Victorian Pain by Rachel Ablow (review)

Rachel Ablow’s Victorian Pain takes its readers deep into the belly of the utilitarian beast, advancing the provocative argument that the complex conceptions of pain and suffering offered by prominent Victorian authors can hardly be squared with liberal utilitarianism’s buttoned-up hedonistic subject. In five incisive close readings—of John Stuart Mill, Harriet Martineau, Charlotte Brontë, Charles Darwin, and Thomas Hardy—Ablow persuasively makes the case that “utilitarian assumptions of human atomism in relation to aversive physical sensation” fail to capture important social and relational dimensions of pain and suffering (140). Against the pervasive picture of the solitary sufferer, on the one hand, and the callous incredulity of a whole tradition of doubting Thomases, on the other, Ablow insists that certain Victorian thinkers understood pain to be “something we necessarily experience in relation to, and in the context of, others,” “something like a condition of existence, something that brings us together at least as much as it separates us” (140).

In addition to seeking to complicate our understanding of liberalism’s monadic form of individuality, Ablow’s thesis that pain and other “aversive” sensory-affective experiences played an organizing role in nineteenth-century social life intends to disrupt the disciplinary focus on sympathy that has dominated a strain of Victorian studies, including Ablow’s 2007 book, The Marriage of Minds: Reading Sympathy in the Victorian Marriage Plot (5). In lieu of a sociality rooted in sympathetic identification, Ablow’s scrupulous and detailed readings bring into view the contours of a darker, more nihilistic, yet nevertheless shared, public world engendered through experiences of pain, suffering, shame, repulsion, and aversion. The precise detailing of what such a social world would look like and of the ways in which it would function, however, falls beyond the scope of Ablow’s book. Ablow’s thinking tends to delve deeper into the conceptual idiosyncrasies of her authors, rather than to elaborate more fully the broader historical and social-theoretical implications of her argument about the sociality of negative affect. Several chapters do end with brief codas outlining the relevance of her readings to a more contemporary theoretical landscape. Her reading of Darwin, for example, ends with a pointed discussion of its implications for affect theory. These codas are provocative, but their extreme brevity has the effect of underscoring the conceptual distance between Ablow’s chief concerns and the problems and pressures of the contemporary, rather than integrating them. While the book’s argument is suggestive in the best way possible, it can also leave one wishing Ablow had pushed her discussion further beyond the limits of the close reading.

Although Victorian Pain opens with an illuminating discussion of the rise of medical anesthesia in the middle decades of the nineteenth century and its impact on Victorian religious ideas about the moral value of suffering, Ablow’s study is ultimately more philosophical than historical. Indeed, the matter of pain for Ablow is framed primarily by two competing philosophical accounts: what she calls the epistemological approach—compatible with certain ideals of an atomistic liberal subjectivity and exemplified by Elaine Scarry’s landmark The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World (1985)—and Ludwig Wittgenstein’s dense meditations on pain in his grammatical investigations of the relationship between philosophical discourse and subjective experience. This distinction between epistemological and grammatical approaches to the experience of pain lies at the heart of Ablow’s book. For Scarry, as Ablow puts it, pain is “defined by certitude for the one in pain and by doubt for the one who is not,” whereas for Wittgenstein the philosophical language of knowledge and certainty does not properly apply to our experiences of our own subjectivity; one does not know that one is in pain because subjective experience is not a category that is accounted for by knowledge (5). It is the desire to apply the criteria of philosophical certainty to our subjective experiences—the pathos attending to the will to knowledge—that, in Wittgenstein, leads to the contrived epistemic crisis of...