympathy as they appear in Henry Mackenzie’s best-selling novel in letters
Julia de Roubigné (1777) as a new explanation for the persistent influence of
epistolary dynamics in nineteenth-century frame tales—Chateaubriand’s
René (1802), Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818) and Brontë’s Wuthering Heights
(1847). Identifying the novel’s revision of sympathy as a mode of vicarious
narrative calls for a reinterpretation of retrospective frame tales in which
they can be seen to transform features associated with (but not exclusive to)
epistolary fiction—vocal mobility, emotional immediacy, and multiple
perspectives—into the frame tale’s narrative levels and shifting speakers.
The second sub-plot in the history of the novel that this book traces centers
on short tales framed by sympathetic response—first, the sympathetic scenes
that pervade the anthologies that flooded the British literary market after
perpetual copyright was lifted in 1774 and, second, canonical French novels
that originally appeared as narrative episodes in longer, non-fictional works.
In the first case, literary anthologies are explicit about modeling morality and
celebrating sentiment. Less explicitly, they are instrumental in the rises of the
novel and of certain types of novel reading. When repackaged, resequenced,
and retitled in these collections, the inset, embedded tales of Laurence Sterne’s
novels reconfigure significant elements of his works—shared and private
feelings, figures of radical difference, and the narrative effects of sympathy.
In the second case, I look to the narrative roles that kinship metaphors and
sympathetic response play in Paul et Virginie (1788) by Bernardin de Saint-
Pierre and René and Atala (1801) by Chateaubriand, all of which originally
appeared as episodes within longer works. The narrative structures and
publication histories of these novels put forth a specific model of sympathetic
narrative transmission. In these works, experiences of sympathy between
adoptive fathers and sons cross lines of racial, cultural, and generational
difference, and they produce the shifting perspectives and narrative levels
that constitute these canonical frame tales. Along with gothic frame tales and
epistolary fiction, narrative extracts and episodes framed by sympathetic
response generate a novelistic version of sympathy that reshapes the mental
 7
faculty that Smith defined into the imaginative attempt to overcome differ-
ence through the active engagement with another person’s story.
Scholars have drawn a broad range of conclusions about the roles that
sympathetic experience plays in cultural history. In a central paradox,
sympathy has, on one hand, been praised for its contributions to the rise
of democracy and humanistic education while, on the other, its emotional
structures have been seen to collude with institutions of social inequality and
physical or psychological oppression. Sympathy’s ethical value often hinges
on the responses of novel readers, and the role sympathy plays in novelistic
forms and subgenres specifies aspects of this far-reaching paradox. Martha
Nussbaum has influentially claimed that reading literature fosters habits of
mind that facilitate the acceptance of racial or cultural difference by means
of the sympathetic imagination.¹⁰ Extending this claim, other scholars have
aligned sympathy’s ethical value and its relationship to fiction with major
historical developments: Nussbaum’s assertion that the rise of the novel
“coincided with, and supported, the rise of modern democracy” has been
echoed by Lynn Hunt, who suggests, based on Benedict Anderson’s notion
of the imagined community, that the rise of “imagined empathy” contributes
to the construction of democratic ideals in the middle of the eighteenth
century.¹¹ The novel, according to this view, promotes new versions of
psychological identification, which in turn provide the foundation for
human rights to be considered self-evident. Ian Baucom has described the
philosophical, financial, and literary discourses whose convergence pro-
duced an “alternate form of representational legitimacy” through “remon-
strance, expostulation, and sympathy,” enumerating the ways in which the
reproducibility of the melancholy fact generates a new kind of affective
epistemology that is the foundation of modern humanitarianism.¹²
¹⁰ Martha Nussbaum, Cultivating Humanity: A Classical Defense of Reform in Liberal

Education (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998), p. 94. Suzanne Keen, by contrast,
argues that reading fiction, especially popular fiction, does not lead to ethical behavior. Empathy
and the Novel (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007). See also Raymond Mar and Keith
Oatley, “The Function of Fiction is the Abstraction and Simulation of Social Experience,”
Perspectives on Psychological Science 3 (2008), pp. 173–92; Blakey Vermeule, Why Do We
Care about Literary Characters? (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010); and Keith
Oatley, The Passionate Muse: Exploring Emotion in Stories (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2012), pp. 153–70.
¹¹ Nussbaum, p. 94. Lynn Hunt, “Paradoxical Origins of Human Rights,” in Human Rights
and Revolutions, ed. Jeffrey N. Wasserstrom, Lynn Hunt, and Marilyn B. Young (New York:
Rowman & Littlefield, 2000), pp. 3–17.
¹² Ian Baucom, Specters of the Atlantic: Finance Capital, Slavery, and the Philosophy of
History (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005), pp. 208, 209.
8  
But, as these critics are aware, claims that the genre of the novel fosters the
sympathetic imagination, which then fuels the spread of democracy and
humanitarianism, risk overlooking other connections between the rise of the
novel and the rise of other European political and social institutions, most
notably those of empire and slavery. A significant body of work on senti-
ment and sympathy that focuses on the incorporation of these concepts in
novelistic perspective has identified invasive, coercive, and violent implica-
tions in eighteenth-century descriptions of sympathy. Other critics have
been attentive to sentimentalism’s dependence on inequalities of class,
gender, and race; when literary sentimentalism’s tropes migrate to the far
reaches of empire, a European’s distress over a colonial subject’s sufferings
can be seen to reinforce racial and imperial hierarchies.¹³ Lynn Festa, noting
that sentimental fiction and the shared feelings it celebrates reach a height in
Britain and France at a time “when categories of national, ethnic, and
cultural difference seem most imperiled,” argues that these novels work to
“create the semblance of likeness while upholding forms of national, cul-
tural, and economic difference.”¹⁴
This underlining of difference in tandem with the exploration of similar-
ity describes the cultural work that certain novels perform in their very
structure. Narrative exchanges enacted by novelistic forms through which
one character speaks and feels for another suggest that sympathetic identi-
fication can temporarily transcend distinctions of class, race, or species, and
that speaking as another need not signal emotional appropriation but
instead might, during the act of narrative transmission, suspend the bound-
aries that create human difference. Challenges in certain novels to philoso-
phy’s apparent insistence on biological similarity mean that, during the
same decades that witness the ascendancy of racism as a cultural discourse
underwritten by speculative science, key novels integrate attempts to over-
come difference in their structural fabric. These novels not only promote the
¹³ Classic studies remain G. J. Barker-Benfield, The Culture of Sensibility: Sex and Society in
Eighteenth-Century Britain (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992) and R. F. Brissenden,
Virtue in Distress: Studies in the Novel of Sentiment from Richardson to Sade (New York: Barnes
& Noble, 1974). On sympathy in imperial contexts, see Amit S. Rai, Rule of Sympathy:
Sentiment, Race, and Power, 1750–1850 (New York: Palgrave, 2002) and Marcus Wood,
Empathy, Slavery, and Pornography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003). In a similar vein
but different context, Audrey Jaffe argues that sympathy in Victorian fiction upholds the social
divisions it might seem to erase. Scenes of Sympathy: Identity and Representation in Victorian
Fiction (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2000).
¹⁴ Lynn Festa, Sentimental Figures of Empire in Eighteenth-Century Britain and France
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006), p. 51.
 9
experience of sympathetic identification in their readers but actually entail

the imaginative dynamics of that experience in their form. By giving mater-
ial shape to both the philosophical tradition of sympathy and the emotional
and ethical effects of novel reading, the traditionally marginal subgenres of
the sentimental novel, gothic fiction, and the fictional extract assume more
prominent positions in the cultural and literary histories of sympathy.
To be sure, the frame tale and the epistolary novel are not the only
novelistic forms to engage with sympathy. The marriage plot and the
national tale are also linked to sympathy’s cultural currency.¹⁵ Gender and
nationality are not the focus of this study, though, because, although they are
frequently mediated by sympathetic responses, they also tend to be accom-
modated by the novelistic forms of the marriage plot and the national tale—
in sentimentalism, sympathy frequently morphs into eroticism or romantic
love, and in the national tale, sympathy is mobilized to establish new forms
of national union. Marriage can offer an apparent resolution to gender
difference, and naturalization, often joined with marriage, can seem to
accommodate national difference. It is instead through a mode of vicarious
narration that this era’s fiction attempts to accommodate differences of race
and species that its social institutions and historical realities cannot.
In fictional worlds, stories shared by characters who cross lines of
difference—lines that would only be reinforced by identity categories and
institutional structures—suggest that imaginative forms might suspend
these boundaries and, for example, allow a European monster to speak on
behalf of an Arabian woman, or permit an Englishman to speak for a caged
bird. Such encounters across boundaries of differences that Romantic-era
institutions cannot accommodate challenge what Nancy Yousef has called
sympathy’s “demands for intersubjective symmetry—be it the perception of
similarity, the impression of equality, or the expectation of reciprocity.”¹⁶
When the experience of sympathy between dissimilar individuals is blocked,
stymied, strained, or delusional, fiction generates a new version of sympathy
that reformulates the imaginative shifts in perspective that characterize
Smith’s sympathy in its attempt to accommodate difference.
¹⁵ On sympathy’s relationship to the marriage plot, see especially Rachel Ablow, The
Marriage of Minds: Reading Sympathy in the Victorian Marriage Plot (Stanford: Stanford
University Press, 2007); on its relationship to the national tale, see Evan Gottlieb, Feeling
British: Sympathy and National Identity in Scottish and English Writing, 1707–1832
(Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 2007).
¹⁶ Nancy Yousef, Romantic Intimacy (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2013), p. 3.
10  
Smith’s Sympathy and the History of the Novel
Smith’s definition of sympathy is a radical departure from its earlier and

contemporary formulations. An older conception of sympathy as an unre-
flective, somatic communication persists well into the early nineteenth
century and often, even as it accounts for physical phenomena, relies on
untraceable, immaterial affinities between organs or across bodies. Hume,
Edmund Burke, and Anthony Ashley Cooper, Third Earl of Shaftesbury,
describe sympathy as the inevitable flow of sentiments from one body to
another. They emphasize the “propensity we have to sympathize with
others, and to receive by communication their inclinations and sentiments”
(Hume) or the flight of emotion from “from face to face” “by contact or
sympathy” that is “no sooner seen than caught” (Shaftesbury).¹⁷ The full
duplication of another person’s suffering poses no problem for Burke, as it
arises, he claims, “from the mechanical structure of our bodies, or from the
natural frame and constitution of our minds.”¹⁸ According to Burke, phys-
ical pain moves from person to person with both ease and delight in his
aesthetics of fugitive emotions, and for Hume, emotions double between
persons through a series of echoing vibrations. “The minds of men,” Hume
says, “are mirrors to one another.”¹⁹ Differences between these writers and
Smith—for whom the challenge posed by approximating another’s suffering
triggers the intricate workings of the mind—can be stark.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s conception of pity is commonly discussed along-
side the British discourse of sympathy, and in emphasizing Smith’s distinc-
tions from these other writers, I acknowledge but do not privilege
distinctions between French and British theories of emotion. According to
these distinctions, French materialists more often look to the physiology of
¹⁷ Hume, Treatise, p. 206; Anthony Ashley Cooper, Third Earl of Shaftesbury, “A Letter
Concerning Enthusiasm,” in Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times, ed. Lawrence
E. Klein (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), p. 10. Other authors who presume this
easy emotional communicability include l’Abbé du Bos, Lord Kames, and Denis Diderot. Du
Bos considers sympathy to be based on visual perception and explicitly beyond the realm of
reason: “Les larmes d’un inconnu nous émeuvent même avant que nous sçachions le sujet qui le
fait pleurer. Les cris d’un homme qui ne tient à nous que par l’humanité, nous font voler à son
secours par un mouvement machinal qui précede toute déliberation.” Réflexions critiques sur la
poésie et la peinture (Paris: P-J Mariette, 1733), p. 39. According to Lord Kames, “distress
painted on the countenance . . . instantaneously inspires the spectator with pity.” Elements of
Criticism (New York: Garland, 1972), p. 440.
¹⁸ Edmund Burke, Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and
Beautiful, ed. Adam Phillips (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), p. 41.
¹⁹ Hume, Treatise, p. 236.
 11
feeling while their British, and primarily Scottish, contemporaries offer a

view of sentiment that differentiates bodily responses from the cognitive acts
that they alternatively provoke and parallel; French writers more easily
presume the lure of society while British theories of sociability seem pressed
to coax a solitary individual into a realm of social affections.²⁰ Indeed, stages
of social development are the conceptual foundation of Rousseau’s pitié,
which shares many features of Smith’s sympathy: both are articulated in
scenes of violence committed against family members, both emphasize the
role of the imagination, and, as David Marshall illuminates, both expose
and, in different ways, resist the theatricality of sympathy.²¹ Across Rous-
seau’s works, the meaning of “pitié” oscillates between extremes of the innate
and unreflective operation of the senses in the Discours Second (1754) and
the provoked and abstract exercise of the imagination in the “Essai sur
l’origine des langues” (1754; 1781). Although Rousseau’s pitié, like Smith’s
sympathy, involves alterations of position, place, and case—“ce n’est pas
dans nous, c’est dans lui que nous souffrons”—its fundamental contradic-
tions have more to do with the complex transition from the state of nature to
the state of society, with what is for him the inherent theatricality of pity’s
ostensibly “natural” experience.²²
Conflicts between Smith’s conception of sympathy and the more mobile
sentiments that Hume and others describe give rise to a novelistic version of
sympathy. Adela Pinch has illustrated the ways that sympathy’s wandering
emotions, especially in Hume’s account, divorce the study of emotion from
the study of the individual in a period traditionally associated with the
harnessing of private feeling to individual identity. These feelings are, in
her analysis, “autonomous entities that do not always belong to individuals
but rather wander extravagantly from one person to another,” and James
²⁰ See Lynn Festa, Sentimental Figures; for the medical contexts of French sentimentalism,
see Anne Vila, Enlightenment and Pathology: Sensibility in the Literature and Medicine of
Eighteenth-Century France (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997).
²¹ On Smith, see The Figure of Theater: Shaftesbury, Defoe, Adam Smith, and George Eliot
(New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), and on Rousseau, Surprising Effects, pp. 135–77.
Not unlike Smith’s tortured brother, Rousseau imagines “la pathétique image d’un homme
enfermé qui apperçoit au dehors une Bête féroce, arrachant un Enfant du sein de sa Mére,
brisant sous sa dent meurtriére les foibles membres, et déchirant de ses ongles les entrailles
palpitantes de cet Enfant.” Discours second in Œuvres complètes, ed. Jean Starobinski (Paris:
Gallimard, 1959), vol. 3, p. 154.
²² “Essai sur l’origine des langues” in Œuvres complètes, vol. 5, p. 395. On differences between
sympathy and pity, see Lamb, The Evolution of Sympathy, p. 42.
12  
Chandler identifies in Smithean sentiment “a structure of vicariousness.”²³

