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Seeing Suffering in Women's Literature of the Romantic Era (review)

In her introduction to Seeing Suffering in Women’s Literature, Elizabeth Dolan situates her argument in the cultural understanding of eighteenthcentury life, focusing their incompatible concerns of social justice and medical conceptions of vision that create “new modes of ‘seeing’ (and thus of expressing and alleviating) suffering in the Romantic era” (p. 1). Locating contrasting perspectives on Romantic notions of sensibility, solitude, gender, and sympathy, Dolan explains the connection between vision and subjectivity as it arises through her analysis of the particularly unromantic terms of rationality, sociability, authority, and judgment. As she assigns authority to the medical conceptions of vision with attention to the body, Dolan emphasizes that perception—the eye—is no longer recognized as just a philosophical idea but a material one integrated with thinking about the body, how the eye functions, and its pathology. Suffering then is re-envisioned through the poetical works of Romantic women writers in light of startling medical discoveries and social concerns about the inhumanity of slavery and animal cruelty. Dolan points out in the first part of her book that with the arrival of medical interest in redefining melancholia, the cultural discomfort of an emotionally excessive Werther was counteracted by medical discourse about the melancholic. The rational and sensible qualities surrounding melancholia defined the literary poet by their conciliatory relationship as Dolan suggests: “In mid-eighteenth-century literature, these qualities were companion aspects of literary genius” (p. 24). However, Dolan argues that medical discourse served to shift this view to create a “gendered and oppositional” positioning of sensibility and rationality “in an attempt to save the long-standing profile of the English melancholic genius” (p. 25). In her analysis of Charlotte Smith’s elegiac Sonnets, Dolan argues that Smith links rationality with sensibility, illustrating that the melancholic is an embodied vision of the culture and not a bodiless figure. In contrast, Dolan draws on Mary Shelley’s “celebration of the visionary’s invisibility” while Smith embraces the desire “to be held in a sympathetic gaze” (p. 49). In her examination of the relationship between medical theories—especially of the eye and its contagious pathology—and cultural expressions of