Figures of pain: Suffering and selfhood in early modern English literature

This dissertation investigates how early modern authors employ representations of physical suffering to construct personal and textual identities and actively convey those identities to audiences. Pain is generally considered a devastating phenomenon that destroys an individual's subjectivity and capacity for communication with others. The authors treated here, however, demonstrate that pain was also a highly useful tool in the creation and adoption of desirable social roles. In these works, pain becomes one facet in the performance of identity and agency. Figures of Pain: Suffering and Selfhood in Early Modern English Literature begins with an examination of historical and theoretical understandings of pain that link this physical sensation to ideas of truth and certainty. The study then explores the repercussions of these links for the creation and communication of identity in Sir Philip Sidney's Astrophil and Stella, John Donne's devotional poetry and prose, William Shakespeare's The Merry Wives of Windsor, and John Webster's The Duchess of Malfi. Each of these texts uses pain as a means of performance or identification of self, manipulating it as an instrument of expression rather than decrying it as a necessary but unfortunate aspect of life. By embracing pain's potential as a means of self-presentation, these authors prompt a reconsideration of pain's effects on selfhood and personal agency. This study not only offers new readings of texts in several early modern genres, including a reexamination of the role of pain in tragedy, but it also revises the conceptions of pain and suffering that dominate modern political life and encourages a critical reassessment of the role of pain in both performance of self and participation in the larger community.