The Routledge Companion To Literature And Human Rights

Empathy and Mediation in Literary Transactions of Human Rights

Sarah Winter

Does empathy lead to altruism in the face of human rights violations? (See Keen 2007: 16–26.) Understood as a fundamental form of compassionate response to pain, suffering, and injustice, empathy has come into increasing currency among historians, literature scholars, and theorists focusing on human rights. Positioned at the intersection of psychology, neuroscience, the moral sentiments, and the theory of aesthetic response, empathy can be defined in affective terms as happening when “we feel what we believe to be the emotions of others” (Keen 2007: 5) or, in more cognitive terms, as “trying to imagine a view of the world that one does not share” (Cameron 2011: 7). Political philosopher Johannes Morsink seems to imply that empathy supports what he defines as the “moral inherence” and “epistemic universality” of human rights: “every normally healthy human individual has the epistemic equipment to discover that we all have human rights” when confronted with atrocities (2009: 58–59). Referencing an Enlightenment-era genealogy, Morsink explains that “[s]ince it is through their moral sentiments that people discover the metaphysical universality of human rights, these other theorists [who view rights as historically constructed] end up denying the real presence of human rights in the human person” (2009: 59). Empathy would form part of such “epistemic equipment” underlying the recognition of the inherency and “real presence” of human rights.

Historian Lynn Hunt has also argued more explicitly that modern notions of human rights emerged in the eighteenth century out of an “imagined empathy” fostered by reading certain kinds of narratives, including sentimental novels, which communicated “new cultural experiences”:

[Such empathy] is imagined, not in the sense of made up, but in the sense that empathy requires a leap of faith, of imagining that someone else is like you. Accounts of torture produced this imagined empathy through new views of pain. Novels generated it by inducing new sensations about the inner self. Each in their way reinforced the notion of a community based on autonomous, empathetic individuals who could relate beyond their immediate families, religious affiliations, or even nations to greater universal values.

(2007: 32)

Michael Barnett captures the importance of a bridging concept such as empathy when he defines modern humanitarianism as “a global architecture of care for distant strangers” (2011: 9). Barnett also points to humanitarianism’s dependence on leveraging empathy through the media: “Humanitarians must be attentive to the marketplace because good thoughts do not save lives, and they must even ‘profit’ from the misery of others because people donate only when they are gripped by haunting images” (2011: 96). Empathy becomes pivotal as the form of emotional connection with distant suffering producing the gesture to donate money or offer aid toward its relief.

This currency of the concept of empathy in discussions of human rights and humanitarianism has also provoked controversy. The central question seems to be whether empathy should be seen as essential to galvanizing public recognition of human rights violations and resulting humanitarian crises, leading in turn to pressure on governments toward more effective implementation and enforcement of human rights. Can the empathy felt by individuals as citizens, particularly when generated in the media sphere, lead to collective domestic and even international political leverage? Critics of the potential role of empathy in the arena of human rights often find it to be a dead end allowing for the replacement of responsibility and action by mere feelings, as authentic as they may be. For example, in her recent study of embodiment in human rights narratives, Elizabeth S. Anker argues that in Enlightenment-era conceptions, sympathy with human suffering is

usually understood in terms of its capacity to elicit the perception of commonality or symmetry; it is thus achieved when the object of sympathy can exhibit sufficient proximity and likeness to the reader-observer. As such, it has long been criticized as a potentially conservative response just as likely to ratify the subject position of the person bestowing charity as to challenge their relative privilege – meaning that it will obscure and condone conditions of hardship or suffering with which the observer cannot identify.

(2012: 29)

Anker extends her critique of sympathy to Hunt’s account of the historical emergence of human rights, which also “defines empathy by way of liberal notions of ‘interiority,’ ‘autonomy,’ and ‘the self-enclosed individual,’” thus “prioritizing reasoned intellection in terms that … are a counterpart to a denigration of embodiment” viewed as the source of vulnerability to violations of rights (Anker 2012: 29). For Anker, then, sympathy has functioned historically to prop up social distinctions, while empathy, even as it seeks to overcome distances, actually reinstitutes them by presupposing a certain kind of self-contained subject of human rights.

