The late 1980s witnessed the ethical turn in literature, with notable scholars being J. Hillis Miller, Wayne Booth, and Martha Nussbaum.Footnote ¹ Recent studies of Victorian narrative have explored ethics as a relation between self and other through a lens of sociality and openness to otherness. In this essay, I would like to focus on studies on the ethics of care, sympathy, hospitality, and empathy before turning to underexplored areas of research.

In the past few years, scholars have turned their attention to the analysis of ethics and the marriage plot, with the coming together of wife and husband “marking a larger reconciliation between individual and society.”Footnote ² Talia Schaffer's study, Romance's Rival: Familiar Marriage in Victorian Fiction, explores, among other things, the marriage of a physically disabled person through the theory of ethics of care, which asserts that human relations should be understood as interdependent exchanges of caregiving and care-receiving. By drawing attention to a social rather than a medical understanding of disability, Schaffer encourages readers to shift away from diagnosis, towards the relationship between carer and cared-for. Victorian novels of the disabled person and the caretaker offer models of the interdependencies on which all human relations rest. Thus, what the male disabled character of Victorian fiction loses in autonomy, he gains in sociality. Excluded from the male world of self-interested striving, he is introduced to a female-associated system of mutual caretaking. For instance, Rochester spends much of Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre trying to trick or overpower the titular character, but only when he is disabled can he express his dependency; his weakened male body facilitates mutual social relations.Footnote ³

Like Schaffer, Rachel Ablow looks at ethics in the context of the marriage plot in The Marriage of Minds: Reading Sympathy in the Victorian Marriage Plot. She is less interested in sympathy as an emotion than “as a mode of relating to others and of defining a self.”Footnote ⁴ Ablow demonstrates that, for many Victorians, the novel, like the effect of a good wife on her husband, helps readers maintain and cultivate their best selves. Her work on the morality of the domestic sphere addresses the ways by which the marriage plot serves to reinforce a moral code based on sympathy, whereby the home represents a private space of mutual understanding between spouses as well as one of respite from the corruption of the marketplace.

Rachel Hollander's Narrative Hospitality in Late Victorian Fiction: Novel Ethics builds on Ablow's study in order to argue that, in the last third of the nineteenth century, an ethics based on sympathy “gives way to an ethics of hospitality, in which respecting the limits of knowledge and welcoming the stranger define fiction's relationship to both reader and world.”Footnote ⁵ Hollander's understanding of hospitality derives from Emmanuel Levinas's philosophy to indicate the individual's welcome of the absolute other. Given this, Hollander looks at novels that call into question the stability of domestic life. Characters are now forced to look beyond sympathy to the possibilities of opening self and home to that which is other. Thus, in George Eliot's Daniel Deronda, Daniel's marriage heralds not a stable English home but a journey to the Middle East and the consequent abandonment of England as homeland.Footnote ⁶

Like Hollander, Rebecca N. Mitchell draws on Levinas, for whom ethics entails one's responsibility for the (unknowable) other. In Victorian Lessons in Empathy and Difference, Mitchell reframes conventional understandings of Victorian empathy by arguing that it is not identification but the recognition of irreducible alterity that forms the basis of intersubjectivity and ethics in realist narratives and paintings. Indeed, texts by Charles Dickens, George Eliot, and Thomas Hardy work to disabuse readers of the tendency to view characters as human and knowable. It is in being aware of the limits of our ability to know the other that we seek to understand the other as best we can: “empathetic extension arises from the recognition of difference.”Footnote ⁷ Realist novels and paintings show individuals growing into the recognition of alterity “by learning to appreciate difference.”Footnote ⁸

The studies mentioned have focused almost exclusively on secular fiction. As a result, there is still much research to be conducted on ethics in other genres such as Victorian poetry and devotional verse. For example, in my book on Gerard Manley Hopkins, I write about one's ethical obligation towards the other, but under the theme of love.Footnote ⁹ Love is undoubtedly an important goad for ethical action. Ignatius of Loyola (founder of the Society of Jesus, which Hopkins entered in 1868), argued that love (amor) is given “in mutual interchange,”Footnote ¹⁰ most often in deeds, that is, in ethical acts. I explored these ideals of mutual love through Luce Irigaray's theory of mutual touch. Irigaray speaks of the ethical relationship between the sexes as an enactment of what she calls the caress. The caress expresses one's regard for the alterity of the other. “Distanced by our difference,” she says, “but present to each other,” with the caress fulfilling an obligation in the act of loving: to be ourselves and to be “present” with the other.Footnote ¹¹ Hopkins's poetry demonstrates that love and touch are two sides of each other; in “Felix Randal,” two very different men, a priest and his dying, working-class parishioner, arrive at a tender moment of trust, comfort, and love: “My … touch had quenched thy tears, / Thy tears that touched my heart” (lines 10–11).

The turn to ethics has brought exciting new ways of reading Victorian fiction. It has offered us greater insight into the lives of women, the marginalized, and indeed the other. The future of studies in ethics has the potential to further delve into territories less familiar, for instance, love, poetry, and the intersection of literature with religion.