Victorian Pain - Hardcover

Ablow, Rachel

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0691174466 ISBN 13: 9780691174464

Publisher: Princeton University Press, 2017

Synopsis

The nineteenth century introduced developments in science and medicine that made the eradication of pain conceivable for the first time. This new understanding of pain brought with it a complex set of moral and philosophical dilemmas. If pain serves no obvious purpose, how do we reconcile its existence with a well-ordered universe? Examining how writers of the day engaged with such questions, Victorian Pain offers a compelling new literary and philosophical history of modern pain.

Rachel Ablow provides close readings of novelists Charlotte Brontë and Thomas Hardy and political and natural philosophers John Stuart Mill, Harriet Martineau, and Charles Darwin, as well as a variety of medical, scientific, and popular writers of the Victorian age. She explores how discussions of pain served as investigations into the status of persons and the nature and parameters of social life. No longer conceivable as divine trial or punishment, pain in the nineteenth century came to seem instead like a historical accident suggesting little or nothing about the individual who suffers.

A landmark study of Victorian literature and the history of pain, Victorian Pain shows how these writers came to see pain as a social as well as a personal problem. Rather than simply self-evident to the sufferer and unknowable to anyone else, pain was also understood to be produced between persons―and even, perhaps, by the fictions they read.

About this title

About the Author

Rachel Ablow is associate professor of English at the University at Buffalo, State University of New York. She is the author of The Marriage of Minds: Reading Sympathy in the Victorian Marriage Plot and the editor of The Feeling of Reading: Affective Experience and Victorian Literature.

From the Back Cover

"With distinctive and insightful readings of John Stuart Mill, Harriet Martineau, Charlotte Brontë, Thomas Hardy, and others, Rachel Ablow's Victorian Pain eloquently makes the case that in the nineteenth century literature and philosophy offered indirect, subtle, and ultimately transformative ways to represent shareable pain--thereby making a nonatomistic liberalism imaginable."--John Plotz, author of Portable Property: Victorian Culture on the Move

"Victorian Pain provides a needed example of the rewards of philosophically informed literary criticism, one that should encourage other scholars and students to greater ambition and independence of thought. Finding intellectual inspiration in unusual places, Ablow has crafted a convincing and widely resonant argument."--Andrew H. Miller, author of The Burdens of Perfection: On Ethics and Reading in Nineteenth-Century British Literature

"Breathtakingly original. Victorian Pain is erudite, vastly informed, yet utterly readable."--Adela Pinch, author of Thinking about Other People in Nineteenth-Century British Writing

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Victorian Pain

By Rachel Ablow

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 2017 Princeton University Press
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-691-17446-4

Contents

Acknowledgments, ix, 
INTRODUCTION Pain, Subjectivity, and the Social, 1, 
CHAPTER 1 John Stuart Mill and the Poetics of Social Pain, 24, 
CHAPTER 2 Harriet Martineau and the Impersonality of Pain, 48, 
CHAPTER 3 Pain and Privacy in Villette, 72, 
CHAPTER 4 Charles Darwin's Affect Theory, 93, 
CHAPTER 5 Wounded Trees, Abandoned Boots, 114, 
AFTERWORD The Fantasy of the Speaking Body, 135, 
Notes, 141, 
Works Cited, 173, 
Index, 187, 

CHAPTER 1

John Stuart Mill and the Poetics of Social Pain

Human nature is not a machine to be built after a model, and set to do exactly the work prescribed for it, but a tree, which requires to grow and develop itself on all sides, according to the tendency of the inward forces which make it a living thing.

