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  • Affecting Fictions: Mind, Body, and Emotion in American Literary Realism
  • Carol Kolmerten
Affecting Fictions: Mind, Body, and Emotion in American Literary Realism. By Jane Thrailkill. Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 2007. 320 pp. Cloth, $45.00.

New Critics beware: Jane Thailkill's recent book, Affecting Fictions: Mind, Body, and Emotion in American Literary Realism, is a "sustained argument" defending the Affective Fallacy. W. K. Wimsatt and Monroe Beardsley, Thrailkill argues, were wrong—judging a text on the basis of its emotional effects on a reader is quite relevant to the work's interpretation. In fact, nothing could be more relevant.

Thrailkill organizes her book around the ideas of psychologist Theodule Ribot, whose thinking influenced William James, whose theories, in turn, provides a foundation for Thrailkill. In Psychology of the Emotions (1897), Ribot argues that states of feeling can be grouped into four principle types: pain, fear, excitability, and agreeableness. To Ribot's four states of feeling Thrailkill (I think) adds a fifth: the state of wonder (her use of passive voice—"To the list of four anatomized in Ribot's text is added a fifth" makes me uncertain).

Building on the voluminous work of critics (not new) who have helped us to understand that the Body (and its textures, habits, and responses) need to be understood as an expression of culture, Thailkill argues that although the cultural significance of feelings may change over time, the "actual corporeal architecture of emotional experience … has evolved so slowly … as to be … practically stable." So, it appears we do have Timeless Truths and they are rooted in our bodies.

Each main chapter in Affecting Fictions is centered on one of Ribot's states of feelings. In chapter 2 ("Pain"), Thailkill focuses on the work of Oliver Wendell Holmes, particularly on his little known Elsie Venner. In chapter 3 ("Fear"), Thrailkill examines the medical debate over "railway spine" (terrible symptoms following a train crash with minor injuries) and Holmes' A Moral Antipathy.

In chapter 4 ("Excitability") Thrailkill re-evaluates Charlotte Perkins Gilman's "The Yellow Wallpaper." Positing that Gilman and S. Weir Mitchell were not so far apart (both, she argues, were trying to make sense of the physical sensations that accompany thinking). Gilman, however, as Thrailkill allows, [End Page 174] was trying to change the home and the culture while Mitchell was attempting to help women fit into "their" place. Throughout this chapter, Thrailkill cites innumerable critics from the 1990s and on who have looked at the story through a theoretical lens, often referring to some of the lesser known of Gilman's other stories and information from Gilman's biography.

So much has been written (and rewritten) on "Wallpaper" that wading through all Thrailkill's dense theoretical writing (along with its abstract jargon) needs to reward the reader with new insight. Finally we get to the questions my students wonder about and would love to hear more about:

[We] are left to puzzle over the story's antinomies. Who is "Jane," whom the narrator inexplicably refers to in the story's notorious final scene. How can the narrator both write in her journal (now in the present tense) and also perambulate on hands and knees around her sickroom? Gilman's agitated readers recognized that the attempt to consolidate the story's irresolvable elements into a coherent narrative was impossible; many of them, appropriately, turned away frustrated from the tale's discomforting pages. Literary critics, with our tendency to transform a fractured text into a coherent one, have tended to miss the point.

What, I wonder, is the point? Perhaps translating agitation/nervousness into institutional change? Thrailkill argues that the "value" of our various readings of "The Yellow Wallpaper" lies not in their "correctness"; rather, the value comes from engaging in scholarship that is "affectively attuned and aesthetically oriented." Alas, not an answer to "who is Jane?" and "how can the narrator crawl about the room while writing in her journal?"

In chapter five ("Mindless" Pleasure), Thrailkill looks primarily at The Awakening (along with the little-discussed Chopin short story "The Storm") to illustrate how Kate Chopin linked "practices of corporeal passivity and spiritual expansion" to pursue questions about "the mind's relationship...

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