Schools of Sympathy: Gender and Identification Through the Novel

Elisabeth Anne MacDonald-Murray is an assistant professor of English at
the University of Western Ontario.

Nancy Roberts’s feminist study of the novel genre as the site of
gender positioning is the third volume in the University of British
Columbia’s Academic Women’s Association’s book series featuring
contemporary feminist scholarship. Schools of Sympathy examines the
construction of the central female character as both heroine and victim
in four major canonical novels of the 18th and 19th centuries: Henry
Richardson’s Clarissa, Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter,
Henry James’s The Portrait of a Lady, and Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the
D’Urbervilles. Roberts employs feminist theory to explore how the
author portrays the female protagonist, constructing her heroism not as
the product of her own agency but as a reflection of the sympathetic
response she generates in the reader.

Critics have long puzzled over the apparent passivity of the heroines
of these novels in the face of tragedy; all four women—Clarissa,
Hester, Isabel, and Tess—seem to embrace their own destruction rather
than attempt to resist the consequences of their powerlessness. Yet
while earlier critics have sought the key to each woman’s seemingly
wilful self-destruction within the psychology of the individual
character, Roberts focuses her attention on the author’s
representation of the female character and its effect on not only the
novel’s other characters but also the reader. She argues that the
novel functions as a form of “social work” in which the reader is
being schooled in the appropriate gendered response to both the heroine
and her situation. Through her investigation of the issues of gender
construction and power roles within the novel, Roberts examines how the
author generates both sympathy for and identification with the heroine.

Schools of Sympathy presents an excellent critique of female
representation within the genre of the novel, demonstrating how male
authors can createe and preserve historical and social constructions of
female agency by conditioning the reader’s response to a heroine’s
plights. Through her comparison of these four novels to the works of two
20th-century female authors, Margaret Atwood and Angela Carter, who also
deal with issues of female victimization and heroism, Roberts shows the
need for the feminist reader to recognize and resist the power positions
produced through sympathy and identification.