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Useful dangers: the erotics of form, sadomasochism, Victorian narrative

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Useful dangers: the erotics of form, sadomasochism, Victorian narrative

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Content 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 ii For D. R. — To be with the one I love and to think of something else: this is how I have my best ideas. —Roland Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text iii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS It is the custom to build thanks in climactic order, and being a lover of narrative, I have followed this tradition. But, in reality, it is the accumulation of all of these thanks that made it possible for me to think, to write, to revise: this has been, therefore a process of gratitude. To the Department of English at the University of Southern California for always advocating for its graduate students. For a generous summer stipend. For being brave enough not to be too limited by disciplines and historical periods. For allowing me to take poetry workshops. To the USC Graduate School for the award of an Anna Bing Arnold Endowed Fellowship. To my committee, always available and ready with generous, rigorous words: Kara Keeling, Susan McCabe, and James Kincaid. To the professors whose classes I deeply loved and who always encouraged and pushed me in my provocative ways: Alice Echols, Bruce Smith, David Rollo, Tania Modleski, Margaret Russett, Jack Halberstam, Carol Muske-Dukes, and David St. John. To Flora Ruiz for endless advice, patience, and the perfect office in which to rest. To Hilary Schor, who challenged me with her skepticism and always reminded me that the writing of ideas is just as important as the ideas themselves. And who put Jane Eyre on the syllabus. Without the support of a lively, ever-changing graduate student body, at USC and beyond, I quite simply would have given up long ago: there are too many folks to name. To Katherine Karlin for being the first to have coffee with me; Carla Scaglione for her iv beauty and humor, and for teaching me that there’s a difference between dressing “to match” and dressing “to go together.” To Pearl Chaozon Bauer, for laughing, pranking, cruise directing. To Barbara Mello for driving me home during rush hour, for having the loveliest garden I have ever seen, and for always welcoming me into her home. Too many thanks go to Karen Tongson for being, in her words, a “full-service” chair, for giving me encouragement to commit to this peculiar sort of project. Your talent at bringing people together and bringing ideas together is unmatched. To my grandmother, Mabel Louise Tharp, may you rest in peace and live through all that I do. To my mother, Donna Jean Davis, for teaching me over and over to love what I do and to do it well – and that doing something well generates a passion all its own. All that I have I owe to you both, for working together to raise me in love. And to Ricky: for being committed to the whole of the process, and for growing the parts of me into the whole. v TABLE OF CONTENTS Dedication ii Acknowledgments iii Abstract vi Chapter One: Negotiations 1 An Introduction Chapter Two: The “Creative Enterprise” of Sadomasochism 41 Nineteenth-Century Sexology, Deleuze, and Foucault Chapter Three: “The Icy Stillness of Perpetual Suspense” 77 Plotting with Mary Elizabeth Braddon and Wilkie Collins Chapter Four: Esther’s “Tidy Pain” 114 Narration and Power in Charles Dickens’s Bleak House Chapter Five: “On the Extreme Brink” with Charlotte Brontë: 155 Jane Eyre, The Professor, and the Erotic Ethics of Sadomasochism Conclusion: Aftercare 223 An Afterword Bibliography 226 vi ABSTRACT: Useful Dangers: The Erotics of Form, Sadomasochism, Victorian Narrative 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. vii 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 viii 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 ix 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. x 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. 1 CHAPTER ONE: NEGOTIATIONS An Introduction Let me, then, jump ahead here for a moment along the simplest of trajectories to hand, the directly sadomasochistic one whose perversion lies in its exact, it retardataire simplicity. —Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick 1 Comet with a ponderous phosphorescent tail: reasons-obsessions, you cross the nineteenth century with a grenade of truth in your hand, and explode on arrival at our times. —Octavio Paz 2 The here of this project on sadomasochism and the erotics of form is not the Marquis de Sade or Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, although these monolithic figures exist at its edges. Here, there is a host of adjectives that should send me running: immature, obvious, perverse, simplistic, with oppressive, patriarchal, racist, and homophobic not far behind. Yet retardataire is a term I invite in, naively and then stubbornly behind the times, late-comer, late-bloomer, outmoded, the passing of a fad. Retardataire, these days, is often the trajectory assigned to sadomasochism, both the term itself and its associated practices. 3 1 “A Poem is Being Written,” Tendencies (Durham: Duke UP, 1993) 187. 2 “The Prisoner,” An Erotic Beyond: Sade (San Diego: Harcort Brace, 1998) 3. 3 Elizabeth Freeman and Patrick D. Hopkins offer the best analyses of the sudden deflation of critical and political sparring over sadomasochistic erotic practices. Only a brief moment in her excellent chapter on the peculiar “erotic time machine” of sadomasochism (138), Freeman’s discussion connects queer theory’s sudden disinterest in sadomasochism to it being viewed as a “sociosexual and critical fad, whose fading 2 How else to increase this backwardness but a step back into theory and into Victorian narrative? While most recent studies of sadomasochism center in the fields of cultural and sexuality studies – foregoing theory in favor of social science – this project returns sadomasochism to the realm of narrative 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 an 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 narration and power in Charles Dickens, suspense and plotting in Wilkie Collins and Mary Elizabeth Braddon, 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 Victorian narrative forms contributed to the cultural conditions that made possible sadomasochism’s eventual codification through sexology and psychoanalysis. “Useful Dangers” offers sadomasochism as a unique from academic interest ought to be viewed with relief” and as “critical and . . . political progress” (141). Hopkins makes a similar point about sadomasochism as a critical “fad” within feminism, and casts valid doubt on the assumption that less discussion of sadomasochism means the erotic practice is more accepted (117). The sixteen years separating these publications seems evidence enough of sadomasochism’s continuing ability to fascinate and frustrate. See Freeman, Time Binds: Queer Temporalities, Queer Histories (Durham: Duke UP, 2010) and Hopkins, “Rethinking Sadomasochism: Feminism, Interpretation, and Simulation,” Hypatia 9.1 (Winter 1994): 116-141. 3 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 relational eroticization of forms. While I bring together discourses on sadomasochism from the fields of psychoanalysis, feminism, philosophy, 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 4 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. In these opening negotiations, I will trace out what seems to be the “simplest of trajectories to hand,” but which instantly (and I mean this literally) emerges as quite the opposite. I begin with an extensive, often ponderous, exploration of the emergence of “sadism” and “masochism” in the Western lexicon, as part of the developing discipline of nineteenth-century sexology, before shifting to the subsequent terminological grapplings in both academic and popular communities. As many of these terminological choices are made on the basis of political affiliation, I next revisit the complicated critiques offered by feminists, queer theorists, and contemporary practitioners, which circle sadomasochism’s problematic play with traumatic ideologies. Finally, I shift my consideration of sadomasochism’s useful dangers to survey how criticism of nineteenth- century narrative and culture has dealt with its perverse erotic stepchild. This project engages with the familiar connection between sadomasochistic erotics and the nineteenth century, which can be seen in the lexical origins of the term in the nineteenth-century disciplines of sexology and psychoanalysis; in the increased interest among the Victorians in the work of the Marquis de Sade; in the fact that Sacher-Masoch’s novels are entrenched in nineteenth-century culture and politics; and in notorious Victorian literary figures such as Algernon Charles Swinburne. While this introduction will range beyond the nineteenth-century, my goal of tracing out an alternate trajectory of 5 sadomasochism is to better understand how this specific erotics achieved more cultural cohesion (though still rather intangible) during the mid- to late-nineteenth century, and in turn how this cohesion was reflected in the evolving narrative forms of Victorian culture. My purpose is thus somewhat paradoxical: in complicating the trajectory sadomasochism charts from the nineteenth century to our contemporary moment, I will simultaneously arrest the movement described in Paz’s lyric, and suspend us in the nineteenth century. I want to redress the not-uncommon idea that any study of sadomasochism, if it’s going to do anything new or useful at all, achieves direction and magnitude only through a connection with the present. To put the goal of my project more abstractly: I aim to upset trajectories through the creation of suspended affinities. The trajectory of the erotics of sadomasochism is not simple nor is it, perhaps, when we get right down to it, even a trajectory. The movement of the erotics of sadomasochism is not the burning propulsion of the comet. It might be best considered, ironically, in somewhat Deleuzian terms. In his massively influential essay “Coldness and Cruelty,” Gilles Deleuze offers what I consider an opportunity, yet which he considered the phrasing of a critique of the compound term sadomasochism: “When we are given two stories, it is always possible to bridge the gaps that separate them, but in the process we arrive at a third story of a different quality from the other two.” 4 While Deleuze is primarily concerned with dismantling the third story of sadomasochism told by psychoanlysis, and clarifying the difference between the two, sadism and masochism, I maintain that there is indeed a third story of a different quality 4 Gilles Deleuze, Masochism: Coldness and Cruelty; Venus in Furs (New York: Zone Books, 1991) 108. 6 from these pure forms, a story that has evolved into the version being played by contemporary practitioners, but that begins in the nineteenth century. RETARDATAIRE There is an obvious reason why we might suspend a study of sadomasochistic erotics in the nineteenth century: if we wish to find a terminological origin for “sadomasochism,” it’s here. Of course, what we might call “sadomasochistic” practices and texts existed before the nineteenth century, but did so largely without a unifying term. Although the compound term ‘sadomasochism’ did not emerge until 1913 in a work by Viennese psychoanalyst Isidor Isaak Sadger, Über den sado-masochistischen Komplex, the individual terms ‘sadism’ and ‘masochism’ were coined in 1886 by German neurologist Richard Von Krafft-Ebing, in his Psychopathia Sexualis. From the moment these terms entered the Western lexicon, however – replicated first by sexology and then by psychoanalysis – they begin to describe an erotics beyond what is depicted in the works of Sade and Sacher-Masoch, as well as beyond the endless categorizing attempts of sexology. The inadequacy of the compound term sadomasochism has been famously and extensively critiqued by Gilles Deleuze, but the inadequacy of the individual terms ‘sadism’ and ‘masochism’ was immediately noted by Krafft-Ebing’s contemporaries. As Alison Moore has shown in her extensive analysis of these neologisms, other terms such as ‘algolagnia’ and ‘algophilia’ were favored, “since the practices of the Marquis de Sade included too many other elements to give a clear 7 definition” of the specific desire combining pleasure and pain. 5 The works of Sade – and, I would suggest, the works of Sacher-Masoch – “appeared to very few people at the end of the nineteenth century as a likely source for understanding the set of desires that now captivated psychiatric thought, even when Krafft-Ebing’s neologism was linguistically replicated.” 6 Contemporary theorists have continued to problematize sexology’s terminology, attributing the general fungibility of the terms – their ability to be used and shaped to fit the needs of any number of purposes, any sort of study, any type of character, and most especially the ease with which they are applied to describe nearly any phenomenon that seems to be linking pain with pleasure, regardless of the resulting oversimplification – to their connections with aesthetic works that are not seen to be representative of real-world conditions. 7 Studying sadomasochism, therefore, has always 5 Moore, “The Invention of Sadism? The Limits of Neologisms in the History of Sexuality,” Sexualities 12.4 (Aug. 2009): 492-3. See also Alison Moore, “Rethinking Gendered Perversion and Degeneration in Visions of Sadism and Masochism, 1886-1930,” Journal of the History of Sexuality 18.1 (Jan. 2009): 138- 57 for an in-depth discussion of the gendering of sadism and masochism in early sexology. For a critique of Krafft-Ebing’s choice in naming a psychosexual perversion (masochism) after a living novelist, and its ramifications for Sacher-Masoch’s reputation, see Alison Moore, “Recovering Difference in the Delusion Dichotomy of Masochism-Without-Sadism,” Angelaki 14.3 (2009): 27-43. See Ivan Crozier, “Philosophy in the English Boudoir: Havelock Ellis, Love and Pain, and Sexological Discourses on Algophilia,” Journal of the History of Sexuality 13.3 (July 2004): 275-305, for a discussion of algolagnia and algophilia, although he seems to be interchanging these terms with ‘sadism’ and ‘masochism.’ 6 Moore, “The Invention of Sadism?” 493. 7 Susan Derwin, in an article entitled “Naming Pains,” argues that the creation of the term sado-masochism rested on a fantasy, which she links with the tendency of psychoanalysis, especially in its beginnings, to “rest” upon literature. This naming procedure becomes unethical, she states, at the very moment Krafft- Ebing “obfuscated the fictitious nature of the texts associated with the terms” by appropriating not characters from the texts (as in Electra, Eros, Narcissus, and Oedipus, there the imaginary origins are clear) but the proper names of living authors. Derwin argues that this elision adds a false sense of reality to a perversion that is characterized by fictional texts, and this falseness affects the entire history of the study of sado-masochism: If the history of the concepts of sadism and masochism . . . is implicated in perverse acts of appropriation, I would argue that such appropriation is an effect of the concepts it is trying to command. That is, the creation of these psychoanalytic concepts according to imaginary models is 8 demanded looking beyond Sade and Sacher-Masoch, as well as thinking beyond the terms generated by nineteenth-century sexology. Despite these problematizations, Krafft-Ebing’s neologisms have proved surprisingly portable, which characteristic is both curse and blessing. The immediate distancing from the works of Sade and Masoch during the nineteenth century suggests not that we abandon the terms as hopelessly flawed, but that we consider how the terms have always referenced a more complicated erotics than is usually assumed. As my next chapter will show, as soon as sexology and psychoanalysis generated and “replicated” these terms, a concept and erotics beyond Sade and Sacher-Masoch entered the world. And this beyondness is why I have chosen to maintain usage of the term ‘sadomasochism.’ The term has always extended beyond attempts to categorize and describe. It has always been much more than what it seems, on the surface, which mirrors the practices of sadomasochism – always much more than they appear to be. My intervention in understanding the precise erotics of sadomasochism is to consider how embodied practices clarify and complicate the theoretical dynamic of sadomasochism we bring to an analysis of aesthetic texts. intimately bound up with the masochistic process itself, while the ensuing dissimulation of the origins of the models in fantasy characterizes the operation of sadism. (475) See Derwin, “Naming Pains,” MLN 108. 3, German Issue (Apr., 1993): 472-483. Alison Moore, in “Recovering Difference,” makes a similar argument against Deleuze, who doesn’t question the linkage between psychoanalysis and literature, but urges that if we are going to base a perversion on a literary work, we must approach that literary work as if describing a symptomatology. 9 The apparent inadequacy of the terms ‘sadism,’ ‘masochism,’ and ‘sadomasochism’ have fueled the development of alternatives for articulating the multitude of practices associated, however much at a slant, with the pain-pleasure complex. Mostly to distance consensual radical sadomasochistic practices from associations with the criminal and the pathological, the majority of contemporary practitioners use terms such as ‘s/m,’ ‘d/s’ (dominance and submission), or ‘BDSM,’ with variations on capitalization and hyphenation (e.g., S/M or SM, sm or s/m, S/m etc. [in the latter case, the capitalization of only the ‘S’ symbolizes the position of power]). 8 ‘BDSM’ is the compound acronym favored by most contemporary practitioners, referring to the overlapping set of pairs, Bondage and Discipline (BD), Dominance and Submission (DS), Sadism and Masochism (SM). In contemporary subcultural practices, the way that SM operates within the compound acronym is to refer to BDSM’s “physical aspects,” 9 specifically the derivation of pleasure from pain. Although it is acknowledged 8 Pat Califia is one of the few practitioners who maintains a claim to this more traditional terminology (he identifies as a sadist who is into sadomasochism) while identifying its negative connotations, stating that “[t]he term sadomasochism has . . . been debased, primarily by the mass media, clinical psychology, and the antipornography movement” (171). See Califia, “Feminism and Sadomasochism” (1980), Public Sex: The Culture of Radical Sex, 2 nd Edition (San Francisco: Cleis P, 2000) 168-180. As Robin Bauer explains in a footnote, “BDSM” is often preferred over SM because the latter “overemphasizes the pain aspect and is associated with pathology.” BDSM is seen as broadening away from pain as well as reclaiming power, being a “nonpathological self-definition originating within the BDSM community” (249). See Bauer, “Transgressive and Transformative Gendered Sexual Practices and White Privileges: The Case of the Dyke / Trans BDSM Communities,” Women’s Studies Quarterly 36.3-4 (2008): 233-53. For a nuanced discussion of the connection between SM and leather communities, see Gayle Rubin’s comments in her interview with Judith Butler. Gayle Rubin with Judith Butler, “Interview: Sexual Traffic,” differences: A Journal of Cultural Studies, 6.2-3 (1994): 63-99. 9 “BDSM.” Wikipedia: The Free Encyclopedia. Oct. 15, 2009, <http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=BDSM&oldid=312187467> 10 that Discipline can involve physical pain, BD and DS try to capture the more psychological elements of play. The terminological evolution from ‘sadomasochism’ to ‘BDSM’ has been in large part to counter the gross generalizations and oversimplifications seen to be propagated by sexology and psychoanalysis. Yet even with the expansion of options in the compound acronym, it is widely acknowledged that settling on a succinct definition that encompasses the various erotic practices of the various groups that identify themselves as BDSM is impossible. One of the most thorough and objective discussions of BDSM can be found on the web-based free-content encyclopedia project, Wikipedia, which states early on that “[b]eyond these basic tenets of eroticism, and of purposefully unequal roles within an activity or an interpersonal relationship, there is almost nothing which universally unites all the disparate subcultures which are grouped under the umbrella term BDSM.” 10 Despite this qualification, the entry gives some initial guidelines for complicating the potential analytics of sadomasochism: the defining markers of sadomasochism are eroticism, rather than sexualization, and power dynamics, rather than pain/pleasure. Academic studies, particularly those interested in the literary and the aesthetic, have tended to avoid the acronym BDSM in favor of s/m or, more often, to divide the compound term ‘sadomasochism,’ focusing in overwhelming numbers on masochism 10 Ibid. Recent edits of the “BDSM” Wikipedia entry have resulted in the removal of this statement. 11 rather than sadism. 11 Other academic studies focusing on the literary and aesthetic detach themselves more completely from these terms by focusing instead on ‘pain and pleasure,’ ‘erotic pain,’ ‘erotic power dynamics,’ etc. 12 However, I persist in using sadomasochism because, first, as I have already suggested, while ‘sadism’ and ‘masochism’ were culled from literary figures, their deployment in early sexology always referred to more than the pain/pleasure complex, even if these threads ran counter to the surface intentions of sexological studies. Certainly the pathological and criminal connotations of sexology’s sadomasochism are problematic – still, the term is rich with alternate meanings. Second, I don’t wish to entirely refuse a historical relationship with the disciplines of sexology and psychoanalysis, or, by extension, with the period of time that formed the context for the generation of these disciplines – the nineteenth century. Finally, I will argue that the compound term sadomasochism does not necessarily describe sadism and masochism as “mirror opposites” of one another; rather, the compounding of sadism and masochism symbolizes the relational nature of these erotics, existing as two fundamentally different worldviews put into relation with one another. This is a different circulation of power than is typically attributed to sadomasochism. Unlike generalizations of sadomasochism that assume this practice to be a violent, nonconsensual, and therefore deeply problematic 11 Two ethnographic studies published in 2011 are important exceptions. Both are intent on delineating how BDSM functions in the lived world, rather than the imaginative or theoretical one. Both are from the social sciences. See Margot Weiss, Technologies of Pleasure: BDSM and the Circuits of Sexuality (Durham: Duke UP, 2011) and Staci Newmahr, Playing on the Edge: Sadomasochism, Risk and Intimacy (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 2011). 12 While my argument will deploy the term sadomasochism, when in discussion with other theorists and critics, I will use whatever version of the term “sadomasochism” they deploy in their own texts, in order to minimize any potential distraction from the conceptual play at hand. 12 replication of traumatic ideologies, I will show that the erotics of sadomasochism has the potential to move power between and among, always relational and cognizant of that relationality. In other words, I am letting sadomasochism – in its succinct referentiality, with all its contradiction, paradox, inadequacy, its connotative power, for better or for worse – mean all of these things, signify every complexity. I do not intend for it to be a universal and generalizing term. I mean for it to contain multiple particularities. I mean to transform it into the more complicated analytical tool it has always been. This, then, is the perverse pleasure of “Useful Dangers”: an intensification of attention to sadomasochism and its peculiar erotics, as it has been circulating in the world since the nineteenth century. Transforming / revealing sadomasochism requires some work on your part. If you haven’t yet done so, set aside all the troubling assumptions, emotions, and images that come to mind when you hear the term sadomasochism. Break from the simplistic view of sadomasochism as the practice (perverted, depraved, abusive, obsessive) 13 of deriving pleasure from pain. While this dialectic remains a significant component of BDSM practice, the types of pains and their specific pleasures are so various that this image is almost always inadequate. 14 Let us also relinquish our attachment to the stereotypical 13 See Terry Hoople, “Conflicting Visions: SM, feminism, and the law. A problem of representation,” The Canadian Journal of Law and Society, 11.1 (Spring 1996): 177-186, for an in-depth discussion of the real world issues facing SM practitioners who choose to come out of the closet about their erotic practices. 14 Assumptions about sadomasochism also generate inaccuracies about its practitioners, ‘duped’ masochists/submissives/bottoms being viewed with a condescending sympathy while ‘violent’ sadists/dominants/tops are attacked with vitriolic feeling. Pat Califia offers a cutting description of these generalizations: “The uninitiated associate masochism with incompetence, lack of assertiveness, and self- 13 sensory scene of sadomasochism: the poorly-lit, grimy and damp dungeons, the repetitive black and the monotony of latex and leather, whips and chains and cuffs, etc. Again, this is an enduring iconography of sadomasochistic practice; but even highly problematic pop cultural representations make an attempt to move beyond such stereotypes. The trajectory of my project, therefore, is not only passé, but also backward- looking. However, as Alison Moore has noted, this is a backward glance that can only be achieved from a contemporary position on sadomasochism as “non-pathological.” In her exploration of the “invention” of sadism at the end of the nineteenth-century, she states, “Such an analysis is indeed perhaps only possible from the standpoint of an age in which self-defined sadomasochistic authors . . . have defended a new version of sadomasochistic desire as a form of psychologically adjusted sexual play between legal and consenting subjects.” 15 I can only re-read the always already multifaceted presence of sadomasochism in the late-nineteenth-century disciplines of sexology and psychiatry, and draw trajectories to the contemporary moment, because I am benefitting from the mindset of my own particular cultural and historical moment. In drawing a new story of the erotics of sadomasochism, I take my lead from a number of contemporary queer historians and theorists, particularly Valerie Rohy, Valerie Traub, and Judith Halberstam, all of who have, at one time or another, however briefly, acknowledged that understanding the erotics of a particular historical moment cannot be done in isolation destruction. But sadism is associated with chainsaw murders. A fluffy sweater type listening to a masochist may feel sorry for her but will be terrified of me.” See Califia, “A Secret Side of Lesbian Sexuality” (1979), Public Sex: The Culture of Radical Sex, 2 nd Edition (San Francisco: Cleis P, 2000) 160. 15 Moore, “The Invention of Sadism?” 487. 14 from other moments, particularly the moment in which the critic currently does her thinking. 16 When I take a more complicated understanding of sadomasochism back to the nineteenth century, know that this is a strategic move on my part. I mean to commit the anachronism. Anachronism is perhaps, in fact, the main movement and texture of the erotics of sadomasochism. Resonating with the accusations of retardataire leveled at studies of sadomasochism, anachronism generates a similar fear of “retrogression,” especially among queer theorists and historians. 17 But I’m getting ahead of myself. USEFUL DANGERS We have already encountered one of the major complications for understanding sadomasochism as an erotics of form: that the fundamental dynamic is not one of pain and pleasure, but one of power. To think of sadomasochism in terms of power both clarifies and complicates. For it is on the idea of the exercise of power that the majority of critics of sadomasochism base their arguments, and it is here that we can begin a re- reading of sadomasochism’s specific erotic play with ideology. Despite the relative quiet around sadomasochism for the past twenty years or so, this is not a sign that things have 16 Here I am referring primarily to Valerie Rohy’s article “Ahistorical,” where she quotes Traub’s idea in The Renaissance of Lesbianism of “strategic anachronism” and Halberstam’s notion in Female Masculinity of “perverse presentism” (Rohy 71). See Rohy, “Ahistorical,” GLQ 12.1 (2006): 61-83. 17 Rohy, “Ahistorical,” 67: “[I]t is the old idea of queer retrogression that most clearly echoes in the complaint against scholarly anachronism.” 15 been resolved. 18 My strategic analysis of the erotics of sadomasochism is deeply dependent on the rich field of feminist and queer scholarship on this non-normative sexual practice, particularly its detractors. Any one writing about sadomasochism from a non-pathologizing, affirmative perspective continues to run up against the same counterarguments posed by radical feminism and, to a lesser extent, critical race theorists. In order to understand this complicated play with ideology, it is necessary to turn to the Feminist Sex Wars of the late 1970s and early 1980s. Occurring mainly between two groups of feminist activists and academics – the radical feminists and the feminist sex radicals – these wars took place over the purposes and manifestations of female erotic pleasure, the most intense sparring surrounding female masochism and/or lesbian sadomasochism. On one pole of the debate, radical feminists viewed women practicing sadomasochism as irresponsibly reiterating the very oppressive structures of patriarchy, classism, and racism against which the feminist movement had rightly pitted itself. At the other pole stood the feminist sex radicals, who believed that submitting one’s erotic pleasures to politics undermined the goals of the feminist movement to empower women as full human beings with complex desires. 19 In 18 See fn. 3 19 Two anthologies capture this division: Against Sadomasochism: A Radical Feminist Analysis was published in 1982 and edited by Robin Ruth Linden, Darlene R. Pagano, Diana E. H. Russell, and Susan Leigh Star (East Palo Alto CA: Frog in the Well P). Its contributors are diverse, including treatises from such star academics and writers as Audre Lourde, Bat-Ami Bar On, Alice Walker, and Judith Butler (as Judy Butler) and letters from “former” masochists and sadomasochists. Some notable essays from this collection include “Racism and Sadomasochism: A Conversation with Two Black Lesbians” (Karen Sims and Rose Mason with Darlene Pagano) and “Lesbian S & M: The Politics of Dis-illusion” (Judy Butler). At the other pole is the anthology published by the lesbian S/M collective Samois in 1982, Coming to Power: Writings and Graphics on Lesbian S/M, 2 nd Revised edition (San Francisco: Alyson Books). 16 “Upsetting an Applecart: Difference, Desire and Lesbian Sadomasochism,” Susan Ardill and Sue O’Sullivan offer a perspective of the Sex Wars from within the feminist movement, through a discourse analysis of the debate over SM groups that occurred at the London Lesbian and Gay Centre during 1985. While these authors cite the familiar arguments on both sides of the debate, their analysis is unique in that it contextualizes the SM debate in a very particular moment of the feminist movement: the attempt to build coalitions with other oppressed populations. In this specific historical context, SM groups, with their blatant citations of traumatic and oppressive ideologies of power – police, Nazis, etc. – “became the walking repositories of racism, fascism and male violence.” Ardill and O’Sullivan provide a cutting critique of the “opportunistic use of race, class, anti-semitism and disability” by groups of radical feminists as “stage props of the central drama” of patriarchal oppression. SM groups were the main targets to play out this drama. Radical feminists deployed “their hierarchies of oppression, their collections of ‘most oppressed,’ and attach[ed] them to the practice of SM sex – thereby ‘proving’ how dangerous, disgusting and politically incorrect SM is.” 20 As Ardill and O’Sullivan note, the invocation of other oppressed groups by white radical feminists led to some Black lesbians resisting anti-racist terminology on both sides of the debate, because it was clearly dominated by and originating in a white perspective. 21 As an interview in 20 Susan Ardill and Sue O’Sullivan, ““Upsetting an Applecart: Difference, Desire and Lesbian Sadomasochism,” Feminist Review 80, Reflections on 25 Years (2005): 98-126. 112. 21 See Weiss’s chapter “Sex Play and Social Power: Reading the Effective Circuit” in Techniques of Pleasure for an extensive discussion of how the contemporary BDSM community continues to be dominated by a white perspective, by whiteness as “a social logic,” to the point that practitioners of color “felt trapped between a racist white BDSM community and a kink-phobic racial or ethnic community” (193). 17 Against Sadomasochism maintains, SM is the problem of white women. Although some Black feminists felt it was important to engage with the debate over sadomasochism in order to bring attention to its “racist implications,” other Black women refused to engage in the discussion mainly because they saw the practice of sadomasochism as perpetuating a deep anti-coalition thread. As Karen Kims states, “it does not speak to building a stronger movement . . ., it does not speak to the racism within the women’s movement. It does not speak to the homophobia in the women’s community – it doesn’t progress us. And I do think it’s a white women’s issue. . . . It comes out of a luxury I don’t have.” 22 Feminist sex radicals were unable to successfully respond to these valid critiques because of a fundamentally different view of to what extent sex should be viewed as a public or private matter. In a recent conversation at the ONE Institute, Gayle Rubin, one of the leaders of the feminist sex radical position, bemoaned that both feminist perspectives never were able to engage in a dialogue about the politics of SM. 23 As feminism attempted active coalition-building, the complex political play of SM was an emotional flashpoint that both the radical feminists and the feminist sex radicals seemed unwilling to let remain an uncertain, ambivalent practice. For dialogue to happen, however, as many academics and activists have noted, the binarized positions of “sex-as-politics” and “sex-as-individual- expression” must be set aside. The complex, often problematic manifestations of BDSM 22 Karen Sims and Rose Mason, with Darlene Pagano. “Racism and Sadomasochism: A Conversation With Two Black Lesbians,” Against Sadomasochism, 99-105. 23 “‘Thinking Sex’ in 2012: Gayle Rubin in conversation with Alice Echols and Ellen DuBois.” Public Talk. ONE Institute. University of Southern California. 16 April 2012. 18 practice in fact show us that sex is both of these at once – even the most ‘natural’ and vanilla of events. This, then, is the useful danger: BDSM practice reveals the forms of sex itself – all sex – but in its excess and exaggeration, it showcases the problematic intersections between sex and social power. BDSM’s forms – its objects, scenes, roles – adds incongruity to sex in order to reveal all sex as a form. Margot Weiss describes this play as a circuit. Her 2011 ethnographic study of the pansexual BDSM community in the San Francisco Bay Area, Techniques of Pleasure, engages in a deep analysis of the complex play of sadomasochism, as “a conduit between individual and social bodies, a circuit between the subjective (private desire, identity, individual autonomy, fantasy) and the socioeconomic (public community, social reality, collectivity, social power).” 24 In describing this complex circuitry, Weiss is able to “reframe the analysis of SM away from a binary” through a “lens trained on ambivalence.” 25 She succeeds in moving us beyond the polarized debate over sadomasochism, arguing that SM is neither a replication of nor an emancipation from oppressive social ideologies and narratives. 26 24 Weiss, Techniques of Pleasure, 30. As potential evidence of the lingering fascination of sadomasochism – as well as of their increased visibility through pop culture and consumerism – another ethnographic study was published during the same year: Newmahr’s Playing on the Edge: Sadomasochism, Risk, Intimacy. Robin Bauer’s article “Transgressive and Transformative Gendered Sexual Practices and White Privileges: The Case of the Dyke / Trans BDSM Communities” foregrounds many of the ideas found in these two longer studies. 25 Weiss, 230. 26 Weiss’s extensive analysis, in particular, of white privilege and “race-play” is one of her most important interventions. Newmahr devotes very little analysis to race-play, simply grouping it with other taboo play, under a heading titled “Ethical and Unethical” (148). Bauer briefly touches on the invisibility of whiteness in dyke and trans BDSM (245-7). The most complex personal discussion, however, is a four-part series of 19 The problem with the image of the circuit, however, is that it loses a sense of creativity, of strategy, of activity that structures the best of BDSM practices. In other words, it is too smooth. This is in part because Weiss attempts to highlight, as some SM practitioners and theorists have done before her, the “paint-by-number” feeling that has entered BDSM communities, through their increasing self-regulation and commodification. As part of larger, but always contingent, movements of neoliberalism, BDSM slips right into what is, indeed, a circuit of “late capitalism.” Weiss achieves fuel for this formulation from Thomas Weinberg’s “provocative suggestion that a large SM subculture will develop in a society that has an unequal power distribution, that has enough affluence for the development of leisure and recreational activities, and that values imagination and creativity.” 27 But, as I will suggest, the image of a circuit cannot completely describe the peculiar creativity of SM. To be sure, how can something be “radical” or “creative” if it adheres so closely to the forms of normative culture? This is the fundamental paradox of sadomasochism, and it is the inherent paradoxicality of BDSM practice that makes an analysis so tricky and yet so necessary. 28 Patrick D. Hopkins – in one of the most unbiased, thorough, and online interviews with Mollena, aka the Pervy Negress, who identifies as a Black female submissive. She is also one of Weiss’s key interviewees. See Mollena Williams “Race Play Interview, Parts 1-4,” Andrea Plaid, interviewer, Perverted Negress (blog, 2009). 27 Weiss, 12. 28 Karmen MacKendrick offers, I think, the best description of the “paradoxicality” of what she has termed “the counterpleasures,” that is, the sorts of pleasures that seem antithetical to pleasure, forms of intense pleasure that overlap again and again with manifestations of sadomasochism. (It seems she develops the term “counterpleasures” in order to extend what might be considered sadomasochistic, while I maintain use of the term because it has always already been inclusive of these “others”.) Although in defining paradoxicality, she makes a clear reference to “classical Sadism or Masochism” as opposed to 20 yet under-cited analyses of the feminist debate over sadomasochism – provides a clarifying analysis of the forms of power enacted through sadomasochism. His goal is to refute the idea that the relative quiet over the past twenty years about s/m practices is because resistance has progressed to tolerance. Hopkins maintains that arguments from the polarized sides of the debate remain the same, despite the fact that defenses of s/m have become more nuanced and articulate. 29 Writing in 1994, Hopkins gives s/m advocates a new task, which is to better articulate and interpret “context, both internal and external.” By “internal,” Hopkins seems to mean that s/m advocates and critics must understand the difference between the power dynamics in s/m scenarios and the power dynamics in oppressive societies and systems. It is the difference between “simulation” and “replication.” S/m dynamics, therefore, function in a vastly different “contextual field”: Replication implies that SM encounters merely reproduce patriarchal activity in a different physical area. Simulation implies that SM selectively replays surface patriarchal behaviors onto a different contextual field. . . . SM participants do not rape, they do rape scenes. SMists do not enslave, they do slave scenes. SMists do not kidnap, they do capture and bondage scenes. The use of the term “scenes” exposes a critical, central aspect of SM culture. SM is constructed as a performance, a staging, a production, a simulation in which participants are writers, producers, directors, actors, and audience. Importantly, this is a simulation recognized as such. contemporary practices (35), I would suggest that this is also the particular, peculiar texture of sadomasochism in contemporary practices: “To say of something that it is paradoxical is not to say that it is either true or illusory, but that its truth is unstill, that its sense is multiple and mobile. . . . Paradox moves meaning in double directions at once; it is polysensuous, or, to be Freudian, polymorphously sensuous. Paradox as polymorphously sensuous leads us (astray, seducing us) straight into the perverse” (35-6). See counterpleasures, (SUNY Ser. in Postmodern Culture, Albany, N.Y.: State U of N. Y. P), 1999. 29 Hopkins, 118. 21 Participants know they are doing a scene. They have sought out other performers. 30 Moreover, not only are performers aware that they “are doing a scene,” but it is this awareness that forms the primary erotic power of sadomasochism, as well as the primary evidence that the forms of power exercised in SM scenes are fundamentally different from the forms of power circulating in society as a whole. This does not mean that simulation is the closest the SM practitioner can get to her real desires. This does not mean that the simulation of rape is a legal stand-in for the real thing. Neither should it be taken for granted that the participants get their pleasure by getting so far into the fantasy that they feel like it is the real thing. Rather, the sadomasochist can desire the simulation itself, not as inferior copy of the real thing, not as copy of anything at all, but as simulation qua simulation. There is a specific sexual context. . . . Not because simulation is all she can get, but because the simulation itself is thrilling and satisfying. . . . The simulation is itself the goal, not a lesser copy of the goal. 31 To understand the texture of simulation is to understand how SM plays with social forms and, as a concept, it helps to define sadomasochism as an entity separate from the more classical and/or sexological versions of sadism and masochism. The feminist sex radicals were unable to explain (in Hopkins’s word, externalize) this texture of simulation; and the radical feminists were either unable or unwilling to understand the texture of simulation. 32 30 Ibid., 123. 31 Ibid., 125. 32 One direct critique from radical feminist Melinda Vadas dismisses Hopkins’ arguments in this way: “If these historical events had never occurred or could not occur (because we all had a kindness gene), the simulation would not only not be thrilling to the SMer, there would be no simulation at all because there 22 Rather than a circuit, I see sadomasochism’s erotic simulations as functioning through the dynamic of play. Weiss interprets the play perspective on BDSM as evidence of a “desire for SM sex to stand outside of social relations,” 33 which makes sense given that the early generations of pro-SM writers maintained their play had nothing to do with real-world oppressions. Pat Califia, for example, in explaining that the practice of S/M is “interested in something ephemeral – pleasure – not in economic control or forced reproduction,” states boldly that “S/M roles are not related to gender or sexual orientation or race or class.” 34 By which she seems to mean that S/M exercises a “power unconnected to privilege,” and that this is the political threat that S/M poses. In other words, the forms of race, class, gender, and sexuality embodied in S/M practice are disconnected from the institutional, oppressive forms of these identity categories. While Califia makes an intriguing and idealistic point central to understanding the particular relationality of sadomasochism, her provocative articulation feeds directly into critiques of S/M as a practice that depoliticizes pleasure by confining it solely to the realm of private fantasy. 35 would be nothing to simulate. The existence or occurrence of the SM simulation both conceptually and empirically requires the existence or occurrence of actual injustice. The experience of the simulation is mediated by the meaning of the injustices simulated. To take pleasure in the simulation is to make one’s pleasure contingent on the actual occurrence and meanings of rape, racist enslavement, and so on. Pleasures taken in this way are not feminist, and cannot be.” While Vadas is correct to note that the simulation could not exist without the original injustice, her implication that SM perpetuates the injustice is overly simplistic. Melinda Vadas, “Reply to Patrick Hopkins,” Hypatia, 10.2 (Spring 1995): 159-161. 33 Weiss 145. 34 Califia, “A Secret Side of Lesbian Sexuality,” 166. 35 See, in particular, the more nuanced comments made by Judy Butler in “Lesbian S & M: The Politics of Dis-Illusion,” and Sandra Lee Bartky, “Feminine Masochism and the Politics of Personal Transformation,” “Nagging” Questions: Feminist Ethics in Everyday Life, Dana E. Bushnell, ed. (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 1995), 361-84. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, the feminist movement, propelled by the 23 This is one of the most powerful points in Against Sadomasochism, made by Judy Butler – that sm “glorifies the life of fantasy to the point that the public realm all but disappears. . . . [S]m takes a non-reflective attitude toward sexual desire. . . . [W]e get a playing-out of sexual fantasies as if the historical and political world did not exist. Strangely enough, what emerges is a clear picture of the power dynamics characteristic of the patriarchal, historical reality that sm supposedly left behind.” 36 This argument overlaps with one made by Leo Bersani, which is that sadomasochism’s forms of power and pleasure are too conventional, too conservatively attached to the modes of dominant culture. They are an “aping” that brings into question “whether we can imagine relations of power structured differently.” 37 Although both Butler and Bersani, over the trajectory of their careers, have offered some of the most powerful theories on queer bodies, pleasures, and power, both maintain a deeply skeptical attitude toward the proclaimed “radical” sex practices of sadomasochism. The “play,” then, of BDSM, is never as transgressive or distinct from the problematic ideologies it eroticizes. Yet this paradox is, in fact, what forms the useful danger of sadomasochism. important idea that ‘the personal is political,’ often took this so far as to demand women make ‘ethical’ choices in their erotic pleasure (Butler 171), sadomasochism of course being the example of the most unethical choice. Also see Ardill and O’Sullivan for some rather hilarious yet disturbing examples of pamphlets calling for “sacrificing” sex to politics (117-8). 36 Butler, 171-2. 37 Leo Bersani, “Foucault, Freud, Fantasy, and Power,” GLQ 2 (1995): 11-33. Bersani describes what he sees as a contradiction in Foucault’s theories of power and pleasure resting on the practice of sadomasochism. The “aping” of dominant culture is, for Bersani, not fulfilling Foucault’s promise of s/m being a “creative enterprise.” 24 Whether or not BDSM practitioners recognize the paradox – and there is a clear thread, in most academic studies, urging practitioners to become more aware of the particular and problematic relationality of their erotic practices – play, as I employ the term, helps to describe the specific paradoxicality of BDSM. Attaching the idea of play to dangerous and traumatic scenes is structurally the same as creating rules and formalities around the ‘naturalness’ of sex, or eroticizing the most mundane of tasks, such as pulling weeds from a garden or ironing a school uniform. My use of play turns upon a preposition: rather than manifesting a desire to remain outside of social relations, sadomasochism’s play depends upon engaging with social relations. Play delineates less a space apart from social norms, but the specific texture, or movement, of the deep engagement with social forms. To recognize the depth of the play, and the type of the play, we must also recognize the diverse ways in which social forms are engaged. The majority of the studies of BDSM practice focus on the most provocative of scenes. 38 For example, although Margot Weiss’s study is one of the most thorough and detailed to date, covering all aspects of the community and a variety of BDSM practices, the bulk of her analysis centers on the most aggressive forms of BDSM practices, dealing with some of the most problematic social moments – Nazi play, slave auctions, and Abu Ghraib in particular. 38 I have yet to see an extensive engagement with the non-sexual (although by no means unerotic) aspects of BDSM, such as service, which is does not even merit a glossary entry in one of the most extensive and recognized manuals of BDSM, Jay Wiseman’s SM 101: A Realistic Introduction (San Francisco, Ca.: Greenery P, 1996). Extensive ethnographic studies from within the BDSM community have yet to be produced, which means that the even the most insightful analyses by Weiss are primarily from the perspective of a spectator. Newmahr, however, does take an active role in the SM community she explores, assuming primarily the role of the bottom. Her analysis is interspersed with “creative,” narrative responses to her experiences, offering a much more palpable image of SM play in all its ambivalence. 25 This focus is certainly important, as the extreme versions get the most play in popular representations, often without the explication of context advocated by Patrick D. Hopkins. While the analyses offered by these anthropological studies are much more nuanced, balanced, and objective, truly attempting to engage with the deeply ambivalent way in which BDSM eroticizes traumatic ideologies, the people detailed, scenes described, and play narrated – the emotional force – is centered on extreme versions of BDSM, in an distant echo of the case studies forming the bulk of sexology. This is a bold statement, I am aware – but there has yet to be an extensive exploration of the more mundane elements of BDSM culture. This is likely because, as Weiss has noted, a number of serious practitioners (at least in the SF Bay area) express boredom with and disdain of the more banal elements. 