In the novels I discuss, scenes of sympathy employ grammars of
vicariousness—the subjunctive mood, for example, in which William God-
win’s Caleb Williams feels the past and present sufferings of his imperious
employer that he is preparing to retell “as if they were my own.”²⁴ Building
on Chandler’s discussion of sentimentalism’s “novelistic scheme of inter-
locking points of view” and Pinch’s unraveling of the ties binding emotional
experience to individual subjectivity, I argue that obstacles to emotional
transferability give rise to novelistic forms of vicariousness that modify
Smith’s definition of sympathy.²⁵
These forms—frame tales, embedded narratives—are by no means exclu-
sive to the novel. But in epistolary, sentimental, and gothic novels, these
forms employ grammars of vicariousness that, by destabilizing the referen-
tiality of the first-person singular pronoun, loosen the tenacious hold of the
critical narrative that intertwines the historical rises of the novel and the
modern individual.²⁶ When, that is to say, one novelistic character speaks as
“I” when he relates both his own—and then, in an embedded tale—another
person’s past, first-person speech refers to multiple selves. Such shifts in
speakers that occur along with representations of sympathetic response
often suggest origin stories of both the individual novel of which they are
a part and, at least implicitly, “the Novel” as a genre. This book charts key
moments in the history of the novel’s generic self-authentication, moments
that, taken together, constitute a small but notable challenge to critical
accounts of the genre’s dependence on the individual. Long understood as
fundamental to the readers’ experience of the novel, sympathy is also, as
²³ Adela Pinch, Strange Fits of Passion: Epistemologies of Emotion, Hume to Austen (Stanford:
Stanford University Press, 1996), p. 3; James Chandler, An Archaeology of Sympathy: The
Sentimental Mode in Literature and Cinema (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013),
pp. 11–12. Rei Terada suggests a similar point when she says that “pathos conveys the explicitly
representational, vicarious, and supplementary dimensions of emotion.” Feeling After Theory:
Emotion After the “Death of the Subject” (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001), p. 5.
²⁴ Caleb Williams, ed. Pamela Clemit (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), p. 9. The
invisibility of the subjunctive here should not minimize its significance. It is also worth noting
that this grammar is distinct from what Julie Ellison has identified in Anglo-American culture
of the early eighteenth century as a “culture of vicariousness” that locates sympathy and pity
within systems of inequality. Cato’s Tears and the Making of Anglo-American Emotion
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), p. 7.
²⁵ An Archaeology of Sympathy, p. xx.
²⁶ Nancy Armstrong revives Ian Watt’s focus on individualism in How Novels Think: The
Limits of Individualism from 1719–1900 (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005). Ian
Watt, The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson, and Fielding (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1957). On narratives of vicarious experience, see Monika Fludernik, Towards a
Natural Narratology (New York: Routlege, 1996), pp. 52–56.
 13
these individual works suggest, instrumental in its formal development and

generic self-justification. As they are introduced or concluded by experi-
ences of sympathy, framed, embedded, and conspicuously cited novelistic
narratives suggest that we risk misunderstanding the novel as a genre
by associating it primarily with the rise of the modern individual or
the intertwining of private feelings and individual identities. Works of
sentimental and gothic fiction anchor their own generic status on the
embedded tales that arise from attempts to tell another person’s story rather
than one’s own.
The challenge of gaining access to such stories often underlies fictional
scenes of torture. Smith’s image of the brother on the rack is part of a
transition during the eighteenth century in which conceptions of torture
come to emphasize the viewer’s imagination and the victim’s psychological
interiority over the assumption that the truth can be forced out of a body in
pain. In this way, speculative scenes of torture conceptualize the experience
of imagining another person’s pain and past; the rack, as Smith suggests in
this vignette and as fiction elaborates through narrative representation,
theorizes vicarious experience. As Ian Baucom has elaborated, the imagina-
tive category of sympathy involves the abstraction necessary to reconstitute
another person’s “case” or “situation,” a process which Chandler has shown
to make historicism (especially “romantic historicism”) possible.²⁷ Chandler
and Baucom show that historicism depends in particular on acts of intel-
lectual abstraction and imaginative exchangeability that Smith specifies take
place through the shifting persons, rather than the shared sensations, that
the imagination generates through representation.
Vicarious narrative experience modifies the assumptions of a sentimen-
talist epistemology. For Smith, our knowledge of what the tortured brother
feels does not derive from the senses, which he says “never inform us of what
he suffers,” but instead requires the representational effects of the imagin-
ation, which allow “his agonies” to be “adopted and . . . made . . . our own”
before they can “affect us” and cause us to “tremble and shudder” (12). In
the opening frame of Wuthering Heights, Lockwood’s claim that his “sym-
pathetic chord within” is what “tells” him about Heathcliff ’s nature is
confounded by Heathcliff ’s illegibility before it is reshaped into the novel’s
²⁷ Ian Baucom, Specters of the Atlantic; James Chandler, England in 1819: The Politics of
Literary Culture and the Case of Romantic Historicism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1998).
14  
complex narrative structure.²⁸ This scene and the frame tale it precedes
distill a fundamental concern of the following chapters—the increasing
significance of story-telling’s representational forms over the epistemo-
logical purchase of identification based on sensory experience.
Sympathy, Literary Form, and History
To consider novelistic forms alongside Smithean sympathy’s “structure of

vicariousness” is to approach “the very heterogeneity at the heart of form’s
conceptual history” that Caroline Levine has remarked “an attention to both
aesthetic and social forms” provides.²⁹ Smith’s version of sympathy consti-
tutes a particular form, an imaginative, psychological pattern, with which
the forms of fiction intersect. This intersection in turn confronts social
forms by which “otherness” is constructed. In identifying these intersections
of forms that are literary, emotional, and social, this study adopts a meth-
odology that has affinities with the politically-engaged new formalism that
Levine describes. Uncovering the formal dynamics of sympathy’s novelistic
incarnation ultimately suggests that the novelistic version of sympathy
embodied in key texts of the Romantic century posits flexible conceptions
of identity and greater ease in identifying across boundaries of difference. In
their forms rather than their plots, certain novels put forth a more inclusive
version of sympathy than that which historical realities offer. In this light,
fictional adaptations of philosophical theories of sympathy, serve, as Levine
and Susan Wolfson have argued of literary forms, to “investigate problems
of ideology, subjectivity, and social conditions.”³⁰
In my argument, literary forms often suggest experiences of sympathetic
union and elastic categories of identity that historical realities preclude. The
narrative forms discussed in following chapters are proposed, desired, or
implied almost as much as they are enacted. These unrealized forms—stories
that are promised but untold, suspected but not revealed—conjure struc-
tures of narrative layers that never appear in the plots of Tristram Shandy
and Caleb Williams (1794); epistolary exchange is a subject of desire rather
²⁸ Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights, ed. Ian Jack (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008),
p. 3.
²⁹ Chandler, Archaeology of Sympathy, pp. 11–12. Caroline Levine, Forms: Whole, Rhythm,
Hierarchy, Network (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015), p. 3.
³⁰ Levine, p. 12. Susan Wolfson, Formal Charges: The Shaping of Poetry in British
Romanticism (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997).
 15
than the content of Henry Mackenzie’s Julia de Roubigné or Chateaubriand’s

René; a collection of letters might, in Frankenstein’s internal textual genesis,
authenticate its central frame tale. Form, in these situations, becomes quite
immaterial, but it is no less, as it were, material.
Literary forms are not, then, seen as forces of constraint or ideological
contortion, and they are not understood to distort or suppress historical
reality. Instead, historical reality functions both to encourage imaginative
forms that attempt to reach beyond its limits and to prompt explicit and
more careful articulations of sympathy’s dynamics. In chapter 1, the French
Revolution does not radically alter the novelistic forms in which sympathy
takes shape, but it does lend particular urgency to some of the same
novelistic forms that appear, as following chapters show, as early as the
1760s and as late as the 1840s. In discussing the revolution, I emphasize the
conceptual, lexical, and formal nuance with which sympathy must, in its
wake, be articulated, but in discussing texts published well beyond its
influence, I note similar novelistic patterns that question the impact of the
revolution on the literary history of sympathy.
Many scholars agree that the French Revolution profoundly complicates
the cultural history of sympathy. There is less agreement, though, on what
that complication actually entails—sympathy’s eradication as a social ideal,
its absorption into an insidious mode of narrative omniscience, or its retreat
into a realm of private isolation.³¹ A French translation and critique of
Smith’s Theory produced immediately after the Terror directly addresses
these issues. Sophie de Condorcet, née de Grouchy—a translator, salonnière,
and the wife of Jean Antoine Nicolas de Caritat, Marquis de Condorcet—
completed her translation after her husband died while in flight from
revolutionaries. De Grouchy radically alters Smith’s “brother . . . upon the
rack” when she renders his iconic image as one of our “similars” on the
“wheel” [“un de nos semblables . . . sur la roue”].³² Readers of her translation,
which was the standard French version of Smith’s Theory for nearly two
centuries, are asked to imagine the sufferings of a “similar” or a “fellow” on
the breaking wheel rather than the pain of a sibling on the rack. In 1794–5,
³¹ For an overview of these discussions, see Ablow, Marriage of Minds, p. 3. Janet Todd has
noted that, by the end of the eighteenth century, “sensibility was viewed more and more as anti-
community, a progressing away from, not into, Humean social sympathy.” Sensibility: An
Introduction (New York: Routledge, 1986), p. 126.
³² Sophie de Condorcet, née de Grouchy, Théorie des sentimens moraux, ou essai analytique
sur les principes des jugemens que portent naturellement les hommes d’abord sur les actions des
autres, et ensuite sur leurs propres actions, suivi d’une dissertation sur l’origine des langues par
Adam Smith (Paris: F. Buisson, 1798), p. 6.
16  
when de Grouchy is thought to have begun her translation (published in

1798), torture cannot be understood as the historically or geographically
distant metaphor that it is for Smith in 1759. With this phrase, de Grouchy
signals the incompatibility of Smith’s figurative violence with the Terror’s
actual violence of 1793–4, expands the range of Smith’s sympathy in accord-
ance with the revolution’s promise of universal inclusion in 1789, and
initiates a critique of the restrictions that kinship imposes on his version
of sympathy.
De Grouchy is instrumental in a study of Smith’s influence on British and
French narrative fiction not because the novelists I discuss read her trans-
lation or used her terminology; indeed, it is also worth noting that Smith’s
sympathy informs works by novelists whether they are known to have been
familiar with his writing or not. Her translation is a nuanced response to
Smith’s philosophical system produced in an incendiary atmosphere that is
charged with the very issues—state violence, shared sentiments, pledges for
equality and brotherhood—that animate the cultural and critical afterlives of
Smith’s sympathy. For Smith’s Theory, which Rae Greiner has described as
“a work of narrative theory,” to meet the French Revolution so directly in de
Grouchy’s work is for sympathy’s inchoate ties to fiction and form to face
exactly the kind of physical violence and emotional contagion that literary
adaptations of sympathy have, however problematically, been understood to
incarnate.³³ Her translation also mediates between Greiner’s classification of
Smith’s text as a work of narrative theory and Baucom’s consideration of it
as “a treatise on the relation between the historical event and the human
imagination.”³⁴ Her work, which is increasingly being granted the individual
attention that it warrants, serves in this study as a conceptual framework for
narrative form’s modification of philosophical models of sympathy. For the
novels studied in later chapters, the same issues that specify de Grouchy’s
divergence from Smith—the roles that the body, the imagination, kinship,
and resemblance play in sympathetic response—constitute fiction’s redefin-
ition of sympathy as a particular narrative mode.
As reading Smith’s Theory of 1759 through its revolutionary-era transla-
tion suggests, a literary history of novelistic sympathy requires not only the
broad chronological span of “the Romantic century” that this book adopts
but also the somewhat peculiar chronological procedures that many
³³ Rae Greiner, “Sympathy Time: Adam Smith, George Eliot, and the Realist Novel,”
Narrative 17 (2009), p. 294.
³⁴ Specters of the Atlantic, p. 274.
 17
individual chapters follow. My argument is to some extent teleological,

