1Harriet Prescott Spofford has been subject to limited criticism since her death in 1921. Despite six decades of output and an evident popularity throughout the nineteenth century, this criticism has focused to a great extent on The Amber Gods, a short story collection from 1863 republished in 1989. I intend to expand the reach of Spofford criticism with an analysis of “The Magnetic Patient” (1869), one of numerous short stories she published in Harper’s Bazar in the mid-late nineteenth century. It recounts the strained relationship between Mr. Knight and his housekeeper turned wife, Hortense. Major events include Mr. Knight’s adulterous desire for a young Italian musician, Felicitá, and a serious accident involving one of his machines. These two events are conflated in the climax of the story as both appear as catalysts for a fatal swelling of the brain that requires surgical intervention. The story concludes with a graphic representation of this surgery where Hortense, and not the very ill Mr. Knight, is revealed as the eponymous “magnetic patient.” Her magnetism manifests in an ability, and willingness, to literally conduct her husband’s pain even as it leads to her own death. The story has received a limited second publication by Ash Tree Press in 2000, although it is only briefly introduced there as one of several “supernatural” tales written in the Poe tradition (Salmonson xxiii). Employing close analysis of the story alongside some of Spofford’s other fictional and non-fictional writing this article will foreground an aspect of Harriet Prescott Spofford’s work that has so far been viewed as a secondary or implicit concern: physical pain. Where the depiction of pain has previously been acknowledged, such as by Theresa Strouth Gaul in reference to labor pains and “Circumstance,” it has been appreciated in symbolic terms and/or subordinated to narratives of female sexuality and creativity. I contend that Spofford is more acutely interested in physical pain as a direct, visceral experience, one that is both separate from and connected to other forms of patriarchal power.

1. Articles for Harper’s Bazar

2With its unflinching depiction of brain surgery, the experience of physical pain is a primary concern in “The Magnetic Patient.” The interest can, however, be traced back to her earlier stories, as well as forward to where it finds its most explicit and politicized expression in three passionately argued articles she wrote for Harper’s Bazar in the 1890s. In “A Point at Issue.” published in 1895, Spofford criticizes a recent scientific study that uses brain measurements to argue that “women are less sensitive than men.” The article reveals a marked distrust, bordering on disdain, of the “man of science” and the power he wields. Although lacking direct reference, the details resemble Crichton-Browne’s influential paper on brain weight from the same period. Damning the findings of this study as the “last absurdity of certain sciolists” who “surely do not deserve to be called men of science,” Spofford conveys a respect and investment in “real” science with an exasperation at pseudo-scientific research that is ill informed and reliant on gender bias. At no point in this article does Spofford reject scientific reasoning as a means of knowledge production; indeed, she employs scientific logic herself when suggesting a proportional relationship between the brain and the body it controls. Nevertheless, at the heart of her critique is an insistence on what she regards as the “actual facts” of pain infliction and suffering in the world, including “war” and “torture,” as being able to override any lab or logic derived “scientific” finding. Throughout the article, there is an intense skepticism regarding the master narrative of science alongside a push to correct it by paying greater attention to events that take place outside of the laboratory. These events necessarily include the lived, if unexpressed, experience of women and their pain. As will be seen later in this article, it is this element of doubt concerning what the male-written narrative of science misses or fails to acknowledge that sits at the heart of “The Magnetic Patient.”

3The significance of pain for Spofford is reinforced in the article by the fact that after accepting a definition of sensitivity given in the original study as the “livelier susceptibility to emotions and sensations concerning pain and pleasure,” she then completely ignores the experience of “pleasure.” She focuses solely on the pain-inflicting, male-dominated fields of animal vivisection, torture and war in ironic support for men’s “superior sensitivity.” Taken alongside the above definition of sensitivity, there is an assumed conflation between sensitivity to one’s own pain and that of others. Such conflation finds full literary expression in “The Magnetic Patient” when the sensitive Hortense actually “conducts” the pain of her husband, Mr. Knight. In the article, Spofford cements her argument that, in contrast to the study, it is women that are more sensitive than men, by reclaiming conventional discourse regarding “heroism” and the taking of “wild risks” and applying them not to the men inflicting pain but to the women who “have been taught by ages of repression to endure [their pain] in silence.” Through this she creates a vivid portrait of the cowardly, male perpetrator of pain set against the valiant, female sufferer.

