Rachel Ablow, Victorian Pain. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2017. x + 191pp.

ISBN: 978-0-691174-464. £30.00

In a note which is part quotation part summary which he took from an article on the

Austrian poet Nikolaus Lenau in the Cornhill Magazine, Hardy writes Lenau ‘deserves to be

more widely recognised – Like H[eine] he is a singer of world-pain & despondency – But

[…] Lenau is gently resigned’.1 ‘A singer of world-pain’ is the kind of figure in whom we

might expect Hardy to show interest – and he had a fondness for pessimistic Italian Romantic

poet, Giacomo Leopardi – perhaps because he was such a singer himself. That is certainly the

case for Rachel Ablow, who considers Hardy’s depictions of and interest in ‘world-pain’,

though she looks exclusively at Hardy’s fiction.

Victorian Pain is a catchy title, but not as catch-all as it sounds. While it may lead

you to expect something of the medical developments which led to a peculiarly Victorian

conception of pain grounded in a newly neurological understanding, this is not what Ablow is

interested in.2 Though chunky, more navigable titles would include The Social Nature of

Victorian Pain or The Others Involved in Victorian Pain since, as the end of the introduction

notes, ‘Throughout […] I argue that “modern pain” is characterized by its imbrication with

the social’ (p. 23). The problem Ablow takes as her focus in this book is much more complex

than a historical consideration of felt pain but rather – taking Mrs Gradgrind’s “I think there’s

a pain somewhere in the room […] but I couldn’t positively say that I have got it” as her first

epigraph – ‘Victorian writers’ interest […] in what it would mean to experience pain as

something that is not self-evidently one’s own’ (p. 1). Given the thorny nature of such a task,

Ablow handles it admirably, taking readers through new and innovative readings of Mill,

Martineau, [Charlotte] Brontë, Darwin, and Hardy. However, with the introduction offering

an overview of the theological, philosophical, and medical debates surrounding pain from the
nineteenth century to the present, the reader could be forgiven for confusion over the fact that

the book’s main thrust is ‘pain’s role in the adequate description of the social’, a neat

summary which is buried in the text (p. 94).

In a lucid introduction, Ablow outlines the differences between the epistemological

model of pain popularised by Elaine Scarry’s The Body in Pain versus the more philosophical

accounts of pain from thinkers such as Ludwig Wittgenstein, Stanley Cavell, and Veena Das.

The introduction is a masterclass in how to characterise the breadth of nineteenth-century

advances in scientific understandings of pain, as well as the history of pain’s many

conflicting theorisations, briefly but comprehensively.

Methodologically, the quirk of Victorian Pain is that the first two chapters focus on

writers who themselves suffered significantly with pain: John Stuart Mill and Harriet

Martineau. I’m prepared to concede that as a chronic pain sufferer myself this distinction

might mean more to me than other readers, but it is surprising that there isn’t more

explanation of how this difference of genre (let alone experience) is at work. To Ablow, the

Darwin chapter is the aberration, referring to him as a possible ‘outlier’ (p. 94). For this

reader, the chapters work better as stand-alone considerations, even as they speak to each

other in interesting ways. Mill’s and Martineau’s respective perspectives dovetail particularly

well in ‘thinking through the relation between liberal subjectivity and pain’ (p. 52). What is

impressive about Ablow’s writing is her ability to transfer seamlessly between different

critical approaches, from contextualising Lucy Snowe’s hypochondria using contemporary

tracts (pp. 74-80), to a beautiful close reading of the descriptions of drowning in Vilette with

reference to Cathy Caruth’s trauma theory (pp. 85-92). Bringing her discussion up to the

present day, Ablow manages to discuss Darwin in the context of Paul Ekman’s Facial Action

Coding System (FACS), with its worrying possible uses by Homeland Security for

identifying terrorists (pp. 96-7), and puts Darwin’s notion of nerve force alongside Brian
Massumi’s ‘strongly biological account of affect’ (while acknowledging that neuroscientists

have problematised the experiments on which Massumi’s findings are based, pp. 99-100).3

For readers of this journal, Chapter 5 – ‘Wounded Trees, Abandoned Roots’ – will

be of most interest, opening with the claim that ‘Although all the writers I examine in this

book take pain as a central problem, none address it with the single-mindedness that

characterizes Thomas Hardy’ (p. 114), and Hardy does seem singled out by Victorian Pain.