39 Many practitioners still attempt to preserve the fluidity, naturalness, and authenticity of their erotic play, which undermines the banal, ambivalent productivity of BDSM practice. BDSM erotics turn upon mundane forms – even when highly commodified – in order to reveal sex itself as a form, rarely fluid, never authentic, always unnatural. EROTICS / ANALYTICS Weiss herself performs this separation from the mundane and banal, in her exploration of “effective” play with social power, which she bases on Jon McKenzie’s 39 Weiss 75. 26 theory of performance as effective when it “draws attention to the efficiency or functionality of flexible circuits, to how subjects and scenes are linked through complex feedback loops and series of exchanges.” 40 For Weiss, the most effective BDSM scenes play upon the more extreme cultural traumas – she cites black/white race relations, Nazi play, rape play, and incest play – because they “involve” the audience. 41 Precisely how these scenes involve the audience is not exactly clear, except that they “draw selectively, seeking deeply affective, culturally shared scenarios,” scenes that “push hot buttons . . that access the power that coheres within national imaginaries that structure citizenship, belonging, and subjectivity through affective relations.” 42 But the scene that Weiss chooses to develop as an example of “ineffective” play highlights a deeper tension in her analysis. The scene featured Mollena, the Pervy Negress who, while leading a class on “Playing with Taboos,” is interrupted by a mock-mugging by a Latino man (James). As with most scenes centered in extreme cultural traumas, this is a psychological scene, where the mugger pushes Mollena to the floor and calls her racial epithets, wielding a knife to increase his threatening presence. Weiss describes the reception of this scene, and her own reaction, in this way: The audience was silent during this mock-mugging, watching but unresponsive. There was none of the excited whispering, laughing, or gasping that usually happens during a class demonstration. 40 Weiss, Techniques of Pleasure, 189. 41 Ibid., 213-217. 42 Ibid., 214. 27 I found the demo odd in part because I had witnessed James’s transformation in the hotel bar after Mollena left to prepare for her class. James had gone to a local strip mall in search of his outfit and, as he dressed in the bar while we chatted, I couldn’t help but laugh at his transformation from serious San Francisco guy to Latino gang banger. But when he strutted onstage and took Mollena down, I was uncomfortable for several reasons: it wasn’t so much that I was watching a mugging filled with racial epithets, but my nagging suspicion that the performance wasn’t working. The juxtaposition between Mollena’s jovial presentation and this Latino-on-black everyday kind of crime was awkward. I was also intrigued that Mollena had chosen such an everyday taboo to play with and on – intrigued theoretically, but not moved. It was a scene of the urban present, and, although it was about crime, fear, gender, race, and class all at the same time, I suspected that it was too mundane to make good erotic drama. 43 What Weiss identifies as an ineffective scene is marked in a particular way: at least for Weiss, the transformation of the performers is visible, and so she is forced to experience the juxtaposition of ‘authentic’ human beings with stereotypical roles. (For the full-time BDSM practitioners who see their community members both in role and out, this juxtaposition might be in fact be a consistent, necessary part of the erotics.) When compared with the other scenes Weiss details, the mock-mugging is relatively simple in action and in objects. There is none of the luxurious paraphernalia described (and critiqued) in her chapter called “The Toy Bag,” and in fact the banality is increased through Weiss’s inclusion of the detail of James acquiring his outfit at “a local strip mall.” The power dynamic is enacted not through any kind of explicit sexual violence, but more through use of language, and body positions, James towering over Mollena as she cowers and cries on the floor. Still more problematically is Weiss’s statement that the 43 Ibid., 213. Weiss does not include any responses from the audience members. 28 scene was not moving because it was too “everyday,” too “mundane” – and that this everydayness and mundanity was connected to a relationality being played out between a Black woman and a Latino man. If, as Weiss has convincingly demonstrated, the audience of BDSM scenes is primarily white, does this mean that scenes lacking in the white subjectivity position, and producing a response of silence (which is an affective response nonetheless), are politically ineffective? To poise the transformation of James into Latino gang-banger and Mollena into mugging victim, which combines with the everyday scene and mundane objects, and generates only uncomfortable, awkward silence – to poise this particular scene against “good erotic drama” is intensely problematic. Here, the circuit frays. The “urban present” and “everyday crime” of Black-Latino violence is not, it seems that Weiss is suggesting, as “deeply affective” of other national traumas, nor is it “culturally shared,” especially if the culture of BDSM is primarily white. But the visibility of the mechanics of the scene, the elements of mundanity and banality that disrupt the smoothness, naturalness, authenticity of the erotic, force a necessary critique of the concept of “good erotic drama.” This critique is in fact the political potential of sadomasochism, which plays even the horrific events (Weiss’s affective/effective traumas) through the mundane and the everyday, all of the gear and rules and unerotic actions which are repurposed to refurbish the horror. Questions of “good” and “bad” are of little importance, as sadomasochism eroticizes a variety of traumas through its attention to forms, regardless of the affective outcome. 29 Sadomasochism’s erotics of form provides the foundation for our retardataire leap from embodied practices to literary textualities. What I mean by form is perhaps where I should have begun: My use of this term is layered, and best clarified by the OED: “form” signifies the “particular mode” in which sadomasochism “manifests itself,” namely the ordinary, mundane, and banal. Foucault describes this aspect of sadomasochism’s erotics of form as “insisting that we can produce pleasure with very odd things, very strange parts of our bodies, in very unusual situations.” 44 These mundane elements disrupts the “set, customary, or prescribed” forms of ‘natural’ sex, and this disruption is structured by an exaggerated and excessive attention to social forms: a “set method of outward behaviour or procedure in accordance with prescribed usage, etiquette, ritual, etc.; a ceremony or formality. (Often slightingly, as implying the absence of intrinsic meaning or reality.)” 45 The formal erotics of sadomasochism, therefore, pervert what are perceived as the natural impulses of sex, detaching sex from an essential physiological drive and function, formalizing sexual relations to such an extent that they are no longer natural or normal, but excessive, in that they reveal the inner mechanisms of the natural – like repeating or writing a word over and over until it becomes not itself, a semantic satiation at the level of the body. 46 44 Michel Foucault, “Sex, Power, and the Politics of Identity,” Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth. Essential Works of Michel Foucault. v.1, Paul Rabinow, ed., Robert Hurley, trans. (New York: New Press, 1997 (1994)), 163-73. 165. 45 “form, n; senses 5, 11, 14, 15,” The Oxford English Dictionary, 3 nd ed. 2008. OED Online. Oxford UP. June 2012. http://dictionary.oed.com. 46 Semantic satiation is the scientific term for the disorienting effect that occurs upon excessive verbal or written repetition of a word. 30 This rearticulation of sadomasochism as an erotics of form offers a way to read textual erotics beyond sexual identities and toward formal structures of erotic play. We seem fond of using sadomasochism in its adjectival form to explain certain problematic interactions in our responses to literature, and fond of using the types of sadomasochism – the Sadist, the Masochist – to explain elements of psychological and (un)ethical motivation, yet rarely is sadomasochism deployed in an analysis of literature in a way that accesses the formal elements of texts beyond the isolated desires of characters, speakers, authors, or readers. In other words, our use of sadomasochism in the analysis of literature tends to be not in terms of form, but in terms of type. To read for forms of erotic play means to look beyond character development, to think of how novels convey erotics through structural forms rather than through characters. To read for forms of erotic sadomasochism takes our consideration of formal pleasures to another level, one certainly encapsulating an amount of formal pain (the pain/pleasure dynamic being assumed as the central movement of sadomasochism), but not quite. 47 To think of sadomasochism in terms of an erotics of form is also to recognize the kind of sadomasochism of which I speak, the kind that has always been a deliberate play with social ideologies, a play marked by a self-consciousness and embracement of its own formal incorrectness, its mundanity and banality, its awkward performances of social forms. To take this understanding of sadomasochism to the level of narrative form 47 Kucich links his argument in Imperial Masochism to literary form, but he calls these “formal payoffs”: “a new understanding of doubling in Stevenson, of self-consuming narrative energies in Conrad, of the parable or ‘dream’ as a narrative device in Schreiner, or of an ambiguous diegetic involvement on the part of Kipling’s narrator” (247-8). Rather than considering these formal elements as “payoffs,” I instead want to emphasize how formal elements, of aesthetic texts and social relationships, in fact fuel the erotic relationality of sadomasochism, a means rather than a result. See John Kucich, Imperial Masochism: British Fiction, Fantasy, and Social Class (Princeton: Princeton UP, 2006) 249. 31 drops us, paradoxically, into the most contentious aesthetic evaluations while simultaneously demanding that we resist evaluations of ‘good’ and ‘bad,’ and instead consider how the narrative excesses, mundanities, and failures – those moments that fissure the narrative and mark the reading process – are central to our reading pleasure, to the erotic power dynamics between readers and texts. To echo an earlier version of my argument: sadomasochism’s erotics of form reveals narrative itself as a form, rarely fluid, never authentic, always unnatural. But you have likely come this far – through accepting the agreement offered by the title – because of the dreadful promise, or delicious threat, of an analysis of Victorian narrative forms. I suggest not only that sadomasochism has been simplistically deployed in an analysis of literature in general, but that a more complicated erotics/analytics of sadomasochism might clarify the specific relationship between what have come to be seen as some of the most conventional of narrative forms – Victorian novels – and the cultural ideologies of the period. As this was the very period during which the new discipline of sexology was beginning to solidify, we will see that sadomasochism’s erotics of form – already in circulation in writings by nineteenth-century sexologists, as we will see in the next chapter – and how it questions the naturalness and normalness of sex also apply to questions of aesthetic forms, as the novel itself was an institution becoming solidified at around the same time. While my formulation of the erotics of sadomasochism might be portable to any text, it is particularly useful, dangerously useful in drawing connections between evaluations of good and bad, natural and unnatural erotics relations across nineteenth-century disciplines and cultural forms. 32 A few key critics explore a more complicated relationship between sadomasochism and the nineteenth century, yet rarely offer a deep engagement with questions of form. Anne McClintock, in her landmark study of the intersection of race, class, and gender in the deployment of British colonialism – Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest – explores and critiques the “ways in which people’s actions and desires are mediated through institutions of power.” 48 She focuses on the peculiar relationship between upper-class Arthur Munby and working-class Hannah Cullwick. Their relationship, which lasted nearly a quarter of a century, was built almost entirely upon “a profound and mutual involvement in a variety of fetish rituals: slave/master (S/M), bondage/discipline (B/D), hand, foot and boot fetishisms, washing rituals, infantilism (or babyism), cross-dressing, and a deep and mutual fascination with dirt.” 49 In analyzing their relationship through the lenses of psychoanalysis and Marxism, McClintock builds connections between their clearly S/M relationship and the institutions of domesticity and empire. Clearly the dominating theme of Munby and Cullwick’s relationship is the psychoanalytic concept of the fetish, and McClintock sets out “to explore fetishism as a more complex, historically diverse phenomenon that cannot be reduced to a single, male, 48 Anne McClintock, Imperial Leather: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in the Colonial Conquest (Routledge, New York, 1995). 49 Ibid., 138. 33 sexual narrative of origins.” 50 She places Cullwick “among the countless women for whom fetishism was an attempt – ambiguous, contradictory and not always successful – to negotiate the boundaries of power in ways that do not yield simple lessons about dominance and submission.” 51 To aid in her complication of the relationship between Munby and Cullwick, McClintock turns to theories of sadomasochism, taking issue with scholars who have dismissed the S/M texture of their relationship either because the concept is seen as “no more than the retrospective imposition on the past of images and terminology from the present”; or because the S/M play is read as the “theater” of “reality.” 52 Using ideas put forth by Foucault in Madness and Civilization, McClintock interprets S/M instead as “a theater of conversion” that functions paradoxically: while S/M “parades a slavish obedience to conventions of power,” it also, “with its exaggerated emphasis on costumery, script and scene, . . . reveals that social order is unnatural, scripted and invented.” 53 Elaborating on the critique this paradox offers to the idea of a “natural order,” we are left with the enigmatic claim that S/M “is a radically historical phenomenon” that “presents social power . . . as radically open to historical change.” 54 50 Ibid., 138. 51 Ibid., 138. 52 Ibid., 142-3. 53 Ibid., 143. 54 Ibid., 144. 34 How, then, are Victorian narrative forms part of sadomasochism’s radical historical phenomenon? More recently, Elizabeth Freeman has deeply explored sadomasochism’s particular play with history in “Turn the Beat Around: Sadomasochism, Temporality, History,” situating the emergence of sadomasochism during the nineteenth-century Industrial Revolution, and the “celebrated sentimental heart” that formed in counterpoint to the pace of modern production. In a Foucauldian formulation, Freeman writes that “the time of emotions” emerged alongside the time of factories and clocks; it was a “slow time” characterized “as timeless, as primal, as a human condition located in and emanating from the psyche’s interior.” 55 Institutions and systems developed in order to grapple with the disjunct between “modern time” and “slow time,” notably Freudian psychoanalysis, which, Freeman argues, shifted the “biological paradigms” of sexology to the emerging paradigm of productivity and efficiency. The tension between modern time and slow time formed the development of sadism and masochism – and other perversions – through nineteenth-century sexology and then psychoanalysis, and it is this tension that marks Freeman’s own interpretation of s/m erotics as a deployment of bodily sensations through which the subject’s normative timing is disaggregated and denaturalized . . . [S]adomasochistic sex performs the dialectic of a quick-paced modernity and a slower “premodern,” the latter indexed by any number of historical periods. Seen as a kind of erotic time machine, sadomasochism offers sexual metacommentary on the dual emergence of modernity and its others, on 55 Elizabeth Freeman, “Turn the Beat Around: Sadomasochism, Temporality, History,” Time Binds: Queer Temporalities, Queer Histories (Durham: Duke UP, 2010) 33. Freeman’s discussion centers specifically on Sade, contextualizing him in eighteenth-century evolutions of time. Considering Masoch’s themes as a development of nineteenth-century temporality might help to further hone her argument. 35 the entangled histories of race, nationhood, and imperialism as well as sexuality. 56 Freeman’s analysis echoes McClintock’s emphasis on the power of sadomasochism to question the perceived naturalness of sex, and the naturalness of social orders, but she tackles sadomasochism’s play with history much more specifically. Unlike McClintock, Freeman’s exploration of sadomasochism’s play with social orders and with history does not emphasize a reversal or revision, but “a means . . . [of] meeting up . . . in the first place.” 57 While the text Freeman considers is a 1992 short film by Issac Julien entitled The Attendant, her analysis of the film moves us a step closer to the nineteenth century, as she shows how The Attendant uses sadomasochism “to undermine the British empire’s monumentalizing history of itself” 58 – through explicit connections to the nineteenth- century parlor game of the tableau vivant, to specific images of race slavery, and to specific scene of the British Museum, which experienced an enormous (and imperial) expansion of its collection during the nineteenth century. While never being an argument about sadomasochism’s connections to the nineteenth century or to the forms of pacing and editing that she so insightfully analyses in the Julien film, Freeman’s analysis reveal just how fundamental both the nineteenth century and aesthetic form are to a more complicated understanding of sadomasochism. 56 Ibid., 34. 57 Ibid., 42. 58 Ibid., 63. 36 Perhaps the most provocative element of Freeman’s argument is the explicit connection she builds between queerness and sadomasochism. We cannot successfully theorize sadomasochism without considering the multiple engagements offered by queer theory; and Freeman both sheds light on queer theory’s interest in contemporary practices of sadomasochism, as well deepens this corpus of work. Freeman’s intervention into queer theories of s/m practices focused on Leo Bersani’s desire to de-couple “the master- slave relationship from historically specific ‘economic and racial superstructures’.” 59 Indeed, according to Freeman, Bersani “does not seem to consider s/m a catalyst for any genuinely historical inquiry or a mode of connecting otherwise separate historical moments,” which stems directly from Bersani’s wider view of sex as “fundamentally antirelational.” For the most part, the position of white gay male theorists focuses on “s/m’s largely structural role as a force of negation.” 60 Bersani’s response derives, to some extent, from feminist critiques of s/m that interpret the practices as a simple reiteration of historical traumas. Yet to view sadomasochism as asocial and antirelational does not capture the complex, ambivalent relationality that is BDSM practice. Freeman’s analysis responds to Bersani, beginning to suggest that the queerness of s/m cannot be located in the identities of its players or in its vast difference from “normal” sex, but in its erotic embodiment of, and play with, historical trauma. 59 Ibid., 37. 60 Ibid., 39. 37 Both McClintock and Freeman analyze sadomasochism for its broader cultural strokes, while John Kucich returns us to the realm of psychoanalysis. One of the most significant theorists of masochism in Victorian culture, Kucich’s 2011 PMLA essay historicizes the figure of masochism in early psychoanalytic theory, an extension of his reconceptualization of masochism in Imperial Masochism: British Fiction, Fantasy, and Social Class. 61 In this book, Kucich seeks to relate masochism to class rather than sex, and to redefine psychoanalytic generalizations about masochism through the more complicated theories offered by relational psychoanalysis, producing an understanding of masochism “less confined to an analysis of sexual domination and submission and more determinate in its decoding of masochism’s ideological significance. 62 Kucich, in the PMLA essay, extends his exploration of this ideological significance to a discussion of the problematics of suffering and pain in the history of feminism, arguing that the relentless tendency to sexualize and Oedipalize masochism relegates the possibility of feminist organizing around pain and suffering – which characterized first-wave feminism in the late-nineteenth century – to the realm of “shadow discourse,” in the process “los[ing] sight of a nonsexual form of masochism vital to its own history that could energize its ongoing political projects. 63 61 John Kucich, “Psychoanalytic Historicism: Shadow Discourse and the Gender Politics of Masochism in Ellis, Schreiner, and Haggard,” PMLA 126.1 (2011): 88-106 and Imperial Masochism. 62 Kucich, Imperial Masochism, 21. 63 Kucich, “Psychoanalytic Historicism,” 89. 38 My reading of sadomasochism – in my perverse maintenance of both the compound term and an understanding of it that relies on the erotic – might seem to contradict Kucich’s. Yet I share with Kucich the goal of desexualizing formulations of sadomasochism, although for a different purpose: to understand the erotic relationality of sadomasochism beyond its main binary players. Key to moving beyond, as I have already suggested, is an analysis of sadomasochism’s erotic forms. “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 means that Esther Summerson in Bleak House is often 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. In each of these novels, character readings achieve much more nuance when considering how the erotics of sadomasochism circulates at the level of form. What they appear to be, as characters, can never be separated from what they are doing in the text, as forms of themselves, as form itself. These cultural forms of Victorian narrative are not snapshots of the deep cultural shifts occurring during this period rather, they are deeply in play with the ideologies. Play, Matthew Kaiser tells us, is a uniquely nineteenth-century concept that obsessed the Victorians, as they sought to describe and affix a world that was very much “in play.” To be “in play” describes the more familiar state of being “inconstant and unsettled,” [b]ut a world in play also means a world that throws itself headlong into play, inside it, where it constructs a parallel universe, a ludic microcosm 39 of itself, which eventually displaces that world. The membranes of play, its elastic fibers, stretch to the point where they encircle all of existence. Modern life is drawn inescapably into play, subjected simultaneously to a miniaturizing, reductive pressure and to an increasingly erratic, oscillating motion. Recall for a moment Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865) in which Victorian England, in the shape of a little girl, leaps into a microcosm of itself, a world of toy-like objects and childish creatures, riven with epistemological undecidability and political strife, where a queen with a penchant for beheadings reigns. Lewis Carroll’s rabbit hole captures, in whimsical fashion, the precise psychological state that many Victorians associate with modernity: a narrow space without a floor, constricting but unfixed, finite but unending, a world in play. 64 The anxiety surrounding this sense of a world in play led, of course, to the drive to manage this world, and would lead, at the end of the nineteenth century, to the institutionalization of anxieties around sex through the disciplines of sexology and psychiatry. 65 “Useful Dangers” locates the erotic play of sadomasochism in the moments right before the lexical formations of sadism and masochism, in the cultural forms of Victorian narrative, in order to show how the ambivalent and paradoxical erotics of sadomasochism deeply textured the social fabric of the period, beyond what would be solidified by nineteenth-century sexology. My next chapter, “The ‘Creative Enterprise’ of Sadomasochism” begins in the moment when sadism and masochism entered the lexical world, and proceeds to complicate not only our understanding of how sexology presented these fundamental 64 Matthew Kaiser, “The World in Play: The Portrait of a Victorian Concept,” New Literary History 40.1 (Winter 2009): 105-129. 105-6. 65 See Heike Bauer’s English Literary Sexology: Translations of Inversion, 1860-1930 (Palgrave Stud. in 19 th -C. Writing and Cult. New York: Palgrave Macmillan) 2009, for an extensive exploration of how shifts in the way Victorians perceived themselves as social beings intersected with the developments of sexology. 40 perversions, but also how these original threads resonate and evolve throughout significant theories of sadomasochism. With this deep sense of sadomasochism’s erotics of form, my third chapter engages one of sadomasochism’s more commonly recognized elements. Entitled “‘The Icy Stillness of Perpetual Suspense’,” this chapter considers the power dynamics between reader and texts more closely by analyzing 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 normal male erotic development, allows us to investigate how the pleasure of these novels originates in and plays with problematic patriarchal ideologies. “Esther’s ‘Tidy Pain,’” my fourth chapter, offers a sustained analysis of narration and forms of power in Charles Dickens’s Bleak House. My reading of sadomasochism in Bleak House 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 41 formal erotics draws a more complex picture of the relationship between Victorian cultural ideologies and narratorial techniques. I expand upon the intersection between the erotics of sadomasochism and patriarchal ideologies in my final chapter, through an 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. And a more complicated understanding of how the erotics of sadomasochism functions thematically in the novels of Charlotte Brontë opens into a more complicated reading of how and to what extent the form of the bildungsroman is structured by contracts. The first extended study of sadomasochism as a theory of peculiar narrative pleasures, “Useful Dangers” illustrates how some of the most canonical novels of the nineteenth century built their pleasures upon a play with problematic ideologies. Instead 42 of dismissing these novels because of this ideological play, I argue that we must understand the ambivalent, addictive interaction between the pleasure and the ideology. And it’s a queer little relation, a fundamentally queer way of reading novels that has very little to do with objects and identities. Sadomasochism’s erotics of form, through its blatant infusion of pleasure in ideology, allows just such an opening. 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. Through a deliberate edge-play with ideology, sadomasochism reveals how the canonical pleasures of Victorian narrative function in tandem with bad erotic form. 41 CHAPTER TWO: THE “CREATIVE ENTERPRISE” OF SADOMASOCHISM Nineteenth-Century Sexology, Deleuze, and Foucault To say of something that it is paradoxical is not to say that it is either true or illusory, but that its truth is unstill, that its sense is multiple and mobile. —Karmen MacKendrick 1 Our negotiations put forth the idea that the erotics of sadomasochism extend both beyond a simple reiteration of social violences and a pure transgression of social norms, by putting into conversation the diverse arguments made by feminism, queer studies, anthropology, BDSM practitioners, and, literary studies. Our objective has been to bring a more embodied perspective to what has often been critiqued as the too-abstract, too- theoretical application of sadomasochism to aesthetic texts. Yet it is likely still unclear what exactly is meant by erotics of form. In this chapter, then, we will fall (more) deeply into theory, approaching the erotics of sadomasochism from another angle, but still vaguely familiar. Your experience will be a sort of temporal drag – the clichéd, raising / cracking of the whip sans the sting. Or, less clichéd – the absence of an orgasm (not due to failure, but because that was never the purpose), or the demand to re-polish the silver. In this dragging, retardataire movement, we will attempt the admittedly-ideal: to bring the lived experiences of living populations a little closer together with theory, to create a relationality between the two without resorting to a slippage, a confusion. This is not to say that the ideas built here reflect what BDSM practitioners do, or what perverts in the 1 See Chapter 1, ftn. 31 42 nineteenth century did. I would, however, like to suggest that our theories can achieve new perspectives from lived populations, while the practices of lived populations might be thought and analyzed through the provocative ideas offered by theory. 2 In other words, there is a kind of “creative enterprise” to sadomasochism that resonates with both material and textual experience. Sadomasochism as a “creative enterprise” was first described by Foucault, and my redrawing of its erotics is angled through a precise moment in Foucault, one that we have already encountered but that is worth revisiting. In an interview given at the end of his life, he explains (in terms that should, by now, be familiar) that S&M is not simply a reflection of “tendencies deep within our unconscious,” nor “related to a deep violence”: S&M is much more than that; it’s the real creation of new possibilities of pleasure, which people had no idea about previously . . . I think it’s a kind of creation, a creative enterprise, which has as one of its features what I call the desexualization of pleasure. . . . These practices are insisting that we can produce pleasure with very odd things, very strange parts of our bodies, in very unusual situations. 3 That sadomasochism might be viewed as a creative production of pleasure, rather than a bizarre perversion of sex, is a familiar iteration of Foucault’s campaign to reclaim bodies and pleasure from the regimes of sexuality and sex. Although Foucault does not use the 2 This desire to bring empirical studies into conversation with theory is in many ways a response to Gayle Rubin’s critique of the valorization of theory: “There is a common assumption that certain kinds of conceptual analysis or literary and film criticism provide descriptions or explanations about living individuals or populations, without establishing the relevance or applicability of such analyses to those individuals or groups. . . . I have this quaint, social science attitude that statements about living populations should be based on some knowledge of such populations, not on speculative analysis, literary texts, cinematic representations, or preconceived assumptions. And I can hear the objection to what I’m saying already: ‘but Deleuze,’ someone is bound to say, ‘is Theory.’” Rubin and Butler, “Sexual Traffic.” 3 Foucault, “Sex, Power, and the Politics of Identity,” 165. 43 term form, the idea is implied: that sadomasochism plays with the forms of natural sex, shifting erotic pleasure to “very odd things, very strange parts of our bodies, in very unusual situations,” in a paradoxicality intrinsic to sadomasochistic erotics. The specific creative enterprise of sadomasochism, then, functions by creating a paradoxical relationship between bodies and pleasures through, as I will seek to show in this chapter, an attention to form. Sadomasochism’s engagement with form extends back to early sexology, a fact that introduces my first qualification of Foucault: this creative enterprise was not unknown before our contemporary moment. Certainly the types of S&M erotics being described by Foucault are not the same as they were during the nineteenth century, not the same as they are in the early twenty-first century. Yet, as this chapter will suggest, although the extreme and excessive case studies of sadism and masochism dominate our understanding of the scientia sexualis (and therefore our understanding of how sadism and masochism were manifesting during this period), other forms of sadomasochism, beyond the monstrous and horrific, were also in circulation. Our task of reconsidering sexology is not an easy one, due to the sometimes totalizing critique of these discourses offered by Foucault in his first volume of The History of Sexuality. It is difficult to see beyond Foucault’s argument regarding the purposes and results of sexological and psychoanalytic discourse, and yet Foucault himself offers a way through his own critique, in his concept of “reverse discourse”: There is no question that the appearance in nineteenth-century psychiatry, jurisprudence, and literature of a whole series of discourses on the species and subspecies of [sexual aberrations] . . . made possible a strong advance of social controls into this area of “perversity”; but it also made possible 44 the formation of a “reverse” discourse: homosexuality began to speak in its own behalf, to demand that its legitimacy or “naturality” be acknowledged, often in the same vocabulary, using the same categories by which is was medically disqualified. . . . [T]here can exist different and even contradictory discourses within the same strategy; they can, on the contrary, circulate without changing their form from one strategy to another, opposing strategy. 4 The structure of Foucault’s radical reconceptualization of the development of sexuality during the nineteenth century is by now familiar: the scientia sexualis, in their attempts to get at the “facts of life,” generated an ars erotica that “multiplied, intensified, and even created its own intrinsic pleasures.” 5 That is, as it sought to establish a natural and normal understanding of human sexuality, the scientia sexualis ended up developing what Foucault termed an ars erotica of perverse, abnormal, artificial, immature, adolescent, degenerative, non-genital – in a word, what came to be known as unnatural sexual identities and acts. Foucault’s critique of the social controls enabled by the categorizing mission of the scientia sexualis has generated contemporary simplifications of early sexology, resulting in the deliberate distancing of contemporary theorists and practitioners of sadomasochism from sexological and psychological classification and terminology. “Frequently,” Lucy Bland and Laura Doan write, “misunderstanding, scepticism, and even hostility towards sexology’s taxonomies and categories, and 4 Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality: An Introduction. Robert Hurley, trans. (New York: Vintage Books, 1990 [1976]) 101-2. My emphasis. 5 Ibid., 71. 45 towards the way in which sexological theories have been applied (or might have been applied), cloud our understanding of what early sexologists actually said and did.” 6 We still have, therefore – despite our best retrogressive intentions – a tendency to think that the contemporary theorization and practice of sadomasochism has so far progressed and evolved discourses about this erotics, that what is described and practiced today is an entirely different entity from the erotics of sadism and masochism that solidified at the end of the nineteenth century. As we negotiated in the previous chapter, nineteenth-century sexology grappled with how to define sadism and masochism, and not only in terms of what to call these perversities. Sexologists were interested in moving beyond the generalizations of pain and pleasure, continuously wrestling with sadomasochism’s tricky similarity to ‘natural’ sex. Let’s trouble the progressive trajectory claimed by both practitioners and theorists, not in order to reclaim early sexological discourse on sadomasochism from its medico-forensic goals, but to recognize that the ‘progress’ achieved in contemporary theory and practice was a current already at work within and against nineteenth-century sexological discourse, albeit a subtle one. Foucault’s objections to the scientia sexualis (19 th -century sexology and psychiatry) were drawn along the distinction he makes between desire and pleasure. As Elizabeth Freeman summarizes: “[P]sychoanalysis inevitably thinks in terms of desire, which centralizes identities and object choices, rather than pleasure, which centralizes 6 Lucy Bland and Laura Doan, “General Introduction,” Sexology Uncensored: The Documents of Sexual Science (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998) 1. 46 sensations and practices.” 7 But sexology had not gone to the same lengths to theorize object choice and identities as psychoanalysis would. Nineteenth-century sexologists were in fact invested in exploring both the types and forms of sex, the former being more an articulation of objects and identities, the latter being focused on sensation and practice. This was the two-pronged goal of early sexological theory, as Joseph Bristow explains, to build “an elaborate descriptive system to classify a striking range of sexual types of person (bisexual, heterosexual, homosexual, and their variants) and forms of sexual desire (fetishism, masochism, sadism, among them).” 8 In the inviting pool of perversions, sadomasochism has, from the beginning, occupied a “peculiar position,” both central and peripheral. Richard Von Krafft-Ebing, who (as you remember) developed the neologisms sadism and masochism, stated in 1890 that “masochism and sadism appear as the fundamental forms of psycho-sexual perversion, which may make their appearance at any point in the domain of sexual aberration.” 9 Some fifteen years later, Sigmund Freud makes an equally differentiating, and contradictory set of claims: after stating that “sadism and masochism occupy a special position among the perversions, since the contrast between activity and passivity which lies behind them is among the universal characteristics of sexual life,” in a footnote he shifts his argument, “assign[ing] a peculiar position . . . to the pair of 7 Elizabeth Freeman, “(This Review Will Have Been) Impossible to Write: Lesbian S/M Theory as Academic Practice,” GLQ 5.1 (1999): 63-72. 8 Joseph Bristow, Sexuality (New Crit. Idiom Ser. London: Routledge, 1997) 13. Emphasis mine. 9 Richard von Krafft-Ebing, Psychopathia Sexualis: A Medico-Forensic Study, Ernest van den Haag, intro. Harry D. Wedeck, trans. (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1965 [1886; English trans. 1903]) 217-8. 47 opposites constituted by sadism and masochism, placing them outside the class of the remaining perversions.” 10 What, then, is the peculiar relationship sadomasochism has with the developing Western understanding of natural and normal sexuality, if it is both a “fundamental form” of perversion and occupies a “peculiar position . . . outside” perversion? From their entrance on the sexological scene, researchers and theorists struggled to define the difference between the ‘natural’ quantities of sadism and masochism structuring sexual life, and ‘perverse’ quantities that turn functional sex away from reproductivity and towards erotic pleasure for its own sake, creating the monstrous and decadent figures of the Sadist and the Masochist. Writers of the nineteenth century conceived of sadomasochism in two ways: a perversion of “gender deviation” (female sadists and male masochists) or a perversion of “excess” (dangerous levels of activity and passivity, even if found in the “correct” sex). 11 It was, therefore, normal for the male of the species, being naturally more active and dominant in the world, to exercise mild forms of sadism, just as it was normal for women, being naturally more yielding and passive, to display appropriate levels of masochism. But these natural amounts become easily perverse when they distract us from the goals of reproductive sex. This, after all, is the definition of perversion: those forms of pleasure that detach sexual pleasure from 10 Sigmund Freud, “The Sexual Aberrations,” Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, James Strachey, trans. (New York: Basic Books, 2000 [1905]) 1-38. 25. 11 Moore, “Rethinking Gendered Perversion and Degeneration,” 140. 48 reproduction. But with sadism and masochism, the resemblance to ‘natural’ sexual acts was always a puzzle for sexologists. In one of the only extensive dissections of the emergence and evolution of the neologisms sadism and masochism, Alison Moore traces late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century sexological theories for “the rather faint and uncertain line of normalcy that was drawn.” 12 In determining sadomasochism’s relationship to the normal, Moore offers a clear distinction between the perspectives of nineteenth-century and inter-war sexologists. Before normativity itself “became positively suspect in interwar discourses,” the earliest sexological discourse on sadomasochism revealed a “uniquely late-nineteenth-century precariousness of normalcy.” 13 While Moore is mainly concerned with describing the perspectives sexologists used in interpreting sadomasochism (nineteenth-century sexology responded primarily from the perspectives of degeneration and atavism), how this denaturalization occurs, in the first place, remains unclear. Understanding the specific denaturalization offered by sadomasochism will enrich our understanding of its precise erotics of form. Even in early sexological theory, sadomasochism was an extremely active entity, always and already operating upon the forms of normality, always resisting the stasis of types and categories. 14 One important result of sadomasochism’s peculiar relationship 12 Ibid., 140. 13 Ibid., 140. 14 Deleuze and Foucault have theorized the activity of sadomasochism in entirely different ways: Deleuze, with the goal to split the compound term “sadomasochism,” analyzes sadism and masochism as involving separate processes of desexualization and resexualization, revealing “a complete structural self-sufficiency” (130); and Foucault, speaking of the “creative enterprise” of contemporary S&M practices in his late interviews, names them as a “desexualization of pleasure” (“Sex, Power, and the Politics of Identity” 165). 49 with ‘natural’ sex is that, although ever trying to categorize types of individuals– the Sadist, the Masochist – sexological discourse was always pulled towards describing a form of sex. Sadism and masochism was an erotics not easily shifted into types, except in very extreme cases. The peculiar relationship of sadism and masochism to ‘normal’ sexuality – a deformation of the right form – exerted a continual pull away from types of individuals and into forms of pleasure. In a fundamental sense, therefore, sadomasochism resisted the force of sexology toward the delineation of modern sexual types, because it was already gesturing beyond individuality and into relationality. 15 INTENSE RELATIONS Early sexologists attempted to understand the exact form of sadomasochism by exploring its relationship to the pleasure-pain complex, which was immediately recognized as inadequate for describing the denaturalization of sex performed by sadomasochism. Reducing sadomasochism to the pain/pleasure dialectic prevents us from seeing that the conjunction of pain and pleasure is either the means or the result: it’s very rarely a goal of sadomasochism in and of itself. In Psychopathia Sexualis, for example, Krafft-Ebing states, in his section on sadism, that “there arises an impulse to react on the object, in every possible way, and with the greatest intensity. . . . To a certain extent these 15 Elizabeth Freeman’s review of Lynda Hart’s Between the Body and the Flesh, shows that the tension between type and form still exists in contemporary criticism. Freeman critiques Hart for being too wedded to identity: “[P]erhaps Hart’s apparatus undoes her because the foundational logics that undergird it are themselves identitarian. Every time she introduces the language of force, repetition, impact, action, reaction, surprise, and delay, she moves closer to the visceral regime that seems to interest her most. Every time she introduces the language of part objects and their relation to identity categories, she moves farther away from it.” Freeman, ““(This Review Will Have Been) Impossible to Write,” 69. 50 are psychical accompaniments; . . . it is a true hyperbole, a desire to exert the utmost possible effect upon the individual . . . The most intense means, however, is the infliction of pain.” 16 Although Krafft-Ebing rarely returns to the idea of intensity – resorting to the typical language of causing pain (in the case of the sadist) and suffering pain (in the case of the masochist) – he has opened, here, an understanding of sadomasochism as simply a process of giving and receiving intense effects, pain being one of many possibilities. Power, according to Krafft-Ebing, is one of the central defining factors of sadomasochism, more fundamental to than the pleasure-pain complex usually assigned to sadomasochistic erotics. Writing to a different purpose and from a different perspective, British sexologist Havelock Ellis composed one of the most extensive treatises on ‘algophilia,” entitled Love and Pain, which clearly and continually resonates with forensic and medical discourses on sadism and masochism, although he repeatedly attempts to refuse this terminology. 17 His extensive discussion – despite its problematic gendering and emphasis on evidence from the natural world – establishes the major themes that will dominate 16 Krafft-Ebing. Psychopathia Sexualis, 84-5. Karmen MacKendrick utilizes this same terminology of ‘intensity’ instead of ‘pain’ to describe the various pleasures simplistically categorized as part of the pleasure-pain complex, that is, as sadomasochistic. In elaborating on Freud’s theory of the perversions, she writes, “The sole aim of perverse sexuality is pleasure: pleasure in the service of nothing whatsoever, not even the release of tension. But if the increase in tension is perversity, all sexuality is more or less perverse. What we see here is a pleasure that attaches to tension, a pleasure in intensity, bearing with it a drive to increase intensity, to further tension” (10). Similar to a number of studies on sadomasochism, MacKendrick does not extend her elaboration of s/m’s intensity to 19 th -c sexology. MacKendrick, counterpleasures. 17 See Heike Bauer, English Literary Sexology, for a detailed analysis of the emergence of Continental sexological theory within the British literary elite, resulting in such interdisciplinary works as Havelock Ellis’s multi-volume Studies in the Psychology of Sex. 51 emerging ideas of sexology and psychoanalysis, mainly: the continuity between the perverse and the normal (rather than developing rigidly isolated identity categories); the interdependence of sadism and masochism (within single individuals, but also as a form of desire); and, perhaps most importantly, his emphasis on power dynamics rather than on erotic pain. As he attempts to move away from the criminal and the pathological, Ellis’ discussion centers more on the relational aspects of sadomasochism than previous sexology studies. In beginning his thorough discussion on love and pain in volume three of his Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Ellis notes, during his discussion of courtship in the animal kingdom, “[t]he infliction of pain must inevitably be a frequent indirect result of the exertion of power.” 18 Ellis attributes the occurrence of pain in sexual pleasure to the exercise of power. Moreover, Ellis also introduces the complicated idea of how to determine what is painful when pleasure is being generated. Quoting at length a woman with whom he corresponds regarding the ‘naturalness’ of the female ability to suffer pain, this particular correspondent does much to complicate his argument, as she reflects “what would be pain to a sensitive person would be only a pleasant excitement, and it could not be truly said that such obtuse persons liked pain, though they might appear to do so. I cannot think that anyone enjoys what is pain to them, if only from the fact that it detracts and divides the attention.” 19 This woman introduces two key distinctions to be made 18 Havelock Ellis, “Love and Pain,” Studies in the Psychology of Sex. Volume Three. 2 nd ed. (Philadelphia: F. A. Davis Co.) 1922. 67. 19 Ibid., 90. 52 about the relationship between pain and pleasure. The first, which has already been touched on in the introduction, alludes to the idea of simulation – in this case, that something appears to be painful does not mean that it is. Second, whatever sensation “detracts and divides the attention” is antithetical to the process of intensification – and real pain, real violence certainly detracts and divides. This discussion occurs outside of Ellis’s sections on sadism and masochism, within his larger exploration of the ‘naturalness’ of pain to reproductive sex. Ellis is one of many sexologists who grappled with the natural’ amounts of pain within sexual pleasure, which can be seen in his continual, and usually unsuccessful, attempts to distinguish between the extremity of sensation and act in the Sadist and the Masochist, and the rites of animal courtship in the natural world. He even goes so far as to attempt to do away with the terms sadism and masochism: “they are here rejected as the pivots on which the discussion ought to turn.” All the same, he returns to these terms over and over in describing ‘unnatural’ occurrences of pain in sexual pleasure, eventually arriving at one of the more complicated articulations of sadism and masochism by nineteenth- century sexologists: “[W]hen we understand that it is pain only, and not cruelty, that is the essential in this group of manifestations we begin to come nearer to their explanation. The masochist desires to experience pain, but he generally desires that it should be inflicted in love; the sadist desires to inflict pain, but in some cases, if not in most, he desires that it should be felt as love.” 20 Despite being pulled to identify abnormal manifestations of erotic pain, the fact that Ellis links sadism and masochism to love, 20 Ibid., 160. 53 begins to shift the horrific and excessive ideas of the Sadist and Masochist. In his concluding statements to his section on “Love and Pain,” Ellis articulates his vision of the intersection of pain with sexual pleasure, this time clearly stating that the occurrence becomes unnatural when the drive to feel and/or generate intense emotions usurps the trajectory of normal sex. [W]e have come to see that in the phrase “love and pain” we have to understand by “pain” a state of intense emotional excitement with which pain in the stricter sense may be associated, but is by no means necessarily associated. It is the strong emotion which exerts the irresistible fascination in the lover, in his partner, or in both. The pain is merely the means to that end. It is the lever which is employed to bring the emotional force to bear on the sexual impulse. The question of love and pain is mainly a question of emotional dynamics. . . . [I]t is not cruelty that is sought; it is the joy of being plunged among the waves of that great primitive ocean of emotions which underlies the variegated world of our everyday lives, and pain—a pain which, as we have seen, is often deprived so far as possible of cruelty, though sometimes by very thin and feeble devices—is merely the channel by which that ocean is reached. . . . It will not have escaped the careful reader that in following out our subject we have sometimes been brought into contact with manifestations which scarcely seem to come within any definition of pain. . . . But pain, as we have here to understand it, largely constitutes a special case of what we shall later learn to know as erotic symbolism: that is to say, the psychic condition in which a part of the sexual process, a single idea or group of ideas, tends to assume unusual importance, or even to occupy the whole field of sexual consciousness, the part becoming a symbol that stands for the whole. 