• The "victim of too much loving":Perdita Verney's Self-Destructive Sympathy in Mary Shelley's The Last Man
• Shoshannah Bryn Jones Square (bio)

I have lost you, myself, my life.

—Perdita Verney (The Last Man 124)¹

In Mary Shelley's fiction, sympathy is represented as a curious and dizzying paradox, her novels conspicuously and vividly registering its sometimes puzzling ambiguity. Although several of Shelley's influences and contemporaries were also grappling with the complexities of sympathy, exhilaratingly enigmatic as it is, Shelley surpassed all others in her sustained, rigorous, and painstaking engagement with its meanings, mechanisms, and purpose. Conventionally understood as a prosocial emotion capable of connecting self to other, individual to society, and so of expanding our sphere of ethical consideration and encouraging altruism, sympathy, in Susan Lanzoni's words, "install[s] the social at the heart of the individual" (284). Indeed, in the nineteenth century, sympathy was considered "a powerful emotion enlisted to serve many agendas: it provided an evolutionary basis for ethics, offered a model of emotional imitation, and was instrumental to sociality" (284).² Shelley's particular insight, however, was to recognize the precarity of sympathy's role as a prosocial emotion. According to her, when felt too excessively, sympathy can become pathological, its positive potential negated, and it may instead inflame the passions and precipitate madness, alienation, and suicide.

Moreover, Shelley suggests that the tendency to feel too much—which, she argues, can provoke suicidal thoughts—is linked to femininity. Like "hysteria," "the most commonly diagnosed 'female malady'" of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, hyper-sympathy is, in Shelley's novels, typically associated with women (Ussher 63). Because women in the nineteenth century were excluded from the realms of education, work, and travel and were forced to define themselves within the traditional classifications of daughter, wife, and mother,³ their ability to develop autonomous identities independent of their prescribed gender roles was severely [End Page 61] limited. Consequently, women were, according to Shelley, especially vulnerable to the dangers of sympathetic excess. Shelley's mother, Mary Wollstonecraft, argues something similar in her Vindication of the Rights of Woman: "only taught to look for happiness in love, [women] refine on sensual feelings, and adopt metaphysical notions respecting that passion"; if they were allowed "to share the advantages of education and government with man," Wollstonecraft asserts, women would "grow wiser and become free" (330, 310). Hyper-sympathy in women is thus a symptom of patriarchal society, an argument presented powerfully in Shelley's The Last Man through the character of Perdita Verney, who explicitly embodies the pathological possibilities of sympathy. Exhibiting her sympathy to an "extreme" and "psychologically unhealthy" degree, Perdita loses her self in her pathological love for her husband Lord Raymond, a metaphorical annihilation of self that eventually leads to a literal annihilation of self, one signalled by Perdita's name, meaning "lost" in Italian ("pathological" colloq. def. 4).

Importantly, this threat to selfhood borne of the unstable boundary between self and other in the sympathetic relationship is implicit in one of the many definitions of sympathy, its meanings as diverse as its effects. As Nancy Yousef observes, the term "sympathy" "is at once ubiquitous and conceptually unstable" (4). In the eighteenth century, for example, sympathy was described, in Ildiko Csengei's words, as "a moral and emotional response and a social bonding force," a "mechanistic and magnetic attraction, a communication or transfusion of feeling, [a] sympathetic bond," and as a form "of imaginary identification" (9). It is with the latter conception of sympathy as a form of "imaginary identification" that this study is concerned. As Adam Smith writes in his Theory of Moral Sentiments, through our imaginations, "we place ourselves in [another's] 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" (3). That is, when we sympathize with another, we are "merged in" their "feelings, inclinations, or temperament," and to "merge" is "to be absorbed and disappear, to lose character or identity by absorption into something" ("sympathy," defs. 2, 3a.; "merge" def. 2a). Thus, in sympathizing with another, our identities may become entangled with, and sometimes...

