Imperial Masochism: British Fiction, Fantasy, and Social Class, by John Kucich

Abstract

Reviewed by: Imperial Masochism: British Fiction, Fantasy, and Social Class Regenia Gagnier (bio) Imperial Masochism: British Fiction, Fantasy, and Social Class, by John Kucich; pp. x + 258. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2007, $35.00, £22.95. John Kucich has written in the past of transgression, repression, excess, and restraint in Victorian literature. With Imperial Masochism he demonstrates his command of yet another psychosocial motive of the period by applying the insights of psychoanalysis beyond the individual to recover something like the group interiority or collective psychology that has all but disappeared in contemporary critique. As he states, then, his intentions are to demonstrate the continued relevance of psychoanalysis to historicism; to elucidate the role masochistic fantasy plays in identity formation beyond the field of sexuality; to illuminate the social function of such fantasy in British culture; and to recuperate for historicist studies both the category of social class and the domain of the psychological. Defining masochism as any pursuit of physical pain, suffering, or humiliation that generates phantasmic, omnipotent compensations for narcissistic trauma, Kucich identifies four types of masochistic fantasy: of total control over others, of the annihilation of others, of the omnipotence of others, and of solitary omnipotence. Chapters on Robert Louis Stevenson, Olive Schreiner, Rudyard Kipling, and Joseph Conrad then explore these fantasies in detail. Imperial Masochism contests current critical assumptions that masochism is always about sexuality; that it always organizes oedipal patterns of dominance and submission; and that, in colonial contexts, it is primarily about race, gender, or sexual orientation rather than class. To Kucich, masochism is a psychosocial language, not a fixed set of behaviors, and masochistic fantasy is an instrument for social action, not a specific act in itself. Class is a symbolic medium of conflict—rather than an economic or political category—in which conceptions of social identity are framed. Kucich successfully argues that willful self-martyrdom was central to the emergence of professional middle-class culture in the Empire at the end of the nineteenth century. [End Page 166] Against a psychoanalysis that views masochism as a sexual rebellion governed by oedipal thematics, Kucich proposes a relational psychology in which omnipotent fantasy is the compensation for narcissistic wounds. The interpretive cruxes he thereby clarifies are Conrad's stance on imperialism, Kipling's ambivalence toward social authority, the relationship between politics and decadence in Stevenson, and the relation of Schreiner's self-martyring politics to postmodern feminism. While I cannot say how professional psychoanalysts would judge it, to those of us interested in how and why the language of self-sacrifice, evangelism, and atonement functioned to secure empire, Kucich's analysis is persuasive and salutary. Each chapter in Imperial Masochism works through the relevant typology of masochistic fantasy and then turns to the emergent class dynamics. Stevenson is poignantly "perverse" (Kucich's term) in channelling evangelical authority into an anti-imperialist crusade, and Kucich links this with the author's decadent melancholy, defending the place of perversity in political radicalism. Beginning with the gang group fantasy of Stalky & Co. (1899), which Kucich calls magical, the chapter on Kipling shows how he fused a radical form of middle-class individualism with the intersubjective demands of the Tory public school in a professional code of conduct for imperial rule. Conrad, predictably the subtlest of imperialists, imported elements of masochistic self-consciousness that de-idealized the chivalric aims he hopelessly opposed to capitalism's creative destruction. Kucich argues on good grounds that Schreiner proposed a middle-class women's masochistic project to counter what she called their female parasitism. Yet his definition of masochism and discursive analysis of class do not seem adequate to the issues that Schreiner and her scholars have recognized: how much does extending freedom mean if it is merely procedural and not economic? Is altruism no more than masochism without compensatory fantasies of omnipotence? In using Matthew Arnold's categories of philistines, populace, and barbarians, Schreiner was referring to ideological machinery, labour, and manners or taste. What do these have to do with the economic stages of development, or relative distance from necessity, that distinguished the British, Boers, and Blacks? Were Boers—or for that matter, Blacks or white Europeans—in...