21 Although no specific references are made, in this last passage, to sadism and masochism, these pleasures are implied when Ellis refers to the concept of “erotic symbolism,” which comes to be his way of discussing perversion. Yet Ellis’ complication of pain – as 21 Ibid., 184. 54 subordinate to an intense emotional dynamic – is rarely taken into consideration when approaching sadomasochism. The intense relationality of sadomasochism is, perhaps, easy to forget when the impulse of many sexologists has been to draw similarities between sadism and masochism, when in fact the intense dynamic depends upon the distinct world views of sadism and masochism coming into contact. Krafft-Ebing and Ellis are invested in showing that sadism and masochism are mirror opposites, that they compliment one another and in fact slip between each other. Ellis, at one point, suggests that because sadism involves pain more than cruelty, sadists and sadistic acts of the more mundane form are simply evidence of masochism in disguise. 22 There are some important differences between the work of Krafft-Ebing and that of Ellis, the former sticking strictly to the neologisms of his own creation in order to explain sadism and masochism as mirrors, or exact opposites (although his case studies often evidence otherwise). Ellis makes a direct refusal of the terms sadism and masochism, yet he continually returns to them in order to explain extreme versions of the erotic symbolism of love and pain. Ellis seems to object to the notion of sadism and masochism as “opposed states.” Ellis argues, instead, that they are complementary states, and he foreshadows Freud by emphasizing the idea that characteristics of both the masochist and the sadist are often found in the same person. This idea is formative to Freud’s conceptualization of sadism and masochism within psychoanalysis, in particular the relationship between the ego and super-ego. Freud, we might say, takes sadism and masochism almost entirely into the 22 Ibid., 166. 55 realm of symbolism, wedding them to concepts of the self and of identity, for better or for worse. The intense dynamic referenced, therefore, by Krafft-Ebing and Ellis – and lost, perhaps, in Freud’s singular focus on the individual – holds a rich understanding of sadomasochism if we allow for the complex relationality of the compound term sadomasochism. If, in other words, we allow sadism and masochism to exist as complements to one another (but not slipping into the other, as Ellis would have it), approaching the intense emotional dynamic through two distinct but complementary world views. The distinction between the two is a defining factor of the intense relationality. A sadist, therefore, must understand the experience of her masochist, but she doesn’t have this understanding because she is really a masochist in disguise. She understands because she seeks to bring herself into relation with her masochist. We can see, therefore, that nineteenth-century sexology, although propelled forward by a drive to classify and categorize, was also marked by its own complicating threads, running counter to the objective of creating a clear science of sex. POWER, ITS RELATIONALITY, ITS IDEOLOGIES It is not, then, the conjunction, the overlap, the blurring of pleasure and pain that causes so much discomfort when we encounter sadomasochism. For in the pain, we find roots of the pleasure and in pleasure are always remnants of pain. This is the hallmark of sexual desire, grappled with, as we have seen, by nineteenth-century sexologists, who 56 acknowledged the “peculiar position” of sadism and masochism in the realm of the perversions, treading precariously close to the normal. 23 What Ellis arrived at through his exploration of pain’s presence in the erotic was the characteristic of an intense emotional dynamic. The extent to which this intense emotional dynamic consumed the view of its practitioners (distracting from the goals of reproductive sex) determined if the labels of sadist or masochist should be applied. What Ellis also gestured toward was the enactment of these intense emotions within a power dynamic. Basing this idea on the work of Nietzsche, the “fascination” with emotional “intoxication . . . gives us the consciousness of energy and the satisfaction of our craving for power.” 24 Not only do sadism and masochism enact more intense manifestations of pain-pleasure, but they do so in the framework of a power hierarchy – an intensity of attention focused to hierarchical roles and their (deliberate) enactments. As sexological and psychoanalytic writings increased during the early twentieth- century, the play of sadomasochism with power also became increasingly used. Writing in the 1920s, Wilhem Stekel places power, in the form of affect, at the center of sadomasochism and makes a crucial, decisive move away from pain: An erroneous conception of the sadomasochistic complex makes pain the central factor for consideration and occupies itself with the phenomenon of gratification derived from pain. . . . We have ascertained, however, that the decisive thing in the phenomenon of sadomasochism is the affect, which is fed from two sources: in the sadist, from his own sense of power in overcoming the resistance of another and from his feeling himself into 23 Freud, “The Sexual Aberrations,” 25. 24 Ellis, 185. 57 the humiliation of his partner; in the masochist, from the overcoming of his own resistances (power over himself!) and the feeling of himself into the partner who humbles him. 25 Affect, here, has a complex definition specific to psychology and psychiatry, as “[a] feeling or subjective experience accompanying a thought or action or occurring in response to a stimulus.” 26 Moreover, beyond the specific feeling a sadist has from exerting her power over another, or that the masochist experiences from releasing her power to another, the affect is marked by feeling oneself into the power-position of the other. Here, an erotics that is often viewed as a reiteration of traumatic ideologies, an erotic acting-out and therefore perpetuation of real violence or hatred, is given its paradoxical purpose: an extreme, intense act of empathy, and the feeling of oneself into the other becoming a significant source of the pleasure of the sadomasochistic relationality. The pleasure comes, therefore, from the sense that one is in a relational dynamic – that one’s response is fueling the intense feeling of the other. This is a small sampling of sexology’s counter-threads – brief moments, discussions, and phrases that run contrary to sexology’s own problematic objectives to classify and categorize. I have offered them, here, to show that the elements of BDSM now being standardized in contemporary subcultures around the globe – the intense emotional relationality in a dynamic of power, in which pain may appear but is not 25 Wilhelm Stekel, “Sadism and Masochism (1924),” Sexology Uncensored, 254-7 (emphases mine). Although this formulation, especially the concept of feeling oneself into another, seems to present a more affirmative view of sadomasochism, the bulk of Stekel’s theory argues that the affects of sadism and masochism both originate in a hatred or cruelty. 26 “affect, n. B. Psychol. (and Psychiatry).” The Oxford English Dictionary. 3 nd ed. 2008. OED Online. Oxford UP. June 2012. http://dictionary.oed.com. 58 required – were elements that deeply concerned sexologists from the moment the terms entered the lexicon. Our more nuanced understanding of how sexology conceived of sadomasochism, in all its contradictions and paradoxes, allows for a deep appreciation of the ars erotica at work within sexology itself. To understand the erotic potential of sadomasochism’s play of power demands that we prolong the concept even more, a drawing out and back. The particular, peculiar power of sadomasochism is multi-fold, vastly different from Foucault’s social power because power here is relational. As MacKendrick paraphrases Foucault: “[W]e might be better off never speaking of ‘power’ at all, given the noun’s tendency to reify, but only ‘relations of power’ . . . Power-as-such would not exist, then, only power as (and not merely in) the relations of force, relations at once discursive and embodied, at once structural and explosive.” 27 The relational power of sadomasochism exhibits specific characteristics. First, and perhaps most obviously, the power circulating in sadomasochism is visible, by which we might say it is citational – the roles and scenarios existing on the surface in deliberate, often ponderous or tedious simulation, ridiculously, sometimes even banally recognizable. Second, and perhaps because of its relational nature, it is an interdependent power, the figure of dominance not acting upon the power of the submissive, but acting with the expectation of having her power received, acting with an understanding that the submissive is willing. That the rule-giving will be 27 counterpleasures, 125. The at-once-ness seems to be key to the particular paradoxicality of sadomasochism. 59 answered with communication. 28 Third, and paradoxically, the sadomasochistic relational power is oppositional, that is, the top and the bottom do indeed experience power from two incompatible world views – their experiences of the interdependent power is contingent on their different positions in the relation and of the relation, and the differences in play at once and against one another, but not as a power struggle. Fourth, paradoxically and tenuously, the power is played, or in play: what Baudrillard calls a seductive game, what Hopkins calls a simulation, what I will call, simply, play. MacKendrick describes this game of sadomasochism as the difference between rules and the Law, where playing with a “full devotion to the rules is to suspend for a moment the seemingly greater force of law before the seductiveness of serious play, serious enough to treat the rule as if it were law.” 29 These powers are really experienced, seriously felt by BDSM practitioners. At once, they are deployed in the context of play, with a citationality that both represents certain ideological symbols and reveals them, plays them up into their most banal forms. While the relationality appears to be “power of one subject against another subject[,] . . . it can instead be the power . . . across subjects,” 30 and drawing together two oppositional 28 “This is control, the autonomy of being master, the one who makes the rules – already played against communication” (132). MacKendrick calls this interdependence responsive receptivity, which is a power shared by both tops and bottom in a BDSM scene (127). See her chapter “switch/hit” for the most expansive and philosophical discussion of the relations of power between top and bottom, especially significant because it reclaims the top position from misreadings of cruelty and destruction, from remaining “purely instrumental” (124). 29 Ibid., 132 (emphasis mine). 30 Ibid., 130. 60 yet complementary experiences – because both parties will the responsiveness of the other. When the players feel themselves into one another, they often appear to be doing otherwise. As if it were. THE THIRD STORY OF SADOMASOCHISM But the careful reader will still be wondering how two (seemingly) incompatible erotics can come together in an interdependent, empathic relationship, especially if we remember the devastating disconnection of sadomasochism performed by Gilles Deleuze in Coldness and Cruelty. Especially when remembering the case studies that form the bulk of the early sexological research of sadism and masochism, where there is rarely – if ever – a case that shows a consensual, relational dynamic of sadism and masochism. In fact, the types of case studies populating these manuals provide the prime evidence of the conflicting world views. To consider one of the definitive sexological manuals, Krafft- Ebing’s Psychopathia Sexualis, the case studies for both sadism and masochism evidence the extreme forms – the most monstrous forms of sadism and the most decadent forms of masochism. With sadism, we have case after case of nonconsensual cruelty, enacting what Deleuze deems as the primary formal condition of sadism, that of projection: “In this way the fantasy acquires maximum aggressive power, systemization and capacity of intervention in the real world: the Idea is projected with extraordinary violence.” 31 There 31 Gilles Deleuze and Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, Masochism: Coldness and Cruelty; Venus in Furs, Jean McNeil, trans. (New York: Zone Books, 1991) 73. The differentiation between formal conditions actually provides a potential reason for the uptakes of Deleuzian theory that maintain manifestations of sadism in 61 are therefore innumerable case studies of sadists who project their fantasies with violent, nonconsensual realness. The case studies show masochists, then, who exhibit the formal condition of waiting – “its characteristic of patient waiting, its suspended and static power, and the way in which the ideal and the real are together absorbed by it.” 32 Despite his endless drawing of sadism and masochism as “the perfect parallels,” Krafft-Ebing acknowledges that the majority of masochistic fantasies remain in the imaginative power of the masochist. One of Krafft-Ebing’s patients describes this pure form of masochism: I have never attempted to realize my very definite and characteristic ideas—i.e., to connect them with the world without me—but I have contented myself with reveling in the thoughts, because I was convinced that my ideal would not allow even an approach to realization. The thought of a comedy with paid prostitutes always seemed so silly and purposeless, for a person hired by me could never take the place of my imagination of a ‘cruel mistress.’ I doubt whether there are sadistically constituted women like Sacher-Masoch’s heroines. But, if there were such women, and I had the fortune (!) to find one, still, in a world of reality, intercourse with her would ever seem only a farce to me. 33 So, indeed, it seems that the case studies representing sadism and masochism in fact represent two world views that are opposite in the case of never meeting. Sadism is acted contemporary s/m practices are actually just masochism. Because the pure fantasy of sadism is so violently represented in the world, whereas the pure forms of masochism remain almost entirely inside an individual, it’s much more comforting to resist the possibility of an actual non-masochistic-sadism existing in consensual s/m practices. Moore yet again provides the most insightful dismantling of this theoretical history: “Claims that sadism and masochism are incompatible typically rely upon the juxtaposition of a ‘real sadism’ imagined as the cruelty or non-compassion of the non-consensual torturer. The long history of imagining institutional and genocidal cruelty as the model of sadism plays an implicit role here, since it is clear that what permits the assertion that there can be no such thing as sadism in an SM scenario is the assumption that the true sadist is a torturer, camp guard or Holocaust perpetrator” (“Recovering Difference,” 37). 32 Deleuze, 73. 33 Krafft-Ebing, 138 (emphasis mine). 62 into the world violently and nonconsensually – resulting in the criminal sadism – while masochism is either left purely in the imagination, or must be an experience purchased through prostitution. 34 It makes sense, then, that Deleuze would critique the assumption that “the sadist and masochist are destined to meet.” 35 These early examples populating nineteenth-century sexology are evidence of the precise incompatibility of sadism and masochism, as these perversions really do seem to be working against each other in the real world. The idea of play – which this patient refers to with condescension, as a comedy or a farce – has not yet gained currency. I would suggest that the idea of play is also lacking from Deleuze’s analysis of sadism and masochism in his 1967 “Coldness and Cruelty,” 36 which provides a deep immersion in the literary representations of sadism and masochism, with the aim of refusing sexology’s claims of complementarity opposites that fueled the creation of the compound term sadomasochism. After the writings and research of early sexologists and 34 The lack of evidence supporting consensual, relational sadomasochism might be attributable to the larger objective of sexology to draw correlations with the natural world. Any possibility of consensuality is disappeared by the drive of sexologists to remain objective, and to locate objective correlatives in the natural world – to determine what constitutes the ‘natural’ sex act. In the attempt to describe sadomasochism’s denaturalization of sex, nineteenth-century sexologists relied upon evidence and examples from the natural world that disallowed the sort of staging and performativity – the eroticization of form – being described in so many of the case histories. Because of this reliance on the natural world, nineteenth-century sexology described forms of sadism and masochism that are incompatible, and therefore denied the possibility of a relationality described by the compound term sadomasochism. 35 Deleuze, 40. 36 Alison Moore provides an insightful critique of the common translation of Deleuze by Zone / McNeil, which “tones down Deleuze’s judgments and removes the connotations of pathologisation that are indeed present in the original essay.” See Moore, “Recovering Difference,” 36. I would add that the back cover of the Zone Books translation offers an additional misinterpretation of the lexical history of sadism and masochism, when it states that Sade and Sacher-Masoch are “the geniuses who created” sadism and masochism, when, as we have seen, this naming history is much more complex. 63 psychoanalysts, Deleuze’s essay makes the most significant shift in the history of theorizing sadomasochism. His argument is relatively simple: the compound term sadomasochism attempts to unify the two wholly different systems of thinking and of desiring represented within the works of Sade and Sacher-Masoch, and this “unfair assumption of complementarity and dialectical unity with Sade” 37 has resulted in a lack of attention directed to the actual literature of Masoch: “They represent parallel worlds, each complete in itself, and it is both unnecessary and impossible for either to enter the other’s world. We cannot at any rate say that they are exact opposites, except insofar as opposites avoid each other and must either do so or perish.” 38 Deleuze builds these parallel worlds thus: “the masochistic model is structured around frozen suspense and contract while the sadistic model is one of institutionality and perpetual motion.” 39 The persistence in viewing the oeuvres of Sade and Masoch as complementary opposites is reflected in the clinical symptomatology created during the nineteenth century, which, as we have seen with Krafft-Ebing and Ellis, emphasized how elements of sadism and masochism could often be found in the same person, suggesting that the slippage between the two was an easy, necessary matter. Deleuze delivers a shattering critique of the compounding of sadism and masochism through a close analysis of the different literary 37 Deleuze, 13. And considering the critical bibliography surrounding sadomasochism, when it comes to literature, much more attention has been given to the work of Sade. When it comes to concepts, however, masochism is the favored object of analysis, although works focusing on masochism very rarely deal specifically with the literature of Masoch. One notable exception is Barbara Mennel, The Representation of Masochism and Queer Desire in Film and Literature (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007). 38 Ibid., 68. 39 Claire Jarvis, Making Scenes: Supersensual Masochism and Victorian Literature, Diss. (Johns Hopkins U, 2008. Ann Arbor: UMI, 2009) 43. 64 forms of Sade and Masoch, directly increase the critical attention given to masochism (although there is still a lack of specific attention given to Sacher-Masoch’s oeuvre), and a general sense of retardataire being attached to the term sadomasochism. Deleuze’s interventions are invaluable in attempting to draw more critical attention to Sacher-Masoch, whose oeuvre has indeed been overshadowed by an incessant linkage with Sade and by generalizing psychoanalytic conceptualizations of sadomasochism. But Deleuze’s reconceptualization of masochism has undergone an appropriation similar to that suffered by sadomasochism – a casual and generalizing application. It has been lifted from the historical context of Deleuze’s own authorship, and taken to be the definitive theorization of both sadism and masochism. 40 After all, how can we return to sadomasochism once it has been exploded into its disparate parts? In these easy appropriations, as Alison Moore suggests, theorists and critics often overlook the context in which Deleuze developed his argument about masochism. In contextualizing the development of Deleuze’s argument in the post-WWII era and during his completion of Difference and Repetition, Moore argues that Deleuze attempts to describe “the incommensurability of sadism and masochism” through relying on “naively typologised” nineteenth-century categories, thereby negating the “difference between literary eroticism and psychiatric pathology”: “We see Deleuze perform precisely the kind of hasty dialectic he himself warns against performed along another axis.” 41 In 40 See Rubin and Butler, “Sexual Traffic.” Rubin has an incisive critique of how quickly theorists and critics have taken up Deleuzian masochism “as descriptions or interpretations of what actual masochists are, do, or mean.” 41 Moore, “Recovering Difference,” 28. 65 essence, Deleuze bases his disjoining of sadomasochism on the equation that “the clinical specificities of sadism and masochism are not separable from the literary values peculiar to Sade and Masoch.” 42 Both applications of Deleuzian masochism and Deleuzian masochism itself overlook the more complicated currents running through nineteenth- century sexological theories of sadism and masochism, as well as the entire history of practices that might be called sadomasochistic – “as if something beyond both this model [Deleuzian masochism] and the conjunctive psychoanalytic one he critiques were not possible.” 43 Deleuze’s theorization, which so completely echoes nineteenth-century sexology, does not recognize that the field itself approached the terms sadism and masochism with a deep ambivalence. The “beyond” that Moore introduces at the end of her essay is based on forms of sadism and masochism in contemporary SM scenarios, which she describes as two distinct desires “not assimilable to the other’s desire, even as it is deeply compatible with it.” 44 Moore preserves the distinction that Deleuze makes between sadism and masochism while also preserving their ability to complement one another. Her argument refutes the 42 Ibid., 27. 43 Ibid., 27-8. A few of the more notable studies, especially with reference to literary and cultural studies (in no particular order) include John K. Noyes, The Mastery of Submission: Inventions of Masochism (Cornell Stud. in Hist. of Psychiatry. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell UP, 1997).; Michelle Massé In the Name of Love: Women, Masochism, and the Gothic (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell UP, 1992); John Kucich’s Imperial Masochism; Susan Stewart-Steinberg. Sublime Surrender: Male Masochism at the Fin-de-Siècle (Cornell Stud. in Hist. of Psychiatry. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell UP, 1998); Nick Mansfield, Masochism: The Art of Power (Westport, Connect.: Praeger Pub., 1997); Rita Felski, “Redescriptions of Female Masochism,” Minnesota Review: A Journal of Committed Writing, 63/64 (2005): 127-39. 44 Ibid., 38. 66 uptakes of Deleuze that suggest that contemporary manifestations of consensual sadism are really just a disguised form of masochism. In this paradox of interdependent opposition – elaborated most fully by MacKendrick and referenced by Moore – the two erotics identified by Deleuze have a relational possibility. In this relationality, it is important that the two positions of sadism and masochism remain distinct, as the erotics of sadomasochism is generated, to borrow MacKendrick’s phrasing, not through the complementarity of the two worlds of sadism and masochism, but through the paradox of communicating between these worlds in a simulation of the scene of Law (or social power). Therefore, it makes sense that what Deleuze critiques most in the conjunction sadomasochism is how the deep complementarity of these two desiring systems slips into the assumption that they will (and perhaps should) “transform” into their complement. Deleuze is concerned, and rightly, that the concept of transformation reduces attention to the particular, independent experiences of the sadist and the masochist, with the result that the pleasure-pain link is being abstracted from the concrete formal conditions in which it arises. The pleasure-pain complex is regarded as a sort of neutral substance common to both sadism and masochism. . . . and it is supposed to be experienced equally and identically by the sadistic and masochistic subject, regardless of the concrete forms from which it results in each case. 45 Here, we can see how Deleuze actually aligns with contemporary theorists and practitioners of sadomasochism who wish to maintain the experiences of the sadist and the masochist as distinct, and wish to nullify the reductive interpretive power of the pain- 45 Deleuze, Coldness and Cruelty, 45. 67 pleasure complex. In other words, here we have the possibility of reading Deleuze for that third story of sadomasochism. The careful reader will have noted that in our time with Foucault, Deleuze, and nineteenth-century sexology, we have still been focused on reconceptualizing types, of understanding the experiences of the sadist and masochist, the dominant and the submissive, the top and the bottom, as distinct but relational. This complication is important in order to understand the precise structure of this erotics – or the “form” of the sex, as the sexologists would say. Deleuze’s use of the term ‘form’ early in his study is not out of convenience; rather, he develops the concept of ‘form’ as one of the primary distinguishing factors between sadism and masochism: It would seem that the contents of sadism and masochism are each intended to fulfill a form. . . . Any given formula for the association of pleasure and pain must take into account certain specific formal conditions (e.g., the form of waiting [masochism], the form of projection [sadism]). . . . Fundamentally, masochism is neither material nor moral, but essentially formal. We need, for the understanding of the world of perversions in general, a genuinely formal, almost deductive psychoanalysis which would attend first of all to the formal patterns underlying the processes, viewed as the formal elements of fictional art. 46 Deleuze uses the terms form and formal to refer to the structural components of sadism and masochism as presented in the works of Sade and Masoch. Form, in his usage, encourages us to think beyond the content of the perversions, which has been the problem: “If we take the material content as our starting point, we solve everything and we arrive besides at the supposed unity of sadism and masochism, but at the price of total 46 Ibid., 74. 68 confusion.” 47 Through understanding the different formal conditions out of which the sadist and masochist enact their pleasures, we come to a richer perception of these positionalities. According to Deleuze, sadism negates, instructs, describes, and reasons; masochism suspends, educates, persuades, and imagines. Sadism functions institutionally, masochism contractually. Sadism is universal and impersonal, masochism is dialectical and personal. These differences are represented at the formal level through, in Sade, the relentless descriptions elaborating countless horrific acts, ironized through what seem to be philosophical tangents. In Masoch, we find novels in which nothing happens – the pure forms of suspense and waiting, humorized through a theatrics of guilt. Deleuze’s use “form” is specific to the works of Sade and Masoch; yet the term opens the possibility of rethinking the form of sadomasochistic erotics, beyond their pure manifestations in theory. 48 In turning to the question of literary form, Deleuze already begins the process of shifting our existing tools of the analysis of sadomasochism in literature beyond questions of identity and into questions of structure. But what do we do with the fact that Deleuze rebuilds sadism and masochism by analyzing separate literary forms, for building his entire dismantling of the “semiological howler” of sadomasochism on the 47 Ibid., 74. 48 Deleuze’s attachment to the term form also appears in his work Nietzsche and Philosophy. In analyzing the Nietzchean will to power, Deleuze states, “appropriating, possessing, subjugating, dominating –these are the characteristics of active force. To appropriate means to impose forms, to create forms by imposing circumstances” (qtd. in MacKendrick 136). 69 analysis of two separate and incompatible literary forms? 49 These different formal conditions are useful for thinking of how, in real-world conditions, the sadist and the masochist experience the erotics of sadomasochism differently. But this does not much matter for Deleuze, whose goal is to shed particular light on the work of Sacher-Masoch, as well as to question “very crude and ill-differentiated concepts” of sadism and masochism as performed by psychoanalysis. 50 But Deleuze distinguishes the two incompatible models of sadism and masochism based on their extreme, literary forms. Just as we saw, in the nineteenth-century case studies of sexology, that pure forms of sadism and masochism never involved real players from the opposite position, so in the Deleuzian model “[t]he woman torturer cannot be sadistic precisely because she is in the masochistic situation, . . . a realization of the masochistic phantasy. . . . The same is true of sadism. The victim cannot be masochistic, not merely because the libertine would be irked if she were to experience pleasure, but because the victim of the sadist belongs entirely in the world of sadism.” 51 As works of art, then – as pure examples of the fantasies of masochism and sadism – sadism and masochism will of course never be compatible. Deleuze is considering a pure Sadean literature, a pure Masochian literature, and therefore his goal is to delineate two forms. How, then, do we conceptualize the erotic forms of sadomasochism, that problematic conjunction, that third story that Deleuze writes against and yet, as I argue, has yet to be fully told? How, then, do we 49 Ibid., 134. 50 Ibid., 132. 51 Ibid., 47. 70 describe the erotics of a relationality that exists beyond the case studies of sexology, the analyses of psychoanalysis, and the theoretical models of Deleuze? Deleuze assumes, as Moore has convincingly shown, that sexology built its definitions of sadism and masochism on the oeuvres of Sade and Masoch, when, in reality, although Krafft-Ebing’s neologisms held, most sexologists recognized that the case studies referred beyond Sade and Sacher-Masoch. Within sexology itself, there are forms of sadomasochism that run counter to the pathological and the criminal, just as in literature, there are forms of sadomasochism that run counter to Sadean and Masochian forms. As we have seen with the attempts of nineteenth-century sexology to theorize sadism and masochism beyond the pain/pleasure complex, we can also look here for alternate examples of the forms sadism and masochism assumed. Although provided for forensic and medical purposes, almost despite themselves the case histories evidence other forms of sadomasochism, elements that are ordinary and even mundane, although they are made un-ordinary and exotic through the process of eroticization. Krafft-Ebing, for example, refers to banal and “silly” acts of both sadism and masochism. In his section on sadism, he acknowledges that there is “a long series of forms which begins with capital crime and ends with paltry acts affording merely symbolic satisfaction.” 52 These “paltry acts” he explores in more detail under a section entitled “Symbolic Sadism,” where he states “if there is yet sufficient moral resistance, it may happen that the perverse inclination is satisfied by an act that is apparently quite senseless and silly, but which has 52 Psychopathia Sexualis, 92. 71 nevertheless a symbolic meaning for the perpetrator.” 53 Whereas his section on the extreme forms of nonconsensual criminal sadism contains upwards of twenty individual case histories, Krafft-Ebing only gives two histories for “symbolic sadism.” His section on masochism reveals an entirely different set of cases, and is where we locate more examples of the banal erotics of sadomasochism. Despite Krafft-Ebing’s repeated attempt to mirror sadism and masochism with one another – which he takes to the level of the sentence, as he repeats his syntax from his section on sadism, merely substituting in the language of masochism – his case histories evidence more of the symbolic acts. He repeats his formulation of sadism, saying for masochism, “there is a gradation of the acts from the most repulsive and monstrous to the silliest, regulated by the degree of intensity of the perverse instinct and the power of the remnants of moral and aesthetic countermotives.” 54 Krafft-Ebing does not offer a clear sense of what he means by “paltry” and “senseless and silly,” except that these acts present symbolic forms of these desires. Moreover, instead of limiting these “silliest” of acts to the section on “symbolic masochism,” the symbolic details thread throughout all the case histories on masochism. They come to use through an emphasis on mundane details and banal scenes, an intensification of attention given to the forms of everyday life – objects, places, and roles – that fuels sadomasochism’s erotics of form. Therefore, throughout the case studies of masochism, we find objects such as high heels, leather switches, wooden wagons, 53 Ibid., 77. 54 Ibid., 128-9. 72 short white dresses, stirrups; specific body parts such as meaty fists, haughty profiles, the sweat from feet, a lathered neck for shaving; places such as the kitchen floor, the plowed field, the formal parlour; and, of course, the roles, such as the countess, the houseboy, the pony, the schoolboy. In many of the case histories on masochism, even the most disgusting, there is a clear reliance on role-playing and performance – the “farce” and “comedy” dismissed by Ellis’s masochist – that is rarely, if ever, represented through the case histories for sadism. This fact may be because, as Krafft-Ebing states, “The extreme consequences of masochism . . . are checked by the instinct of self-preservation, and therefore murder and serious injury, which may be committed in sadistic excitement, have here in reality, so far as known, no passive equivalent.” 55 Most of the examples of masochism take place in role-playing and performance, or even in an individual’s fantasy, which seems to support, again, Deleuze’s separation of the two. Havelock Ellis, despite his rich discussion of pain, follows the same trajectory created by Krafft-Ebing in his sections explicitly on sadism and masochism: the sadism described is purely criminal, whereas the masochism described is mundane and performative. However, there is one interesting example that shows an elaborate, detailed creation of conditions, reminiscent of negotiations or contracts in the BDSM scene. At the end of his section on the prevalence of “love and cruelty” in the natural world, Ellis 55 Ibid., 133. Contemporarily, there is a form of play in the BDSM community known as “edgeplay,” in which acts tread close to fatal harm. It has been theorized, however, less in terms of fatal harm, and more in terms of individual edges of comfort / safety, both physically and psychologically. See in particular Newmahr, Playing on the Edge and MacKendrick, counterpleasures. 73 discusses the “natural female affinity” to endure pain. He quotes, at length, a letter from a woman: “I only get pleasure in the idea of a woman submitting herself to pain and harshness from the man she loves when the following conditions are fulfilled: 1. She must be absolutely sure of the man’s love. 2. She must have perfect confidence in his judgment. 3. The pain must be deliberately inflicted, not accidental. 4. It must be inflicted in kindness and for her own improvement, not in anger or with any revengeful feelings, as that would spoil one’s ideal of the man. 5. The pain must not be excessive and must be what when we were children we used to call a ‘tidy’ pain; i.e., there must be no mutilation, cutting, etc. 6. Last, one would have to feel very sure of one’s own influence over the man. So much for the idea. As I have never suffered pain under a combination of all of these conditions, I have no right to say that I should or should not experience pleasure from its infliction in reality.” 56 Here we can identify the mundanity of the erotics of sadomasochism, in the form of an elaborate set of conditions, very nearly resembling the form of a contract (so extensively eroticized by Sacher-Masoch, and still a central part of the process of contemporary BDSM practices today). Although Ellis is offering this particular case history as evidence of the ‘naturalness’ of female submission, there is nothing at all natural about these conditions. If this woman really were to be an example of the naturalness of submission, then there would be no ‘conditions’; there would be no limits drawn; and, finally, there would be no mutuality of power. Most importantly, this reflection on female erotic submission would be invisible and silent. The very process of articulation, reflection, and elaboration is the eroticization of the form of normative sexuality that reveals what we think to be ‘natural’ as just another empty form. Ellis, however, does not recognize the 56 Ellis, Love and Pain, 91-2. 74 unnaturalness of the extensive formalization of an act and positionality that is expected to be self-explanatory, or natural. That third story of sadomasochism: the mundane, the banal, the idea of pleasure in the simulation being fundamental to the erotics, the element of strategy and play that is somehow different from the theatrical quality ascribed to masochism by Deleuze – each of these form a component of sadomasochism’s relational erotics. STORY OF A SCENE We rarely, if ever, approach an analysis of sadomasochism in literature and art from this more complicated relational dynamic. Turning ever to Foucault adds one more level of clarification to the question of form and sadomasochism, one that helps to clarify the potential of the third story, particularly as a tool for literary analysis. Elaborating on the “creative enterprise” of S&M, Foucault maintains that this enterprise depends upon “the eroticization of strategic relations[,] . . . the use of a strategic relationship as a source of pleasure.” 57 More often than not, these strategic relationships are located in social institutions. Gathering spaces for BDSM practitioners, in addition to the stereotypical dungeon scene, also possess medical examination rooms and libraries; nurseries and schoolrooms. Within each of these spaces, there are specific and elaborate rules to abide by; there is a code of ethics dependent upon the forms of negotiation and contracts. BDSM practice, therefore, is entirely dependent upon 57 “Sex, Power, and the Politics of Identity,” 170. 75 eroticizing, and even idealizing, the forms and bureaucracies of institutions. Foucault introduces the concepts of strategy and play as terms to clarify how BDSM’s engagement with the forms and rituals of institutions is different from pure social power. What does it mean, for the interpretation of literature, to have a kind of sadomasochism with the formal conditions of form itself, the mundane and the banal, the simulated roles representing traumatic ideologies, of projection and waiting, of the institution and the contract? Dealing, however, with these newer and dirtier forms of sadomasochism – with form in and of itself – gets us into a different kind of aesthetics, a different sense of the literary. This aesthetics is based on the relational. It requires players and power dynamics, it requires a sense of play, and it relies upon very mundane forms, even unappealing aesthetic forms –the contract, the elaborate staging of an institutional scene, the annoying play of submission, the excessive attention to detail, the weighing of different forms of mastery. These are excessive, even immature forms, perverse forms that create a different aesthetic experience. Sadomasochism’s erotics of form, then, will certainly be discussed in relation to character, but will also inform a discussion of the dynamic between Victorian narratives and its readers, both then and now. Most of all, considering sadomasochism’s erotics of form in Victorian narrative will help us to develop a more complex understanding of the relationship between these narrative pleasures and their cultural ideologies – complicating an assumption eerily (but not 76 surprisingly) similar to that held about sadomasochism: that the pleasures of Victorian narratives are mere “vehicles for these ideologies.” 58 58 J. Jeffrey Franklin, Serious Play: The Cultural Form of the Nineteenth-Century Realist Novel (New Cultural Studies Ser. Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 1999) 8. 77 CHAPTER THREE: “THE ICY STILLNESS OF PERPETUAL SUSPENSE” 1 Plotting with Mary Elizabeth Braddon and Wilkie Collins To a greater or lesser degree every man is suspended upon narratives, on novels, which reveal to him the multiplicity of life. —Georges Bataille 2 It is perhaps with this image of the slightly perverse, dilatory, almost fetishistic text of narrative pleasure that we may best end this brief exploration of the popular novel. —Peter Brooks 3 Let’s begin our first analytical scene with an analogy: between the plotting of narrative and the plotting of sex, and how the perverse (read: excessive) plotting of sadomasochism might help us to flesh out our understanding of the excessive (read: perverse) plotting of sensation fiction. To a certain extent, this chapter is about every novel, the novel form in general, their plots in particular. A certain amount of what I will theorize here touches on the general nature of plots and the pleasure generated by plots. This general nature can be described in terms of suspense – when we understand suspense to be a rhythm of delay and deferral. Suspense, in this most obvious sense, is a defining characteristic of novels. 4 A certain amount of suspense is central, therefore, to 1 Wilkie Collins. The Woman in White. Matthew Sweet, ed. (London: Penguin Classics, 1999 [1859]) 480. 2 Quoted in Roland Barthes, S/Z: An Essay, Richard Miller, trans. (New York: Hill and Wang, 1975) 267. 3 Peter Brooks, Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative (New York: Random House, 1984) 170. 4 Juan A. Prieto-Pablos suggests as much: “Suspense is consubstantial to narrative itself” (109), which highlights the work of narratologist Meir Sternberg, in response to other theorists who suggest that 78 the landmark novelistic genre of the nineteenth century, the realist novel. One of our guiding questions becomes, then, what makes novels of suspense – in this chapter, sensation novels – so different from realist novels, or, to phrase it differently: what is unique about the suspense in sensation fiction? The relationship is structurally similar when we perform a terminological substitution: sadomasochism is central to, shall we say, realistic sex. To a certain extent, therefore, to talk about erotic plots is akin to trying to identify the precise erotics of sadomasochism, which as we have seen in the negotiations and in Chapter Two, is tricky because of their startling proximity to normative sexual relations. In the way that sadomasochistic erotics appear so often like normalized, hegemonic sexual relations – natural dynamics – forms of suspense in sensation fiction appear to be similar to the suspense generated by all plots. This is the paradox that generates the pleasure, where excess – always, always – becomes the operative distinguishing term. What I suggest: that sadomasochism is to normal sex as sensation fiction is to realism. Just as human sexuality was coming to be described in terms of ‘natural’ and ‘unnatural,’ the expansion of the novel form during the last half of the nineteenth century was subject to a similar ideological distinction between realism and sensation. And this distinction was marked, in the response to sensation fiction by nineteenth-century critics, by a fear of uncontrollable, unproductive, sensation – of sensation without end, of endlessly repeatable sensation. suspense is a “circumstantial phenomenon in the processes of response to narrative” (109). See “The paradox of suspense,” Poetics 26 (1998): 99-113. 79 At its height during the 1860s, sensation fiction – in its emphasis on plotting (over character) and on the maximization of readerly sensations through elaborate creations of suspense – was one of the genres that helped to draw the line between ‘realistic’ and ‘sensational’. Anthony Trollope takes issue with this distinction, stating that “A good novelist should be both [realistic and sensational], and both in the highest degree.” 5 But while most critics acknowledge that sensation narratives did rely on the everyday realities of mid-Victorian England as a setting for their dramatic events, and vice versa, sensation was a distinct genre inaugurated by Wilkie Collins with the publication of The Woman in White, a genre that came to be described as emphasizing plot over characterization, emphasizing even, as Patrick Brantlinger has noted, “descriptive detail and setting . . . [over] character.” 6 Through this elaborate plotting and setting, the goal of sensation (aside from its clear commercial ambitions) was emotional, as Wilkie Collins evidences in his call to critics and reviewers to stop spoiling his plots; to stop spoiling “the two main elements in the attraction of all stories – the interest of curiosity, and the excitement of surprise.” 7 5 Quoted in Caroline Levine, The Serious Pleasures of Suspense: Victorian Realism and Narrative Doubt (Vic. Lit. & Cult. Ser., Jerome J. McGann and Herbert F. Tucker, eds., Charlottesville: U of Virginia P, 2003) 207. 6 Patrick Brantlinger, “What Is ‘Sensational’ about the ‘Sensation Novel’?” Nineteenth Century Fiction. 37.1 (June 1982): 1-28. 7 Collins, “Preface (1860),” 4-5. In Come As You Are: Sexuality and Narrative (New York: Columbia UP, 1996) Judith Roof equates the “middles” of narratives with perversion, and states that commodity culture (contemporary, I think) has come “to suspend us in a perpetual middle, where each simulation [orgasm, at the closure] only leads to another. . . . Perversion has its place as always in the still-dominant and omnipresent heterosexual story . . . , is permitted as narratively useful, necessary to stir up the middle, to 80 Sensation narrative was, therefore, heavily invested in setting the scene, staging the scene. We might even go so far as to suggest that it was invested in making a scene. But what, precisely, is so unique about the setting of the scene? Most contemporary critics acknowledge that sensation fiction relied upon, not necessarily a realist project, but certainly on a resonance with the contemporary moment. In his 1865 review of Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Henry James fleshes this out quite a bit: To Mr. Collins belongs the credit of having introduced into fiction those most mysterious of mysteries, the mysteries which are at our own doors . . . Instead of the terrors of “Udolpho,” we were treated to the terrors of the cheerful country-house and the busy London lodgings. And there is no doubt that these are infinitely the more terrible. . . . Mrs. Radcliffe’s mysteries were romances pure and simple; while those of Mr. Wilkie Collins were stern reality. . . . The novelty [of Lady Audley’s Secret] lay in the heroine being, not a picturesque Italian of the fourteenth century, but an English gentlewoman of the current year, familiar with the use of the railway and the telegraph. The intense probability of the story is constantly reiterated. Modern England – the England of to-day’s newspaper – crops up at every step. 8 James, who would in later years critique nineteenth-century realism for its comic endings, preferring tragedy to express more of the chaos of humans and the events they create, in this review acknowledges that sensation fiction was operating under a different form of suspense than Gothic novels, acknowledges that sensation fiction was attempting to shore up its intense probability. The suspense generated by sensation fiction relies upon a sustain consumptive desire” (38-9). In this reading, the interplay between perversion and power is never seen as a positive thing, because Roof emphasizes reading for the end, the closures. 8 Henry James, “Mary Elizabeth Braddon (1865),” Literary Criticism, Volume One: Essays on Literature, American Writers, English Writers (New York: Library of America, 1984) 741-6. 81 “detailism” of the contemporary Victorian moment, in a general move to reveal that things are not as they should be or things are not what they seem. 9 This chapter will explore this peculiar epistemological world view deployed by sensation fiction, first within the wider realm of criticism about forms of suspense in the Victorian novel, accessing the narrative being told about sensation fiction by nineteenth- century critics. 10 After complicating theoretical approaches to the erotics of suspense, I will turn to the plots of two of the foundational novels of sensation fiction – Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White (1860) and Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret (1861-2) – which are rarely put into conversation with one another. We shall see, at this point, how the excessive plotting of these two novels affects our ability to produce a deeply engaging close reading. Yet that is precisely the point I wish to make about the forms of suspense in sensation fiction – the visibility of the plotting, the emphasis on mundane details produces a sadomasochistic structure of narrative pleasure that very nearly renders the content of the plots irrelevant. 9 This, of course, resonates with what Alison Moore has described as “the uniquely late-nineteenth- century’s precariousness of normalcy” (140). 10 Jonathan Loesberg offers the best account of how the genre of sensational fiction was created within the literary journals and through the literary critics of more ‘serious’ works of fiction. Jonathan Loesberg, “The Ideology of Narrative Form in Sensation Fiction,” Representations, 13 (Winter 1986): 115-138. 