• “太多爱的受害者”：玛丽·雪莱的《最后的男人》中的佩迪塔·韦尔尼（Perdita Verney）的自我毁灭同情
• Shoshannah Bryn琼斯广场（生物）

我失去了你，我自己，我的生命。

-佩迪塔·弗尼（Perdita Verney，《最后的男人》（The Last Man 124））¹

在玛丽·雪莱（Mary Shelley）的小说中，同情表现为一种好奇而令人头晕的悖论，她的小说醒目生动地体现了其有时令人困惑的模糊性。尽管雪莱的一些影响者和当代人也都在努力应对同情的复杂性，尽管如此令人难以置信地令人难以置信，但雪莱在其含义，机制和目的上的持续，严谨和艰苦的努力超过了所有其他人。传统上被理解为一种亲社会的情感，用苏珊·兰佐尼（Susan Lanzoni）的话说，“能够将自我与他人，个人与社会联系起来，从而扩大我们的道德考虑范围并鼓励利他主义，同情”，“将社会置于个人的核心” ”（284）。实际上，在19世纪，同情被认为是“²雪莱的特殊见解是，认识到同情作为亲社会情感的作用并不明确。根据她的说法，当同情感过强时，同情会变得病态，它的积极潜力被削弱，反而可能激起激情并引发疯狂，疏远和自杀。

此外，雪莱（Shelley）认为，感觉过度的趋势与女性气质有关，感觉过度的趋势可能会引发自杀念头。像18世纪和19世纪的“歇斯底里”（“ hysteria”），“最常被诊断为“女性疾病”一样，在雪莱的小说中，过度同情通常与女性有关（Ussher 63）。由于19世纪的女性被排除在教育，工作和旅行领域之外，并且被迫在女儿，妻子和母亲的传统分类中定义自己，³他们独立于规定的性别角色而发展自主身份的能力是严重[结束第61页]有限的。因此，据雪莱说，妇女特别容易遭受同情过度的危险。雪莱的母亲玛丽·沃斯通克拉夫特（Mary Wollstonecraft）在她的《妇女权利辩护》中提出了类似的观点：“只教人们在爱情中寻找幸福，[女性]善于感性情感，并采用尊重这种激情的形而上学观念”；沃尔斯通克拉夫特断言，如果允许她们“与男人分享教育和政府的优势，那么女人将“变得更聪明并变得自由”（330，310）。女性的同情心是父权制社会的症状，这在雪莱的《最后的男人》中有力地论证了通过Perdita Verney的角色，他明确体现了同情的病理可能性。佩迪塔（Perdita）表现出对“极端”和“心理上不健康”的同情之情，在对丈夫雷蒙德勋爵（Lord Raymond）的病态爱中失去了自我，这是对自我的隐喻that灭，最终导致了对自己的直面an灭，这是由佩迪塔（Perdita）的名字所暗示的，在意大利语中意为“迷失”（“病理学”语言定义第4部分）。

重要的是，在同情关系中，自我与他人之间不稳定的边界所带来的这种对自我的威胁，隐含在同情的许多定义之一中，其含义和影响是多种多样的。正如南希·优素福（Nancy Yousef）所观察到的那样，“同情”一词“无处不在且在概念上是不稳定的”（4）。例如，在18世纪，以Ildiko Csengei的话形容同情为“一种道德和情感反应以及一种社会结合力”，“一种机械和磁性的吸引，一种情感的交流或输血，[一种]同情的结合”。 ”和“虚构标识”的形式（9）。这项研究关注的是后一种同情概念，即“虚构认同”的一种形式。通过我们的想象，“我们置身于[他人的]境地，我们设想自己经受着所有相同的折磨，我们进入了他的身体，并在某种程度上成为了同一个人”（3）。也就是说，当我们同情他人时，我们“融入”了他们的“感觉，倾向或气质”，而“合并”就是“被吸收和消失，通过被某种东西吸收而失去品格或身份”（同情”，定义2、3a；“合并”定义2a）。因此，在同情他人时，我们的身份可能会纠结在一起，有时……