Empathy
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The novel’s central tragi-comic conceit is that its lesbian protagonist Anna has never slept with another lesbian but always falls for ambivalent bisexuals. She can’t understand why and so goes to Doc, apparently a pavement psychoanalyst who offers counseling sessions. In engaging psychoanalysis the text foregrounds its Jewish identity. It invokes and plays on notions of Jewishness, for example the stereotype that all New York Jews are in analysis or are themselves analysts or the children of analysts. Both Anna and Doc are the children of Jewish psychoanalysts, and therefore ‘born’ Freudians. There are obvious echoes of Sigmund Freud’s (himself, of course, a Jew) relation to his female patients. Indeed, the novel represents a radical intertextual reworking of Freud’s female case studies: Anna’s lover in the novel is called Dora. Anna O. was Freud’s first patient, Bertha Pappenheim, who with Breuer, invented the talking cure. Dora, whose real name was Ida Bauer, a resistant heroine for feminism, refused to name her desire for another woman and famously sacked Freud. There is also a character called Herr K, Dora’s seducer in the Freudian case study, who Schulman rewrites as Doc’s mentor and as ‘a pioneer in the field of interruption theory.’
The novel’s epigraph comes from Freud’s 1920 essay ‘The Psychogenesis of a Case of Homosexuality in a Woman’ which defines female homosexuality as a combination of masculinity complex and frustrated desire to have a child by one’s father. Freud states: ‘She changed into a man and took her mother in place of her father as the object of her love.’ This misogynistic and homophobic construction is internalized by the protagonist. As a result, Anna experiences extreme alienation from her body and sexuality and becomes a disembodied, dysphoric subject. Schulman represents her subjectivity through a correspondingly fragmented and discontinuous narrative style, split between the two protagonists, Anna and Doc. However, Doc rejects the sexism and heterosexism that inform psychoanalytic theory and, unlike Freud, he deconstructs the power relations of the analytical scene. He is aware both of the value of listening and the power it confers on the listener. Paradoxically, he himself has never been in therapy because he sees its potential for exploitation:You tell them one real thing and then the doctor thinks he knows you. He starts getting arrogant and overfamiliar, making insulting suggestions left and right. You have to protest constantly just to set the record straight. Finally he makes offensive assumptions and throws them in your face. A stranger in a bar could do the same.
The novel undertakes a critique of the psychoanalytic theory of sexual difference, describing it as shoring up heterosexuality as a political institution. It articulates the lesbian feminist view that women’s oppression is constructed in and through heterosexuality as well as gender. The text negotiates two main theories of lesbian identity, associated with the work of Monique Wittig and Judith Butler, two of the most influential theorists for lesbian feminism in the 1980s and 1990s.
In exploring the relationship between heterosexual women and lesbians, the novel addresses the issue of diversity within the women’s movement. Despite the centrality of lesbians to so-called first and second wave feminism, lesbianism is commonly articulated as threat. The preferred feminist narrative of female solidarity is a non-sexual sisters-in-arms affair. Lesbians, as the novel shows, pose a challenging question: what happens when you eroticize relations between women? The sign lesbian works to detach gender from its assumed connection to heterosexuality. Lesbian difference thus complicates the concept of female identity. The novel uses this insight as a source of humor. At one point Anna remarks:Maybe that’s the problem I’ve always had with female identification. It’s like looking at Picasso’s Three Women only to come away thinking, ‘My breast is your thigh.’
It should be clear that Empathy articulates a postmodern politics of location, recognizing the fact that ‘a person positions herself on quicksand.’ In the course of the novel, Anna acknowledges the need for a new ethics, distinguishable both from the old overarching metanarratives and from politically quiescent models of postmodernity. She recognizes:that every single individual has to rethink morality for themselves and at the same time come to a newly negotiated social agreement. That’s how Anna learned to be many people at once and live in different worlds of perception at the same time each day.
In subscribing to an ethical postmodernism, the novel rejects the politically disengaging mode of postmodernism, refusing the simulacrum, and insisting on the political meanings of identity and desire. It articulates a critique of postmodern relativism, of a world without depth, meaning, or value and demonstrates that postmodernism is a heterogeneous phenomenon, containing ‘worlds of difference.’ Schulman’s text represents a symbolic exploration of women’s unequal differences as articulated in contemporary feminist theory and in the process exhorts feminists to take seriously the possibilities for empathy as a political stance in a postmodern world of shifting locations.
EMPATHY
Copyright © 1992 by Sarah Schulman
Preface, introduction, and afterword copyright © 2006 by the authors
First Arsenal Pulp Press edition: 2006
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or used in any form by any means — graphic, electronic or mechanical — without the prior written permission of the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may use brief excerpts in a review.
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Printed and bound in CanadaThis is a work of fiction. Any resemblance of characters to persons either living or deceased is purely coincidental.
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Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication:
Schulman, Sarah, 1958-
Empathy / Sarah Schulman.
(Little Sister’s classics)
Originally published: New York : Dutton, 1992.
eISBN : 978-1-551-52401-6