Writing Pain in the Nineteenth-Century United States

Abstract

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.

Descubriendo a Emily Dickinson: Después del giro crítico… ¿se asoma por fin la sonrisa?

“…En 2019, Snediker, en «"The Vision -pondered long": Dickinson, Chronic Pain, and the Materiality of Figuration», estudiaba la relación entre los afectos psíquicos de Dickinson y su dolor crónico. Más recientemente, para Smith (1998), Jackson (2013) y Noble (2000) la escritora hace una poética del dolor, según Constantinesco (2022), «to inhabit the space of femininity carved out by nineteenth-century New England cultureand on the other hand, as a paradoxical conduit for reclaiming agency and authority» 4 (p. 88).…”

“…Ya existen, por supuesto, críticas feministas, así como críticas que se desentienden por completo del dolor. -Como dice Constantinesco (2022):…”

“…Snediker (2008) ofrece una posible respuesta a esta última pregunta: «Dickinson's understanding of happiness is inseparable from happiness's encroachment on pain» 10 (p. 95). Lo que esto indica, según Constantinesco (2022), es que «there is no simple way of extricating or abstracting pain from our readings of Dickinson» 11 (p. 89) pues el dolor en la poesía de Dickinson es «a complex heuristic and aesthetic structure of experience» 12 (p. 89).…”