Abstract
This chapter reorients historical understandings of sympathy, arguing that in the Victorian period, sympathy was understood not as merely cognitive but as an affective response that was deeply embodied. It examines depictions of bodily sympathy in Victorian scientific and philosophical writing, as well as sensation fiction, a popular genre of the 1860s. Further, MacDonald argues that the Victorian writers discussed in the chapter can be aligned with recent affect theorists, who similarly displace the centrality of cognition, as well as notions of discrete personhood. The chapter ends by exploring the relationship between affect theory and the history of emotions, arguing that both can offer fruitful approaches for examining historical understandings of emotion.
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- 1.
For instance, Rei Terada explains that “by emotion we usually mean a psychological, at least minimally interpretive experience whose physiological aspect is affect” (2001, 4).
- 2.
I am thinking specifically of Phenomenology of Perception, in which Merleau-Ponty states, “To be a consciousness or rather to be an experience is to hold inner communication with the world, the body and other people, to be with them instead of being beside them” (1962, 111). William Cohen has noted that Merleau-Ponty “is not far from the Victorian physiological psychologists” in his thinking (2009, 17). Cohen’sEmbodied: Victorian Literature and the Senses has influenced my understanding of the Victorians’ preoccupation with the materiality of the body. He discusses embodiment and the senses in a range of Victorian novels, but not sensation fiction.
- 3.
I borrow Bruno Latour’s term here. Jane Bennett explains that “an actant is a source of action that can be either human or nonhuman; it is that which has efficacy, can do things, has sufficient coherence to make a difference, produce effects, alter the course of events” (2010, viii).
- 4.
Nicholas Dames also gives a compelling reading of this scene as the “ur-scene of the Victorian depiction of consciousness” (2011, 215).
- 5.
Cohen includes this passage in Embodied. He further analyzes the ways in which Martineau, as a deaf woman, talks about her body in her autobiography.
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MacDonald, T. (2019). Bodily Sympathy, Affect, and Victorian Sensation Fiction. In: Ahern, S. (eds) Affect Theory and Literary Critical Practice. Palgrave Studies in Affect Theory and Literary Criticism. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-97268-8_7
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