Everyday masochisms: Charlotte Bronte, George Moore, D. H. Lawrence, and Jean Rhys
Item
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Title
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Everyday masochisms: Charlotte Bronte, George Moore, D. H. Lawrence, and Jean Rhys
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Identifier
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d_2009_2013:397755a9f232:11372
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identifier
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11751
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Creator
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Mitchell, Jennifer,
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Contributor
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Richard A. Kaye
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Date
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2012
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Language
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English
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Publisher
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City University of New York.
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Subject
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Modern literature | English literature | Gender studies | Caribbean literature | Masochism | Modernism | Sexology | Victorian literature
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Abstract
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This dissertation argues for the magnitude of a critical literary period in the development and exploration of theories about masochism. Beginning in the mid-nineteenth-century, discourses about sexuality become more publicly accessible. Circulating ideas by sexologists Richard von Krafft-Ebing and Havelock Ellis, and psychoanalysts like Sigmund Freud, encourage a public conversation about sex, desire, and identity. Both novelists and their readers find themselves in a groundbreaking space that fosters a rethinking of sexual selfhood. Instead of relegating masochism to institutions, brothels, and case studies, Charlotte Bronte, George Moore, D.H. Lawrence, and Jean Rhys provide representations of masochism that are far more ordinary, surfacing in various everyday experiences. I analyze the existence of different portrayals of masochistic relationships: courtships and partnerships in Villette (1860), unrequited lesbian desire and its reincarnation as religious zeal in A Drama in Muslin (1886), surprisingly dynamic marital partnerships in The Rainbow (1915), and an adulterous love triangle in Quartet (1928). I begin with a reading of the Biblical story of Samson and Delilah in conjunction with Leopold von Sacher-Masoch's foundational Venus in Furs in order to develop and contextualize a transhistorical masochistic lineage. Finally, this project looks ahead to Ian McEwan's The Comfort of Strangers (1981), which notably returns to the enactment of more literal sadistic and masochistic fantasies, furthering emphasizing the unique literary approaches to masochism covered by the four main authors in this project.
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Type
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dissertation
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Source
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2009_2013.csv
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degree
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Ph.D.
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Program
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English
