Empathy and the Strangeness of Fiction: Readings in French Realism by Maria C. Scott (review)

Reviewed by: Empathy and the Strangeness of Fiction: Readings in French Realism by Maria C. Scott John T. Booker Scott, Maria C. Empathy and the Strangeness of Fiction: Readings in French Realism. Edinburgh UP, 2020. ISBN 978-1-474-46305-8. Pp 235. Drawing on a promising vein of research in psychology, Scott sets out to explore the "relation between affective sharing and mind-reading in the reception of narrative fiction" (9). A trio of early nineteenth-century works—Balzac's La fille aux yeux d'or, Stendhal's Le rouge et le noir, and Sand's Indiana—will serve as case studies, but Scott first lays out her critical approach at considerable length. Understood in simple terms, affective sharing is characterized by empathy, while mind-reading takes the form of suspicion. These contrasting attitudes can be observed between fictional characters, especially when the introduction of a stranger troubles the status quo, while an analogous dynamic plays out between reader and narrator. Scott's central premise is that "novelistic representations of encounters with fictional strangers might help us to understand what is at stake in our encounters with fiction" (47). The chapters on the novels, categorized rather broadly as "early examples of French literary realism" (56), will be of most interest to readers of this journal, although the inclusion of translations indicates that Scott is also writing for an anglophone audience. Balzac's novella, with its exotic atmosphere, enigmatic characters, and cryptic plot, provides a fertile starting point, leading to the conclusion, as one might expect, that it is "a deeply ambiguous text, which both offers itself to and resists the critic as mind-reader" (92). In Stendhal's novel, the interplay of seduction and suspicion is both pervasive and considerably more nuanced. While Julien Sorel emerges from the outset as an obvious figure of the stranger, Scott comes to focus more extensively on Madame de Rênal and Mathilde de la Mole, who personify "two different reading stances, one naive and affect-driven, the other critical and detached" and whose "divergent attitudes might be aligned with affective sharing and mind-reading, or seduction and suspicion" (135). In the fictional world of Indiana, where the underlying principles of melodrama seem to hold sway, it is a pair of male characters who elicit the most interest. Raymon de Ramière, gifted with linguistic facility and an instinct for exploiting the weakness of others, obviously "embodies the dangerous seductions of fiction" (146), but it turns out to be Sir Ralph, following his dramatic transformation in the novel's conclusion, who ultimately plays the role of "seductive storyteller" (166). Scott's treatment of the fictional texts is both perceptive and lively. She engages along the way with a wide range of existing criticism, from both literary and psychological domains, all duly documented in an extensive bibliography, with a welcome index. Since her presentation is eminently readable, one might wish that she felt less need to recap so explicitly and to preview what she will do next. The three works she examines all appeared in a very brief time frame (1830–1835), so it would be interesting to see what her approach might yield if applied to fictional texts written at other periods, including those in which the presence of a narrator is not so overt. End Page 102 John T. Booker University of Kansas Copyright © 2024 American Association of Teachers of French