Seeing Suffering in Women's Literature of the Romantic Era (review)

In her introduction to Seeing Suffering in Women's Literature, Elizabeth Dolan situates her argument in the cultural understanding of eighteenth-century life, focusing their incompatible concerns of social justice and medical conceptions of vision that create "new modes of 'seeing' (and thus of expressing and alleviating) suffering in the Romantic era" (p. 1). Locating contrasting perspectives on Romantic notions of sensibility, solitude, gender, and sympathy, Dolan explains the connection between vision and subjectivity as it arises through her analysis of the particularly unromantic terms of rationality, sociability, authority, and judgment. As she assigns authority to the medical conceptions of vision with attention to the body, Dolan emphasizes that perception—the eye—is no longer recognized as just a philosophical idea but a material one integrated with thinking about the body, how the eye functions, and its pathology. Suffering then is re-envisioned through the poetical works of Romantic women writers in light of startling medical discoveries and social concerns about the inhumanity of slavery and animal cruelty.

Dolan points out in the first part of her book that with the arrival of medical interest in redefining melancholia, the cultural discomfort of an emotionally excessive Werther was counteracted by medical discourse about the melancholic. The rational and sensible qualities surrounding melancholia defined the literary poet by their conciliatory relationship as Dolan suggests: "In mid-eighteenth-century literature, these qualities were companion aspects of literary genius" (p. 24). However, Dolan argues that medical discourse served to shift this view to create a "gendered and oppositional" positioning of sensibility and rationality "in an attempt to save the long-standing profile of the English melancholic genius" (p. 25). In her analysis of Charlotte Smith's Elegiac Sonnets, Dolan argues that Smith links rationality with sensibility, illustrating that the melancholic is an embodied vision of the culture and not a bodiless figure. In contrast, Dolan draws on Mary Shelley's "celebration of the visionary's invisibility" while Smith embraces the desire "to be held in a sympathetic gaze" (p. 49). In her examination of the relationship between medical theories—especially of the eye and its contagious pathology—and cultural expressions of sympathy for the other in Shelley's Frankenstein, Dolan situates contagion, sympathy, and invisibility "as a strategy for escaping the judgmental gaze" (p. 74).

After identifying the nature of illness and its relationship to suffering during the Romantic era, Dolan addresses the manner in which the travel narratives of Mary Wollstonecraft and Mary Shelley, along with Charlotte Smith's literary references to scientific botany, all function as healing agents of both physical disease and emotional disturbance. The mode of traveling in Wollstonecraft's Letters Written During a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway and Denmark in 1796 is carefully examined. As Dolan notes, "In treating picturesque journeys as therapeutic pilgrimages, Wollstonecraft portrays the interaction between her mind and the landscape as restorative" (p. 79). Dolan elaborately describes Smith's use of external nature to foster a "relational framework" (p. 127) between feelings of melancholia and scientific botany, while she equally contrasts the internal nature of suffering with Shelley's method of "[v]eiling, displacing, recasting, cloaking—all responses to trauma . . . to help readers see and sympathize with Italy's struggle" (p. 160) as a way to connect the invisible with political suffering. Dolan's discovery of these forces between suffering and the visible landscape in the writings of Wollstonecraft, Smith, and Shelley contributes to new insights in understanding how sympathy operates through women's literature and their lives. She asserts that "while both Wollstonecraft and Smith present their suffering bodies and minds to readers, Mary Shelley adamantly resists the penetrating gaze of others" (p. 137).

To complement her insights into how eighteenth-century views of sympathy displace the tradition of sentimentalism, Dolan concludes her last two chapters with social injustices of seeing poverty and the unsentimental in didactic children's literature. As she develops the social and political contexts of enslavement and tyranny of...