4With a focus on the way in which men and women act in the world, in “A Point at Issue” Spofford offers a perspective on pain that is strongly gendered, while also avoiding the biological reductionism of the study she is criticizing. Spofford’s location of vivisection alongside war and torture, and her challenging the arguments of ‘men of science’ on the basis of distinctly feminine psychological responses to suffering additionally aligns her with a growing movement of female anti-vivisectionists in the 1800s, an alignment that is reinforced in the two articles Spofford wrote shortly after this, which focus specifically on the pain of animals. In these, Spofford depicts animal pain as intersecting with the pain of women in a manner that primes women to take a semi-messianic role when confronted with cruelty.

5In “The Attitude of Women Towards Dumb Animals” (1896), Spofford calls upon women to take a more active stance in preventing the pain of domestic animals. The specificity of details such as the horse’s harness, which is “allowed to gall him and to rub over the sore spot so that every movement and every moment is an agony” recalls Sewell’s Black Beauty (1877) in encouraging a strongly empathic response in the reader. In contrast to “A Point at Issue,” the reader is then addressed in terms of her biology, specifically her “possibility of motherhood.” This biological circumstance does not automatically result in increased sensitivity, as indicated by her emotive examples of the type of animal pain inflicted or ignored by women. She does assert, however, in a framing that is more ethical than scientific, that it should: “remember that to the mothers of the world belongs the province of saving and shielding from pain.” In this analogy, domestic animals, albeit infantilized, are brought into the sphere of humanity via their capacity for pain, while the relieving of pain renders mothers/potential mothers almost divine.

6This image of the caregiver mother is similarly seen in the climactic scene of “The Magnetic Patient,” where Mr. Knight, undergoing his potentially fatal brain surgery, emits a “hoarse, swift bark” of pain that renders him first animal and then “a drowsy child in [his wife’s] arms.” This emphasis on motherhood reflects the increased importance of the Madonna in American Christian revivalism at this time, with the Harper’s Bazar article highlighting an important intersection between Spofford’s Christian faith and her political activism. This intersection is equally apparent in “The Magnetic Patient” where the religious framing of Hortense’s ability to save her husband-animal-child by channeling “heaven” and “God” furthers the notion of a Madonna-centric, pain-relieving faith as being able to conquer a male-centered, pain-causing science.

7Spofford’s final call to arms in “The Attitude of Women Towards Dumb Animals” is the assertion that women “most of all the world know what pain is.” The most obvious connection to be made here is with labor pain, an allusion that is more politically charged in the context of widespread and vocal discussion on the use of chloroform in childbirth. However, she could just as easily be gesturing towards the well-documented and multiple inflictions of pain on women of the mid-1800s which saw a troubling rise in clitorectomies and ovariectomies, often performed without anesthetic and by unlicensed physicians (see, for example, Isaac Brown and Florence Nightingale). Although ambiguously constructed in this instance, the perceived association between the pain of animals and that of women is directly related to medical malpractice in the article she wrote a year later, and the final one to be considered in this article.

8Briefly mentioned in “A Point at Issue” as one of the horrors perpetuated by medical men, animal vivisection is expounded upon in “The Vivisection Bill in Congress,” which finds its place in the broader field of activism against animal experimentation or, more precisely, animal pain. In “The Vivisection Bill in Congress,” Spofford’s concern once again is with the erasure of unnecessary pain. The article consists of an argument in support of “A Bill for the Further Prevention of Cruelty to Animals in the District of Columbia,” This bill intends to regulate rather than outlaw vivisection. Spofford makes it clear from the outset that she fully supports “justifiable” vivisection, performed upon “completely anaesthetized animals.” In contrast to prominent anti-vivisectionists like Frances Power Cobbe who had, in the British context, already denounced such political measures as simply “protecting scientists from prosecution, not animals from suffering,” Spofford maintains an optimistic attitude towards anesthesia and its use. Perhaps naive in ignoring the extensive experimentation on the nervous system that was being conducted at this time and which required conscious animal subjects (see, for example, Charles Bell and Marshall Hall), Spofford presents the bill as an unequivocally positive step in the elimination of animal suffering. In Spofford’s eyes, it is a bill that will result in the “uplifting of human nature instead of its debasement.” This optimism is yet another indication of her respect and belief in a science that is conducted responsibly and, most importantly, does not inflict physical pain on its subject.