insofar as I claim that eighteenth-century novels anticipate a version of
sympathy that is most fully incarnated in Shelley’s Frankenstein and
Brontë’s Wuthering Heights. I want to emphasize, though, that the develop-
ment of a mode of vicarious narration is not entirely linear, that it emerges
out of nineteenth-century fiction’s revisions of eighteenth-century philoso-
phy and confrontations between new and traditional narrative and print
forms. Such anachronisms feature in individual chapters: Sterne’s original
publications of the 1760s are considered alongside their altered appearances
in early nineteenth-century anthologies, and Brontë’s Victorian novel is
discussed as a commentary on eighteenth-century epistolary and sentimen-
tal tropes. What this historical range also reveals, in the development of a
mode of vicarious narration before, during, and long after the 1790s, is the
possibility that the French Revolution might play a different, smaller role in
the relationship between sympathy and the novel than has been assumed.
This book’s contention that the transmission of narrative offers imagina-
tive experiences that render notions of identity more capacious diverges
from current assumptions about Enlightenment individuality and the
Romantic self. The shared feelings that Smith describes and that novelists
fictionalize are not amenable to assumptions of affect theory, and they rest
uneasily with tenets of poststructuralism.³⁵ Smith’s sympathy denies both
the privilege that affect theory grants to communal emotions and the
exclusive interiority of individual feeling that some traditional histories of
both the subject and the novel have valorized.³⁶ Following chapters focus on
³⁵ The analysis offered here refracts the questions in Enlightenment philosophy of shared
emotion and individual identity through narrative form rather than a rehearsal of the post-
structuralist “death of the subject.” Jacques Khalip’s discussion of sympathy takes as a starting
point the unmoored subjectivity that poststructuralism has nearly reified. The prominent role
played by human difference in fiction’s redefinition of sympathy runs against what Khalip
references as “the humanistic imperative to conceive others as like subjects—an imperative
specific to a sentimental politics of recognition.” Anonymous Life: Romanticism and Disposses-
sion (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009), p. 17. Taking a different approach, Thomas
Pfau reads romantic affects (paranoia, trauma, and melancholy) in ways that yield a similar
conclusion that minimizes the force of the romantic subject. Romantic Moods: Paranoia,
Trauma, and Melancholy, 1794–1840 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005).
³⁶ Smith, Hume, Rousseau, and others have no place, for example, in Teresa Brennan’s claim
that, after the seventeenth century, “the idea that persons were . . . affected by the emotions of
others . . . loses ground in the official record, the philosophical canon.” The Transmission of
Affect (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2004), p. 17. Reading eighteenth-century sympathy
through affect theory, Miranda Burgess offers a graceful description of conflicting models of
sympathy that concludes by favoring the model articulated by Shaftesbury and Hume and
characterizing Smith’s opposing model as one of displacement. “On Being Moved: Sympathy,
Mobility, and Narrative Form,” Poetics Today 32.2 (2011), pp. 289–321.
18  
novels whose depictions of sympathy presume that emotions originate in

individual experience and that one individual’s emotional experience might
be met with responsive identification from another individual. In these
novels, emotional experience then serves, through its transformation into
cited, transcribed, retold narratives, as the material for novelistic forms by
which sympathy is redefined.
Based on two case studies centered in the year 1794, de Grouchy’s
translation of Smith’s Theory and Godwin’s Caleb Williams, chapter 1
explores historical situatedness as a means to reconsider literary forms
that struggle to imagine human connections beyond the social, political,
and institutional limitations of contemporary reality. In this chapter’s first
case study, de Grouchy’s translation responds to the question of Smithean
sympathy’s fate after the French Revolution and highlights the same features
of his work (kinship, physicality, and imaginative abstraction) that are
fundamental features in novelistic revisions of sympathy. Through its inter-
weaving of historical reference and novelistic form, Caleb Williams shows
that modifying Smith through political fiction means that the reality of
social oppression limits the possibility of fiction’s unique purview—the
imaginative experience of becoming someone else. The responses of Godwin
and de Grouchy to Smith’s work of 1759 dramatize the tensions that define
the mode of vicarious narration that later chapters elaborate.
Historically and conceptually, this mode of vicarious narration has its
origins in the decline of the epistolary novel. Chapter 2 positions Henry
Mackenzie’s Julia de Roubigné as a transitional text in the history of the
novel due to its formal revisions of epistolary perspective and its echoes of
Smith’s sympathy. Sympathy invokes an emotionally receptive other, and
the acts of imaginative repositioning that Smith describes produce multiple
perspectives; these elements shape the particular epistolary form of Mack-
enzie’s novel. Julia de Roubigné provides only one side of its three corres-
pondences, and characters refer to absent letters in a practice of citation that
destabilizes the speaking self and transforms conversation into soliloquy.
The novel’s brief encounter with racial difference on a plantation in the
Caribbean remains enclosed within the voice of a single letter-writer, as if to
indicate that the epistolary novel’s characteristic multiplicity of voices can-
not provide equal space for the confrontation of difference.
From chapter 2’s focus on the decline and reimagination of epistolary
fiction, chapter 3 turns to the rise and revisionary effects of the literary
anthology, specifically the immensely popular versions of Sterne’s Tristram
Shandy and A Sentimental Journey. Anthologized versions of Sterne
 19
mobilize prominent aspects of his original works—the structure of the frame

tale, an interest in giving voice to figures of radical difference, and intersub-
jective experiences of sentiment and narrative. Episodes of A Sentimental
Journey that circulated widely in literary anthologies stand to complicate
critical discussions of Sterne’s sentimentality and subjectivity because they
omit not only his bawdy humor and his sentimentalist eroticism but also his
emphasis on resolute subjectivity and sympathetic acquisitiveness. In the
case of Tristram Shandy, anthologies amplify what is in the novel a muted
echo of Smith’s “brother . . . upon the rack.” Tristram Shandy repeatedly
gestures towards the untold tale of an African girl that is linked in undis-
closed ways to that of Sterne’s own figure of a brother who suffers the pains
of the rack. In the novel, Sterne focuses on a tortured brother and a silent
former slave in passages that were originally separated by multiple volumes
and many years of publication. Extracts in popular anthologies, however,
bring the suffering brother closer to the silent former slave and stress the
implicit connections between the stories of the tortured Englishman and the
African girl. In an elaborate series of embedded tales that repeatedly promise
and withhold narrative, Sterne suggests—and anthologies emphasize—that
although a familial model of sympathy cannot represent the stories of those
beyond notions of human resemblance, the shifting perspectives that con-
stitute Smith’s sympathy offer fiction the structural means by which to
aspire to the representation of such narratives. Popular anthologies around
the turn of the century suggest that Sterne’s fiction imagines sympathetic
identification beyond the historical realities of both the 1760s and later
decades that would have maintained the distance between the experiences
of an Englishman and a former slave.
Chapter 4 further considers textual extraction and the life of sympathy
after the French Revolution. Textual extraction of the sort that creates the
literary anthology is also at play in the publication histories of René (1802)
and Atala by François-René de Chateaubriand and Paul et Virginie (1788)
by Jacques-Henri Bernardin de Saint-Pierre. Originally episodes within
longer non-fictional texts, each of these novels foregrounds sympathetic
responses in its narrative frame. In these works, the exchange of narrative
overcomes differences that oppose both a familial model of sympathy and
the extreme resemblances that produce unsustainable communities and
narrative silence. Threats of sibling incest lie at the core of each framed
tale. These three novels, published on the eve and in the wake of the French
Revolution, critique the ideal of fraternity through the ancestral lines that
narrative transmission forges across generations: young men tell stories to
20  
adoptive fathers, and fathers tell stories to strangers who are addressed as
sons. Structures of kinship offer novelistic solutions to the stasis and silence
that the social ideal of universal siblinghood generates. These novels locate a
model of sympathy that specifically rejects fraternity at the moments when
narrative perspectives shift and the texts of these episodes-turned-novels
begin. According to the publication histories of these works, not only is
sympathy a defining feature of fiction, but its explicit presence can oversee
the transformation of embedded narrative episodes into canonical novels.
From Chateaubriand’s fictions set in French Louisiana, chapter 5 turns to
Shelley’s Frankenstein, in which a striking scene shows the creature weeping
with the Arabian Safie over the fate of Native Americans as he watches her
unobserved. This strained identification of an inhuman creature with the
novel’s racial other is the crux of Frankenstein’s version of sympathy. The
creature embodies a kind of difference beyond classification that Shelley’s
novelistic model of sympathy seeks to accommodate through acts of vicari-
ous narration, and his telling and transcription of Safie’s story are both the
structural center of the novel’s narrative levels and the conceptual pivot of
Shelley’s reformulation of sympathy. With letters at its margins and its
center, Frankenstein abandons the form but absorbs key features of epistol-
ary fiction as it explicitly puts forth the transmission of retrospective narra-
tives as compensation for the impossibility of sympathetic experience.
Throughout this novel, moments of narration, transcription, and transmis-
sion consistently intersect with experiences of sympathy, which provide the
impetus for narrative to be both told and recorded. The shifts in perspective
around which Smith centers his definition become, in Shelley’s version of
novelistic sympathy, acts of narrative framing and novel writing that
attempt to overcome difference that defies classification.
The final chapter offers a new reading of Wuthering Heights, in which
sympathy performs a structural function without facilitating the exchange of
sentiment. Focusing on Lockwood’s roles as the novel’s original narrator,
Nelly Dean’s auditor, and her story’s scribe, chapter 6 argues that the
dynamics of a novelistic rather than physiological version of sympathy
negotiate transitions between oral narratives, the written text of Lockwood’s
journal, and the printed retrospective narrative that constitutes this novel.
The mode of vicarious narration this book identifies originates in the decline
of epistolary fiction, and it culminates in the epistolary logic that justifies the
unique frame structure of Wuthering Heights. Brontë’s novel transforms
Enlightenment conceptions of sympathy not only in its formal manipulation
of epistolary logic but also in the shared identity between Heathcliff and
 21
Catherine, which returns to the extremes of familial proximity and racial

difference that trouble eighteenth-century notions of sympathy: Heathcliff ’s
unknown origin allows him to be read either as Catherine’s brother or a
racial “other.” After explaining that she has “watched and felt” Heathcliff ’s
sorrows, Catherine tells Nelly “I am Heathcliff.”³⁷ This assertion of their
shared identity simultaneously suggests both extremes, an assimilation of
radical otherness or a complete mirroring of the self in the familial other, as
if to annihilate, through the experience of shared suffering, the boundary
that separates sibling from stranger.
³⁷ Brontë, pp. 72–3.

1
1759 and 1794
Moral Sentiments, Political Revolution,
and Narrative Form
The eighteenth-century discourse of emotion abounds in scenes of violence

and spectacles of suffering. To parse the elements of sympathetic response,
writers including Adam Smith, David Hume, and Edmund Burke look to
state-sponsored acts of punishment and justice; the social sentiments of
shame and sympathy are variously defined through references to the pillory,
the scaffold, and, most notably, the rack. Such philosophical vignettes invoke
real historical violence, whether it is understood as foreign, distant, or
comparatively recent. But when sympathy is a topic of consideration during
and immediately after the Terror, suggestions of historical or foreign vio-
lence pale in comparison to what was the present moment of political
upheaval. In the middle of the eighteenth century, Smith defines sympathy
through a hypothetical scene of extreme physical pain. After the excesses of
the French Revolution, though, such definitions of sympathy through
imaginative scenarios of political and juridical violence prompt more expli-
cit articulations of sympathy during a decade that witnessed very real
spectacles of suffering. This chapter identifies an urgent clarification and
careful articulation, in post-Terror philosophy and fiction, of sympathy’s
abstract, imaginative, and potentially transgressive features.¹
Both of this chapter’s case studies are centered in the year 1794. Imme-
diately after the Terror, Sophie de Grouchy, the widow of one of its victims,
produced a translation of Smith’s Theory that directly addresses a question
that historians and literary critics have been asking for decades: what
happens to sympathy, and Smith’s sympathy in particular, after the French
Revolution? While some critics argue that sympathy itself fundamentally
¹ This process parallels, on a smaller scale, Michael McKeon’s concept of “explicitation,” the
manifestation in conceptual clarity of that which had been present but never articulated. The
Secret History of Domesticity: Public, Private, and the Division of Knowledge (Baltimore: Johns
Hopkins University Press, 2005), p. xix.
Vicarious Narratives: A Literary History of Sympathy, 1750–1850. Jeanne M. Britton, Oxford

University Press (2019). © Jeanne M. Britton.
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198846697.001.0001
, ,   23
depends on physical or imaginative violence, others have argued that the

French Revolution and subsequent anxieties in Britain required a radical
reinterpretation if not the outright rejection of sympathy as a viable cultural
concept.² Her translation offers a nuanced critique of Smith’s sympathy that
highlights the same aspects of his work—kinship, abstraction, and
physicality—that are fundamental features in novelistic revisions of sym-
pathy. De Grouchy’s remarkable rendition and, in her “Lettres sur la sym-
pathie,” her rigorous critique of the Theory interrogate Smithean sympathy’s
proclivities for violence, its reliance on kinship and resemblance, and its
alternations between abstraction and embodiment.
When Smith’s sympathy migrates to revolutionary Paris, what emerges in
de Grouchy’s lexical nuance and direct critique is an argument that his
understanding of sympathy is inadequate in the face of actual political
insurrection and that his reliance on kinship is distinct from the revolution’s
egalitarian ideology. For the novels studied in later chapters, the issues that
specify de Grouchy’s divergence from Smith—the roles of the body, the
imagination, kinship, and resemblance in sympathetic response—constitute
fiction’s redefinition of sympathy as a particular narrative mode. De Grou-
chy’s translation is itself a highly charged text in the cultural history of
sympathy that warrants individual attention; in the context of this book, it
provides a conceptual framework for the modification of sympathy’s
dynamics in novelistic form. As they are presented in his original work
and its revolutionary-era translation, Smith’s two key figures of the brother
on the rack and the impartial spectator specify features of his version of
sympathy that give shape to a novelistic mode of vicarious narration.
What de Grouchy articulates as philosophical content, William Godwin’s
Things as They Are; Or, the Adventures of Caleb Williams (1794) articulates
in novelistic form. The full title’s emphatic indicative mood—“Things as
They Are”—leaves little room for the grammar of vicariousness that Smith’s
² See Evelyn Forget, “Evocations of Sympathy: Sympathetic Imagery in Eighteenth-Century