Both positive and critical accounts draw attention to empathy’s mediations, its function as a conduit blending affective, imaginative, and ethical responses to human suffering and injustice that must then be implemented in some way in relation to human rights. In this chapter, I argue that understanding this role of empathy as mediation is crucial to explaining how it may be involved in transactions of human rights in literature and the arts. Scholars’ rejection or embrace of empathy seems often to depend on whether they view it as an essential or tangential element of human rights aesthetics. In her study of photographs of Palestinians living under Israeli governance, Ariella Azoulay discounts empathy and instead theorizes the relationship between photographer, photographic subject, and viewer as a “civil contract” which works “to anchor spectatorship in civic duty toward the photographed persons” as in fact “dispossessed citizens who, in turn, enable the rethinking of the concept and practice of citizenship” (2008: 16–17). Azoulay contends that this conception of photography as entailing citizenship requires the displacement of the moral sentiments often invoked to create reciprocity between viewers of the photograph and the instigating gaze of the photographic subjects:

I employ the term “contract” in order to shed terms such as “empathy,” “shame,” “pity,” or “compassion” as organizers of this gaze. In the political sphere that is reconstructed through the civil contract, photographed persons are participant citizens, just the same as I am. Within this space, the point of departure for our mutual relations cannot be empathy or mercy. It must be a covenant for the rehabilitation of their citizenship in the political sphere within which we are all ruled, that is, in the state of Israel.

(2008: 17)

In Azoulay’s view, empathy upholds the difference between the viewer and the person photographed, rather than pointing to the solidarity and mutual obligations that arise from a contractual understanding of a common right to citizenship presented by the photograph. The problem she identifies is not the photograph’s status as a reproduced image, but rather the assumption that the space between viewer and photographic subject must be bridged because it is not experienced in common. Pointing to the political rather than simply the affective aspects of the common ground revealed by the human rights photograph, Azoulay argues that it “presumes the existence of a civil space in which photographers, photographed subjects, and spectators share a recognition that what they are witnessing is intolerable” (2008: 18). For Azoulay, the common political ground constituted by the photograph does not require empathy as its provocation or supplement.

Responding to Azoulay’s stipulations and focusing more broadly on conceptions of human rights rather than humanitarianism, I want to explore how understanding empathy as mediation could align the aesthetic and affective responses that it typically designates more closely with the political recognition by citizens of their entailment in human rights and their responsibilities toward upholding them. Such recognition mediated through empathy often involves becoming implicated in a widely different experience than one’s own. Applied linguist Lynne J. Cameron has analyzed how empathy can be politically constructive in face-to-face contacts and dialogue in the aftermath of violent conflicts. In her recent study of the dialogue over several years between Jo Berry, whose father was a British Conservative member of Parliament killed by an Irish Republican Army bomb in 1984, and Patrick Magee, who had planted the bomb and served time in prison for his crime, Cameron focuses on the role of metaphors in building an empathetic understanding between Berry and Magee that fostered their conciliation. Drawing on research by Jodi Halpern and Harvey M. Weinstein (2004), Cameron defines empathy cognitively:

Cognitively, empathy requires that people seek to understand the other person’s perspective on the world: their perspective on themselves and how they fit in their society; their perspective on history; their perspective on their future, and how conflict appeared necessary to improve that future.

(2011: 6)

Distinguishing empathy from sympathy, or “emotional attunement to others,” Cameron focuses on empathy’s capacity to integrate cognitive and moral dimensions in ways that become particularly crucial to fostering communication across political divides and between perpetrators and victims:

While empathy does not require a person to agree with the reasoning or rationalizing that led to violence, at the same time, it does not let this ethical gap prevent perspective-taking and emotional attunement. Empathy becomes really powerful by separating out approval of a person’s actions, choices or decisions from understanding why that person took those actions or made those choices.

