Ordinary Masochisms: Agency and Desire in Victorian and Modernist Fiction by Jennifer Mitchell

Abstract

Reviewed by: Ordinary Masochisms: Agency and Desire in Victorian and Modernist Fiction by Jennifer Mitchell Robin Hackett Ordinary Masochisms: Agency and Desire in Victorian and Modernist Fiction. By Jennifer Mitchell. Gainesville: University Press of Florida. 2020. x +215 pp. ISBN 978-0-8130-6667-7. In this monograph, Jennifer Mitchell seeks to reclaim masochism for empowerment as writers and activists in the long civil rights era have worked to reclaim other minoritized sexual orientations. Mitchell distinguishes masochism from victimhood, separates it from gender, and describes a tie between masochism and social survival. She builds from feminist critiques of masochism as one among many concepts through which sexual violence is normalized, and also from queer theorists' insights about self-shattering ecstasies. As a bonus, because of its coincidence with the covid-19 pandemic, Ordinary Masochisms also suggests an explanation for the rage that has been part of the public response to mask mandates. [End Page 293] Mitchell is careful to note that her subject is books and narrative techniques rather than bodies—a distinction enabling her to discuss the relationship between agency, pain, and pleasure, without increasing the vulnerability of victims of sexual violence. She is clear, as well, that she is talking about ordinary and mundane examples of abjection and deference rather than spectacular masochisms. Her argument extends elegantly to whips and chains, and to the upsurge in popular uses of the language of masochism, such as in Fifty Shades of Grey. But Mitchell makes her point with evidence of unremarkable masochisms in novels commonly read for pleasure—including works by Charlotte Brontë, D. H. Lawrence, Jean Rhys, and George Moore—that are filled with characters who pleasurably submit and suffer, and that also subject readers to long, convoluted, narrative deferrals and self-shattering reading experiences. Foundational work by Victorian sexologists, Mitchell shows, describes masochism as an exaggeration of normal female sexuality (as it describes sadism as an exaggeration of normal male sexuality). The pathological theory of masochism that persists into the present turns on this gendered view: masochistic desires are especially pathological when they are expressed by men, and largely unremarked when expressed by women. Masochisms described by Mitchell, alternately, are enjoyed by characters across the gender spectrum. Moreover, lovers shift readily back and forth between submission and mastery. Mitchell also speaks against the common pairing of masochism and sadism. Masochism is a matter of agency, not victimhood. Masochists run the scene, define the terms of their pleasure, and seduce willing partners into performances. No true sadist, whose pleasure derives from torturing an unwilling victim, would find satisfaction from a masochistic partner. Rather, the partner to a masochist is better understood as another masochist, deferential and submissive to a lover's desire. Finally, masochism has narrative correspondences that make literary analysis a particularly suitable way to understand and recuperate masochism. The agential interaction between masochists depends on narrative set-ups. Masochists control by telling, by asking, by describing. Moreover, long, twisting, Victorian plots and frustrating modernist refusals of narrative coherence compare to deferral rather than to pleasure, which compares, instead, to punctuation. In arguing for a tie between masochism and social survival, Mitchell suggests that if pleasured orientation to self-shattering, to near-endless deferrals, to abjection as means of achieving ecstasy, is specifically masochistic, it is also a source of social survival. This is the most provocative and enticing of Mitchell's claims if also the least compellingly elaborated. Finally, Mitchell's work helps explain the rage with which some have responded to mask mandates during the covid-19 pandemic. A mask on a face exposes more than it hides: vulnerability and abjection, as well as deference to public health. Mitchell's book clarifies the ways in which mask mandates require the public embrace of a masochism that, to date, has been pathologized in gendered terms, wrongly understood as victimhood, and anathema to masculinity. A recuperated [End Page 294] masochism that separates mask mandates from victimhood, and gender conventions, is welcome indeed. Robin Hackett University of New Hampshire Copyright © 2022 Modern Humanities Research Association