Consciousness, Literature and the Arts

Archive

Volume 16 Number 3, December 2015

___________________________________________________________________

 

Born to Sorrow: Empathic Workouts in Mrs. Henry Wood’s East Lynne

by

Sheila Bauer-Gatsos

Dominican University, River Forest, Illinois

 

Abstract:

Drawing on recent studies in psychology and cognitive literary studies, this paper explores the relationship between literature and empathy.  The author suggests that literary scholars closely study fictional narratives to determine the strategies that appear to exercise readers’ empathy.  This paper specifically considers Ellen Wood’s East Lynne, which engages in a process of encouraging readers’ alignment with and empathy for the main character as it simultaneously calls for readers to pass judgment on the character as a fallen woman.  Through a close reading of this popular nineteenth-century text, we can observe the complex relationships between writers, readers, and texts.

 

***

Recent scholarship in cognitive literary studies prompts many questions about the complicated relationship between empathy and literature.  Does reading literature create empathy in readers? Do certain kinds of literature encourage empathy more than others?  What are the risks inherent in suggesting that reading about fictional characters can inspire empathy for real-life others? To what degree does empathy felt during the reading experience translate into real world social action? These questions are significant for the fields of cognitive science and literary studies.  As scholars and teachers of literature, we have likely long believed in the power of fiction, yet some of the claims that emerge from cognitive literary scholarship might seem simultaneously exciting and troubling.  Recall, for example, the mixed responses to the October 2013 study in Science, titled “Reading Literary Fiction Improves Theory of Mind,” in which psychologists David Comer Kidd and Emanuele Castano argue that reading literary fiction at least temporarily enhances Theory of Mind, or our ability to “identify and understand others’ subjective states of mind” (Kidd and Castano, 2013, 377).  Many articles reporting on the study quickly made the leap from Theory of Mind to empathic capacity, suggesting that reading somehow makes us “better people.”[1] Louise Erdrich, for example, reported feeling “cheered” and wrote in an email, “This is why I love science.  [The researchers] found a way to prove true the intangible benefits of literary fiction” (Belluck, 2013).  Others were less amused and enchanted by these claims, though, and wonder to what extent we need or want empirical studies to tell us anything about literature.  Writing in Slate, Mark O’Connell expresses his ambivalence about asking whether reading makes us better people and suggests that the question itself, which can be considered “narrow and reductive,” might not be a meaningful one to ask in the first place.  He writes, “There’s a risk of thinking about literature in a sort of morally instrumentalist way, whereby its value can be measured in terms of its capacity to improve us” (O’Connell, 2013).[2]   These disparate responses reveal our desire to see the practice of reading in its full complexity but also our resistance to the idea that science has the power to validate literature.  I understand and, to some degree, share these reactions; I’ve always believed that reading is good for us, but I also don’t want to reduce it to a daily vitamin whose benefits can be weighed and measured.[3]  I would argue, though, that there is distinct value in using the knowledge emerging from cognitive science to inform our literary scholarship—and vice versa.  For while the recent studies in cognitive science might help us examine literary texts in new ways, more importantly, literary scholars can help to illuminate the work of cognitive scientists by doing what we do best: focusing on literary texts, their rich social/cultural contexts, and their readers. Rather than accepting or discounting studies of fiction and empathy out of hand, I’d like to encourage us to examine exactly what features in literary texts appear to engage and possibly extend readers’ empathy.  To that end, I turn to Ellen Wood’s East Lynne to examine the ways that this nineteenth-century novel engages readers in what I’m calling empathic workouts.  Specifically, I argue that in East Lynne, Ellen Wood uses narrative strategies that simultaneously pull and push her readers toward and away from empathic engagement with the text and, more specifically, with the character of Isabel Vane.  East Lynne calls us to empathize with Isabel Vane but also demands that we condemn her actions.  That tension is part of what makes the novel so engaging, both for Wood’s contemporary readers and for readers today.