— JOHN STUART MILL, ON LIBERTY (1859)

John Stuart Mill's Autobiography (1873) tells the story of a machine that turns into a tree. Before the "mental crisis" described in chapter 5, Mill claims that he had been "built after a model" by his father, James Mill, along with Jeremy Bentham, and "set to do exactly the work prescribed for it," devoid of any personal investment in the object of that work. He was "a mere reasoning machine," committed to "the good of mankind" out of a "zeal for speculative opinions," rather than "genuine benevolence, or sympathy with mankind." After the crisis, by contrast, he was able to question certain of his makers' assumptions and take pleasure in activities with no immediate, practical end. He achieved this new state as a result of identifying the precise therapy he required. "What made Wordsworth's poems a medicine for my state of mind," and "the very culture of the feelings, which I was in quest of," he explains, is that "in them I seemed to draw from a source of inward joy, of sympathetic and imaginative pleasure, which could be shared in by all human beings; which had no connexion with struggle or imperfection, but would be made richer by every improvement in the physical or social condition of mankind" (A 151). By reading about trees — and tree-like poets — Mill effectively becomes one: an organism able to "grow and develop itself on all sides, according to the tendency of the inward forces which make it a living thing."

But how can a machine become a tree? How, in other words, can a manufactured tool, designed and constructed to perform a particular function, turn into an organism characterized by "inward forces" that require expression? In this chapter, I argue that Mill stages this miraculous transformation as a way to demonstrate the limitations of classical utilitarian conceptions of pain. Utilitarianism purports to attend to pain and pleasure above all else. "Nature has placed mankind under the governance of two sovereign masters, pain and pleasure," Bentham asserts at the beginning of The Principles of Morals and Legislation (1789). "In words a man may pretend to abjure their empire: but in reality he will remain subject to it all the while." Bentham's "principle of utility ... recognizes this subjection, and assumes it for the foundation of that system, the object of which is to rear the fabric of felicity by the hands of reason and of law." In Mill's account, however, it is simply not sufficient to take pain seriously: according to him, utilitarianism is fundamentally limited by its misunderstanding of what pain is. The "mental crisis" described in the Autobiography thus narrativizes his own passage from a utilitarian model that casts pain as prior to the social, to a model that regards both pain and the subject as inescapably social. Pain is something each of us may experience alone, Mill concludes, but only insofar as we also experience it in relation to others. In this way, his mental crisis ultimately serves not just as a way to imagine a different model of pain, but also as a way to offer different ways of thinking about the subject, the relations between subjects, and the relations between the subject and the social. Put most simply, while before the crisis, Mill inhabits the social order as a more or less simple aggregate of fundamentally isolated individuals — as Bentham explains, "The interest of the community is ... the sum of the interests of the several members who compose it" — afterward, he embraces a model of liberal sociality organized like a Wittgensteinian language game in which the terms of the discussion are endlessly renegotiated among individuals who share the same fundamental pain of self-alienation. That "game" serves as a common ground, but it also constitutes a kind of bond, able to generate felt investments in others who participate in it. As a result, it begins to resolve one of the key problems of utilitarianism: that of how to connect individual pains and pleasures to collective well-being.

In the first section of this chapter, I examine the understanding of the human mind that subtends the education Mill describes receiving in the Autobiography. Even as James Mill and Jeremy Bentham were committed to the self-evidence of pain and pleasure, they also believed in the radical educability of the associations between the ideas to which those sensations give rise. In the Autobiography and elsewhere, by contrast, Mill argues for the limits of human educability in terms that reinstall something like an intuitive and foundational attachment to self. In other words, against his tutors' commitment to the eradicability of such an attachment — and hence, the viability of aspiring to a naturalized form of impersonality — Mill insists on the inevitability of experiencing one's own happiness differently from the way one experiences the happiness of others. In the second section of this chapter, I consider the alternative model of the relation between the self and the social that Mill proposes through his encounter with Jean François Marmontel's Memoires (1804). In place of a utilitarian subject isolated in her own sensorium, Mill uses his experience of reading about another's tragedy to imagine a social subject who enters into self-consciousness through its relationships to and within a social field. This model of subjectivity may not eliminate skepticism, or the recognition of the tragic inaccessibility of others, but it insists on the extent to which all subjects are implicated in it: the self as well as others. In the third section, I consider what that subject looks like when activated within the social field through which it has emerged. Through Wordsworth, I argue, Mill imagines a distance between self and experience that suggests one learns what Wittgenstein calls "pain behavior" in the process of becoming a recognizable member of a community. The result is a reimagination of the bonds between the individual and the collective through a shared "form of life" involving pain. Thus, while Wendy Donner claims that "Mill's individualism assumes social beings," and Nancy Yousef argues that "solitariness and privacy remain existentially fundamental to Mill's conception of the individual," this chapter argues that these are not opposing alternatives: in the terms that Wittgenstein provides, privacy is neither more nor less than the condition of the language game of pain.

