Part One: Body Language
May of 2024 saw an unusually happy coincidence of Nineteenth Century-ists in Paris (to summon a symphony from another reality). Four scholars — Sari Altschuler, Shari Goldberg, Cynthia J. Davis and Justine Murison — were able to come together for an A19 session focussed on the health humanities. The session thus inaugurated a transatlantic conversation between A19, Project AmHealth and their American friends and collaborators: a conversation due to continue with a panel at MLA 25 in New Orleans this January. The meeting was also a chance to celebrate the publication of “Pain,” a special issue of American Literature edited by A19/Project AmHealth’s Thomas Constantinesco, and Sari Altschuler. The issue had been a long work of collaboration with pre-pandemic roots, and this in-person session was a fine testament to a collective scholarly and personal resilience over the last few years. The issue features essays from six writers (including Goldberg and Davis), each of which achieve the none-too-simple task of making a broad intervention suited to American Literature as host, while staying grounded in close, often startling textual analysis. While pain was not the listed topic of the session itself, the shapes of thinking sketched by Altschuler and Constantinesco in the issue’s introduction flared up throughout the afternoon’s papers. To talk about health is to talk about pain: as health’s opposite, evidence of its diminishing, or as a troubling prerequisite for participation in emotionally “healthy” societies. The papers bore out what Altschuler and Constantinesco mark as the three ‘paradigm shifts’ in the study of pain (which is the study of health) after 2020: pain’s multiplicity, the simultaneity of its personal/political/historical dimensions, and the need to embrace new, non-empirical ways of its being known. The session thus offered a snapshot of health as a phenomenon uniquely, even vitally permeable to literary study, and its expertise in difference and resemblance.
Sari Altschuler was first on deck, with an adapted version of a paper published earlier this year in PMLA: “Babo’s ‘Mute’-ny: Deaf Culture and Black Testimony in Antebellum America”. Having struggled to get my own puns through in the past, I am glad the editors let Altschuler’s stand. Like the best quibbles, it asks its own question: how can a mutiny, a collectively-voiced act of resistance, be mute? This riddle charges, or perhaps simply is, Melville’s Benito Cereno (1855), his fictionalised account of a revolt aboard a slave ship, led by the mute Babo. Altschuler offered A19 an accretive reading in which Babo’s muteness becomes profoundly and provocatively eloquent. To take from the article: “understood formally and historically, Melville’s representation of muteness moves readers beyond the dichotomies of words/deeds and speech/silence as frameworks for thinking about Black communication.” This is a reading firmly embedded in nineteenth-century disability cultures. While Babo is not himself deaf, Altschuler proposed that the growing visibility of deafness and signing in the midcentury allowed Melville to raise the possibility of different communicative methods and their value for otherwise unheard Black populations. This session came just as I had finished writing a chapter of my own on nineteenth-century deaf literature. Because this work ended later in the century, it had to deal with the corollary of the deaf/Deaf optimism which charged Altschuler’s talk. The years in which sign language was recognised as a viable communicative method, capable of an eloquence equivalent to spoken English, were few, and by the century’s end the campaign to remove signing from deaf schools was beyond assault. This longer history would be tricky to build into a reading of Benito Cereno, which is something of a closed system, taking place as it does on one of Melville’s ultra-formal ship-worlds, but Altschuler has opened such a vibrant connection between Blackness and deafness that I hope that work comes in time.
I was also struck by the paper’s participation in a momentous (in the sense of having and gaining momentum) trend in Black literary studies: the undoing of the neoliberal search for ‘lost voices’ and a hidden history of Black feeling. I first encountered this movement in Jennifer Stoever’s The Sonic Color Line (2016), and it has since been given a manifesto in Xine Yao’s Disaffected (2021). These are very different works, but together they request a reset of what literary scholarship wants from and looks for in Black literary testimony. To seek out the sentimental, the textual open wound, is, Yao suggests, counterintuitively comforting to the white reader who expects or demands it. She asks, instead, “what we can apprehend if we stay with the negativity of unfeeling and suspend its rehabilitation”. For Yao, Babo is “the treacherous Black unfeeling object”. Altschuler’s essay complements and complicates this restorative devoicing, showing that Babo can be read as both silent and communicative, as long as we embrace the potential for expressive technique outside the white, abled norm. His voice isn’t lost, it just requires a different kind of listening.
