Villette’s Erotic Experimentation

In Villette, Charlotte Brontë’s narrator Lucy Snowe experiments with what can be read as gendered sadistic and masochistic roles before discovering in M. Paul a mutually masochistic partner. With Ginevra Fanshawe, Lucy dabbles in sadism in the abuse she doles out whereas with Dr. John, Lucy performs as the traditional courted woman who relishes an apparently inactive position as the feminine object of courtship. This relationship with Dr. John is her trial with the kind of inherent female masochism psychoanalysts and sexologists identify as endemic to the female experience. Unsurprisingly, these relationships fail and the satisfaction Lucy yields from them is fleeting and insubstantial. By falling for M. Paul, Lucy is able to successfully link the two worlds with which she previously flirted—the typically female masochistic realm and the conventionally male sadistic realm.

The Rainbow’s Generational Masochisms

Husband and wife in D.H. Lawrence’s The Rainbow equally embrace and use masochism as a tool of intense interpersonal interaction. Lawrence approaches the first Brangwen generation, Tom and Lydia, with a subtle gesture to their capacity for masochism. As their daughter, Anna, marries Will, this second generation is marked by a keen consciousness of the need for mutual masochism in order to render their partnership successful. Anna and Will are extraordinarily well-matched and, in many ways, could be considered Lawrence’s marital ideal. In direct conversation with the flat and failed masochistic experimentation of their daughter, Ursula, Will and Anna’s relationship is telling in its dynamic reciprocity. This chapter traces the three generations in the novel and the ways in which Lawrence’s portrait of marital success is contingent upon the recognition of marriage as an already accepted, socially and legally sanctioned form of masochism.

A Drama in Muslin’s Queer Mysticism

Marginalized physically by her hunchback, religiously by her staunch Protestantism, and emotionally by her unrequited lesbian desires, A Drama in Muslin’s Cecilia Cullen cannot control her love for the novel’s heroine, Alice. Her increasingly frustrated desires culminate in her religious conversion from Protestantism to Catholicism, and its accompanying discourse of divine torment. At the novel’s close, Cecilia paints herself as a sacrificial female martyr who relishes in the abuse of God. Cecilia’s account of her grief, her pain, her sin, and her love echoes the language with which earlier female mystics describe their relationship with Christ and God. The prime example, St. Teresa of Avila, employs terms that help foreground Cecilia’s own religious masochism. This chapter approaches Cecilia Cullen as a doubly marginalized young woman and as the prototype of Victorian mysticism, a representation of the tellingly queer transition to devout religiosity in all its spectacular masochistic glory.

A Tale of Two Terms

The introduction situates this book’s contribution to the field of literary, theoretical, and cultural studies of masochism. The introduction contextualizes previous critical and historical methodologies by examining case studies by sexologists including Richard von Krafft-Ebing, Havelock Ellis, Albert Eulenburg, and Magnus Hirschfeld; psychoanalytical approaches to masochism from Sigmund Freud, Marie Bonaparte, Jessica Benjamin, and Juliet Mitchell; more modern theoretical texts including works by Gilles Deleuze, Anita Phillips, Slavoj Žižek; and specifically intersectional approaches that consider queerness and gender by Leo Bersani, Paula Caplan, Jack Halberstam, and Amber Jamilla Musser. This chapter sets up the core conflict at the center of Ordinary Masochisms: a pseudo-scientific, roundly negative consideration of masochism countered by a collection of unexpected, active, and empowering literary representations of masochism.

Quartet’s Modernist Muddles

The triangulation of masochistic desire that takes center stage in Jean Rhys’s Quartet attests to the self-aware participation of all parties involved, an overt acknowledgement of a developing collective consciousness suddenly more informed by psychoanalysis and sexology. The popularity of sexology and psychoanalysis during the 1920s allows readers to understand that seemingly helpless Marya and apparently predatory duo, the Heidlers, are all aware of masochistic possibilities and the consequences of their sexual and romantic decisions. Given narrative authority to ascribe thoughts and emotions to other characters, Marya takes such as opportunities to abuse and humiliate herself, hiding her active power under the projected opinions of others. Marya is complicit in the crafting and unfolding of her masochistic fantasies, however hurtful and upsetting they may be, ultimately exposing the surprising but telling amount of personal and narrative agency ascribed to her.

Murderous Masochism in The Torture Garden

This interlude contextualizes the shift in public consciousness regarding sex and gender through a literary case study of Octave Mirbeau’s The Torture Garden (tr. 1903; Les jardins des supplices, 1899). The narrator embarks on a fictional, albeit typical journey from west to east, wherein he witnesses both the elaborate, public torture of Chinese prisoners punishments and his lover’s erotic pleasure in them. The novella plays with both sexological discourses of deviance and aesthetic concerns about art and literature, inviting readers to explore the connection between masochism, sadism, and reading. An ideal representation of decadent literature, The Torture Garden, by performing a model of masochistic reading, invites readers to consider their own relationship to violence and the erotic.

Reading Masochisms

Having offered analyses about some Victorian and modernist masochistic characters—the diverse range of their roles, the empowerment they access through suffering, the challenges they pose to pervasive clinical diagnoses, the narratives that they shape and reshape—the afterword briefly addresses one of the core undercurrents in this project: the potentially masochistic relationship between reader and text or, in other words, the possibilities of masochistic reading. Just as the masochisms of the characters explored in this book are plural, so too are the possible readerly masochisms they inspire. This afterword asks readers to consider this meta-masochism, so to speak, of masochistically reading about masochistic characters and its pleasurable, painful, but ultimately generative capabilities.

Mythologizing Masochisms

This chapter is a comparative reading of Leopold von Sacher-Masoch’s Venus in Furs, from which masochism is so named, and the Old Testament tale of Samson and Delilah in order to claims Samson as the actual “father” of masochism. Putting the two texts into conversation enables readers to understand that Samson willingly and pleasurably positions himself as subjected to Delilah—a conclusion made plausible by Severin, the protagonist of Venus in Furs. Chapter 1 argues that the long literary history of masochism begins not with Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, but with the mythical man his protagonist idolizes and the long erotic legacy of betraying women as a result.

Murderous Masochism in The Comfort of Strangers

Almost one hundred years after The Torture Garden, Ian McEwan’s The Comfort of Strangers (1981), the subject of this conclusion, explores the complex relationship between masochistic pleasure and criminal violence. In the novella, tourists Colin and Mary find themselves lost in Venice and become the objects of desire for Robert, an abusive husband, and Caroline, his excessively masochistic wife. Caroline’s enraptured narrative chronicles the unfolding of her masochistic tendencies within the confines of her marriage and at the behest of her husband Robert’s strength and power. Although Caroline explains that she possesses the death wish that sexologists initially declare the logical (albeit exaggerated) end of masochistic fantasies, Caroline finds that Robert simply cannot kill her. The married couple seeks and finds a surrogate for Caroline in Colin, a complex but revealing gender reversal in itself, and they set the stage for the fulfilment of Caroline’s desires by murderous proxy.