The Masochistic Pleasure of Sentimental Literature.
Princeton, Princeton UP; 2000.
[Main argument]
In The Masochistic Pleasure of Sentimental Literature, Marianne Noble argues that eroticized violence recurring in the nineteenth century sentimental literature simultaneously endorses patriarchal oppressions and allows exploration of female desire. One of the main factors that made antebellum middle-class culture so receptive to the stories of the heroines’ masochistic suffering—both spiritual and physical—is the convergence of discourses of true womanhood and Calvinism. With the Calvinistic notion of providence, wherein affliction is translated into God’s love, individuals were disciplined to relinquish earthly comforts in order to acquire heavenly support. This Calvinist association of pain with divine love paradoxically gives vent to female desire supposedly confined within the discourses of true womanhood and its ideals of non-corporeal woman. The theologically sanctioned masochistic pleasure derived from pain makes available to a woman a way of covertly restoring a presence of female body that the ideology of true womanhood expunges. For the nineteenth century female writers, Noble argues, masochistic fantasies are “a limited and limiting—but effective—means of imagining physical pleasure without damaging culturally sanctioned ideals of female identity” (25).
In The Masochistic Pleasure of Sentimental Literature, Marianne Noble argues that eroticized violence recurring in the nineteenth century sentimental literature simultaneously endorses patriarchal oppressions and allows exploration of female desire. One of the main factors that made antebellum middle-class culture so receptive to the stories of the heroines’ masochistic suffering—both spiritual and physical—is the convergence of discourses of true womanhood and Calvinism. With the Calvinistic notion of providence, wherein affliction is translated into God’s love, individuals were disciplined to relinquish earthly comforts in order to acquire heavenly support. This Calvinist association of pain with divine love paradoxically gives vent to female desire supposedly confined within the discourses of true womanhood and its ideals of non-corporeal woman. The theologically sanctioned masochistic pleasure derived from pain makes available to a woman a way of covertly restoring a presence of female body that the ideology of true womanhood expunges. For the nineteenth century female writers, Noble argues, masochistic fantasies are “a limited and limiting—but effective—means of imagining physical pleasure without damaging culturally sanctioned ideals of female identity” (25).
[Key concepts]
l Eroticized violence (15)
l Calvinism
l Ideology of “true womanhood” and its ideal of a non-corporeal woman
l Transcendentalism as an outgrowth of Puritanism (in its resignation of self—total loss of self)
l Gothic and sentimental literature—both generate masochistic pleasure for the reader identifying with the protagonists (71-72) [identifying with another’s pain]
[Quotations]
l In this book, I argue that the masochism in nineteenth-century American women’s sentimentality can be seen as an opportunity for agency that presented itself to authors within the ideological constraints of the culture. . . . The masochism in sentimentality—neither subversive nor purely reactive—makes available the “bliss” of reveling in fantasized submission to power. (4-5)
l The eroticism of sentimental suffering was a double-edged sword, functioning both as a discursive agent for the proliferation of oppressive ideologies and as a rhetorical tool for the exploration of female desire. (6)
l On the most basic level, masochistic fantasy offers women the same possibilities for empowerment through repudiation of power that it offers men: the position of being done to can be a powerful stance for seizing political and social agency, coercing the doer to obey not through force of arms but through force of self-esteem. (9)→Tompkins
l While to be civilized, men must submit to restraint and discipline, to me manly, they must use their cultural power to subjugate others. Rather than suffer nervous breakdowns, some of those who find the clash untenable parody social violence through fantasies of violence turned against themselves—thereby identifying simultaneously as liberal and manly subjects. (15)
l The nineteenth-century sentimental authors discussed in this book are influenced by the discourses of the culture out of which they emerge, which prompt them to represent sexuality in terms of domination and promote desires for such experiences by associating them with ecstatic pleasures. Contradictorily, these authors are also women who are committed to the autonomy of the self, partially because of their roots in Calvinism, partially because of ideologies of American individualism, and partially because they are ambitious artists. They are therefore in a double bind, conflicted between their understanding of selfhood and their language of sexuality. Masochistic fantasies of the loss of self-control are a way of resolving that conflict, a way of responding to culturally determined forms of desire and of maintaining aesthetic and personal control. (20)
l I seek origins of women’s literary masochism more in history than in theory, though theory helpfully guides my interpretation of historical data. Masochism is more culturally and historically specific than theorists suggest, frequently arising in conjunctions with ideals of ethereal femininity, innocence, self-sacrifice, and a disciplined work-ethic—such as characterized northeast American, nineteenth-century, middle-class Protestant culture (though obviously occurs elsewhere). ここがNobleの強み。Psychoanalysisをベースに使いながらもhistorical specificity を見落とさない。
l One of the important attractions of masochism is that it makes available to a woman who endorses “true womanhood” a way of imagining her own embodiment and her own desire for physical pleasure, thereby restoring to presence a female body that that ideology effectively erases. (23)
l I analyze masochism as a limited and limiting—but effective—means of imagining physical pleasure without damaging culturally sanctioned ideals of female identity. (25)
l Receptivity to masochism is linked to spiritual transcendence. The protestant doctrine underlying this belief system is the notion of providence, according o which affliction is a manifestation of God’s love, sent to force individuals to turn away from earthly comforts and toward heavenly support.