(2011: 6)

Cameron identifies the way such cognitive empathy arises “from the flow of talk” through the development of a shared set of metaphors, such as the idea of “journeys” toward a different viewpoint, or the sense that even without full agreement, “bridges can be built” (2011: 20, 12, 4). These metaphors fostered understanding for Berry and Magee across their fundamental differences and disagreements, including the political views that motivated Magee’s violence. Cameron emphasizes how metaphor lends itself to the bridging effects of empathy: “A metaphor brings together two different ideas and, through some interaction of their meanings, produces a further sense” (2011: 3). Cameron’s work highlights both the discursive and epistemological dimensions of empathy as a kind of mediation that arises through language. Such cognitive empathy does not simply serve to negotiate radically disparate points of view, but also counts as mediation because it seems to materialize in both emotional and discursive registers the divergence of perspectives and what is incommensurable about them, while also showing that this distance can be bridged by shared metaphors. When positioned in response to Anker’s critique, Cameron’s account also indicates that empathy is not simply a corrective stance for the privileged, but can support reciprocity and reparation.

Empathy’s role in conciliation or reconciliation after violent conflict, or in galvanizing public support for the implementation and protection of human rights, is further complicated, however, when we focus on the fact that the specific form, whether narrative or visual, for communicating a rights violation is often already mediated and shaped rhetorically or according to specific generic conventions, such as in testimony before an international tribunal, in a photograph or documentary film, or in a dramatic performance or a novel. To clarify the possible role of literary works, media representations, or the arts in mobilizing public engagement with human rights through empathy, then, it is necessary not just to investigate how empathy works, but also how creative works and media representations are published, received, or consumed. As the affiliation of empathy with the moral sentiment of sympathy and the possible historical connections of human rights with sentimental novels both suggest, the problem of defining the particular ways of gaining access imaginatively to others’ experience has been an important focus of the history of aesthetics, and has been treated extensively by both moral philosophers and writers. The term empathy’s introduction into English can be dated to 1909 when it was proposed by British psychologist Edward B. Titchener as a translation of the term Einfühlung, then current in German studies of psychological aesthetics (Greiner n.d.). This aesthetic notion of empathy “describes a projective fusing with an object – which may be another person or an animal, but may also be a fictional character made of words, or even, in some accounts, inanimate things such as landscapes, artworks, or geological features” (Keen 2007: 28).

In this chapter, I offer a further definition of empathy itself as a medium, thus building on and also modifying definitions focusing on literature and the visual arts as mediations of empathy. Developing Cameron’s definition of empathy as taking place through dialogue and shared metaphors, I also draw on John Guillory’s account of Enlightenment understandings of mediation as “a term closely allied to notions of transmission or dissemination but invoking the material forms of these processes, especially print” (2010b: 37). He points out that in this period, the material form of a medium could extend to a natural phenomenon such as light, which was conceived as “need[ing] a medium, however imperceptible” (Guillory 2010b: 37). Guillory takes pains to distinguish mediation equally from representation and from the idea of the mass media:

The indispensable condition of mediation is the interposition of distance (spatial or temporal) between the terminal poles of the communication process (these are persons but also now machines). This distanciation is another way of looking at the operation of transmission … . The notion of distance should not be mistaken, then, as an equivalent term for absence, or as a pole in the philosophical antinomy of presence and absence. Distance creates the possibility of media, which become desirable for themselves and not as the default substitute for an absent object.

(2010b: 62)

I want to suggest that literature and the visual arts, including photography and cinema, as mediated forms, can serve to reinforce empathy’s own bridging effects of mediation, not by collapsing the distance between the witness and the human rights subject (or victim of a violation), but rather by materializing their connection, just as light was thought to be supported by an “ethereal” substance (Guillory 2010b: 37). Even more, I want to entertain the possibility that such artistic mediations of empathy converge with empathy’s own mediation as the kind of “epistemic equipment” for recognizing the “moral inherence” of human rights that Morsink describes. Empathy as a form of mediation in human rights aesthetics would thus involve bridging not just the difference between self and other but also – in ways entailing ethics, politics, and law – the disparity of rights and security between the citizen or witness to atrocity and the person whose rights are violated, or who is harmed by violence, provoking on the part of citizens “a recognition that what they are witnessing is intolerable,” as Azoulay conceives the contractual effect of the photograph (2008: 18). As both Azoulay and Anker contend, a crucial contribution of literature and the visual arts to human rights involves the implication of citizens in the human rights struggles of fellow citizens and noncitizens, so that their sense of immunity or protected status may be troubled. I argue here that the distanciation and communication implied in empathy within a human rights frame could facilitate the transmission of a shared recognition of human rights violations as a situation demanding collective accountability and redress. While empathy understood as mediation would not go so far as to establish a contract, as the photograph does in Azoulay’s account, it could contribute an affective, imaginative, and cognitive form of connection supporting the sense of participation in and recognition of the dependency of the rights of citizenship upon the protection of human rights. From the side of those whose rights have been violated, empathy as the sharing of an experience of violence, stigmatization, and damage entails a claim to just treatment and protection. Whereas empathy is not a material form like print or the photograph, literature and the visual arts could be viewed in specific instances as functioning analogously to such material forms by transmitting empathy’s mediations.

