Skip to main content
SpringerLink
Log in

Sympathy, Disability, and the Nurse: Female Power in Edith Wharton’s The Fruit of the Tree

  • Published:
Journal of Medical Humanities Aims and scope Submit manuscript

Abstract

The nursing profession’s emphasis on empathy as essential to nursing care may undermine nurses’ power as a collective and detract from perceptions of nurses’ analytical skills and expertise. The practice of empathy may also obscure and even compound patients’ suffering when it does not fully account for their subjectivity. This essay examines the relation of empathy to women’s agency and explores the role empathy plays in obscuring rather than empowering the suffering other, particularly people who are disabled, through a close reading of Edith Wharton’s 1907 novel, The Fruit of the Tree, and through discussions of empathy and sympathy from literary and disability studies.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this article

Log in via an institution

Price excludes VAT (USA)
Tax calculation will be finalised during checkout.

Instant access to the full article PDF.

Institutional subscriptions

Similar content being viewed by others

Notes

  1. See, e.g., C. Davies, Gender and the Professional Predicament in Nursing (Buckingham: Open University Press, 1985).

  2. See “Preliminary Findings: 2004 National Sample Survey of Registered Nurses” published by the Health Resources and Services Administration on their website: http://bhpr.hrsa.gov/healthworkforce/reports/rnpopulation/preliminaryfindings.htm. Accessed January 31, 2008.

  3. M. Poovey, Uneven Developments: The Ideological Work of Gender in Mid-Victorian England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), 100.

  4. S. Reverby, Ordered to Care: The Dilemma of American Nursing (New York: Cambridge University Press, l987), 2.

  5. See, e.g., G. Kristjánsdóttir, “Empathy: A Therapeutic Phenomenon in Nursing Care,” Journal of Clinical Nursing 1 (1992): 131–140: “There is no doubt from the literature that empathy is an essential phenomenon in nursing practice,” (p. 131), and J.M. Morse, J. Bottorff, G. Anderson, B. O’Brien, et al., “Beyond Empathy: Expanding Expressions of Caring,” Journal of Advanced Nursing 53, no. 1 (2006): 75–90: “In the past 3 decades, empathy has been touted as...the central ‘helping component’ in nurse-patient interaction” (p. 75). See also C. May and C. Fleming, “The Professional Imagination: Narrative and the Symbolic Boundaries Between Medicine and Nursing,” Journal of Advanced Nursing 25 (1997), 1094–1100.

  6. See, e.g., A. Henderson, “Emotional Labor and Nursing: An Under-appreciated Aspect of Caring Work,” Nursing Inquiry 8, no. 2 (2001): 130–138.

  7. See, e.g., A.C.H. McQueen, “Emotional Intelligence in Nursing Work,” Journal of Advanced Nursing 47, no. 1 (2003): 101–108.

  8. D. Kunyk and J.K. Olson, “Clarification of Conceptualizations of Empathy,” Journal of Advanced Nursing 35, no. 3 (2001): 317–325, at 317.

  9. See R. Garden, “Expanding Clinical Empathy: An Activist Perspective,” Journal of General Internal Medicine 24, no. 1 (2009): 122–5.

  10. M. Hojat, M. Vergare, K. Maxwell, G. Brainard, et al., “The Devil is in the Third Year: A Longitudinal Study of Erosion of Empathy in Medical School,” Academic Medicine 84, no. 9 (2009): 1182–1191.

  11. Morse et al.

  12. Hojat et al., 1183. This distinction is made in the nursing literature as well as that written by and for physicians: “In nursing, [sympathetic] responses are devalued, and nurses are taught to respond to patients more ‘professionally.’” Morse et al., 78.

  13. J. Halpern, From Detached Concern to Empathy: Humanizing Medical Practice (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 2001), 33 and 40.

  14. For example, one section of a collection of essays on disability that focuses on the problem posed by sympathy is called “The Pity Ploy.” The Ragged Edge: The Disability Experience from the Pages of the First Fifteen Years of The Disability Rag, ed. B. Shaw (Louisville, KY: Avocado Press, 1994).

  15. E. Wharton, The Fruit of the Tree (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 2000), 13. All subsequent references will be cited in the text.

  16. While nursing ethics at the turn of the twentieth century were primarily concerned with respect for hospital etiquette and obedience to authority, issues like protecting patient confidentiality were a concern. According to Isabel Hampton Robb, “To confide to another the disease from which one patient is suffering, whether he is likely to recover and the like, is a sin of which a nurse should never be guilty.” I. Hampton Robb, Nursing Ethics: For Hospital and Private Use (Cleveland: Koeckert, 1918), 149.

  17. Halpern, 85.

  18. Halpern discusses disgust, imagination, and empathy in a section called “Emotional Inertia,” 49–52.

  19. Halpern, 51.

  20. Ibid.

  21. Hampton Robb, 40.

  22. Ibid., 75, 82, 76, and 81.

  23. Ibid., 83.

  24. L.L. Dock, “The Relation of Training Schools to Hospitals,” Nursing of the Sick, 1893, by Isabel A. Hampton and Others: Papers and Discussions, McGraw-Hill Series in Nursing, ed. L. Petry (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1949), 16.

