Pain and US Literary Realism

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This essay derives from my current book project of the same title. During the final decades of the nineteenth century, many privileged Americans pursued a painless ideal that entailed denying both the necessity of physical pain and any personal value in exposure to it. By the century’s turn, physical suffering had increasingly come to seem not just avoidable but loathsome, especially for members of the upper classes who could both afford and also supposedly needed insulation more because they were perceived as more alive to suffering than were their cruder peers. In short, to be civilized increasingly meant to possess the capacity to respond exquisitely to pain but the inclination and the option not to experience it. The U.S. literary realists examined in my study, however, resisted this contemporary aversion to pain. Invested for a number of reasons in depicting physical suffering, they embraced the concept of a heightened sensitivity to pain as an inevitable effect of the civilizing process and suggested to those inclined to shrink from physical suffering that continued exposure to it could potentially enhance refinement. Authors discussed in this study include Alice, Henry, and William James, William Dean Howells, Mark Twain, Edith Wharton, W. E. B. Du Bois, Gertrude Stein, and Ernest Hemingway.

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