Sympathy in the 21st Century: Zadie Smith's Victorian Roots

The influence of the Victorian novel on 20^th and early 21^st century fiction takes many forms: from rewritings of classic works, to the creation of historical fiction, to the transposition of literature to different media. This thesis focuses on the contemporary novel’s formal engagements with its Victorian predecessors, arguing that multiculturalism and immigration impact the ways in which contemporary novels utilize Victorian narrative structures and plots. Using British novelist Zadie Smith as a case study, I analyze how Smith adopts Victorian narrative structures and views on sympathy in her first novel, White Teeth. Part I addresses the impact of multiculturalism and the Windrush generation on national, individual, and literary identity in Britain, before examining how Smith’s nonfiction writing addresses the role of sympathy and identity in 19^th-, 20^th-, and 21^st-century fiction. Part II extends Smith’s reflections to the formal and thematic concerns of White Teeth by showing how its chapter structures, shifts in perspective, and emphasis on alternative families provides a particular model of sympathy. In this model, characters sympathize with various imagined, generalized perspectives in order to more clearly define their own identity, particularly in relationship to their familial roots. As such, it sheds light on how the Victorian novel functions in contemporary writing: as an imagined, generalized form of the past that is both adopted and rejected.