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USEFUL DANGERS:
THE EROTICS OF FORM, SADOMASOCHISM, VICTORIAN NARRATIVE
by
Mary Ann Davis
A Dissertation Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE USC GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
(ENGLISH)
August 2012
Copyright 2012 Mary Ann Davis
Object Description
| Title | Useful dangers: the erotics of form, sadomasochism, Victorian narrative |
| Author | Davis, Mary Ann |
| Author email | maryannd@usc.edu;profmadavis@gmail.com |
| Degree | Doctor of Philosophy |
| Document type | Dissertation |
| Degree program | English |
| School | College of Letters, Arts And Sciences |
| Date defended/completed | 2012-05-08 |
| Date submitted | 2012-08-06 |
| Date approved | 2012-08-06 |
| Restricted until | 2012-08-06 |
| Date published | 2012-08-06 |
| Advisor (committee chair) | Tongson, Karen |
| Advisor (committee member) |
Kincaid, James R. McCabe, Susan Keeling, Kara |
| Abstract | While most recent studies of sadomasochism center in the fields of cultural and sexuality studies, this project returns sadomasochism to the realm of literary criticism and queer theory in order to complicate the often-contentious relationship between sexual and textual pleasure. “Useful Dangers” takes as its perverse task the reconstruction of sadomasochism as a queer erotics of form, intervening in a history of over-emphasis on psychoanalytic identities and simplistic transpositions of contemporary s/m practices to past literatures. In the first section of this project, I reconsider theories of sadomasochism in order to build a conceptual tool that moves beyond erotic identities (e.g., the Sadist, the Masochist) and into erotic forms (e.g., suspense, narration, contracts). In the second section, I turn sadomasochism’s erotics of form to some of the most canonical works of the nineteenth-century novel, exploring suspense and plotting in Wilkie Collins and Mary Elizabeth Braddon, narration and power in Charles Dickens, and narrative ethics and contracts in Charlotte Brontë. This project seeks not only to explore the peculiar affinity between sadomasochism and the Victorian, but also to understand how the Victorian novel contributed to the cultural conditions that made possible sadomasochism’s eventual codification through sexology and psychoanalysis. “Useful Dangers” offers sadomasochism as a unique relational dynamic for clarifying legacies of power that weave together texts, histories, and ideologies into a painful pleasure that marks that very discipline established to study nineteenth-century Victorian literature. ❧ Revisiting theories of sadomasochism offers evidence for a methodological move away from sexual identities and toward an erotics of form, and in this move, sadomasochism can be understood as not only a way to categorize erotic types that function through binary relationships – pain/pleasure, dominance/submission, fantasy/reality – but also around a multi-dimensional, multi-relational eroticization of forms. While I bring together discourses on sadomasochism from the fields of psychoanalysis, feminism, queer studies, contemporary popular writing, and nineteenth- century sexology, this project builds on the theoretical moves made by Michel Foucault in his late interviews, where he describes sadomasochism as a “creative enterprise” that relies upon a “strategic” play with forms of social power. However, in extending this reading of social forms back to nineteenth-century sexology, this project challenges interpretations of Foucault’s History of Sexuality that dismiss the relevance of early sexological and psychoanalytic discourse. From nineteenth-century sexological theory to writings by contemporary queer and feminist s/m practitioners, sadomasochism appears again and again through a play with social forms that reveals its fundamental process to be an eroticization of form itself. Beyond the stereotypical content – the dungeon and the whip, the pleasure and the pain – sadomasochism disrupts what counts as ‘normal’ sexual pleasure through excessive attention to mundane forms (the sheer white shift, an oiled leather saddle), and structures this disruption around an intensification of attention to social forms of power (spaces such as barracks, libraries, and nurseries, roles such as tutor and pupil, duchess, butler and valet). I define sadomasochism not so much as a sexual practice, but as a queer practice that, paradoxically, simulates problematic forms of power in order to reveal them as form itself, empty and arbitrary. ❧ “Useful Dangers” challenges the standard application of sadomasochism in the analysis of literature, which tends toward the categorization of psychological identity, reading for dialectical themes of pain and pleasure, or dominance and submission. This project also challenges standard queer readings of literature that look for queerness in object choice rather than structures of desire. This means that Esther Summerson in Bleak House is almost always read as an exasperatingly self-deprecatory submissive; that Lady Audley has an unhealthy amount of power and aggression – sadism – that must be punished through her institutionalization; and that Jane Eyre’s desire to submit to Rochester is a patriarchal pressure that must be overcome. My reading of sadomasochism in Bleak