1Building on Elaine Scarry’s foundational description of pain as something that both destroys and elicits language, Thomas Constantinesco’s elegant and beautifully written monograph, Writing Pain in the Nineteenth-Century United States, shows how pain "fuels the work of literature" in the era of the U.S. Civil War. Across various literary forms – from Emerson’s essays to Dickinson’s poetry to the diary of Alice James – the writers in this study grapple with various forms of pain: physical and psychological; individual and collective. Constantinesco is especially keen to elaborate the relation between these sites and scales of pain – the body and the mind, the suffering individual and the suffering nation – in order to trace the contours of "pain’s social life" (p. 117). And he does so through sustained attention to form, both the literary forms these writers employ to capture the experience of pain, and the forms of thought, sociality, and even nationality that pain helps to shape.

2The most prominent and recurrent form Constantinesco identifies is the "economy of pain" (p. 5). The book begins with Emerson, who establishes the economic model with a "philosophy of ‘compensation’", through which "material pain" can be turned to spiritual "gain" (p. 5). Within this economic structure, pain is a kind of investment, the payoff of which – as power, as transcendence, as painlessness – is always assured. Emerson himself would famously run up against the limits of this "logic of profitability" with the loss of his son Waldo, but that logic would persist in his writings about slavery and the Civil War. In those writings, Emerson also provides the model for what would become something of an expropriative economy of national pain and suffering, whereby the pain of soldiers and enslaved people would be assimilated to a narrative of national redemption and reconciliation.

3The other writers in the study counter or complicate this economic model. Harriet Jacobs and Emily Dickinson, for example, push against it by representing pain as intransigent, recursive, or even constitutive of a nation built on the violence of slavery and at constant war with itself. As Constantinesco argues, Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl offers a stark contrast to the Emersonian trajectory of pain transformed into gain. Jacobs narrates the shift not from the pain of slavery to the painlessness of freedom, but from pain inflicted to pain deliberately chosen "through the operations of the will" (p. 60). Willfully undergoing forms of suffering of her own choosing – from her seven-year confinement in a crawl space to her ultimate separation from her grandmother when she escapes – Jacobs reclaims "pain as a ground for Black subjectivity" (p. 60). That subjectivity, however, is shaped not merely through the individual experience of pain, but in relation to a community of common (though differentiated) suffering under the systemic violence of slavery.

4Constantinesco’s chapter on Dickinson similarly figures pain as a medium of relation between the individual and the collective. In this case the collective at issue is the nation itself, and the challenge for Dickinson is to preserve the uniqueness and reality of the individual experience of pain against the backdrop of mass suffering inflicted by the war. In the context of the war and its aftermath, both the acute pain of battlefield wounds and the durational suffering of bereavement would be increasingly assimilated to narratives of national injury and recovery. Such narratives essentially reproduce Emerson’s "economy of conversion" of pain into gain at the scale of the nation (p. 103). Dickinson’s poetry offers a counterpoint to that kind of teleological insistence on the dissipation of national pain, dwelling instead on pain that is "individual and chronic" as opposed to "historical and temporary" (p. 101).

5Central to Constantinesco’s larger argument is the contention that the individual and irresolvable nature of pain does not render it incommunicable, and that literary writing provides the ligature to connect a community in pain. Like Dickinson, Henry James was concerned with the relation between individual pain and the mass suffering of the war that would be critical to postwar figurations of national identity. While there was what Constantinesco calls a "currency of pain" (especially pain that could be publicly verified through the visibility of scars or amputations), James’s early story "A Most Extraordinary Case", published in 1868, focuses on a veteran with an "invisible yet devastating injury" (p. 119, p. 121). James himself had suffered just such an "invisible injury" that would keep him out of the war but saddle him with a lifetime of chronic pain (p. 25). Constantinesco tracks James’s thinking about pain and national identity over the course of that lifetime, from "A Most Extraordinary Case" – a story grappling with the Civil War’s immediate aftermath – to James’s autobiography, Notes of a Son and Brother, which would be published just on the cusp of World War One. If the early story registers James’s national alienation as someone who avoided service (and who would spend much of his life abroad), in the autobiography James is able to redeem that alienation by acknowledging it as the source of his art. From the retrospective vantage of the memoir, James could see the "irrelevant" pain that kept him out of the "national convulsion of the war" as the foundation of his indelible contribution to a national literature.