In the rest of this chapter, I examine a single case study of an early-nineteenth-century novel that attempts to theorize how literature and the arts imaginatively mediate emotions and understanding. Published in 1817, the novel Harrington by the Anglo-Irish author Maria Edgeworth develops a theory of “inverted sympathy.” With this term, Edgeworth seems to describe the kind of mediation accomplished by empathy, explored in the text through a transaction between two genres, the novel and the theater. The relevance of this particular novel for the history of empathy and human rights also has to do with its topic: how to undo the irrational and unjust prejudice of anti-Semitism. Edgeworth’s novel thus extends into narrative form the related ideas of sympathy and empathy that, according to Thomas Laqueur, were innovations of Enlightenment-era sentimentalism, theorized by novelists as well as by moral philosophers such as David Hume and Adam Smith, which

vastly expanded [the] ethical category of the “human(e)” to include animals as a limit case, but more centrally humans unseen and unheard, those who suffer across what would seem to be unimaginable distances, geographical and cultural, those who are in the old sense [of charity as the duty of the upper classes toward the poor] already excluded.

(Laqueur 2009: 44–45)

These new “humane” moral sentiments were made accessible both in works of literature and in popular humanitarian campaigns such as the abolition of slavery: “Aesthetics – or, more precisely, new forms of the ‘humanitarian narrative’ – that demanded new ways of seeing were the instruments for this exercise in moral magic” (Laqueur 2009: 45).

In addition to publishing novels, Maria Edgeworth authored several volumes of popular stories for children. With her father, Richard Lovell Edgeworth, Maria also published an influential pedagogical treatise in 1798, Practical Education, which laid out a nonsectarian, Enlightenment-inspired program for training children’s reasoning powers and advised against rote learning and harsh punishments. In 1815, a young Jewish-American teacher named Rachel Mordecai wrote to express her admiration of Edgeworth’s writings, but reproached Edgeworth for her negative representations of Jews in many of her works. How was it possible, Mordecai wrote, that a writer “who on all other subjects shows such justice and liberality, should on one alone appear biased by prejudice: should even instill that prejudice into the minds of youth!” (quoted in Edgeworth 2004: 298). Edgeworth seems to have been deeply affected by this letter; she entered into a correspondence with Rachel Mordecai and published Harrington in an effort not only to vindicate the Jews against the anti-Semitic libel in her own writings, but also to affect her readers by helping them to question and even reject their own prejudices.

As a “novel of prejudice,” Harrington also explores “the epistemological and social obstacles to the recognition of human dignity” and “the challenge of creating reliable conditions for exercising humane moral judgments” (Winter 2009: 79). Edgeworth’s major argument in Harrington is that prejudice is an artificial disposition that begins in childhood and is instilled through the child’s familial and social environment. Set in the late eighteenth century, the novel centers on the experiences of the first-person narrator, Harrington, the son of a member of Parliament and landowner, who develops a debilitating phobic prejudice against Jews as a young child. The phobia stems from his nurse’s cruel attempts to control him by telling him frightening stories about a Jewish seller of old clothes who is frequently seen in the streets of his family’s London neighborhood. The nurse tells Harrington that if he does not obey her, the old Jew Simon will come to kidnap him and take him away in his bag, and she repeats many other atrocious anti-Semitic stereotypes. As a result, Harrington experiences an intense anxiety whenever he sees or hears about Jews that also makes him unruly and unable to sleep. Developing the empiricist psychology and epistemology of John Locke, the novel shows that Harrington’s childhood prejudice against Jews is the product of an irrational implanted pathological association of ideas that can be gradually counteracted and removed by substituting rational thinking based in experience.