Ellen Wood’s East Lynne, first published beginning in 1861 in New Monthly Magazine, was a wildly popular novel in its time.  Readers were immediately drawn to the story of scandal, mistaken identity, betrayal, and suffering.  The novel’s plot reads like a melodrama, and in fact, that is how the text is often discussed.[4] After the death of her father, Isabel Vane learns that due to her father’s extensive debts, she has no money, no home, and only one relative, whose ability to help her is hampered by a jealous and manipulative wife. She quickly (and somewhat desperately) marries Archibald Carlyle, a respectable lawyer who has just purchased her family estate, despite her increasing attraction to Francis Levison, a charming but dishonorable man.  Isabel’s insecurity in her marriage is inflamed by Levison, eventually leading her to abandon her husband and three children to run away with Levison, who promptly abandons her.  After she is disfigured in a train accident and presumed dead, she returns to her family home to work as the governess, Madame Vine, so that she can be near her children and her former husband once again. While the novel is clearly melodramatic, with a heavy reliance on action and plot (Vicinus, 1981, 134), readers responded to the story with enthusiasm; Ellen Wood notes in a letter to her publishers that a female reader told Wood she “could not go to bed until she had finished it [for] she had not read anything like it in years” (qtd in Maunder, 2000, 695).  The novel was reprinted numerous times, and more than 500,000 copies had been sold by the end of the century. 

While the story was popular with most readers, however, critical reaction towards the novel was mixed.  An early rejection from a publisher was based on the novel’s foul nature, which was considered “not good for the general public” (Maunder, 2000, 18).  Critics particularly worried about the appeal of Lady Isabel, who they feared becomes far more interesting to readers once she falls.  Readers were firmly drawn into the tale of Isabel Vane, despite (or perhaps because of) her scandalous fall from grace.  Even some of the reviewers who felt the novel breached “good taste” found that they could not put it down until they’d “read the conclusion for [their] own amusement” (Maunder, 2000, 18). This ambivalent response to the content of the novel—a story readers felt was “wrong,” but one they could not stop reading—is somewhat mitigated by what appears to be its firm punishment of the fallen woman.  Critics believe the fallen woman motif served as a cautionary tale with a clear-cut moral lesson and a personal warning (Elliott, 1976, 331). Isabel falls, suffers deeply, and, the text seems to suggest, suffers rightly. That very suffering, though, is an essential element of readers’ engagement with the novel and its heroine.   As Andrew Maunder explains in his introduction to the text,  “The sufferings of Isabel Vane struck a deep chord in an era which took pride in its capacity to empathize with suffering and to respond feelingly from the heart to the plight of the distressed” (Maunder, 2000, 20, emphasis added).  East Lynne’s narrative structure requires that readers project themselves into Isabel’s situation to consider her perspective with an empathic response, but it also requires that we remain outside the text, passing judgment on her decisions and actions from a distance.

How does it do this? Steven Pinker and Suzanne Keen can help us think specifically about the ways that empathic engagement functions in our brains and in the books that we read.  In The Better Angels of Our Nature, Steven Pinker explores, in part, the cognitive complexity of empathy, explaining that “The overall picture that has emerged from the study of the compassionate brain is that there is no empathy center with empathy neurons, but complex patterns of activation and modulation that depend on perceivers’ interpretation of the straits of another person and the nature of their relationship with the person” (Pinker, 2011, 578).  What happens in our brains, Pinker explains, is far more complex than simply a spontaneous sense of empathy when witnessing or reading about the plight of another. Instead, Pinker describes a process through which empathy might be encouraged but then moderated, often through conscious or subconscious beliefs and biases.  Pinker’s description of activation and modulation seems to aptly apply to the narrative process in East Lynne. Similarly, we can draw on Keen’s study of the narrative strategies that are considered particularly likely to invoke empathy in readers. In her book Empathy and the Novel, Keen examines the role of empathy in literature, though she does not wholeheartedly endorse either the capacity or the imperative for novels to build empathy in readers, nor does she necessarily believe that empathic responses that do occur from reading will lead to prosocial action.[5]  Keen does, however, examine the possibility for empathic responses from reading as she closely analyzes what occurs among readers, authors, and texts.  Keen reminds us that while “readers’ cognitive and affective responses do not inevitably lead to empathizing, fiction does disarm readers of some of the protective layers of cautious reasoning that may inhibit empathy in the real world” (Keen, 2007, 28).  Keen points to two factors in particular that I would argue appear to be at work in East Lynne: character identification[6] and narrative situation.  Keen explains that aspects of characterization such as naming and description (among others) “may be assumed to contribute to the potential for character identification and thus for empathy” (Keen, 2007, 93).  Importantly, this kind of identification and extension of empathy can occur “even when the character and reader differ from each other in all sorts of practical and obvious ways” (Keen, 2007, 70).  Readers thus may identify with the fallen woman character even as they deliberately differentiate themselves from her.  Narrative situation refers to “the nature of the mediation between author and reader, including the person of the narration, the implicit location of the narrator, the relation of the narrator to the characters, and the internal or external perspective on characters, including in some cases the style of representation of characters’ consciousness” (Keen, 2007, 93), and Wood’s narration in East Lynne plays a key role in exercising our empathy. 