9The same optimism is expressed, in a tone of wonder, by an old surgeon in the opening of “The Magnetic Patient” as he prophesies that “Ether and its kindred compounds ... will do more for humanity than Galen or Paracelsus combined.” Hortense literally embodies this anesthetic power in her ability to eliminate her husband’s pain in the final paragraphs of the story. Here, we watch in real time as the doctors are also transformed, synecdochally expressing Spofford’s optimism regarding anesthesia and the medical profession as a whole. As Hortense lessens her husband’s pain, anxious surgeons “wiping their foreheads” become considerate professionals who “neither shrank nor tortured.” In Spofford’s writing, there is a consistent linking of human progress with the erasure of pain and, within this ideal, women are pioneers in humanity’s advancement.

10A specifically female experience of unnecessary pain in a medical context is included towards the end of “The Vivisection Bill in Congress.” This example strongly aligns Spofford with fellow female anti-vivisectionists who embraced “a host of concerns that went beyond cruelty to animals,” including ways in which women were physically harmed by the “obnoxious degree of professional power wielded by the ‘men of science’” (Donald 200). Spofford reminds her late-nineteenth century readers that “in the case of one dreadful calamity the way to a successful operation ... was closed for forty years by the folly of a vivisector pursuing his researches erroneously at the cost of unspeakable anguish to the dumb and helpless.” Although directly referring to animals, the parallels made between female and animal pain prime us to read “the dumb and helpless” as applying equally to those women who suffered and died in silence during forty years of malpractice. The incident referred to, if unclear to a modern reader, is assumed to be known by her contemporaries. Such presumed knowledge hints at other, lost subtexts in Spofford’s fiction with regard to the unspoken and/or overlooked pain of women in the nineteenth century.

11All three of these articles freely associate the position of women with that of animals in arguments which, despite their differing topics, prioritize the negation of pain over all other considerations. I contend that paying attention to Spofford’s attitude to pain in these articles, as well as the specific patriarchal-medical context of the mid-late 1800s, alerts the reader to underexplored resonances in her literary works, as well as underexplored works themselves, not least the highly provocative short story “The Magnetic Patient.”

2. “The Magnetic Patient”

12The narrative voice of “The Magnetic Patient,” like Spofford in her political arguments, brings to the fore those hidden, female, narratives that lie behind mainstream, male-centric science. In the opening paragraphs we are told that this story concerns a medical case “on record” of “a remarkable insensibility to pain ... during a terrible operation under which no patient had ever survived.” But, unlike the “on record” version, this story will include “some of the surrounding and accompanying facts of which are not to be found in the books of surgery.” The mainstream scientific narrative is again undermined by Spofford, this time in a fictional work, with the employment of its lexis—“facts”—to describe what has been left out. We soon discover that the “facts” of “The Magnetic Patient” concern the crucial role played by Hortense, housekeeper-turned-wife, in ensuring a major medical breakthrough. Revealed in the climax of the story as the “Magnetic Patient” of the title, Hortense willingly assumes, or “conducts” the pain of her husband as he undergoes a potentially fatal brain operation. Her efforts result in the first successful operation of its kind, as well as her own death, although both remain unacknowledged by the medical texts. The seemingly faith-based mechanism by which the conduction occurs is not easily assimilated into scientific reasoning, and the surgeons’ undervaluing of Hortense’s subjectivity appears as an extension of her husband’s earlier condescension. From the outset, the text suggests that Hortense’s experience of pain cannot find a place within these hegemonic, patriarchal structures and so requires a counter narrative to bring it to light. Although it is invariably men who are in the position to inflict pain, Spofford does not present gender as fatalistic or a result of fixed, innate qualities. There is always the suggestion that particular actions and courses have the potential to disrupt social norms, resulting in completely new power dynamics.

13Exploiting the gothic mode, with its hidden narratives and representation of intense physical pain, “The Magnetic Patient” is set in those horrific pre-anesthetic days when “the misery of inflicting pain upon others was [the male physician’s] to the fullest extent.” This caricature of the medical sadist is nuanced, however, by the figure of an old and repentant surgeon who admits to suppressing his original “nervous sympathy” just to calm his hand enough to perform the frequently fatal operations. As in “A Point at Issue” and “The Vivisection Bill in Congress,” sensibility/insensibility to pain is inculcated by experience, and a learned suppression of nerves leads inevitably to the detached, voyeuristic pleasure of the sadist. The pain of the patient, combined with the detachment of the surgeon, turns the scene of an operation from one of scientific advancement into one of torture. The later setting of Mr. Knight’s operation in his own home further elides these two worlds/powers of medicine and torture. In The Body in Pain, Scarry describes torture’s ability to “represent the world at its most contracted and distilled form.” This ability is derived partly from the fact it is enacted within a room, which is “the simplest form of shelter” and which “expresses the most benign potential of human life” (38). Mr. Knight’s operation disrupts not only collective notions of security, but also his male-gendered, individual sense of security as head of his household. In Spofford’s story, the site of pain is always the site of disruption.

