I haven't read Persuasion yet, so this is a fairly limited post. I'll attempt to add to it once I'm able to start the novel.
"Human beings, like other primates, tend to experience empathy most readily and accurately for those who seem like us" (Keen, 214)
This makes me question if, during some of the more violent/dangerous scenes (the consensual(ish) whipping, the attempted rape by the first suitor, etc.), the men reading Memoirs of a Women of Pleasure experience less empathy for Francis Hill than perhaps the women might? Or, is she too far displaced in time from even the women of today to feel empathy? Do we feel sympathy for her?
"My research suggests that readers’ perception of a text’s fictionality plays a role in subsequent empathetic
response, by releasing readers from the obligations of self-protection through skepticism and suspicion." (Keen, 220)
Does this theory also function in Hill's naivety at the beginning of the novel? That is, because this world is so different from what she knows, does she let herself empathize with the other women more than she does later in the novel when she understands what women are expected to do to survive in her world?
Each article also mentioned mirror neurons, involved in empathy as well as seeing/reading actions. The brain also activates similar structures toward words as what those words represent in real life would activate in a brain. This felt like what the class talked about last week when we mentioned the way Hill's voyeurism of the varied sexual acts she sees seem to arouse her. We had touched on the idea of the involvement of mirror neurons, I believe, and I wonder if the physical feelings within her body are a sort of empathy she feels while watching these acts. Or, are they something different? If so, what do we call it and how does it work?
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