Using Pinker and Keen can help us think about the ways that East Lynne might exercise our empathic capacity.  East Lynne activates and modulates our empathy for Isabel by creating strong character identification early in the novel (which, I will show, continues even after her fall and subsequent return to her family) and through frequent narrative addresses and admonishments. The text thus engages in complex patterns of activation and modulation, by calling for empathy as well as simultaneous judgment against her actions.  While there are many examples of this process in the novel, I will focus on four particular moments of engagement with Isabel: the first introduction and descriptions of her character, her deliberate effort to deny her attraction to Levison, our reintroduction to her a year after she abandons her family, and her position after she returns to work as her children’s governess.

The first encounters with Isabel illustrate the naming and descriptive elements of character identification described by Keen.  Isabel meets Mr. Carlyle, who, upon viewing her enter the room, thinks, “Who—what—was it? Mr. Carlyle looked, not quite sure whether it was a human being: he almost thought it more like an angel” (Wood, 2000, 49).  Lord Mount Severn introduces his daughter formally, noting her name and her relationship to him, when he says, “’My daughter, Mr. Carlyle; the Lady Isabel’” (Wood, 2000, 49).  The first descriptions of Lady Isabel note her surpassing beauty, with perfectly contoured features, delicate skin, luxuriant hair, and a sweet expression in her eyes.  Beyond the physical descriptions, though, we also learn that “Lady Isabel was wondrously gifted by nature, not only in mind and person, but in heart. She was as little like a fashionable young lady as it was well possible to be, partly because she had hitherto been secluded from the great world, partly from the care bestowed upon her training. . . . Generous and benevolent was she; timid and sensitive to a degree; gentle and considerate to all” (Wood, 2000, 50-51).  Isabel is established as a proper young woman, with a virtuous nature and a good background.  Even as the first praise is bestowed upon her, however, the narrator also offers a warning.  While the earl is exceedingly proud of his daughter, calling her as good as she is beautiful, the narrator tells us that such a reputation will not be hers forever, stating,

Do not cavil at her being thus praised: admire and love her whilst you may; she is worthy of it now, in her innocent girlhood; the time will come when such praise would be misplaced. Could the fate, that was to overtake his child, have been foreseen by the earl, he would have struck her down to death, in his love, as she stood before him, rather than suffer her to enter upon it. (Wood, 2000, 51) 

The narrative pattern here draws us into alignment and identification with Isabel at the same time it also warns us to keep our distance.

In several other early incidents with Lady Isabel, we are again engaged in a process of activation and modulation when the text calls us to identify with Isabel’s virtue but also forewarns of her future downfall.  One such incident occurs when Isabel’s gold cross necklace, a gift from her late mother, breaks.  In describing the incident, Wood highlights Isabel’s modesty and innocence, as Isabel fears that the accident must be “an evil omen,” since the cross was supposed to be her “talisman” to help her in times of distress or when she was in need of her mother’s guidance.   The broken necklace incident and Isabel’s reaction to it remind us that she is motherless and often without counsel.  That isolation is intensified upon the death of her father, and Wood again uses strategies of character identification and narrative direction to activate our empathy for Isabel’s clear and complete displacement at the loss:

