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...blacks order to take the pressure off themselves. One day, in the sight of at least fifty white men who stood by, four white workers pummeled Douglass with a brick and hand-spike and kicked him in the eye. The attack aroused the sympathy of his owners. When Douglass got home, Sophia Auld "was again melted in pity toward me. My puffed-out eye, and my scarred and blood-covered face, moved the dear lady to rears." (1) Mrs. Auld took care of him so tenderly that, as Douglass writes, "It was almost compensation for the murderous assault, and my suffering, that it furnished an occasion for the manifestation of ... kindness" (BF, 235). But although she was almost maternally kind and loving towards Douglass, Mrs. Auld nonetheless was not politically transformed by the episode. She did not come to understand the role of racism in the economy, and she did not convert to anti-slavery. Her sympathy with Frederick's suffering did not bring her to a position where she understood the conditions of her slave's life, his extraordinary intellect, his deeply felt aspirations for his life.
Jeannine DeLombard interprets this scene as encapsulating the inaccessibility for blacks of Emerson's ideal of a transcendental eyeball. (2) As an anti-slavery advocate Douglass seeks the Emersonian role of all-observing critic with comprehensive knowledge and without the partiality inherent in a subjectivity grounded in corporeality. However, that role is unavailable to him; his would-be transcendental eyeball is always already burst because of his race, his body. Living in the South, he is both brutalized and silenced. But in the North too, he cannot attain the respect accruing to one with transcendent vision but rather is constrained into an identity defined by his experiences of physical violence. The legitimacy of his vision and consequently his voice are limited. The only contribution to the cause abolitionists seek from him is that of witness to sufferings. DeLombard traces how Douglass rejects this role of eye-witness and chooses metaphors of speaking and voice over vision and body to represent his role as anti-slavery author. What Lacan calls "the scopic regime" consigns him to mere corporeality; an aural regime does not.
DeLombard thoroughly documents Douglass's turn from a visual sense of his own authorship to an aural sense of it, and she explores certain aspects of why such study of visual culture matters. But she fails to address the critique of sympathy embedded in the scene. Mrs. Auld is moved but not changed, and the nature of sympathy that this fact implies is a primary cause of the dramatic shift in Douglass's writing. In his writings, Douglass indicates that sympathy gained through listening and speaking is superior to sympathy grounded in visual signs of physical suffering, providing a more nuanced, sensitive, and generous relationship to the other and a greater likelihood of political and psychic transformation. Aural forms of knowledge avail a more genuinely connective form of interpersonal relations than visual forms of knowledge can. They are more truly sympathetic. In rejecting visual and corporeal foundations for knowledge, Douglass also rejects sentimental abolitionist misconconceptions regarding sympathy that were prominent in his era. He suggests that certain sentimental definitions of sympathy are insufficient at best and politically regressive at worst. In turn, he gives voice to a definition of sympathy as an emotion rooted not in the universality of physical experience but instead premised upon difference and rooted in dialogue. Douglass places a high value on true sympathy and strives to conceptualize how speaking and listening connect people in ways that get beyond surface signs and establish interpersonal contact in ways that feel authentic and significant to the individuals involved.
This claim makes a significant contribution to contemporary scholarship on African American visual culture. Critics have not fully appreciated the implication of the turn away from the "scopic regime" in many African American artists for an understanding of sympathy. Recent scholarship in African American visual culture has typically focused upon a repressive objectification in visual forms of knowledge, but it has not fully recognized that interpersonal relationships are enhanced--deepened, vitalized--when individuals gain knowledge of each other through non-visual means. (3) In particular, Douglass's redefinition of sympathy provides a hopeful though 'sober blueprint for how meaningful interracial connections might be established through listening. Whether his blueprint is realistic is a matter of debate. The limits of his ideal become evident when we compare Douglass's ideas about sympathetic listening with those of Herman Melville. Writing at the same time as Douglass, also exercised by racial oppression, Melville offers an even more scathing condemnation of the visual than Douglass. But Melville is far less optimistic about the likelihood of listening actually becoming the basis of a successful program. Nonetheless, he shares Douglass's belief that sympathy is the foundation of a meaningful and progressive engagement with the social world, and that it requires not a quick visceral response to a visual stimulus but the harder challenges of articulation and listening. They share a vision of true sympathy as a generous and non-totalizing penetration beneath visible surfaces, an acknowledgement of the way full humanity always exceeds visual grasp.
Douglass's work on sympathy also has significant implications for contemporary scholarship in nineteenth-century sentimentalism. If contemporary critics are to understand the racial politics of sentimental abolitionism, then they need to take into account Douglass's assessment of those politics--as well as scholarly work on visual culture. Over the past thirty years, scholars have debated the politics of sentimental representations of sympathy, but to a large extent they have not fully engaged with assessments of that politics within the nineteenth-century texts themselves. In her new book, Family, Kinship, and Sympathy in Nineteenth-Century American Literature, Cindy Weinstein takes a major step towards filling this gap. (4) She demonstrates that many sentimental novels contain self-reflexive assessments of their own attitudes towards sympathy and criticisms of the conception of sympathy popularized by Adam Smith. Though not a novelist, Douglass is part of this trend of criticizing sentimental representation. In "The...
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