The Shattering of the Self: Violence, Subjectivity, and Early Modern Texts (review)

Abstract

At the center of Cynthia Marshall’s The Shattering of the Self: Violence, Subjectivity, and Early Modern Texts lies the proposition that the pleasures of Renaissance literature are inextricably bound up with the pleasures of sadomasochism, a notion that specialists in this literature can hardly be expected to read with equanimity. In other hands, the idea that readers of early modern texts are hooked into a sadomasochistic dynamic might signal a moralistic tirade or, conversely, a celebration of erotic transgression, but thankfully, Marshall’s book is neither of these things. Her claim is instead part of a subtle, sophisticated, and wide-ranging meditation on the allure of violence in Renaissance texts and on the complexities of early modern subjectivity. In Marshall’s study, sadomasochism signifies neither the ritualized erotic practices of Leopold von Sacher-Masoch nor the more everyday pathologies of self-punishment. Rather, it concerns the new subjectivities possible in the early modern period and the proliferation of Renaissance texts registering an “impulse to undo or negate the emergent self ” (7). Taking issue with the model of autonomous subjectivity she perceives to be the legacy of Stephen Greenblatt, Marshall argues that early modern subjectivity was riven by contradiction and was constituted partly by “an undertow that pulls against the drive Greenblatt identified as . . . ‘self-fashioning’” (30). Rejecting a humanist paradigm that, in her view, dominates Renaissance literary scholarship, she describes early modern subjectivity as fragmented, volatile, and— above all—defined by masochism’s characteristic “movement of the self against the self ” (35–36). Drawing on a range of criticism—not least Greenblatt’s suggestion that the Renaissance experienced selfhood as onerous—Marshall argues that, in an era marked by a new emphasis on individuality, violent literature may have proffered an intensely desired emotional release. Having set out an intricate argument about the “fundamentally paradoxical notion of pleasure” (10), Marshall goes on to explicate how Renaissance texts offered opportunities for dispersing— rather than affirming or stabilizing—a sense of selfhood. With chapters devoted to the language of extremity in Elizabethan sonnet sequences, John Foxe’s Acts and Monuments (1570, 1576, and 1583), Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus (1592), and John Ford’s The Broken Heart (ca. 1629), she forcefully advances the claim that Renaissance texts were compelling to their first readers and audiences precisely because they enabled an experience of “psychic fracture or undoing” (1).