Social Theory and Physiology,” History of Political Economy, Annual Supplement to Vol. 35
(2003) and Mary Fairclough, The Romantic Crowd: Sympathy, Controversy, and Print Culture
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013). On sympathy’s role in British responses to the
revolution, see Harriet Guest, Unbounded Attachment: Sentiment and Politics in the Age of the
French Revolution (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013) and John Whale, Imagination under
Pressure: Politics, Aesthetics, and Utility 1789–1832 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2000). Taking the revolution as a case study in the history of emotions, William Reddy has
shown that the pursuit of false revolutionaries during the Terror effectively unraveled the
dominant discourse of sentimentalism, according to which emotions that are expressed must
necessarily be authentic. The Navigation of Feeling: A Framework for the History of the Emotions
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), pp. 141–72.
24  
version of sympathy facilitates. The novel’s plot persistently seeks, but does
not adequately provide, a narrative confession. Godwin uses two historically-
charged references—colonial torture, a locked iron chest—to signal stories
that are imagined and sought but untold, making novelistic form itself a
pure abstraction. According to Caleb Williams, modifying Smith through
political fiction means that the reality of social oppression restricts the
possibility of fiction’s unique purview—the imaginative experience of
becoming someone else—and requires a more explicit articulation of its
appeal, dynamics, and challenges.
Prominent in critical discussions of fiction’s adaptation of sympathy, the
significance of violence and oppression warrants careful attention. It should
first be noted that the physical pain that the rack implies fades in the
Theory’s subsequent examples of sympathetic response, where this initial
image more clearly becomes the foundation for a process that facilitates
shared joy as well as sorrow. What follows are pleasant, quotidian familial
and social scenes: a mother’s care for her crying infant (15) and a man
sharing pleasure with a friend who enjoys, for the first time, a work of fiction
already familiar to him (17–18).³ Although later scenarios include instances
of social strife and state-supported retribution, it remains just as difficult to
find latent violence in Smith’s scene of communal reading as it is to insist
that a model of appropriative pain is the philosophical core of his work.⁴
Indeed, pain and suffering are not constituent elements of sympathy for
Smith, which he says includes not only shared sorrow but “fellow-feeling
with any passion whatever” (13). The potential for sympathy to refer to
shared pleasure and sorrow calls into question the influence that violence
and disempowerment have had in critical discussions of the incorporation of
sympathy in novelistic point of view.
It is not without reason, though, that Smith’s opening image of the
brother on the rack has seemed to invite claims that Enlightenment notions
of sympathy require the very systems of oppression and violence that they
might otherwise be expected to ameliorate. These claims are of course at
odds with an established argument that sympathy is fundamentally a
³ Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, ed. Knud Haakonssen (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2002). References will be noted parenthetically.
⁴ According to David Marshall, the most vivid pain in Smith’s Theory is not the agony of the
rack but rather the emotional pain provoked by the pillory and the relentless gaze of unsym-
pathetic spectators, the crippling social sentiments of shame and embarrassment. The Figure of
the Theater: Shaftesbury, Defoe, Adam Smith, and George Eliot (New York: Columbia University
Press, 1986), pp. 182–7.
, ,   25
progressive social force, that the Enlightenment discourse of sentiment

ushers in lasting structures of social cohesion. Violence hovers around
Smith’s Theory; Robert Mitchell and Ian Baucom have proven the state-
sponsored executions after the failed Stuart rebellion of 1745 to be, in
Baucom’s words, “everywhere and nowhere” in Smith’s work.⁵ Even though
Smith specifies that sympathy does not exclusively identify shared suffering,
for readers then and now, unpleasant feelings are understood to be the most
common motivations of sympathetic response. For a number of recent
critics, sympathy arises specifically from institutional structures of oppres-
sion. Observing “the proximity of sympathy to aggression,” Jonathan Lamb
states that “sympathy thrives in situations of comparative powerlessness.”⁶
In discussions of Enlightenment philosophy and its nineteenth-century
cultural inheritance, scholars have exposed this apparent paradox—that a
discourse of benevolence entails structures of dominance and cruelty—by
drawing out sympathy’s reliance on visuality and uncovering an insidious
tinge to its ethical stance.⁷ In this vein, Amit Rai has provocatively claimed
that sympathy “needs the trauma of murderous violence to give it life.”⁸
One might wonder, then, whether Smith’s sympathy finds its ideal stage in
the bloodbath of the Terror, or if the violence in Paris of 1794 enacts even if it
inverts the philosophical assumptions of Smith’s 1759 Theory. No critic has
made such an assertion, but it is precisely its incongruity that the more
vehement arguments about sympathy’s innate violence seem to ignore.⁹
⁵ Ian Baucom, Specters of the Atlantic: Finance Capital, Slavery, and the Philosophy of History
(Durham: Duke University Press, 2005), pp. 250–1; Robert Mitchell, “The Violence of
Sympathy: Adam Smith on Resentment and Executions,” 1650–1850: Ideas, Aesthetics and
Inquiries in the Early Modern Era 8 (2003), pp. 321–41.
⁶ Preserving the Self in the South Seas: 1680–1840 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
2001), p. 276; Evolution of Sympathy, p. 1.
⁷ See Marcus Wood, Slavery, Empathy, and Pornography (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2002); Laura Hinton, The Perverse Gaze of Sympathy: Sadomasochistic Sentiments from Clarissa
to Rescue 911 (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1999); and Ildiko Csengei,
Sympathy, Sensibility and the Literature of Feeling in the Eighteenth Century (New York: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2012). According to Wood, Smith’s Theory offers a model of appropriative pain that,
when employed in John Gabriel Stedman’s Narrative of a Five Years Expedition Against the
Revolted Negroes of Surinam, permits the sympathetic gaze of the white spectator or reader to
take over the body of a slave. For Wood, “an observer’s (viewer’s, voyeur’s, witness’s) sympa-
thetic response to another person’s pain lies in a gesture of extreme psychic masochism” (102).
Hinton sees sympathy and its moral authority as more insidious than the panopticon’s prison
guard: sympathy “conceals the desire for and the use of power through identification. Through
sympathy, the aggressivity of sentiment is safely, perversely, released” (16, italics in original).
⁸ Amit S. Rai, Rule of Sympathy: Sentiment, Race, and Power, 1750–1850 (New York:
Palgrave, 2002), p. 70.
⁹ More restrained literary histories have found in the 1790s the ultimate fulfillment of
sentimentalism, increased threats of emotional contagion, and anxieties about the emotional
26  
When literary scholars have focused specifically on sympathy’s relationship

to novelistic perspective, the gaze of Smith’s impartial spectator has been
understood, especially in Foucauldian work of the 1980s, as insidious, and
the violence of Smith’s opening image has been understood to generate in
novelistic omniscience a fictional form of psychological invasion and insti-
tutional coercion. I remain skeptical about such claims. I do take seriously,
though, the implications of surreptitious cruelty lingering beneath sympa-
thy’s veneer of benevolence. Based on the two case studies of de Grouchy’s
translation and Godwin’s Caleb Williams, this chapter examines the violence
that has been attributed to Smith’s sympathy itself and its reinterpretation in
narrative forms in order to specify the significance of metaphor and gram-
mar as well as the function of kinship and physicality in his definition of
sympathy. In its figures of the brother on the rack and a natural disaster in
the Far East, as the chapter’s final section elaborates, Smith’s Theory initiates
a transformation of visual perception into imaginative perspective that Caleb
Williams and the novels discussed in later chapters explore in literary form.
Historical Torture and Fictional Imagination
Smith’s speculative scene of torture calls on the long history and contem-
porary experience of witnessing other people’s real pain. In Smith’s scenario,
a group of witnesses is asked to imagine the pain the rack inflicts: “Though
our brother is upon the rack, as long as we ourselves are at our ease, our
senses will never inform us of what he suffers” (11). For Hume, by contrast,
the rack elicits only “horror,” leaving its witnesses “no leisure to temper this
uneasy sensation by any opposite sympathy.”¹⁰ It is not for Smith the
experience of seeing the victim writhe in pain or hearing his screams, and
quite possibly the audible dislocation of his joints, that manages to “inform”
witnesses to this scene of the pain being experienced. “It is,” he continues,
“by the imagination only that we can form any conception of what are his
sensations” (11). While historically, the rack signals a pursuit of criminal
confession, philosophically, Smith uses the rack to consider the mental
and political force of epistolary correspondences. David Denby, for example, describes the
French Revolution as “the ultimate sentimental event.” Sentimental Narrative and the Social
Order in France, 1760–1820 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), p. 96.
¹⁰ David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, ed. David Fate Norton and Mary J. Norton
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), p. 250.
, ,   27
faculty that might give us knowledge—“inform us”—about another person’s

experiences. Seeking knowledge of another person’s pain rather than a
criminal confession, Smith’s witnesses are informed not by sensory stimu-
lation but by imaginative labor.
The rack was primarily used in private, in judges’ quarters, and generally
hidden from public view. Secrecy was normally a central feature of legal
proceedings that included torture.¹¹ In general, a more limited English
practice contrasts with the more widespread use of torture on the continent.
During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, torture was more common
in Scotland than in England; the rack was outlawed in England in the 1620s
and in Scotland in 1708, after the 1707 Acts of Union.¹² The contrast
between English and Scottish practice casts the Theory’s opening image as
a point of national division forty years after unification; just over a decade
after the Jacobite rebellion of ’45, this image can also be understood to
register the brutality of English oppression.¹³ If Smith’s moral philosophy
intends to forge social bonds that would parallel national union, its opening
image might instead invoke threatening degrees of difference and discord.
Over the course of the eighteenth century, changing conceptions of torture
grant increasing significance to psychological interiority and the mind instead
of physical violence and the body.¹⁴ Building on the imaginative implications
that the practice had gathered during the eighteenth century, Romantic-era
literary depictions of torture frequently point to hidden, untold stories from
positions of radical individuality: the novelistic torture scene, by promising
and withholding narrative disclosure, conceptualizes psychological interiority
¹¹ John H. Langbein, Torture and the Law of Proof: Europe and England in the Ancien Régime
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976), p. 83; see also Pieter Spierenburg, The Spectacle of
Suffering: Executions and the Evolution of Repression: From a Preindustrial Metropolis to the
European Experience (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), p. 188.
¹² See Elizabeth Hanson, “Torture and Truth in Renaissance England,” Representations 34
(1991), pp. 53–84.
¹³ Because the rack was banned in Scotland only after the Union with England, it seems quite
possible that shame may inform Smith’s scene of torture. It is also worth considering this point
in light of Evan Gottlieb’s observation that sympathy may, by virtue of its primarily Scottish
origins, arise precisely from culturally enfranchised if politically marginalized national groups.
Feeling British: Sympathy and National Identity in Scottish and English Writing, 1707–1832
(Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 2007), pp. 20–1.
¹⁴ Steven Bruhm, noting that “off-stage” scenes of torture in gothic literature make another
person’s physical suffering the product of imaginative labor, argues that torture prioritizes
psychological interiority over visual spectacle. Gothic Bodies: The Politics of Pain in Romantic
Fiction (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1994), p. 117. In the French context,
Lisa Silverman identifies a transition in which truth comes to be understood as a result of mental
deliberation rather than bodily release. Tortured Subjects: Pain, Truth, and the Body in Early
Modern France (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), p. 168.
28  
and impenetrable alterity. In fiction, the rack theorizes vicariousness and