House, then, focuses on Esther Summerson’s character development as arising from power dynamics created through her simultaneous position as the first-person narrator, Esther Woodcourt. I challenge the typical, gendered division of the narration in Bleak House by reading for stylistic overlaps between the two narrators. The narration in Bleak House is not necessarily a double narration in the sense of two narrators (the female first-person and the male omniscient); rather, I argue that it is doubly narrated through a switching Esther, who plays both the dominant and submissive. Reading the narration’s formal erotics draws a more complex picture of the relationship between patriarchal ideologies and narratorial techniques. ❧ I consider the power dynamics between reader and texts more closely in analyzing the excessively plotted forms of delay in Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret and Wilkie Collins’ The Woman in White. While plots, by their very nature, demand a certain amount of delay and anticipation – marking all texts, to some extent, with the dynamic of pleasure and pain – this chapter considers the excessively plotted forms of delay that perpetuate pleasure in the movement of delay itself, rather than in the moment of discovery. The intersection between this sadomasochistic plotting and themes of female desire, individualism, and institutionalization, allows us to investigate how the pleasure of these novels originates in and plays with problematic patriarchal ideologies. I expand upon the intersection between the erotics of sadomasochism and patriarchal ideologies in my analysis of Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre: An Autobiography and The Professor. Unlike novels by Collins, Braddon, and Dickens, Brontë’s texts deal directly with themes of erotic dominance and submission. The primary danger of novels such as Jane Eyre and The Professor is, therefore, the pairing of the powerfully affective formal devices (such as her unique first-person narration) with an erotics of domination and submission often depicted through a rhetoric of orientalism, imperialism, and nationalism. Both proponents and opponents of Brontë’s novels build their arguments by precluding the possibility of Charlotte Brontë engaging with the dangers of eroticized power dynamics in deliberate and thoughtful ways. Instead of negotiating sadomasochism out of her novels, I consider how these erotics are negotiated within Brontë’s works as an ethical mode of empowerment. In my reading, the practice of active and conscious submission is not incompatible with feminist principles of agency and embodiment. ❧ The first extended study of sadomasochism as a theory of peculiar narrative pleasures, this project illustrates how some of the most canonical novels of the nineteenth century built their pleasure upon a play with problematic ideologies. Instead of dismissing sadomasochism because it treads too close for comfort to the symbols of enduring oppressions, I take seriously the useful danger of sadomasochism to complicate the relationship between narrative pleasure and power, in an erotics of form that I bring to the level of the text. Through a deliberate edge-play with ideology, sadomasochism reveals how the canonical pleasures of Victorian narrative function in tandem with bad erotic form. |
| Keyword | sadomasochism; erotic; form; narrative; Victorian; queer theory |
| Language | English |
| Part of collection | University of Southern California dissertations and theses |
| Publisher (of the original version) | University of Southern California |
| Place of publication (of the original version) | Los Angeles, California |
| Publisher (of the digital version) | University of Southern California. Libraries |
| Provenance | Electronically uploaded by the author |
| Type | texts |
| Legacy record ID | usctheses-m |
| Rights | Davis, Mary Ann |
| Access conditions | The author retains rights to his/her dissertation, thesis or other graduate work according to U.S. copyright law. Electronic access is being provided by the USC Libraries in agreement with the author, as the original true and official version of the work, but does not grant the reader permission to use the work if the desired use is covered by copyright. It is the author, as rights holder, who must provide use permission if such use is covered by copyright. The original signature page accompanying the original submission of the work to the USC Libraries is retained by the USC Libraries and a copy of it may be obtained by authorized requesters contacting the repository e-mail address given. |
| Repository name | University of Southern California Digital Library |
| Repository address | USC Digital Library, University of Southern California, University Park Campus MC 7002, 106 University Village, Los Angeles, California 90089-7002, USA |
| Repository email | cisadmin@usc.edu |
| Archival file | uscthesesreloadpub_Volume4/etd-DavisMaryA-1143.pdf |
Description
| Title | Page 1 |
| Full text | USEFUL DANGERS: THE EROTICS OF FORM, SADOMASOCHISM, VICTORIAN NARRATIVE by Mary Ann Davis A Dissertation Presented to the FACULTY OF THE USC GRADUATE SCHOOL UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY (ENGLISH) August 2012 Copyright 2012 Mary Ann Davis |
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