6While "A Most Extraordinary Case" focuses on the invisible but physical injury of a surviving veteran, Elizabeth Stuart Phelps’s The Gates Ajar – the focus of Constantinesco’s fifth chapter – attends to the psychic suffering of women in mourning. Published almost simultaneously with James’s story, Phelps’s novel is similarly concerned with the relation between individual and collective pain in the context of the Civil War. Exemplifying the key claims of Constantinesco’s argument, Phelps’s novel figures pain as generative of "both a system of relations and literary writing" that together work to constitute a "community of women through shared grief" (p. 151-2). The novel dramatizes what Constantinesco calls a "pedagogy of pain," with the protagonist Mary Cabot learning to work through her grief with the help of her Aunt Winifred, who shares her own suffering but also a vision of a material and accessible heaven that would mark that suffering’s end. This vision of heaven to some extent replicates Emerson’s economy of pain, but, as Constantinesco incisively argues, the materiality of the vision of heaven actually points us to a slightly different view of the payoff for the pain of bereavement. In Constantinesco’s reading, the payoff is less abstractly economic than it is materially ecological, as Winifred helps Mary not only to imagine the afterlife in material terms, but to see the material world around her as literally constituted by the "bodily reincorporation" of the dead into the "organic matter" of "regenerated life" (p. 168-9).

7At the heart of Phelps’s novel, Constantinesco contends, are two competing forms of sympathy and sentimentalism: one that the novel rejects for its "social hypocrisy" and "therapeutic illusoriness", and another – exemplified by the pedagogical relation between Mary and her aunt – which is "more authentic and truly comforting" (p. 155). While Phelps’s novel employs the form of a fictional diary (Mary’s) to explore this problem of "fake or misguided sympathy", Alice James would take up this problem as a central concern of her actual diary (p. 155). James was afflicted for much of her life with chronic pain and illness, and in her diary she aims to counter impressions amongst her friends and contemporaries that she was "pain incarnate" (p. 177). Constantinesco suggests that such impressions result from a "perverse logic of sympathy", which reduced her complex subjectivity to an "alienating fiction of sickness and pain" (p. 177). For James, this logic – which is also the logic of sentimental writing – appropriates the pain of illness and disability for the edification of the "well" (p. 186). As Constantinesco observes of Harriet Jacobs earlier in the book, Alice James uses autobiographical writing – often in an ironic and even humorous mode – to "reclaim her pain" and the full complexity of her subjectivity (p. 177).

8The book concludes with a coda that offers a concise recapitulation of its major concerns: contestation over the economic model of pain; the ways pain mediates relations between individuals, and between the individual and the nation; and how different literary forms – the essay, the slave narrative, the lyric poem, the novel, and the autobiography – mediate those complex experiences and relations of pain. Ultimately, while the book will surely make a critical contribution to the field of pain studies, I do think that this last feature of the book – its attention to literary form – is in many ways its most compelling. This is not merely because of the lucid virtuosity of the readings, but because the book highlights the capacity of literary writing to capture, without containing or reducing, what Constantinesco rightly calls "pain’s messiness" (p. 207). This acknowledgement of pain’s messiness is the foundation of the book’s ethical endeavor, which is to approach pain not from the teleological "vantage of its prospective disappearance", but to attend to its chronicity, its recursions, its "ubiquity", and its "enigma" – and to what Constantinesco calls "the theoretical work of literature" that renders "our ceaseless reckonings with pain" not merely "destructive" but "generative" (p. 207-2, p. 207-3).