prompts representation through its invocation of untold narratives. Godwin
extends this logic in a reference to torture that amplifies the role that scenes of
torture play in understanding the process of imaginatively feeling another
person’s pain and temporarily adopting his identity.
Caleb Williams centers on its title character’s agonizing pursuit of a
criminal confession—confirmation of his employer’s suspected guilt in
three murders. As if writhing in the turmoil of uncertainty, Caleb considers
a radical switch in identity a means by which to hear a criminal confession.
“Curiosity,” Caleb states, “so long as it lasted, was a principle stronger in my
bosom than even the love of independence.” To gratify it, he says, he “would
have submitted to the condition of a West Indian Negro, or to the tortures
inflicted by North American savages” (139–40).¹⁵ Submitting to slavery and
torture, Caleb also imagines a significant alteration in person and position—
to satisfy his curiosity, he imagines not only sacrificing his freedom, but also
changing his race. Caleb’s employment means that his patron, the troubled
squire Ferdinando Falkland, agrees, after the deaths of Caleb’s parents, to
“take” him “into his family” (4). But this domestic adoption cannot erase
class division, and Caleb bases his homosocial bond with Falkland on
difference rather than likeness: “there was,” he says, “a magnetical sympathy
between me and my master” (109).¹⁶ Indeed, Caleb’s willingness to sacrifice
his Englishness also registers the vast distance—or the opposing poles—
between which sympathy’s magnetism reaches. In Godwin’s politically rad-
ical novel, Caleb, a servant, might as well be a slave; seeking the experience of
otherness that hearing his patron’s confession would grant him, he positions
himself alongside the British empire’s most disempowered subjects.
For Caleb, torture is perhaps an unsurprising point of comparison. Its
specific effects, though, are quite surprising. As he imagines it, torture
reverses the logic that presumes that the truth can be forced out of a
suffering body by casting the torture victim as he who wishes to hear rather
than hide a criminal confession. His speculative torture scene embodies the
desired experience of hearing—and then transmitting—another person’s
¹⁵ Caleb Williams, ed. Pamela Clemit (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009). References to
the novel’s original edition, noted parenthetically, will be to this edition.
¹⁶ For this term’s resonance with political radicalism, see Eric Daffron, “ ‘Magnetical
Sympathy’: Strategies of Power and Resistance in Godwin’s Caleb Williams,” Criticism 37.2
(1995), pp. 213–32. For a discussion of the homoerotic and psychoanalytic significance of the
attraction between Caleb and Falkland, see John Rodden, “Godwin’s Caleb Williams: ‘A Half-
Told and Mangled Tale’,” College Literature 36.4 (2009), pp. 119–46.
, ,   29
story. With this scenario, Godwin imagines the potential for a sympathetic
exchange of narrative to suspend categories of human difference, to make
one individual willing to become—temporarily, imaginatively—another.
Elaine Scarry has argued that torture renders pain visible and destroys
speech.¹⁷ The literary scenes that reinterpret this historical practice, though,
emphasize the possibility of speech, the momentary silence rather than the
permanent annihilation of the voice. Just as a spoken confession would bring
the suffering induced by the rack to a halt, fictional scenes of torture depend
on confessions that are desired but untold, on the voice that remains silent
but possible. Smith’s image of visceral pain makes suppressed, unspoken
narrative central to his theory of sympathy. The rack is emblematic of the
Theory not because it illustrates sympathy’s dependence on extreme violence
but because it theorizes the vicarious experience of narrative.
While this image invoked Smith’s local contexts when the Theory first
appeared in 1759, by its final publication near the end of the century, the
“brother . . . upon the rack” had accrued associations with colonial, religious,
and wartime atrocities well beyond the English suppression of Scottish rebels.
The rack’s broad range of associations by then include interrogation methods
of the Inquisition, wartime practices of certain Native American tribes, and,
particularly in the final years of the century, the inhumane treatment of slaves
in the Caribbean, popularized by images including William Blake’s “The
Execution of Breaking on the Rack” of 1796.¹⁸ And yet, the claim, based on
Smith’s 1759 image, that “slavery is the first example [of sympathy] Smith
offers” in the Theory elides the historical complexity of Smith’s original
reference with the resonances that develop in following decades.¹⁹ Eschewing
linear chronology in order to emphasize historical specificity, this chapter
adopts a temporal span that is intrinsic rather than tangential to Smith’s
Theory, which he revised over the course of three decades and substantially
supplemented shortly before his death in 1790. When de Grouchy faces
Smith’s “brother . . . upon the rack,” both terms have been radically altered:
the Terror has sullied the ideal of fraternité for a nation that has quite recently
witnessed the replacement of the rack by the guillotine.
¹⁷ The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1985), pp. 27–59.
¹⁸ Pierre François Xavier Charlevoix described torture practices in North America in Histoire
et Description General de la Nouvelle France (1744). See also Jonathan Lamb, Preserving the Self,
p. 255, and Debbie Lee’s discussion of Blake’s engravings, which appeared in John Stedman’s
Narrative, in Slavery and the Romantic Imagination (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania
Press, 2002), pp. 66–119.
¹⁹ Lee, Slavery and the Romantic Imagination, p. 35.
30  
Adam Smith’s “Our Brother . . . upon the Rack” in

Post-Revolutionary France
The migration of Smith’s Theory to revolutionary-era Paris exposes dis-

sonances in Smith’s work that, most broadly, revise histories of sympathy
in the Romantic century and, more specifically, shape fiction’s revision of
sympathy. With this historical, national, and legal transition from Britain
forty years after unification and fifteen years after the Stuart rebellion to
Paris during the Reign of Terror, a metaphorical figure of violence stands
between alternative registers of physical pain—the conjectural and abstract
pain that Smith invoked in the 1750s and the present, real violence that
Sophie de Grouchy witnessed and feared during the 1790s. In the context
of the Terror, the relationship of Smith’s sympathy to physical pain—
whether imagined, witnessed, or experienced—takes on acute urgency,
and the distinction between speculative exercise and recent violence
unravels. After the fall of the guillotine’s blade, de Grouchy’s rendition of
Smith suggests that the delicate balance between philosophical scenario and
historical reality, between metaphorical figure and contemporary reference,
has been severed.
While Smith imagines that “our brother is upon the rack,” de Grouchy
speculates “qu’un de nos semblables soit sur la roue.”²⁰ Readers of her
translation, the standard French version for nearly two centuries, are asked
to imagine the sufferings of a “similar” or a “fellow” on the breaking wheel
rather than the pain of a sibling on the rack. These negotiations of Smith’s
meaning, whether they are seen as slight, skillful, or both, carry profound
historical and philosophical significance. Rather than simply accommodat-
ing Scottish empiricism to French materialism or distinguishing a follower of
Locke from a disciple of Condillac and the Idéologues, de Grouchy’s trans-
lation, here and elsewhere, calls attention to the figurative language by which
Smith articulates experiences of sympathy. While contemporary events
determine some of her choices as a translator, philosophical conviction
makes many of those choices significant moments during a crucial period
in the cultural history of sympathy.
²⁰ Sophie de Condorcet, née de Grouchy, Théorie des sentimens moraux, ou essai analytique
sur les principes des jugemens que portent naturellement les hommes d’abord sur les actions des
autres, et ensuite sur leurs propres actions, suivi d’une dissertation sur l’origine des langues par
Adam Smith (Paris: F. Buisson, 1798), 2 vols., vol. 1, p. 6. References to her translation (which
was of the seventh edition of Smith’s Theory [1790]) will be to this edition.
, ,   31
Scholars have been especially attentive to de Grouchy’s philosophical

convictions.²¹ The growing body of criticism on de Grouchy’s response to
Smith, which has approached her work through the lenses of political
philosophy and the gendering of sentiment, has emphasized her “Lettres
sur la sympathie,” in which her diversions from Smith are explicit.²² In these
letters, she insists on the significance of physical pain as a motivation for
sympathetic response and praises the instructive effects of witnessing public
executions. The lexical detail of her translation, though, contains a subtle but
perhaps more trenchant critique of Smith’s notion of sympathy. First pub-
lished in 1798 but begun in 1794 or 1795, de Grouchy’s translation chal-
lenges as it modifies Smith’s original phrasing, repeatedly altering Smith’s
figurative language and the images of embodiment he employs in descrip-
tions of cognitive abstraction.²³
De Grouchy’s rendition of Smith’s “brother . . . upon the rack” as one of
our “similars” on the “wheel” conspicuously diverges from both the lan-
guage of the Theory and the choices of its two previous French translators.²⁴
In his 1764 translation, Marc-Antoine Eidous adheres quite closely to
Smith’s language and syntax when he imagines “[n]otre frère” being
²¹ See the essays included in Les Lettres sur la Sympathy (1798) de Sophie de Grouchy:
Philosophie Morale et Réforme Sociale, trans. and ed. Marc André Bernier and Deidre Dawson
(Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 2010); “Introduction,” Sophie de Grouchy, Letters on Sympathy:
A Critical Edition, ed. Karin Brown and trans. James E. McClellan III (Philadelphia: American
Philosophical Society, 2008); Alexander Broadie, Agreeable Connexions: Scottish Enlightenment
Links with France (Edinburgh: Birlinn, 2012), pp. 125–9, 141–59; and Catriona Seth, “Sophie de
Grouchy-Condorcet’s Translation of Adam Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments,” The Adam
Smith Review, vol. 7, ed. Fonna Forman (New York: Routledge, 2014).
²² The “Lettres” appeared in editions of the Théorie published in 1798, 1820, 1830, and 1860.
Her disagreements with Smith are varied. Deidre Dawson, for example, points out that de
Grouchy emphasizes the cultivation of sympathy through education while Smith assumes it to
be innate. “From Moral Philosophy to Public Policy: Sophie de Grouchy’s Translation and
Critique of Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments,” in Scotland and France in the Enlightenment,
ed. Deidre Dawson and Pierre Morère (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 2004), pp. 269–73.
²³ On de Grouchy’s modifications of Smith’s language, see Catriona Seth, “Un double service
rendu à la postérité: la Théorie des sentiments moraux par Adam Smith, suivie des Lettres sur la
sympathie,” in Les Lettres sur la Sympathie (1798) de Sophie de Grouchy: Philosophie Morale et
Réforme Sociale, pp. 127–37.
²⁴ Her translation is the third French version of Smith’s Theory to appear within thirty-five
years, and early reviews considered it quite favorably. Smith was concerned with the translation
of his work: he describes his “mortification” at the quality of the Theory’s first translation by
Marc-Antoine Eidous and was also unsatisfied, as were French readers, with the translation by
l’Abbé Blavet. Letter to Mme de Boufflers, February 1772, in The Correspondence of Adam
Smith, ed. Ernest Campbell Mossner and Ian Simpson Ross (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1987), p. 161. See Gilbert Faccarello and Philippe Steiner, “The Diffusion of the Work of Adam
Smith in the French Language: An Outline History,” in A Critical Bibliography of Adam Smith,
ed. Hiroshi Mizuta (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2002), p. 79.
32  
subjected “à la torture” while “nous sommes à notre aise.”²⁵ In Abbé Blavet’s

translation, published ten years later, the phrase reads “Tant que nous
serons à notre aise, nos sens ne nous instruiront jamais de ce que souffre
un homme actuellement appliqué à la question.”²⁶ Before the French Revo-
lution, translating Smith’s “brother . . . upon the rack” as a tortured family
member invites the consideration of shared pain and bodily response that
Smith’s phrase originally raised. After the revolution, though, it has become
impossible to investigate the nature of sympathy by imagining the torture of
“notre frère.” In the years after the Terror, to illustrate Smith’s theory of
sympathy through a literal translation of his brother on the rack would risk
both aligning an Enlightenment discourse of sympathy with the ideology
and the violence of the revolution and, even in de Grouchy’s subjunctive
mood, compromising Smith’s meaning, especially his emphasis on the
imagination at the expense of the body, in the process.²⁷ Altering Smith’s
language in this early, crucial instance, de Grouchy signals the incompati-
bility of Smith’s figurative violence with the revolution’s real violence of
1793–4, expands the range of Smith’s sympathy in accordance with the
universal inclusion promised in 1789, and initiates a critique of the restric-
tions of kinship on his version of sympathy. After the revolution, Smith’s
sympathy calls for a more literal articulation, and the role of the imagination
must be rendered more explicitly.
The ideology of the revolution and the events of the Terror cast long
shadows on de Grouchy’s response to Smith. The Terror claimed her hus-
band, the philosopher and political theorist Jean Antoine Nicolas de Caritat,
Marquis de Condorcet, as one of its victims: he died fleeing revolutionaries
in March 1794, when she was already working on her “Lettres sur la sym-
pathie.”²⁸ The time she spent thinking intensively about Smith’s notion of
²⁵ Marc-Antoine Eidous, Métaphysique de l’âme, ou Théorie des sentimens moraux (Paris:

Briasson, 1764), p. 3.
²⁶ Abbé Blavet, Théorie des sentimens moraux (Paris: Valade, 1774), p. 3.
²⁷ Similarly, Isabelle Bour has found in 1790s translations of Mary Wollstonecraft an
investment in clarifying the nuances of sentimental language immediately after the Terror.
“The Boundaries of Sensibility: 1790s French Translations of Mary Wollstonecraft,” Women’s
Writing 11 (2004), pp. 493–506.
²⁸ A warrant was issued for his arrest in October 1793 after he criticized the Jacobin
constitution, and he went into hiding for five months. As a more moderate Girondin and a
titled aristocrat, he almost certainly faced death on the guillotine. Despite his work in the
National Assembly in favor of the people’s rights, the furor of 1793 left him no way out. After
fleeing Paris, his request for an extravagant meal raised suspicions; as authorities tried to confirm
his identity, he died in captivity. It is believed he took poison supplied to him by Pierre Jean
George Cabanis, Sophie’s brother-in-law. See Jules Michelet, Les Femmes de la révolution (Paris:
Adolphe Delahayas, 1855); Thierry Boissel, Sophie de Condorcet: Femme des Lumières (Paris:
, ,   33
sympathy quickly followed and possibly overlapped with the time she spent
visiting her husband in hiding and anticipating his death, a death that is
significant in a number of ways. It was probably expected to take place on the
guillotine, it was one of many repercussions of the tarnishing of the revolu-
tion’s ideals, and by being unseen and hidden from his widow for months, it
reversed the kind of public violence that she had witnessed (in the Champs de
Mars Massacre of 1791 and the execution of the king in 1793) and likely
feared for her husband. In this context, Smith’s image of torture and his
conception of physical pain’s limited role in eliciting sympathy fail to address
the power of the senses or the significance of bodily suffering. These circum-
stances certainly inform her avoidance of an explicit reference to kinship in
her version of Smith’s scene of torture. But this avoidance also betrays a
complex response to figurative kinships as they shape both Smith’s under-
standing of sympathy and what would later become the revolution’s rallying
cry for “liberté, égalité, fraternité.”
When de Grouchy translates Smith’s image of the state-inflicted torture of
a brother, her translation’s linguistic details warrant careful attention. In other
instances, her translation also points to major issues in the international
language of sentiment. Her use of the term “sympathie” itself underscores a
number of difficulties in rendering Smith’s English in French. For de
Grouchy, “sympathie” translates Smith’s “fellow-feeling,” “sensibility,” and
nominal and verbal forms of “correspondence.”²⁹ Based on these alterations,
the French term seems more elastic and capacious than the English; “sym-
pathie” seems to be a less precise concept and, perhaps consequently, a less
common term in French. But de Grouchy conversely translates Smith’s
“sympathize” in other ways, most frequently as “partager.” Indeed, “partager”
replaces a number of Smith’s phrases, particularly those which employ his
figurative and spatial terminology in order to describe imaginative processes.
Phrases such as “go along with” or “enter into” most frequently become
“partager” or occasionally “sympathiser avec.”³⁰ While de Grouchy does at
times approximate Smith’s spatial language of shifting perspectives, to “share”
Presses de la Renaissance, 1988), pp. 161–75; Evelyn Forget, “Cultivating Sympathy: Sophie
Condorcet’s Letters on Sympathy,” in The Status of Women in Classical Economic Thought, ed.
Robert Dimand and Chris Nyland (Northampton, MA: Edward Elgar, 2003), pp. 142–64.
²⁹ Smith’s “fellow-feeling” (15, 42) becomes “sympathie” (13, 65); while Smith’s “sentiments . . .
correspond” (24), de Grouchy’s “sentiments sympathisent” (30); Smith’s “dull sensibility” (58)
becomes “peu de sympathie” (97).
³⁰ For example, she renders Smith’s phrase “go along with” (54, 63) as “partager” (91) or
“sympathiser” (108).
34  
sentiment simplifies the imaginative movement that Smith’s sympathy

