The limits of sympathy in George Eliot's novels

A central paradox one observes throughout George Eliot's life and works is her deep respect for difference coexisting with her equally deep desire to resolve and transcend it. Sympathy is at the center of this paradox because Eliot recognizes difference almost exclusively through the process of sympathetic identification, yet sympathy by definition attempts to eradicate or neutralize difference through identification. Despite Eliot's professed goal of "enlarging men's sympathies" and despite her efforts to create an illusion of inclusiveness in her novels, her actual representation of the sympathetic imagination (of both her narrator and of particular characters) often belies these efforts. I focus on certain textual moments where the discrepancy between her purported aesthetic goal and her actual construction of the narrative (in such a way as to disable her readers from "imagining and feeling" the pains and joys of the Other) is most pronounced. Specifically, I examine two sets of paradigmatic scenes: the moments when two female characters are presented as transcending through sympathetic identification the rivalry that threatens to divide them; and the moments when a son is insufficiently able to identify imaginatively with the struggles of his mother. Economic metaphors might be used to characterize the sympathetic transactions in both sets of scenes: the illusion of sympathetic plenitude suggested in the first set of scenes is paralleled by the disclosure of sympathetic scarcity in the second.;Eliot begins her writing career by unconsciously demonstrating the obstacles to sympathetic identification (in her scathing essays on Cumming and Young), but then goes on self-consciously to explore them in her fictional work where she fashions for herself an aesthetic that forces her to engage in the same kind of ethical self-discipline that she expects of heroines like Dinah and Dorothea. Middlemarch represents Eliot's most optimistic vision of the (seemingly) endlessly expansive powers of the sympathetic imagination, while Daniel Deronda represents her at her most pessimistic/realistic. By Daniel Deronda, Eliot has developed a newfound respect for the impenetrable opacity of the other, a humbling new awareness of the limitations of the sympathetic imagination.