82 NONSERIOUS PLEASURES There exist very few extensive critical works on Victorian suspense, and most are invested in understanding suspense beyond the sensation novel, bringing it into more serious conversation within more serious works. 11 The best examples of these studies attempt to understand how suspense in Victorian narrative works beyond a simple emotional response, beyond an attempt to draw in an audience and therefore make more money. Caroline Levine’s The Serious Pleasures of Suspense does just that, by arguing that “the experience of suspense was not a means of social regulation, but a rigorous political and epistemological training, a way to foster energetic skepticism and uncertainty rather than closure and complacency.” 12 Here, suspense refers to the suspension of judgment in order to elevate a more objective and skeptical scientific mode. Through Levine’s close readings of a number of mid-Victorian thinkers and authors, in particular John Ruskin, she places suspense – in the form of a pause – at the center of the development of realism. 13 She picks up on Ruskin’s distinction between “imitative” art (that which first deceives as being real, and then generates pleasure in the viewer as we realize that it’s not real; that which attempts to be like something; a pleasure in the trick) and “truthful art” (that which acknowledges its own construction in the representation, 11 The landmark text here is Caroline Levine’s The Serious Pleasures of Suspense: Victorian Realism and Narrative Doubt (Charlottesville: U of Virginia P, 2003). 12 Levine, The Serious Pleasures of Suspense, 2. 13 Ibid., 3; 55. 83 that which is the form of something, the pleasure in seeing something as a form, not a trick) as offering the essential definition of the realist project. Levine describes this form of representation, “truthful mimesis,” as “a road map . . . document[ing] not impressions but relations, points of reference on a relational diagram.” 14 Truthful mimesis implicates the viewer in a relationship with the object, and demands of viewers that we consider the form as part of the representation – that we see the world as form. Levine extends this relationality into a new conceptualization of narrative realism: the realist experiment – like the scientific experiment – never purports to describe the intrinsic emplotment of the real. What Ruskin’s plot chronicles is a method. Suspense is the experience by which readers learn to doubt their own convictions and approach the mysteries of alterity. Suspenseful plotting, then, is not the form of the real; it is the form of the acquisition of knowledge. 15 This fundamental connection between suspense and knowledge is what leads Levine to deem this a serious epistemological pursuit, and to explore how suspense functions in some of the most canonical realist novels of Victorian period. Her foray into the realm of sensation is brief: while she acknowledges that “sensational Collins was in fact an exemplary Victorian realist,” 16 he enters her analysis primarily as an example of the blatant link between science and suspense, as the outcome of The Moonstone hinges upon a literal experiment in the narrative itself. Levine’s goal, however, is more philosophical 14 Ibid., 57. 15 Ibid., 60. 16 Ibid., 43. 84 or, if you will, metaphorical: in her efforts to locate suspense in both aesthetic and scientific discourses emerging in the middle of the nineteenth century, to save it from its shameful (and over-simplified) connections with plot, she sidesteps a consideration of suspense’s most obvious players: sensations novels. This move away from sensation novels is based, perhaps, on Ruskin’s differentiation between imitative art and truthful art; between the trompe l’oeil and truthful mimesis. This definition turns upon, as Levine phrases it, “the viewer’s sequence of experience.” 17 In imitative art, the viewer first experiences a picture of the real, which is immediately followed by the recognition that it is, in fact, not a real thing. It relies upon experiencing a trick. In truthful mimesis, the viewer recognizes the medium but quickly passes through it in order to access a deeper contemplation of the world being presented. Truthful mimesis builds a relationship between the viewer and the text because it is form and the viewer recognizes it immediately as such: “truthful mimesis begins with the separation between representation and the real and then invites us to bring them into relation . . . While imitation delights us with both its cleverness and our own, truthful art encourages a process of doubting and testing . . . It invites us to enjoy our own curiosity.” 18 Given this distinction, it seems that Levine has rejected sensation novels because they are merely imitative art. But if the Ruskinian distinction hinges upon form, then sensation narrative might be more “truthfully” mimetic than we tend to think. For 17 Ibid., 58. 18 Ibid., 60. 85 form is so central to sensation narrative that it becomes the primary experience of these novels; truth is not at stake, but the sensation of the form is. Sensation fiction inaugurated a new medium – a new form – that was by and large unfamiliar to 19 th -century readers. If, to paraphrase Barthes, a significant part of the tale is the telling, then what is the specific tale being told in sensation fiction’s form? While very few sensation novels approached the formal innovations of Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White, in general they all offered a narrative in which the sequencing of events was just as much a theme of the novel as the formal structure of the novel. Most of the readerly pleasure of sensation novels is attributed to what Collins identifies in his preface, the elements of curiosity and surprise, usually surrounding a mystery, both of which combine to form our experience of suspense. Both of the novels under consideration here have a proclaimed mystery at their core: in The Woman in White, we are asked to understand the relevance of the woman in white to the identity theft committed towards Laura Fairlie, through her marriage to Sir Percival Glyde. In Lady Audley’s Secret, we are asked to understand what is the true identity of Lady Audley and its relevance to the disappearance of George Talboys. The sequencing of events leading to the unveiling of these mysteries, again, becomes the dominating theme and form of these novels. Writing some fifteen years earlier than Levine, Jonathan Loesberg deeply engages sensation fiction’s deliberate sequencing, stating that it is “constructed on the principle of inevitable sequence depicted alternatively as either a chain made of links or as a providential unfolding.” 19 Building his argument on Frederic Jameson’s understanding of 19 Loesberg, 117. 86 history (and therefore, ideology) as being available “only in the narratives it produces,” Loesberg makes a convincing argument for why the sensation narrative emerged during the 1860s, but by the 1870s “seems to have lost definition and to have ceased to be controversial.” 20 According to Loesberg, the form of sensation narrative was a manifestation of the ideologies circulating during the Reform Debates of the 1850s and 1860s, a form that was also replicated in the nineteenth-century critical creation of and response to the sensation genre. Yet sensation fiction was not about the parliamentary reform under discussion; it was neither for nor against it. 21 While it often picked up on the vague fears surrounding more permeable class boundaries, and while these fears seem to be reflected in the thematics of the narratives, in terms of a persistent interest in the instability of identity, Loesberg extends these cultural fears to the level of narrative structure. Sensation fiction is structured by “an inevitability governing a mounting sequence,” to the extent “that any incident or concatenation of incidents will do as long as that incident or concatenation is sufficiently unusual, shocking, or violent.” 22 This structure of “mounting sequence” was shared by both sides of the Reform Debates and, more importantly, it was replicated by contemporary critics of the sensation novel. On the critiques leveled against sensation narrative by Margaret Oliphant and H . L. Mansel – both of whom worry about its slippery slopes – Loesberg states: 20 Ibid., 115. 21 In fact, Loesberg names one defining characteristic of sensation narrative to be “thematic indeterminacy,” which, combined with the “carefully wrought [structural] complexity… disallows thematic explanations by allowing too many of them” (132). 22 Ibid. 127, 129. 87 The story H. L. Mansel tells about the development of sensation fiction in his criticism of it is thus fully a sensational plot. Even as Mansel criticizes novels of plot as a debasement of the readers’ interest from the more serious novels of character, he tells a story in which the villainous sensation fiction victimizes the heroine, the reputable novels of character, as a result of the inevitable sequence created by demands of ever greater sensation. . . . And this sensation narrative of an inevitable sequence is one told by both sides of the debate over reform. 23 This argument is important in that it reveals how tightly woven sensation fiction was with the contemporary moment: not just the objects and technology identified by James, but sensation novels, created in conjunction with critical response to them, were formed, according to Loesberg, with specific reference to the ideological structure of the period. This leads the sensation genre to be marked by “contradictoriness, dissociations, and willed nonseriousness.” 24 These three categories offer a complicated picture of the specific type of suspense operating in sensation fiction, all of which emerge from the structure of ideology in response to class evolution. All three elements help to make visible the plotting of sensation fiction. What I will explore is how the pleasures of suspense in sensation fiction outlined a similar, developing anxiety about human sexuality. Similar to what Charlotte Bronte accomplished with her first-person narrative of an orphan girl, what was new and sensational about sensation narrative was not only its content, but the form of the content – and, for sensation narrative in particular, how the sequence of events is framed as inevitable, but structurally relies upon a host of 23 Ibid., 128. 24 Ibid., 133. 88 seemingly unrelated events and details. This contradiction required sensation novels to explain their own structures to the readers. The excessive emphasis on plotting and detail created a very peculiar narrative pleasure. “SOMETHING WANTING, SOMETHING WANTING” 25 We cannot get too far down the road in a discussion of narrative plots and erotic pleasure without turning, briefly, to Peter Brooks, whose work Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative, reclaimed plots from their shameful, merely affective position. Modifying Barthes’s formulation of all narrative structure hinging on the paradox between meaning (story, which propels us forward) and desire (plotting, which slows us down), Brooks articulates this narrative structure in Freudian terms, where, grossly paraphrased, the suspense natural to all novels – what Brooks terms detours – are best understood through the delays and deferrals necessary to the structure of both desire and life. Suspense, in this understanding, is natural to the thrust of narrative, is not yet excessive enough to be perversion. And so, as sadomasochism has that peculiar relation to normal sexuality, tracking so close to the ‘natural’ dynamics of sex, so too does suspense have a peculiar relation to narrative, being fundamental to all plots – and both, I argue, emerge as ‘unnatural’ through their excessive and mundane forms. In excess and blatancy is where we locate the erotics of sadomasochism in the form of suspense found in sensation novels. 25 Collins, The Woman in White, 54. 89 What Roland Barthes identifies as the guiding idea of all novels – la passion du sens – is intense emphasized through the plots of mystery and detection so blatant in sensation fiction. La Passion du sens, as Barthes shows us, is a passion precisely through a system of delay and deferral; it operates in a paradoxical structure, the sentence working against the hermeneutic code, slowed by the proairetic code, in a “static dynamics”: “whereas the sentence quickens the story’s ‘unfolding,’ and cannot help but move the story along, the hermeneutic code performs an opposite action: it must set up delays (obstacles, stoppages, deviations) . . . [B]etween question and answer there is a whole dilatory area whose emblem might be named ‘reticence,’ the rhetorical figure which interrupts the sentence, suspends it, turns it aside.” 26 A certain amount of delay, therefore, is necessary to all novels. Yet Barthes maintains an enigmatic approach to suspense-proper. Early in The Pleasure of the Text, he denies the connection between narrative suspense and pleasure: “The pleasure of the text is not the pleasure of the corporeal striptease or of narrative suspense. In this case, there is no tear, no edges: a gradual unveiling...” 27 These texts, which he names “classical texts” (or “readerly” texts, to connect back to his earlier work, S/Z) are rarely excessive in their forms, producing the gaps necessary for pleasure: “the seam between . . ., the fault, the flaw.” 28 Yet 26 Barthes, S/Z, 75. 27 Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text, 10. 28 Ibid., 7. The first example Barthes offers in order to show what he means by “the pleasure of the text” – “Sade: the pleasure of reading him clearly proceeds from certain breaks (or certain collisions): antipathetic codes (the noble and the trivial, for example) come into contact; pompous and ridiculous neologisms are created; pornographic messages are embodied in sentences so pure they might be used as grammatical models . . . The pleasure of the text is like that untenable, impossible, purely novelistic instant so relished 90 immediately Barthes identifies “a sort of diluted tmesis” in these classic readerly texts, and this experience of pleasurable cutting is a mundane one: [W]e do not read everything with the same intensity of reading; a rhythm is established, casual, unconcerned with the integrity of the text; our very avidity for knowledge impels us to skim or skip certain passages (anticipated as “boring”) in order to get more quickly to the warmer parts of the anecdote (which are always its articulations: whatever furthers the solution of the riddle, the revelation of fate): we boldly skip (no one is watching) descriptions, explanations, analyses, conversations; doing so, we resemble a spectator in a nightclub who climbs onto the stage and speeds up the dancer’s striptease, tearing off her clothing, but in the same order, that is: on the one hand respecting and on the other hastening the episodes of the ritual. . . . Thus, what I enjoy in narrative is not directly its content or even it structure, but rather the abrasions I impose upon the fine surface: I read, I skip, I look up, I dip in again. 29 Despite identifying the breaks necessary to his rather intangible conception of bliss, despite evidencing some sort of pleasure, in the above passage, in the this system of reading, Barthes seems to fight with himself 30 – throughout S/Z and now The Pleasure of the Text – over the pleasure taken from readerly texts, from the texts of pleasure. He links the texts of pleasure to “the text that contents, fills, grants euphoria; the text that comes by Sade’s libertine when he manages to be hanged and then to cut the rope at the very moment of his orgasm, his bliss.” In this passage, we can see how Barthes often interchanges pleasure with bliss. Indeed, this slippage is in fact necessary, I think, to his understanding of how the pleasure of the text is a writerly experience. Which is why, in the next passage, we will see Barthes contradicting himself. 29 Ibid., 10-12. 30 It may comes across, to me, as fighting with himself, but I would hazard to guess that Barthes is not dismissing the texts the are more readerly but in fact chastising readers who allow themselves to slip unquestioningly into this comfortable reading practice without developing the plurality of perspectives for which S/Z in essence advocates. 91 from culture and does not break with it, is linked to a comfortable practice of reading.” 31 And narrative suspense – although generating anxiety and tension – is necessary to our comfortable reading practice. Although Barthes seems to be calling for texts that break us more fully from culture, my purpose, here, is not to reclaim sensation fiction from its cultural dependence. Rather, I seek to understand how the modes of suspense coming from culture reflect, play upon – in a “willed nonseriousness” – the ideological structures of the period, especially with regards to the erotic. Most critics pull from Barthes an understanding of suspense that is dependent on la passion du sens, and this makes sense, as suspense seems more valued in its expanded noun form, suspension. The final word of Roland Barthes’s S/Z is suspension. 32 Five years later, the penultimate fragment in the Pleasure of the Text, “Value,” begins with the statement: “Pleasure’s force of suspension can never be overstated.” 33 An initial reading of Barthes, both S/Z and The Pleasure of the Text, suggests that his use of the term refers less to the sort of curiosity and anxiety that has come to describe narrative suspense. Yet Barthes makes a startling clarification of suspense in his development of the proairetic code in S/Z. Separate from the hermeneutic code, which defines the elements of a story that remain an enigma for the reader, the proairetic code identifies the actions in a story which will lead to additional narrative 31 Ibid., 14. 32 Barthes, S/Z, 217. 33 Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text, 65. 92 actions. Thus, as Dino Felluga explains, “Suspense is . . . created by action rather than by a reader’s or a viewer’s wish to have mysteries explained.” 34 What should be clear is that suspense functions in both ways, as the hermeneutic drives the proairetic, and vice versa. This understanding of suspense as a static dynamic seems different from suspension. Suspension, of course, has a rhetorical meaning – referring to the delay in the fullness or completion of knowledge or meaning (what Brooks calls the delay in the “final predication”), usually with the intention of creating a mental state of “fixity, attention, or contemplation.” 35 It creates “a condition of waiting, especially of being kept waiting,” which is often deemed essential to the careful consideration of a situation, issue, etc.; in this case, suspension refers to our judgments. Yet of course suspension works doubly, at the level of the material: “a way that something is hung up, the action of being hung up.” It perhaps goes without saying, but just as suspense is one of the defining characteristics of the novel, so too is it one of the defining characteristics of sadomasochism. For Gilles Deleuze, suspense is one of the primary differentiating characteristics between sadism and masochism. If Masoch has deemed his own aesthetics “supersensualism,” which refers to the “frozen quality” of masochistic pleasure – all slowed down, prolonged, disavowed into a single interminable moment – Deleuze names Sade as the definitive sensualist, consumed in the pace of lust. Sade writes in Juliette 34 Felluga, Dino. "Modules on Barthes: On the Five Codes." Introductory Guide to Critical Theory (31 Jan. 2011, Purdue U. 01 Apr. 2012). <http://www.purdue.edu/guidetotheory/narratology/modules/barthescodes.html>. 35 “suspend, v.” and “suspense, n.” Oxford English Dictionary. 3 nd ed. 2008. OED Online. Oxford UP. June 2012. http://dictionary.oed.com. 93 “lust, which all too quickly crowns our actors, might not have allowed the artist time to portray [this scene]. It is not easy for art, which is motionless, to depict an activity the essence of which is movement.” 36 Therefore, the techniques employed by Sade to convey the relentless “movement” of his particular sensuality is “the quantitative techniques of accumulation and acceleration . . . reiteration and multiplication of scenes, precipitation, overdetermination.” 37 Of the supersensualism that defines the masochistic experience, “[w]aiting and suspense are essential characteristics . . . [h]ence the ritual scenes of hanging, crucifixion and other forms of physical suspension in Masoch’s novels.” 38 Deleuze resists the “pleasure-pain complex” because it reduces the significance of “the form and in particular . . . the temporal form [of masochism]. . . . Formally speaking, masochism is a state of waiting; the masochist experiences waiting in its pure form.” 39 But as discussed in Chapter Two, there is a third story to be told, about the specific erotic relationality of sadomasochism. If we expand this story to be about suspense, then the sadism or dominance of sadomasochism is not in opposition to the suspense desired by the masochist or submissive. All scenes have an end, which the masochist resists and the sadist propels, the delay being the primary pleasure of the masochist and the culmination (not necessarily orgasm, but there is usually some sort of 36 Quoted in Deleuze, 70. 37 Ibid., 70. 38 Ibid., 70-1. 39 Ibid., 71. 94 finale) being the primary pleasure of the sadist. The erotics of sadomasochism interpolates this paradoxical dynamic between masochistic prolongation and sadistic propulsion. This third story is remarkably similar to the one told by Barthes about the paradoxical dynamic of narrative. 40 The acceleration forward of the sentence (remember Sade’s sentences of grammar so pure) with the necessarily slowing reticence of meaning. But in the erotic relationality of sadomasochism, it is the dynamic between propulsion and delay that matters. These erotics center on actions that happen in scene rather than what the ending is. Because, in the sadomasochistic scene, the end is always known, as the objective has been negotiated beforehand. The suspense enters, therefore, not with regard to what will happen – the masochist will be beat, etc. – but with regard to how it will happen, how certain actions and reactions will interact with one another toward the final agreed-upon objective. Even scenes that seem planned down to the last detail – “I will enter the room, you will remove my boots,” etc. – are at least minutely flexible. How, for example, will I remove the boots? Will I be kneeling and looking up? Will I be standing and bending over? Will I use my teeth to undo the laces? Suspense, here, aligns with Barthes’s articulation of the proairetic code, which attributes the creation of narrative suspense to action more than to meaning. If, as Loesberg has argued, the meanings of sensation fiction are indeterminate – due to the excessive multiplicity of meaning – then the plotting of sensation fiction becomes the primary purpose. This element contradicts Brooks’s understanding of the 40 Indeed, Barthes’s term for this essential narrative dynamic is itself paradoxical: “static dynamic.” 95 ultimate goal of narrative desire as “desire for the end.” 41 The middle phase of delay, anticipation, and prolongation – the experience of coming to knowledge – is the point. This understanding of suspense resonates with a major claim I want to make about novels in general, and sensation novels in particular: that we almost always know what the outcome will be. Most critics, however, take it for granted that we’re all surprised by the outcomes of novels. Indeed, Levine indicates this as a modern fault: “literary critics have been inclined to forget what it is like to read Victorian novels for the first time.” 42 But let’s face it: except for the few moments of true surprise – moments which rarely align with the actual climaxes of story – most of us, when reading a classical novel, already know what’s going to happen. We may not know the specifics, but the general idea exists. 43 How things fall apart and resolve becomes more important than what causes the 41 Brooks, Reading for the Plot, 52. 42 Levine, Serious Pleasures, 47. 43 In her dissertation on Victorian suspense, Audrey Murfin resists describing suspense in terms of emotional states: “[I]t is a mistake to assume that each reader feels the same suspense and anticipation in the same way, when our emotional responses to texts are both individually and culturally determined. Ann Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794), for example, is tedious to most modern readers, however thrilling it was to Northanger Abbey’s (1817) avid reader Catherine Morland and her contemporaries” (3). Murfin, Stories Without End: A Reexamination of Victorian Suspense (Diss. Binghamton Univ., 2008. Ann Arbor: UMI, 2008). One convincing interpretation of the historically different responses to suspense is offered in a study by Juan A. Prieto-Pablos, who suggests that our familiarity with the conventions of a genre affect the intensity of our suspense (101). Therefore, part of the shock of sensation fiction and the outcry against it during the 1860s had to do with the new-ness of the genre. I acknowledge that there are individual experiences of suspense, however, these individual responses might be viewed as working within some more generalized responses. I feel, in other words, that even with the surprises of a new genre, we can articulate some general reactions to suspense that function even in our jaded contemporary mode. Certainly a significant chunk of Vic. critics were jaded enough to see through the artifices of plot. Peter Brooks also talks about our common sense of plots: “Yet the obvious can often be the most interesting, as well as the most difficult, to talk about.” (xi). 96 fall, or what the resolution is. 44 Loesberg calls this the element of “dissociation” necessary to the sensation genre, when the actual suspense that is generated does not align with the guiding mysteries that would seem to be fueling the suspense. For example, one can never forget the moment in The Woman in White when Marian Halcombe’s diary is interrupted by the main villain, Count Fosco – when her writing is literally taken over, supplanted by his words, and the readers are left not knowing what has happened to her. This is the culmination of a slowly building anxiety that is topped off by a surprise. Yet the moment of suspense is not related to the initial mystery of the woman in white, at least for the readers because, at least by Chapter Nine, that mystery has been solved, both for the readers and the characters. Suspense is therefore generated through a deliberate, often heavy-handed plotting that culminates in moments distinct from the thematic mysteries. Similarly, in Lady Audley’s Secret, the actual secret could refer to any number of crimes. In its most general form – that Helen Talboys and Lady Lucy Audley are the same person – the secret is clear, to the readers and to Robert Audley (the self-appointed detective-protagonist), at least by the fourth chapter. Over and over, therefore, the dissociation of suspense from meaning shows to us that the process of 44 Levine makes an incisive rebuttal to the claim that “suspense operates in the service of its conclusions”: “we might say just as well that novelistic endings prove to us that we should always remain in suspense” (74). Prieto-Pablos maintains that readers generate questions in response to suspenseful narrative puzzles more along the lines of how the puzzle will be resolved, rather than what the solution will be (108). These “how-questions,” and their intersections with readers’ ideological schemata as well as their experience with the familiar, in addition to their ability to be forgotten, leads re-readers to experience suspense even when the outcome of narrative is known. Barthes, of course, takes the concept of first readings and re-readings even further: “(as if there were a beginning of reading, as if everything were not already read: there is no first reading, even if the text is concerned to give us that illusion by several operations of suspense, artifices more spectacular than persuasive)” (S/Z 16). 97 coming to know, the experience of plotting itself, is the primary objective of sensation fiction. Sensation fiction takes these to extremes, favoring action and sequence over the meaning created when things come together at the end, continuing on with the relentlessness of plotting, even when we know what will happen. “A TASTE OF THE CONSTRUCTION” When I sit down to write a novel I do no at all know and I do not very much care how it is to end . . . Wilkie Collins . . . plans everything on, down to the minutest detail, from the beginning to the end. . . . The construction is most minute and most wonderful. But I can never lose the taste of the construction. – Anthony Trollope, Autobiography 45 Peter Brooks gives very little attention to what he calls “popular novels,” yet what he does say is worth considering. In his formulation, these novels are, unsurprisingly, “slightly” perverse in their construction, employing a “common understanding of plotting as the masterful management of suspense and mystery, artfully leading the reader through an elaborate dilatory space that is always full of signs to be read, but always menaced with misreading until the very end.” 46 After an extensive reading of Eugène Sue’s Les Mystères de Paris, he offers a brief foray in the work of Wilkie Collins, of which he states about The Woman in White and The Moonstone: [Collins] uses multiple narrators to maintain interest and to create a nearly epistemological form of suspense, a deep uncertainty of perspective . . . 45 Qtd. in Wilkie Collins: The Critical Heritage. Norman Page, comp. (New York: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1974) 222-3. 46 Brooks, Reading for the Plot, 168. He reserves the full privilege of perversity for his next chapter on Flaubert: “Retrospective Lust, or Flaubert’s Perversities.” He seems to be aligning, even more than Barthes does, the texts of pleasure with commodity culture and comfortable reading practices. 98 [his] world is a veritable utopia of reading and writing, pursued both for the solution of enigmas and their prolongation in suspense, in the pleasure of the text: the best possible case of plot for plot’s sake. 47 These statements about Collins, combined with the understanding of plotting and perversity that comes through in the next chapter on Flaubert – “his relation to traditional uses of plot can only be described as perverse” 48 – suggests, again, that in Brooks’s formulation of narrative desire, the pleasure of the text is something altogether different. Moreover, it is not complete perversity (losing the plot entirely, as he will argue about Flaubert) but it exists in the fetishization of plotting. Sensation plots cannot be completely perverse because they do not involve the complete refusal of plot necessary to fit in the Freudian conceptualization of perversity. “Popular” novels have such a clear relationship between the paradox of textual pleasure described by Barthes – the forward tracking toward solution with the frozen prolongation of the enigma, a near backwardness, retardataire – that they cannot be celebrated in the privileged position of subterfuge occupied by Freudian perversity. They are simply popular excess, existing too much on the surface of things. This common response – that all is entirely too much on the surface in sensation fiction – is the reason a number of critics dismiss a consideration of sensation fiction from studies that speak both thematically and structurally to the genre. This dynamic is precisely why the erotics of sensation fiction might be considered sadomasochistic – 47 Ibid., 169-170. 48 Ibid., 171. 99 nothing is subtle about the construction. But it’s not enough to say that the plotting is conventional; it is the visibility of the plot through the act of plotting that generates the peculiar pleasure of reading sensation fiction. It is the plot revealed as plot itself – plotting taken to the thematic level, which imbues it with so much meaning as to burst meaning from plot. The peculiar suspense of sensation fiction works in two directions: first, it relies upon the idea that things / people / places / the world are not always what they appear to be and that a nervous, affective interior life runs counter to the mundane exterior realities from which we cannot escape. These are the dominant themes of suspense in sensation fiction. 49 Structurally, this thematic suspense results in plots that are relentlessly propelled forward through the process of detection and yet plots that have moments of structural digression, which thematically conveys the disjuncture between mundane exterior and affective interior. Both of these structural elements lead to what critics often consider to be the primary aesthetic failure of sensation fiction: that all, both themes and forms, are entirely too visible. In The Woman in White, this visibility is conveyed, immediately, through institutional language, of two kinds: we have the institution of narrative form that Collins invokes in his 1860 preface, and the institutional language of the law, and law-making, that Walter Hartright invokes in his opening. With Collins on the institution of the novel, 49 I agree with Loesberg’s claim that sensation fiction is marked by a thematic indeterminacy, which means, for my claims, that there are exceptions: there are elements of the world which are exactly what they appear to be, and the mentally unstable affective interiority is usually banished, by the end of the novel, through the resolution of the guiding mysteries. 100 he frames the plotting of the story in terms of an “experiment”: “An experiment is attempted in this novel, which has not (so far as I know) been hitherto tried in fiction. The story of the book is told throughout by the characters of the books. They are all placed in different positions along the chain of events; and they all take the chain up in turn, and carry it on to the end.” And immediately he takes us into the question of form: “If the execution of this idea had led to nothing more than the attainment of mere novelty of form, I should not have claimed a moment’s attention for it in this place. But the substance of the book, as well as the form, has profited by it.” 50 And the new form is immediately apparent, on the opening page of the novel: we are placed fully into the institution of the Law: As the judge might once have heard it, so the Reader shall hear it now. No circumstance of importance, from the beginning to the end of the disclosure, shall be related on hearsay evidence. When the writer of these introductory lines (Walter Hartright, by name) happens to be more closely connected than the others with the incidents to be recorded, he will describe them in his own person. When his experience fails, he will retire from the position of narrator; and his task will be continued, from the point at which he left it off, by other persons . . . Thus, the story here presented will be told by more than one pen, as the story of an offence against the law is told in Court by more than one witness – with the same object, in both cases, to present the truth always in its most direct and most intelligible aspect; and to trace the course of one complete series of events . . . Let Walter Hartright, teacher of drawing, aged twenty-eight years, be heard first. 51 50 Collins, 3. 51 Ibid., 9-10. Later in the narrative, Hartright frames his role in more active terms. In resisting slipping back into the “darkness and confusion” that results from discovering that Laura is still living, although sorely changed, Hartright chastises himself: “This must not be, if I, who write, am to guide, as I ought, you 101 I offer a quote of such length in order to show the fullness of the institutional framing given to this novel, as well as to show just how awkward it is. Also, what seems to be a contradiction in his invocation of the use of Law. Hartright assumes, and in fact demands of us, that we completely trust his ordering of the events, his sequencing. That all is absolutely truthful and real. But of course, we are not in the realm of the law-proper. We are not, for example, in Chancery, struggling under the frustrations of a never-ending, circular suit. We are in fact told, in these same opening paragraphs, that those on the side of right did not possess “the lubricating influences of oil of gold,” and therefore had to do their own justice-seeking. While we might view this as merely a representation of vigilante justice, and on one level – the thematic one – it is: this does something to the structure our experience – the readers – with this story. Here we have a simulation of the witnessing and confessional processes of law-enforcement and the courtroom, without being in the specific scenes of these institutions. The plot is made visible to us, explained to us, through the invocation of the institutions. It seems to be a novel in which the story and plot are quite closely aligned. Yet the appearance of following the story exactly as it happened, told in these fragments of voices – the appearance of truth and exactitude – is itself a plot. As Brooks notes, this produces a paradoxical effect, “a deep uncertainty of perspective” – despite the proclaimed certainty and truth of the perspectives being who read. This must not be, if the clue that leads through the windings of the Story is to remain, from end to end, untangled in my hands” (412). 102 offered. The novel is so vocal about its exact representation that, naturally, we’re inclined to doubt whether there can be such a thing. The law enters The Woman in White through the form the novel takes; in Lady Audley’s Secret it enters through the character of Robert Audley, and is given similar failures in our very first introduction to him, in Chapter Four, which begins: “Robert Audley was supposed to be a barrister.” 52 But this novel is not structured with the same complexity of voices. We have one voice, some undefined narrator, who does not begin the tale with a set of guidelines for how to approach the genre. The form of the novel is not explained to us, we’re simply invited to go on a walk. We began, to some extent, en media res – but not really, because this is a dead scene, stagnant. But we walk through it, taken by the hand by some curious narrator: It lay low down in a hollow, rich with fine old timber and luxuriant pastures; and you came upon it through an avenue of limes, bordered on either side by meadows, over the high hedges of which the cattle looked inquisitively at you as you passed, wondering, perhaps, what you wanted, for there was no thoroughfare, and unless you were going to the Court you had no business there at all. 53 Thematically, the opening of Lady Audley’s Secret is not a secret. The excessive descriptions of the scene and the Court in a decaying form, everything out of order, in a chapter with the title “Lucy” encourages the reader to make direct connections between the setting, and the state of affairs of those who rule the setting. Formally, the opening 52 Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Lady Audley’s Secret (Penguin Classics. London: Penguin, 1998 [1861-2]) 35. 53 Ibid., 7. 103 begins the sensation genre’s unique relationship with suspense through its direct appeal – more like a demand – for the participation of the reader. What is curious about both openings is this invocation of the reader: in The Woman in White, through the direct reference to our reading experience, with directions on how we should experience the novel; in Lady Audley’s Secret, through the use of the second person. In other words, these novels are already setting up the sensation genre to be one that is highly, intensely dependent on its readership. Although not as formally complicated as the set-up of The Woman in White, Lady Audley’s Secret participates in the excessive, heavy-handed plotting that marks novels of this genre. But rather than name this as evidence of the aesthetic failures of the writer, how does the excess shift when viewed as a formal device to generate the form of suspense peculiar to the sensation novel? In Lady Audley’s Secret it is the reliance on the technology of the day, as Henry James has noted, that creates the specific thematics of these novels, but that also creates a kind of formal awkwardness as the specific sequence of events must be made blatantly clear to the reader. Collins has allowed himself some flexibility for this awkwardness by making the juxtaposition of difference voices and different forms of writing central to the plot itself. Braddon, without such explicit framing, has written a novel in which the aesthetic awkwardness affects our position as ‘comfortable’ readers. For example, right before Robert Audley runs into (literally) his former Eton friend, George Talboys, the narrator tells us “At about twelve o’clock on the morning following that night upon which the events recorded in my last chapter had 104 taken place…” 54 ; and other moments such as these populate the text, with the sequence of events is so deliberately, ponderously constructed that, indeed, we get rather too much of the “taste of the construction.” And the heavy-handedness of the plotting relies directly upon mundane details. Whether it’s deliberate references to clock-time, to the “narrow black ribbon” which Lady Audley wears around her neck, always keeping “whatever the trinket was . . . hidden under her dress” 55 What is interesting about these details, at least the ribbon and the ring, is that they don’t reappear at the end. They are not essential to solving the mystery. Or, again and again how George Talboys keeps missing his opportunity to identify my Lady – the most pointed event converging with a chance encounter with Alicia Audley in the lane, when she just happens to have a letter from Lady Audley, which RA describes in elaborate, rapturous detail: a passage full of heavy- handed cues that we, the readers, can see, but are repeatedly ignored or missed by George Talboys. All of these misses culminate in the infamous scene of viewing the portrait, which cannot be accessed directly (because my Lady keeps her rooms locked tight), but must be gotten to by Alicia, who remembers a secret passage into my Lady’s rooms; and the portrait must be viewed only by one single candle, and with the sound and smells of a coming storm in the background. The Woman in White relies on a similar heavy foreshadowing that is, for the most part, missing from novels of the 19 th century based more on “plots of surprise.” This is, 54 Ibid., 37. 55 Ibid., 14. 105 again, conveyed through the figure of the lead detective. Walter Hartright, dominating the first significant chunk of the novel, teaches us how to read beneath the surface of our everyday life. We receive our first major lesson during Hartright’s encounter with the woman in white, in the middle of the night on the road to London: One word! The little familiar word that is on everybody’s lips, every hour in the day. Oh me! and I tremble, now, when I write it. We set our faces towards London, and walked on together in the first still hour of the new day – I, and this woman, whose name, whose character, whose story, whose objects in life, whose very presence by my side, at that moment, were fathomless mysteries to me. It was like a dream. Was I Walter Hartright? Was this the well-known, uneventful road, where holiday people strolled on Sundays? Had I really left, little more than an hour since, the quiet, decent, conventionally-domestic atmosphere of my mother’s cottage? 56 The “conventionally-domestic” is juxtaposed with the dream-like mystery of the bewildering encounter with the woman. The resultant confusion seeps even into Walter’s own sense of identity. This makes sense, to some extent – yet Hartright’s sense of identity is unstable even during moments which seem the least connected to suspense as it is connected to mystery. We have another questioning of identity in the moment when he is to encounter the first lady at Limmeridge. This experience is already disorienting – he calls it “a strange sensation” on first arriving – and connects it even to the view outside of his window, which, he ruminates, “was such a surprise, and such a change to me, after my weary London experience of brick and mortar landscape, that I seemed to burst into new life and a new set of thoughts the moment I looked at it. A confused 56 Collins, 26-7. 106 sensation of having suddenly lost my familiarity with the past, without acquiring any additional clearness of idea in reference to the present or the future, took possession of my mind.” 57 This is a familiar sensation, a shift in the self that occurs when the scene around us is shifted. It is not so much a feeling of suspense, but it is a lesson in how easily the self can be called into question (and its acquires even more weight when we recall that Hartright is of another class, and so his sense of self might be in question because he has stepped out of his class). Another lesson in how suspense functions comes when first meeting Marian Halcombe; it is an infamous scene that I will quote at length: The instant my eyes rested on her, I was struck by the rare beauty of her form, and by the unaffected grace of her attitude. Her figure was tall, yet not too tall; comely and well-developed, yet not fat; her head set on her shoulders with an easy, pliant firmness; her waist, perfection in the eyes of a man, for it occupied its natural place, it filled out its natural circle, it was visibly and delightfully undeformed by stays. She had not heard my entrance into the room; and I allowed myself the luxury of admiring her for a few moments . . . She turned towards me immediately. The easy elegance of every moment of her limbs and body as soon as she began to advance from the far end of the room, set me in a flutter of expectation to see her face clearly. She left the window – and I said to myself, The lady is dark. She moved forward a few steps – and I said to myself, The lady is young. She approached nearer – and I said to myself (with a sense of surprise which words fail me to express), The lady is ugly! Never was the old conventional maxim, that Nature cannot err, more flatly contradicted – never was the fair promise of a lovely figure more strangely and startlingly belied by the face and head that crowned it. The lady’s complexion was almost swarthy, and the dark down on her upper lip was almost a moustache. She had a large, firm, masculine mouth and jaw; prominent, piercing resolute brown eyes; and thick coal-black hair, growing unusually low down on her forehead. . . . To see such a face as this set on shoulders that a sculptor would have longed to model – to be charmed by the modest graces of action through which the symmetrical limbs betrayed their beauty when they moved, and then to be almost 57 Ibid., 33. 107 repelled by the masculine form and masculine look of the features in which the perfectly shaped figure ended – was to feel a sensation oddly akin to the helpless discomfort familiar to us all in sleep, when we recognise yet cannot reconcile the anomalies and contradictions of a dream. 58 Here, again, we do not have an event in and of itself threatening. And yet, this first encounter between a single young man from the middle class and a single, young “highly-bred woman” pupil, is extended in its description. The effect of the suspension in the bewildering contradiction of Marian Halcombe’s figure is not only to make her one of the most vividly memorable characters in the novel; it not only prepares our readerly minds to know her, and see her, so that when we are given her journal to read, we have this delightful contradiction before us; but the experience embodies the sort of “epistemological suspense” perhaps not envisioned by Peter Brooks. The act of viewing Marian Halcombe is an act of suspending judgment similar to that described by Levine (through Ruskin). Here Collins is offering a precise form of epistemological suspense: it is the kind of suspense that emerges when the perfection of form is sullied by something that doesn’t belong. As we can see in the above quotation, Nature itself is drawn into question, and questioned even further as we come to realize that Marian Halcombe is one of the most trustworthy figures of the novel. If we understand the structure of Collins’ logic, as he takes us through this elaborately slow perception of all of Halcombe, to function in line with the ideological structure of perversity and the ‘unnatural’ coming into increasing 58 Ibid., 34-5. 108 circulation during this period, we have one way of understanding how the excesses of suspense in sensation fiction were thought to lead to such problematic moral decay. The problem becomes that these novels, despite whatever conventional ends might be proposed, celebrate perversity – or, at the least, they make pleasurable perverse states of being and sensations that run counter to the humdrumness of everyday life. 59 Sensation fiction, in its serial, material life, shows the power of fantasy to take us away from the real world. But sensation fiction, in the worlds created by the novels, also encourages a simultaneous doubt of realness. What seems perverse or unnatural is often harmless and entirely real. 60 It comes to be more trustworthy than the real – in the case of The Woman in White and Lady Audley’s Secret, those of impeachable conduct and the smoothest manners are merely façades for maligned purposes. This is why when, in Blackwood’s Magazine, Margaret Oliphant writes that “the violent stimulation of serial publication – of weekly publication, with its necessity for frequent and rapid recurrence of piquant situation and startling incident – is the thing of all others most likely to develop the germ, and bring it to fuller and darker 59 This is reminiscent of how Ellis describes our attachments to pain: “it is the joy of being plunged among the waves of that great primitive ocean of emotions which underlies the variegated world of our everyday lives, and pain—a pain which, as we have seen, is often deprived so far as possible of cruelty, though sometimes by very thin and feeble devices—is merely the channel by which that ocean is reached.” See Chapter 2, pg 53. 60 When even get this lesson linked directly to the term ‘perversity’ in The Woman in White, when the boy being chastised for refusing to relinquish the idea of having seen a ghost in the church yard is described as “ ‘The matter begins and ends with the boy’s own perversity and folly” (88). This is followed by, on the next page, Walter Hartright saying, of his withholding of the realization that the sighting is likely an actual sighting of Anne Catherick in the church yard, states “ ‘I was afraid to encourage it in myself. I thought it was utterly preposterous – I distrusted it as the result of some perversity in my own imagination’” (89). 