repeatedly undertakes, flattening the imaginative triangulation he describes
between sympathizer, sufferer, and the impartial spectator into intensity and
immediacy. In her translation, sympathy tends to identify an instance of
shared sentiment rather than the abstract repositioning of imaginative per-
sona. Her choices expose Smith’s metaphorical articulation of his disembod-
ied conception of sympathy by calling attention to bodies that function
imaginatively rather than physically.
Rendering Smith’s “brother . . . upon the rack” in French requires transla-
tions that are cultural and legal as well as linguistic. The torture devices
specified in Smith’s original and de Grouchy’s translation each carry historical
resonances that in turn shape their philosophical claims. The rack offers
Smith a historically distant yet visceral image, while the wheel—also known
as the “breaking wheel” or the “Catherine wheel” in English incarnations—
had been banned in France in 1791 and replaced by the guillotine.³¹ De
Grouchy’s “semblable . . . sur la roue” of 1798 thus bears a much closer
relationship to the historical legal practice to which it refers than does Smith’s
“brother . . . upon the rack.” De Grouchy’s proximity to state violence recali-
brates notions of distance that have informed critical discussions of torture
and sentiment. Claudia Johnson considers torture, from the perspective of
eighteenth-century England, to be “hardly a remote affair” and identifies the
torture and execution of Robert-François Damiens in France in 1757 as a
likely source for Burke’s consideration of torture in his Enquiry.³² The
position of Smith’s French translator in 1790s Paris, though, can specify
such conceptions of the “remote.” Additionally, even if we acknowledge the
shadowy presence of the 1745 rebellion in Smith’s Theory—“the historical,”
according to Baucom, whose absence within the Theory means that it “can be
accessed only at a spectatorial remove”—to engage in the imaginative exercise
specified in its first chapter would for Smith require the compression of
geographical or historical distance.³³ For de Grouchy, though, to imagine a
³¹ Her reference to the “roue” also bypasses a possible translation for the English “wheel”—the
“chevalet” [horse]—which identified the particular device used by the Spanish Inquisition. The
wheel had been used in 1762 in the execution of Jean Calas, who was tried and tortured for the
murder of his son in the Calas affair that gripped Toulouse when Smith visited the city in 1764.
³² Claudia Johnson, Equivocal Beings: Politics, Gender, and Sentimentality in the 1790s—
Wollstonecraft, Radcliffe, Burney, Austen (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), p. 121.
³³ Baucom, p. 250. Despite torture’s abolition, it continued to be ordered by Parliament and
the Privy Council during the seventeenth century; the fact that torture had never been made
officially legal permitted its continued use. See George Ryley Scott, The History of Torture
throughout the Ages (London: T. W. Laurie, 1940), pp. 86–90.
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The theatre was a large barn-like structure; and it was filled with an
audience who sat in its boxes, or small, square divisions marked off
by narrow boards, where they arranged themselves for the most part
as they were assorted by domestic or friendly ties. Although they
obviously kept fully aware of what was going on upon the stage, and
at times seemed to look and to listen intently, or to break forth into
irrepressible applause, the most exciting scenes did not appear
greatly to interrupt their incessant smoking and indulgence in various
kinds of cheap drinks and eatables. Incessant tea-drinking went on
as a matter of course.
The principal play on this occasion celebrated the daring and
unflinching loyalty of a confidential servant to his Samurai master.
The purposes of the master were by no means wholly honourable as
judged by our Western standards of morals; and the means
contrived by the servant for carrying out these purposes were
distinctly less so. Especially was this true of the heartless and base
way in which the servant, in furtherance of his master’s interests,
treated the daughter of his master’s enemy, who had trusted him
with her love and her honour. I am sure that for this sort of behaviour
the rascal would have been hissed off the stage of even the lowest
of the Bowery theatres. But when he was detected and caught by the
father of the girl, the servant who was so despicably base toward
others, remained still so splendidly loyal to his master, that the
climax of the entire drama was reached and successfully passed in a
way to astonish and disgust the average audience in Western and
Christian lands. For he cheerfully bares his neck and, kneeling,
stretches it out to catch fully the blow of the father’s sword,—
protesting that he esteems it an honour and a joy to die in this
honourable manner for his lord and master. So impressed, however,
is the would-be executioner with the rascal’s splendid exhibition of
the noblest of all the virtues, that he raises the betrayer of his
daughter from his knees, pardons him, praises him unstintedly for his
honourable excellence, makes peace with the servant’s master, and
gladly bestows upon the servant his own beloved daughter in
honourable marriage.
As I have already said, it was undoubtedly the influence of such
dramas which helped to keep alive the extreme and distorted views
of the supreme excellence of loyalty as a virtue, in the narrower
significance of the terms, that went far toward securing the
remarkable character for self-sacrificing courage and endurance of
the Japanese private soldier during the late war with Russia. It would
not be fair, however, to infer from this, or other similar experiences,
the inferiority of the Japanese as a race in either ethical maxims or
moral practice. For, has not an extravagant and perverted
conception of the Christian virtue of “love” served in Occidental lands
to obscure and overshadow the even more fundamental virtues of
courage, endurance, and a certain necessary and divine sternness
of justice? And, with all its restrictions and deficiencies, the
Japanese Bushidō has hitherto resisted the temptations to avarice
and a selfish indulgence in luxury, on the whole, rather better than
anything which these Western nations have been able to make
effective in its stead. But when Japan gets as far away from the
Knightly spirit of Feudalism as we have for a long time been, its
moral doctrines and practices of the older period are likely to
undergo changes equally notable with those which have taken place
in Europe since feudal times prevailed there.
It was not until my second visit, in 1899, that I enjoyed the
opportunity of seeing Japan’s then most celebrated actor, Ichikawa
Danjuro. “Danjuro” is the name of a family that has been eminent in
the line of histrionic ability for nine or ten generations. Ichikawa, of
that name, was especially remarkable for combining the several
kinds of excellence demanded of the actor by Japanese dramatic art.
He had very uncommon histrionic power; even down to his old age
he was able almost equally well to take all kinds of parts, including
those of women and boys; and he had “marvellous agility as a
dancer.” As respects his ideals and characteristic style—making due
allowance for the wide differences in language and in the traditions
and requirements of the stage in the two countries—Danjuro has
been called “The Irving of Japan,” not altogether unaptly.
On this occasion I had not my usual good fortune of being in the
company of an intelligent and ready interpreter, who could follow
faithfully and sympathetically, but critically, every detail of the
scenery and the wording of the plays, as well as of the performance
of the actors. But the two of the three plays in which Danjuro took
part, between the rising of the curtain at eleven o’clock and our
departure from the theatre at about four in the afternoon, were quite
sufficient to impress me with the high quality of his acting. I need
scarcely say that he gave me that impression of reserve power and
of naturalness which only the greatest of artists can make. But,
indeed, reserve, and the suggestiveness which goes with it and is so
greatly intensified by it, is a chief characteristic of all the best works
of every kind of Oriental art.
It was a still different exhibition of Japanese histrionic skill which I
witnessed on the afternoon and evening of October 15, 1906. In the
most fashionable theatre of Tokyo a Japanese paraphrase of
Sardou’s “La Patrie” was being given by native actors. It was in
every way a most ambitious and even daring attempt to adopt
outright rather than to adapt, foreign dramatic models, in all their
elaborate details. How far would it be—indeed, how far could it be—
successful? I could see and judge for myself; since I was to have the
best of interpreters. The advertised time for the rising of the curtain
was five o’clock; but the actual time was a full half-hour later. The
entire performance lasted for somewhat more than five hours. The
scenery and stage settings were excellent. The scene of the meeting
of the Prince of Orange and the Count of Flanders in the woods by
moonlight was as artistically charming and beautiful a picture as
could be set upon the stage anywhere in the world. Much of the
acting, considering the difficulty of translating the motifs and the
language, was fairly creditable; but the Japanese have yet a great
deal to learn before they can acquire the best Western and modern
style of the dramatic art. Indeed, why should they try? The stilted
stage-manners of their own actors in the past, and the extravagance
of posturing and gesturing for the expression of strong emotions, still
hamper them greatly in this effort. Why then should they spend time
and money on the attempt at this reproduction of foreign models,
rather than in the reproduction and development of the best of their
own dramatic art? Certainly, artistic success in such an endeavour,
even if it could easily be attained, could not have the same influence
upon the conservation of the national virtues which have
distinguished their past that might reasonably be hoped for by a
more strictly conservative course. As a piece of acting the attempt to
reproduce the French play was a failure. The performance of the
drama was followed by a very clever farce called “The Modern
Othello,” which was written by a business man of Tokyo, a friend of
our host on this occasion.
For witnessing the latest developments of the highest-class dramatic
art of Japan, it was a rare opportunity which was afforded by a series
of performances lasting through an entire fortnight in November of
1906. The occasion was a “Memorial,” or “Actor’s Benefit,”
commemorative of the life-work of Kan-ya Morita, who, in a manner
similar to the late John Augustin Daly, had devoted himself to the
improvement and elevation of the theatre. All the best actors in
Tokyo, including the two sons of Morita, took part in these
performances, which consisted of selected portions of the very best
style of the dramas of Old Japan. I cannot, therefore, give a more
graphic picture of what this art actually is, and what it effects by way
of influence upon the audience, than to recite with some detail our
experiences as members of a theatre party for one of these all-day
performances.
A former pupil of mine and his wife were the hosts, and the other
guests, besides my wife and myself, were Minister and Madam U
——, and Professor and Mrs. U——. Since we were the only
foreigners among the members of the party, our hostess came to
conduct us to the tea-house, through which, according to the
established custom, all the arrangements for tickets, reserved seats,
cushions, hibachis, refreshments, and attendance, had been made.
There we met the husband, who had come from his place of
business; and after having tea together, we left our wraps and shoes
at the tea-house, and, being provided with sandals, we shuffled in
them across the street into the theatre. Four of the best boxes in the
gallery, from which a better view of the stage can be obtained than
from the floor, had been thrown into one by removing the partitions of
boards; and every possible provision had been made for the comfort
of the foreigners, who find it much more difficult than do those to the
manner born to sit all day upon the floor with their legs curled up
beneath them. The native audience—and only a very few foreigners
were present—was obviously of the highest class, and was in
general thoroughly acquainted with the myths, traditions, and
histories, which were to be given dramatic representation. As the
event abundantly showed, they were prepared to respond freely with
the appropriate expressions of sentiment. It is an interesting fact that
Japanese gentlemen and ladies, whom no amount of personal grief
or loss could move to tears or other expressions of suffering in
public, are not ashamed to be seen at the theatre weeping copiously
over the misfortunes and sorrows of the mythical divinities, or the
heroes of their own nation’s past history.
The curtain rose at about eleven o’clock; and the first play was a
scene from an old Chinese novel, and bore the name “zakwan-ji.” It
represented three strong men who, meeting in the night, begin to
fight with one another. Snow falls, while the battle grows more fierce.
Two of the men are defeated; and the victor, in his arrogance, then
attacks the door of a shrine near by. But the spirit of the enshrined
hero appears and engages the victor of the other men in combat. Of
course, the mere mortal is easily overcome by his supernatural foe;
but when he yields, all parties speedily become friends. The acting
was very spirited and impressionistic; but no words were spoken by
the actors. The story was, however, sung by a “chorus” consisting of
a single very fat man, who sat in a box above the stage; but the
language was so archaic that even our learned friend, the professor,
could not understand much of it.
The second play was a version of the celebrated story of the Giant
Benkei and the warrior Yoshitsune. It differed materially from the
version given by Captain Brinkley in his admirable work on Japan. In
this scene, when Yoshitsune and Benkei have arrived at the “barrier,”
disguised as travelling priests, and are discussing the best means of
procedure, three country children appear with baskets and rakes to
gather pine leaves. On seeing the priests, the children warn them
that yesterday and the day before two parties of priests have been
killed by the soldiers at the barrier, on suspicion of their being
Yoshitsune and his followers in disguise. Benkei then comes forward
and asks of the boys the road the travellers ought to take. In very
graceful dances and songs the children give a poetical description of
this road. Benkei then takes an affectionate leave of his master, and
goes up to the gate to ask for passports of its guardian. It is agreed
that the signal for danger shall be one sound of Benkei’s horn; but
that if the horn is sounded three times, it shall mean “good news.”
Soon the horn is sounded once, and Yoshitsune rushes to the
rescue of his faithful attendant. At this point the stage revolves, and
the next scene presents the guardian of the gate seated in his
house, while in the foreground Benkei is being tortured to make him
confess. Yoshitsune attempts to rescue Benkei, but the latter
prevents his master from disclosing his identity. The guardian,
however, suspects the truth; but since he is secretly in favour of
Yoshitsune, he releases Benkei, and after some hesitation grants the
coveted passports and sends the whole party on their way.
The third play, like the first, was also Chinese; it was, however, much
more elaborate. A Tartar General, while in Japan, has married a
beautiful Japanese girl, and has taken her back with him to live in
China. After a great battle the General returns to his home, and an
old woman among the captives is introduced upon the stage to plead
for the release of her son, a Captain in the Japanese army, who had
also been taken captive. The old woman proves to be the step-
mother of the young wife and the Japanese Captain is her brother.
When the wife recognises her mother, she is much overcome, and
joins in pleading for the life of both the captives. The husband
becomes very angry and threatens to kill both mother and daughter;
but the mother, although her arms are bound, throws herself before
him and saves her daughter. The daughter then goes to her room,
and according to a prearranged signal with her brother, opens a vein
and pours the blood into a small stream that runs below. The brother,
who is in waiting on a bridge over the stream, sees the signal and
hurries to the rescue of his sister. He reaches the palace and
compels the men on guard to carry his sword within; it requires eight
men to accomplish this stupendous task, so exceedingly strong is
the swordsman! He overcomes the Tartar General and gets himself
crowned Emperor; but he comes out of the palace in time to see his
sister die of her self-inflicted wound. The aged mother, thinking it
would be dishonourable to allow her step-daughter to make the only
great sacrifice, stabs herself and dies to the sound of doleful music
long drawn-out.
During the intermission which followed this impressive but crudely
conceived and childish tragedy, we enjoyed an excellent Japanese
luncheon in the tea-house near by.
When the curtain rose for the next performance, it disclosed a row of
ten or twelve actors clothed in sombre Japanese dress, all on their
knees, who proceeded to deliver short speeches eulogistic of the
deceased actor in whose memory this series of plays was being
performed. The next play represented Tametomo, one of the twenty-
three sons of a famous Minamoto warrior, who with his concubine,
three sons, his confidential servant, and some other followers, had
been banished to an island off the coast of Japan. The astrologers
had prophesied that he and his oldest son would die; but that his
second son would become the head of a large and powerful family.
Not wishing his future heir to grow up on the barren island, he
manages to get a letter to a powerful friend on the mainland, who
promises that if the boy is sent to him, he will treat him as his own
son and educate him for the important position which he is destined
to fill in the world. But the father does not wish to disclose his plan to
the rest of the family. He therefore bids the two older boys make a
very large and strong kite; and when it is finished and brought with
great pride to show to the father, he praises the workmanship of
both, but calls the younger of the two into the house and presents
him with a flute. The child is much pleased with the gift and at once
runs away to show it to his brother, but stumbles and falls at the foot
of the steps and breaks the flute. This is considered a very ill omen,
and Tametomo pretends to be very angry and threatens to kill his
son. The mother, the old servant, and the other children plead for the
life of the boy; and at last the father says that he will spare his son,
but since he can no longer remain with the rest of the family, he will
bind him to the kite and send him to the mainland. A handkerchief is
then tied over the boy’s mouth and he is bound to the huge kite and
carried by several men to the seashore. Then follows a highly
emotional scene, in which the mother and brothers bewail the fate of
the boy and rebuke the hard-hearted father. The wind is strong, and
all watch the kite eagerly; while the father reveals his true motive for
sending away his son, and the youngest of the brothers, a babe of
four years old, engages in prayer to the gods for the saving of his
brother. The servant announces that the kite has reached the shore;
and soon the signal fire is seen to tell that the boy is safe. Tametomo
then assures his wife that the lives of the family are in danger from
the enemy, whose boats are seen approaching the island. At this the
wife bids farewell to her husband and takes the two children away to
kill them, with herself, before they fall into the hands of the enemy.
Tametomo shoots an arrow at one of the boats, which kills its man;
but the others press forward, and just as they are about to disembark
on the island the curtain falls.
On this lengthy and diversified programme there follows next a
selection of some of the most celebrated of dramatic dances. The
first of these was “The Red and White Lion Dance.” Two dancers
with lion masks and huge red and white manes trailing behind them
on the floor, went through a wild dance to represent the fury of these
beasts. The platforms on which they rested were decorated with red
and white tree-peonies; for lions and peonies are always associated
ideas in the minds of the Japanese. Another graceful dance
followed, in which the dancers, instead of wearing large masks,
carried small lion heads with trailing hair, over the right hand. The
masks of these dancers had small bells, which, as they danced,
tinkled and blended their sound with the music of the chorus. Then
came a comic dance, in which two priests of rival sects exhibited
their skill,—one of them beating a small drum, while his rival
emphasised his chant by striking a metal gong.
The seventh number on the programme was very tragic, and drew
tears and sobbing from the larger part of the audience, so intensely
inspired was it with the “Bushidō,” and so pathetically did it set forth
this spirit. Tokishime, a daughter of the Hōjō Shōgun, is betrothed to
Miura-no-Suké. The young woman goes to stay with the aged
mother of her lover, while he is away in battle. The mother is very ill,
and the son, after being wounded, returns home to see his mother
once more before she dies. The mother from her room hears her
son’s return and denounces his disloyal act in leaving the field of
battle even to bid her farewell; she also sternly forbids him to enter
her room to speak to her. The young man, much overcome, turns to
leave, when his fiancée discovers that his helmet is filled with
precious incense, in preparation for death. She implores him to
return to his home for the night only, pleading that so short a time
can make no difference. When they reach the house, a messenger
from her father in Kamakura presents her with a short sword and
with her father’s orders to use it in killing her lover’s mother, who is
the suspected cause of the son’s treachery. Then ensues one of
those struggles which, among all morally developed peoples, and in
all eras of the world’s history, furnish the essentials of the highest
forms of human tragedy. Such was the moral conflict which
Sophocles set forth in so moving form in his immortal tragedy of
“Antigone.” The poor girl suffers all the tortures of a fierce contention
between loyalty and the duty of obedience to her father and her love
for her betrothed husband; who, when he learns of the message,
demands in turn that the girl go and kill her own father. The daughter,
knowing her father to be a tyrant and the enemy of his country, at
last decides in favour of her lover, and resolves to go to Kamakura
and commit the awful crime of fratricide. After which she will expiate
it by suicide.
The closing performance of the entire day was a spectacle rather
than a play. It represented the ancient myth of the Sun-goddess, who
became angry and shut herself up in a cave, leaving the whole world
in darkness and in sorrow. All the lesser gods and their priests
assembled before the closed mouth of the cave and sang enticing
songs and danced, in the hope of inducing the enraged goddess to
come forth. But all their efforts were in vain. At last, by means of the
magic mirror and a most extraordinarily beautiful dance, as the cock
crows, the cave is opened by the power of the strong god, Tajikara-
o-no-miko-to; and the goddess once more sheds her light upon the
world.
At the close of this entire day of rarely instructive entertainment it
remained only to pick at a delicious supper of fried eels and rice
before retiring,—well spent indeed, but the better informed as to the
national spirit which framed the dramatic art of the Old Japan. It is in
the hope that the reader’s impressions may in some respect
resemble my own that I have described with so much detail this
experience at a Japanese theatre of the highest class.
CHAPTER VIII
THE NO, OR JAPANESE MIRACLE-PLAY
The comparison of the Japanese dramatic performance which bears

