This book examines how pain is represented in a range of literary texts and genres from the nineteenth-century United States. It considers the aesthetic, philosophical, and ethical implications of pain across the works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Harriet Jacobs, Emily Dickinson, Henry James, Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, and Alice James, as the national culture of pain progressively transformed in the wake of the invention of anesthesia. Through these writers, it argues that pain, while undeniably destructive, also generates language and identities, and demonstrates how literature participates in theorizing the problems of mind and body that undergird the deep chasms of selfhood, sociality, gender, and race of a formative period in American history. Writing Pain considers first Emerson’s philosophy of compensation, which promises to convert pain into gain. It then explores the limitations of this model, showing how Jacobs contests the division of body and mind that underwrites it and how Dickinson challenges its alleged universalism by foregrounding the unshareability of pain as a paradoxical measure of togetherness. The book investigates next the concurrent economies of affects in which pain was implicated during and after the Civil War and argues, through the example of James and Phelps, for queer sociality as a response to the heteronormative violence of sentimentalism. The last chapter on Alice James extends the critique of sentimental sympathy while returning to the book’s premise that pain is generative and the site of thought. By linking literary formalism with individual and social formation, Writing Pain eventually claims close reading as a method to recover the theoretical work of literature.
This Introduction sets out the theoretical and methodological stakes of the book, along with its historical range. It begins by exposing the problem of pain as a tension between the evidence of pain and its enigma, which the rest of the book investigates. It then develops the claim that pain, while undeniably destructive, is also generative—of language, subjectivities, and collectivities—as it circulates within and between persons and through writing. Linking literary formalism with individual and social formation, the chapter argues for close reading as a method to recover the theoretical work of literature. It further positions the argument within the field of pain studies, before tracing the main transformations of the United States’ culture of pain in the nineteenth century, from the rise of secularism, sentimentalism, and utilitarianism, to the invention of anesthesia and the development of tort law, as well as the politics of pain during the Civil War and in the early years of Reconstruction. It ends with an overview of the book’s structure that emphasizes the affordances of pain—their limitations and their potentialities—in the shaping of individual and collective identities.
This chapter explores how Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861) exposes the problematic function of pain in the disciplinary apparatus of slavery and in the constitution of Black subjectivity. It considers how Jacobs illuminates the contradiction of slavery’s biopolitical power, which treated enslaved men and women as both possessing and not possessing a will. As property, the chapter shows, enslaved people had no will, only a body that did not belong to them; as legal persons, they were granted a negative will of criminal intent, which returned them to their commodified body, experienced through the pain of forced labor and corporeal punishment. The chapter demonstrates however that, rather than seeking to escape from body to will, Jacobs’s journey from enslavement to emancipation takes the form of a looping structure, whereby she comes to will her own pain of body and mind through her escape in the “loophole of retreat” she finds in her grandmother’s garret. It further argues that the narrativization of her pain complicates the equivalence between literacy and liberation that underwrites slave narratives, as much as it challenges the conventions of sentimentalism that Incidents nevertheless deploys. It eventually makes the claim that, by willing pain as a paradoxical source of agency, Jacobs’s narrative reveals how pain is integral both to the reappropriation of embodied selfhood and to the familial and social bonds she strives to recover after her flight from enslavement.
This chapter examines the forms and functions of grief in Elizabeth Stuart Phelps’s Civil War fiction, The Gates Ajar (1868). It shows how this sentimental novel problematizes its relation to the conventions of sentimentality, as its form as a diary helps emphasize the limits of misguided sympathy. It also illuminates how Phelps deploys sentimentalism against itself to imagine the successful work of mourning as relying on the recovery, or the invention, of authentic fellow-feeling. The chapter further argues that, in the novel, family sympathy allegorizes the prospect of national reunion in a succession of scenes of women caring for each other. It then demonstrates that Phelps’s queer pedagogy of pain culminates in the picturing of heaven as a paradise of painless re-embodiment. Relating the novel’s economy of compensation to Emerson’s philosophy of pain, the chapter reveals how grief may be recuperated for Phelps through a transformative ecology of sacrifice and death. It concludes by arguing that Phelps invites us to recognize pain so that we may overcome it, not by burying the dead in the vain hope of forgetting them, but by burying them to ensure their survival with us and in us.
The coda considers the ways literary forms produce and circulate our thinking about the function of pain in individual and social formations, relating the book’s claims and interventions to the critical purchase of literature and literary studies. While the work of literature has often been reduced to its dimension of storytelling and to its capacity to foster empathetic identification through narratives of pain, attending to the labor of form shows how literature effectively theorizes the affordances of pain—its challenges and its potentials—outside the frameworks of medicalization and sentimental sympathy, as a generative feeling to be neither anesthetized nor bemoaned.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.
hi@scite.ai
10624 S. Eastern Ave., Ste. A-614
Henderson, NV 89052, USA
Copyright © 2024 scite LLC. All rights reserved.
Made with 💙 for researchers
Part of the Research Solutions Family.