Review of Rebecca Spence’s “‘A Sigh of Sympathy’: Thomas Hardy’s Paralinguistic Aesthetics and Evolutionary Sympathy.”

opens a wider conversation about the expressive and aesthetic contributions of 'sighing' in the work of Thomas Hardy.Her reading of Hardy is guided by Herbert Spencer's essay 'The Origin and Function of Music' (1857), in which he posits that "highly developed humans are able to aurally perceive and respond sympathetically to the emotionally heightened paralinguistic expressions of others" (117).This pairing builds on Spence's broader fascination with the impact of 'sympathy' in Hardy's novels.Her focus on "the aesthetic operations of paralanguage" (117), draws on Herbert Spencer's literary-scientific enquiries, as well as convincingly showing how his is a somewhat flawed conceptual model, one that does not entertain the elusive anti-cultural nature of sighs.Spence starts her essay by considering "key scenes of sighing" (118) in Tess of the d'Urbervilles, Mayor of Casterbridge and The Woodlanders.This focus on Hardy's language guides her methodological practice in the close reading of seminal passages.Hardy's depictions of sighs both emulate and contradict H. Spencer's model described in 'The Origin', and work to produce "an aesthetics of sympathy" (118).Spence explains why sighing can be deciphered through the idea of paralanguage and gives insights into the work of the linguist Fernando Poyatos.Spence is particularly cognisant that a sigh for Hardy has a "distinctive nature" (119).In Far from the Madding Crowd, Troy's sigh "has something of its own intrinsic logic or ontology" (119).These insights help to define how sighing is distinctive from other sounds such as gasping, sobbing or groaning.By introducing the sigh as part of the "aesthetics of sympathy" (119) Spence shows how Hardy pulls away from the influence of H. Spencer's model.Another link between sighing and sympathy that interests her is the process of listening.A change of voice (cadence, tone, pitch) in one person can produce an emotional response in the listener, prompting "a sympathetic identification" (121).This is different from H. Spencer's notion of 'cultivated sympathy'.A higher form of sympathy for H. Spencer is a product of good taste and even better breeding: "a refined aesthetic sensibility" (123), which is "a sign of both cultivation and morality" (124).What Hardy cultivates in turn with his empathy for others is "an ironic countermodel of cultivated sympathy" (118) through the "cultivation of nature" (135).What this signals is an entanglement between human and non-human worlds, one that enables the extension of sympathy towards non-human entities.Hardy's milkmaids, field labourers, and farmers partake in the same sympathy that Spencer reserved for the cultivated.Spence extends the idea of cultivation to include Hardy's integrating vision of humans as part of the environment.This is reinforced by further probing into sighs produced by Eustacia in The Return of the Native -sighs that show how deeply entangled she is with the environment of Egdon Heath.RN shows an "extension of sympathy between the human and natural realms" (127).This is also "an idealized form of sympathy" (128), one that sees all creation as part of the same organic whole.The real accomplishment of Rebecca Spence's work is that she foregrounds the idea that the sigh "is elusive as an expression" (126): it is a shadow realm between language and experience, a liminal zone where multiple meanings can accumulate.