the name of “Nō” to the miracle-plays of Mediæval Europe is by no
means appropriate throughout. Both, indeed, dealt in the manner of
a childish faith, and with complete freedom, in affairs belonging to
the realm of the invisible, the supernatural, the miraculous; and both
availed themselves of dramatic devices for impressing religious
truths and religious superstitions upon the minds of the audience.
Both also undertook to relieve a protracted seriousness, which might
easily become oppressive, by introducing into these performances a
saving element of the comic. But in some of its prominent external
features, the Japanese drama resembled that of ancient Greece
more closely than the plays of Mediæval Europe; while its literary
merit, and the histrionic skill displayed upon its stage, were on the
whole greatly superior to the Occidental product. In the “Nō,” too, the
comic element was kept separate from the religious, and thus was
never allowed to disturb or degrade the ethical impressions and
teachings of the main dramatic performances.
In the just previous chapter the account of the probable origin of this
form of dramatic art in Japan has been briefly given: and a few
words as to its later developments will serve to make the following
description of some of the performances which I have had the good
fortune to witness, in the company of the best of interpreters, more
interesting and more intelligible. It has already been pointed out that
the Nō was at first performed by Shintō priests in the shrines, and so
the acting, or “dancing,” and the music are of a religious or
ceremonial origin and style. But the texts of the drama called by this
name came from the hands of the Buddhist priests, who were the
sources of nearly all the literature of the earlier periods.
The popularity which these ceremonial entertainments attained at
the court of the Tokugawa Shōguns received a heavy blow at the
time of the Restoration. With all their many faults, the Tokugawas
were active and influential patrons of art and of the Buddhist religion.
After their overthrow, important material and military interests were
so absorbing, and the zeal for making all things new was so
excessive, that there was no small danger of every distinctive form of
native art suffering a quick and final extinction instead of an
intelligent and sympathetic development. Besides, the philosophical
and religious ideas of Buddhism, as well as of every form of belief in
the reality and value of the invisible and spiritual, were at the time in
a deplorable condition of neglect or open contempt. About the
fifteenth year of the Era of Meiji, however, an attempt was made to
revive these religious dramatic performances. And since this
movement has been more and more patronised by the nobility,
including even some of the Imperial family, and by the intellectual
classes, the equipment, the acting, and the intelligent appreciation of
the audiences, have so improved, that it is doubtful whether the “Nō,”
during its entire historical development, has ever been so well
performed as it is at the present time. According to a pamphlet
prepared by a native expert, it is the supreme regard given by the
suggestion of spiritual ideals to a trained and sympathetic
imagination, which furnishes its controlling artistic principles to this
form of the Japanese drama.
“The Nō performance,” says the authority whom I am quoting, “is a
very simple kind of dance, whose chief feature is its exclusive
connection with ideal beauty, wholly regardless of any decorations
on the stage. The old pine-tree we see painted on the back wall of
the stage is only meant to suggest to us the time when performances
were given on a grass plot under a pine-tree. Sometimes such rudely
made things are placed on the stage, but they may be said to
represent almost anything, as a mound, a mountain, a house, etc.;
their chief aim is accomplished if they can be of any service in calling
up even faintly the original to the imagination of the audience. The
movements of the performer, in most cases, are likewise simple and
entirely dependent upon the flourishes of a folding fan in his hand,
for the expression of their natural beauty. Any emotion of the part
played is not studiously expressed by external motions and
appearances, but carelessly left to the susceptibility of the audience.
In short, the Nō performance has to do, first of all, with the interest of
a scene, and then with human passion.”
The last sentences in this quoted description are liable to serious
misunderstanding; for what the author really means is unfortunately
expressed through lack of an accurate knowledge of the value of
English words. That anything about this style of dramatic
performance is “carelessly left” to the audience, is distinctly contrary
to the impression made upon the foreign critical observer of the
Japanese Nō. The truth which the writer probably intended to
express is the truth of fact; both the ideas and the emotions which
are designed for dramatic representation are suggested rather than
declaimed or proclaimed by natural gestures; and this is, for the
most part, so subtly done and so carefully adapted to conventional
rules, that only the most highly instructed of the audience can know
surely and perfectly what ideas and emotions it is intended to
express.
“IN ONE CORNER OF THE STAGE SITS THE CHORUS”

