Rachel Ablow. The Marriage of Minds: Reading Sympathy in the Victorian Marriage Plot. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007. ISBN: 978-0-804-75466-8. Price: US$55.

In The Marriage of Minds, Rachel Ablow aims to do three related things: first, to invite us to reconceptualize sympathy not as pity but “as a psychic structure through which the subject is produced, consolidated, or redefined” (2); second, to link sympathy as it is evoked within novels to the nineteenth-century reader’s experience of those novels; and third, to frame this large discussion of sympathy within the specific context of marital relations, both as they were depicted in the novel and as they were discussed in the debates about marriage law reform that took place over the course of the century. Though the discussion of marital reform emerges patchily in Ablow’s discussions, the idea of marriage as an analogy for reading both the relations between characters within novels and between readers and texts is crucial. It allows Ablow to reconceive sympathy as a force that comes into being not within individuals but between them, allowing subjects to constitute themselves in relation to each other. The goal her book sets is “to determine precisely how Victorian writers and readers understood the means by which we become subjects through our encounters with others” (8). In each chapter, Ablow begins by countering received critical impressions of nineteenth-century novels that have been based on the modern ideas of sympathy which are associated with identification. She seeks instead to read these novels as exploring interpersonal relations based on the interactive concept of sympathy which emerged out of the eighteenth-century thinking of writers like David Hume and Adam Smith. She establishes this position in the critical first chapter of The Marriage of Minds by arguing that David Copperfield does not invite readers to identify with its hero. Instead she shows how Dickens’s descriptions of his hero, from an early moment in childhood, dwell on the boy’s propensity to idealize his attachments to others, an idealization that makes it easy for the novel’s readers to see how inaccurate David’s perceptions are. Ablow makes a similar point about the propensity to misread in the chapter that follows where she argues that, in Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights, the heroine must learn to recognize that she has misunderstood the subjects who surround her, imagining that love could overcome the logic of power that actually dominates their relations. In entitling her book The Marriage of Minds, thereby echoing Shakespeare while leaving out the adjective “true,” Ablow aptly captures what she does in her readings, which is, to explore the feelings that circulate between characters without pushing her interpretation towards some resolution that would identify a truth behind those feelings. The work that Ablow does here dovetails beautifully with the general exploration of the complexity of feelings now being undertaken by critics both Victorian and otherwise. I think specifically of Sianne Ngai’s Ugly Feelings (Cambridge: Harvard, 2005). Like Ngai, Ablow can, once the more conventional conception of sympathy has been set aside, explore the ugliness of the feelings that allow characters to define themselves in relation to one another. In her analysis of Wuthering Heights, for example, Ablow maps out a series of interactions that show characters assuming that, “To have something worth having, it seems is to have it at the expense of another” (50). In The Mill on the Floss she similarly uses incidents from across the novel to show the dangerous effects of emotional or imaginative absorption, which is most powerfully figured, here and elsewhere in Eliot in “the awful power of marital relationships to absorb one’s power to care for anyone outside the relationship” (73). In each case she then explores how the novel finds a way …