Shari Goldberg built upon Altschuler’s opening with a paper on another species of Black bodily eloquence, based on her piece for the American Literature special issue. She began with the kind of elegant provocation that I imagine many of us are daily searching for: what if we were to read the widespread language of heartbreak and heartache in slave narratives (and beyond) not only as sentimental trope, but as a documenting of physical symptoms? What if, in essence, sentiment was always also sensation? That is, Goldberg admitted, a hard pill to swallow. We might well be wary of “bringing literality to bear on what is usually taken metaphorically”, in case that literality undoes the figuration which carries it. But equally (and here again we are in the gravitational pull of Disaffected), what if sentiment is only what we wanted to find in the literature of suffering — what if our horizon of expectation is limited by our desire for emotionally legible Black subjects? Goldberg’s reading of Harriet Jacobs showed us how a reading of heartache as an always layered experience of emotional and physical pain can offer a productive challenge to scholars of slave narratives. She showed us what it would mean to refuse to read all heart talk as “mere convention for wrenching emotion”. Instead, she suggests, “each instance of heart refers to itself: the subject’s heart at a given moment, requiring context, nuance, and interpretation”. This taps into the expanded definition of pain promoted by Altschuler and Constantinesco’s introduction, a “multiscalar” understanding wherein pain’s emotional and physical dimensions are uniquely active even if they cannot be held apart by either the observer or the subject themself. That contradiction charges Goldberg’s “story of the heart”.
The trickiness lies in what this reading (and, by extension, Yao’s) does to sentimentalism as form and genre. To talk about “mere convention” in a writer like Jacobs, who actively sought out the editorial backing of celebrity sentimentalists, might be to underplay her literary achievement. Goldberg shows that Jacobs could do both, that she could write a “simultext” which trades on convention even as it encodes a personal history of pain, but I wonder if that reading would have happened without a catalytic suspicion of the sentimental as inherently insufficient, unbefitting or problematic. I don’t have an answer to offer to this blog, but it seems like as good a place as any to ask the question. I would be the first one in the room to say that the search for overlooked complexity should remain the literary scholar’s basic task. That a heart can hurt both in and out of metaphor is a superb, pathfinding read, and I’ve filed Goldberg’s essay in the folder of “must teach”. But I suppose I would warn my students that reading the sentimental on its own terms must come first. If the genre seems to us too open and thus foreclosed to interpretation, that might be a challenge to face up to nineteenth-century pain as uniquely exposed and textually fungible, and to reckon with why that makes us uncomfortable. This is, in the end, exactly Goldberg’s point: we should listen when someone tells us their heart is aching, and not let one kind of pain forestall another. If we can focus on that layered pain in our reading without denigrating the genre that permits its expression as somehow “mere” or regrettable convention, we will surely reap the rewards.
Jamie Fenton
Part Two: Inside Out
Bringing pain, one of the central loci of the health humanities, into focus, Cynthia Davis examined the social and historical dynamics involved in the valorisation of both highly privatised and singularly lively affective interiorities laid bare in Kate Chopin’s and Edith Wharton’s high realist fin-de-siècle novels. Chopin’s The Awakening (1899) and Wharton’s The Reef (1912) depart from the traditional schematisation that places pleasurable hedonic feelings above painful ones and instead classify affective experiences according to their (un)conventionality and outward expressiveness (or, more often, lack thereof), treating physical and/or mental anguish as an occasion for the authors’ upper-class white female protagonists to have a heightened experience and to enrich their already vast interiorities. As revealed by Davis’ selective close reading of the two novels, by consistently prioritising the feeling subject who simultaneously enjoys an intensely vibrant inner life, yet keeps it entirely contained behind an opaque façade, this coupling of affective dichotomies—typical vs. unique, private vs. public—extolls elite white subjects, whom these authors routinely invest with such (literally and figuratively) rich interiorities, and distinguishes them from the inferior emotional shallowness and demonstrativeness associated with marginalised race and class identities. Davis posited that both The Awakening and The Reef feature character pairings that hinge on accentuating the contrast between the “self-contained” emotions of the exceptional white socialite and the excessive animatedness of their racialised lower-class foil, where the latter novel takes on the additional negative connotation of typifying America itself. In this way, Chopin and Wharton subscribe to, as Davis put it, “a broader tendency, one that persists to this day, to reframe structural inequalities as individual affective differences.”
