Matt's Blog the Second: Scenes of Sympathy and/or Charity

Since I am not quite done reading Felix Holt and at the moment do not agree with myself about his class status, I will focus on Jaffe’s insights and North and South.  The prompt asks whether or not Jaffe’s ideas “distort or misunderstand cross-class encounters in the novel,” and I keep coming back to what I think is an important distinction between Jaffe’s conception of “sympathy” and that of “charity,” which does not get much play in her introduction but I think is pretty operational in the novel.  I wonder if by focusing on “sympathy” we run the risk of problematizing any acts of care or kindness from a higher to a lower class to the point of immediate suspicion.

As Jaffe rightly points out, sympathy was an important conduit to the middle-classes’ (at least as depicted in novels) understanding the boundaries of their status above and below:

“[Closely] tied to a sense of economic well-being, sympathy follows a capitalistic logic: like money it must be meted out with care lest it—and the identity it represents—dissipate entirely.  For the Victorian middle classes, then, the attempt to imagine the self in the other’s place was less an enjoyable theatrical exercise than a reminder of identity’s contingency.”  

Sympathy has a value insofar as it helps form the shape of one’s subjectivity within capitalism.  Even further, this marks a sense of exchange value operating between classes, i.e. taking my own value and checking it against the object of my sympathy, I might surmise that it would take 20 of them to amount to myself in terms of capital.  As Jaffe writes, “the need to verify the identity of the sympathetic object suggests that the spectator’s identity is itself fallen and in need of verification, lapsed from an idealized and naturalized aristocratic past.”  Aristocratic, yes, but with regard to North and South, this verification of identity also has quite a lot to do with one’s orientation to God, something Margaret Hale and Bessy both seem to care about a great deal.

On the face of it, charity and sympathy might seem like essentially the same thing with the same problematic possibility of dehumanizing (which I think is a better word for this than objectifying) the individual we deem worthy of charity.  We call large events with celebrities and $500 dinner plates “charity events,” but this is not the sense I am getting at.  I am thinking more in the classical, ideal sense of charity that stems from the Greek word caritas, a word that demands an ethic of love at its root.  While acts and feelings of sympathy might contain love at their base, charity goes a bit further.  I would argue that while Margaret certainly experiences one of Jaffe’s “scenes of sympathy” in her initial contact with the Higginses, she goes a bit further in her sympathy of the Higginses and, later, the Bouchers with her frequent visits and acts of care. 

Undoubtedly, there are points in these exchanges where Margaret clearly thinks herself better than the Higginses on more than one level (education, godliness, etc.), but I think Gaskell critiques these moments by painting Bessy and Nicholas in a more dynamic light.  The words—not just the image, as Jaffe might have it—of these lower class individuals have the ability to change the perspective of someone from a higher class.  This is not to say that Jaffe’s framework does not jive with quite a bit of the class encounters in North and South; I am more concerned that if followed too far, the specter of capitalistic determinism fails to recognize acts that may alleviate some aspect of human suffering in the immediate at the expense of focusing on the structural violence (Thanks Wes!) that needs to be addressed at the political/systemic level.