14In contrast to Spofford’s real-life examples of suffering in Harper’s Bazar, which involve only women and animals, it is the human-male body that is viscerally impacted in “The Magnetic Patient.” This narrative choice does as much as journalistic polemic to undermine conventional forms of masculine power. Mr. Knight is introduced as a wealthy man and we see him surveying the things he owns, from his new machines to his housekeeper/future wife: “Mr. Knight really felt a pride of proprietorship in her.” In opposition, however, to both his name and self-regard as “a power among men,” the plot also casts him as the archetypal damsel in distress or vulnerable subject in need of saving, a role that necessitates physical pain.

15Mr. Knight collapses twice in the story; the first time after an accident with one of his manufacturing machines and then, a few months after, while listening to the Italian musician Felicitá sing to him in his conservatory. After the second collapse, he is given an authoritative, medical diagnosis by doctors who offer reassuringly scientific detail in “deciding the trouble to be the formation of a bony process, incident to the healing of one of the crushing wounds made by the machinery at the time of his disaster.” In parallel to this highly rational, male-coded, medical narrative, the sequencing of these pain events within the romantic drama of the story means that they form part of an alternative narrative; one that contributes to a broader, satirical characterization of Mr. Knight as both psychologically and physically weak. This ironic characterization brings him close to the textbook nineteenth-century female “hysteric” whose acute physical pain becomes impossible to disentangle from her/his sexual frustrations. While undermining Mr. Knight’s male-coded identity, these traits also underline the way in which mainstream medicine constructs and simplifies its narratives according to particular gender biases.

17This serious accident is not enough, however, to reconcile Mr. Knight with his own embodied self. As he recovers in Hortense’s care his performances of gallantry are revealed as superficial and contrived. The romance of his admiration for “the gloss of [Hortense’s] black hair” and “great luminous eyes,” while seeming to build up to a declaration of his love, is pointedly undermined: “‘Hortense,’ said he at last, ‘I think you love me.’” Even in courtship, he retains a proprietary attitude towards her, appreciative of what she can do for his well-being but wary of the ways in which increased intimacy could destabilize his own sense of self and power. We are told that even in the early days of their subsequent marriage, his “material affairs occupied him a great deal more than matters of sentiment did.” The futility of this continuing attempt to distance the material from the sentimental is illustrated, once again, through an acute experience of pain when Mr. Knight experiences his second, almost fatal, collapse.

18At this point in the text, the narrative voice clarifies that Mr. Knight is unfeeling not by nature but by design: “Mr. Knight had always fancied himself a hard-headed man but ... was not in the least so.” As with the first physical collapse, his second occurs immediately after a scene of heightened, sexual tension, where he appears both willing and unable to get close to Felicitá. The irony of her name, meaning happiness, satisfaction or contentment in English only heightens the psychoanalytical resonances here. Mr. Knight takes the girl on several private outings. However, the relationship is perpetually stilted by a misreading of what he sees: “He read this and that poem to Felicitá, who looked up at him with her great moony eyes, but had no more comprehension of the verses than if they had been Sanskrit.” These private outings provoke suspicion and unhappiness in Hortense, something that Mr. Knight also sees but is not conscious of: ‘time after time Mr. Knight saw the unnoticeable little scene without knowing that he saw it.” A short while after, with increasing attraction to Felicitá and repulsion for Hortense, yet unable to connect the two, he asks the Italian to sing for him. This song is accompanied by physical proximity as Mr. Knight, “full of a strange fever of the blood,” approaches Felicitá and places “his arm across her shoulder.” It is this physical connection that seems to instigate the final crisis: “A terrible confusion and turmoil seemed to be seething even in his veins,” while “his brain burned and grew full of blood to bursting.” The “swollen blood vessels” of his later medical diagnosis could just as easily be incorporated into this description of overwhelming emotion. Ultimately, Mr. Knight’s sense of self is so dependent on a kind of proprietary detachment based on seeing, even when that sight is misleading, that any kind of feeling threatens it with dissolution.