  25. Hampton Robb, 74.

  26. Reverby, 58.

  27. See, e.g., Morse et al.’s review and analysis of those strategies for mediation.

  28. Hampton Robb, 231.

  29. E. Wharton, The House of Mirth (New York: Everyman/Knopf, 1991), 274.

  30. Reverby, 103.

  31. Hampton Robb, 231.

  32. J. Halpern cites sadism as an example of an empathic enjoyment of another’s suffering. See From Detached Concern, fn 21, p. 36.

  33. P.A. Kalisch and B.J. Kalisch, The Advance of American Nursing (Boston: Little, Brown, 1978), 186.

  34. Reverby, 96.

  35. Hampton Robb, 71.

  36. A narrative voice identifies this loss of interest as a gender issue: “A more expert knowledge of the sex would have told Amherst that such ready sympathy is likely to be followed by as prompt a reaction of indifference” (FT 92).

  37. Although she distanced herself dryly from the “Wanamaker’s clientele,” the department-store masses who made The House of Mirth a best-seller, Wharton published ghost stories in popular venues like Scribner’s Magazine and wrote novels that, even while critiquing it, were nonetheless preoccupied with New York society and satisfied the masses’ hunger for stories about it. H. Lee, Edith Wharton (New York: Knopf, 2007), 173.

  38. L. Wexler, “Tender Violence: Literary Eavesdropping, Domestic Fiction, and Educational Reforem,” in The Culture of Sentiment: Race, Gender, and Sentimentality in Nineteenth-Century America, ed. S. Samuels (NY: Oxford, 1992), 17, 15.

  39. M. Stoddard-Holmes, Fictions of Affliction: Physical Disability in Victorian Culture (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2004), 111.

  40. M. Klages, Woeful Afflictions: Disability and Sentimentality in Victorian America (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999), 7.

  41. Ibid., 59.

  42. R. Garland-Thomson, Extraordinary Bodies: Figuring Physical Disability in American Culture and Literature (NY: Columbia University Press, 1997), 82. See especially Chapter 4, “Benevolent Maternalism and the Disabled Women in Stowe, Davis, and Phelps,” 81–102.

  43. Ibid., 82.

  44. Ibid., 83.

  45. Ibid., 101.

  46. Ibid., 83.

  47. The language Wharton uses to describe Justine’s caregiving reflects Hampton Robb’s description of the sympathetic nurse: Wharton tells us that Bessy “liked to feel that Justine’s quick hand and eye were always in waiting on her impulses prompt to interpret and execute them without any exertion of her own” (FT 219).

  48. John and Justine’s growing intimacy is couched in terms of sympathy: Justine “frankly wanted to see Amherst again—his tone, his view of life, reinforced her own convictions....Her extreme sensitiveness to surrounding vibrations of thought and feeling told her...that [John] too was obscurely aware of the same effect” (FT 272).

  49. See C.J. Singley, Edith Wharton: Matters of Mind and Spirit (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 56–58.

  50. P.J. Ohler, Edith Wharton’s “Evolutionary Conception”: Darwinian Allegory in Her Major Novels (NY: Routledge, 2006), 39.

  51. R. Garland-Thomson, “The Cultural Logic of Euthanasia: ‘Sad Fancyings’ in Herman Melville’s “‘Bartleby,’” American Literature 76, no. 4 (December 2004): 777–806.

  52. Ibid., 795.

  53. S.V. Hartman, Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America (NY: Oxford University Press, 1997), 19. For discussion of concerns about empathic practices occluding the suffering of the other in the context of medicine, see R. Garden, “The Problem of Empathy: Medicine and the Humanities,” New Literary History 38, no. 3 (Summer 2007): 551–568.

  54. Ibid., 789.

  55. J.A. Kassanoff, Edith Wharton and the Politics of Race (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 76–77.

  56. R.H. Gregory, quoted in J.M. Appel, “A Duty to Kill? A Duty to Die? Rethinking the Euthanasia Controversy of 1906,” Bulletin of the History of Medicine 78 (2004): 610–634, on p. 622. See also Kassanoff, Chapter 3, “A Close Corporation: The Body and the Machine in The Fruit of the Tree,” 59–82, esp. 74–77 on euthanasia advocacy.

  57. L. Sheldon, qtd. in Appel, 615.

References

  • Appel, J.M. “A Duty to Kill? A Duty to Die? Rethinking the Euthanasia Controversy of 1906.” Bulletin of the History of Medicine 78 (2004): 610–634.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Davies, C. Gender and the Professional Predicament in Nursing. Buckingham: Open University Press, 1985.

    Google Scholar 

  • Dock, L.L. Nursing of the Sick, 1893, by Isabel A. Hampton and Others: Papers and Discussions, McGraw-Hill Series in Nursing. Ed. Lucile Petry. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1949.

