Who has the right to feel?: the ethics of literary empathy

Style, Summer, 1998 by Kathleen Lundeen

Like most golden rules, empathy is seen as more than a virtue; for many, it is a litmus test of one's humanity. In the political realm it is lobbied for in the form of social legislation and demanded of elected officials who must "relate" to their constituents. As privacy has become a public commodity and the talk show host the prototype of a leader, politically motivated empathy has on occasion escalated to the point of being maudlin. Though Bill Clinton is hardly ubiquitous, surprisingly few challenged him when he declared to a heterogeneous electorate, "I feel your pain." But while a show of empathy may enhance a person's profile in real-life encounters, it has of late raised suspicion when directed toward fictional subjects. Writers or readers who appear to empathize with another's life experiences are often accused of arrogating a cultural authority to which they have no natural claim.

Discourse of all kinds - poetic, fictional, critical - is taken at this time to be an artifact of social identity; the language of a particular text is thus treated as the secret code of those who share a designated mark of social identification. Moreover, since everyone is marked by society in a number of ways (through, for instance, ethnicity, class, sex, religion, age, physical mobility, and nationality), if we were to insist on shared identity in all areas, writers would only be fit to represent themselves, and readers, to understand representations of themselves. By this logic, autobiography would emerge as the sole legitimate creative genre and it would be suitable only for a readership of one: its author.

Though no one proposes surrendering to such an extreme position, questions linger about the degree to which social identity insinuates itself into literary art. David Palumbo-Liu's musing on his experience as an assistant professor is worth noting since his account, which is hardly unique, reminds us that assumptions about literary empathy have real consequences:

what do we do when called on (over and over again) to guest-teach The Woman Warrior? or The Color Purple or Ceremony and so on? Do we insist that skin color has no bearing on the ability or right of anyone to teach a particular work and enter once again into the debates that inevitably follow regarding the politics of hiring faculty members of color? Is the request that I teach Maxine Hong Kingston a sign of the dreaded ethnic ghettoization or a sign of respect? (1078)

The question persists: to what extent is our literary engagement biologically or culturally determined?

Narrowing the authority of writers, readers, or teachers obviously reduces the scope of their literary activities, but it poses an even greater threat to culture: it debunks a fundamental assumption about cultural expression - namely, that representation presupposes a capacity for empathy. That particular assumption is so rooted in human consciousness that it has endured in the face of the shrewdest of arguments about the nature of representation. Notwithstanding postmodern pronouncements that all systems of representation are mechanisms of distortion (a claim that tacitly argues there is a truth to be distorted), the collective faith that representation is possible has not diminished. We might have expected in the wake of deconstruction to witness the long, withdrawing roar of verbal activity, but, of course, we have not. Though postmodern critique has not preempted representational acts, it has left many in a duplicitous relationship with culture, one in which they exercise their faith in language by speaking and writing, but remain skeptical of others' verbal expression, always keeping an eye out for the ways they are being had.

In 1828, Felicia Hemans published a poem that, were it not for the problems it raises about literary empathy, might be dismissed as unmemorable. "Indian Woman's Death-Song" was inspired by an account of a woman who, distraught by the abandonment of her husband, drowned herself and her two young children in the Mississippi River. In the poem, Hemans romanticizes the mother's murder and suicide by presenting them as an act of courage. Preceding her sentimental rendering of the event, her several epigraphs to the poem, especially the quotation from James Fenimore Cooper's The Prairie: "Let not my child be a girl, for very sad is the life of a woman," signal her editorial position. Hemans's refusal to question the woman's actions poses an ethical dilemma for her readers, however: is her empathy with the woman a testament to her freedom from cultural hegemony, or is it evidence of a self-serving ploy by which she can exploit another culture for her own psychological gain?

Hemans learns of the drowning incident from William Keating's Narrative of an Expedition to the Source of St. Peter's River. Keating's retelling is telling. In the report, Keating makes the American Indians sound suspiciously English in sensibility:

An Indian of the Dacota nation had united himself early in life to a youthful female, whose name was Ampota Sapa, which signifies the dark day; with her he lived happily for several years, apparently enjoying every comfort which the savage life can afford. Their union had been blessed with two children, on whom both parents doated with that depth of feeling which is unknown to such as have other treasures beside those that spring from nature. (310)