Perhaps the most striking element of Davis’ intervention was the impressively broad spectrum of historical interpretations that she put forth with the purpose of contextualising the two texts’ pointed valorisation of certain types of affective experiences over others. Davis saw the two authors’ preoccupation with individual uniqueness as at once a secular and feminised extension of the Emersonian philosophy of “Self-Reliance.” She likewise attributed Chopin and Wharton’s at times obsessive attitude towards privacy to their rapidly changing social conditions, which created anxiety around the modern American citizen’s right to an inviolate private life. Additionally, Davis proposed that the two authors resisted the growing pressure among the elites to display their affluence for the purpose of upholding their social standing, likely finding this alarming new tendency to flaunt one’s wealth personally distasteful. Finally, perhaps the most intriguing interpretation of all, was Davis’ idea that the US government’s adoption of statistical methods of classification triggered the upper-class individuals’ refusal to be reduced to statistical persons and to have their unique characteristics drowned in the void-like homogeneity of the average.
Sharing some of Davis’ concerns, Justine Murison’s paper likewise centred on privacy, though of a very different kind. Having a keen interest in the present and future of reproductive rights in the modern-day US in the aftermath of the Supreme Court overturning Roe vs. Wade in 2022, Murison gave a talk that at once exposed the long history of moral panics over public access to sexual health and elucidated literature’s role in the creation of laws that continue to haunt today’s political debate on reproductive rights. The laws in question are collectively referred to as the Comstock Act of 1873, also known as obscenity laws due to the fact that they placed a ban on circulating materials deemed “obscene” by post. Murison views this Act as something of a “Victorian zombie” resurrected in the public discourse by the pro-life movement, a zombie whose origins can be traced back to late nineteenth-century sensation fiction and several of its famous literary opponents. Through a series of close readings, namely of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Pink and White Tyranny (1871) and My Wife and I (1871), as well as of Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women (1868), Murison shed light on the birth of a figure that would go on to gain momentous importance in the following decades and even whole centuries: that of a vulnerable and impressionable white male boarding-school child, whose undiscerning mind is susceptible to be corrupted by “obscenities.” It was this highly susceptible reader, whose inadvertent exposure to even the most indirect or coldly scientific references to sex was guaranteed to lead to moral degradation, that was ultimately written into US law under the Comstock Act. As Murison showed, the moral protection of a hypothetical straw-child took precedence over American adults’ access to educational sexual health materials, in a mirrored version of today’s moral panic over the unregulated digital access to pornography (the definition of which, much like that of the word “obscenity,” often remains conveniently loose).
This fascinating talk on the history of the conflict between two kinds of freedom conceived as mutually exclusive, i.e. the freedom to exercise one’s religious rites and the freedom to make informed choices about one’s reproductive well-being, provided an insight into the depth of impact that literature can and does regularly have on people’s access to public health information and medical interventions, both essential and elective. In Murison’s case study, literature literally shaped the legal reality that dictates and limits the ways in which American women are able to care for their bodies today. In light of literature’s deep implication in the questions and praxes of public health, it is our job as scholars of health humanities to interrogate both its positive and negative contributions to US-specific and global medical landscapes alike.
The two scholars’ shared engagement with the question of privacy resulted in a productive exchange that highlighted literature’s often understated capacity to restrict (and, perhaps more crucially for health humanities scholars, to enable) the various social groups’ ability to access the care they need. If Murison’s research alerted us to literature’s role as a disease vector for moral panics, which misrecognise their main symptom, i.e. the demand for increased policing of people’s bodyminds, as their cure, Davis’ discussion of her archive elucidated that, despite the fact that the the capacity to feel acute suffering harbours a socially equalising potential, both the raw experience of pain and its expression are continuously inflected by unequal socio-economic and material conditions, exposing “how broader systems of bias can shape, while lending salience to, divergent manifestations of feeling.”
Anna Shmatenko