Abstract
Talia Schaffer’s Communities of Care is an exceptionally ambitious volume that combines at least two distinct goals. As an exercise in Victorian literary and cultural history, it seeks to understand the workings and failures of care in the fiction of Jane Austen, Charlotte Brontë, Charles Dickens, George Eliot, Henry James and Charlotte Yonge. As a broader ethical and political exploration, it is a fundamentally didactic project that draws on the lessons of Victorian fiction in order to teach us how to turn care into the modus operandi of not only literary criticism but academic life itself.
The theoretical cornerstone of Schaffer’s endeavour is the ethics of care, an evolving ethical framework that seeks to undermine traditional assumptions about individual autonomy and personal responsibility by emphasising our fundamental dependency on other human beings. Within this framework, care—which Schaffer defines as ‘meeting another’s need’ (p. 35)—becomes central to the analysis of human relations: what does it mean to give and receive care? What is good and bad care? What ought to be the role of care in the communities in which we all participate, given that caregiving is ‘one of the most fundamental forms of human relationality’ (p. 28)?
That Schaffer has decided to address such questions by focusing on the Victorians is hardly surprising given not only the affinities between the Victorian conceptualisations of duty and contemporary care ethics, but also the extent to which Victorian fiction engaged in the representations of care. Victorian novels are both obsessed with figures of care (such as governesses) and ‘constantly depict people forming ad-hoc, flexible, small communities of caregivers, usually composed of voluntary connections and including perhaps three to ten people’ (p. 61). While Schaffer is not the first scholar to invoke the ethics of care in the interpretation of nineteenth-century novels, she is the first one to do so systematically and on a large scale, enabling us to see the seemingly familiar aspects of Victorian fiction in a radically new light. This alone makes Communities of Care a significant intervention in the field of Victorian studies.
Having established the theoretical framework in the Introduction and Chapter One, in Chapter Two Schaffer depicts what she recognises as the major shift in Victorian attitudes to caring. Whereas early-nineteenth century works like Austen’s unfinished Sanditon (1817) and Dickens’ A Christmas Carol (1843) depict a world in which voluntary, ‘affiliative, egalitarian small communities’ (p. 86) are still the norm, later in the century the development of institutionalised medicine suppressed such communities in favour of paid care. While Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847) ‘promulgates a vision of affectionate family or friends offering tender care to those they love, with paid service work visible only as an occasional, unsatisfactory alternative’ (p. 84), in Villette (1853), domestic caregiving is replaced by a professionalised approach to care.
Schaffer offers four detailed case studies. In Chapter Three she focuses on Villette’s Lucy Snowe as ‘an early example of a modern, migrant global caregiver’ (p. 88). Like her modern counterparts, Lucy is traumatised by emotional labour, the need to suppress her personality and the constant surveillance of her hostile employers: ‘the conditions of her employment corrode her personhood’ (p. 89). In Chapter Four Schaffer analyses the ‘pathology of feeling without acting’ (p. 117) in Eliot’s Daniel Deronda (1876). Daniel’s moral transformation (a perennial critical problem) is described as movement from sympathy to active care: initially paralysed by an ineffective sense of ‘universal sympathy’ (p. 127), Daniel is changed through the interaction with Mordecai Cohen who introduces him to a properly reciprocal care relationship (p. 131), thus paving the way for Daniel’s proto-Zionist project: ‘Deronda imagines a future in which a nation could be a community of care’ (p. 139).
In the final two chapters the analysis takes a turn that is both more formal in its focus and more metaphorical in its deployment of the concept of care. In Chapter Five, Schaffer explores the failed care community surrounding Milly Theale in James’ The Wings of the Dove (1902): the members of this community are led by self-interest rather than authentic care, while the cared-for herself refuses communication, a precondition of care (p. 153); at the same time, the sheer difficulty of James’s style forces the reader to approach the text with something like care (p. 157). Finally, Chapter Six examines Charlotte Yonge’s The Heir of Redclyffe (1853) as a text that not only describes the workings of a care community but enacts one by being in constant conversation with other texts in a way that goes beyond conventional ideas about influence and intertextuality (p. 181).
Communities of Care freely admits that it is a book with ‘multiple agendas’ (p. 23), one that analyses care in Victorian fiction, but also one that (especially in its Epilogue) advocates for the value of care in our reading, teaching and even citation practices. Of course, this type of duality is not uncommon, and the tension between theoretical interventions and historical analysis is a widespread feature of contemporary literary criticism. There are, however, instances when such tension can be detrimental. I worry that Communities of Care is one such instance.
Simply put, Shaffer’s desire to link Victorian fiction with contemporary preoccupations and to extract practical insights from nineteenth-century novels leads her to produce some very strained readings. To take one of the more obvious examples, in her interpretation of Villette, Shaffer is so committed to portraying Lucy Snowe as a precursor of modern migrant labourers that she largely derives her character’s psychology from sociological observation about contemporary migrant caregivers while ignoring both the text of the novel and the more immediate and obvious contexts. She claims that Lucy’s jingoism and disdain for her adoptive country are not an innate trait but a typical migrant worker’s response to the microaggressions she is exposed to in Mme. Beck’s school. This is not only purely speculative but also ignores the enduring opposition between wholesome Englishness and the morally dubious Continental ways that is structural to Brontë’s thinking before and beyond Villette, including in Jane Eyre. Schaffer’s analysis of Lucy’s attitude towards Labassecour is at best incomplete because it fails to consider the fact that the Francophone, Catholic, Continental Other is a staple of Brontë’s moral universe. In a case like this one, I cannot help but think that Schaffer’s desire to speak to the present—as admirable as it may be—sometimes undermines the interpretative rigour of her Victorianist project.
At the very end of the book, Schaffer turns to the idea that criticism should be a form of care for the text (p. 213) and warns against the critical practice that ‘misinterprets and distorts’ the text under discussion, pushing its own agenda even as the text resists (p. 216). While I am not sure that Schaffer always heeds her own advice, I do believe that her reconceptualisation of reading as an act of care is a significant and potentially very productive theoretical gesture. We should also be grateful to Schaffer for bringing about such a wide-ranging dialogue between Victorian fiction and care ethics. It is a conversation very much worth having.