As a youth, Harrington trains himself to overcome his prejudices and phobia by meeting and associating with Jews, in particular the refined and cosmopolitan Spanish-American-Jewish family of Mr. Montenero and his beautiful daughter, Berenice, with whom Harrington falls in love. However, Harrington must prove that he has conquered his anti-Semitic phobia before Berenice will agree to marry him. An incident crucial to this resolution, and to the process of Harrington’s reeducation, exposes him to the pain of being the target of anti-Semitic prejudice, and gives him a model for experiencing the stigmatized person’s feelings through empathy. This scene takes place at the theater, where Harrington is attending a performance of Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice. In the row of seats in front of him, he notices a beautiful young woman, who turns out later to be Berenice, but who has simply been identified to him as a “Jewess.” At first Harrington is swept away by the celebrated Irish actor Charles Macklin’s performance of the role of Shylock:

Shylock appeared – I forgot everything but him. Such a countenance! Such an expression of latent malice and revenge, of everything detestable in human nature! Whether speaking or silent, the Jew fixed and kept possession of my attention. It was an incomparable piece of acting.

(Edgeworth 2004: 136)

Gradually, however, Harrington becomes aware that the performance distresses his fellow spectator, the Jewess:

I could no longer enjoy Macklin’s incomparable acting; I was so apprehensive of the pain which it must give to the young Jewess. At every stroke, characteristic of the skilful actor or of the master poet, I felt a strange mixture of admiration and regret. I almost wished that Shakespeare had not written or Macklin had not acted the part so powerfully. My imagination formed such a strong conception of the pain the Jewess was feeling, and my inverted sympathy, if I may so call it, so overpowered my direct and natural feelings, that at every fresh development of the Jew’s [Shylock’s] villainy I shrunk as though I had myself been a Jew.

(Edgeworth 2004: 137)

In Harrington’s use of the generic term “Jew” to refer to Shylock, the novel shows both how the stereotype can displace the specific character and how the character can be seen by the audience to confirm particular prejudices, despite any ambiguities in Shakespeare’s play. The effects upon Harrington of witnessing “the Jewess’s” distress must be conceived as powerful enough to replace his “direct and natural feelings” based in prior experiences and the power of the performance with a new, deeply felt comprehension of another’s perspective. This revolution is indicated by Harrington’s physiological response of “shrinking,” not only flinching away from the anti-Semitic portrayal, and thus acting out his imagination of Berenice’s feelings, but also mirroring the Jews’ subordination and exclusion in English law and society. In this passage, Edgeworth depicts the necessary denaturalization of prejudice. With the phrase “inverted sympathy,” she also signals that she is theorizing the effects of literature and art in both reinforcing and undermining prejudice by adapting Adam Smith’s influential definition of sympathy.

In his 1759 treatise, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, Smith explains that sympathy is dependent upon the imagination:

Though our brother is upon the rack, as long as we ourselves are at our ease, our senses will never inform us of what he suffers. They never did, and never can, carry us beyond our own person, and it is by the imagination only that we can form any conception of what are his sensations. … By the imagination we place ourselves in his situation, we conceive ourselves enduring all the same torments, we enter as it were into his body, and become in some measure the same person with him, and thence form some idea of his sensations, and even feel something which, though weaker in degree, is not altogether unlike them. His agonies, when they are thus brought home to ourselves, when we have thus adopted and made them our own, begin at last to affect us, and we then tremble and shudder at the thought of what he feels.