Isabel leaned her head upon her hand. All the difficulties and embarrassments of her position came crowding upon her mind. [ . . . ] Since the previous morning, she seemed to have grown old in the world’s experiences; her ideas were changed, the bent of her thoughts had been violently turned from its course. Instead of being a young lady of position, of wealth and rank, she appeared to herself more in the light of an unfortunate pauper; an interloper in the house she was inhabiting. It has been the custom in romance to represent young ladies, especially if they are handsome and interesting, as being altogether oblivious of everyday cares and necessities, supremely indifferent to the future prospects of poverty—poverty that brings hunger and thirst and cold and nakedness in its train; but, be assured, this apathy never exists in real life. Isabel Vane’s grief for her father—whom, whatever may have been the aspect he wore for others, she had deeply loved and reverenced—was sharply poignant; but in the midst of that grief, and of the singular troubles his death had brought forth, she could not close her eyes to her own future. (Wood, 2000, 141)

Our empathic engagement with Isabel is certainly activated within this passage, where we are drawn into her situation by the narrator’s descriptions of her grief and frank assessment of her position (and the loss thereof).  This passage draws on Isabel’s neediness and isolation, which are other factors, Pinker claims, that more readily activate our empathy (Pinker, 2011, 581). Wood continues to engage our empathy as we see Isabel marry and struggle to identify her place within that relationship, where she feels insecure in the face of her sister-in-law’s disdain and her husband’s friendship with their neighbor, Barbara Hare.  Wood’s narrative throughout these early scenes calls us to identify with Isabel’s virtue but also warns us of her future downfall.

That downfall, of course, comes as Isabel becomes increasingly tempted by Francis Levison, and strikingly, even here, as we move toward the fallen woman narrative, Wood’s text begins to engage the empathy of her readers. The narrator points to the role Levison will play in her life when Isabel first meets him on the same day that she meets Carlyle: “Strange—strange that she should make the acquaintance of those two men in the same day, almost in the same hour: the two, of all the human race, who were to exercise so powerful an influence over her future life” (Wood, 2000, 53).  The text calls our attention to Levison’s power and influence and then builds on that by putting the two in subsequent, increasingly sexually charged encounters.  When Isabel and Levison find themselves together, Isabel is “aware that a sensation all too warm, a feeling of attraction towards Francis Levison, was working within her; not a voluntary one; she could no more repress it than she could repress her own sense of being; and, mixed with it was the stern voice of conscience, overwhelming her with the most lively terror. She would have given all she possessed to be able to overcome it; she would have given half the years of her future life to separate herself at once and for ever from the man” (Wood, 2000, 261).  In this passage, Wood stimulates our empathy for Isabel by revealing both the strength of her attraction and her desperate desire to resist it.  We feel with Isabel, especially since her husband’s casual, somewhat oblivious neglect leaves her with Levison for extended periods of time.  Moreover, the narrator actively encourages us to feel with and for Isabel, stating, “Oh reader! never doubt the principles of poor Lady Isabel, her rectitude of mind, her wish and endeavour to do right, her abhorrence of wrong; her spirit was earnest and true, her intentions were pure” (Wood, 2000, 268-9), but even in these words, the narrator reminds us that we will soon doubt Isabel’s principles and intentions.  When Isabel ultimately leaves her family to run away with the deceitful and manipulative Levison, we share the sense of her despair, but we also understand that she has been misled, and, as readers, we recognize the consequences of her decision.  Our empathy, then, might be activated toward Isabel, but it is also quickly modulated through reminders of the dishonor of her actions.  Isabel’s husband, Carlyle, states that her betrayal is worse than a death, and he works to erase Isabel from the family’s life, even taking her name away from their daughter, who will now be called Lucy in the future (Wood, 2000, 333). Isabel is gone “as one forgotten” (Wood, 2000, 380), and, it seems, she cannot return.

