"Pain into sympathy": Ethical realism and the conversion of feeling in Eliot, Tolstoy, and Stowe.

Abstract

Although George Eliot, Lev Tolstoy, and Harriet Beecher Stowe read and admired one another, little has been done to examine the ground they share. This study compares their work, particularly Eliot's Adam Bede, Tolstoy's Resurrection, and Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin, to demonstrate that they are joined by the practice of ethical realism. I define ethical realism as a response-oriented aesthetics that brings the utopian morality of belief to bear upon the realist project of representing an existing world. Eliot, Tolstoy, and Stowe compel their readers not simply to "see" reality but to transform it. Building upon Elaine Scarry's thesis that the body in pain, because of its potential to "shatter language," motivates the struggle to make meaning, I show how Eliot, Tolstoy, and Stowe represent suffering in order to enact ideological conversions; they attempt to alter social reality by moving their readers, in Eliot's words, "from pain into sympathy." Their subject is the body whose suffering is socially determined: that of the slave, the "hereditary" criminal, the unwed mother. The reader's sympathetic response transforms the pain of these victims into new meanings of identity, expanding the human community to include them. My chapters discuss how individual works by Eliot, Tolstoy, and Stowe address the temporal and aesthetic problems raised by ethical realism. The trope of birth, with its concrete image of emergence, serves in Adam Bede to account for the referentiality of the reader's anticipated response of sympathy to its painful stories. Imagining reading as labor rather than pleasure enables Stowe and Tolstoy, in The Key to Uncle Tom's Cabin and What is Art?, to suggest ways of representing pain without distancing readers from its reality. In Resurrection and Uncle Tom's Cabin, the religious symbolism of the martyr helps to construct an image of reading as a means of transcending the limits of the body and experiencing the utopian possibilities of the text. Nostalgia connected to a myth of redemptive maternity serves in all three novels to represent a transformed reality that returns to the past; it projects a utopia shaped by a "natural" truth that both pre-exists and transcends the social realities of exclusion and injustice.