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Ordinary Masochisms - Agency and Desire in Victorian and Modernist Fiction (Hardcover)
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Ordinary Masochisms - Agency and Desire in Victorian and Modernist Fiction (Hardcover)
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Ordinary Masochisms reveals how literary works from the nineteenth
and twentieth centuries frequently challenged the prevailing view
of masochism as a deviant behavior, an opinion supported by many
sexologists and psychoanalysts in the 1800s. In these texts,
Jennifer Mitchell highlights everyday examples of characters
deriving pleasure from pain in encounters and emotions such as
flirtations, courtships, betrothals, lesbian desires, religious
zeal, marital relationships, and affairs.Mitchell begins by
examining the archetypal tale of Samson and Delilah together with
Leopold von Sacher-Masoch's Venus in Furs, from which masochism
gets its name. Through close readings, Mitchell then argues that
Charlotte Bronte's Villette, George Moore's A Drama in Muslin, D.
H. Lawrence's The Rainbow, and Jean Rhys's Quartet all experiment
with masochistic relationships that are more complex than they
seem. Mitchell shows that, far from being victimized, the
characters in these works achieve self-definition and empowerment
by pursuing and performing pain and that masochism is a generative
response rather than a destructive force beyond their control.
Including readings of Octave Mirbeau's The Torture Garden and Ian
McEwan's The Comfort of Strangers, Mitchell traces shifts in public
consciousness regarding sex and gender and discusses why masochism
continues to be categorized as a perversion today. The literary
world, she asserts, has repeatedly questioned this notion as well
as masochism's associations with passivity and femininity, using
the behavior to defy heteronormative and heteropatriarchal gender
dynamics.
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