Being in Borders: Empathy and Pacifism in the Essays of Vernon Lee (1900-1935)

In response to recent revaluations of the concept of empathy, literary scholarship has witnessed a rise in criticism that engages with the various genealogies of Vernon Lee’s discourse of empathy and its manifestations in her writing. Less has been done, however, to foster critical understanding of the ways in which Lee’s concept of empathy and her politics of peace come together in the essays, periodical articles and essayistic notes that she published in the early decades of the twentieth century. This dissertation focuses on how Lee’s concept of empathy evolves and finds expression in her pacifist corpus and how her pacifist corpus extends her reflection on empathy in ways that challenge what we often mean by it today. Essentially I argue that Lee’s work introduces a concept of empathy that clashes with notions of identification, locating instead feelings of tension and anxiety, which, to her, form the base of an encounter with exteriority. I also argue that the idea of empathy as inconceivable outside the experience of struggle becomes Lee’s primary means of thinking about borders in non-violent terms and one that guides her politics of peace. This line of thinking is examined in this dissertation across three chapters. The first chapter offers a critical analysis through a close reading of the empathy essays published in Lee’s Beauty and Ugliness and Other Studies in Psychological Aesthetics (1912), The Beautiful: An Introduction to Psychological Aesthetics (1913) and of Lee’s introduction to Clementina Anstruther-Thomson’s Art & Man: Essays & Fragments (1924). The second and third chapters shift attention to Lee’s essays on war and her essayistic notes to the war drama Satan the Waster: A Philosophic War Trilogy with Notes and Introduction (1920). The conclusion gathers the principal findings from the critical analyses and comments on their larger relevance to Lee scholarship and recent studies of empathy.