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Body Language: Pain in Victorian Literature Laura Jane Faulk Louisiana State University and Agricultural and Mechanical College

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Body Language: Pain in Victorian Literature Laura Jane Faulk Louisiana State University and Agricultural and Mechanical College Louisiana State University LSU Digital Commons LSU Doctoral Dissertations Graduate School 2014 Body Language: Pain in Victorian Literature Laura Jane Faulk Louisiana State University and Agricultural and Mechanical College Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.lsu.edu/gradschool_dissertations Part of the English Language and Literature Commons Recommended Citation Faulk, Laura Jane, "Body Language: Pain in Victorian Literature" (2014). LSU Doctoral Dissertations. 142. https://digitalcommons.lsu.edu/gradschool_dissertations/142 This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by the Graduate School at LSU Digital Commons. It has been accepted for inclusion in LSU Doctoral Dissertations by an authorized graduate school editor of LSU Digital Commons. For more information, please [email protected]. BODY LANGUAGE: PAIN IN VICTORIAN LITERATURE A Dissertation Submitted to the Graduate Faculty of the Louisiana State University and Agricultural and Mechanical College in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in The Department of English by Laura Jane Faulk B.A., Hendrix College, 2007 M.A. Louisiana State University, 2009 May 2014 For my sisters ii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS This project would never have become anything without my committee, Drs. Elsie Michie, Daniel Novak, and Sharon Weltman. Thank you for reading so many of my papers and drafts and for your always helpful suggestions: Sharon, for the two Victorian literature classes I had with you that introduced me to so many literary critics whose studies have informed this one; Dan, in your insistence that I try to leave my close readings to consider my argument and ideas in the abstract; and Elsie, for putting up with my stubbornness as you repeatedly tell me some aspect is not working and then, most importantly of all, suggest alternatives. Without your guidance, I would still be in eighties feminist criticism. I would like to thank the English department at LSU for giving me so many opportunities. The Dickens Project was a wonderful experience, and I am grateful for the chance to teach so many classes and relate them to my own interests. My fellow graduate students have been a source of support and feedback. Thank you, JT, Alison, and Jason for pulling me away from my research so I could return to it with fresh eyes. My gratitude goes to members of my writing group, Conor Picken, Kris Mecholsky, and especially Laura Marks and Corrie Kiesel, who have read so many parts and drafts of this project and become such good friends. Thanks go to Lindy Dentinger, the one person who has read more of my drafts than anyone else and patiently given feedback and support through the last seven years. My parents and sisters have supported my graduate studies, enduring my rants and excitement. My mother, Jane Everist Faulk, introduced me to Jane Eyre, Alice in Wonderland, and Vanity Fair and facilitated my love of Victorian literature. My father, Trippett Faulk, taught me to love history and Biblical references. My sisters have kept me sane and grounded: Megan iii with her optimism and undying, energy, Carol with her sympathy and eye-rolls, and Julie with her attitude and sarcasm. iv TABLE OF CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ............................................................................................................. iii ABSTRACT ................................................................................................................................... vi INTRODUCTION ENVISIONING THE VICTORIAN BODY ...................................................................................1 CHAPTER ONE VISIBLE BODIES: THE READABLE SIGN SYSTEM, MASKS, AND MUTILATION .........28 CHAPTER TWO TANGIBLE BODIES: INURY AS EVIDENCE OF ABUSE ......................................................83 CHAPTER THREE NETWORKED BODIES: PHYSICALLY MANIFESTED EMOTIONS AND RELATIONSHIPS .......................................................................................................................140 CONCLUSION FINDING EXPRESSIONS OF PAIN IN THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY .........................206 WORKS CITED ..........................................................................................................................215 VITA ............................................................................................................................................227 v ABSTRACT “Body Language: Pain in Victorian Literature” argues that Victorian authors use the readable sign system of the body and pain to emphasize their characters’ physical features to the reader. As characters physically manifest emotions or experience violence, their appearances change, and these differences depend on physical descriptions. Marks on the body give it texture and depth, creating a layering that encourages the reader to envision and remember it. Character interactions, particularly when they read others’ somatic signs and experience or cause brutality, further flesh out characters, emphasizing their physical presences in the reader’s mind. The somatic sign system depends upon both alterations to the body and character interchanges in which other characters view a somatic sign. Yet this sign system is often disrupted; some forms of physical change confuse or deflect legibility. Extensive facial mutilation may prevent the physical manifestation of emotion. Bruises caused by an attack reveal more about the attacker’s state of mind than the victim. Even strongly manifested emotions that cause a rapid decline in health, indicate as much about the character’s relationships with others as his or her own personal feelings. I examine moments in which characters experience or show marks of previously experienced pain because I find that pain, which is difficult to express verbally because it has no referential content, is readily conveyed by descriptions of how it affects the body. vi INTRODUCTION ENVISIONING THE VICTORIAN BODY “They were fair-haired girls, very like each other, of whom I have before my mind’s eye a distinct portrait, which I fear I shall not be able to draw in any such manner as will make it distinct to others” (The Small House at Allington 55). In The Small House at Allington, Anthony Trollope admits, through the narrator, that he struggles to describe two sisters so that the reader can picture the two characters as he does. In doing so, he acknowledges two larger, connected problems: that of a writer’s representing bodies in language, and that of readers’ imagining the bodies that the writer describes. In this project, I address how writers present bodies so readers can mentally picture them. I argue that Victorian authors accomplish this feat by complementing initial physical descriptions, which often provide few concrete details of characters’ bodies, with descriptions of characters’ features as they shift or alter. Often, the alterations are not merely physical but also signify the characters’ mental states, adding a deeper meaning to the changes. The modifications may be as small as a change in expression or as extreme as the ravaging effects of illness. I find that characters are most detailed and most visible when experiencing or marked by pain. The more painful the experience that causes the alteration, the more notable and lasting the physical changes are. The more notable and lasting the physical changes are, the more the narrator and other characters react and draw the reader’s attention to them and thereby provide added details and opportunities for the reader to imagine the characters’ bodies. This project explores reading a text for character’s bodies rather than reading through the text for the meaning behind characters’ bodies. It focuses on a subject people tend to avoid, pain, to show how it connects readers to characters and how Victorians present it as uniting rather than individualized and isolating. Elaine Scarry writes on both pain and imagining characters’ bodies, indicating that pain and readers’ envisioning of characters are connected. She addresses the problem of imagining 1 physical things and argues that people cannot imagine objects as vividly as they can perceive them, that “the imagined object lacks the vitality and vivacity of the perceived” (“On Vivacity” 1). The one exception to this general rule are the “verbal arts”; verbal descriptions stimulate readers’ and listeners’ imaginations so that they can picture the “vivacity of perceptual objects” in their minds (2). Scarry argues that good writers draw comparisons between the solid and transparent objects, the hard and soft, and that this layering of various materials “entails a coaxing of the imagination into outcomes that move it beyond its ordinary Aristotelian enfeeblement” (6-7). Scarry contends that solidity is more difficult than the visual “to reproduce in the imagination because it entails touch, the sense whose operation is more remote to us in imagining” (7). Yet she gives an example of a furnished room that encourages readers to imagine the touch and sight of objects. The reader may struggle to imagine the solidity of a wall, but by placing drapes on the wall, a substance with different, even oppositional qualities from the material of the wall, such as texture, color, and opaqueness, a writer encourages the reader to imagine two objects and increases the vivacity of the imagining by layering the two differing objects in the reader’s mind. The wall seems more solid, more like a barrier, because the drapes are not; the wall seems taller
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