Abstract

This essay examines Henry James’s complex answer in The Wings of the Dove to the late nineteenth-century belief, illustrated by Jane Addams, in suffering’s progressive potential in the world. In James’s novel, pain fails to spontaneously produce empathy’s feeling results. Rather, suffering’s taboo status and the elaborate evasions to which it gives rise draw attention to disquieting processes of mediation that often disrupt the spontaneous flow of emotions between people. James’s novel shows that empathy can degenerate into a whole new experience of suffering, supplanting that of the original sufferer, and obscuring the distinction between bearers and administrators of pain.

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