One trait Ablow teases out from Hardy is the sense of scale as something not predicated on

distinct, bounded human measurements, as also explored by Benjamin Morgan’s recent

scholarship.4 ‘Pain […] has the potential to pull against the idea of the individual as a self-

evident unit of measure or observation. At the very least, in the work of the writers I examine,

it raises serious questions regarding where one person ends and another begins’ (p. 9).

Therefore, Marty South’s unusual sensitivity to the natural world comes to the fore, as Ablow

demonstrates that the line between Marty and her surroundings (and vice versa) is difficult to

draw, if indeed it exists. Ablow singles out Marty, Tess, and Gabriel Oak as ‘offer[ing]

potential examples for ethically responsible engagement with pain, both one’s own and that

of others’ (p.123)

In a poignant comparison, Ablow reads Tess’s sexual assault alongside that in from

a story by Sa’adat Hasan Manto, which anthropologist Veena Das retells when discussing the

task of making a home for the pain of the other (p. 123-6). This allows Ablow to theorise

Angel’s abandonment of Tess in a new ethical context, a passage which is moving as well as

intellectually stimulating. What follows is a discussion of how Tess transposes her self-pity

into pity for the inanimate objects which are her boots, then how Gabriel Oak’s sensitivity to

the pain of his sheep, and the hypothetical pain of Bathsheba (should she have accepted his

offer of marriage).
 Ablow repeatedly makes reference to the idea that ‘readers have consistently

identified something especially oppressive about his work’, as if reading Hardy is itself

painful, but this seems an odd assertion given that she neither corroborates this specifically

nor follows a reader-response approach to Hardy’s novels (p. 119). While in the previous

chapter Darwin’s vision of pain is characterised as simultaneously allowing for ‘the palpable

pleasure involved in witnessing such counterintuitive phenomena’ as he sees in a ‘compound’

scene (p. 106), pain in Hardy seems to crowd out any possibility for pleasure, with Ablow

noting that whether readers recognise the trees’ or Marty’s pain, ‘All it can do is intensify the

sense – always available in a Hardy novel – that we exist in a disordered universe in which

suffering is as meaningless as it is omnipresent’ (p. 120). In another strange mention of the

reader, Ablow allows for the ‘extreme aesthetic pleasure for the reader’ derived from the

passage when Tess hears Angel’s harp-playing, but ‘the kind of unselfconsciousness

signalled at this moment is at best ethically neutral and at worst dangerous’ (p.129). And,

while I would argue for attention to the moments in Hardy when self extends into world free

from a condition of suffering, Ablow disparagingly refers to ‘the kind of dissolution of self

into the landscape that has sometimes been valorized in Hardy’s work’ (p. 129). There is no

saving Hardy from himself, it seems.

In his ‘“1867” Notebook’, the two quotations Hardy chooses to transcribe from

Eliot’s Adam Bede both relate to pain: ‘Sorrow lives in us as an indestructible force …

passing from pain into sympathy’ and ‘Mental as well as bodily pain … becomes a habit of

our lives, & we cease to imagine a condition of perfect ease’.5 While Hardy never offers

‘perfect ease’, his writings are attentive to the momentary easing of circumstance offered by

communion with nature, or a fellow creature. Given that Ablow’s focus is on noxious

sensation (pain) and the ways in which our relation to others in pain is uneasy, she perhaps

takes a necessarily hard-nosed view of Hardy’s philosophy. However, in bypassing the

possibilities for pleasure in Hardy’s work, while Victorian Pain is erudite, engaging, and

engrossing, it does little to re-coup Hardy’s reputation from the perennial claims of his being,

first and last, a pessimist.

1
Lennart A. Björk, ed., The Literary Notebooks of Thomas Hardy: Volume 1 (London: Macmillan, 1985), p.
141.
2
For this, though, there is Lucy Bending’s detailed study The Representation of Bodily Pain in Late Nineteenth-
Century Culture (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2000).
3
Read Ekman’s article for The Washington Post on ‘How to Spot a Terrorist on the Fly’, originally published
29 Oct 2006, at <http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-
dyn/content/article/2006/10/27/AR2006102701478.html>, last accessed 16 May 2019.
4
See ‘Scale as Form: Thomas Hardy’s Rocks and Stars’ in Tobias Menely and Jesse Oak Taylor eds.,
Anthropocene Readings: Literary History in Geologic Times (University Park, PA: Penn State University Press,
2017) and ‘Scale in Tess in Scale’, NOVEL 52.1 (2019): 44-63.
5
Lennart A. Björk, ed., The Literary Notebooks of Thomas Hardy: Volume 2 (London: Macmillan, 1985), p.
458.