The aesthetic pleasures of pain, 1688-1805【翻译】

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I would like to thank Lori Branch, Eric Gidal, Blaine Greteman, Judith Pascoe, and
Roland Racevskis, for their time, their encouragement, their advice, and their kindness. I am
grateful for the generous support of the English Department, for the immense gift of time I
received due to the Ballad and Seashore Fellowship, and for the friendship of my fellow graduate
students.
ABSTRACT
My dissertation examines how representations of physical and mental suffering in literary
texts reveal paradoxes in the structure of sympathy that remain under-explored by literary
scholars. In the philosophical thought of Shaftesbury, Hutcheson, Hume, and Smith, sympathy
was a feature of the “moral sense,” an aesthetic intuition that, with proper training, could compel
individuals to act ethically in society. However, because sympathy allowed individuals to feel the
experiences of others, not just through the imagination, but in connection with the body itself, the
motivation for sympathizing with pain presented a significant problem for Enlightenment
philosophy. Largely divested of its religious contexts, pain was increasingly classified as a
mechanism that registered distress or pathology in the body, and as an experience that human
beings instinctively avoid. Terry Eagleton, Adela Pinch, and G. J. Barker-Benfield, among
others, have analyzed sympathy and the culture of sentimentality in terms of their moral
relativism, derivative emotionality, and regulatory influence on gendered behavior and social
norms. My dissertation makes a needed contribution to the field by focusing on the ways pain
reveals structural contradictions in sympathy’s claim to penetrate the boundaries of subjective
experience, an experience that was becoming “buffered”— to use Charles Taylor’s term — from
the influence of others.
Each chapter of my dissertation positions a landmark text—Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko
(1688), Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa (1748), Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774),
and William Wordsworth’s The Prelude (1805) — within the context of Enlightenment moral
sense philosophy to highlight the intentional and unintentional ways literary authors modified
philosophical formulations of sympathy to create the ethically complex pleasure of sympathizing
with the pain of others. Because the concepts of pain and subjectivity were taking on modern
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shapes in these texts, literary critics must reconsider how ethical claims were made by the
aesthetic practice of connecting representations of pain with the pleasure of sympathizing.
Globalized media are bringing increasingly distant experiences of pain to our attention in
increasingly intimate ways. These technologies can be invaluable for promoting a sense of social
responsibility for the pain of even the most distant others, but only if we hold ourselves
accountable for how and why we look.
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PUBLIC ABSTRACT
My dissertation examines how sympathy with pain problematizes a cornerstone of
eighteenth-century thought: moral sense philosophy. Reacting to a Hobbesian pessimism about
humanity’s self-interestedness and the secularized amorality of rational Enlightenment thinking,
philosophers and artists alike were searching for new ways to conceive of their social obligations
to others. Because “the moral sense” was conceived as a unique human characteristic that made
social cohesion and ethical behavior possible, it increasingly became the model of eighteenthcentury
morality. As such, many Enlightenment and Romantic writers considered it their duty to
hone the moral sense of their readers by depicting scenes of heart-rending emotional and
physical agony in their texts. Unfortunately, if the sympathizer is confronted with the other’s
pain too intensely, there is little incitement to engage with it closely enough to relieve it.
Each chapter of this project focuses on different ways that key literary texts grappled with
the problem of pain by considering how they amended the logic of sympathy and the moral
sense. In doing so, I hope to sketch the rough trajectory of pain’s evolving significance while
simultaneously allowing moments of incongruity and contradiction to come into focus. The
picture that emerges shows the excesses of pain—situated as it is between sensation and
perception, between individual and community, and between language and inexpressibility— as
well as the struggles eighteenth-century writers faced as they attempted to integrate those
excesses into understandings of subjective experience and coherent philosophical, aesthetic, and
moral systems.
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TABLE OF CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION .......................................................................................................................... 1
Sympathy, Sensibility, and Sentimentality ................................................................................. 4
Pain ............................................................................................................................................ 11
Pain, Pleasure, and the Moral Sense ......................................................................................... 26
CHAPTER I
“HE GAVE UP THE GHOST WITHOUT A GROAN OR A REPROACH”:
HONOR AND THE DISAVOWAL OF PAIN IN OROONOKO ............................................ 54
CHAPTER II
“YOU STAB ME WITH YOUR GOODNESS ... AND I CANNOT BEAR IT!”:
DISTRESSING VIRTUE IN CLARISSA .................................................................................... 101
CHAPTER III
THE TRAUMA OF SYMPATHY AND THE SUBLIME IN
THE SORROWS OF YOUNG WERTHER .................................................................................. 148
CHAPTER IV
“A MISERABLE LOVE THAT IS NOT PAIN TO HEAR OF”:
WORDSWORTH, SPINOZA, AND MONISTIC MORALITY ............................................... 196
CONCLUSION ........................................................................................................................... 256

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