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ABSTRACTS Regina Bartolone (University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill) Spheres of Pain: Private Pain in to Public Art in the Works of Marguerite Duras and Frida Kahlo This paper will examine l'Amant by Marguerite Duras and "My Birth" by Frida Kahlo as they thematically and structurally challenge the culturally established notion that the pain of suffering a miscarriage is a subject that should resist public expression and remain confined to the private sphere. I will support this claim with Elaine Scarry's work, The Body in Pain, as she asserts that pain destroys the victim's ability to articulate it and that we are reliant on the vocabulary and images proscribed by external cultural bodies (i.e. medical, anthropological, religious, artistic communities) to express it. One of the ways that these cultural spheres (namely the medical and anthropological ones) have coded pain behavior in Western society is to distinguish between private and public responses to suffering. Private pain, if expressed at all, tends to be relegated to intimate communication like diary-keeping or personal letters. The expression of private pain generally avoids public circulation or representation. Public pain is not only expressed but initiates a social relationship between s/he who is in distress and the person for whom it is being interpreted. What I hope to reveal is how both Duras and Kahlo expose a typically "private" issue, failed female reproduction, through a relationship between the act of borrowing words and images from cultural bodies and their representation in the public arena of art.

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