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While literary modernism’s signature narrative style, stream of consciousness, has been widely studied from the perspective of Freudian psychoanalysis, other possible inter-influences between modernism and psychology have received little scholarly attention. This paper asks for the need to move beyond Freud by calling attention to the approximate coincidence of the emergence of literary modernism and the introduction of the word “empathy” into English. Empathy was coined by the English psychologist Edward B. Titchener in 1909 as a translation of the German word Einfühlung, an aesthetic phenomenon whose framework was theorized by the German philosopher Theodor Lipps. This paper reads Dorothy Richardson’s Pointed Roofs (1915) as an early modernist work to show the neglected connection between Einfühlung/empathy as a popular subject of study in both aesthetics and psychology in the early 1900s and the modernist exploration of interiority. Known as the first writer whose work was described as “stream of consciousness,” Richardson represents her protagonist Miriam Henderson’s consciousness by merely recording what she perceives, feels, thinks, and, often partially, understands. This paper argues that while depicting Miriam’s struggle to adjust to a new life as an English teacher in Germany, the novel captures the then-burgeoning concept of Einfühlung/empathy and its relevant anxieties by accentuating moments of aesthetic encounters and the limits of Miriam’s ability to understand other minds.