The regular complement of performers in the Japanese Nō is three
in number: these are a principal (Shité), and his assistant (Waki);
and a third, who may be attached to, and act under, either of the
other two (a so-called Tsuré). In one corner of the stage sits the
chorus (Jiutai), whose duties and privileges are singularly like those
of the chorus in the ancient Greek drama. They sing, or chant, a
considerable portion of the drama, sometimes taking their theme
from the scene and sometimes from the action of the play.
Sometimes, also, they give voice to the unuttered thoughts or fears,
or premonitions of the performer on the stage; and sometimes they
even interpret more fully the ideas and intentions of the writer of the
drama. They may give advice or warning, may express sympathy
and bewail the woes or follies of some one of the actors; or they may
point a moral motif or impress a religious truth. At the rear-centre of
the stage sits the orchestra, which is regularly composed of four
instruments,—a sort of snare-drum at one end and a flute at the
other; while in between, seated on low stools, are two players on
drums of different sizes, but both shaped like an hour-glass. As to
the function of this rather slender, and for the most part lugubrious
orchestra, let me quote again from the same expert native authority.
“Though closely related to one another and so all learned by every
one of the players, the four instruments are specially played by four
respective specialists, each of whom strictly adheres to his own
assigned duty, and is not allowed in the least to interfere with the
others. Now this music is intended to give assistance to the Shité in
his performance, by keeping time with the harmonious flow of his
song, which is usually made up of double notes, one passage being
divided into eight parts. The rule, however, may undergo a little
modification according to circumstances. In short, the essential
feature of the music is to give an immense interest to the audience,
by nicely keeping time with the flow of the Shité’s words, and thus
giving life and harmony to them.” More briefly said: The instrumental
part of the Japanese performance of Nō punctuates the tempo,
emphasises the rhythm of the actor’s chant or recitative, and helps to
define and increase the emotional values of the entire performance.
One or two attendants, dressed in ordinary costume and supposed
to be invisible, whose office is to attend upon the principal actor,
place a seat for him, arrange his costume, and handle the simple
stage properties, complete the personnel of the Nō as performed at
the present time.
It was customary in the period of the Tokugawa Shōgunate, and still
continues to be, that a complete Nō performance should last through
an entire long day, and should consist of not fewer than five
numbers, each of a different kind. As has already been said, these
serious pieces were separated by Kyogen, or comediettas of a
burlesque character. The shorter performances, to which tickets may
be obtained for a moderate fee, have doubtless been visited by
some of my readers. But I doubt whether any of them has ever spent
an entire day in attending the regular monthly performances of the
rival schools, as they are given for the entertainment and instruction
of their patrons among the nobility and literati. It is, perhaps, more
doubtful whether they have had the patience to hold out to the end of
the day; and altogether unlikely that they have had the benefit of any
such an interpretation as that afforded us by the companionship of
my friend, Professor U——. For this reason, as well as for the
intrinsic interest of the subject, I shall venture to describe with some
detail the dramas which I saw performed during two all-day sessions
of the actors and patrons of the Nō, in November, 1906.
The first of these performances was at the house of an actor of note
who, although ill-health had compelled him to retire from the stage,
had built in his own yard a theatre of the most approved conventional
pattern, and who conducted there a school for this kind of the
dramatic art. The enterprise was supported by a society, who paid
the expenses by making yearly subscriptions for their boxes. Two of
the boxes had been kindly surrendered to us for the day by one of
these patrons.
Although we reached the theatre, after early rising, a hasty
breakfast, and a long jinrikisha ride, before nine o’clock, the
performance had been going on for a full hour before our arrival. The
first play for the day which we witnessed bore the title of “Taira-no-
Michimori”; it is one of the most justly celebrated of all the extant Nō
dramas, both for its lofty ethical and religious teaching and also for
its excellent artistic qualities. The scene is supposed to be near
Kobé, on the seashore. A very sketchy representation of a
fisherman’s boat was placed at the left of the stage. The chorus of
ten men came solemnly in, knelt in two rows on the right of the
stage, and laid their closed fans on the floor in front of them. The
four musicians and two assistants then placed themselves at the
rear-centre of the stage. In addition to the use of their instruments,
as already described, they emphasised the performance by the
frequent, monotonous emission of a cry which sounds like—“Yo-hé,
yo-hé, yo-hé.”
This play opens with the appearance of two characters, who
announce themselves as wandering priests, and who proclaim the
wonderful results which their intercessory prayers have already
achieved. They then relate the fact of the battle on this very spot, in
which the hero of the play, Taira-no-Michimori, was slain. So great
was the grief of his wife that, when she heard of the death of her
husband, she threw herself over the sides of the boat in which she
was seated at the time, and was drowned. Since then, the ghosts of
the unhappy pair have been condemned to wander to and fro, in the
guise of simple fisher-folk. When the priests have finished, they seat
themselves at the right-hand corner of the stage; and the chorus
take up the story of the battle and its sequent events. First, they
describe in poetic language the beauty of the moonlight upon the
sea and its shore. But as they enter upon the tale of so great and
hopeless a disaster, the chorus and the orchestra become more
excited, until—to quote the statement of my learned interpreter—
they cease to utter intelligible words, and “the Hayaskikata simply
howl.”
But now the ghosts themselves appear at the end of the long raised
way on the left, by which they must reach the stage; and with that
strange, slow and stately, gliding motion which is characteristic of so
much of the acting in this kind of drama, they make their way to the
skeleton boat, step softly into it, and stand there perfectly
motionless. (It is explained to us that, in Nō “ladies are much
respected” and so the wife stands in the boat, in front of her
husband,—a thing which she would by no means have done in the
real life of the period.)
Standing motionless and speechless in the boat, with their white
death-masks fixed upon the audience, the wretched ghosts hear the
church-bells ringing the summons to evening prayer, and catch the
evening song which is being chanted by the priests within the temple
walls. As though to enhance their wretchedness by contrasting with it
the delights of earth, the chorus begins again to praise the beauty of
the Autumn moonlight scene. The persuasive sounds of the intoning
of the Buddhist scriptures, and the prayers of the priests imploring
mercy upon the faithful dead, are next heard; and at this, the chorus
take up their fans from the floor and begin to extol the saving power
of both scriptures and priestly intercession. And now the ghostly
forms fall upon their knees, and the woman, as though to propitiate
Heaven, magnifies the courage and fidelity of the hero and recites
his death-song in the recent battle. At this the chorus break out into
loud lamentations that the entire family of so famous a hero has
perished and that no soul is left alive to pray for the souls departed.
After a period of kneeling, with their hands covering their faces in an
attitude of hopeless mourning, the ghosts rise and slowly move off
the stage; and the first act of the drama comes to an end.
Between the acts, a man appears and recites in the popular
language what has already been told by the chorus and the actors in
the more archaic language of the drama itself. The priests ask for a
detailed narrative of the character and life of the two noble dead; and
in response to this request, the reciter seats himself at the centre of
the stage and narrates at length the story of the love of Itichi-no-Tami
(the hero’s personal name) for his wife Koshaisho; of his knightly
character; and of her great devotion to her husband. When the
priests confess themselves puzzled by the sudden disappearance of
the fisherman and his wife, the reciter explains that their prayers
have prevailed, and that the ghosts of Itichi-no-Tami and Koshaisho
will now be permitted to resume their proper shape.
During this popular explanation, the audience, who, being for the
most part composed of learned persons, might be supposed not to
stand in need of it, engaged freely in conversation, and availed
themselves of the opportunity to take their luncheons; while through
the window at the end of the “bridge” the ghosts might be seen
changing their costumes and their wigs, with the assistance of
several “green-room” dressers.
In the second act of the drama, the ghost of the hero appears in his
proper form, gorgeously dressed as a prince, and is joined by his
wife upon the stage. He performs a very elaborate dance, and
recalls his parting from his wife, the different events of the battle, his
wounding and defeat, and the wretched conditions that followed.
These recollections work him into a state of fury; the passion for
revenge lays hold of, and so powerfully masters him, that all which
has already been done for his salvation is in danger of being lost.
And now begins a terrible spiritual conflict between the forces for
good and the forces for evil, over a human soul. The priests pray
ever more fervently, and rub their beads ever more vigorously, in
their efforts to exorcise the evil spirits. The beating of the drums and
the “yo-hés” become more frequent and louder. But at last the
prayers of the priests prevail; the soul of the doughty warrior is
reduced to a state of penitence and submission; and Itichi-no-Tami
and Koshaisho enter Paradise together.
No intelligent and sympathetic witness of this dramatic performance
could easily fail to be impressed with the belief that its influence, in
its own days, must have been powerful, and on the whole salutary.
For in spite of its appeal to superstitious fears, it taught the
significant moral truth that knightly courage and loyalty in battle—
important virtues as they are (and nowhere, so far as I am aware, is
there any teaching in the Nō performances which depreciates them)
—are not the only important virtues; nor do they alone fit the human
soul for a happy exit from this life or for a happy reception into the
life eternal. And as to the doctrine of the efficacy of prayers for the
dead: Has not this doctrine been made orthodox by the Roman-
Catholic Church; and is it not taught by the Church of England
prayer-book and believed by not a few in other Protestant churches?
The next of the Nō performances which we saw the same day was
less interesting and less pronouncedly a matter of religious dogma. It
bore the title of Hana-ga-Tami, or “The Flower Token.” This drama
tells the story of a royal personage who lived one thousand years
ago in the country near Nara. For his mistress he had a lovely and
devoted country maiden. Although he had not expected ever to
become Emperor, the reigning monarch dying suddenly, the young
man is selected for the succession, and is summoned in great haste
from his home to ascend the vacant throne. So great, indeed, was
his haste that he could not say farewell to his lady-love, who had
gone on a visit to her parents; but he leaves a letter and a flower for
her as a token of his undiminished affection. Overcome by gratitude
for his goodness and by loneliness in her abandoned condition, the
girl at last decides to follow him to Nara,—at that time the Capital of
the country. She takes with her only one maid and the precious
flower-token. After many frights—for travelling at that time was very
dangerous—by following the birds migrating southward, she at last
reaches Nara. Being poor, and without retinue, she cannot secure
entrance to the Palace; but she manages to intercept a royal
procession. When one of the Imperial followers reprimands her and
attempts to strike from her hand the flower-token, to which she is
trying to call the Emperor’s attention, she becomes indignant and
performs a dance that wins for itself the title of the “mad dance.” In
the procession the part of the Emperor is taken by a young boy;
since to have such a part performed by an adult man would be too
realistic to be consistent with the Imperial dignity. The attention of the
Emperor being attracted by this strange performance, he expresses
a wish to see the “unknown” in her “mad dance.” But when she
appears, dressed in bridal robes of white and red, and tells the story
of her life in a long song accompanied by expressive movements,
and finally sends her love to His Majesty, who “is like the moon,” so
far above a poor girl like her, and like the reflection of the “moon in
the water,” so unobtainable; the Emperor recognises her by the
flower-token and gives orders to admit her to the Palace. She then
exhibits her joy in another song and dance, which ends with the fan
“full-open,” to denote happiness complete and unalloyed and
admitting of “no more beyond.”
The last of this day’s Nō performances dealt again with the power of
the prayer of the minister of religion to exorcise evil spirits. Two
itinerant Buddhist priests find themselves at nightfall in the midst of a
dense forest. They send a servant to discover a place for them,
where they may spend the night. The servant returns to tell them of a
near-by hut, in which an old woman lives alone. They go to the hut,
boasting by the way that their prayers can even bring down a bird on
the wing; but when they reach the hut and ask for shelter, its
occupant at first declines to receive them, on the ground that her
dwelling is too poor and small to shelter them. At last they persuade
her; whereupon she comes out of the bamboo cage, which
represents her hut, and opens an imaginary gate for them. The
priests show much interest in her spinning-wheel. But she appears
sadly disturbed in mind at their presence; and finally announces that,
as the night is so cold, she will go out and gather a supply of
firewood. With an air of mystery she requires from them a promise
not to enter her sleeping-room while she is absent; and having
obtained their promise, she takes her leave.
The aged servant of the priests, however, becomes suspicious of
something wrong, and begs permission of his masters to enter the
forbidden room, since he has himself taken no part in their promise;
but as a point of honour they refuse his earnest request. The
servant, in spite of their refusal, feigns sleep for a time, and then
when his masters have fallen into a sound slumber, he steals away
to the bedroom of the old woman. On the first two or three attempts,
he makes so much noise as to waken the priests; but finally he
succeeds in entering the room which, to his horror, he finds filled with
human bones,—all carefully classified! He then rushes to his
masters and wakens them with the information that their hostess is
really a cannibal witch, and that they must escape for their lives. This
advice he at once puts into practice by making good his own escape.
But the flight of the priests is only symbolised by their standing
perfectly motionless in one corner of the stage, while the chorus
eloquently recites these blood-curdling experiences.
When the witch, in her demon-like form, overtakes the ministers of
the Buddhist religion, the two spiritual forces represented by the
actors then on the stage enter into the same kind of conflict as that
which has already been described. The demon rages furiously; the
priests pray fervently, and rub their rosaries with ever-increasing
vigour; for the contest is over a human soul. But at the last the evil

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Vicarious Narratives: A Literary History

of Sympathy Jeanne M. Britton

From its ﬁrst incarnation as a dissertation at the University of Chicago and

Press, I am grateful to Robert Faber, Stephanie Ireland, Eleanor Collins, and

Introduction: Deﬁning Sympathy 1

1. 1759 and 1794: Moral Sentiments, Political Revolution,

2. Letters in the Novel and the Novel in Letters: Henry

3. Laurence Sterne in the Romantic Anthology 93

4. The Ends of Kinship in the French Romantic Novel 126

5. Novelistic Sympathy in Frankenstein 152

6. Wuthering Heights and the Relics of the Epistolary Novel 180

Vicarious Narratives: A Literary History of Sympathy, 1750–1850. Jeanne M. Britton, Oxford

primarily emotional experience that is to some extent shared between

constitute sympathetic response. This formal echo coincides, though, with a

so rich in embedded tales that elicit sympathetic response.⁷ This book

narrative—the transition from visual perception to imaginative perspective.

imagination to represent and simulate the emotions and experiences of

¹⁰ Martha Nussbaum, Cultivating Humanity: A Classical Defense of Reform in Liberal

experience of sympathetic identiﬁcation in their readers but actually entail

Smith’s Sympathy and the History of the Novel

Smith’s deﬁnition of sympathy is a radical departure from its earlier and

feeling while their British, and primarily Scottish, contemporaries offer a

Chandler identiﬁes in Smithean sentiment “a structure of vicariousness.”²³

these individual works suggest, instrumental in its formal development and

Sympathy, Literary Form, and History

To consider novelistic forms alongside Smithean sympathy’s “structure of

than the content of Henry Mackenzie’s Julia de Roubigné or Chateaubriand’s

when de Grouchy is thought to have begun her translation (published in

individual chapters follow. My argument is to some extent teleological,

novels whose depictions of sympathy presume that emotions originate in

mobilize prominent aspects of his original works—the structure of the frame

Catherine, which returns to the extremes of familial proximity and racial

³⁷ Brontë, pp. 72–3.

The eighteenth-century discourse of emotion abounds in scenes of violence

Vicarious Narratives: A Literary History of Sympathy, 1750–1850. Jeanne M. Britton, Oxford

, ,   23

depends on physical or imaginative violence, others have argued that the

² See Evelyn Forget, “Evocations of Sympathy: Sympathetic Imagery in Eighteenth-Century

, ,   25

progressive social force, that the Enlightenment discourse of sentiment

When literary scholars have focused speciﬁcally on sympathy’s relationship

Historical Torture and Fictional Imagination

, ,   27

faculty that might give us knowledge—“inform us”—about another person’s

and impenetrable alterity. In ﬁction, the rack theorizes vicariousness and

, ,   29

Adam Smith’s “Our Brother . . . upon the Rack” in

The migration of Smith’s Theory to revolutionary-era Paris exposes dis-

, ,   31

Scholars have been especially attentive to de Grouchy’s philosophical

subjected “à la torture” while “nous sommes à notre aise.”²⁵ In Abbé Blavet’s

²⁵ Marc-Antoine Eidous, Métaphysique de l’âme, ou Théorie des sentimens moraux (Paris:

, ,   33

sentiment simpliﬁes the imaginative movement that Smith’s sympathy

The comparison of the Japanese dramatic performance which bears

“IN ONE CORNER OF THE STAGE SITS THE CHORUS”

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