Conformist Culture and the Failures of Empathy: Reading James Baldwin and Patricia Highsmith

As the interest in empathy has expanded within literary studies, critics have turned to questions of author empathy and reader empathy, interrogating the processes through which writers and their audiences come to empathize with fi ctional characters, as well as the implications of these processes for the contemporary place of fi ction in our lives.1 This increase in attention has been mirrored by the burgeoning interest in literary portrayals of empathy-the empathy that literary characters experience (or fail to experience) for one another within the world of the novel.2 Whether we seek to examine the work that literary characters do to discern the thoughts and feelings of others-known in scientifi c parlance as cognitive empathy-or the experience of actually, personally feeling the emotions of others-generally referred to as aff ective empathy-it can prove fruitful to consider how empathy develops, how it manifests, and why it might dissipate or fail to materialize altogether within the borders of a fi ctional text.