In one such narrative about the eighteenth-century novel, the sentimental novel is a force for social good. Heroines swoon, are betrayed, die; readers weep, learn, and come together in so doing. This novel teaches its readers to feel, and through feeling to know themselves in relation to countless others. Through sentiment, through sensibilité, through sympathy, communities are formed; the reader becomes sensitive to a shared kinship, a gathering together of like-minded readers, a humming, caring hive of emotion which stands ready to be co-opted into all sorts of new social formations. This is a particularly hopeful narrative of the novel’s progress, or rather of the novel’s relation to social progress. In this story, readers cry over novels, but they learn from their tears and are able to imagine forms of social union hitherto unexpressed. This is the case for the novel made by Lynn Hunt in work on the invention of human rights.110
The psychologist Steven Pinker notes that literary scholars often resist such notions: “They see the idea as too middlebrow, too therapeutic, too kitsch, too sentimental, too Oprah.”111 I count myself firmly among the resisters such as Suzanne Keen, who in a study of readers has shown how empathetic reading tends only to reaffirm in-groups and out-groups.112 Not all resisters of the Nussbaum/Hunt model are literary scholars. The historian Thomas Laqueur, for example, cautions that “sad and sentimental narratives can raise just as readily as lower the alterity threshold. The divide between who is in and who is out, between neighbor and stranger, is terrifyingly vulnerable and is secured by exactly the same means as it is breached in the name of humanity.”113 Again, the term “human” prompts us to read with caution.
Keen’s and Laqueur’s resistance draws on reception, real and imagined, but we can also resist the therapeutic model by attending to formal devices and structures. Insisting on the importance of “structures of identification,” Lynn Festa’s trenchant response to the sentimentalization of sentimentalism argues that eighteenth-century tropes and figures work to differentiate as much as to consolidate diverse groups.114 Festa reads sentimentalism as “affective piracy,” a system which usurps the voices of sufferers to insist upon “the humanity of the feeling subject”; she insists that “sentimental form institutes restrictive communities. Sentimental tropes … create the semblance of likeness while upholding forms of national, cultural, and economic difference.”115 Reading sentimentally reinforces difference rather than overcoming it.
How does early modern compassion function as form? In French writing a varied set of structures of compassion—modes of address, rhetorical set pieces, spatializations of affect—are built out of the techniques and aftereffects of the writing of the Wars of Religion. In Chapter 1, for example, we will see the way in which texts frame events as pitiful spectacles; that tableau of affectively fraught spectatorship will also structure the genre of the novel, which I discuss in Chapter 4. The structures of compassion are a dispositif, a set of formal contrivances for bringing a spectator into relation with an instance or idea of suffering; but that dispositif also shapes a disposition, a way of feeling. Where sensibilité lingers on the object, compassion constructs our relation to it.116
Throughout this book I suggest that a certain compassionate mode—not sentimental or contagious, but rather reserved and reflective—is figured by a particular way of reading and interpreting. In many of the texts discussed here, compassion is mediated through images or through other texts; characters frame their encounters with suffering as a spectacle, or philosophers distinguish a compassion elicited by tragedy from a feeling retained from the reading of a poem. These aesthetic experiences are not the contagious and community-building scenes imagined by the readers of sentimentalism. The compassionate mode of reception is not a form of fervent identification. Its readers mark an affective relation with what they read but keep it at a distance.
In Compassion’s Edge, fictional representations of and theoretical discourse about compassion mingle, both participating in the construction of compassion’s exclusions. The history of emotions has tended to disregard literary texts as sources.117 Yet my aim in bringing these different forms of writing together is not to insist on literature’s privileged perspective on the emotions; indeed, very few of the texts I read here come from what are usually understood to be literary genres. Instead, I want to insist that fictive representations and theoretical discussions of compassion in this period alike reflect on the emotional and ethical engagements of our modes of reading. Sometimes this reading-for-compassion is explicit, as it is in the multiple texts where theorists of compassion reflect on scenes of reading or spectating, on novels or on tragedy. More broadly, both kinds of texts suggest that compassion is a way of reading the other, of appraising and responding to signs of suffering that are imagined to figure a narrative. And if I read nonliterary texts with the perspective of my own literary training, sometimes pushing them out of their more usual places in an intellectual history, that serves to remind us that reading, like the compassion I describe here, is a contingent and partisan way of apprehending the world even as it reaches out to draw others in.
Compassion’s Chapters
The first three chapters of this book establish the structures of early modern compassion as they unfold in early modern France, exploring compassion’s edge and looking at the drawing of partisan distinctions and the theoretical structures generated by such distinctions. In the final three chapters, I suggest that those rigid structures are reworked in varied forms of early modern writing which speak from the sometimes more nuanced territory beyond the edge, looking at fiction, at writing about religious difference and transnationalism, and at writing from New France. In these liminal zones, I suggest that compassion’s edge is still fiercely observed but also sometimes recuperated, even if only briefly. In some of this material, the compassionate gesture reaches across difference, although often with troubling results.
In the first chapter, “Pitiful Sights: Reading the Wars of Religion,” I explore the topos of the pitiful spectacle that punctuates writing from the period of the wars on both the Catholic and Protestant sides. This pitiful spectacle became a key weapon in the affective policing of a divided France, across a range of genres and sectarian divides: from Ronsard to Montaigne, via Agrippa d’Aubigné. The pitiful spectacle functioned as an apparatus for the apportioning and directing of pity, underscoring the increasing partisanship of the wars. It also established response to spectacle as something central to the political life of the troubled nation. Through that figure, which returns throughout the book, the Wars of Religion make themselves felt repeatedly and affectively throughout the seventeenth century; the language of pity and compassion shapes the way the French negotiated both the wars and the difficult experiment with toleration that followed them.
In the second chapter, “The Compassion Machine: Theories of Fellow-Feeling, 1570–1692,” I pursue the secular structures of compassion as they were explored by writers of moral and dramatic theory from the late sixteenth to the late seventeenth century: La Taille, Montaigne, Charron, Descartes, La Rochefoucauld, Esprit, Nicole, La Mesnardière, Corneille, Rapin, and Dacier. These very different writers all return to the structure of fellow-feeling set out in Aristotle’s account of pity and terror in the Rhetoric and Poetics: we pity another’s suffering and, in pitying, fear that the same might happen to ourselves. For some this structure makes pity into a narrow response to suffering, whereas for others the ritual observation of the same pairing leads to a broader reflection on human vulnerability. In tracking the variant breadth of pity over these theorizations, I trace the sharply structured constructions of compassion’s edge.
In Chapter 3, “Caritas, Compassion, and Religious Difference,” I ask how religious difference disrupted structures of proximity and distance, looking at Catholic and Protestant understandings of caritas, the bond of universal love. I describe the reach to universalism sketched out in the compassion theories of the Jesuits Jean-Baptiste Saint-Jure and Pierre Le Moyne, and the Capuchin Yves de Paris, but set them against writers who insisted that compassion was importantly