Download Silas Marner and the Paradox of Narrative Empathy Anna Lindhé

Silas Marner and the Paradox of Narrative Empathy
Anna Lindhé
The idea that reading literature makes readers more empathetic – more likely to understand and
feel with “the Other” – is often brought forth to defend the art of reading literature. Some
scholars (in philosophy, psychology, and literary studies) even suggest that experiencing
narrative empathy can influence readers’ moral development and prompt altruistic behaviour
beyond the fictional frame. This paper looks at a simple but crucial aspect of the reading
experience that is often overlooked in the theorization of empathy and its effects on readers.
Reading literature may incline the reader towards greater empathy with “the Other”; but a reading
that elicits empathy for “the Other” may also create an/the Other: at the same time that the reader
experiences empathy on behalf of one character, he or she is also invited to withhold empathy for
other characters. In fact, the feeling of empathy that the reader is moved to experience for one
character may even presuppose other less ethical feelings such as indifference and antipathy
towards (suffering) Others. Departing from an analysis of George Eliot’s Silas Marner (1861),
this paper will attend to how this paradox of narrative empathy complicates the ethics of reading
literature.