:Writing Pain in the Nineteenth-Century United States

Previous articleNext article FreeBook ReviewWriting Pain in the Nineteenth-Century United States. Thomas Constantinesco. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022. Pp. 288.Vivian DelchampsVivian DelchampsDominican University of California Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmailPrint SectionsMoreSomething that is “generative” has the power to produce and reproduce, create and recreate. In Thomas Constantinesco’s exciting book Writing Pain in the Nineteenth-Century United States, the author emphasizes that pain is not solely destructive (as many tired frameworks suggest). The book’s framing of pain in the context of nineteenth-century history opens new avenues for understanding pain as a generative, active force that catalyzes creative experiments with literary form, narrative, and genre. Specifically, Constantinesco demonstrates that literary texts engage with and veer away from the dominant form used to understand pain in the nineteenth century—sentimentalism. Literature generates new knowledge about pain precisely because it does not merely use pain to foster empathy. Rather, literature complexly theorizes the problems of selfhood, identity, and language that emerge in pain’s wake.With this argument, Writing Pain contributes to historical literary scholarship and to pain studies—an interdisciplinary field that explores pain’s cultural and social contexts. Elaine Scarry famously argued in The Body in Pain (1987) that pain is unnarratable, unspeakable, and untranslatable. Constantinesco builds on and challenges Scarry’s ideas, asserting that pain is not merely a hindrance to language but is rather a fertile ground for the emergence of poetic expression. Like Michael Snediker, who deploys figuration to explore chronic pain in his wonderful book Contingent Figure (2021), Constantinesco argues that pain can transform language even when the resulting figures resist complete understanding. While Constantinesco and Snediker develop complementary ideas about pain, Constantinesco differs slightly from Snediker by asserting that literary texts perform formal work that is not only theoretical and philosophical; it is also historical. Thus, Constantinesco embraces the methods of Lauren Berlant (“The Subject of True Feeling” [1999]) who carefully attends to American history while analyzing the politics of pain. Constantinesco’s book similarly, and elegantly, invites theoretical perspectives while tracing pain’s histories and literary topologies.The book’s argument is evidenced in six chapters that interrogate pain’s paradoxical dimensions. Chapter 1 sets the stage for the rest of the book, analyzing Ralph Waldo Emerson’s sentimental framing of pain as something that will someday be exchanged for spiritual ecstasy. Emerson’s economic understanding of pain has much to do with Emerson’s relationship to white masculinity, as Constantinesco demonstrates. Personal grief and political strife—epitomized by the death of Emerson’s son and Emerson’s abolitionist efforts—illuminate the difficulties of maintaining an economic stance toward pain and its prospective value.Chapters 2 and 3 together expose complementary responses to the problems raised by Emerson’s economy of pain. Chapter 2 focuses on Harriet Jacobs who, unlike Emerson, uses sentimentalism to challenge the epistemology of sympathy. Incidents recognizes pain as integral to the reappropriation of Jacobs’s will and bodied self; with this argument, Constantinesco demonstrates that individual experiences of pain should not be collapsed into generic suffering—particularly within the context of Black embodiment and enslavement. In chapter 3, Constantinesco continues to explore pain’s relationship to the self by analyzing Emily Dickinson’s articulation of pain’s unshareability. Constantinesco offers a fascinating close reading of Dickinson’s poem “There is a Pain—so utter,” arguing that the poem grapples with pain’s paradoxes of destruction and creation. As Constantinesco points out, we could read Dickinson’s line as an imperative voice saying, “There is a pain: so, utter!” (8). Through such close readings, Constantinesco illuminates how Jacobs’s narrative and Dickinson’s poetry challenge assumptions of recovery and invite us to sit with pain’s paradoxes. Pain cannot be fully shared with others, yet it generates new literary forms because it demands to be felt and articulated.Chapters 4 and 5 then turn to analysis of queer sociality and gendered appropriations of pain within and beyond the sentimental genre. Constantinesco close reads a little-known Henry James Civil War narrative, arguing that James challenges the heterosexist logic of sentimentalism and highlights the potential for queer sociality as a means of better circulating and understanding invisible male pain. Chapter 5 explores Elizabeth Stuart Phelps’s novel The Gates Ajar, which devises a queer pedagogy of pain that presents heaven as a realm of painless reembodiment. Constantinesco’s excellent analysis of Phelps’s novel reveals how she deploys sentimentalism against itself to confront misguided sympathy and imagine an authentic form of fellow feeling. This cohesive chapter pairing thus attends closely to queer sociality and gender as it tests sentimentalism’s limits for articulating pain.The final chapter highlights the fascinating writing of Alice James, who was diagnosed with hysteria at the end of the nineteenth century (173) and whose diary explores the psychophysiology of invisible pain. The chapter treats her diary as literature rather than as an exclusively biographical document; it thereby emphasizes Alice James’s literary labors and recovers the specificy of her pain. Constantinesco asserts that Alice James subjects herself to the “disabling effects of sympathy,” repurposing this “spectacle” by “casting herself voluntarily in the role of grotesque monster, thus performing her identity as a body in pain and a suffering invalid and literally producing herself as other in the pages of her diary” (26). The chapter deftly concludes the book’s exploration of the paradoxes of sentimental sympathy, demonstrating that Alice James’s pain both constrains and spurs her drive to self-expression.Though the book does not explicate its relationship to disability studies, a field that scrutinizes the political, social, and lived realities of bodymind pain, Writing Pain indirectly contributes to the field (as the above references to grotesque disablement and invalidism especially make clear). The book asks necessary questions about Black authors’ representations of bodymind pain; it might have gleaned new insights by exploring more works by Black disability scholars who explore similar questions, such as Sami Schalk (Bodyminds Reimagined [2018]) and Dennis Tyler (“Jim Crow’s Disabilities” [2017]). Ultimately, Constantinesco invaluably contributes to historical literary scholarship by emphasizing pain’s generative work as he illuminates the ways sentimentalism and anesthetizing politics unhelpfully seek to do away with pain. Writing Pain invites us to celebrate pain’s “messiness” (207) rather than anesthetize it—a move that invites new thrilling examinations of identity and selfhood as well as the worlds and words born of pain. Previous articleNext article DetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Modern Philology Ahead of Print Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/727617 HistoryPublished online October 02, 2023 For permission to reuse, please contact [email protected].PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.