On one hand, then, at this mid-point of the novel, the text suggests that Isabel is entirely displaced as a punishment for her betrayal, yet in the very next chapter of the book, we return again to our central character.  The narrator asks, “How fared it with Lady Isabel?” and answers:

Just as it must be expected to fare and does fare, when a high-principled gentlewoman falls from her pedestal. Never had she experienced a moment’s calm, or peace, or happiness, since that fatal night of quitting her home. She had taken a blind leap in a moment of wild passion; [but] she had found herself plunged into an abyss of horror, from which there was never more any escape; never more, never more. The very hour of her departure she awoke to what she had done: the guilt, whose aspect had been shunned in prospective, assumed at once its true, frightful colour, the blackness of darkness; and a lively remorse, a never-dying anguish, took possession of her soul forever. (Wood, 2000, 334)

The imagery and language here reveal her despair and the inescapable nature of her new position, which sharply contrasts with the position she held as Carlyle’s wife. Wood refuses Isabel even a moment of pleasure, telling us that the horror of the situation set in immediately upon her departure, and she has spent a year regretting her decision and suffering from Levison’s neglect.  Thus, we are again called to simultaneously empathize with and distance ourselves from Isabel as a fallen woman.  This passage continues to activate and modulate our empathy, as the narrator offers a direct warning to her readers:

Oh, reader, believe me! Lady—wife—mother! should you ever be tempted to abandon your home, so will you waken! Whatever trials may be the lot of your married life, though they may magnify themselves to your crushed spirit as beyond the endurance of woman to bear, resolve to bear them; fall down upon your knees and pray to be enabled to bear them: pray for patience; pray for strength to resist the demon that would urge you to escape; bear unto death, rather than forfeit your fair name and your good conscience; for be assured that the alternative, if you rush on to it, will be found far worse than death! (Wood, 2000, 334-5)

In these passages and the ones that follow, the narrator both engages our empathy by pulling us into Isabel’s perspective and calls for our judgment of her actions, a move that requires at least some critical distance.  These complex narrative patterns seem like good illustrations of Pinker’s discussion of what happens in the empathic brain when primitive emotional responses and the processing of contextualizing factors are sometimes in tension or direct conflict with one another (Pinker, 2011, 578-79). 

When Isabel returns to her family to work as a governess for her children, she relies on her mild disfigurement from the train accident, a concealing wardrobe, and a pair of blue glasses to hide her true identity. She is no longer Lady Isabel Vane but is now Madame Vine.  She hears others (Barbara Carlyle, who is now Archibald’s second wife; Barbara’s mother, Mrs. Hare; even the servants) tell the story of Isabel Vane, but she cannot claim that identity.  That identity has been stripped from her, and she must remain outside the family, even while she serves as their governess.  In a conversation with Mrs. Hare, Isabel says, “’Don’t pity me! [ . . . ] Indeed it makes endurance harder’” (Wood, 2000, 485).  But Isabel must endure, and the text continues to call for both empathy and judgment, with frequent references to Isabel bearing her sharp cross (Wood, 2000, 490), which remind us of both her sin and her suffering penance.  

One of the text’s final points of commentary on Lady Isabel’s transgressions is similarly complex and contradictory.  In a long address where the narrator calls frank attention to her role in the text, she claims that no matter what people will say, “it is impossible to eradicate human passions from the human heart.  You may suppress them, deaden them, keep them in subjection, but you cannot root them out. The very best man that attains to the greatest holiness on earth has need constantly to strive and pray, if he would keep evil away from his thoughts, passions from his nature” (Wood, 2000, 655).  In this passage, Wood’s narrator aligns all readers—even the very best men—with the passions of Lady Isabel.  And, the narrator continues to explore this line of thinking, this activation of our empathy, for several pages, telling the reader, “I shall be blamed for it, I fear, if I attempt to defend her” (Wood, 2000, 656), but then offering a qualified defense anyway.  The narrator expresses empathic engagement with Isabel, who, she claims, has suffered greatly since her return.  “No wonder” the narrator states, “that the chords of life were snapping: the wonder would have been had they remained unstrained” (Wood, 2000, 657).   The narrator continues by invoking a moralist who might act as judge:

