Schools of sympathy -- Clarissa: novel as trial -- The Scarlet Letter and "The spectacle of the scaffold" -- Changing places: gender and identity in The Portrait of a Lady -- "A thousand pities": the reader and Tess of the d'Urbervilles" -- "Back talk": the work of Margaret Atwood and Angela Carter
Summary
"Schools of Sympathy is a feminist exploration of gender and identification in Samuel Richardson's Clarissa, Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter, Henry James's Portrait of a Lady, and Thomas Hardy's Tess of the d'Urbervilles. In each of these novels the heroine is portrayed as a victim. Nancy Roberts examines how the reader's sympathy for the heroines is constructed, the motivations and desires involved in an identification with victimization, and the gender and power roles that such an identification calls into play."--Jacket
Notes
Co-published by the University of British Columbia, Academic Women's Association