19While Mr. Knight’s trajectory can be read as that of the hysteric, his “unmaking” also closely follows Scarry’s description of intense pain as that which destroys “a person’s self and world” as it severs the linguistic cathexis between body and world (Scarry 35). Non-verbal exclamations are crucial to Spofford’s representation of pain and further conform to Scarry’s observation that “Physical pain does not simply resist language but actively destroys it, bringing about an immediate reversion to a state anterior to language, to the sounds and cries a human being makes before language is learned” (Scarry 4). Mr. Knight’s first accident and recovery period are accompanied by “shrieking” and “cries.” Later, when the surgeons are working on him, Hortense’s position outside a closed door allows for an extended emphasis on sound which contributes to the sense of interrupted subjectivity that is so central to Scarry’s theory. At one point, the bodily limits of Mr. Knight appear to disappear completely into a scream that could be coming from hell itself: There came a long sigh shivering through the door and wainscot of every room in the house - a sharp, hissing, terrible sigh, as if the central fires had whistled up through some cleft of earth on which the house was standing”. Mr. Knight’s key identities are destroyed through an agony that severs him from language. This destruction is represented in a final abject image of pre-verbal, writhing life: “A storm of cries and curses. Scream after scream. And then silence. That silence was broken by a sound where agony and exhaustion wrestled—a strange sound, a horrible, recolting [sic] sound, neither shrieking nor groaning, but a bark, a hoarse, swift bark, another and another, as if manhood were destroyed, and only the animal were left alive and writhing.”

20At the climax of Mr. Knight’s self-annihilating pain, Hortense enters the room. At this point, the focus of the text transitions from sound to sight. Consistent with the regard she holds for her husband and the disregard encouraged in the reader, Hortense’s transformative love is set against the graphic viscerality of the text: “Nothing of the frightful scene did she see, neither bleeding vein nor quivering flesh, nor the leathern thongs which had been burst asunder by the force of the excruciating pangs.” As Mr. Knight becomes a calm animal-child in Hortense’s arms, the accompanying visuals serve to underline his absolute unmaking: “their saws labored through the bone, while their pincers, groping at the root of the live nerves, held them up like flaccid threads.” Mr. Knight is exposed in absolute vulnerability, the operation again resembling Scarry’s description of torture in that it “bestows visibility on the structure and enormity of what is usually private and incommunicable, contained within the boundaries of the sufferer’s body” (Scarry 27). The shame of this emasculating, dehumanizing exposure is foreshadowed earlier when Mr. Knight urges Hortense to remain outside the room: “I have pain to suffer, but I will not have the humiliation also of your seeing me suffer it.” Mr. Knight has an inclination of what this pain might mean to him and resists it strongly.

21Whereas Mr. Knight conforms to Scarry’s description of the unmade subject, Hortense’s own experience departs from it significantly: rather than unmade, she is empowered by her pain. Neither is this new powerful self created by her pain in a way that could be explained by Scarry’s “remade” subject; rather, it is there at the beginning of her story and relationship with Mr. Knight, when she is described as “ignorant of her chiefest power.” In her literal conduction of another person’s pain, she presents a direct challenge to Scarry’s defining characteristic of pain: its “unsharability.” In Scarry’s theory, having pain is “the most vibrant example of what it is to ‘have certainty,’” but for the person to whom it is communicated, it “exists as the primary model of what it is ‘to have doubt’” (Scarry 4). In opposition to this, Hortense’s role as conduct is depicted as the ultimate expression of intimacy and faith; rather than excluded from Mr. Knight’s world she obtains an intimacy that reaches beyond the flesh and gazes “not as it were, upon the countenance [of Mr. Knight] but possibly upon the soul itself.”

22While Hortense’s powers appear supernatural, the narrative is careful to distinguish them from the more archetypal magical powers associated with the feminine. The narrative voice frequently mocks those in the story who, as a result of their own insecurities, ascribe to superstitious interpretations in order to explain Mr. Knight’s otherwise inexplicably attraction to his housekeeper. These include the jealous neighbors who “declared it as a fact that [Mr. Knight] was nothing but bewitched” as well as Mr. Knight himself who feels a “dim sort of sensation that [Hortense] exercised undue influences over him.” The ironic bite of these remarks, as well as the way in which they conflict with the otherwise sympathetic portrayal of Hortense, keep the narrative grounded and encourage us to take Hortense seriously as human woman rather than witch. This counter-fantastical representation gives greater import to the proposed shareability of pain depicted in the story and its implications for how we view pain receiver-pain witness relations more generally.

