Eroding emotions and everyday life in the realist novel: Situations of sympathy

Selboe, Tone

doi:10.1075/chlel.xxxiii.03sel

Part of

Landscapes of Realism: Rethinking literary realism in comparative perspectives
Edited by Svend Erik Larsen, Steen Bille Jørgensen and Margaret R. Higonnet
[Comparative History of Literatures in European Languages XXXIII] 2022
► pp. 201–223

Situations of sympathy

Eroding emotions and everyday life in the realist novel

Tone Selboe | University of Oslo

This essay ventures to show how the novel and its many negotiations of feelings, sympathy in particular, but also its antithesis, antipathy, feed into an exploration of emotional life as connected to the sphere of everyday practices related to home and family, often embedded in situations of crisis. My main examples are Charles Dickens’s Bleak House (1852–1853), Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina (1873–1877), and Knut Hamsun’s Sult (1890), three nineteenth-century novels that in terms of style, plot and character are quite distinct in varying ways, hence suited to challenge and broaden the notion of realism. Style, character, and plot are in each novel inextricably interwoven with the landscape in which it is set, whether it be the outdoor life or the home, but inner and outer ‘realities’ are played out differently, thus forming specific versions of the realist project. While Bleak House and Anna Karenina stay within the realm of literary realism, Hunger does not, hence it represents a sort of crisis not only in terms of emotions, but also in terms of the novel genre.

Keywords: sympathy, empathy, antipathy, novel, Dickens, Tolstoy, Hamsun, realism

Article outline

1.Domestic emotions in crisis
2.History of terms
3.Home and homelessness: Bleak House
4.After marriage: Anna Karenina
5.Exile at home: Hunger
6.Concluding remarks
Notes
Works cited

Published online: 16 March 2022

https://doi.org/10.1075/chlel.xxxiii.03sel

References

Works cited

Bartlett, Rosamund

2014 “Introduction.” In Anna Karenina, translated by Rosamund Bartlett, vii–xxiii. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Beer, Gillian

1975 “Myth and the Single Consciousness: Middlemarch and The Lifted Veil.” In This Particular Web: Essays on Middlemarch, edited by Ian Adam, 91–115. Toronto and Buffalo: University of Toronto Press.

Blain, Virginia

1987 “Double Vision and the Double Standard in Bleak House: A Feminist Perspective.” In Modern Critical Interpretations: Charles Dickens’s Bleak House, edited by Harold Bloom, 139–56. New York: Chelsea House Publishers.

Dickens, Charles

2008 Bleak House [1852–1853] London: Oxford University Press.

Eliot, George

1990 “The Natural History of German Life.” In Selected Essays, Poems and Other Writings, edited by A. S. Byatt and Nicholas Warren, 107–39. London: Penguin Books.

2000 Middlemarch [1871–1872] New York: Norton.

Greiner, D. Rae

2011 “Thinking of Me Thinking of You: Sympathy versus Empathy in the Realist Novel.” Victorian Studies 53.3 (Spring): 417–26.

Hamsun, Knut

1994 Knut Hamsuns brev 1879–1895, edited by Harald Næss. Oslo: Gyldendal.

2001 Hunger, translated by Sverre Lyngstad. Edinburgh: Canongate Books.

2003 Sult [1890] Oslo: Gyldendal.

Harrison, Mary-Catherine

2008 “The Paradox of Fiction and the Ethics of Empathy: Reconceiving Dickens’s Realism.” Narrative 16.3 (October): 256–78.

Jones, Garreth

2008 “Introduction.” In Anna Karenina, translated by Louise and Aylmer Maude, vii–xxviii. London: Oxford University Press.

Mandelker, Amy

1993 Framing Anna Karenina: Tolstoy, the Woman Question, and the Victorian Novel. Columbus: Ohio State University Press.

Ngai, Sianne

2005 Ugly Feelings. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

Selboe, Tone

2015 “Hungry and Alone: The Topography of Everyday Life in Knut Hamsun and August Strindberg.” In Literature and the Peripheral City, edited by Lieven Ameel, Jason Finch and Markku Salmela, 131–48. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

Smith, Adam

2009 The Theory of Moral Sentiments [1759] London: Penguin Books.

Smith, Ali

2014 How to Be Both. London: Penguin Books.

Titchener, Edward

2014 “Introspection and Empathy” [1909] Dialogue in Philosophy, Mental and Neuro Sciences 7.1: 25–30.

Tolstoy, Leo

1996 Anna Karenina [1873–1877] In Собрание сочинений в восьми томах, vols. 5, 6. Accessed July 7, 2020. [URL]

2014 Anna Karenina, translated by Rosamund Bartlett. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Vischer, Robert

1994 “On the Optical Sense of Form: A Contribution to Aesthetics” [1873] In Empathy, Form, and Space, edited and translated by H. F. Mallgrave and Eleftherios Ikonomou, 89–123. Santa Monica, California: The Getty Center for History of Art and the Humanities.

Watt, Ian

2000 The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson and Fielding. London: Pimlico.

Welsh, Alexander

1971 The City of Dickens. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Williams, Raymond

Structures of Feeling.” In Marxism and Literature, 128–35. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Woolf, Virginia

1984 “Modern Fiction.” In The Common Reader: First Series, edited by Andrew McNeillie, 146–54. San Diego and New York: Harcourt Brace & Company.

Young, Kay

2012 “ ‘Wounded by Mystery’: Dickens and Attachment Theory.” English 61.234: 234–47.

Zwerdling, Alex

1987 “Esther Summerson Rehabilitated.” In Modern Critical Interpretations: Charles Dickens’s Bleak House, edited by Harold Bloom, 37–56. New York: Chelsea House Publishers.