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For generations, critics have noticed in nineteenth-century American women's sentimentality a streak of masochism, but their discussions of it have over-simplified its complex relationship to women's power. Marianne Noble argues that tropes of eroticized domination in sentimental literature must be recognized for what they were: a double-edged sword of both oppression and empowerment. She begins by exploring the cultural forces that came together to create this ideology of desire, particularly Protestant discourses relating suffering to love and middle-class discourses of "true womanhood." She goes on to demonstrate how sentimental literature takes advantage of the expressive power in the convergence of these two discourses to imagine women's romantic desire. Therefore, in sentimental literature, images of eroticized domination are not antithetical to female pleasure but rather can be constitutive of it. The book, however, does not simply celebrate that fact. In readings of Warner's The Wide Wide World, Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin, and Dickinson's sentimental poetry, it addresses the complex benefits and costs of nineteenth-century women's literary masochism. Ultimately it shows how these authors both exploited and were shaped by this discursive practice.
The Masochistic Pleasures of Sentimental Literature exemplifies new trends in "Third Wave" feminist scholarship, presenting cultural and historical research informed by clear, lucid discussions of psychoanalytic and literary theory. It demonstrates that contemporary theories of masochism—including those of Deleuze, Bataille, Kristeva, Benjamin, Bersani, Noyes, Mansfield—are more relevant and comprehensible when considered in relation to sentimental literature.
Acknowledgments vii
Introduction "Weird Curves": Masochism and Feminism 3
One Masochistic Discourses of Womanhood 26
Two Sentimental Masochism 61
Tbe Parallel Structures of Sentimentalism and Masochism 62
"The Lineaments of the Divine Master" 85
Three "An Ecstasy of Apprehension": The Erotics, of Domination in The Wide, Wide World 94
The Making of a Masochist 96
Horsewhipping and the Exploration of Desire 113
Four The Ecstasies of Sentimental Wounding in Uncle Tom's Cabin 126
The Epistemology of Wounds 128
A Raging, Burning Storm of Feeling 136
Five The Revenge of Cato's Daughter: Emily Dickinson's Uses of Sentimental Masochism 147
The Power of Sentimental Masochism 157
The Erotics of Sentimental Masochism 164
The Presence of Sentimental Masochism 174
Conclusion The Possibility of Masochism 190
Notes 199
Works Cited 235
Index 251
Overview
For generations, critics have noticed in nineteenth-century American women's sentimentality a streak of masochism, but their discussions of it have over-simplified its complex relationship to women's power. Marianne Noble argues that tropes of eroticized domination in sentimental literature must be recognized for what they were: a double-edged sword of both oppression and empowerment. She begins by exploring the cultural forces that came together to create this ideology of desire, particularly Protestant ...