Utilitarian Pain

Critics have offered a variety of accounts of the "real" cause of the mental crisis at the center of Mill's Autobiography. Alexander Bain summarily rejects Mill's own claims of ennui on the grounds that "it was too early to have exhausted his whole interest in life" and turns instead to his friend's notorious industriousness: "I am unable to produce an instance of a man going through as much as Mill did before twenty." A. W. Levi, by contrast, rejects Bain's account on the grounds that "no one ... has ever suffered a nervous breakdown from mere overwork" and instead attributes Mill's breakdown to his repressed hatred for his father. This is the "unacknowledged trauma, that unassigned conflict, which, lying latent and malignant, needed but the strain of the year 1825 to transform itself into the mental crisis of the year 1826." Janice Carlisle takes a different tack entirely, pointing to Mill's unhappiness with his position in the India House and his father's refusal to give him the "opportunity to prepare himself for a public career through the conventional route of university attendance." And John M. Robson emphasizes Mill's sense of alienation from his fellows and his recognition that his father's "science of morality ... had no power to motivate his actions." Despite the diversity of offered explanations, however, most commentators agree that Mill himself sought to place much of the blame on what Carlisle calls the "emotional poverty of his education." As John Durham writes, fairly typically, "the period of melancholy seems to have been caused by emotional exhaustion, an exhaustion resulting from the peculiar nature of his education which had not allowed natural emotions to develop." In other words, Mill had an unnatural childhood, during which his training in utilitarianism forced him to repress his emotions. The breakdown was a simple consequence of this repression and a necessary step toward establishing a more "natural" emotional balance.

To some extent, claims like these seem to be legitimated by Mill's repeated references to his father's suspicion of the way emotions tend to be invoked and described. "Offended by the frequency with which, in ethical and philosophical controversy, feeling is made the ultimate reason and justification of conduct," John Stuart explains, James Mill "had a real impatience of attributing praise to feeling, or of any but the most sparing reference to it either in the estimation of persons or in the discussion of things" (A 113). Furthermore, "for passionate emotions of all sorts, and for everything which has been said or written in exaltation of them, he professed the greatest contempt" (A 51). The impression that James Mill and Bentham sought to repress emotion is additionally reinforced by the consistency with which both men voiced concern about the injustices committed in its name. In The Principles of Morals and Legislation, for example, Bentham describes "the principle of sympathy and antipathy" as effectively a "principle of caprice." Whether one calls it a "moral" or a "common" sense, a "Law of Nature, Law of Reason, Right Reason, Natural Justice, Natural Equity, [or] Good Order," the appeal to supposedly universal or natural feelings is merely a way of expressing that one likes or dislikes a thing and cannot give any good account of why. "The various systems that have been formed concerning the standard of right and wrong ... consist all of them in so many contrivances for avoiding the obligation of appealing to any external standard, and for prevailing upon the reader to accept of the author's sentiment as a reason for itself."

As Frances Ferguson explains, Bentham and James Mill's rejection of the explanatory value of feeling constituted an attempt to make "judgments look plausible to those who were not themselves parties in a dispute" and so to ground decision-making in something more consistently predictable than individual preferences or attachments. This commitment has been extremely important in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. One can see its influences, for example, in John Rawls's "veil of ignorance," which constitutes a way to "nullify the effects of specific contingencies which put men at odds and tempt them to exploit social and natural circumstances to their own advantage." While comprehensible and even laudable in the context of public policy, however, this suspicion of "strong feeling" can seem bizarre, and possibly even cruel, when brought to bear on personal relations — as it seems to have been in relation to John Stuart. The schoolmaster M'Choakumchild insists in Charles Dickens's Hard Times (1854), "Facts alone are wanted in life. ... You can only form the minds of reasoning animals upon Facts; nothing else will ever be of any service to them." The mouthpiece may be grotesque, but this nevertheless seems like an opinion with which Bentham and James Mill might have agreed.