  • Garden, R. “Expanding Clinical Empathy: An Activist Perspective.” Journal of General Internal Medicine 24, no. 1 (2009): 122–5.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • ———. “The Problem of Empathy: Medicine and the Humanities.” New Literary History 38, no. 3 (Summer 2007): 551–568.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Garland-Thomson, R. “The Cultural Logic of Euthanasia: ‘Sad Fancyings’ in Herman Melville’s ‘Bartleby,’” American Literature 76, no. 4 (December 2004): 777–806.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • ———. Extraordinary Bodies: Figuring Physical Disability in American Culture and Literature. NY: Columbia University Press, 1997.

    Google Scholar 

  • Halpern, J. From Detached Concern to Empathy: Humanizing Medical Practice. New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 2001.

    Google Scholar 

  • Hampton Robb, I. Nursing Ethics: For Hospital and Private Use. Cleveland: Koeckert, 1918.

  • Hartman, S.V. Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America. NY: Oxford University Press, 1997.

    Google Scholar 

  • Health Resources and Services Administration. “Preliminary Findings: 2004 National Sample Survey of Registered Nurses”: http://bhpr.hrsa.gov/healthworkforce/reports/rnpopulation/preliminaryfindings.htm.

  • Henderson, A. “Emotional Labor and Nursing: An Under-appreciated Aspect of Caring Work.” Nursing Inquiry 8, no. 2 (2001): 130–138.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Hojat, M., M. Vergare, K. Maxwell, G. Brainard, et al., “The Devil is in the Third Year: A Longitudinal Study of Erosion of Empathy in Medical School.” Academic Medicine 84, no. 9 (2009): 1182–1191.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Kalisch, P.A. and B.J. Kalisch. The Advance of American Nursing. Boston: Little, Brown, 1978.

    Google Scholar 

  • Kassanoff, J.A. Edith Wharton and the Politics of Race. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004.

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • Klages, M. Woeful Afflictions: Disability and Sentimentality in Victorian America. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999.

    Google Scholar 

  • Kristjánsdóttir, G. “Empathy: A Therapeutic Phenomenon in Nursing Care,” Journal of Clinical Nursing 1 (1992): 131–140.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Kunyk, D. and J.K. Olson. “Clarification of Conceptualizations of Empathy.” Journal of Advanced Nursing 35, no. 3 (2001): 317–325.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Lee, H. Edith Wharton. New York: Knopf, 2007.

    Google Scholar 

  • May, C. and C. Fleming. “The Professional Imagination: Narrative and the Symbolic Boundaries Between Medicine and Nursing.” Journal of Advanced Nursing 25 (1997): 1094–1100.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • McQueen, A.C. H. “Emotional Intelligence in Nursing Work.” Journal of Advanced Nursing 47, no. 1 (2003): 101–108.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Morse, J.M., J. Bottorff, G. Anderson, B. O’Brien, et al., “Beyond Empathy: Expanding Expressions of Caring.” Journal of Advanced Nursing 53, no. 1 (2006): 75–90.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Ohler, P.J. Edith Wharton’s “Evolutionary Conception”: Darwinian Allegory in Her Major Novels. NY: Routledge, 2006.

    Google Scholar 

  • “Pity Ploy, The.” In The Ragged Edge: The Disability Experience from the Pages of the First Fifteen Years of The Disability Rag. Ed. Barrett Shaw. Louisville, KY: Avocado Press, 1994.

  • Poovey, M. Uneven Developments: The Ideological Work of Gender in Mid-Victorian England. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989.

    Google Scholar 

  • Reverby, S. Ordered to Care: The Dilemma of American Nursing. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1987.

    Google Scholar 

  • Singley, C.J. Edith Wharton: Matters of Mind and Spirit. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998.

    Google Scholar 

  • Stoddard-Holmes, M. Fictions of Affliction: Physical Disability in Victorian Culture. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2004.

    Google Scholar 

  • Wexler, L. “Tender Violence: Literary Eavesdropping, Domestic Fiction, and Educational Reform.” In The Culture of Sentiment: Race, Gender, and Sentimentality in Nineteenth-Century America. Ed. S. Samuels. NY: Oxford, 1992.

    Google Scholar 

  • Wharton, E. The Fruit of the Tree. Boston: Northeastern University Press, 2000.

    Google Scholar 

  • ———. The House of Mirth. New York: Everyman/Knopf, 1991.

    Google Scholar 

Download references

Acknowledgement

Thanks to Sandra D. Lane, Martha Stoddard-Holmes, and Delese Wear for their sharp readings of this essay.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Center for Bioethics and Humanities, Upstate Medical University, 618 Irving Ave., Syracuse, NY, 13210, USA

    Rebecca Garden

Authors
  1. Rebecca Garden
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Rebecca Garden.

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

About this article

Cite this article

Garden, R. Sympathy, Disability, and the Nurse: Female Power in Edith Wharton’s The Fruit of the Tree . J Med Humanit 31, 223–242 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10912-010-9115-3

Download citation

  • Published:

  • Issue Date:

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10912-010-9115-3

Keywords

Search

Navigation