Narrative Pain and the Moral Sense: Towards an Ethics of Suffering in the Long Eighteenth Century

Writers in the eighteenth century encountered a generative impasse in the representation of narrative pain. While they could capitalize on expressions of pain as common cultural currency, as varieties of corporeal experience they had in common with their audience, they could not recapture the idiosyncratic, ineffable qualities of pain, the ways in which suffering occurs differently and indescribably for every individual. By appealing to the elaboration of moral sense theory, a current of philosophy that describes how sensitive beings form impressions and make judgments based on a species of feeling that involves both physical and emotional responsiveness, contemporary readers may observe how writers of fiction during the period developed a series of representational strategies to deal with this impasse, to make pain visible, legible, and useful for a variety of narrative purposes.