To claim that James Mill and Bentham rejected emotion as a reliable guide to legislation is not at all the same as to claim that they sought to suppress feeling, however. In fact, their commitment to pain and pleasure — along with the emotions to which they give rise — as the springs of all action, effectively place the emotions at the center of their understanding of human psychology, and hence, too, of the legislation they sought to develop. The notion that "Nature has placed mankind under the governance of two sovereign masters, pain and pleasure," itself assumes that these masters lie at the core of even the most complex emotions: our commitments and beliefs, our relationships to others, and our ambitions and aspirations. As John Stuart explains in his essay, "Sedgwick's Discourse" (1835), for example, "In all circumstances ... the determination of the will is wholly by feeling. Reason ... teaches us to know the right ends, and the way to them; but if we desire those ends, this desire is not Reason, but a feeling." This is a claim his father makes at much greater length in his treatise on utilitarian psychology, Analysis of the Phenomena of the Human Mind (first published in 1829, published with notes by John Stuart Mill, Alexander Bain, Andrew Finklater, and George Grote in 1869). In addition to a chapter on "Pleasurable and Painful Sensations," James Mill includes one chapter on the "Causes of the Sensations of Pleasure and Pain," another on "Ideas of Pleasure and Pain and of the Causes of them," another on "The Pleasurable and Painful Sensations, contemplated as passed, or future," and still another on "The Causes of Pleasurable and Painful Sensations, contemplated as passed, or future." The list can seem almost comical, but under this last heading alone, James Mill accounts for our attachments to wealth, power, and dignity; our capacity for friendship and kindness; our attachment to family, country, party, and mankind; and even our senses of the sublime and the beautiful. In his view, all emotions — no matter how apparently complex — can be broken down into their basic components of pain and pleasure. Far from being dispensable, therefore, emotions are bound up with the basic claims of utilitarian theory, and the problem Mill and Bentham diagnose is not that feelings themselves are too powerful but instead that the fact of their power is so rarely acknowledged.

Considering the centrality of the emotions to utilitarian theory, then, it would be strange for John Stuart to claim his educators sought simply to suppress them. Nor does he ever make exactly this claim. Instead, he objects much more specifically to what he describes as the artificial ends to which his teachers sought to put his emotions. According to James Mill, rewards and punishments can effectively establish almost any association: "When Education is good, no point of morality will be reckoned of more importance than the distribution of Praise and Blame. ... They are the great instruments we possess for ensuring moral acts on the part of our Fellow-creatures." According to John Stuart, however, his father vastly overestimated the power of those "instruments." He writes:

I had always heard it maintained by my father, and was myself convinced, that the object of education should be to form the strongest possible ... associations of pleasure with all things beneficial to the great whole, and of pain with all things hurtful to it. This doctrine appeared inexpugnable; but it now seemed to me on retrospect, that my teachers ... seemed to have trusted altogether to the old familiar instruments, praise and blame, reward and punishment. Now I did not doubt that by these means ... intense associations of pain and pleasure, especially of pain, might be created. ... But there must always be something artificial and casual in associations thus produced. (A 141)

Despite the nobility of their goal, Mill argues, because there is no "natural tie" between the pains and pleasures used to educate him and their desired associations, those associations will be unable to withstand analysis. As a result of his mental crisis, therefore, "I now saw, or thought I saw, what I had always before received with incredulity — that the habit of analysis has a tendency to wear away the feelings" (A 141). It would have required a much more strenuous emotional education to make "indissoluble" the associations his educators wished to establish, Mill insists, if they could in fact be established at all.

Part of what Mill points to in the passage cited above is what he sees as a tension between the supposed self-evidence and privacy of pain and pleasure, on the one hand, and the radical availability of associations to education, on the other. For while the one suggests their irreducible attachment to self, the other makes that self seem available to extremes of self-denial in the interest of the collective. The notion that sensations are intuitively available is central to James Mill's psychology. He explains in his Analysis, "A man knows [the difference between different sensations], by feeling it; and this is the whole account of the phenomenon."

(Continues...)

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Edition details

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Publication date: 2017
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0691174466
• ISBN 13: 9780691174464
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 208