109 bearing,” we can easily think of this ‘germ’ as being sex. 61 And this is sex of a particular sort: it must be repeated frequently, etc. etc. Moreover, it must take us away from the mundanity of every day life through a sensationalization of the mundane. This is the paradox, and yet again, it is that paradox which most mimics the critiques of sadomasochism. The epistemological suspense in Lady Audley’s Secret is of a related, yet fundamentally different sort. In Collins, suspense hinges upon a conjunction of contradictory elements – walking a popular London road in the middle of the night with a strange woman, the ape-like, masculine face on a woman with a ‘rare beauty of form’ – which highlight the artificiality of these things we come to take as normal, natural, beautiful. In Braddon, suspense is built first through, in the same way as Collins, when we are taught not to trust outward appearances. The most famous of these lessons come in the forms of a digression on the seedy under-layer of English country homes, or the endless descriptions of Lady Audley, which are always conveyed with a puzzling, ominous tone. But more interesting about Braddon’s epistemological suspense is how it hinges upon the disjunction between nervous affective interior life and unfeeling exterior realities 62 : The cab stopped in the midst of Robert Audley’s meditation, and he had to pay the cabman, and submit to all the dreary mechanism of life, which is 61 Quoted in Matthew Sweet’s introduction to The Woman in White, xvii. 62 In their introduction to the novel, Taylor and Crofts state that Lady Audley’s Secret is marked “by a series of digressions through which we are drawn into Robert’s frame of mind, and which links the inner turmoil of the self to the stubborn materiality of modern consumer society.” 110 the same whether we are glad or sorry – whether we are to be married or hung . . . We are apt to be angry with this cruel hardness in our life – this unflinching regularity in the smaller wheels and meaner mechanism of the human machine, which knows no stoppage or cessation, though the mainspring be for ever broken, and the hands pointing to purposeless figures upon a shattered dial. Who has not felt, in the first madness of sorrow, an unreasoning rage against the mute propriety of chairs and tables, the stiff squareness of Turkey carpets, the unbending obstinacy of the outward apparatus of existence? Digressions such as these in sensation fiction create the gaps fundamental to Barthes’s conception of the pleasure of the text: “Tmesis, source or figure of pleasure, here confronts two prosaic edges with one another; it sets up what is useful to a knowledge of the secret against what is useless to such knowledge.” 63 This sensationalization of the everyday was noted by in a parody performed by Punch, in mock-description of a new journal deemed “The Sensation Times”: “This Journal will be devoted to the following subjects; namely Harrowing the Mind, making the Flesh Creep, Causing the Hair to Stand on end, Giving Shocks to the Nervous System, Destroying Conventional Moralities, and generally Unfitting the Public for the Prosaic Avocations of Life.” 64 Both The Woman in White and Lady Audley’s Secret, then, reveal the taste of the construction. The novels show us how we come to know anything, not just the central mysteries that area already-known. We are given lessons in how to read the novels 63 Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text, 11. 64 Qtd. in Taylor and Crofts introduction to Lady Audley’s Secret, xviii-xix. 111 themselves, but we are also given lessons on how to read the world. We are not, therefore, held in the “icy stillness of perpetual suspense,” because suspense in this formulation depends on a constant engagement with a bewildering world. And this world hinges upon the accumulation of minute details, an excessive attention to the mundane elements that removes them from their ordinariness. So while Robert Audley is discombobulated by the juxtaposition between his intense detecting activities (physical and mental) and the monotony of daily life, he also sifts through these monotonous and mundane elements for the smallest relevant detail, keeping an intricate record of these in his journal and filing important papers in “a Pigeonhole labeled ‘Important.’” Of course, the entire text of The Woman in White represents the accumulation of details and experience. All of this we experience as necessary, in direct contradiction to the fact that the central mystery is already known. Again, the pleasure of suspense, here, is carried through the action of coming to know. If by epistemological we mean the overall meaning of a text – the knowledge in a text, an “acquiring” of that knowledge, as Levine has argued – then these novels are not that. If by epistemological we mean the process of coming to know – about the information in a text and/or about ourselves – and in the process of experiencing ‘what will happen next’ (that is, narrative suspense), then these novels are epistemological. And the fact that with sensation novels we almost always know ‘how it will end,’ but not ‘how we will get to the ending,’ means that the lesson is a playful one, nonserious – we learn to enjoy the sensation itself. 112 What I am trying to identify here, then, is that elements considered aesthetic (and moral) failures of sensation novels are in fact a result of the formal excesses of the genre. They are purposeful. Recognizing these ‘failures’ as purposeful, as part of the goals of the genre, forces us to reconsider the purpose of thematic failures – for example, the critical tendency to interpret the sensation genre as having a liberal middle in order to reaffirm convention at the close. In considering how these two novels structure their pleasures around cultural ideologies (as Loesberg has done with class), it is impossible to ignore that these novels relate the detection of a mystery to development of their main male detectives as properly national and gendered men, who both come into their normal, natural sexual selves. The excessive form of plotting, then, combines with the excessive thematics of manhood. These culminating manhoods can be easily paraphrased: In his distress over leaving Laura Fairlie to be married to another man, Walter Hartright accepts a position on an expedition to Central America, and what he learns there prepares him to handle the urban jungle of London, and protect the safety of his love, Laura, and his friend, Marian, while he completes his detection of the villainous Percival Glyde and Count Fosco. Robert Audley must access a sternness within his character, resisting all of his effeminate, bachelor ways, in order to discover what has happened to his friend, George Talboys, whose sister he eventually marries – the culminating act of his maturity is to gift his French novels and meerschaums to a young barrister. Both of these trajectories, paraphrased, seem more than a little melodramatic and banal, and yet a similar feeling is conveyed in the actual text. This, I would suggest, is a result of the forms of sensation novels, which in their generation of pleasure through the excessive 113 attention to plotting and to details deemphasizes our investment in characters. This seems contradictory: why would we want to read a novel if we did not really care about its characters? Because we care, when reading excessively plotted genres like sensation, what happens to the characters, and how it happens. Just as sensation fiction depends upon an excessive construction of plots, plays and extends the very sensation of plotting, so too might sensation fiction present its trajectories of male sexual becoming in an equally nonserious play. 114 CHAPTER FOUR: ESTHER’S “TIDY PAIN” 1 Narration and Power in Charles Dickens’ Bleak House It’s not hard to hear that the writer is laughing—at the law, patriarchy, and paternity—nor is it difficult to discern the pain. It’s the “two of them” that makes the first of them so eerie: so unsettling or troubling in other words. 2 —Katherine Cummings switch, v. To direct (a current) by means of a switch . . . Of a two-state device: to pass to the other state. Of its state: to change. 3 When, in Chapter Three of Bleak House, Esther Woodcourt describes one of the most plotted moments of her life – the transfer from the Miss Donnys to Bleak House – you have probably stopped hearing this passage, for it strikes that familiar, Esther-y tone we have all learned to dismiss. When she says that “the pleasure of it, and the pain of it, and the pride and joy of it, and the humble regret of it, were so blended, that my heart seemed almost breaking while it was full of rapture” 4 , we recognize that mixed, ambivalent, even paradoxical combination of feelings best termed bittersweet. This combined affect of pain and pleasure occurs repeatedly in Esther Woodcourt’s portion of the narrative, and Dickens critics have a familiar name for it: we call it masochism, we 1 The phrase “tidy pain” is taken from one of Havelock Ellis’s correspondents. See Chapter 2, pg. 73. 2 Katherine Cummings, “Rereading Bleak House: The Chronicle of a ‘Little Body’ and Its Perverse Defense,” Telling Tales: The Hysteric’s Seduction in Fiction and Theory (Stanford: Stanford UP, 1991) 191-229. 215. 3 “switch, v. 8 a. and c”. The Oxford English Dictionary. 3 nd ed. 2008. OED Online. Oxford UP. June 2012. http://dictionary.oed.com. 4 Charles Dickens, Bleak House. George Ford and Sylvère Monod, eds. (Nort. Crit. Ed. New York: W. W. Norton, 1977 [1851-3]) 27. 115 connect it to Esther’s endless attempts at self-deprecation and submission, and we have come, I think, to take it for granted. These critics have been summarized by Helena Michie as interpreting Esther through the lens of “psychological types,” which readings, despite their easy fit, “are counterindicated by the [novel’s] consistent problematizing of the notion of self, particularly the female self, and that . . . Bleak House . . . [is] in some sense about the construction of the female self through pain and fragmentation.” 5 As the sharp mixture of pain and pleasure is such a blatant theme of Bleak House – and may very well best describe our reading experience of the novel – why not approach it through that most retardataire of concepts, sadomasochism, that one small, psychoanalytic leap we have been trained to make when dynamics of painful pleasure and pleasurable pain are invoked? That essential and, yet, somehow, oversimplifying, always paradoxical blend of pain and pleasure – despite what I attempted to suggest in the first chapter – that specific tincture of pain-pleasure, considered more closely, can open our reading of Bleak House’s more extensive engagement with pain and pleasure at the level of form. In exploring how Esther Woodcourt (narrator) remembers Esther Summerson’s (character) excruciating coming of age, in exploring how Esther Woodcourt writes of her old self, and – most importantly for my argument – how she structures the text around this pain, perhaps through this pain – exploring, in other words, 5 Helena Michie, “‘Who Is This in Pain?’: Scarring, Disfigurement, and Female Identity in “Bleak House” and “Our Mutual Friend,” NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction 22.2 (Winter, 1989): 199-212. 200. Before this section, Michie writes “Bleak House and Our Mutual Friend become, then, not only gigantic experiments in realism, but texts in which female pain produces a discourse of and for the female self and for the female body.” Eleanor Salotto offers another form of this reading that speaks to the potential for female subjectivity to fragment a text: “The transformations of subject positions in this text shatter the myth of an essential personality” (338). Eleanor Salotto, “Detecting Esther Summerson’s Secrets: Dickens’s Bleak House of Representation,” Victorian Literature and Culture (25.2 [1997]): 333-349. 116 the dynamic between narrator- and character-Esther, opens a consideration of how power dynamics reverberate throughout the form of the novel. 6 How pain fragments the self is not a new way of thinking about Bleak House. Nearly every critic thinking and writing about Bleak House is faced with accounting for how Esther’s pain manifests in the text, and nearly every one of them, at some point or another, talks around or directly names masochism as somehow central to this novel, and especially to the Esther’s portion of the narrative. While rich psychological and psychoanalytic interpretations of Esther Summerson’s portion of Bleak House certainly exist, very little has been done with the psychoanalytic types of sadism and masochism, nor the psychoanalytic form of desire, sadomasochism, beyond the simple appellations of this terminology to the text. It is easy to describe Esther Summerson as “submissive,” “passive,” and/or “masochistic.” And from this typology of character, it is easy to extend an understanding Esther’s character into a reading of the narrative form of the novel. So much of the novel turns upon Esther’s position as one cog – albeit an important one – in the more complex, patriarchal machinery of the story / society. Her individual voice – first-person narration – is subsumed in the larger crowd milling and speaking through the anonymous portion – the third-person narrator. Esther’s grateful passivity in the face of the relentless events of her own story might remind us of the sadism of stories, plots, and narratives in general. This sadism was famously articulated by Laura Mulvey: “Sadism 6 The only other character who deliberately invokes pain and pleasure together is Lady Dedlock, speaking with Tulkinghorn: “ ‘I am to drag my present life on, holding its pains at your pleasure, day by day?’” (659). 117 demands a story, depends on making something happen, forcing a change in another person, a battle of will and strength, victory/defeat, all occurring in linear time with a beginning and an end.” 7 Mulvey makes this comment in passing, as she identifies sadistic and masochistic elements in what she calls the “voyeuristic active/passive mechanisms” 8 of narrative cinema. For her, the binary of sadism/masochism is aligned with other phallocentric polarities, primarily male/female and active/passive. Women, then, are created and maintained as passive and masochistic, controlled and repressed by the sadistic drive of male narratives and male protagonists. No doubt Esther Summerson is easily, even naturally, viewed in this light. Yet even in this same early passage, where Esther receives the letter calling her to London to serve as companion to Ada, we can see that reading Esther purely in terms of passivity and masochism, as a mere recipient for the painful pleasure, is not quite right: something far more interesting, more cunning, is at work. O, never, never, never shall I forget the emotion this letter caused in the house! It was so tender in them to care so much for me; it was so gracious in that Father who had not forgotten me, to have made my orphan way so smooth and easy, and to have inclined so many youthful natures towards me; that I could hardly bear it. Not that I would have had them less sorry—I am afraid not; but the pleasure of it, and the pain of it, and the pride and joy of it, and the humble regret of it, were so blended, that my heart seemed almost breaking while it was full of rapture. 9 7 Laura Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure in Narrative Cinema,” Feminist Film Theory: A Reader, Sue Thornham, ed. (New York: NYU Press, 1999) 58-69. 65. 8 Ibid., 69. 9 Ibid., 27. 118 This passage does far more than describe Esther Summerson’s experience of the heady mix of pleasure and pain: it also serves to establish Esther in a far more active role with regard to this painful pleasure, as Esther Woodcourt spends significant time describing her attachment to this emotion. For Esther Woodcourt, in the formal choices she makes in narrating this scene, displays more than mere masochism in her attachment to this mixed feeling, but instead almost revels in an unexpected sadism, taking genuine pleasure in the emotional pain of her friends. How can this be? Sadism is a strong word, defined by the OED as “[e]nthusiasm for inflicting pain, suffering, or humiliation on others,” 10 hardly what we would expect to associate with the (seemingly) least aggressive person in Bleak House. Certainly I am over-stating the case, for wouldn’t anyone be pleased to find that one’s departure generates more sorrow than joy, especially an abused child like Esther Summerson? Yet the way that Esther Woodcourt remembers their sorrow – “O never, never, never shall I forget the emotion this letter caused in the house!” 11 – carries a peculiar tone of enthusiasm that reveals a highly passionate attachment to the suffering caused by the mere threat of her departure. But that is not all: the very offhand way with which she reflects on their sorrow – “Not that I would have had them less sorry—I am afraid not”; her own initial lack of feeling at the displacement; all of this introduces a curious edge of coldness that seems so out of place within a character who works so hard to construct 10 “sadism,” Oxford English Dictionary, 3 nd ed. 2008. OED Online. Oxford UP. June 2012. http://dictionary.oed.com. 11 Dickens, Bleak House. 27. 119 herself as unassuming, kind, dutiful, and passive. At the same time, Esther Woodcourt spends three paragraphs luxuriating in the precise emotional pain this letter caused not only in the house, but in the surrounding neighborhood, ending two of the paragraphs with a reference back to that heart “breaking while it was full of rapture.” 12 While Esther Summerson is quite “bowed down in the coach,” Esther Woodcourt moves on quickly, in that same cool fashion, to a cutting commentary on London fog and congestion – “I was quite persuaded that we were there, when we were ten miles off; and when we were really there, that we should never get there” – given in that peculiar Esther-y way that is self-deprecating while entirely true and insightful. Here, I am arguing, is evidence of a more active Esther –the narrator Esther – one who responds to the mixture of pain and pleasure, who remembers it and narrates it, in a way that gestures toward a more complex erotics of sadomasochism, not only in her relations with the characters within the novel, but with her relationship to different versions of herself and, more significantly, with us, her soon-to-be-tortured readers. Esther Woodcourt is not just feeling pain or enjoying inducing it in her friends – she is taking us along for the ride. Understanding the ‘ride’ – the movement of Esther’s narration and her structuring of her remembrance – is important for gleaning a more nuanced sense of the text’s specific play with pleasurable pain. And although my reading suggests a new psychological interpretation of the dynamic between Esther Summerson and Esther Woodcourt, we must dehumanize our reading of Esther, to a certain extent. Rather than taking Esther at face value, rather than favoring literal interpretations – even those that 12 Ibid., 41-2. 120 read a more cunning mimesis and play in Esther’s character creations – to develop a deeply complicated understanding of Esther’s character we must, ironically, view her not as a living character, nor even as a character typology, but as a formal device within the novel: the Esther switch. If, as I have already suggested, Esther possesses a more active relationship to her pain and, by extension, a more active role in narrating (constructing) this pain, this brings in to question the double narration structuring the novel. Bleak House is typically read as a novel comprised of two distinct narrators, and works very hard to maintain this separation. Esther Woodcourt is one if its busiest workers. However, I will suggest how the boundary between the two narrations is not so clear, and precisely at the moments Esther, as a character, is confronted with intense emotional pain, or: those moments when narrator-Esther is charged with taking us through this pain. I take up, then, this basic question of form: why do we, as readers and critics, accept so easily the separation between the first- and third-person narrators of Bleak House, despite the fact that, as Audrey Jaffe has noted, “the fiction sustaining each narrative cannot be upheld”? 13 CAUGHT IN THE COGS OF BLEAK HOUSE Teresa DeLauretis picks up Mulvey’s articulation on sadism and story in her chapter “Desire in Narrative” from Alice Doesn’t, where she seeks to explore “a 13 Audrey Jaffe, “David Copperfield and Bleak House: On Dividing the Responsibility of Knowing,” Vanishing Points: Dickens, Narrative, and the Subject of Omniscience (Berkeley: U of California P, 1991) 112-149. 130. 121 connection between sadism and narrative that may presuppose the agency of desire . . . a structural connection between sadism and narrative.” 14 DeLauretis argues that the connection between narrative and sadism is stronger than the connection between narrative and desire, primarily because traditional conceptualizations of desire invoke, demand, a necessary sadism. Her goal is to reconsider sadism and desire in terms of structure, rather than content. Structuralists, she argues, would and do relegate such narrative elements as sadism or desire to the level of thematics, being reluctant to open narrative theory to the questions and challenges of subjectivity implied by such a perversion as sadism. “The problem,” she writes, is that many of the current formulations of narrative process fail to see that subjectivity is engaged in the cogs of narrative and indeed constituted in the relation of narrative, meaning, and desire; so that the very work of narrative is the engagement of the subject in certain positionalities of meaning and desire. 15 As DeLauretis sees it, and quite rightly, female subjects and female desires are driven into a certain space and understanding by the mythic structure of narrative, one that allows males to transform, passage, progress, overcome woman and, in the end, achieve woman. Such progressions often result in, to borrow DeLauretis’s language, the attack, the battle, the slaying, the penetration, the overcoming of some sort of female figure or 14 Teresa DeLauretis, “Desire in Narrative,” Alice Doesn’t: Feminism, Semiotics, Cinema (Bloomington, IN: IU P, 1984) 103-57. 104. 15 Ibid., 106. 122 space. 16 In this sense narrative rests “on a specific assumption of sexual difference.” 17 DeLauretis reverses Mulvey’s phrase, stating instead that “‘Story demands sadism, depends on making something happen, forcing a change in another person, a battle of will and strength, victory/defeat, all occurring in linear time with a beginning and an end.” 18 Stories, in other words, tell women rather than being told by them. In this formulation rests one answer for why we persist in reading Bleak House as the product of two distinct narrators: as a central figure of an intricate web of other stories (told in that anonymous, third-person voice), both character- and narrator-Esther easily fit the position of the woman being told. I cannot, even if I wished to, disagree with the necessity of sadism to stories. Even if the sadism of stories, and the subsequent demands of masochism on the part of female characters, queer characters, and readers, all function as a tool for eliciting my consent to seduction, 19 I am not terribly troubled by this fact because I continue—and not alone—to find the seduction intensely pleasurable. I am terribly pleased, in fact, when DeLauretis assures us that we don’t have to relinquish our pleasures, that we might “resist confinement in that symbolic space by disturbing it, perverting it, making trouble, 16 Ibid., 132. 17 Ibid., 113. 18 Ibid., 132-3. 19 Ibid., 134. 123 seeking to exceed the boundary”; 20 it may be “possible even without the stoic, brutal prescription of self-discipline, the destruction of [narrative] pleasure, that seemed inevitable at the time.” 21 We might show the excesses and gaps of formulaic desire, understanding, à la Foucault, that any liberation from the grid of power, of narratives, is an illusion necessary to the proper functioning of that power. 22 So we work within the grid, we read and write within the narratives, new versions and perversions. Yet it becomes clear in DeLauretis’s argument that sadomasochism is, in fact, not a perverse positionality that can work from within narrative. The preclusion exists because, in DeLauretis’s formulation, sadism (and, again, masochism) are not perversions but instead ideologies of desire structured along the lines of sexual difference. And we remember that Freud himself, in Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, articulated this fundamental paradox of sadomasochism: that sadism and masochism as perversions are “the most common and most significant,” while simultaneously “occupy[ing] a special position among the perversions, since the contrast between activity and passivity which lies behind them is among the universal characteristics of sexual life”. 23 Although DeLauretis does not state it so baldly, this seems to be the formulation of desire against which she writes, a desire which contains unconscious ideologies of sadism and 20 Ibid., 139. 21 Ibid., 155. 22 See, of course, D. A. Miller’s The Novel and the Police (Berkeley: U of California P, 1988) for the most extensive elaboration / application of this dynamic. 23 Freud, “The Sexual Aberrations,” 23-4. 124 masochism that we are obliged or seduced to perform. Sadism and masochism, for DeLauretis, for many feminists, and for Freud himself are less perversions than universal ideologies; and precisely for this reason, they are positionalities, states of being that have been, more often than not, abandoned as hopelessly, circuitously, relentlessly phallocentric. For DeLauretis, therefore, sadomasochism is not one of those structures of desire that can pervert normative narrative, as sadism and masochism in fact are central to ideological narrative structure. To consider Esther as a sadist, then, again, seems astonishing – yet not entirely out of sync with the more complicated narrative erotics of sadomasochism, one that is a playful yet serious simulation, one in which the simulation in fact becomes an extraordinary source of pleasure. Esther Summerson, who seems just as much a part of this elaborate and enigmatic system of the novel, but as a “bearer, not maker, of meaning,” 24 at the same time finds herself (or places herself) in the position of part-time producer, controller, director, plotter, not only as Esther Summerson but most of all in her position as narrator-Esther Woodcourt. She was produced by the events of the story, and she plots these events for the reading pleasure and pain of her “unknown friend.” 25 She was produced and made meaningful by Mr. Jarndyce, Woodcourt, and her own attempts to be so; but she strives to author her life, particularly through authoring the life of those around her. In very initial and general ways, we already witness Esther’s switchiness, generated through her unique position as narrator and character. 24 Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” 59. 25 Dickens, Bleak House. 767. 125 How, then, to access the Esther switch beyond the blatant references to pain and pleasure? We can begin with the thematics of control. Esther’s sadism cannot be described, I think, as violence, nor does aggression seem to be the right term – sadism, perhaps is not the correct term at all, but Esther’s craving to control and master might best be termed dominance. ‘Sadism’ and ‘dominance’ are not interchangeable terms, as a sadist is typically much more interested in creating the physical experience of pain, whereas a dominant is generally interested in control over another person, with or without the physical sensation of pain. Subtle manifestations of Esther’s dominance appear in her relationship with Ada Clare, which becomes evident not a day after their first meeting. In offering us the first glimpse of the architecture and layout of Bleak House, we get a glimpse of exactly how precious Ada Clare is to Esther Summerson (Woodcourt?). After describing her own room, “that had more corners in it than I ever counted afterwards[,]” Out of this room, you went down two steps, into a charming little sitting- room, looking down upon a flower-garden, which room was henceforth to belong to Ada and me. Out of this you went up three steps, into Ada’s bed-room, which had a fine broad window, commanding a beautiful view (we saw a great expanse of darkness lying underneath the stars) to which there was a hollow window-seat, in which, with a spring-lock, three dear Adas might have been lost at once. 26 Such a small moment, just as easily lost within the text as the three dear Adas it describes as possibly, wishfully, longingly being lost in the window-seat. This moment is part of a larger descriptive passage, which of course evidences one of the leading characteristics of Dickensian prose – the winding, eccentric descriptions, exceptionally vivid – and is one 26 Ibid., 85. 126 of many moments when Esther’s narrative evidences stylistic overlaps with the third- person narrator. Yet why this specific image in order to describe the generous size of the window-seat? Or, from another perspective, why this image in order to describe the petite passivity of Ada Clare? The moment is small, yes, but I would suggest that it is intensely symbolic of Esther’s desire to control. It is not an image of safety or protection, as the specificity of the spring-lock – being easy and swift to lock, through the weight of slamming shut (by someone or by oneself) and as only unlockable from the outside – render the image so specific as to verge on creepiness. There is, moreover, the conjuring of “three dear Adas,” who might “have been lost at once,” the phrase “at once” meaning “directly” and “at the same time,” signaling immediacy and multiplicity. This small moment evidences a symbolic intensity of Esther’s desire toward Ada, a desire to have more of her, and a desire to bind her – to preserve, to prolong. This theme of control over Ada extends to Esther’s pleasure in Ada’s struggle to reveal her love for Richard, and how Esther refuses to help – guising it, of course, in the form of consideration and sensitivity to the young, budding love. Of course, Esther, with her “noticing way,” 27 finds them out: “I could not say so, of course, or show that I knew anything about it. On the contrary, I was so demure, and used to seem so unconscious, that sometimes I considered within myself while I was sitting at work, whether I was not 27 Esther Woodcourt describes herself early on this way: “I had always rather a noticing way – not a quick way, O no! – a silent way of noticing what passed before me, and thinking I should like to understand it better. I have not by any means a quick understanding. When I love a person very tenderly indeed, it seems to brighten. But even that may be my vanity” (28). What follows, however, in Ada’s confessional scene with Esther, and in innumerable other moments in the novel when Esther’s “noticing way” leads to her indispensability, truly contradicts her self-deprecating statements here. 127 growing quite deceitful.” 28 Yet her demureness and consideration is rather belied by Esther’s reaction when it comes time for Ada to make her confession: Now, I observed that evening, as I had observed for some days past, that Ada and Richard were more than ever attached to each other’s society; . . . though I was not quite prepared for her coming into my arms, and beginning to speak to me, with her face hidden. “My darling Esther!” murmured Ada. “I have a great secret to tell you!” A might secret, my pretty one, no doubt! “What is it, Ada?” “O Esther, you would never guess!” “Shall I try to guess?” said I. “O no! Don’t! Pray, don’t!” cried Ada, very much startled by the idea of me doing so. . . . It was so pretty to have her clinging to me in that way, hiding her face; and to know that she was not crying in sorrow, but in a little glow of joy, and pride, and hope; that I would not help her just yet. . . . 29 In this scene, the mixture of emotion is much the same as that described on leaving the Misses Donny’s establishment, with the significant exception that there is a noticeable lack of pain/pleasure mix and a noticeable increase in the playfulness of this scene, which both masks and reveals Esther’s control, as she suspends herself (and her readers) within her enjoyment of this confessional moment. But rather than reading this moment as an example of violent textuality, the control Esther registers more at the level of play. It also registers Esther Summerson/Woodcourt’s own need for Ada Clare, a vulnerability manifested through the impetus to control. One might wonder, then, that if Esther can speak so blithely, unconcernedly, and yet greedily, needily, about her controlled 28 Ibid., 137. 29 Ibid., 209. 128 deception of and playing with Ada Clare, we don’t suppose that the narrator-Esther might be enacting / deploying a more extensive and controlled deception of us, her readers. Why might not her control register at the level of narrative form? NARRATING ESTHER – OR, ESTHER’S HEADSPACE Howevermuch the participants may feel together, they do not feel the same . . . [R]ather, the power, being relational, begins in the relation, the space between these two (or more) subjects, a space between boundaries that this movement of power will rupture. 30 —Karmen MacKendrick I am not the first to propose that we consider Bleak House not as the product of two narrators, but as doubly narrated by Esther Woodcourt. The narration of Bleak House is so unusual – it is neither told by multiple characters nor is it a first-person narration enhanced by a third-person omniscience that remains unseen by our first-person narrator – precisely because it calls attention to itself and its oddity. Esther knows of the other presence. In Dickens on the Romantic Side of Familiar Things, Robert Newsom argues that “[e]very reader of the novel quickly recognizes that something peculiar is going on in the way the story is told.” 31 What is enticingly clear is that Esther Woodcourt is clearly 30 MacKendrick, counterpleasures, 130. 31 Robert Newsom, Dickens on The Romantic Side of Familiar Things: Bleak House and the Novel Tradition (Santa Cruz, Ca.: The Dickens Project, 1988 [1977, Columbia UP]). 14 Hilary Schor in Dickens and the Daughter of the House and John O. Jordan in Supposing Bleak House offer two other compelling readings of the permeable boundary between the novel’s narrations. See below for my discussion of Schor’s argument. John O. Jordan verges the closest to connecting the formal questions of narration to the thematic questions of Esther’s pain, with the goal of “accounting . . . for the depth of psychic pain that Esther confronts [and] for the residue of this pain in her retrospective narrative.” While Jordan is not quite as direct in Schor in suggesting that Esther Woodcourt has penned all portions of the novel, his argument does evidence the “permeable” nature of the division between the ‘two’ narrators. Still, his purpose is so entirely focused on understanding how the act of retrospective narration affects Esther’s portion of the narrative, that he rarely, and seriously, considers how the retrospective narration might be affecting the 129 aware of the other Voice, 32 and her constant references to her “portion of these pages” and her occasional (very occasional) references to the awkwardness she feels in writing 33 help us, as readers, to believe in the “truth” of the narration divided between two separate beings “with two points of view which are somehow incompatible” 34 : While the novel’s two narratives are opposites in many ways (the one being masculine, aggressive, and angry, and interested only in the present, the other being feminine, retiring, self-involved, and reflecting only on what is already past), it is nevertheless sometimes difficult to tell them apart. Esther, in particular, often falls into the voice of the other narrator, and this suggests we may read them as alter-egos. 35 Newsom proceeds to suggest, in a parenthetical, that “in fact the only way to explain the double narrative according to even the loosest standards of ‘realism’ is to say that Esther Other Narrator. How, in fact, the Other Narration might be part and parcel of the entire act of retrospective narration (although the Other Narration deflects this sort of reading through its use of the present tense.) Jordan’s goal is to develop a deeper understanding of Esther’s “role as narrator, her place within language,” which he argues that most critics neglect in the process of focusing “on the plot, on Esther’s place in society.” (73-4) 32 As Schor states: “This is the verisimilar crux of the problem: Esther seems aware of the third-person narrator, and of the submergence of her narrative within it” (117). 33 Dickens, Bleak House: “I have a great deal of difficulty in beginning to write my portion of these pages, for I know I am not clever” (27); “I don’t know how it is, I seem to be always writing about myself” (137). Esther’s repeated self-disparagement of her cleverness helps to solidify the division between the narrations, especially as the third-person narrator, as Robert Garis has argued, represents Dickens’ “theatrical mode,” which evidences a kind of tonal self-satisfaction: “[T]he source of Dickens’s enjoyment . . . is not only the scene before him, but his own skill in rendering that scene, and that he consciously offers us that skill for our enjoyment and applause” (qtd. in Newsom 16). The Other Narrator is clearly aware of her cleverness. 34 Newsom, Dickens on the Romantic Side of Familiar Things, 14-5. 35 Ibid., 87. In a footnote to this reading on the gendering of the narrators, Newsom also offers a typical psychoanalytic reading of the sexuality of the novel, stating that the goal of the novel is for Esther to achieve ‘adult,’ ‘genital’ sexuality. While this may be the goal for Esther Summerson, I would suggest that the erotic goals of Esther Woodcourt are more sadomasochistic, in the more complicated sense I am developing here. 130 has chosen to write in the first person, but has written an ‘other,’ third-person narrative to cover those events of her story in which she has not directly participated.” 36 While Newsom offers an elaborate, insightful reading of the doubling and repressions so central to Bleak House, his acknowledgment that Esther Woodcourt has written the entirety of Bleak House remains in the parenthetical. Hilary M. Schor offers a direct response to gendered readings of the narration of Bleak House, which rely on attaching certain tones and attitudes to different genders, and in the process provides one of the most in-depth and persuasive developments of Esther Woodcourt being the author of all of the novel. With the goal of showing how Esther’s claimed portion is as much about the “law plot” as the Other Narration – despite the fact that Esther “clings to the division with which the novel beings: that unlike the ‘Chancery’ narration, her narration is personal, is familial, is about powerlessness” 37 – Schor expands the possibility suggested by Newsom, that Esther is the third-person narrator, but this time along the lines of gender: The other narrator is aware of her . . . but he does not tell her story; indeed, she attends far more to his concerns (repeating his events) than the other way around. It seems to me entirely possible to read “his” text as “her” imaginings of those scenes from which she is absent . . . The third person is a short step from the dissociation that marks much of Esther’s self-narration: its flatness, its coolness at moments of stress, its refusal to be the text of female desire we might expect. In fact, one could postulate that in writing the other narrative, Esther has achieved what she claimed she wanted in her own: a text in which her little body will, in fact, “fall into the background.” 36 Ibid., 87. 37 Hilary M. Schor, “Bleak House and the dead mother’s property,” Dickens and the Daughter of the House (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1999) 103. 131 And then she asks a central question: “not, why does Dickens write two novels (that is, write ‘his’ and Esther’s) but why does he write a novel in which one woman (Esther) writes two narratives.” 38 Schor’s answer to this question is for power: “the will to power that is the novelist’s; the agency that is the character’s; the power of Esther’s investigations of all the scenes she was absent from.” 39 But, for Schor, this power “of authorship . . . is a dark one.” Where does the pleasure in this darkness come? My goal is to understand Esther as a plotter, and to understand how her plotting of the novel, of the entirety of the novel, might be considered both as a response to psychological pain / traumatic memories and as a result of her position in the nineteenth- century social order. There is a recurring structural clue supporting a reading of Bleak House as entirely under the control of Esther Woodcourt, and it is one referenced by Schor – the moments when Esther’s little body falls into the background nearly always occur directly after an emotionally painful moment. Jordan offers the more common psychoanalytic reading of Esther’s trauma, stating that “Esther’s habit of narrative indirection” can be read in what occurs “whenever she witnesses (and reexperiences) a traumatic ‘primal’ scene [:] . . . she will displace her reaction onto a nearby figure in her narrative.” 40 But the other, more formal, structural way of putting it: the emotional 38 Ibid., 122. 39 Ibid., 122. 40 Ibid., 69. 132 displacements we see Esther performing, and that we credit to her subjectivity as a writing adult with a history of an abused past, and that we often assume must be out of her control, must be unconscious responses to the pain of remembering – these moments of displacement might also be read as moments of deferral, as they contribute to the overall effect and success of the novel’s pacing. To return to Stekel’s phrasing of the relationality of sadomasochism, we see Esther feeling herself into others. As readers, we experience these moments as narrative suspense, heightening our experience of revelations that we, mostly, already know. To put too much of the human into this formal reading: these moments of are not, then, only elements of Esther’s “darker writing self,” but they might be usefully considered to be elements of Esther’s cunning writing self – the part of her that takes joy in the writing, in exercising narratorial control over events in her life that, previously, controlled her. “A STUDIED, ALMOST MASOCHISTIC” ESTHER 41 Newsom, Schor, Jordan, all approach the apparent ‘truth’ of the two separate narrators, all circling the same sort of point but in varied guises, but the question remains: Why do we persist in taking for granted the two narrators of the novel? Why do we prefer 41 As Jordan states, “In the reading that I give to it, Esther’s narrative is a marvelous ghost story. It is a narrative full of contradictory impulses, containing passages of brilliant, powerful, hallucinatory prose, equal to the best that any Victorian novelist (even Dickens!) could produce, but also replete with coy evasions, sentimental self-indulgence, and a studied, almost masochistic desire to hide her beauty, sexuality, and creativity from the view of others and from herself. To the extent that generations of readers have found her ‘unlikable’ as a narrator, she has succeeded in this effort at concealment. My task in reading her otherwise has been to bring out the darker, more powerful and conflicted side of Esther’s character and to locate the sources both of her strengths and of her neuroses, the two being closely connected” (72-3). 133 to let Esther have her domestic portion of the pages, yet are willing to consider that David Copperfield or, more convincingly, Philip Pirrip, have written their own story? Why can’t Esther’s version of her own story involve what seem to be two voices? One way to approach this question of the division between the two narrators is, in fact, to consider how the division is solidified by narrator-Esther Woodcourt’s creation of character-Esther Summerson (properly Esther Hawdon), her deliberate and often heavy-handed depiction of repressed goodness. Esther’s concealments are remarkably successful. I would suggest that Esther Woodcourt’s creation of her character, Esther Summerson, is central to the narrative control she exerts over the whole the text. Audrey Jaffe offers the best elucidation of Esther’s deliberate creation of her own passivity, asserting that the character-Esther’s self-effacement is a deliberate strategizing on the part of narrator-Esther: Insisting upon her status as one who does not know, who does not even occupy the subject’s position in her narrative, Esther works to efface her own knowledge. And her self-effacing narration serves both a narrative and characterological purpose, enabling her to structure her narrative and her character without appearing to do so . . . [She] structure[s] herself as subject by structuring herself as object, directing the course of her narrative and articulating her own identity while claiming that it is articulated by others. 42 As Jaffe notes, without using the same language, Esther’s masochism, her passivity, her self-repression is a deliberate positionality built by the more sadistic narrator-Esther. The narrator-Esther rarely emerges in sadistic or domineering ways partially because she so actively constructs herself as the exact opposite. We can see how Esther’s heavy-handed 42 Jaffe, 132, 135. 134 construction of passivity verges on a form of industrious activity, signaling the excessive possibilities of power binaries, and the always already constructed element of power relation. 43 The relations of power circulating between narrator-Esther and character- Esther are not pure forms of social power, but illusions of these positions. We might describe the typical contemporary dominant/submissive relationship in the same terms: Whereas a dom would be considered both author/narrator and character of a scene, and a sub only a character, this is in fact not the case, as both the dom and sub will have collaborated and communicated previously to negotiate the scene’s edges; or the sub would be what is called “topping from the bottom,” which occurs when a bottom (sub) controls and guides a scene with her top through actions and language designed to signal her desires to the top. In such a case, an outside viewer may believe the dom/top to be completely in control of the events, when in actuality she is taking cues from her sub/bottom. All effort goes, however, into maintaining the illusion (and here, again, we come to the idea of simulation) of dominance and submission, and all the affect generated by such positions. In the case of Bleak House and Esther Summerson/Woodcourt, outside viewers tend to be overpowered by the (dominating) image of a submissive and enduring Esther. The assumed boundaries and responsibilities of characters and narrators is something that Jaffe notes in exploring the omniscient moments in Esther’s first-person 43 In fact, the search for industrious activity becomes frantic, in direct proportion to Esther’s struggle to present herself as grateful and cheerful after losing her face (literally) to small-pox, and resigning herself to serving as Mr. Jarndyce’s wife: “how could I ever be busy enough, how could I ever be good enough, how in my little way could I ever hope to be forgetful enough of myself”(686); “only new reasons why I should be busy, busy, busy” (693). 135 narration. She narrows the gap between the first-person and omniscient narrators by identifying in them a common “desire to take up a position outside the self.” 44 For omniscience, this desire is manifested as a fantasy of “transcending individual consciousness.” 45 The first-person desire, however, functions as the achievement of that fantasy through the ability of narrators to be “subjects and objects of their own narratives . . . occupy[ing] a position of self-transcendence.” 46 The fantasizing nature of omniscience and the self-transcending power of the first person, both contradict major assumptions about these narrative techniques. But what Jaffe doesn’t quite say is how our assumptions of omniscience and first-person narrations rely upon illusions of power. While omniscience is the possession of “absolute knowledge” 47 of all events and motives, if it is characterized primarily by objectivity and activity in presenting these events and motives, if it is the dominant force of plotting, a dominance “everywhere and no where at once”; 48 it is also part of the cultural fantasy of transcending individual consciousness, a subject of the machine of cultural systems, an illusion of dominance. Similarly, if first- person narratives are marked by the limitations of their subjectivity, by “coyness, passivity, detachment,” 49 narration renders them as self-transcendent, as achieving 44 Jaffe, 115. 45 Ibid., 114. 46 Ibid., 115. 47 Ibid., 114. 48 Ibid., 137. 136 dominance enough to step outside of their character function in order to navigate the plot—an illusion of submission. Because of the overlap of function between omniscience and first-person, Jaffe is able to identify and discuss omniscient moments in the self- effacements of Esther Summerson. These are, as I have paraphrased Jaffe, the tactics Esther uses to strategically create her own passivity. But why the need to strategically create passivity? According to Jaffe, the passivity serves as a function supporting those omniscient moments in Esther’s narrative, those moments when her “little body” does indeed “fall into the background.” 50 But I would like to propose a different reading of Esther’s purpose in strategically creating this passivity: that Esther’s deliberate creation of her own passivity is in many ways a direct response to the pain of her narrative, particularly those moments when her pain borders so closely on pleasure. And, as I have suggested, this is not merely a way for Esther to handle this pain, or to deal with it: the fact that Esther Summerson’s passivity and Esther Woodcourt’s control are, as we have seen, illusions, suggests that we read this power relation formally. We have seen that, when it comes to the pain of others, Esther evidences a desire to extend this pain, to control the discomfort; and when it comes to her own pain, she exercises a similar intensification. It works at the formal level, to delay and extend what causes the pain; it works, also, at the psychological level, as we understand Esther not only to be melancholic in her remembrance of / attachment to the pain, but to be attached to the pain in ways that are quite autoerotic. 49 Ibid., 113. 50 Dickens, Bleak House, 27. 137 The control that Esther Woodcourt exerts over her self-creation indicates not, as some might interpret it, the ease with which sadism slips to masochism, and masochism to sadism. The ease resonates, rather, with a specific role / subjectivity described by BDSM practitioners as a switch. An abject position, and greedy; rather like the position of bisexuality within the field of homonormativity, the switch is often seen as being noncommittal, indecisive, wanting her cake and eating it, too. And if only she would commit!, she’d finally just come out as bottom or top. Even in cultures that (seem to) resist static categories, folks are uneasy with the both/and/more structures of subjectivity and erotic relating. Within the etiquette and boundaries of negotiated BDSM scenes, the switch chooses her position. Perhaps what is so entirely disconcerting about the position of a switch is how it engenders, or embodies, the notion of play. To switch – as in, changing states, although what follows might apply to the act of applying a switch to someone – is a serious thing, but it demands a more fluid understanding of erotic subjectivities. 