(Smith 1984: 9)

Sympathy for Smith is not a direct response, because we cannot inhabit another person’s body, but instead it must function indirectly by way of imaginative extension and analogous feelings. Nevertheless, this imaginative connection is powerful, producing responses of “trembling” and “shuddering” and involving the “adoption” of another’s pain as “our own.” Sympathy also creates “a curiosity to inquire into [the sufferer’s] situation” (Smith 1984: 11). As Smith conceives it, sympathy is therefore cognitive and situational, as in Cameron’s definition of empathy: “Sympathy, therefore, does not arise so much from the view of the passion, as from that of the situation which excites it” (Smith 1984: 12). Sympathy for Smith therefore does not amount primarily to a feeling of pity. Moreover, Smith explains that in order for sympathy to implicate us in the misfortunes of distant others, the conscience must come into play by acting as a check upon egotism:

It is reason, principle, conscience, the inhabitant of the breast, the man within, the great judge and arbiter of our conduct … . It is from him only that we learn the real littleness of ourselves, and of whatever relates to ourselves, and the natural misrepresentations of self-love can be corrected only by the eye of this impartial spectator.

(1984: 137)

Edgeworth externalizes Smith’s notion of the conscience by placing her protagonist in the crowd at the theater. Rather than experiencing the return of his childhood phobia against Jews during the performance, Harrington is transformed into the “impartial spectator,” viewing the effects of the play on another spectator directly implicated in its anti-Semitic portrayal of Shylock.

But Edgeworth also overtly revises Smith’s formulations in working out her model of “inverted sympathy” by inserting a further set of mediations into his account of the imaginative connection and curiosity incited by actual scenes of suffering. Edgeworth wants to demonstrate how fictional scenes of suffering or injustice can intensify sympathy as Smith conceives it by simultaneously materializing its mediating functions for the reader, thus fostering an awareness of how it works in ways that comport with historically later definitions of empathy. In order to create empathy, “inverted sympathy” follows a reflexive, zigzagging path. It involves rerouting and transforming Harrington’s participation, through his “direct and natural feelings,” in the Christian audience’s more typical response to Shakespeare’s powerful play and Macklin’s acting, in which the Jew Shylock is represented in such a way as to make him seem stereotypically “horrifying” in his desire for revenge on the Christian. By perceiving the effects of Macklin’s performance on “the Jewess,” Harrington’s response to the play is “inverted” into his awareness of her identification with Shylock as a Jew. Instead of going along with the anti-Semitic crowd, Harrington enters into and comes to share Berenice’s personal response to the anti-Semitic performance, making him feel “as though I had myself been a Jew.” “Inverted sympathy” thus captures how empathy with another person’s painful undergoing of stigmatization can take place in a rebounding and mediated way, producing psychologically robust effects, through a shared experience of a literary representation, performance, or work of art. As Guillory argues, “It is much easier to see what a medium does – the possibilities inherent in the material form of an art – when the same expressive or communicative contents are transposed from one medium into another. Remediation makes the medium as such visible” (2010a: 324). For our purposes, Edgeworth’s scene is a remediation of empathy’s mediation. In the rest of the novel, Harrington also becomes a conscientiously committed rather than an “impartial” spectator by taking sides with Berenice and the Jews. We can understand the activist engagement resulting from the realization of injustice that Harrington experiences through “inverted sympathy” as the product of an aestheticization of empathy’s mediation.

A further layer of mediation involved in “inverted sympathy” strengthens the novel’s defense and recognition of the Jews’ common humanity, since the reader’s understanding of the narrative itself encompasses not just Harrington’s empathy with Berenice’s distress over Macklin’s acting of Shakespeare’s play, but the entire scene with all its interpersonal and transgeneric dynamics involving a dramatic performance depicted before an audience in a novel. The novel replaces and remediates Shakespeare’s play, along with its possible function as a vehicle for disseminating and reinforcing anti-Semitic prejudice, substituting Edgeworth’s own project to correct prejudice and undermine anti-Semitism. The inclusion of the historical figure Macklin and his most famous portrayal of Shylock allows the novel to transgress the boundary between fiction and the actual world of Edgeworth’s readers. This scene thus invites the reader to experience the effect of “inverted sympathy” in the same way as Harrington does – through the mediations of fiction and depicted performance. What makes “inverted sympathy,” or empathy through literature and art, potentially more powerful than sympathy as Smith defined it, however, is precisely its shared and mediated nature, as Edgeworth’s novelistic exploration shows. These effects are reinforced by the novel’s positioning of the theater as its counterpart, using the figure of the spectator to create a powerful analogue for the reader, thus making visible the positive and active operation of distance and transmission in mediation and empathy, as Guillory’s account indicates. This redoubling and rebounding transaction of empathy also amplifies the novel’s ability to call attention to the role of narrative art in bridging disparate understandings in similar ways to the functioning of metaphor in Cameron’s account of conciliation through dialogue. By multiplying and calling attention to the layers of mediation, then, Edgeworth’s novel reinforces its own efforts to foster empathy with persons stigmatized by prejudice, showing in the process that literature and the arts, as material forms, are in certain ways uniquely qualified to convey the mediated experience of empathy.

