Eugene Delacroix’s 1827 canvas, The Death of Sardanapalus (see frontispiece), is not about the death of Sardanapalus. The moment captured by the painting immediately precedes the one in which the Assyrian king of Byron’s drama will drink poison and immolate himself on his own bed. What Delacroix has chosen to present is a king who watches others die, a king who, in the painting, remains untouched. Poised with seeming insouciance on his bed, surrounded by riches and lushly attired, Sardanapalus watches the assassination of his concubines by the soldiers of his treasonous satraps. The painting is not about the death...

Pain and danger, sickness and death — these ideas, according to Edmund Burke’s 1757 A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas on the Sublime and Beautiful, give rise to the strongest passions of which we are capable, and can be a source of pleasure leading to the sublime (39). Even stronger than pleasure itself, pain, when rightly experienced and contemplated, can produce an “elevation of the mind [that] ought to be the principal end of all our studies” (53). Burke’s proclamation on the aesthetic pleasures of pain was part of a larger fascination with physical pain at the end...

In 1793 Wordsworth traveled across Salisbury Plain, where he had the experience that would provide the “spot of time” for the section of The Prelude quoted above. The same year, Ann Radcliffe published not her first, but certainly her most popular and critically successful novel, The Mysteries of Udolpho. And in that novel Emily St. Aubert, like Wordsworth, comes upon a gibbet which has been the site of someone’s intense physical pain, and Radcliffe records her terrified reaction to that place. Both authors are writing in the same mode: Radcliffe is, of course, the “mother” of the English Gothic novel...

When Emily St. Aubert drew back the mysterious curtain in Udolpho’s passageway, she beheld a wax figure that represented a human body. This representation immediately invoked the freezing effect of horror, yet later betrayed itself as a stage prop, a piece of theatre. Similarly, when Wordsworthian travelers came upon the gibbet in the Salisbury Plain series, they became increasingly more removed from a suffering body that might entrance them in cold, stony horror. The previously theatrical body, rendered visible in A Night on Salisbury Plain for its emotive, even pedagogical effects, is gradually consigned to the wings, made not to...

“The origins of melodrama,” writes Peter Brooks, “can be accurately located within the context of the French Revolution and its aftermath. This is the epistemological moment which it illustrates and to which it contributes: the moment that symbolically, and really, marks the final liquidation of the traditional Sacred and its representative institutions” (Melodramatic 14–15). Melodrama, for Brooks, is a victory over the repression instituted by tradition: “The desire to express all seems a fundamental characteristic of the melodramatic mode. Nothing is spared because nothing is left unsaid” (4), a total disclosure that informs discourses from Rousseau’s Confessions to the...

A young boy has been murdered. His lacerated body has been discovered near his home, the Castle Frankheim. The suspect: a ne’er-do-well from the rival house of Orrenburg, presumed to be operating under instructions from his boss. But the suspect, once apprehended, is reluctant to confess; the proper means must be taken to extort a confession. When Osbright, the victim’s brother, learns that the “proper means” are the rack, and that until Frankheim “had recourse to torture, not a syllable would [the suspect] utter, but assertions of his own and his master’s innocence,” he is outraged. For Brother Peter, who...

The theatre of the scaffold as it is represented by Godwin bridges the gap between the specularized victim of state repression and the (un) sentimental audience member watching the cruelties perpetrated on that victim. Under the guise of horror at barbarity, Godwin delineates the subjective pleasure of feeling the lash, a pleasure in placing oneself in both a community of sufferers and the sure space of one’s own corporeality. Yet, Fleetwood’s “pleasure” in feeling the suffering he inflicts on his stage props is coterminous with the pleasure of ending that suffering: “Like those victims, when the apparatus of torture was...

Burke knew that an empowered body — in the form of an empowered body politic — could defy the control of its master, and he feared this power. Wordsworth and Coleridge feared it too; Lewis and Shelley were ambivalent about it; Byron hoped for it. For each of these writers, the body holds a political strength that, rightly used, can destroy the old order. Yet this fearful, empowered body is also placed under attack: it is rent, dismembered, afflicted, diseased, maimed. Its power is put in check by pain. And this pain, moreover, can be another agent of a revolution that the...