51 If we read Esther less literally, and if we take seriously Jordan’s statement that Esther really does control all surfaces of the novel; and if we, more importantly, explore the symbolic layers of a switch, Esther does not simply evidence a subversive thematic desire to control others – but her control becomes a formal thing. Esther might be seen as the switchboard of the novel, that grid of power through which all events come to us, the readers, in their specific and purposeful system of intensified 51 Which is not at all to say that there are no static categories. Just as masochism has long been articulated as a unique erotic subjectivity (see innumerable texts), and as sadism has begun to receive similar attention (see Moore and MacKendrick in particular), the subjectivity of the switch holds her own experiential uniqueness, although this erotic subjectivity has yet to be substantially theorized. 138 delay. 52 Which is not to say that Esther is easily switchable, or changeable, any more than it is to say that one who switches in the BDSM community does so without control, mid- scene. To switch, in BDSM practice, means that one has taken the time to experience and therefore, ideally, comprehend differing perspectives of power. The switchiness of Bleak House is, in fact, tightly controlled, and masterfully controlled by Esther Woodcourt, who spends so much (not very believable) time convincing us that she is anything, or anyone, but in control of her life, or her plot. Her switchiness clarifies when we combine the understanding of her deliberately constructed passivity with a closer inspection of how Esther Woodcourt functions as a narrator beyond this peculiar, particular character creation. Marked by extended passages where her body drops from the page; by passages where her narrator-function becomes acutely apparent; or simply by moments when Esther refers to herself in the third person, these are ruptures that point to Esther’s predilection for narration, meaning: the possibility of Esther Woodcourt being responsible for all portions of the novel, for playing the switch. When Esther departs the Miss Donnys, overwhelmed by both pain and pleasure, “quite bowed down in the coach,” telling us “I made myself sob less, and persuaded myself to be quiet by saying very often, ‘Esther, now you really must! This will not do!’” 53 —she takes a narratorial stance outside of herself, one of many performed throughout the novel, through use of the third-person in order to regain control of herself. 52 Many thanks are owed to Hilary Schor for suggesting that I read switch in all its various material appearances in the world, rather than simply as a mode of identification in the BDSM community. Of course, the image of switchboard likely engenders Foucault’s descriptions of grids of power. 53 Ibid., 28. 139 A more complicated bit of narration is performed when she first sees Lady Dedlock. I quote at length in order to represent the entire effect: As the bell was yet ringing and the great people were not yet come, I had leisure to glance over the church, which smelt as earthy as a grave, and to think what a shady, ancient, solemn little church it was. The windows, heavily shaded by trees, admitted a subdued light that made the faces around me pale, and darkened the old brasses in the pavement, and the time and damp-worn monuments, and rendered the sunshine in the little porch, where a monotonous ringer was working at the bell, inestimably bright. But a stir in that direction, a gathering of reverential awe in the rustic faces, and a blandly-ferocious assumption on the part of Mr. Boythorn of being resolutely unconscious of somebody’s existence, forewarned me that the great people were come, and that the service was going to begin. “‘Enter not into judgment with thy servant, O Lord, for in thy sight—’” Shall I ever forget the rapid beating of my heart, occasioned by the look I met, as I stood up! Shall I ever forget the manner in which those handsome proud eyes seemed to spring out of their languor, and to hold mine! It was only a moment before I cast mine down—released again, if I may say so—on my book; but I knew the beautiful face quite well, in that short space of time. 54 In this passage we also see just how skilled a narrator Esther is—skilled, really, in a way quite similar to the omniscient narrator. The “earthy grave” smell of the church is a direct echo of the omniscient narrator’s description of it as infused with “a general smell and taste of the ancient Dedlocks in their graves,” 55 both descriptions foreshadowing Lady Dedlock’s own impending grave. The “sunshine in the little porch . . . inestimably bright” marks Esther’s impending enlightenment, once her mother passes through that patch and 54 Ibid., 224. 55 Ibid., 11. 140 into the shadowy gazes of the churchgoers. All is rendered in a way that slows the pace of the passage, indeed marking with irony the arduous wait for “the great people” while building the valid suspense of this encounter of two characters previously confined to their own narrators. Not only does Esther use her narratorial skills to defend herself against pain, she also uses it to delay and suspend the arrival of the painful-pleasurable feeling, in the end to heighten their overlap as well as evidencing an overlap with the style of the third-person narrator. Indeed, the pleasure and pain of this encounter is so extreme that Esther rather abruptly drops the confusion and mystery it generates, shifting to an extended dialogue between Skimpole and Boythorn, one in which Esther’s body recedes for paragraphs, perhaps to recuperate for another fraught encounter with her unknown mother, perhaps as a way to extend this tincture of pleasure and pain. Yet again, the next encounter is preceded by an exhibition of Esther’s skills with description: It was grand to see how the wind awoke, and bent the trees, and drove the rain before it like a cloud of smoke; and to hear the solemn thunder, and to see the lightning; and while thinking with awe of the tremendous powers by which our little lives are encompassed, to consider how beneficent they are, and how upon the smallest flower and leaf there was already a freshness poured from all this seeming rage, which seemed to make creation new again. “Is it not dangerous to sit in so exposed a place?” “O no, Esther dear!” said Ada, quietly. Ada said it to me, but, I had not spoken. 56 56 Ibid., 228. 141 Again the delay, the suspense, building to the revelation of her mother’s voice, and to Ada’s confusion of the two, mother and daughter. And, afterwards, the necessary recession of the “little woman,” Esther’s body being called onto the page only to be recognized by Lady Dedlock, otherwise we are left to the conversation between the Lady and Mr. Jarndyce, the altercation between Rosa and Hortense, the rejection of Hortense and her dramatic, shoeless exit. And then, most dramatically and affectively (especially for us readers, who know the remarkable nature of this encounter, which of course Esther Woodcourt refuses to speak directly), for the space of four omnisciently narrated chapters, we abruptly leave behind the intense emotion for other characters and events. When we finally return to Esther—or, as I would eventually like to prove, when Esther returns us to herself—we are told of the experience in terms we’ve heard before: “I do not quite know, even now, whether it was painful or pleasurable; whether it drew me towards her or made me shrink from her. I think I admired her with a kind of fear; and I know that in her presence my thoughts always wandered back, as they had done at first, to that old time of my life.” 57 This particular movement – when a momentous, often painful event happens to Esther Summerson, which we abruptly leave behind for the stories and voice of the omniscient narrator – occurs throughout the novel, and in fact contributes to the disorienting feel of doubling, commented on by so many readers and critics. In addition to often being literally marked by a reference to pain and pleasure, this suspenseful structure is also often marked by Esther’s reflections on what it means to be her many 57 Ibid., 284. 142 selves. One of the most significant moments comes in the multiple climaxes of the novel, and bears an extensive consideration. This will be difficult to describe, and I can only refer you to your own experience with the novel, and to have that experience again: but here is how things come to us: We begin with the first of the climaxes that form the center of the novel, Charley and then Esther’s illness, and then one of the first passages (and oft-quoted) of her “darker writing self,” reading thus: I had no thought, that night – none, I am quite sure – of what was soon to happen to me. But I have always remembered since, that when we had stopped at the garden gate to look up at the sky, and when we went upon our way, I had for a moment an undefinable impression of myself as being something different from what I then was. I know it was then, and there, that I had it. And this remarkable reflection on the self and identity is preceded and followed by equally remarkable, quite crafted and suspenseful descriptions of scene and place, gothic and vivid. This is precisely the sort of pacing that Esther Woodcourt consistently creates. But to return to my charting of this plot movement: we begin, again, with the first of the narrative climaxes forming the center of the novel, that is, with Esther Summerson’s illness. Chapter 31 ends with Esther’s blindness. We are then transported to London, to Lincoln’s Inn, where in Chapter 32 “The Appointed Time,” Mr. Guppy and Mr. Weevle await, with dread, their midnight appointment with Mr. Krook. This is an equally gothic chapter, and the air being described as flavored with the cooking of “Chops,” and Mr. Guppy’s repeated encounter with a fatty layer covering all of Lincoln’s Inn – “A thick, yellow liquor defiles them, which is offensive to the touch and sight, and more offensive 143 to the smell. A stagnant, sickening oil” 58 – adds to the horror of the revelation of Mr. Krook’s Spontaneous Combustion, which concludes Number 10. Chapter 33, the beginning of Number 11, we are yet in Lincoln’s Inn and witness the aftermath of Krook’s demise, and the revelation that Mr. Smallweed is his brother-in-law, and his claiming and sealing of the property: “ ‘I have come down to look after the property; it must be sealed up, it must be protected. I have come down,’ repeats Grandfather Smallweed, hooking the air towards him with all his ten fingers at once, ‘to look after the property’.” 59 Chapter 34 is indeed “A Turn of the Screw,” as Grandfather Smallweed traps Mr. George into relinquishing his sample of Captain Hawdon’s writing, thereby proving that Hawdon and Nemo were the same man, sealing Lady Dedlock’s fate. When we finally return to Esther in Chapter 35, we are still caught in her darker writing self, released by her illness from the clutches of heavily fabricated femininity. Here, we learn that Esther’s face has been pocked, here, Esther gives up her attempt at demureness / narrative deferral by finally confessing her feelings and hopes about Mr. Woodcourt. Here, she struggles with reclaiming the dutiful femininity and gratitude, but the text cannot contain the emotional pain. Esther, in fact, cannot remain in her female position at Bleak House; instead, she makes a rare demand, and a specific one: she requests of Mr. Jarndyce that she be allowed to finish her recuperation at Chesney Wold. 58 Dickens, Bleak House, 516. 59 Ibid., 529. 144 The tendency is to read this movement as a movement between two narrators: between Esther and an anonymous voice. Reading this series of climaxes with the understanding that it was entirely written by Esther Woodcourt shows the specific control she has over her remembering of the events, and our experience of her memory. The control serves to intensify through a series of frustrations followed by revelations. As it is structured, the text / Esther intensifies the affects surrounding this series of events by placing them in the above order. 60 Yet there is one notable and rather infamous instance when Esther clearly marks herself as the omniscient narrator of a scene at which she was never present. This, of course, is the scene where Woodcourt keeps his promise to Esther and seeks out Richard in London, via Mr. Vholes. This advanced piece of narration is clearly demarcated as being performed by Esther; and within the same chapter, (entitled “Enlightened”) we leave it behind and return to Esther’s first-person narration. The chapter begins with Esther, and ends with Esther, but the middle reads like a passage from a chapter by the anonymous narrator, and is unique because it is the only moment in the entire novel where Esther’s body recedes for the narration of a scene at which she was not present. In other words, no pretense is made to separate the first-person and omniscient narrators, at least in terms of chapter breaks and/or chapter titles such as “Esther’s Narrative.” Interestingly enough, this chapter also contains the painful and pleasurable experience of resolving the “shade” that had fallen between Esther and Ada. 60 It perhaps goes without saying, of course, that this structuring had everything to do with the way the novel was released in monthly numbers. 145 How selfish I must have been, not to have thought of this before! I don’t know what I said now. I was so sorry, and yet I was so fond of them, and so glad that they were fond of me; I pitied them so much, and yet I felt a kind of pride in their loving one another. I never had experienced such painful and pleasurable emotion at one time; and in my own heart I did not know which predominated. But I was not there to darken their way; I did not do that. 61 Selfish indeed, a selfishness that stems from Esther miscomprehension of Ada’s motives. Indeed we might almost accuse Esther of assuming too much omniscience over Ada— believing that Ada feels pity for her at her impending marriage to Mr. Jarndyce, and her failed relationship with Woodcourt. So Esther chooses to “be as brisk and busy as possible” in order to prove that she is “quite contented and quite happy.” 62 Instead of making herself vulnerable to Ada, Esther opts for a forced comprehension that misses the mark, a sense of infallibly understanding her darling and, because of this, the belief that acting on an omniscient knowledge is the best tactic. 63 She follows this self- enlightenment with another round of scolding, saying “and as for me, I should have been the worst of the three if I had not said severely to myself, ‘Now, Esther, if you do, I’ll never speak to you again!’” 64 Chapter 51 indeed enlightens, if we view the narratorial play as more than just an anomaly, but in fact representative of the narratorial shifts throughout the novel. Despite 61 Ibid., 614. 62 Ibid., 604. 63 In the BDSM community, acting infallible and omniscient, in effect nonconsensually dominating another player, is known as “top’s disease.” 64 Dickens, Bleak House, 614. 146 the deliberate demarcation of “Esther’s Narrative”—which, by the way, falls in line with Esther’s tendency to speak to herself in the third person—there is no reason why her moments of omniscience might not expand into full chapters and sections completely devoid of the presence of Esther’s body, even in the (immediate) background. We might interpret Esther’s choice in omniscience as helping her to deal with the pain and trauma of her story; yet it also serves as a way to extend the pleasure of that pain, to create suspense, anticipation, and desire for the working out and through of pain. Esther’s story definitely demands sadism, a sort of dominance that controls the intense affect surrounding her traumatic history, an attempt to stand outside that trauma in order to gain control, mastery, knowledge— and pleasure. A control that prolongs and intensifies, again and again, the pointed affect. Through her control of events and characters, Esther plays with and extends the pleasure and pain of narrative deferral. 65 The narration in Bleak House, then, is not necessarily a double narration in the sense of two narrators; rather, I would argue that it is doubly narrated through a switching Esther, who plays both the sadist and masochist, the top and bottom, the dominant and submissive. 66 Both narratorial functions become a new characterization of Esther as not only repressed and 65 Esther’s play with narrative deferral may serve to explain the agony and multiplicity with which the text opens, climaxes, and ends. In each case there are at least three beginnings (Chancery, the fashionable world, Esther’s narrative); numerous climaxes (Esther’s illness, Krook’s spontaneous combustion, Esther’s discovery of her mother, Tulkinghorn’s murder, Lady Dedlock’s flight and death, Jarndyce’s Woodcourt plot, all interspersed with multiple smaller climaxes); two ends (Richard’s death / the end of Jarndyce and Jarndyce, and Chesney Wold); and a refusal to end (“—even supposing—”). Esther’s final act is truly where she exercises the most control, and most sadism. 66 In BDSM communities, a switch refers to a person who takes both top and bottom roles, as well as to a cane made of willow. Jay Wiseman, S/M 101: A Realistic Introduction. 2 nd Ed. (San Francisco, Ca.: Greenery P, 1996). 147 self-effacing, but as choosing her repressed moments and her dominant moments—and in this choice, Esther reveals the masterful control she holds over her story and, by extension, other stories. “SO STRANGELY DID I HOLD MY PLACE IN THIS WORLD” 67 Empathy cannot be the whole of the story, however; the experience of topping is not the same as the experience of bottoming; exerting and inflicting are not the same as undergoing. 68 —Karmen MacKendrick The self in Bleak House, no less than elsewhere in Dickens, is a made thing, composed, patchwork, patched together. 69 — Hilary Schor Read any number of critical works on contemporary s/m practices and you will encounter, eventually – sooner rather than later – the tantalizingly irresolvable conundrum of what the pain-pleasure complex (through all its assorted degradations, boredoms, humilities, shames, ecstasies) does to subjectivity. The common argument is that there is a fragmentation, a shattering of the subject; a removal from the self (taken out and placed firmly within the body’s ecstasy’s, out of the mind’s categories); a fantasy of self-transcendence. The theories of narration tell us much the same about subjectivity, and so, in the criticism surrounding a novel of which the central narrative question centers in the double narration – the question of Esther’s subjectivity is inevitable, 67 Dickens, Bleak House, 583. 68 MacKendrick, counterpleasures, 130. 69 Schor, Dickens and the Daughter of the House, 112. 148 especially when, yet again, her self-effacing narration does so much pointed and poignant referencing of her self, her selves in all their various forms. If, however – as I am more and more convinced – Esther is responsible for the entirety of this text, what does that mean for our understanding of her subjectivity? What does it mean to be a switch? It is important not to relegate Esther to sadism or masochism, to top or bottom. Because, if the illusion of separate narrations tells us anything, it’s that Esther Woodcourt has made the choice to revisit these scenes through the guise of omniscience, a fantasy of control. She has made the choice to take on this fundamentally male form, and part of her cunning in assuming this form is that her deliberately first-person account works so hard to present the perfect image of dutiful female passivity, works so hard to show us how little control she has. Still, I’m not sure I buy this reading, promoted by Esther and taken at face value by so many of her critics. To be sure, to a certain extent the plotting of Esther’s life is out of her control, drastically out of her control – she is raised, in secret, by her aunt, she is sent to the Misses Donny’s by some mysterious benefactor, the same mysterious benefactor transfers her to Bleak House to serve as companion, she is presented with housekeeping keys (and no opportunity to refuse this role), and so on, and yet – yet for example, surrounding the illness of Charley and then herself, she exhibits profound control. She prevents Ada from entering the sick room, even when Esther herself is taken down; but more interesting is how she structures her own recovery and times when and where she will reveal her scarred features to Ada. These chapters – 35 and 36, “Esther’s Narrative” and “Chesney Wold,” forming the end of Number Eleven and the beginning of 149 Number 12, respectively – bring this control into blatant relief, beginning with her loss of control, over her mind and body, through her illness. Her very identity is muddled, “where there was little or no separation between the various stages of my life,” and the way in which these divisions of time became confused with one another, distressed my mind exceedingly. At once a child, an elder girl, and the little woman I had been so happy as, I was not only oppressed by cares and difficulties adapted to each station, but by the great perplexity of endlessly trying to reconcile them. 70 These chapters are often singled out as the best example of Esther’s narration, when she drops the façade of dutiful femininity and is herself, in all of her pain. Yet it is also in these chapters that Esther’s sense of self is fundamentally altered, not only by disease, but by the revelation, that comes in “Chesney Wold,” of Lady Dedlock to Esther as her mother. Indeed, the drama of these chapters produces some of the best writing (is the product of), and I agree with Jordan when he states that we should view the description of the sick room hallucinations and the intensely gothic moment when Esther herself treads the Ghost’s Walk, as equal with the intensely suffocating psychological passages in Villette. The combination of these formal elements of narration – the lack of the carefully constructed, self-deprecating voice of the little woman in the face of her deep grief over her altered face – with the plot revelations (although we have known for some time, of course) contribute to the sense that here, we have the real Esther. 71 At the same time, her 70 Dickens, Bleak House, 555. 71 I would argue that this feeling of “genuine” Esther is enhanced by her retreat into the natural world, at Boythorn’s house in Chesney Wold, which Esther describes in the following way: “If a good fairy had built the house for me with a wave of her wand, and I had been a princess and her favored godchild, I could not have been more considered in it” (571). 150 narration, in at least two places, resonates – jarringly and unusually – with other voices, bringing into question Esther’s ‘realness’. First, is a sort of academic tone she uses to describe how her illness jumbled together in her mind all the different phases of her life: “Perhaps the less I say of these sick experiences, the less tedious and the more intelligible I shall be. . . . It may be that if we knew more of such strange afflictions, we might be better able to alleviate their intensity.” 72 Second, we have recourse again to the incisive voice of Esther, whose sarcasm cuts as much as does that of the anonymous narrator, and is directed toward Miss Flite’s naïve assumption that Mr. Woodcourt would “ ‘have a Title bestowed upon him’” for his brave heroics after being shipwrecked. Esther’s response: That he well deserved one, yes. That he would ever have one, no. “Why not, Fitz-Jarndyce?” she asked, rather sharply. I said it was not the custom in England to confer titles on men distinguished by peaceful services, however good and great; unless, occasionally, when they consisted of the accumulation of some very large amount of money. 73 And third, is an odd sort of doubling of voice that occurs when Lady Dedlock speaks to Esther of Mr. Tulkinghorn’s reasons for tracking her down. This moment is not so much an example of Esther’s narratorial fluidity, but yet another piece of evidence for reading Esther as the author of her portion and the anonymous portion, for the way that Esther 72 Ibid., 556. 73 Ibid., 569. 151 writes Lady Dedlock’s description of Tulkinghorn is eerily similar to the way he is described by the anonymous narrator. To return to the question, what does it mean to be a switch, might perhaps be best approached through another question (asked previously in various guises): why do we persist in viewing the narrations as told by two people? Why maintain that separation between the first-person and the omniscient narrator? The easy answer (one I will return to at the end of this chapter) is: Esther Woodcourt wants us to believe in this separation. Her drive to create this separation combines with the ease with which we view Esther as masochistic, and the difficulty we have of viewing her as a deliberately sadistic author, practicing an extended narrative omniscience that is so successful, so mature, so incisive, and so clearly male that of course we will believe the sectioning of first-person and omniscient. But to read Esther Woodcourt as a switch means that we must resist gendered readings of the narrators of Bleak House. Eleanor Salotto has nicely summarized how critics have tended to attribute masculinity to the “anonymous” narrator and, of course, femininity to Esther’s portion of the narration. She argues, however, “that this categorization of identity results from reading Esther on a literal level[,] thereby neglecting to dismantle her account in the text. In a text which foregrounds detection and secrets, Esther’s narration cannot remain untouched from an analysis of her concealments. . . . Too often, critics have been ‘blind followers,’ not paying enough attention to the clues the text gives them.” 74 Like Jaffe and Schor, Salotto proceeds to 74 Salotto, “Detecting Esther Summerson’s Secrets,” 333-5. 152 analyze the purpose behind Esther’s blatant coyness and passivity, arguing that Esther’s “mimicry” of the prototypical Victorian Angel of the House, combined with the “multivocality” of Esther Summerson’s discourse, “ironizes the [masculine] institution of narrative in which she is placed.” 75 Using Luce Irigaray, Salotto makes a structurally similar argument to the one I have made about the movement of the erotics of sadomasochism: that in playing the ideologies to such excess, the forms of the ideologies are revealed, and they are revealed as empty forms. But interestingly enough, Salotto does not extend her consideration of the way that Esther Summerson plays with/within masculine discourse to the potential way that Esther Woodcourt plays with the vocalities of the anonymous narrator. Which suggests that she does, in fact, takes Esther’s position in this system of relations more seriously than she intends. 76 To read Esther Woodcourt as a switch also demands that we relinquish both an understanding of whole, static identities and an understanding of shattered subjectivity. Or, we allow the fractured subject to cohere as pieces of itself, a self, a self made of pieces; in the case of Esther, as the character who undergoes and as the narrator who exerts her imagination of it (fantasizes) all. For, as Jaffe tells us, the beauty of this novel that insists on maintaining (the illusion of) two separate narrations is that we are forced, 75 Ibid., 333. 76 We can see this, for example, in her reading of Esther Woodcourt’s narration surrounding Caddy Jellyby’s request to teach her the fine art of housekeeping. Salotto takes it literally when Esther calls herself an “impostor,” whereas I argue that this scene might be read in more of a switching sense. Rather than seeing a purpose to Esther’s coyness, she sees this moment as one in which Esther “assum[es] a false identity” (Salotto 335). 153 as readers, to acknowledge the space between, and to dwell in this discomfort for some time. To be a switch means to be both/and. (UN)TIDY WRITING It may seem that my reading of Esther Summerson/Woodcourt focuses too much on the human. Indeed, my attempt to read Esther as a formal device seems undermined, at times, by the affects generated by this story of Esther, my attachment to her progress. Part of the irresistibility of viewing Esther in human (psychological) terms stems from her own entrance into the text as a writing subject. 77 The famous closing of Bleak House offers us that image of the writing Esther Woodcourt; but, as we have seen, both Schor and Jordan are inclined to view this writing with darkness – of memory, of lost mothers, of a costly power. 78 But the close of Esther’s narrative, darkness is missing, and therefore most critics express a dissatisfaction with the ending. Indeed, it is excessively formulaic, wrapping up all loose ends, as so many Victorian novels do, and performing the exact sort of self-deprecating Esther-ing we have come to expect, but perhaps thought we had evolved from: The people even praise me as the doctor’s wife. The people even like me as I go about, and make so much of me that I am quite abashed. I owe it all to him, my love, my pride! They like me for his sake, as I do everything I do in life for his sake. 77 See footnote 39, this chapter. 78 I’m borrowing some of Hilary Schor’s language here. See her chapter, which is less about law and property than about the intangible property(less) act of writing. 154 This excessive, even formulaic version of Esther follows what might just have been titled “The Close of the Anonymous Narrative.” Instead, “Down in Lincolnshire” does that ruminating form of description and commentary found throughout its portion of the novel. Paradoxically, it is in the writing that Esther most clearly emerges in the form of a switch, the pieces of her subjectivity coming together into a whole writing and remembering self but – and this is key – still as pieces. I find even more evidence, as I read and re-read, that Bleak House is an act of control, of memory, of intense love produced entirely through the word and mouth of Esther Woodcourt. Here, then, we can see the subject, and subjectivity as form. 155 CHAPTER FIVE: ON THE ‘EXTREME BRINK’ WITH CHARLOTTE BRONTË Jane Eyre, The Professor and the Erotic Ethics of Sadomasochism DISCIPLINING CHARLOTTE You know, you and I, Miss Brontë, have both written naughty books! —William Thackeray to Charlotte Brontë 1 With its evocations of childishness and impropriety, an alluring blend of mischievousness and titillation, the term “naughty” seems woefully inadequate for describing the passionate search for individualism propelling Jane Eyre. “Naughty,” moreover, undermines the contemporary status the novel has achieved, through hundreds of adaptations, as one of the quintessential depictions of heterosexual romance. Its recent re-publication by HarperCollins, for example, with a new look marketed to the Twilight- influenced teen audience, features a glossy black cover with a just-blossomed, glistening pink peony, above which is printed, in text the same color of the flower, “Love Conquers All.” In this presentation, we are reminded of the infamous scene at Moor House when the disembodied voice of Rochester calls Jane Eyre from the freezing influence of St. John Rivers. This is a serious, fragile, and uncannily natural love. There is no reference to Jane’s difficult search for independence and self-sufficiency, let alone how this journey is depicted as an erotic self-development infused, at every turn, with a rhetoric of domination and submission. 1 Qtd. in Elizabeth Gaskell, The Life of Charlotte Brontë (London: Smith, Elder, 1857). 156 A notable (and entertaining) exception to this pattern of adaptation is a book entitled Disciplining Jane, a pornographic retelling of Brontë’s original novel, which is not a little odd because it includes a “foreword” that plays at being academic. 2 The “editors” of this volume explain that Disciplining Jane was collected together after “the discovery in a house not far from Haworth” of some fragments composed by Jane Eyre herself, which illuminate “[w]hat has not always been seen, beneath the author’s brave and prescient feminism [:] the algolagnic or sadomasochistic element at large throughout the narrative. Jane Eyre is profoundly and healthily s-m” (Eyre 7-10). These fragments have freed the “editors” to re-interpret the original novel, and they proceed to summarize it in such a way that, really, one begins to wonder how she missed all the birching. The remainder of the foreword creates a rough, generalizing parallel between the events in Jane Eyre and the events in Charlotte Brontë’s life, reading her upbringing and her juvenilia in predictably psychological terms, and supporting this analysis with an extensive excerpt from Richard Chase’s essay “The Brontës: A Centennial Observance.” 3 Both the foreword to Disciplining Jane and the actual analysis by Richard Chase describe the “sexual energy” of Jane Eyre in the stereotypical terms of sadomasochism, relying on 2 Disciplining Jane was first published several years earlier under a different title: P. N. Dedeaux, An English Education, then republished when Blue Moon Books shifted ownership. It is not entirely clear why this pornographic retelling was re-marketed as an archival discovery of a primary source by Jane Eyre. Jane Eyre, Disciplining Jane (Philadelphia: Running Press, 2001). 3 The analysis in the foreword to Disciplining Jane is, in fact, a mostly unattributed paraphrase of Chase’s essay, which characterizes the art of Charlotte and Emily Brontë as deriving from the principle they “came to admire and fear the most: sexual and intellectual energy” (490). Robert Chase, “The Brontës: A Centennial Observance (Reconsiderations VIII)” The Kenyon Review. 9.4 (Autumn 1947): 487-506. 157 a simplified application of psychoanalysis that emphasizes biographical interpretations of the eroticized power dynamics clearly at work not only in Jane Eyre but in all of the novels of Charlotte Brontë. While Disciplining Jane is certainly a playful attempt to grapple with the specific erotics – as opposed to the general, or “universal” heterosexual erotics – present in the original Jane Eyre, the result is a gross misinterpretation that perpetuates many of the stereotypes of sadomasochism circulating in both popular and academic discourse. Disciplining Jane is, indeed, unabashedly, “healthily s-m”, in that it is a catalogue of birching and flogging scenes, and a host of other non-normative sex acts. But in highlighting and exaggerating only stereotypical images of sadomasochism, Disciplining Jane loses the erotic energy that propels the original novel. It is boring and predictable. It lacks, in particular, the peculiarly charged combination of first-person narration and erotic self-development that structure the novel with a more complex erotics of sadomasochism. Such an erotics has very little to do with a catalogue of sexual acts that might be stereotyped as sadomasochistic. They deal in forms that seem, in fact, to have very little to do with what is considered “sexy,” especially in the normative sense. Still, this pornographic retelling is correct in discerning the blatant themes of dominance and submission structuring the erotics of Jane Eyre, although (despite its self- proclamation) it is not the only work to recognize what seems to be a deep contradiction between the “brave and prescient” feminist principles of Jane Eyre and the eroticized power dynamics that complicate such passion. Moreover, Disciplining Jane highlights a particular naughtiness in Jane Eyre: an erotic play with the simultaneous reiteration and 158 transgression of social forms and ideologies. This dynamic permeates the novels of Charlotte Brontë, and is what I have already complicated as one of the central movements of sadomasochism. This eroticism of Jane Eyre is typically viewed as dangerous, even if the perception of the danger shifts across historical periods. In his seemingly off-hand statement to Brontë, it is clear that Thackeray is attempting to disempower the emotional reactions of nineteenth-century readers – through the connotations of childishness and immaturity conveyed in the term “naughty” – who were also in an uproar about his own Vanity Fair. Still, I would like to suggest that his use of the term uncovers a peculiar 4 element in Jane Eyre that persists in bothering its readers, from its publication in 1847 to the present moment. To call a book “naughty” indicates a potentially erotic effect at once threatening and playful, transgressive and mischievous. It is a term that helps us to complicate our sense of Brontëan erotics; most importantly, with its clear allusions to childhood and levels of maturity, this term can help us to redress the critics who often lament this element of her novels, attributing the palpably erotic power dynamics to an unfortunate immaturity, an obsessive attachment to adolescent fantasies, an un- or under- developed novelist. While nineteenth-century reviewers of Jane Eyre criticized the portrayals of romantic love that “‘glow with a fire as fierce as that of Sappho,’” 5 of courtship as 4 Janis McLarren Caldwell states that the term “peculiar” is Brontë’s “own specially marked word”: “Peculiar – in the sense of singular, special, strange, odd – is indeed an appropriate word for the dissonance Brontë favors, given that it is her own specially marked word. In her farewell to her beloved M. Heger, Brontë wishes for him “peculiar blessings” (488). Caldwell, “Conflict and Revelation: Literalization in the Novels of Charlotte Brontë,” Victorian Literature and Culture 31.2 (2003): 483-499. 5 This review appeared in The Christian Remembrancer in 1848 (qtd. Kaplan 17). Cora Kaplan, Victoriana – Histories, Fictions, Criticisms (Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2007). 159 “‘deadly and uncompromising, where the combatants . . . make no secret of their ferocity,’” 6 the primary complaint was about the form of Jane Eyre. This novel was unique in giving a first-person female voice to a search for a passionate and erotic individualism. Nineteenth-century readers were both shocked and gripped by the unique formal devices of Jane Eyre, mainly, the use of the first-person narrator, to convey the erotic interior experience of a Victorian woman. The power of this voice represented the danger of being caught up in an affective passion that undermined the coolness of moral (and aesthetic) judgment. As one reviewer in Fraser’s describes this danger, “ ‘[A]s we read on we forgot both commendations and criticism, identified ourselves with Jane in all her troubles, and finally married Mr. Rochester about four in the morning.’” 7 Notwithstanding the humorous tone of this statement, there is a genuine anxiety about the form that Jane Eyre takes, and its ability to override rationality and aesthetic decency. The common epithet of coarseness, as Caldwell notes, “with its connotation not only of sexual explicitness but also of rough insistence on the intransigence of matter and human bodies,” 8 also implies an unrefined and underdeveloped aesthetic. Erotic danger, therefore, comes to be linked with a unique, even ‘perverted,’ aesthetics. It seems that the 6 Mrs. Oliphant in 1855. Quoted in Heather Glen, Charlotte Brontë: The Imagination in History (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2003). 7 Quoted in Patricia Menon, Austen, Eliot, Charlotte Brontë and the Mentor-Lover (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2003). Menon notes that the humor in this statement could be “found in many other bemused responses to the work, as if critics feel ill-at-ease with their surrender.” Menon herself, rather like the nineteenth-century reviewers, expresses skepticism and wariness about the power of the first-person narrator to “disable judgment” (99). 8 Caldwell names “coarse” as “the most common epithet hurled” at Brontë (486). 160 erotics of Jane Eyre were shocking, but not because they rested on sadomasochistic power dynamics. 9 Contemporary critics are also wary, to some extent, of the immense power of the individual voice in Jane Eyre, but because it is paired with a rhetoric of erotic domination and submission. This paradox is what fuels much of the wariness among contemporary critics, a rather recent development in the history of literary criticism surrounding the novel. Before Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s 1985 essay “Three Women’s Texts and a Critique of Imperialism,” scholars tended to praise Jane Eyre for intervening in the patriarchal logic of nineteenth-century fiction, through a powerful and personal narrative about the development of female individuality. In her own contribution to this critical history, Cora Kaplan notes that Jane Eyre has become a “mnemic symbol” for Western feminism, “amplif[ying] the dissonances within and among contemporary feminisms.” 10 At one point lauded by feminist literary critics for giving a passionate voice to the struggle for female independence from repressive Victorian norms, Jane Eyre has “become a much more tarnished and controversial emblem of Western feminism’s ambiguous political legacy.” 11 Kaplan refers specifically to the tarnish of Brontë’s 9 Perhaps this reaction can be attributed to what Dianne F. Sadoff argues is a “representative female mythology about desire and punishment in the nineteenth-century patriarchal family and within a phallocentric ideology” (519). See Dianne F. Sadoff, “The Father, Castration, and Female Fantasy in Jane Eyre,” Jane Eyre: Complete, Authoritative Text with Biographical and Historical Contexts, Critical History, and Essays from Five Contemporary Critical Perspectives, Beth Newman, ed. (Boston: St. Martin’s P, 1996) 518-35. I understand this “representative” dynamic in a fundamentally different way. 10 Kaplan, Victoriana, 17. 11 Ibid., 17. 161 “rhetoric of desire” and what it “might conceal,” or, more problematically, how it “enables less liberatory cultural narratives.” 12 The primary danger of Jane Eyre, for contemporary critics, is the pairing of the powerfully affective formal devices with an erotics of domination and submission that are often depicted through the rhetoric of imperialism. As contemporary, mainly female, readers we are supposed to have moved beyond this kind of relationality. We are supposed to identify this patriarchal logic in the world around us, and reject it. It might seem, from these criticisms, that it is our responsibility to move along from Jane Eyre – to find a more appropriate text through which to channel our evolving feminist thinking. Yet this novel offers what I argue are useful dangers worth exploring, especially in terms of reconciling these seemingly contradictory feminisms. Although Kaplan does not connect an erotics of sadomasochism to the rhetoric of desire that she traces in the history of critical engagement with Jane Eyre, this peculiar erotics is precisely one of the dissonances in contemporary feminisms that the novel engages. The configuration of sadomasochistic erotics in Jane Eyre offers a way of thinking through white liberal feminist renderings of the novel without dismissing it for its ‘bad’ erotic forms. The bad erotic form of Jane Eyre means this: Jane’s search for independence and self-fulfillment is simultaneously a search for an active, ethical erotic submission, which is depicted through a blatant and consistent rhetoric of eroticized power. Nearly every critic writing about Charlotte Brontë and sexuality, desire, or the erotic, comes up against this unfortunate element of her novels, and nearly all view these erotics as regrettable. 12 Ibid., 25. 162 Judith Mitchell, similar to many critics, notes that Brontë’s “understanding of erotic domination and submission is acute,” 13 and of Jane Eyre in particular, Mitchell states that the novel “explores the ‘positive’ aspects of the domination / submission fantasy . . . mak[ing] them seem infinitely possible.” 14 Although attempting to acknowledge that Brontë’s goal is to create a “female subject of desire” that functions outside patriarchal logic, Mitchell aligns herself with the many theorists and scholars of Jane Eyre who whittle down the deliberately eroticized power dynamics to mere fantasy, a predictable effect of Victorian social codes – using sadomasochistic in the most generalizing psychoanalytic deployment of the term, and aligning the eroticized power dynamics with the Harlequin Romance tradition. 15 From the perspective of these critics, an erotics of sadomasochism precludes female independence from patriarchal logic. In that it works within and plays upon patriarchal logic, sadomasochism must therefore be viewed as something to move beyond, something to overcome. I intend to remove the quotation marks from around Mitchell’s “positive”—to take seriously the potential for an affirming erotic submission in Jane Eyre, by tracing 13 Judith Mitchell, The Stone and the Scorpion: The Female Subject of Desire in the Novels of Charlotte Brontë, George Eliot, and Thomas Hardy (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1994) 25. 14 Ibid., 45. For a more complicated understanding of how central power is to the novels of Charlotte Brontë, see Terry Eagleton’s Myths of Power (New York: Harper & Row, 1975). Sally Shuttleworth, in Charlotte Brontë and Victorian Psychology, develops this point even further, when she states that Jane Eyre presents not “an invariant, ahistoric model of sexual dynamics, but rather an analysis of the specific forms of erotic enjoyment engendered by nineteenth-century models of economic, psychological and sexual regulation” (172). Sally Shuttleworth, Charlotte Brontë and Victorian Psychology (Cambridge Stud. in 19 th -C. Lit. and Culture. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2004). 15 Ibid., 48. 163 how what is perceived as a conventional rhetoric of dominance and submission is inextricable from Jane Eyre’s quest for purpose and independence, producing an unconventional feminist individualism built upon Jane’s search for an ethical master. In my reading of Jane Eyre, the practice of active and conscious submission is not incompatible with feminist principles of self-agency and embodiment. I do not intend, however, to characterize Jane Eyre and Edward Fairfax Rochester as choosing a sadomasochistic relationship in the full contemporary sense, although my discussion does align with certain elements of contemporary sadomasochistic practices that are startlingly reflected in Jane Eyre; or, to be more precise, these contemporary erotic practices exhibit startling overlaps with a dynamics of power and pleasure already circulating in nineteenth-century Victorian England. My larger project on the erotic forms of the Victorian novel is invested in re-theorizing of sadomasochism as a unique relationality for reading narrative forms, one that clarifies how some of the most canonical pleasures depend upon a play with problematic ideologies. For our time spent with Brontë, I will consider how the narrative of culmination offered in Jane Eyre is also the story of Jane’s search for an active erotic submission. In the case of Jane Eyre, reading the formal erotics of sadomasochism demands that we look beyond the blatant themes of erotic dominance and submission between Jane Eyre and Rochester. The entirety of Jane Eyre is infused with a rhetoric of domination and submission, ranging far beyond the relationship between Jane Eyre and Rochester. The extent to which the rhetoric of erotic domination and submission structures every turn of the novel, reveals Jane Eyre to be not only a bildungsroman of female 164 independence, but also a bildungsroman of ethical, active erotic submission. This more complicated reading of eroticized power dynamics recasts the social forms of negotiation and contracts as necessary components of Jane Eyre’s narrative pleasures. DISASTER, AND ITS EROTICS Submission is good, but only up to a point, and it is that point which Charlotte Brontë’s novels explore. 16 —Terry Eagleton The preoccupations of [Brontë’s] juvenilia suggest that Monsieur Heger was a disaster waiting to happen, a man to whom she was predisposed to respond by long-ingrained patterns of fantasy. 17 —Patricia Menon To romantic souls, Jane Eyre must seem to offer a very perverted model of interaction. 18 —Sally Shuttleworth There are few academic studies that attempt to explore at length or in-depth the eroticized power dynamics that haunt the writings of Charlotte Brontë. Having already touched on the argument in Judith Mitchell’s study of “the female subject of desire” in Victorian fiction, I would like to spend a bit more time with two other critics. Terry Eagleton and Patricia Menon represent drastically different views of the eroticized power dynamics in Brontë’s novels – the former manages a deep social contextualization of the “passionate intensity” 19 of Brontë’s writing, while the latter evidences some of the 16 Eagleton, Myths of Power, 15. 17 Menon, Austen, Eliot, Charlotte Brontë and the Mentor-Lover, 85. 18 Shuttleworth. Charlotte Brontë and Victorian Psychology, 173. 19 Eagleton 1. 165 problems in focusing too closely on biographical details and an oversimplified psychoanalysis. In an early work entitled Myths of Power: A Marxist Study of the Brontës (1975), Terry Eagleton offers one of the most thorough contextualizations of the Brontës’ novels. Even when addressing the particular biographical oddities of this “marooned, metaphysical trio,” 20 he does so in a way that places the peculiar domestic life of the Brontës firmly within the social field of nineteenth-century England. While focusing on the “historical conflict . . . between landed and industrial capital,” particularly fraught in the region of West Riding, he notes that [t]hese pervasive social conflicts were then peculiarly intensified by the sisters’ personal situation. They were, to begin with, placed at a painfully ambiguous point in the social structure, as the daughters of a clergyman . . . They were, moreover, socially insecure women—members of a cruelly oppressed group whose victimised condition reflected a more widespread exploitation. And they were educated women, trapped in an almost intolerable deadlock between culture and economics – between imaginative aspiration and the cold truth of a society which could use them merely as ‘higher’ servants. They were isolated educated women, socially and geographically remote from a world with which they nonetheless maintained close intellectual touch, and so driven back on themselves in solitary emotional hungering . . . It is for this reason that we can trace in their very ‘eccentricity’ the contours of a common condition, detect in their highly specific lifestyle the unfolding of a general grammar. 21 20 Ibid., 1. 21 Ibid., 8-9. 166 In the compounding of increasingly restrictive adjectives, modifying the already bounded noun – socially insecure isolated educated women – Eagleton creates an insightful, if at times sweeping and sentimental, study of the Brontës that begins the process of understanding them not as freaks of their time, or as ahead of or behind their time (and therefore freakish), but as the peculiarly “over-determined” products of the period. 22 As he explores in detail the “mythic unity” within the works of the Brontës’, he also digs deep into the structures of power present in Charlotte Brontë’s novels. For Eagleton, the eroticized power dynamics at play in Brontë’s novels are a direct result of her ambiguous, and often contradictory social position, which creates a paradoxical texture to her works, almost a texture of negotiation (a term that Eagleton uses throughout his analysis). He writes that it “is precisely in this impulse to negotiate passionate self-fulfillment on terms which preserve the social and moral conventions intact” that generates heroines that are “an extraordinarily contradictory amalgam of smouldering rebelliousness and prim conventionalism, gushing Romantic fantasy and canny heard-headedness [sic], quivering sensitivity and blunt rationality.” 