4 - The Economy of Pain: Capitalism, Humanitarianism, and the Realistic Novel

Summary

At one of the most touching moments in The Rise of Silas Lapham, the Laphams, feeling wretched about the drastic new development in their daughters' marital fortunes, go to consult the Reverend Sewell. The minister offers his counsel in the form of a hypothetical question. If somebody else had come to them, with the same unhappy discovery that the presumptive suitor of one daughter was really courting the other, what would they have said? Wouldn't they have come up with some kind of moral arithmetic to solve the problem? As Sewell sees it, that arithmetic is one that would seek to minimize pain:

“One suffer instead of three, if none is to blame?” suggested Sewell. “That's sense, and that's justice. It's the economy of pain which naturally suggests itself, and which would insist upon itself, if we were not all perverted by traditions which are the figment of the shallowest sentimentality.”

As a way of managing the suffering of others, Sewell's “economy of pain” is a truly indispensable vehicle. The sentient and the economic are not usually seen in such close conjunction: Sewell not only mentions them in the same breath but also uses them to justify and reinforce each other. If his concern with pain reflects a humane sensibility, his emphasis on economy, on the distribution and management of pain, bespeaks another influence as well. Neither strictly a model for moral conduct nor strictly a model for economic organization, Sewell's economy of pain works, instead, as a combination of the two.