%0 PDF %T Unstable Sympathies in the 19th-Century British Novel, 1814-1853. %A Deren, Jennifer. %8 2017-04-20 %R http://localhost/files/2z10x242p %X Abstract: This dissertation explores the darker side of sympathy in three 19th-century British novels in order to illuminate the frustrations, anxieties, and displeasures of intimacy, both between people and between readers and texts. Examining just three of many possible ways in which interpersonal encounters can be deeply uncomfortable, I argue that Frances Burney's The Wanderer; or, Female Difficulties (1814), Mary Shelley's The Last Man (1826), and Charlotte Brontë's Villette (1853) illustrate in characters and mobilize in readers self-other relations that are "difficult," revolting, and penetrating, respectively. These modalities of sympathy, which make reading a deeply uncomfortable experience, complicate Adam Smith's influential argument that sympathy generates benevolence and peace between individuals and social groups, challenging 19th-century politics that incorporate Smithian sympathy as a strategy for regulating gendered, lower-class, and racial others. Making sympathetic reading a discomfiting and disconcerting experience, the novels demonstrate that sympathy generates unstable affects that defy attempts to control people and their thoughts and feelings. The Wanderer rewrites the conventions of the novel of manners to present sympathy as a mode of exclusion, aligning readers in "difficult," shifting sympathies with both the suffering heroine and the characters who persecute her. Further extending "difficult" sympathies from domestic to political life, The Last Man mobilizes intimacy that generates visceral revulsion and instigates social and political uprisings that nearly decimate humankind. Finally, Villette revises narrative conventions for realist fiction in order to explore the sexual politics of sympathy, which Brontë portrays as an invasive mode of penetration that painfully binds self and other. Together, the novels show that 19th-century novelistic sympathy was fraught with disagreement and discontent that is obscured by the dominance of Smith's theory in contemporary politics and in modern studies of the 19th-century British novel. Examining unstable sympathies in The Wanderer, The Last Man, and Villette recovers the political valence of the novels' resistance to literary conventions of sympathy, which, the novels suggest, do not fully capture the volatility of interpersonal encounters.; Thesis (Ph.D.)--Tufts University, 2015.; Submitted to the Dept. of English.; Advisor: Sonia Hofkosh.; Committee: Jillian Heydt-Stevenson, Joseph Litvak, and Lisa Lowe.; Keyword: British and Irish literature. %[ 2022-10-11 %9 Text %~ Tufts Digital Library %W Institution