Gothic empathy

This thesis explores how empathy as the process of ‘feeling into’ has preserved its original nuance from Ancient Greece to the eighteenth century and the early twentieth century. The precise term to name the mode of empathy I attempt to show is 'Gothic empathy' as the title suggests: it is a status of fused feeling occurring in the dynamic experience of a negative art form. I pay attention to the bodily, expressive and affective aspect of empathy that has often been viewed negatively in history. To do that, I compare Gothic empathy to the eighteenth-century term 'sympathy' and look at its overlaps with contemporary empathy and the German term Einfühlung. Although it appears far from or irrelevant to the commonly believed moral feeling such as sympathy in the eighteenth century, I propose to read the persistent presence of Gothic empathy in the extended context of the 'sublime', an originally ancient aesthetic concept. The selected thinkers and writers in this thesis adopted a Gothic perspective to enliven their idea of humanity. Edith Stein's philosophy of a psycho-physical human being, as thoroughly demonstrated in On the Problem of Empathy (1964; 1989), demonstrates the mechanism behind an individual’s genuine empathic experience. Wilhelm Worringer’s aesthetic theory in Abstraction and Empathy (1997) and Form Problems of the Gothic (1920) applies and extends Stein’s idea towards the topic of art history as well as the spirit of art creation and reception. Then I draw attention to Ann Radcliffe’s and Virginia Woolf's literary embodiment of empathy. Radcliffe's novel, The Mysteries of Udolpho (2001), uses devices often known as the Gothic sublime to elicit terror for the reader’s deeper empathy. Her writing experiment advances Edmund Burke’s account of the sublime in A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (2005). Woolf's essays and short stories are also analysed. I shed light on her conscious use of Gothic elements. Woolf was aware of the potential of the Gothic genre as a medium for empathy that could lead to the reader's enlightenment by challenging traditional ideas of authorship. The selected writers focus on the nuanced realm between individual and external realities to demonstrate that the feeling of terror evoked by reading novels can ultimately lead to self-expansion and, consequently, the development of empathy. It promises the ability to feel and think from another person's perspective.