23 In describing this paradoxical structure of feelings in Brontë’s novels, Eagleton is one of the few critics who acknowledges that the erotics are “inevitably a complicated affair.” 24 Certainly “the primary terms on which Charlotte 22 Borrowing from Althusser, who borrowed the term from Freud, Eagleton is keen to understand the Brontës through the lens of “overdetermination,” by which he means: “major contradictions in society never emerge in ‘pure’ form; on the contrary, they act by condensing into complex unity an accumulated host of subsidiary conflicts, each of which conversely determines the general contradiction” (8). 23 Ibid., 16. 24 Ibid., 30. 167 Brontë’s fiction handles relationships are those of dominance and submission[,] . . . dramatis[ing] a society in which almost all human relationships are power-struggles” 25 – but this eroticized power dynamic is not merely the unfortunate result of a lack of parental love, or a blind, habitual repetition of the sexual relations of patriarchal logic. For Eagleton, Brontë’s complicated erotics stem from her specific position within the social structure of England, which engenders a “general ambiguity about power.” 26 And “[t]he primary form assumed by this ambiguity is a sexual one.” 27 The extent to which Brontë builds her novels upon the play of power dynamics is revealed by the entire chapter Eagleton devotes to “The Structure of Charlotte Brontë’s Fiction,” in which he outlines this particular and “mythic” structure in detail. Writing in the early twenty-first century, Patricia Menon, in Austen, Eliot, Charlotte Brontë and the Mentor-Lover, offers a nuanced analysis of the relationship these three female authors experienced and depicted of the figure of the mentor-lover. This is a ubiquitous figure in the popular literature of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and transfers over into the novels of these three women, as well as into their personal lives. Using close reading, archival research, and biographical literary criticism, Menon engages this figure in order to “follow their explorations of a wide range of interconnected issues stemming from the relationship of love to morality, power and 25 Ibid., 29-30. 26 Ibid., 31. 27 Ibid., 30. 168 judgment.” 28 Similar to Eagleton, Menon is interested in considering how power and sexual love interconnect in the novels of Brontë; and she arrives at a similar conclusion, when she states that “Brontë’s fundamental premise is that someone must hold power.” 29 Yet Menon’s argument diverges from Eagleton’s in important ways. Instead of viewing Brontë’s erotic power struggles as striving after an eventual “equality of power,” 30 one that results in a complicated erotic play structuring her novels, Menon argues that Brontë’s depiction of love as a power struggle is never about achieving a balance of equality. Love as a power struggle is, instead, a juvenile idea carried over from her adolescent writings. While Eagleton never quite gives Charlotte Brontë the credit for deliberately engaging with her peculiar position at the plexus of a number of conflicting social categories, unlike Menon, he does not view Brontë’s engagement with erotic power dynamics as an immature adolescent obsession, as something “wrong” in her development as an individual and an author. Threading through Menon’s analysis of Brontë is the unacknowledged language of psychoanalysis, particularly the problematic idea of a trajectory of normal sexuality. Her language is frighteningly judgmental, and she considers Brontë’s work in a teleological manner, aligning the chronology of writing – juvenilia, The Professor, Jane Eyre, Shirley, Villette – with the trajectory of sexual and adult development. Menon’s judgments of Brontë’s erotic power dynamics are clear in 28 Menon 1. 29 Ibid., 96. 30 Eagleton 30. 169 her language, when she makes such statements as “a regrettable element of immaturity”; “uncontrolled outpourings of a private fantasy feeding on clichés of power and submission”; and “predisposed to respond by long-ingrained patterns of fantasy,” all of which reduce Brontëan erotics to an isolated flaw in the psychosexual development of Brontë-as-auteur. 31 A host of other phrases place a great deal of expectation and judgment onto this stunted writer: “Disappointingly, Brontë does not take the opportunity,” or “there isn’t a great deal to nourish the hope of discovering in Brontë some clarity of viewpoint.” 32 In speaking of the teleology of Brontë’s writing, Menon states: “the essential question must be whether those works offer evidence of advance through re-evaluation and transmutation, or, sadly, the paralysis of obsession.” 33 And, finally, in ending her analysis of Brontë with a close study of Villette, Menon proclaims: Thus, while this last novel does not offer the repellent variations on the theme of mentor-love that mar The Professor and Shirley, it is nevertheless unsuccessful in conceiving of a mature sexual relationship. Indeed, what is particularly disturbing is the possibility it suggests that erotic intensity decreased for Brontë with the waning of hostility . . . Brontë’s novels unintentionally provide a judgment on the assumption that power is the essence of human relationships in general and love in particular, for they demonstrate that to accept such a view is to commit oneself to relationships stuck at the level of childhood or adolescence. . . . [H]er novels are inadvertent testimony to the dangers of holding the view that love and power are indivisible. 34 31 Menon, 80, 84, 85. 32 Ibid., 94, 106. 33 Ibid., 97. 34 Ibid., 126-7. 170 I quote extensively from Menon’s argument in order to highlight a common pattern of feeling that emerges in the discussion of the erotics of Charlotte Brontë. While it can be useful, and even – as in the case of Terry Eagleton’s analysis – insightful to consider the biographical details of an author as a means of understanding her imaginative work, to judge both the creative texts and the living text of an author in terms of normativity and maturity does not advance a deeper possession of the relationality between text, history, and individuality. More problematically, when these judgments appear in an unwarranted form – without explaining, for example, what is entailed in a mature sexual relationship, why or which erotic fantasies are negative, or why we should even expect Brontë to present a particular type of erotic relationship – when this pattern of feeling and reaction goes unacknowledged in our critical work, we do an injustice to the necessary complications inherent in any imaginative work. From these two very different arguments, I would like to clarify some terminology, in order to situate my own reading of Brontëan erotics. Eagleton, even when describing Brontë’s eroticized power dynamics in more complex terms, articulates them through the terms “ambiguous” and “struggle.” Menon, also fond of the term “struggle” to describe the power threading through Brontë’s novels, mainly relies upon the descriptive adjectives of “hostile” and “immature.” I can offer no direct replacement for this set of terms, but I can revise the constellation of feeling these terms engender. Instead of viewing the way in which Brontë channels social power through sexual relationships as an ambiguous struggle between dominance and submission, independence and conformity (Eagleton); or, instead of viewing the chronology of 171 Charlotte Brontë’s imaginative work as representative of her immature obsessions with love as a hostile struggle for power (Menon); I will explore Brontë’s erotics as a deliberate negotiation of an erotic play of power, a play that engages social ideologies in ambivalent and sometimes inadvertent ways, a play that sometimes seems so banal and clichéd that it is often read as such, and dismissed. In other words, I will consider Brontëan erotics in deeply sadomasochistic terms. Ironically, Menon offers a key for understanding the erotics of power in Brontë in more complicated ways, by connecting her novels, at least three times, directly to Foucault: first, in her analysis of The Professor, she quotes extensively from an interview with Foucault, where he speaks directly about S&M as “ ‘a chess game’” that deploys a “ ‘mixture of rules and openness’” 35 ; second, after her brief and singular mention of Eagleton’s Myths of Power, she states that “it is Foucault, sharing Brontë’s view of human relationships, who is her kindred spirit,” before she quotes from the first volume of the History of Sexuality, where Foucault describes sexuality as “‘an especially dense transfer point for relations of power’” 36 ; and, finally, when wrapping up her analysis of Villette and concluding her engagement with Brontë as a whole, she describes Brontë’s perpetual search for “a distinction . . . between tyranny and mastery” as a “Foucault-like belief that the alternation of power made its exercise desirable.” 37 Yet Menon does not 35 Quoted in Menon 96. 36 Quoted in Menon 109. 37 Ibid., 123. 172 fully engage the kinship between Brontë and Foucault, seeming to offer this perspective as a brief counterargument that she inevitably dismisses, on the basis of her fundamental assumption that power, and its play, is never desirable or potentially affirmative. I wish to engage this kinship: that Brontë represents erotic power relations in terms of play; that this play serves as a flashpoint for other ‘relations of power’; and that this representation of erotic power is deliberately engaged. To some extent, Sally Shuttleworth, in Charlotte Brontë and Victorian Psychology, goes down this rabbit hole. In considering the imaginative work of Charlotte Brontë alongside “nineteenth-century economic and psychological discourse,” 38 her intention is to firmly situate Brontë within this period, countering the view that Brontë’s novels are somehow “unVictorian” and “ahistorical.” 39 With this perspective, Shuttleworth is echoing and being echoed by Terry Eagleton and Elizabeth Freeman, both of whom argue (in different terms) that the erotics of sadomasochism reflect a temporal tension between the premodern and the industrial. Shuttleworth’s language reflects her methodological grounding in Foucault, as she describes the “courtship ritual” between Rochester and Jane Eyre as “tactical play”: “What we are offered in these descriptions [of courtship] is not an invariant, ahistoric model of sexual dynamics, but rather an analysis of the specific forms of erotic enjoyment engendered by nineteenth- century models of economic, psychological and sexual regulation.” 40 Shuttleworth has 38 Shuttleworth 158. 39 Ibid., 172. 40 Shuttleworth 172. 173 formed a rigorous and insightful full-length study of Charlotte Brontë, grounded in the archival and contextual sources of New Historicism. Although we have similar goals in complicating our understanding of Brontëan erotic pleasure, my expansion on the sadomasochism demands a bit of ahistoricity. “ON THE EXTREME BRINK I LIKED WELL TO TRY MY SKILL” Why turn to ethics? If we are to identify in imaginative works an erotics that appears to be a simple reiteration of conventional gender ideologies – engaging submission and pain in ways typically viewed as negative – and imperial ideologies, then the ethics of making these erotics appealing comes into question. I am referring here to the dangerous power of first-person narration, which is an issue to be addressed at the end of this chapter. Ethics, in this sense, refers to the transaction of ideas and affect between reader and text. For the moment, however, let’s consider how an ethics of erotic selfhood is developed as a theme within Jane Eyre. The contemporary practice of BDSM has placed ethics at the center of its controversial erotics, to the extent that the ethics themselves become eroticized. Because BDSM practices depend upon the ambivalent simulation of traumatic ideologies, this subculture has taken deliberate steps to be known as an ethical erotic practice. It achieves this status through assuring the physical and mental safety of all its participants through a process of negotiation and contracting, both of which demand the voluntary consent of all parties involved. While questions regarding the 174 ethicality of consent are always in circulation within and around this extreme subculture, the motives of negotiation and contract form such a major component of the scene of BDSM practices, that ethics themselves become part of the erotic process of sadomasochism – contributing to the sense of mundanity, and even banality. Such ordinary and bureaucratic processes as meeting with a partner to negotiate a particular deployment of a peculiar fantasy, and drawing up a contract (written or verbal) that draws the boundaries of the fantasy, become part of the eroticized forms of BDSM. Because of the dangerous power of the first-person narration in Jane Eyre, this novel has always been surrounded by a discussion of narrative ethics. It is in fact this negotiation, through the novel, for an ethical form of erotic power that completes the erotic dynamic. Similar to what occurs in contemporary BDSM practice, the process of “being ethical” becomes eroticized through Jane’s self-journey. And until we understand the nuance of sadomasochistic erotics in the novel, we cannot fully address the implication of erotic ethics with the larger ethical discontinuities that clearly shade Jane Eyre. One of the more perplexing and frustrating discontinuities of the novel is its (seemingly) competing drives for submission and autonomy. When viewed through a more nuanced understanding of sadomasochism, this discontinuity resolves itself as part of the texture of paradox. Part of the sadomasochistic erotics of the novel is not, then, it’s combination of pleasure and pain, or submission and domination, but a more complex paradoxical structure. Jane Eyre’s search for autonomy and purpose, instead of being hindered by her desire for a sadomasochistic pleasure, is in fact depicted through this 175 desire. Jane is searching for a simultaneous independence and ethical submission. Therefore, the sadomasochistic erotics within the novel are presented as the development of an ethical self that gains coherence only through the form of paradox. It is a coherence that appears incoherent or discontinuous. This paradoxical structure shifts the way we might interpret the central climactic break of the novel. A majority of critics are inclined to view Jane Eyre as being both thrilled and repulsed by an erotics of power. However, as I intend to show, Jane Eyre is thrilled by submitting to some forms of mastery, and repulsed by others. Simply because Jane Eyre is turned on by an erotics of sadomasochism does not mean that all masters can command her. 41 The rhetoric of mastery and submission that laces the novel with such danger is, in reality, given a nuanced and careful discussion. The early portion of the novel is a series of scenes of rebellion against despotic forms of power. We begin with Jane’s rebellion against John Reed, which depicts her willingness to fight for autonomy, and her desire to exercise her right to choose the details of her submission. Jane’s continual rebellion is perhaps the best evidence for her attempt at creating an affirming sadomasochism between Jane and Rochester, as no other relationship in the novel is presented by our narrator as willingly, consensually hinging on domination and submission. In other words, when Jane is exposed to an unhealthy, delimiting dominance, she chooses to assert her own autonomy in response. 41 The logic of this idea is familiar when dealing with non-normative erotic practices. For example, the common assumption that lesbians are attracted to all women, simply because their object of choice is of the female persuasion. 176 In the presence of John Reed, for example, Jane experiences a visceral fear, and “every morsel of flesh on [her] bones shrank when he came near.” 42 This is not an erotic submission, but a fear that immobilizes and oppresses Jane. This fear is depicted through the first close description of Jane’s body, a body in pain yet fueled by the desire to survive. Jane’s body is depicted here not to eroticize pain, but to return her to herself: “[T]he volume was flung, it hit me, and I fell, striking my head against the door and cutting it. The cut bled, the pain was sharp: my terror had passed in its climax; other feelings succeeded. . . . I really saw him a tyrant: a murderer. I felt a drop or two of blood from my head trickle down my neck . . . these sensations for the time predominated over fear.” 43 We might view these extreme bodily details as evidence of a masochistic Jane; certainly, the near-coolness with which her bodily suffering is rendered reflects her acceptance of and familiarity with pain. Yet beyond the acceptance and familiarity, Jane welcomes the bodily pain because it snaps her out of her oppressed (as opposed to submissive) state, forces her to recognize her nonconsensual obedience to John Reed. The suffering caused to Jane by this violent dominance does not prompt its prolongation, in an attempt to withstand it and to suffer for pleasure. Reed’s dominance, instead, prompts her to survive, to save her body from a form of tyranny not ethically, or erotically, acceptable. 42 Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre: An Autobiography. Richard J. Dunn, ed. (Norton Crit. Ed. 3 rd ed. New York: Norton, 2001) 8. 43 Ibid., 8-9. 177 Jane continues to rebel against other restrictive forms of dominance, in smaller, less violent ways: Mrs. Reed, Mr. Brocklehurst (primarily with the help of Miss Temple), and Helen (briefly, against Helen’s spiritual notions, while trying to encourage Helen to rebel against the physical punishments) are each subjected by Jane to one form of revolt or another. 44 The first “mastery” that Jane gladly accepts is the guidance of Miss Temple. We do not witness much of the relationship between Jane and Miss Temple, because Jane herself seems not to have noticed being enthralled by Miss Temple until she is gone: “From the day she left I was no longer the same: with her was gone every settled feeling . . . I had given in allegiance to duty and order; I was quiet; I believed I was content: to the eyes of others, usually even to my own, I appeared a disciplined and subdued character.” 45 That Jane “tired of the routine of eight years in one afternoon” signals that her choice of allegiance, to Miss Temple and to the school, was not the best, lacking in “sensations and excitements” and now completely vacant in the absence of Miss Temple. Jane awakens to the idea that she has the right to choose her path in life. Even when she cries “Then . . . grant me at least a new servitude!,” the power in being able to choose the sort of servitude remains. 46 Such small moments populate the text of Jane Eyre, moments when Jane clearly and unabashedly, as she navigates the options before her, reflects on her tendency toward 44 Ibid., 30-1. 45 Ibid., 71. 46 Ibid., 72. 178 and preference for duty and submission. One such reflection immediately follows the first encounter between Jane and Mr. Rochester. The encounter itself we might view as a template for their unfolding “unconventional” relationship. After startling Rochester’s horse into throwing him, Jane is required to step out of her passivity and into active service. In this brief initial encounter, Jane is both submissive and resistant, a complexity that will texture their future relationship. She is drawn, first, to his unconventional looks and manner: Rochester is not “heroic-looking,” nor does he possess “gallantry” or “good- humoured” responses to his fall. Therefore, Jane feels liberated: while she is a little shy, she remains unafraid and mainly intrigued. Indeed, Jane tells us that “the frown and the roughness of the traveller, set me at my ease.” 47 Until they part in the lane, Jane is questioned, responds dutifully; is scrutinized, performs a bit of scrutiny herself; is given orders, counters some and obeys others. Although she admits to being ordinarily “afraid to touch a horse when alone,” she also admits that “when told to do it I was disposed to obey” (98). She is not able to completely overcome her fear of the horse, and so she allows Rochester to use her bodily frame as a crutch. She retrieves his whip; she is given the command to post her letter, “and return as fast as [she] can.” She complies, and begins to ruminate, The incident had occurred and was gone for me: it was an incident of no moment, no romance, no interest in a sense; yet it marked with change one single hour of a monotonous life. My help had been needed and claimed; I had given it: I was pleased to have done something; trivial, transitory though the deed was, it was yet an active thing, and I was weary of an existence all passive. 48 47 Ibid., 97. 48 Ibid., 98 (latter emphasis mine). 179 Jane explicitly prepares the reader that here will be no ordinary romance; therefore, what seems like “conventional male/female erotic domination” 49 is in fact something more unconventional and nuanced. The possibility of that “something more” is immediately evident: in her submission, her obeisance to the commands and directives of Rochester, Jane finds the action she so yearns for. In a state normally taken to be “passive”— submission’s tendency to be viewed as a “state” reflects its assumed passivity—Jane puts action into submission; she infuses it with choice and purpose; she creates a clear distinction between submission and passivity. She reminds us that submission is itself an active thing, particularly if one makes a conscious choice. Jane anticipates what I will argue is one of the major themes of the novel, and one of the dominant elements of its erotic ethics: that individual autonomy can be found within the active choice of submission. But Jane’s continued submission is not ensured, and so ensues a series of negotiations between Jane and Rochester. Many critics have noted the “erotic sparring” that occurs in these conversations, and indeed, as they test the limits of one another, a definite erotic suspense is created. But to view these interactions as “sparring” or as a “struggle” seems to preclude other readings, such as erotic negotiation. Their second conversation 50 is, on the surface, a negotiation of class boundaries, of how to establish equal relations between an employer and salaried employee. All the same, the negotiation 49 Mitchell 29. 50 Brontë, Jane Eyre, 111-19. 180 process and intended results carry an “unconventional” intimacy. Rochester wishes to “dispense with a great many conventional forms and phrases”; he finds it “impossible to be conventional with Jane.” 51 In his choice to forgo convention, he reads Jane’s desires quite clearly: he recognizes a “frank and sincere” nature, stating that “one does not often see such a manner: no, on the contrary, affectation, or coldness . . . are the usual rewards of candour.” 52 This resonates with the pleasure Jane takes, at their first meeting, in his unconventional age, ugliness, and abruptness—again, he’s not the heroic, gallant youth. 53 Yet, unlike the tyrannical and nonconsensual dominance of John Reed and Mr. Brocklehurst, Rochester has no intention of subjecting Jane to a lack of convention without at first obtaining her agreement. Therefore, their negotiations also contain an explicit discussion of mastery and submission: “Then . . . do you agree with me that I have a right to be a little masterful, abrupt; perhaps exacting, sometimes, on the grounds I stated . . . ?” . . . “I don’t think, sir, you have a right to command me merely because you are older than I, or because you have seen more of the world than I have; your claim to superiority depends on the use you have made of your time and experience.” 54 While Rochester does most of the talking, this is a negotiation participated in by both— Jane is free to give her assent or to clarify his meanings, free to make him into the sort of 51 Ibid., 114, 118. 52 Ibid., 115. 53 Ibid., 97. 54 Ibid., 114. 181 master she would willingly submit to. Jane is willing to forgive that Rochester has not made good use of his life, because he takes the “trouble . . . to inquire whether or not [his] paid subordinates” 55 are content with his mastery. In this, Rochester proves to hold an immense value of and respect for Jane; and for this, she will “heartily” agree to “submit” to “hectoring” but not to “insolence.” In the end, Jane chooses to retreat from this conversation, from “a discourse which was all darkness,” 56 when Rochester becomes too dark and frightening for her taste. Jane retains her autonomy even as she helps establish the very terms of her submission to Rochester. Again, while this conversation is, on the surface, about class differences and how to negotiate these boundaries, their mutual desire to transcend the conventions of class – the conventions that dictate the interactions that should occur between employers and salaried employees – generates an erotic intimacy as one kind of power dynamic is transcended and re-negotiated. The power dynamics of class differences is funneled into a mastery and submission that is more erotically charged. This is a power dynamic that is erotic because it is separated from the institutions of class. It is erotic because it is power exercised out of pleasure, it is form bent to the purpose of pleasure, rather than form used to ensure class boundaries. We do not wait long for more explanation of the terms this eroticized power dynamic: “I knew the pleasure of vexing him and soothing him by turns,” Jane admits: it was one I chiefly delighted in, and a sure instinct always guided me from going too far: beyond the verge of provocation I never ventured; on 55 Ibid., 115. 56 Ibid., 118. 182 the extreme brink I liked well to try my skill. Retaining every minute form of respect, every propriety of my station, I could still meet him in argument without fear or uneasy restraint: this suited both him and me. 57 Here is a startlingly detailed description of the paradoxical eroticism of sadomasochism: working within the security and safety of rules and boundaries, with an attention to regulation and etiquette, the players take pleasure in breaking those roles and pushing those boundaries, stepping out of them and enticing before reining themselves in. The “extreme brink,” for Jane, is the paradoxical erotics of sadomasochism, as a practice that takes pleasure in performing form while simultaneously pushing its boundaries. In her interactions with Rochester, Jane develops a “sure,” even powerful instinct that guides her away from “fear and uneasy restraint.” Jane’s existence between transgression and submission is a pleasure to them both, but Jane is the one who wields this pleasure, controlling its ebb and flow by vexing and soothing “by turns.” Compared with the other submissions and rebellions depicted in the novel, Jane’s submission to Rochester is certainly offered with a more detailed, erotic, and affirming rhetoric. One of the most important submissions that Jane grapples with is the interior battle with her own crippling sense of inferiority. Soon after anticipating “the pleasure of vexing and soothing” him, Jane learns that Mr. Rochester has “gone to the Leas,” where a certain Blanche Ingram would be present. Jane latches on to the idea of a romance between Miss Ingram and Mr. Rochester; and while Mrs. Fairfax gives no encouragement to the idea, Rochester has done nothing to assure Jane otherwise. Jane is “arraigned at [her] own bar” of suffering, at which she determines that “a greater fool than Jane Eyre 57 Ibid., 134. 183 had never breathed the breath of life.” 58 She rejects the thought of ever being “gifted with the power of pleasing him.” At this masochistic self-trial and -punishment, Jane cuts herself down to a “disconnected, poor, and plain” governess. Her “sentence” is a “wholesome discipline” to which she requires her “feelings to submit,” and through which she hopes to become more “self-respecting.” 59 Was it, then, not self-respecting when the “ease of his manner freed [her] from painful restraint?” 60 In her growing unconventional erotic intimacy with Rochester, Jane had “ceased to pine after kindred”; her “thin crescent-destiny seemed to enlarge; the blanks of existence were filled up; . . . bodily health improved,” and Jane “gathered flesh and strength.” 61 This, then, is an act of disrespect to the self? Yes, answers Jane’s crippling self-criticism. Yet Jane’s regimen of excessive self-repression cannot withstand the return of Rochester. Although engendering “every good, true, vigorous feeling” she possesses, 62 her erotic connection is still tainted by a vague fear of Rochester’s commitment to another. Seeing Rochester again is, for Jane, “an acute pleasure in looking,—a precious, poignant pleasure; pure gold, with a steely point of agony,” a pleasure by which she is 58 Ibid., 136. 59 Ibid., 137-8. 60 Ibid., 125. 61 Ibid., 125. 62 Ibid., 149. 184 “mastered” and “fettered.” 63 Renewing her sense of his “genuine power,” Jane realizes that she shares with Rochester something that crosses the multiple boundaries between them: [H]e is not of their kind. I believe he is of mine;—I am sure he is,—I feel akin to him,—I understand the language of his countenance and movements; though rank and wealth sever us widely, I have something in my brain and heart, in my blood and nerves, that assimilates me mentally to him. . . . Every good, true, vigorous feeling I have, gathers impulsively round him . . . [W]hen I say that I am of his kind . . . I mean only that I have certain tastes and feelings in common with him. 64 What are the “certain tastes and feelings in common”? The language of the passage seems divided between sadomasochistic erotics and spiritual kinship: “acute pleasure,” “steely point of agony,” “mastered,” “power,” “fettered,” “penetrating” are paired with “of their kind,” “akin,” “good, true, vigorous,” “in common,” “love.” Most critics argue that these two sets of terms are juxtaposed, rather than paired; this juxtaposition is seen to symbolize and presage the climax of the novel, when Jane must resist the unconventional erotics in order to eventually achieve spiritual kinship. And the overpowering danger of an erotics of sadomasochism is present in this passage, as Jane is mastered and fettered by the games Rochester is playing. Yet this passage does not occlude the negotiated erotic power dynamic that we just witnessed; however, what does come into question is whether or not Rochester is able to hold up his end of the exchange. The eroticized power 63 Ibid., 148. 64 Ibid., 149. 185 dynamic is not the issue, but whether or not this contracted mutual pleasure is performed in a ethical manner. Yet Jane sets aside her wariness and takes what is, in terms of class, the unconventional step of agreeing to marry her employer. The conventional power dynamics of marriage, however, threaten to remove the empowerment Jane experiences from her active submission to Rochester. After the engagement—once Jane is very nearly legally in his power and once Rochester is to be master of all of her—the balance of power nearly turns into a switch of power as Jane attempts to preserve their original dynamic. Above all, Jane fears being coddled, being rendered as “an ape in a harlequin’s jacket,—a jay in borrowed plumes.” 65 She wishes to retain the “volatility of the eroticized discourse” 66 : for Rochester to remain dark and demanding, and herself to be challenged with the goal to please and draw him out. Rochester’s tenderness and sweet-nothings seem false; but in trying to convince Jane of his love, he in fact gives her the key to maintaining, and even deepening their sadomasochistic eroticism, telling her I never met your likeness. Jane: you please me, and you master me—you seem to submit, and I like the sense of pliancy you impart: and while I am twining the soft silken skein round my finger, it sends a thrill up my arm to my heart. I am influenced—conquered; and the influence is sweeter than I can express; and the conquest I undergo has a witchery beyond any triumph I can win. 67 65 Ibid., 221. 66 James O’Rourke Sex, Lies, and Autobiography: The Ethics of Confession (Charlottesville: U of Virg. P, 2006) 139. 67 Brontë, Jane Eyre, 222. 186 Though Jane accuses him of unwise talk, she takes seriously his phrase “seem to submit”—and, until their wedding day, she keeps Rochester’s tenderness at bay by becoming, according to Rochester, “a little tyrant,” 68 a “hard little thing.” 69 It is not that Jane dislikes tenderness, but wishes, yet again, to make Rochester into the kind of master she desires. She wishes to maintain the unconventional aspects of their romance – the “volatility of their eroticized discourse” – even if they have taken the very conventional step of becoming engaged. To the accusation of “hard little thing,” Jane responds that she “was determined to show him divers rugged points” so that “he should know fully what sort of bargain he had made.” And Rochester’s reaction to Jane’s “system” is a rendering of Jane’s body in pain: He was kept, to be sure, rather cross and crusty . . . he had no such honeyed terms as “love” and “darling” on his lips: the best words at my service were “provoking puppet,” “malicious elf,” “sprite,” “changeling,” &c. For caresses, too, I now got grimaces; for a pressure of the hand, a pinch on the arm; for a kiss on the cheek, a severe tweak of the ear. 70 The physicality of this description presents another version of Jane’s body in pain—the image of her “teased” or “tormented” body is a clear contrast to the bloody violence of the body rendered by John Reed. This negotiation of an eroticized power dynamic is clearly a sensual experience for Jane, emphasizing how a sadomasochistic way of living – 68 Ibid., 231. 69 Ibid., 233. 70 Ibid., 234. 187 relying on principles of mutuality, consent, and negotiation – in fact is a form of erotic ethics. “IT WAS MY TIME TO ASSUME ASCENDANCY” I have tried to argue that the “conventional” and “negative” erotics of domination and submission that most critics read into Jane Eyre are instead unconventional and affirming, as represented through the eroticized negotiations between Jane and Rochester that test the boundaries of class and gender, through the comparisons with and rejections of other kinds of mastery, and through Jane’s simultaneous search for autonomy and self- respect. Through the negotiation-courtship between Jane and Rochester, their engagement is recast as a sort of a contract of an eroticized power dynamic, which Jane seeks to preserve even in the face of the ordinary conventions of romance and engagement. Of new interest, then, is Jane’s choice to leave Rochester when the existence of his first marriage emerges. Those who would argue that the driving purpose behind Jane Eyre is to negotiate the sadomasochism – that pesky patriarchal logic – out of the text, indicate this moment as the turning point: yes, Jane will again be tested by St. John, but when she chooses to leave Thornfield, she chooses to rescue herself from her unhealthy masochistic drive, and an unhealthy relationship with Rochester, thereby beginning the process of complete autonomy from a patriarchal system of domination and submission. Certainly Jane leaves Thornfield in order to retain her self-respect and, as Menon puts it, 188 a sense of moral superiority. 71 As much as she loves Rochester, she has no desire to lower herself to becoming his mistress. And certainly Jane must relinquish the masochistic drive that would prevent her from demanding honesty and respect from Rochester. Rejecting this element of masochism, however, means that Jane must also reject her desire to render a good service, to aid him in his despair. She must, she knows, reject the pride she takes in such an ability “to control and restrain him”; she feels “an inward power; a sense of influence . . . the crisis was perilous; but not without its charm.” 72 She resists the charm, lingering just long enough to save him from immediate “self- abandonment.” 73 She maintains her self-respect, but, as Shuttleworth has cleverly argued, “Brontë cuts through the niceties of romance tradition, daring to give her heroine . . . a sense of enjoyment at the conventional moment of supposed greatest suffering.” 74 Even as Jane resists the impulse to disrespect herself and take up, again, the position of guide and assistant that she has for so long occupied, the rhetoric of eroticized power dynamics is coolly described. Yet Jane is not entirely free from her interior “negative” masochism: “What was I? In the midst of my pain of heart, and frantic effort of principle, I abhorred myself. I had no solace from self-approbation: none even from self-respect. I had injured— 71 Menon, 107. 72 Brontë, Jane Eyre, 258. 73 Ibid., 274. 74 Shuttleworth, 173. 189 wounded—left my master. I was hateful in my own eyes.” 75 Instead of marking the end of sadomasochistic eroticism, what the center of the novel marks is the negotiation of self- deprecation out of the text. The broken contract serves to delineate the failure of Rochester and the persistence of Jane’s destructive self-criticism; however, this failure, and the renewed sense that Jane must “overcome” her masochistic tendencies, does not also signify the conquest of the eroticized power dynamics. Instead of negotiating the sadomasochism out of the text, various forms of masochism and submission are offered to Jane as choices. With a contract now at the center of the narrative, and a broken contract, the sadomasochistic erotics are in fact only strengthened. If ethical responsibility is the scene of an sadomasochistic relationship, the fact that Jane leaves is not necessarily a total relinquishment of her desire for erotic submission, though it is a temporary rejection of the bond with Rochester. We might, then, view the remainder of the narrative as Jane’s continued quest for an ethically sound sadomasochism, which is in fact dependent on the conquest of her own masochistic sense of inferiority. One can only achieve an ethical erotic submission if one refuses a self-destructive masochism and finds a master worth submitting to. Jane’s search for purpose, and for freedom from her relentless self-criticism, are themes continued across the broken contract, to be negotiated during her time with Rivers family. These themes accompany additional examples of mastery that Jane must encounter and negotiate. St. John Rivers’ mastery is the clearest and most conventional in the narrative, forcing Jane into near-obliterating submission. While Jane admits that 75 Brontë, Jane Eyre, 274. 190 Diana Rivers has a command over her, and that she, Jane, has the sort of “nature to feel pleasure in yielding to an authority supported like hers[,] . . . to bend, where my conscience and self-respect permitted, to an active will,” 76 Jane obeys St. John in a fundamentally different way, and experiences mastery of a fundamentally different sort: I found him a very patient, very forbearing, and yet an exacting master . . . By degrees, he acquired a certain influence over me that took away my liberty of mind . . . I could no longer talk or laugh freely when he was by . . . I fell under his freezing spell. When he said “go,” I went; “come,” I came; “do this,” I did it. But I did not love my servitude . . . I daily wished more to please him: but to do so, I felt daily more and more that I must disown half my nature, stifle my faculties, wrest my tastes from their original bent . . . 77 With Rochester, Jane felt as if her “spirit” were addressing his own, as if they “stood at God’s feet, equal.” 78 There was an “extreme brink” on which Jane could play with power, rather than blindly obeying. With St. John, the very spirit that might stand equal with him is stifled into nothing; and whatever spirit he leaves within her, well – he wishes to claim it, as well, for his missionary work. The foil has been set; again the text has opened to allow different forms of dominance, and to demand Jane’s eventual choice. St. John’s particular mastery is characterized as a psychological mastery, rather than the sensual mastery that allows room for Jane’s body and voice to enter the narrative. The ways in which he conveys his disappointment and displeasure are forms of 76 Ibid., 293. 77 Ibid., 339. 78 Ibid., 216. 191 pain that Jane does not welcome. References to her body are absent, except when it is “yoked” under “eastern suns” 79 ; or when the mental strictures imposed by St. John are described as feeling as if he has a “hold on [her] limbs.” 80 His is a restrictive mastery that seems to dismember her mind and body into parts designed to suit his purpose, whereas Rochester rendered Jane’s body as whole, pliant, and powerful, resisting (remember, she seems to submit) just enough to give them both pleasure from the resistance. When Jane falls under St. John’s “freezing spell,” she is taken out of and denied her body. Thus, when Jane is not able to accept the first of St. John’s marriage proposals, we believe her when she states “I would much rather he had knocked me down.” 81 Certainly Jane would welcome such a physical pain, after the lack of any sort of physicality. Jane experiences sensation, power, and emotion through her body; her body is a conductor of every feeling she experiences, it is the transmitter of the “spirit,” it is the “will and energy” Rochester despairs of losing. 82 If she is to experience God, then that, too, will be through her body. She rejects St. John because he offers only immortal flesh and demands that she deny her fleshly needs. Jane needs to experience her flesh as mortal, but not from the early mortality that a missionary life would impose. 79 Ibid., 347. 80 Ibid., 346. 81 Ibid., 349. 82 Ibid., 271. 192 Jane reclaims her power and her body—in the form of her figure falling to her knees to pray, later that evening 83 —when she finally breaks from St. John and decides to go in search of Rochester. She tells us, “It was my time to assume ascendancy. My powers were in play, and in force,” and when she asks St. John to leave her be, “[h]e obeyed at once.” 84 Jane then renders absolutely clear the fact that, when she chooses to take command, she will, stating, “Where there is energy to command well enough, obedience never fails.” Just as, at the beginning of her stay with the Rivers, Jane noted that she possessed the sort of nature that preferred to submit, if the master was worthy, here she states that she can also command, if that is what the situation requires. Once she is clear on her path, she is able to be dominant or submissive, she is able to choose between one or the other. Her submission is yet again presented as an active choice and not a fated state. The creation of an active erotic submission holds important consequences for the potential to read Jane Eyre as a feminist novel, particularly as revisionary feminist readings have rightly questioned the fact that Jane’s search for erotic freedom depends upon problematic imperial ideologies. 85 Before addressing this justified critique, we must 83 Ibid., 358. 84 Ibid., 358. 85 This unresolved problem is contained within the figure of Bertha Rochester, who is not at liberty to negotiate her own form of erotic submission. James O’Rourke provides an excellent analysis of Bertha Rochester serving as the prime disruption to Jane Eyre’s construction of herself as a “good person” (137). While Jane Eyre offers a nuanced depiction of erotic power dynamics, encouraging us to think of sadomasochism beyond mere reiteration of patriarchal logic by clearly offering up different forms of mastery for our consideration, the intersection of this erotic individualism with imperial ideologies is ignored. This becomes a particular problem in a novel such as The Professor, where the rhetoric of erotic domination and submission is depicted as the development of proper English-ness. 193 consider how the deployment of the erotic ethics of sadomasochism can co-exist with a feminist reading of the novel. Oddly enough, we might find evidence for this reading by considering the ways in which sadomasochism encounters and assimilates the evangelical Christianity threading the novel. When Jane rejects St. John for the last time and falls on her knees to pray, she tells us that she prays in “a different way to St. John’s, but effective in its own fashion.” 86 The fact that Jane cannot ignore the mortality of her flesh (she would rather be “knocked down” than subjected to St. John’s frigid mental construction of religion), that her spirituality is housed in the body and dependent on her return to Rochester, indicates a rendering of a feminist spirituality through Jane’s body as an active and erotic being: her affirming sadomasochistic self. The combination of feminism, spirituality, and sadomasochism is a familiar argument within contemporary theories of BDSM. For example, Lynda Hart describes how the process of performing sadomasochism is often fueled by some sort of “end-truth”: by the anticipation of encountering an end-truth and by the fact that it is somehow always already there, for it is a presupposition of the desire to make the journey itself. In this sense sadomasochism takes on both a redemptive and pastoralizing tone, partaking in the discourses of sacrifice, amendment, atonement. Not, however, in the service of those who have “sinned,” but as compensation for those who have been sinned against. It thus perverts the Christian discourse of redemption—for rather than a sacrifice made by one who stands in the place of the “master” in order to redeem the sinners (who “know not what they do”)[,] the s/m practitioner disarticulates the body as it has been disfiguratively constructed and makes of it “flesh” . . . 87 86 Ibid., 358. 87 Lynda Hart, Between the Body and the Flesh: Performing Sadomasochism (New York: Columbia UP, 1998) 81. 194 St. John, “zealous in his ministerial duties, blameless in his life and habits,” attempts to “disfiguratively” construct Jane’s body, to render it fully into the service of a higher master. Jane, of course, is not at all opposed to living her life for this higher master—as she has had to un-idolize Rochester—but St. John’s particular service would deny her unique connection with spirituality and the Christian God. This connection resides in Jane’s body, and in her choice to erotically and spiritually reconnect with Rochester, to render her flesh to him (and to God) through the sadomasochistic erotics they create together. Or: the sadomasochistic erotics they created together. How can we account for the significant lack of sadomasochistic language at the end of Jane Eyre? If we follow the line of the narrative traced out here, it certainly seems that Jane chooses an empowering submission with Rochester over a deadening submission to St. John. At the end of her tale, however, our narrator seems happy but distant, dedicated to Rochester but with no tangible hint in the language of her active erotic submission. Indeed, we haven’t had a hint of this eroticized power dynamic since Jane left Thornfield at the middle of the novel. To further the strangeness, we end with the words of St. John describing his submission to missionary work, and eventually the offering of his mortal life to his immortal God. The oddness of the close of Jane Eyre seems most readily accounted for by D. A. Miller’s distinction between “nonnarratable” and “unspeakable” elements of a text. While Miller states that the “nonnarratable is not the unspeakable,” both elements 195 can be found at the end of Jane Eyre. 88 Of course, because it is the end of the novel, and nonnarratables are characterized as being incapable of generating story, the achievement of Jane’s quest for fulfillment through an erotics of sadomasochism cannot be narrated successfully in the original language of the negotiation-courtship itself. Yet the leap from a courtship characterized by a sadomasochistic erotics, to a marriage and relationship of sustained sadomasochistic play, is a subject which neither the novel nor nineteenth- century culture is able to speak. Again, I am by no means saying that Jane and Rochester embark on a sadomasochistic relationship in the contemporary sense of the word; instead, I argue that the narrative trajectory, in my reading, resembles a quest for Jane’s fulfillment through sadomasochistic erotic ethics, where Jane is given the power to choose her form of submission, and where submission in and of itself is empowering for Jane. It is an act rather than a state. The narrative, at least in Jane Eyre, cannot speak the end of its trajectory; it must remain implied, unspeakable, silent. Nor, am I sure, under the rule of the nonnarratable, that the narrative would choose to speak its end clearly, if it could. In any case, our understanding of why Jane Eyre ends with St. John can be enlarged if we reconsider it as a vehicle of deflection, implication, juxtaposition, and irony. To end with St. John carries across similar themes of submission, even of an erotic ascetic submission (certainly a speakable); it provides, again, an example of the form of submission Jane refuses; and it adds the flourish of irony, even a sense of justice, in using evangelicalism 88 D. A. Miller, Narrative and its Discontents: Problems of Closure in the Traditional Novel (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1981) 5. 196 as a tool for the thematic implication of sadomasochism – perhaps the ultimate feminist rebuke. “UN PEU ENTÊTÉ, EXIGEANT, VOLONTAIRE—” THE BADNESS OF THE PROFESSOR I have thus far deliberately ignored the ideologies of orientalism and imperialism that form a significant part of the scene of sadomasochistic erotic ethics in Charlotte Brontë’s work. Yet we must grapple with the possibility that the eroticized power dynamic portrayed between Jane and Rochester in the first half of Jane Eyre is heavily dependent on the suspense generated by the mysterious presence haunting the manor – first attached to the lower class figure of Grace Poole, and then correctly attributed to Rochester’s mad, Creole wife, Bertha. This mystery adds a literal element of danger to the negotiated power dynamics between Jane and Rochester, in that their passion seems doomed, if not to fail, then at least to arrive at a perilous crossroads. However, the question becomes to what extent the figure of mad and Creole Bertha Rochester should be viewed as a metaphor for the haunting of sadomasochism, as an erotic and ethical individualism, by problematic and traumatic ideologies. Again, revisionary feminist readings of Jane Eyre demand that we engage these competing ideologies together as potentially complimentary forms. The embodied female autonomy described within Jane Eyre, firmly based within the erotics of domination and submission, as well as the terms of the feminist rebuke concluding the novel, rely, as O’Rourke has noted, on the shadings of the social 197 background. We tend not to see this background, however, because of the overwhelming power of the first-person narration, and its ability to create a believable interiority. For O’Rourke, this personal voice holds the dubious power of helping us to forget the series of fortunate coincidences that seem to contradict the “rightness” of Jane’s decisions. O’Rourke describes this paradox as “ ‘moral luck,’” citing Bernard Williams’ concept of “[t]he dependence of intrinsic moral value on extrinsic factors that are outside the control of the subject.” Therefore, [t]he pretext of Jane Eyre: An Autobiography is that Jane stands on a principle “given by God” when she refuses to join herself to Rochester and that she is rewarded with the fulfillment of a desire that is immune to the vagaries of social value. That Jane’s happiness actually depends on a series of events that are outside her control—an inheritance from a distant relative, the death of Bertha Mason, and the mutilation of Rochester— shows this fabricated interiority to be not only an ideological effect but an attempt to address a moral scandal in the most profound sense of the term. 89 Reading the novel, however, for the texture of an erotics of sadomasochism, helps us to identify an alternate principle guiding Jane’s actions. Instead of being based on purely Christian principles, Jane Eyre is ground more firmly in the principle of an ethical erotic individualism. The novel uses principles of Christianity, revising them and turning them to its own erotic purpose. While Jane’s search for an affirming submission, for an ethical play of erotic power, is given several times through the language of Christianity, this language does not successfully mask the more complicated play between Jane’s self- determined, embodied Christian principles and the dominant Christian discourse represented through the character of St. John Rivers. This, in fact, accentuates the 89 O’Rourke 141. 