Compassion's Edge. Katherine Ibbett
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also feel a twinge—especially, of course, if we are one of those “personnes delicates, qui ont l’imagination vive, et les chairs fort tendres et fort molles” [“delicate people, with a lively imagination, and very tender and soft flesh”].69 And where the body leads, the emotions follow: “Cette compassion dans les corps produit la compassion dans les esprits.” [“This compassion in the body produces compassion in the mind.”]70
In distinguishing between types of compassionate, Malebranche, like other writers of the period, suggests that women and children will be especially prone to such delicacy, such that they will “machinalement” [“mechanically”] respond to sights of brutality, even when exercised only against animals, which in turn are “que des machines” [“only machines”] (281). (Think of Agnès in Molière’s L’École des femmes, whose compassion even to animals marks out her vulnerability; she can’t see a chicken die without weeping, she says, so when a man tells her he suffers for want of her love she is dead meat.)71 On the one hand, Malebranche’s attentive praise of the unique bond between mother and child, worthy of the praise of God and man, proclaims women to be central to compassion; on the other (and in keeping with Stoic tradition, though he was usually opposed to it) he distinguishes between masculine and feminine experiences of compassion.72
Here, as elsewhere in the period, women’s animality places them outside of the reason that the seventeenth century saw as central to the proper procedures of compassion. In early modern French discussions of compassion, the compassionates are mostly men, even if sometimes maternal figures both despised and praised recur as a motif in their theories.73 In the descriptions of the proper sort of compassion that feature in the first half of this book, the body disappears, and with it women’s significance.
Women as objects of compassion feature frequently as literary topoi throughout the materials I explore. More than one of my austere compassionates will remember Dido with tears in his eyes, recalling Augustine’s reading of Virgil in so doing. (In contrast, Heather James argues that in early modern England Dido becomes a figure for compassionate response to suffering, and that such a response was, in English texts, gendered female.)74 Leah Whittington describes how boys in humanist classrooms were often invited to take on the characters of suffering women from antiquity, suggesting, “The humanist schoolroom … was a laboratory for compassion.”75 Yet those who exercise or, as in Whittington’s example, learn to perform compassion are gendered male. Where eighteenth-century compassion will, via the new language of sensibilité and sentimentalism, return to the domain of women and move back into the female body, made visible by a woman’s tears, the male compassionates I study here might well have nodded at Bérulle’s maternal incarnation, but they set their own emotional practices resolutely apart from the bodily compromise it suggests.
In the final chapter, however, I suggest that away from theoretical discussion, away from metropolitan France, and away from what has come to be our canon of the period, women’s writing on their own compassionate practices sometimes spoke of a less restrictive compassion, one able to bind people together instead of hold them apart. In proffering this difference I mean not to cling to an essentialized gendering of emotion but to complicate the rigors of compassion’s edge by approaching it from a different perspective and via a very different territory.
One woman central to the writing of emotion in this period makes only a fleeting appearance in this book: Madeleine de Scudéry, briefly discussed in Chapter 2. Yet Scudéry, the great architect of civility, and her salon women set the terms for many of the emotional concepts of the period, most famously in the Carte de Tendre, or map of the land of tenderness, which features in her beloved midcentury novel Clélie, histoire romaine and which mapped emotional vocabulary for women and men for decades to come. Scudéry’s key term is “tendresse.” To arrive at that tenderness, we learn from our heroine Clélie’s map, we must pass through certain named practices: show “petits soins” [“small cares”], send a “billet doux” [“love letter”], demand “exactitude” [“exactness”], or demonstrate “constante amitié” [“constant friendship”].76 Tenderness might seem akin to compassion, and indeed Eric Langley’s reading of Shakespeare shows that in English the two concepts are elastically intertwined, tendering a new vision of the self.77 Scudéry’s French tenderness, however, is a practice of civility built through outward performance rather than by interior movement. Scudéry’s civil practice suggests itself at various moments in this book. For some figures I discuss, especially Pierre Nicole (Chapter 2), a true inner compassion is importantly nourished out of worldly civility. But figures like Nicole remain attached to an anxious theological dialectic between inner emotional fidelity and outward show, whereas Scudéry’s graceful secular gestures do not dwell on such a fear. Since I (like many other new friends of the period) first learned to think about emotion in the seventeenth century from Scudéry, I hope that the admirable Clélie will understand me when I say that compassion’s edge and its troubled hinterlands are scarcely set out in her map, even if I hope to show the routes between them on another occasion.
Compassion’s Present Time
In 1640s Paris, Thomas Hobbes set out a classification of different sorts of grief: “griefe for the calamity of another is Pitty, and ariseth from the imagination that the like calamity may befall himselfe, and there fore is called compassion, and in the phrase of this present-time a fellow-feeling.”78 Hobbes’s observation that a response to another’s suffering stems from a fear for the self is common to the period; it stems from Aristotle’s reflections on pity in both the Rhetoric and the Poetics, and I discuss its implications in Chapter 2. Hobbes tells us that the phrase “fellow-feeling” is “of this present-time,” and he is etymologically correct in that: the term was a seventeenth-century neologism.79 But we could also say that compassion’s anxious recourse to the self is also always a reflection on our own present time, wherever we find ourselves. Lauren Berlant writes that scholarly work on compassion is necessarily a history of the present because “the word compassion carries the weight of ongoing debates about the ethics of privilege.”80 Each present time—and perhaps our own time is in particular connection to that of Hobbes—produces a form of compassion adapted to its own moment.
In today’s present time, compassion is certainly familiar currency. A University of California research project, for example, has devoted itself to “the deep roots of human goodness,” fusing cognitive research with a social task by sharing “inspiring stories of compassion in action.”81 A MOOC (massive open online course) at Wesleyan asks students worldwide to perform a day of compassion as their final assignment, with a prize at the end, thus blending virtue and strategy in a way that would have appealed to the seventeenth century.82 This affective optimism spills over into popular work like Jeremy Rifkin’s The Empathic Civilization, which asks breathlessly, “Can we reach global empathy in time to avoid the collapse of civilization and save the Earth?”83 Rifkin’s staging of a temporal drama alerts us to the centrality of heroic moments in studies that are pro-compassion, and suggests how easily such work can be exploited by those in power. The rhetoric of compassion is equivalent to the dangerous rhetoric of the “necessary” in its capacity to spur immediate political action in whatever sense the orator feels it should be directed.
Compassion is also big business. A Charter for Compassion, started by Karen Armstrong, with the Dalai Lama as mascot, rubber-stamps various institutions and companies as compassionate.84 The charter’s website provides a range of case studies as part of a “business compassion reader,” showcasing figures such as John Mackey, CEO of Whole Foods, who promotes executive sleepovers as a bonding experience. There’s a burgeoning field of therapeutic self-compassion, too. Paul Gilbert’s 2009 The Compassionate Mind draws on a liberal narrative of progress, calling for “the start of a compassionate awakening.”85 Self-compassion’s emphasis on doing things for oneself, on the self-training of what two practitioners call “portable therapy,” is entangled with the swiftly