PAINFUL AESTHETICS: ON PAIN IN NINETEENTH-CENTURY AMERICAN LITERATURE AND THE WAY WE READ LITERATURE

Abstract

This dissertation examines nineteenth-century American literature representations of pain to argue that scenes of suffering function as a crucial bridge between aesthetic form and historical and political interpretations. Against a longstanding critical division that treats formal analysis and contextual reading as incompatible approaches, the study contends that pain exposes the limits of that separation by demanding narrative mediation while remaining inseparable from the historical conditions that produce it. Focusing on Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Frederick Douglass’s autobiographical narratives, Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, and Charles W. Chesnutt’s The Marrow of Tradition, this dissertation traces how genre, race, gender and historical context shape how pain is represented in these texts, how it circulates between the characters, and whether it can generate ethical judgment or political response. In particular, the discussion analyzes how Stowe’s strategic restraint, Douglass’s confrontation, Jacobs’s indirection, and Chesnutt’s depiction of blocked recognition reveal pain not as a universal or transparent experience but as a mediated concept whose political force depends on formal strategy. By treating pain as a methodological problem for literary criticism, this study challenges approaches that assume pain’s political significance to be self-evident or retreat from its ethical demands and argues that nineteenth-century American literature binds aesthetic judgment to historical urgency through the difficulty of representing suffering.