198 oddness of the ending of the novel, the silencing of the language of erotic power, the supplementation of Jane Eyre’s voice for St. John’s words. Again, the complicated and even problematic erotic ethics of sadomasochism cannot be spoken, and therefore Jane diverts us through the eminently narratable Christian imperialism. Indeed, there is something “‘radically incoherent’” 90 within Jane Eyre, but it is not the contradiction between Jane’s “fabricated interiority” and the actual events of the plot; or, rather, it is not only this contradiction. The radical incoherence, I would suggest, is also a result of the process of ethical individualism being eroticized through the play of power dynamics, and then this ethics of erotic individualism being diverted through and/or masked by ideologies of imperialism. In order to continue an exploration of these interdependent ideologies, I would like to make the perhaps perverse turn to Charlotte Brontë ’s first novel, The Professor. Published posthumously and generally considered her weakest work – usually pigeon- holed between the juvenile fantasies of Angria and the more “serious” aesthetic achievements of Jane Eyre – the novel is composed from a first-person male perspective. This is the only extraordinary detail of The Professor, except perhaps its extraordinary badness. Especially in terms of erotic relationships, The Professor is, in fact, exemplary in its focus on the master-pupil relationship. This element of Brontëan erotics, especially as it is drawn out in The Professor, aligns once more with an erotics of sadomasochism, but The Professor highlights an element not as evident in Jane Eyre. In each of Brontë’s novels, the institution of education is the foundation of the main erotic relationships 90 Raymond Williams, quoted in O’Rourke, 141. 199 within the texts. Between Jane Eyre and Miss Temple, Jane Eyre and Edward Rochester, and Jane Eyre and St. John 91 ; between Caroline Helstone and Robert Moore, Shirley Keeldar and Louis Moore; between Lucy Snowe and Paul Emanuel; and, finally, the relationship I am about to consider in detail, between Frances Henri and William Crimsworth in The Professor – each of these central relationships, spanning four different novels, depends on the forms and bureaucracies of education. It is not simply that these novels contain the roles of master and pupil, of governess, of tutor, of mistress or directress; it is not simply that the schoolroom or the nursery serves as settings for the development of Brontë’s romantic relationships. What I will argue is that the forms of educational institutions are what render the relationships as erotic; and that exploring this dependence can help us form a more complex understanding of the eroticized power dynamics that trouble or excite or, more than anything, disgust and annoy, so many readers and scholars. A close reading of The Professor will allow us the opportunity to explore the relationality between sadomasochism and social institutions. If the erotics of sadomasochism, in Jane Eyre, are depicted through the paradox of an ethics of erotic selfhood and the eroticization of an ethical selfhood, The Professor – despite its first person narration – demands that we step back and consider the relationality between institutions and eroticism, and the inevitable eroticization of ideology and bureaucratic 91 I place the Jane-Edward relationship in this list because, although it is unique in being almost entirely outside of the master-pupil dynamic, in Jane’s role as governess, education is still part of the initial foundation. Menon notes that Brontë “does not abandon her preference for the mentor-lover relationship entirely, instead she situates it outside the classroom” (104). In addition, although Robert Moore and Caroline Helstone, in Shirley, are not in a master-pupil relationship, education is part of the scene of their romantic development, as Caroline first gets close to Robert through her tutoring lessons with his sister, at their cottage. 200 form, which we will then be able to shift back to a reconsideration of the interdependence of individual erotics and the institutions that help form them. The Professor is told from the point of view of William Crimsworth, a young man with family both in the manufacturing business and in the aristocracy. The plot is easily told: William, fresh from an education at Eton, and after a rather disastrous attempt to work for his manufacturer brother, decides to try his skills and talents in Brussels, Belgium. He achieves a position teaching English at a boys’ school, and a part-time gig at the girls’ boarding school next door. Here, he meets two possibilities for erotic and spiritual partnership – Mademoiselle Zoraïde Reuter, the directress of the girls’ school, and Mademoiselle Frances Henri, one of her teachers – and most of the novel conveys his interior struggles with the options before him. Simple enough. But why the vitriolic reactions? The critiques toward the novel tend to run in two veins. First, the developmental, biographical strand: that the novel is a failure because it lacks the serious emotional engagement, present in Jane Eyre and Villette, and that this lack of powerful interiority makes Crimsworth “repellent” and/or “dishonest.” He is viewed by most critics as an unfortunate aesthetic choice made by the still-maturing author-Brontë. Dove-tailing with this critique of authorial development, is a tendency to feel that the novel tracks, too closely, Brontë’s own life, especially her tortured love for her French instructor. The second vein of critique deals with the rhetoric used to depict the main erotic relationship: not only are erotic relationships in The Professor described in the blatant terms of dominance and submission, this erotics is further modified through a rhetoric of imperialism and nationalism. All of these critiques 201 are, to some extent, justified. My goal is not to quibble with the badness of The Professor – oh no – but we will delve more deeply into this aesthetic failure. Because the critiques just described can easily be leveled at Jane Eyre. So, again: what, precisely, is wrong with The Professor? I have a two-part answer – or, rather, way of approaching – this question. I would like to suggest that the acerbic feelings directed toward this novel are the consequence of Brontë’s attempts at pure reality. Indeed, in her preface to this novel (when she once again contemplated an attempt at its publication after her completion of Shirley), Brontë writes: I said to myself that my hero should work his way through life as I had seen real living men work theirs--that he should never get a shilling he had not earned--that no sudden turns should lift him in a moment to wealth and high station; that whatever small competency he might gain, should be won by the sweat of his brow; that, before he could find so much as an arbour to sit down in, he should master at least half the ascent of “the Hill of Difficulty;” that he should not even marry a beautiful girl or a lady of rank. As Adam's son he should share Adam's doom, and drain throughout life a mixed and moderate cup of enjoyment. In the sequel, however, I find that publishers in general scarcely approved of this system, but would have liked something more imaginative and poetical--something more consonant with a highly wrought fancy, with a taste for pathos, with sentiments more tender, elevated, unworldly. 92 Somehow, then – in attempting to describe life in its full reality, in all its harshness and struggle, this realism results in the main erotic relationship being blatantly depicted through the mundane forms of education. This element, combined with the rhetorics of domination and submission, imperialism and nationalism, adds both a banality and a lack 92 Charlotte Brontë, Shirley and The Professor. Rebecca Fraser, ed. (New York: Everyman’s Library / Knopf, 2008) 657. 202 of realism to The Professor that is simultaneously boring and dangerous – or, dangerous in its banality. It is, rather, entirely too real. While there are some similarities between the socially insecure position of both William Crimsworth and Jane Eyre, gender plays a significant role in the difference between the experiences of these two protagonists. Terry Eagleton maintains that “The Professor is essentially a more dishonest and idealised version of Jane Eyre and Villette” because, by choosing a male protagonist, “it is concerned with victory rather than the vulnerability of the solitary social aspirant, and so represses whole dimensions of agony apparent in the other two works.” 93 While Eagleton’s analysis relies on a rather naturalized view of gender and art, he is correct in noting that this novel certainly lacks a serious emotional engagement that makes Crimsworth into a character with a “repellent nature.” 94 But I would like to suggest that the strong feelings of disgust and disappointment generated by this novel are also a consequence one of the most detailed and extended descriptions of a sadomasochistic relationship presented during the nineteenth century. Brontë speaks and narrates what she might have come to feel was both unspeakable and nonnarratable in her later novels. In doing so, there is a definite banality and lack of realism to The Professor that is simultaneously boring and dangerous – or, dangerous in its banality. 93 Eagleton 34. 94 Menon 87. 203 We can attribute, in part, the banality of The Professor to the fact that its sadomasochistic erotics are centered within the bureaucratic forms of education, rather than within the fierce and passionate individualism of Jane Eyre. Conveyed with this eroticization of bureaucracy is an element of strategy and game-playing, which will necessarily remind us of Foucault’s description of S&M’s “creative enterprise” as strategy and play, terms that clarify how BDSM’s engagement with the forms and rituals of institutions is different from pure “social power.” 95 As part of S&M’s agenda to desexualize pleasure, it strategizes a number of sensations, activities, ideas, places, and institutions not typically associated with sexual pleasure. This creative enterprise depends upon “the eroticization of strategic relations[,] . . . the use of a strategic relationship as a source of pleasure”. 96 Although Foucault does not speak directly to “institutions” in this interview, the concept of “strategy” invokes an earlier moment in Foucault’s oeuvre, in the first volume of the History of Sexuality, when he describes sexuality as “an especially dense transfer point for relations of power: between men and women, young people and old people, parents and offspring, teachers and students, priests and laity, an administration and a population.” 97 The language of these two passages from Foucault seem to speak to separate points, but let’s put them into play with one another: 95 Michel Foucault, “Sex, Power, and the Politics of Identity,” 163-73. As mentioned earlier in the chapter, although Patricia Menon gestures briefly to the connections between the erotics of sadomasochism and the strategy of game-playing, she offers this connection in passing, not connecting it to the institutional relationship of master and pupil that she analyzes with such depth. 96 Ibid., 170. 97 Foucault, History of Sexuality, Volume One, 103. 204 sadomasochism is not, in fact, fully a part of the “sexuality” to which Foucault refers to in the History of Sexuality, that sexuality being a part of the normalizing power relations that Foucault is analyzing in this volume. Sadomasochism, instead, desexualizes erotic pleasure, becoming a peculiarly “dense transfer point for relations of power,” unique precisely because it eroticizes the power relations of sexual normalization – that rhythm of simulation and play. Because sexuality is often dictated at the institutional level, the strategic erotics of sadomasochism will certainly play with these social institutions. Therefore, gathering spaces for BDSM practitioners, in addition to the stereotypical dungeon scenes, also utilize medical examination rooms and libraries; nurseries and schoolrooms, police questioning rooms and prisoner cells. BDSM practice, therefore, is entirely dependent upon eroticizing the forms and bureaucracies of institutions. From the first, the male narrator of Brontë ’s The Professor, William Crimsworth, is deeply engaged in an analysis of the institution of education. He reflects, at length, on his particular role, and how best to win and maintain his power. This interest in the forms of education easily translates over to his main romantic interest. Because of the ease of transfer, we might be inclined to view the erotics of the power dynamics of education as simply a means to an end. While William Crimsworth is drawn to his pupil / colleague, Frances Henri, because she is the most talented and dedicated student; and while he is required to respect the forms and bureaucracy of the educational system in his interactions with Mlle Henri, if he wants to maintain his position; these are not his primary reasons for calling upon the forms of education. Instead, William ultimately invokes the roles and forms of master and pupil because he recognizes that it pleases both 205 him and Frances. Even in their first substantial interaction, which propriety dictates must occur within the roles of the schoolroom, Crimsworth notes that his own careful and stern preservation of the role of master not only renders their interaction acceptable (to some extent) it also serves to both excite and calm Mdlle. Henri. Having just received a rather astonishing devoir from her, full of the passionate ideas of an advanced and curious mind, but also full of the grammatical errors of a non-native English speaker, William decides he wants to get closer to Mdlle. Henri, and so he creates an elaborate staging of their first major interchange. When he hands out and comments on the devoirs of the rest of the students, he deliberately overlooks Mdlle. Henri: I said nothing of Mdlle Henri’s exercise, and, spectacles on nose, I endeavored to decipher in her countenance her sentiments at the omission. . . . ‘If she thinks she did a clever thing in composing that devoir, she will now look mortified,’ thought I. Grave as usual, almost sombre, was her face; . . . there was something, I thought, of expectation in her attitude, . . . some slight change did pass over her air and mien, as though she now relinquished a faint prospect of pleasant excitement . . . At four o’clock, when the bell rang and the room was in immediate tumult, instead of taking my hat and starting from the estrade, I sat still a moment. . . . ‘Come here,’ said I, lifting my finger at the same time. She hesitated; she could not hear the words amidst the uproar now pervading both schoolrooms; I repeated the sign; she approached; again she paused within half a yard of the estrade, and looked shy, and still doubtful whether she had mistaken my meaning. ‘Step up,’ I said, speaking with decision. It is the only way of dealing with diffident, easily embarrassed characters, and with some slight manual aid I presently got her placed just where I wanted her to be, that is, between my desk and the window, where she was screened from the rush of the second division, and where no one could sneak behind her to listen. ‘Take a seat,’ I said, placing a tabouret; and I made her sit down. I knew what I was doing would be considered a very strange thing, and, what was 206 more, I did not care. Frances knew it also, and, I fear, by an appearance of agitation and trembling, that she cared much. I drew from my pocket the rolled-up devoir. ‘This is yours, I suppose?’ said I, addressing her in English, for I now felt sure she could speak English. ‘Yes,’ she answered distinctly; and as I unrolled it and laid it out flat on the desk before her with my hand upon it, and a pencil in that hand, I saw her moved, and, as it were, kindled; her depression beamed as a cloud might behind which the sun is burning. ‘This devoir has numerous faults . . . Attend: I will point out some principal defects.’ And I went through it carefully, noting every error, and demonstrating why they were errors, and how the words or phrases ought to have been written. In the course of this sobering process she became calm. . . . ‘Thank you, sir,’ said she, rising. There was gratitude both in her voice and in the look with which she accompanied it. 98 I quote this scene at length in order to show how much of a “scene,” in the performative sense of the term, it truly is. 99 We are given clear images of the two players: Crimsworth, the director of the scene, looking over his spectacles, pencil in hand; and Frances, hesitant, yet waiting to be kindled. We are given a very deliberate and detailed placement of their bodies: William waiting on the estrade, calls Frances to stand before him, and then seats her on a small stool at his side. And we are shown a series of directions issued by William: “Come here,” “Step up,” “Take a seat,” which are followed by a long series of corrections. The pacing of this passage, the dialogue, the descriptions of the characters, might be viewed as clichéd, even plodding. Yet this “bad” aesthetic is directly 98 Ibid., 789-91. 99 See Joseph Litvak’s “Charlotte Brontë and the Scene of Instruction: Authority and Subversion in Villette” for a discussion of theatre and theatricality with reference to Brontë. In Nineteenth-Century Literature, Vol. 42, No. 4 (Mar., 1988), pp. 467-489. 207 attributable to the eroticized power dynamics being deliberately drawn. The banal excess of this scene is, in fact, what reveals that this is not an example of institutionalization, but rather the strategic eroticization of an institution. There is such intimacy conveyed in this scene of instruction, that the forms of education clearly no longer serve as zones of safety, as we can see with the powerful concluding image: It was time, indeed, for our conference to terminate; for, when I glanced around, behold all the boarders . . . were congregated within a yard or two of my desk, and stood staring with eyes and mouths wide open; the three maîtresses formed a whispering knot in one corner, and close at my elbow was the directress, sitting on a low chair, calmly clipping the tassels of her finished purse. 100 The power dynamics of the schoolroom, staged to excess by Crimsworth, generate an intimacy that the forms of education cannot conceal. As he notes immediately after this scene, Crimsworth “esteemed it wise and right . . . to enforce strictly all forms ordinarily in use between master and pupil,” no longer in order to maintain respectable positions, but because he perceived that as his “manner grew austere and magisterial, hers became easy and self-possessed.” Indeed, the health and confidence of Mdlle. Henri is entirely dependent on these specific attentions from her master. Their intimacy is founded on the scenes of education, a play that is consciously activated and deployed by Crimsworth. But as the roles are performed with rigidity to the point of excess, the play both pushes beyond form and eroticizes form. It reveals form as form, and in doing so eroticizes form. 100 Brontë, The Professor, 791. 208 Elizabeth Gargano, in her article on the public and private schoolrooms within the novel Shirley, has discussed Brontë’s engagement with the forms of education in terms of a “Rousseauian rhetoric that stages education as . . . a critique of power structures and social norms.” 101 What sort of critique of power, then, does the staging of education in The Professor offer? Similar to the series of potential masters and submissions that Jane Eyre tests and rejects, Crimsworth is offered two vastly different options for his romantic relationship. But in The Professor, the process of choosing an erotic mate is given not in the terms of education, but the terms of imperialism. Education is still the scene of Crimsworth’s erotic testing, but the rhetoric is different when we are given the counter- example of Mademoiselle Reuter. Also quite similar to Jane Eyre, the eroticized power dynamics of education receive weight through their juxtaposition with what William feels are negative manifestations of power. There is a clear negotiation of and reflection on erotic relations of power; and while this elaboration is problematic, in that it is given in both nationalistic and imperial terms, it is entirely unique in the attentive depth given to erotic power, in general. Our counter-example is Mademoiselle Zoraïde Reuter, who had nearly succeeded in winning Crimsworth’s love, until he discovers she is promised to someone else. Her dishonesty enflames his moral disapprobation; however, when he acts from this space in an attempt to sever his connection with Mdlle. Reuter, his coldness has the opposite effect: 101 Elizabeth Gargano, “The Education of Brontë’s New Nouvelle Héloïse in Shirley,” Studies in English Literature 1500-1900 44.4 (Autumn 2004): 779-803. 780. 209 [M]eeting her gaze full, arresting, fixing her glance, I shot into her eyes, from my own, a look where there was no respect, no love, no tenderness, no gallantry; where the strictest analysis could detect nothing but scorn, hardihood, irony. I made her bear it, and feel it; her steady countenance did not change, but her colour rose, and she approached me as if fascinated. 102 Thus Crimsworth discovers another sort of power, different from the “austere and magisterial” position he assumes with Henri. From this moment forward, Mdlle. Reuter approaches Crimsworth with a “slavish homage” that brings out the worst in him. “Servility creates despotism,” he states, and the particular homage of Mdlle. Reuter does nothing to win his “heart, only pampered whatever was stern and exacting in its mood.” 103 Although he recognizes the sensual pull of Mdlle. Reuter’s extreme humility, he is repulsed by the principles fuelling her passion. There follows a long list detailing all the foibles of the directress’s nature, which, because so clearly disgusting to Crimsworth, becomes a sort of list for what he desires: “She would trample on the neck of humility, she would kneel at the feet of disdain; she would meet tenderness with secret contempt, indifference she would woo with ceaseless assiduities. . . . To violence, justice, tyranny, she succumbed.” 104 The careful distinction made here between servility and humility is especially curious, as they immediately precede the first scene between Mdlle. Henri and Crimsworth. As readers, we are prepared to note the differences between the two women, 102 Brontë, The Professor, 767-8. 103 Ibid., 782. 104 Ibid., 783. 210 which are not only a matter of Crimsworth’s taste, but also a matter of morality. While Menon feels that Brontë does not directly engage with reasons why Crimsworth rejects Mdlle. Reuter’s submission, an examination of the rhetoric makes it clear that two different forms of mastery are being presented, as well as two different forms of submission. After spending time with Henri’s devoir, and staging their first little school room scene, William describes Frances as a soul of “strength and rarity,” 105 in direct response to her clear pleasure at being treated with all the formality of a pupil, while Mdlle. Reuter is described as “a curious soul,” 106 whose moral principles are faulty. It is not that her desire for an erotic play of power is negative; but what drives her character to seek this play is viewed by Crimsworth as morally wrong. And it is the faulty basis of her servility that engenders the worst parts of Crimsworth’s personality. Brontë is clearly aligning this form of erotic power with the worst manifestations of imperialist power: slavery, despotism, tyranny. Crimsworth directly wrestles with these forms of power, engendered by Mdlle. Reuter’s obsequious attentions: [S]trange to say, though my amour-propre was excited not disagreeably by the conquest, my better feelings remained untouched. . . . I could not love, I could scarcely pity her. . . . [H]er presence and manner had then, and for some time previously and subsequently, a singular effect upon me; they sealed up all that was good, elicited all that was noxious in my nature; sometimes they enervated my senses, but they always hardened my heart. I was aware of the detriment done, and quarreled with myself for the change. I had ever hated a tyrant; and, behold, the possession of a slave, 105 Ibid., 790. 106 Ibid., 838. 211 self-given, went near to transform me into what I abhorred! There was at once a sort of low gratification in receiving this luscious incense from an attractive and still young worshipper; and an irritating sense of degradation in the very experience of the pleasure. When she stole about me with the soft step of a slave, I felt at once barbarous and sensual as a pasha. 107 The primary difference between the erotic testing and justification present in both Jane Eyre and The Professor is that the language in the latter novel is so clearly utilizing the rhetoric of imperialism. Unlike the readings offered by the majority of critics, Brontë is doing something a bit more complicated in deploying this rhetoric. In negotiating between erotic partners, Brontë presents an argument against the most violent forms of imperialism. The kind of eroticized power dynamic favored is based on mutuality and ethicality, very similar to Jane Eyre. When they are at play, at master and pupil, Frances is not servile in her manner, and William is not tyrannical in his. Frances Henri is Crimsworth’s ideal erotic partner precisely because their play with erotic power does not exist at the extremes of dominance and submission. It is not pure social power, but strategizing forms of social power in an erotic play that satisfies both members. But, unlike in Jane Eyre, in The Professor Brontë takes this form of sadomasochistic erotics to the next level. Very little is left to the reader’s imagination. We are given a clear picture of how this strategic erotics will continue in their married life. While the erotics in both novels form the courtship ritual between the primary couples, The Professor offers a culminating picture of this sadomasochistic relationality. Beginning the instant after William proposes, even before Frances gives him an answer in 107 Ibid., 838-9. 212 the affirmative, the two begin to delineate the characteristics of their uncommon relationship. Frances asks him, in French, if he won’t continue to be “a little obstinate, demanding, and willful.” 108 This is precisely the sort of master he has been to her, and the sort of master she wishes him to continue to be, despite their marriage. Their domestic life continues this fantasy: while during the day they both work hard, in the evenings, in their private sitting room, their chosen roles are resumed. Their domestic and erotic relationship is clearly depicted in the terms of role-playing. Crimsworth ruminates that “[s]o different was she under different circumstances, I seemed to possess two wives. . . . In the daytime my house and establishment were conducted by Madame the directress . . . At six o’clock p.m.[,] . . . as I entered our private sitting-room, the lady directress vanished from before my eyes, and Frances Henri, my own little lace-mender, was magically restored to my arms.” 109 And William is “as constant to the tryste as herself.” 110 In this private space, master and pupil play together again. Drawing up the terms of their erotic play also involves a continual negotiation of Frances’ financial independence. Again, immediately after agreeing to marry Crimsworth, Henri dares to request that she be allowed to continue working. She asks for this independence not only because her pride demands that she not be an “encumbrance,” but because she prefers to be active: “I like an active life better; I must act in some way, 108 “‘C’est-à-dire, monsieur sera toujours un peu entêté, exigeant, volontaire—?’ ” (879). 109 Ibid., 905-7. 110 Ibid., 907. 213 and act with you.” 111 She wishes to become partner to her husband, rather than simply being the fixture of wife, a simultaneous anxiety and desire that will be repeated in each of Brontë’s novels. In addition to elaborating on the erotics of education in their domestic life, Brontë continues to draw out Frances’ ambition. Two years later, she is yet again petitioning to William for his support in earning more money. She states, “I don’t work enough . . . You are now earning eight thousand francs a year . . . while I am still at my miserable twelve hundred francs. I can do better, and I will.” 112 And so she proposes to begin and run a school. Similar to the depiction of eroticized power dynamics in Jane Eyre, which are depicted through the search for female autonomy and purpose, The Professor depicts an eroticized power dynamic that is presented alongside Frances Henri’s search for purpose and financial success. Menon reads this thread of female “revolt,” across Jane Eyre and The Professor, as a (mostly unsuccessful) justification for pursing a relationship of erotic domination and submission. The Professor, in particular, is problematic in its presentation of female independence because, from Menon’s point of view, the play generated by Frances’ independence merely emphasizes “the pleasures inherent in Crimsworth’s reassertions of power.” 113 This pleasure is true, when we consider the power that is being played with, between William and Frances, in their domestic retreat. Frances stages little revolts in their private sitting room, teasing 111 Ibid., 882. 112 Ibid., 902. 113 Menon 96. 214 Crimsworth “with a wild and witty wickedness that made a perfect white demon of her.” 114 And, when Crimsworth is so plagued by this that he must “arrest bodily the sprite,” this exercise in power indeed induces his pleasure in suddenly finding not “a vexing fairy,” but “a submissive and supplicating little mortal woman in [his] arms.” 115 Menon is entirely correct in noting how both Brontë and Foucault represent a “variability” that maintains erotic intensity, 116 yet she overlooks the distinction Foucault draws between the strategized enactment of power in scenes of sadomasochism, and the pure social power that with immense silence dominates our daily lives. In other words, there is an importance difference between being worked upon by power, and working power for one’s own purpose and pleasure. The constant reassertions of female independence, presented alongside the deliberate choice to submit in play, signify that this novel – as well as most of the novels of Brontë – deals with multiple forms of power. Complicating our understanding of the erotics of sadomasochism assists us in clarifying the deployment of other forms of power. The erotics of sadomasochism teaches us that power is not a single, unified entity. Just as Brontë presents a nuanced understanding of the erotics of domination and submission, so she also distinguishes between other forms of power: the pure social power repressing women during the nineteenth century, and the mutually negotiated power dynamics played out in domestic 114 Brontë, The Professor, 908. 115 Ibid., 908. 116 Menon 96. 215 sitting rooms. Submission and mastery in these two situations are not the same. Frances Henri herself gives us the distinction, in answering William’s curious inquiries into what she would have done or been if “she had married a harsh, envious, careless man – a profligate, a prodigal, a drunkard, or a tyrant.” She maintains that she would abide by the law, but only so far: ‘Monsieur, if a wife’s nature loathes that of the man she is wedded to, marriage must be slavery. Against slavery all right thinkers revolt, and though torture be the price of resistance, torture must be dared: though the only road to freedom lie through the gates of death, those gates must be passed; for freedom is indispensable. Then, monsieur, I would resist as far as my strength permitted; when that strength failed I should be sure of a refuge. Death would certainly screen me both from bad laws and their consequences.’ 117 Once again, Brontë makes the distinction between the slavery of conventional institutions and the servitude offered in a mutual partnership. Crimsworth offers us two clear images of the distinction, in the figure of his own wife: Frances Henri, enslaved by the law of marriage to a tyrannical husband, disallowed the opportunity to continue working and moving up in the world; or, Frances Henri, submissive to a masterful but not domineering husband, one who supports her ambitions and helps her to resist the social structure that keeps women in a perpetually underpaid, disempowered state. After all, the erotic play of the Crimsworths’ was always a bounded scene, subjugated to their “real-life” duties: “[W]hether she read to me, or talked with me; whether she teased me in French, or entreated me in English; whether she jested with wit, or inquired with deference; narrated with interest, or listened with attention; whether she smiled at me or on me, always at 117 Brontë, The Professor, 910. 216 nine o’clock I was left – abandoned.” Frances will always assume her other fulfilling and empowering role as directress of her own school. In the novels of Brontë, the sadomasochistic erotics depend upon the individual growth of their female participants against the patriarchal logic of the nineteenth century, because this is an erotics of mutuality and partnership. Despite the fact that we are not in the viewpoint of Frances, the narratorial dominance of Crimsworth does not preclude Frances’ autonomy and power. In The Professor, especially, the independence of Frances is given through a clear refusal of the rhetoric of tyranny and slavery so central to British imperialism. What we are not given, however, in any of Brontë’s novels, is a refusal of English nationalism and the rhetoric of English superiority. In addition to the fantasy of eroticized educational roles, and the fantasy of successful, hard-working, even feminist, individualism, both William and Frances are driven by a nationalist fantasy. For Frances, this is a particular obsession. The superiority of the British is clearly maintained through the narration of William; more significantly, it bolsters the eroticized power dynamics of the novel. This nationalism can be found even in what seems to be the affective thread of anti-imperialism: as William negotiates his feelings for Mdlles. Reuter and Henri, his dislike for the former is entwined with his general disgust for the Flemish people as a whole, although this feeling is articulated through the anti-slavery rhetoric. Frances herself is saved from this disgust because, by birth, she is half English, and by her own desire, she is wholly Protestant and enthralled with the idea of England. Still, Henri’s non-English traits, particularly her continual, and even deliberate use of French (especially after she is secure in the love of her “Monsieur”), and her subsequent need for 217 correction for this “flaw,” mark not only the erotic scenes of instruction that form their courtship, but also, as we have seen, are central to the idealized domestic scene elaborated at the end of the novel. This un-English flaw within Frances is the first image given of their married erotic play: “Talk French to me she would, and many a punishment she has had for her wilfulness. I fear the choice of chastisement must have been injudicious, for instead of correcting the fault, it seemed to encourage its renewal.” 118 The tone of this comment mirrors one of their first discussions, where William chastises Frances for speaking French, when he knows she possesses an excellent command of English. The play derives from the paradox: we know that Frances longs for England, and yet she continues to deliberately play with an un-Englishness that provokes William. Beyond the dynamics of language, however, there is a larger and more serious – or, at the least, more earnest – nationalist fantasy in circulation. Because Frances is part English, and lost her English mother at an early age, she has a deep passion for all things English: “She said ‘England’ as you might suppose an Israelite of Moses’ days would have said Canaan.” 119 Frances’ dream is to create a life in England, a life sure to be better in a Protestant country, even if the difficulties she faces would be similar. William prepares Frances for the realization of this dream, rather as St. John prepared Jane for the role of missionary wife. He assigns extra lessons to Frances on English classics and contemporary literature, English history, and English composition. 120 118 Ibid., 907. 119 Ibid., 797. 120 Ibid., 801. 218 This curriculum evolves with the erotic relationship between the two. Their erotic roles deepen, in part, because William is able to fulfill Frances’ fantasy of immersing herself in her mother-country. Frances’ passion for all things English, and her passion for a master both stern and tender, feed one another. In The Professor, the sadomasochistic erotics of education, therefore, rely heavily on nationalist fantasies. William is able to be a better master to Frances not only because he understands the balance of tenderness and sternness (rather than the coldness and cruelty, the tyranny engendered in him by Mdlle. Reuter), the necessity of mutuality and interdependency (rather than the tyranny of misogynistic husbands and repressive social conventions), but also because he is English. In addition, Frances is able to be the best pupil for William not only because of her intellect and work ethic, but also because of the shadings of Protestant and British influence inherited from her mother. Still, as Anne Longmuir notes, although Brontë was intensely nationalist (Duke Wellington remained one of her heroes throughout her life), this is an ambivalent nationalism that is best understood by considering the Romantic influences on Brontë’s thinking and writing. 121 And this ambivalence textures The Professor. The intense national pride conveyed by Frances is counterbalanced by the figure of Yorke Hunsden, who reappears throughout the course of the narrative. Hunsden, from the first, is an odd character, in literal and structural terms. He is a perpetual bachelor who thrives on mocking the facts of his own life: an aristocrat who despises the aristocracy, an 121 Anne Longmuir, “‘Reader, perhaps you were never in Belgium?’: Negotiating British Identity in Charlotte Brontë’s The Professor and Villette,” Nineteenth-Century Literature, Vol. 64, No. 2, pp. 163– 188. 174. 219 Englishman who despises England, a shrewd businessman who critiques the culture of industry on which he thrives. Hunsden also, through repeated appearances and disappearances, is a sort of maker of story and men: he generates the rumor that demands Crimsworth stand up to his domineering brother; he makes the suggestion that Crimsworth try his luck on the Continent and writes him a letter of introduction. In all of these acts, Hunsden is a contrarian, even if he contradicts himself; therefore, when he meets Crimsworth’s fiancée, it is not surprising that he shifts his divisiveness to her idealized vision of England. Hunsden calls himself “a universal patriot,” whose “country is the world,” 122 and he expressed extreme cynicism of the social conditions in England. Longmuir analyzes the “opposition” between Hunsden and Henri in terms of both nationalism and politics, arguing that Brontë “blurs the line between ethnicity and culture . . . [so that] cultural values can produce ethnicity rather than vice versa.” 123 Despite her hybrid Anglo-Swiss heritage, Brontë depicts Frances as having more of a claim of Englishness because of her conservative cultural values, whereas Hunsden, with his evident Saxon features, is depicted as less English due to his radical political beliefs. For Longmuir, Brontë’s ambivalent feelings toward English nationalism are manifested most often within her depictions of romantic relationships, which she analyzes as also “representing national interactions.” 124 So, for example, she extrapolates 122 Brontë, The Professor, 896. 123 Longmuir 171-2. 124 Ibid., 182. 220 from the ménage between Crimsworth, Mdlle. Reuter, and M. Pelet, a larger narrative of the relations between England, France, and Belgium, where Crimsworth-England, in his wooing of Reuter-Belgium, mirrors the attempt of England to form relations with Belgium in order to undermine French influence (Pelet-France). 125 Therefore, when Crimsworth makes the turn to the Anglo-Swiss Henri, this represents England’s abandonment of its attempts to Anglicize Belgium, in favor of a more biological understanding of national identity, as Henri “seems to offer the possibility of recovering an ancestral Englishness.” 126 With this understanding of the romantic relations in The Professor, Longmuir interprets the courtship and marriage between Crimsworth and Henri in terms of representing a sort of pure colonization. While I firmly agree with her final assessment regarding the ambivalence of Brontë towards conservative nationalism and romanticized continentalism, I would argue that this ambivalence surfaces more when we complicate our understanding of Frances’ “colonization” (as I’ve done above) and when we consider the contrasts offered between the romantic partnership and external influences. In Longmuir’s analysis, there is no sense of play – Frances is simply colonized by William, there is no acknowledgment of the deliberate playfulness and strategizing of these scenes. We arrive, again, at forms of imperial power being lumped together, although Longmuir has clearly shown how Brontë is engaging in a much more complicated engagement with colonialism, imperialism, and nationalism. 125 Ibid., 183-4. 126 Ibid., 184. 221 In considering this erotic play with Victorian ideologies of nationalism and imperialism, we must also consider influences external to the central romantic couple. St. John, for example, in addition to providing a kind of foil for the erotics of domination and submission depicted in Jane Eyre, offers a different version of British nationalism, one based on the dubious trials of imperial missionary work. The Englishness that Jane chooses is based on a moral superiority to both the Creole Bertha and the trio of continental mistresses that Rochester narrates, as well as a differentiation from imperial missionary Englishness, characterized by hard-working individualism and spiritual romantic partnership. Similarly, in The Professor, Hunsden is a kind of foil to the cultural values idolized by Frances, albeit a more clear-cut and humorous one. But Hunsden is not alone in influencing and, indeed, consuming the end of this narrative: he is one of a pair formed by Victor Crimsworth, the first and only child of Frances and William. These two, similar to St. John, are the focus of the end of the narrative, becoming part of the scene of domestic bliss achieved once the Crimsworths, through wise investments, achieve enough capital to realize their dream of returning to England and establishing their own unique idyll. Interestingly, once the plot moves back to England, the explicit references to the eroticized scene of instruction disappear from the narrative, and are instead replaced by attention to Hunsden and Victor. While the former maintains his unique position as contrary bachelor (with an odd divergence into the mystery of his own failed Continental romance), it is Victor who assumes a position similar to St. John in Jane Eyre, as the sadomasochistic erotics of education and nationalist fantasies are shuttled onto him. 222 The novel concludes with William writing that Victor must soon go to Eton, and though he may find the first several years “utter wretchedness,” especially the “fagging” – the practice in British school systems of younger boys acting as servants to more senior students, often involving scenes of humiliation and flogging 127 – “The step must . . . be taken,” due to a something in Victor’s temper – a kind of electrical ardour and power – which emits, now and then, ominous sparks; Hunsden calls it his spirit, and says it should not be curbed. I call it the leaven of the offending Adam, and consider that it should be, if not whipped out of him, at least soundly disciplined. 128 In this depiction of the power dynamics of education, we have lost the sense of an educational erotics, because we have lost the sense of strategy and play that marked the depiction of the scenes between Frances and William. Instead of strategizing the institution of education, instead of playing with its forms and bureaucracies, instead of critiquing the unquestioned modes of social power – here, instead, William Crimsworth presents an institutionalized version of education that serves to clinch the image of productive British nationalism. As small a scene as this is, especially when compared with the elaborate scenes of educational erotics forming the body of the novel – it still serves as a reminder of the sorts of institutional tyranny and despotism that a strategic erotics can work against. 127 See Ian Gibson, The English Vice: Beating, Sex, and Shame in Victorian England and After (London: Duckworth Pub., 1978). 128 Brontë, The Professor, 920. 223 CONCLUSION: AFTERCARE An Afterword A surprising similarity exists between the critical and emotional engagements of feminism with both the author Charlotte Brontë and the contemporary cultural practices of BDSM. The criticisms leveled at this mid-Victorian novel and this late-twentieth / early-twenty-first century sexual subculture both circle a narrative ethics: how a novel offers a way of living that intersects with problematic, ambivalent ideologies; and how an erotic practice tells a story of a way of living that relies upon problematic, ambivalent ideologies. Most of the novels considered in “Useful Dangers” intersect with, however distantly, “the realist narrative of self-improvement,” and based on the strong emotions and identification engendered by these narratives, the question of narrative ethics follows close on its heels. Rather than approaching narrative ethics as imbuing novels with a “practical, problem-solving role” 1 that is typically deployed, Adam Zachary Newton redefines narrative ethics to mean “simply narrative as ethics: the ethical consequences of narrating story and fictionalizing person, and the reciprocal claims binding teller, listener, witness, and reader in that process.” 2 Interpreting narrative ethics in this way is an intersubjective and relational process, “the difference . . . between a reading which attempts to evaluate or even solve a text’s problems and one which engages them in their 1 Newton, 9. 2 Ibid., 11. 224 concrete, formal, narrative particularity.” 3 The “problem” of ethics in these narratives, or of the narrativization / eroticization of BDSM practice, therefore, is not something to be pointed out, or even solved; ethics stages problems as things to be experienced and engaged: “One faces a text as one might face a person, having to confront the claims raised by that very immediacy, an immediacy of contact, not of meaning.” 4 Our first contact with novels is with their forms. How stories are told determines the sort of pleasure we take, and the telling contains potential to render those pleasures as dangerous. This is not to say that content is unimportant, by any means, but content is not the only vehicle of textual erotics. And it cannot be the only way to understand a text sadomasochistically, that is: to understand how a text plays with forms of social power, how its pleasures depend upon closely tracking these forms of power. To queerly read the erotics of literature is also not to undermine the powerful queer figures that have populated texts, both recognized and unrecognized. What purpose, then, is a queer reading of literature that focuses on form rather than character? In many ways, reading for queer forms means to read a text non-normatively; to read for queer forms necessarily demands addressing what happens between readers and texts. Each of my chapters has dealt with reactions to sadomasochistic forms, whether in feminist and queer scholarship, in the nineteenth-century debates over the sensation genre, in contemporary debates among literary critics over the dubious power of first-person narration. These reactions 3 Ibid., 11 4 Ibid., 11 225 evidence how narrative can pose ethical questions not only within the texts, but through how people react to texts. In these chapters, the ethical questions have often been generated by the perceived erotics of the texts. A queer reading of sadomasochistic forms, then, means reading for the moments that resist being categorized as “good erotic drama,” reading for the mundane, the banal, the excessive, the awkward, the immature, the perverse – but most importantly, reading for how we react to these forms, how we take pleasure in the badness. For if the erotic is to maintain its creative enterprise, sadomasochistic or not, it should always resist the adjective of good. Sadomasochism as a queer erotics of form makes demands of me, as well, as a critic guiding you, sometimes blindly, down these twisted ways, as a writer spinning you, in a kind of lyrical groping, through the turns. You have been very good: participating in our negotiations, accepting the challenge and intensity of scene after scene, surrendering through moments of compliance and resistance (both sweet in their own ways). If these words could embrace you, whisper tender concerns against your ear, care for you: How do you feel? What was this experience like for you? What worked for you, what didn’t? Where did you need me to stop (but perhaps didn’t say so)? Where did you yearn for me to continue, following the visceral thread of ideas through theory and through novels, through you, my lashed and worn reader? Don’t be afraid to answer these questions. Don’t hesitate to talk out what we have shared. 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Creator Davis, Mary Ann (author)

Core Title Useful dangers: the erotics of form, sadomasochism, Victorian narrative

School College of Letters, Arts and Sciences

Degree Doctor of Philosophy

Degree Program English

Publication Date 08/06/2012

Defense Date 05/08/2012

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag erotic,form,narrative,OAI-PMH Harvest,queer theory,sadomasochism,victorian

Language English

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Advisor Tongson, Karen (committee chair), Keeling, Kara (committee member), Kincaid, James R. (committee member), McCabe, Susan (committee member)

Creator Email maryannd@usc.edu,profmadavis@gmail.com

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-c3-88778

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