In her study of empathy and novel reading, Suzanne Keen points to “fiction’s freedom to evoke feeling and readers’ option to feel without following through with action” (2007: 30). She stipulates that

[f]iction cannot document the effects of empathy as if the events recorded happened to real people … . We cannot attribute both causal effects and evidence of those effects to the same fictional texts, especially when attempting to describe the grounds for moral development in human beings.

(Keen 2007: 21)

Keen proposes that “[w]e should inquire, rather than assuming, whether novels make effective vehicles for messages of egalitarianism” (2007: 25). Edgeworth’s text effectively addresses these caveats by simultaneously theorizing, depicting, and conveying to her readers how both empathy’s and fiction’s mediated effects work. It is the understanding of mediation conveyed by the novel’s work across genres that concretizes its capacity to provoke empathy and change minds. Seeming to confirm Edgeworth’s project, Keen observes that “[r]eaders’ cognitive and affective responses do not inevitably lead to empathizing, but fiction does disarm readers of some of the protective layers of cautious reasoning that may inhibit empathy in the real world” (2007: 28).

In proposing a theory of empathy as mediation, I do not aim to resolve the debate about empathy and human rights explored here. If empathy is perceived as an insufficient response to representations of human rights violations in literature, public media, and the visual arts, this may well be due to a failure to convey understanding of the history, causes, and specific situations involved, as suggested in recent critiques of the KONY 2012 media campaign (Chalk 2012: 8–9). Yet if we are to believe that literature, historical accounts, and visual media can implicate readers and viewers in the urgency of upholding human rights – as many writers, artists, critics, journalists, photographers, documentary filmmakers, and activists persist in believing – then empathy, viewed not as an emotional requirement for action but rather as a form of mediation consisting in the transmission of affective and cognitive responses to human rights violations, might provide something valuable to human rights aesthetics. Like metaphor, empathy could become a term used to convey the wide-ranging implications of the conjoining of disparate perspectives and experiences frequently invoked within the frame of human rights and literature. Such opportunities for bridging afforded by mediation in human rights aesthetics across multiple genres give evidence of the substantial and persistent qualities of human connections across distances and boundaries with common experiences of injustice, whether in everyday life, as in Edgeworth’s exploration of prejudice, or in extreme forms such as violent conflicts or genocide. The definition of empathy itself as cognitive and affective mediation further suggests that the distance from the real or the other that we often ascribe to mediated aesthetic forms can support the recognition of human rights rather than creating a defect or gap that deadens feelings or prevents understanding. It is precisely mediation’s function in making the recognition of a human rights violation or another person’s political perspective dependent upon transmission rather than immediacy that also renders such recognition communicable as a shared experience. Such layered mediations of empathy through literature, visual media, and the arts could in turn help to support a broader public investment not just in documenting human rights violations but also in building a collective political responsibility among citizens and noncitizens to advocate for the implementation of more effective human rights regimes, both at home and internationally. Aesthetic mediations of empathy could assist human rights struggles by conveying the shared claim that “what we are witnessing and experiencing is intolerable.”

Acknowledgements

The chapter is based on a paper presented at the University of Connecticut Human Rights Institute Workshop, “Living Empathy: Emotions of Reconciliation and Conflict,” November 1–2, 2012. I thank the organizers, Gustavo Nanclares, Eduardo Urios-Aparisi, and Sebastian Wogenstein, for inviting me to participate. Thanks also to Eleni Coundouriotis and the volume editors for helpful feedback on an earlier draft of this chapter.