ABSTRACT
This chapter examines depictions of human empathy in Middlemarch. Through these depictions, Eliot exposes the egoism that frequently inheres in the empathy we feel for and extend to other persons, and especially in any empathy that is based on our presumption of a fundamental human communion between ourselves and others. In two climactic, much celebrated scenes of depicted empathy late in the novel, Eliot then radically redefines what empathy is and ought to be. Rather than defining it, as in earlier scenes and earlier writings, as a relationship based on identification and comprehension, moving unilaterally from the empathizing self toward the other, she reconceives it in the two scenes as a more open, bilateral relationship, a relationship based on mutual uncertainty and trust. Eliot’s purpose is to reconceive the ethical relationship more broadly: to conceive it not in self-referential and fundamentally egoistic terms, but rather in terms that respect and preserve each person’s essential differences from other persons, as well as the universe’s essential separateness from ourselves.