“She brought it upon herself! she ought not to have come back to East Lynne!” groans our moralist again. Do I not say so? Of course she ought not. Neither ought she to have suffered her thoughts to stray in the manner they did, towards Mr. Carlyle. She ought not to have done so; but she did. If we all did just as we “ought,” this lower world would be worth living in. You must sit down and abuse her, and so calm your anger. I agree with you that she ought never to have returned; that it was an act little short of madness: but are you quite sure that you would not have done the same, under the facility and the temptation? And now you can abuse me for saying so, if it will afford you any satisfaction. (Wood, 2000, 657)

The text mediates between narrator and reader, condemning Isabel’s actions, but also implicating us for sharing the same passions and suggesting that we might all behave in the same way. The text thus strongly encourages us to share Isabel’s perspective, even though it ultimately withdraws from this activation of empathy in the end.  After Isabel has died, Carlyle reveals that he has just discovered Isabel’s disguised return to their family, but he firmly asserts that Isabel’s name must remain barred, never to be mentioned among them.  Isabel is again firmly erased from the text, and our empathy is modulated once more.

Most critics read East Lynne as a text that dramatizes and then fully condemns and punishes the fallen woman at its center, thus reflecting the conventional nineteenth-century value systems within which the novel was written.  I think that by considering the empathic engagement that occurs within the text, we can achieve a more complex reading.  The patterns of empathic activation and modulation through which we are pulled into Isabel’s perspective and her suffering and then pushed back outside to observe her punishment and even pass our own judgment on her actions reveal the complexity of Wood’s text and of women’s position, which, East Lynne reminds us, makes them “born to sorrow” (Wood, 2000, 485).  The fallen woman is not merely distanced and discarded; she returns and continues to engage readers’ empathy even while they judge her actions with a critical eye. East Lynne thus reveals the complicated nature of empathic engagement that occurs among authors, characters, readers, and texts. 

Works Cited

Belluck, Pam, 2013, “For Better Social Skills, Scientists Recommend a Little Chekhov,” The New York Times Well Blog, The New York Times, 3 Oct. 2013, Web. 5 Sept. 2014.

Bury, Liz, 2013, “Reading literary fiction improves empathy, study finds,” The Guardian, Guardian News and Media, LLC, 8 Oct. 2013, Web. 9 Sept. 2014.

Elliott, Jeanne B., 1976, “A Lady to the End: The Case of Isabel Vane,” Victorian Studies, 19:3, 329-344.

Keen, Suzanne, 2007, Empathy and the Novel. NY, NY: Oxford UP.

Kidd, David and Emanuele Castano, 2013, “Reading Literary Fiction Improves Theory of Mind,” Science, 342: 6156, 377-380.

Liberman, Mark, 2013, “That Study on Literary Fiction and Empathy Proves Precisely Nothing,” Slate, Slate Magazine, 29 Oct. 2013, Web. 5 Sept. 2014.

Maunder, Andrew, 2000, “Introduction,” in East Lynne, Ontario, Canada: Broadview.

Mirani, Leo, 2013, “It’s official: Reading literary fiction makes you a better person,” Quartz, The Atlantic Monthly Group, 3 Oct. 2013, Web. 9 Sept. 2014.

O’Connell, Mark, 2013, “10 Novels to a Better You,” Slate, Slate Magazine, 28 Oct. 2013, Web. 5 Sept. 2014.

Pinker, Steven, 2011, The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined. NY, NY: Penguin Books.

Schonfeld, Zach, 2013, “Now We Have Proof Reading Literary Fiction Makes You a Better Person,” The Wire, The Atlantic Monthly Group, 4 Oct. 2013, Web. 5 Sept. 2014.

Siegel, Lee, 2013, “Should Literature Be Useful?” The New Yorker, Conde Nast, 6 Nov. 2013, Web. 9 Sept. 2014.

Vicinus, Martha, 1981, “’Helpless and Unfriended’: Nineteenth-Century Domestic Melodrama,” New Literary History, 13:1, 127-143.

Wood, Ellen, 2000, East Lynne, Ontario, Canada: Broadview.