23It is true that Spofford implies an emotional-spiritual realm as existing in parallel to an earthly one. However, even this retains a mundane reality that is manifested by Hortense’s “wretched countenance” and her actual death, as it is finally acknowledged, and quickly forgotten, by the surgeons. Consistent with the socio-psychological logic of the story, it is Hortense’s invisibility or lack of personal power that enables her to appropriate divine power and channel the omnipotent in order to destroy her husband’s pain: “all the love of heaven strove to annihilate it, the strength of heaven to destroy it.” Amidst the religious overtones, it remains Hortense’s active will that makes this “miracle” possible: “She had demanded it, obtained it, it filled her,” “she chose this man should cease to suffer pain.” Further disabling Mr. Knight’s conventional superiority as Man, Hortense’s receptivity to pain is presented as an active force that renders her god-like.

25In this framework, it is logical that Hortense’s ability to embrace pleasure translates to a greater ability to withstand pain. In contrast, Mr. Knight’s aversion to pleasure may push him into pain more quickly, while also denying him the necessary tools to endure it. An understanding of the way in which Spofford’s story conforms to McIntyre’s model highlights underexplored aspects of her other work. Applying this reading to “Circumstance,” the husband who kills the panther, although frequently read as occupying a position of authority, is instead (symbolically) betraying an aversion to pain. In this story the husband’s abrupt killing of the panther is set against his wife’s extended experience of pain as intense, agonizing, spiritual, creative, and intersubjective.

26Another instance of gender-dependent experiences of pain may be found in a critically overlooked event in “The Amber Gods” concerning a near miss with a train. The passionate Giorgione is out walking with her cousin and her unconventionally named male suitor, Rose, who is perpetually torn between the two women. Giorgione just misses being run down by a speeding train, although she still sustains quite a nasty fall. Spofford exploits a range of expressions when it comes to representing Giorgione’s pain: “I fell dizzied and stunned, and the night express-train shot by like a burning arrow. Of course I was dreadfully hurt by my fall and fright, — I feel the shock now, —the blow, the stroke” (Spofford, The Amber Gods, 29). The exchange that follows this instance of acute pain presents the reader with a similar dynamic to that in “The Magnetic Patient” in that the woman feels while the man sees:

‘I thought I heard you scream, and that you were dead.’
‘And what then?’
‘Nothing, but that you were lying dead and torn, and I should see you,’ he said.
(Spofford, The Amber Gods 40)

27Giorgione and Rose’s diverging character trajectories after this moment recall McIntyre’s diktat: “Either one brings to every encounter a world of hurt, or one blunders forward childishly unconscious of the hurt on which one’s putative wholeness is founded” (394). Rose’s subsequent career as an artist cements his position as detached observer: “He became artist,—ceased to be man,—was more indifferent than the cloud. He could paint me then” (Spofford, The Amber Gods 61). Rose’s economic success, while synonymous with a certain kind of Man, has deprived him of a different humanity, one that is dependent on the ability to feel another’s pain. The story encourages a critical stance towards Rose’s detachment through the pathos of Giorgione’s painful, solitary death, as elaborated in the final paragraphs of the story.

28Considering Spofford’s political engagement with pain, it is logical that an analysis of its representation in her fiction would consider contextual factors, such as the very real pain inflicted on women and animals within nineteenth-century patriarchal structures. Spofford resists the patriarchal structures of nineteenth-century society by steering her reader’s attention towards alternative narratives of subaltern subjectivity. Spofford’s women reappropriate power by using their pain as a transcendent force, pain being something that is unavailable to the patriarch with his limiting and frequently misplaced sense of integrity. Reflecting this difference, Spofford employs a satirical mode when deconstructing the male psyche as confronted by pain, yet moves into a more sentimental and religious register in her depiction of female empowerment obtained through the same experience.

29With its greater emphasis on the way in which gender can be incorporated into a theory of pain, McIntyre’s reinterpretation of Scarry may prove a useful foundation for exploring the issue in Spofford’s other work. Considering recent publications such as Elinor Cleghorn’s popular and accessible cultural history of medical misogyny, as well as government reports which evidence present and historical bias in the recognition and treatment of women’s pain, “The Magnetic Patient” continues to resonate in the context of 21^st century engagement with pain as a feminist issue in the field of medicine (Bamber et al.).