Victorian Pain by Rachel Ablow

Reviewed by: Victorian Pain by Rachel Ablow April Patrick (bio) Rachel Ablow, Victorian Pain ( Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2017), pp. x + 191, $39.95/ £32.95 hardcover. In Victorian Pain, Rachel Ablow considers how texts by John Stuart Mill, Harriet Martineau, Charlotte Brontë, Charles Darwin, and Thomas Hardy grapple with the nature of pain in a century where scientific advances changed human experience of physical discomfort. Rather than engaging with religious and theoretical debates about the use of medicine to eradicate pain, Ablow deftly analyzes how specific literary and philosophical texts used pain "to consider the implications of the forms of subjectivity and sociality that the texts themselves explore and seek to produce" (4). This focus, along with the selection of texts and authors, will likely make this project more relevant to those working in literary studies and philosophy than those working on the social and behavioral side of disability studies. The introductory chapter provides an overview of recent theories of pain as well as Victorian discourse about it. Ablow begins with the best-known theoretical approach from Elaine Scarry's The Body in Pain (1985), which represents pain as an inherently private experience that others cannot, no matter how much they wish to, ever know. Ablow's analysis places Scarry in conversation with, instead of in contrast to, theories of pain that recognize its connection to social life, exploring how pain connects the sufferer with others even if they cannot understand the experience. She builds upon these two approaches to consider how the authors in her study both think about pain and, more importantly to literary studies, use language to represent it. Ablow also lays out the contemporary Victorian conversation about pain and its uses, particularly in the context of newly discovered forms of anesthesia. Her contemporary sources range from volumes on philosophy and science to periodicals like the Westminster Review, Lancet, and British Medical Journal. As Ablow presents the structure of the chapters that follow, she very briefly—in just a single paragraph—summarizes the understanding of pain that shapes her own approach, noting the benefits and drawbacks of theorizing pain using Joanna Bourke's argument that the experience of pain is constructed partially through environmental interactions, Javier Moscoso's analysis of pain through theatrical elements, and Veena Das's description of pain as a transaction between sufferer and audience. The first three chapters of the volume explore the connections between pain and social life in nonfiction by John Stuart Mill and Harriet Martineau and in fiction by Charlotte Brontë. The first chapter focuses on the mental breakdown at the heart of Mill's Autobiography. Ablow reads it, in part, as a response to Mill's utilitarian education, citing heavily from his [End Page 570] father James Mill's writings about pain and the construction of sympathy. She also uses the possibility of compassion to connect the theories of James Mill to Scarry's over 150 years later. In response to the utilitarian views of his father, Mill develops what Ablow calls a social model of sensation as his "self-conscious difference from the collective constitutes the condition of [his] attachment to it" (34). This understanding of pain provides a foundation for the evolution of the concept through nineteenth-century essays, life-writing, and fiction. Chapter two draws on Martineau's Autobiography, Life in the SickRoom, Illustrations of Political Economy, and Household Education to explore how Martineau redefines pain in the context of liberal subjectivity and how her ideas were shaped by philosophy and religion. Ablow uses examples from Martineau's life-writing to demonstrate how she theorizes pain and the experience of it. Most of the quoted writing suggests not only that the invalid's condition separates her from social life but also that solitude from others who do not understand the pain is preferable. Ablow also resolves an apparent contradiction between Martineau's views on impersonality and her interest in mesmerism, which focuses on the connectedness between bodies in order to suggest that the connections drawn through mesmerism transcend corporeal social relations. In chapter three, the study turns from nonfiction to Brontë's novel Villette. Here, Ablow offers a perceptive close reading of Lucy Snowe's...

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