Masochistic Pleasure Research Articles

The Aesthetics of Aging: Visual Strategies and Narrative Form in Tanizaki'sDiary of a Mad Old Man

AbstractThis essay reads Tanizaki Jun'ichirō’s controversial novel Diary of a Mad Old Man (1961) for its contribution to discourses about aging masculinity and male sexuality in later life. The Diary meditates on the mental and physical vicissitudes of aging masculinity, arousal, control, and impotence, focused through the fictional diarist Utsugi's physical ailments and expression of libidinal intensities. The article argues for Tanizaki's depiction of male aging as an exercise in both disenfranchisement and agentive potential. First, it reads the aging process through aesthetic and visual strategies, which magnify the protagonist's cultivation of masochistic pleasure as a specific correlative of aging. The article demonstrates that the narrative uses the rhetoric of cinema and photography—central terms of reference in Tanizaki's work—to frame Utsugi's experiences of old age, and inform his erotic fantasies as stylized, staged performances. In conjunction with these visual modes, the novel draws on traditional Japanese aesthetics to conceptualize the potential affect and perverse empowerment of the aging experience. Second, it addresses the implications of narrative form, as the self-reflexive, first-person diary prioritizes the subjectivity of Utsugi's male old age, while the novel's final pages interrupt and thus alter the diary's significance as a private account of self-expression.

Upheavals in Black Thought

Upheavals in Black Thought

‘Please abuse me’

In the light of Huizinga’s conceptualisation of play and Bakhtinian carnival theory, this article exemplifies the ludic-carnivalesque qualities of female masochism on China’s social media. Arguably, the joint venture of play and carnival frameworks allows a de-pathological account of female masochism under the male gaze and a reclaiming of the feminist agenda through the critical reading of abusive texts in the pan-entertaining digital era. Thus, the study fills a gap regarding non-sexual female masochistic pleasure in the literature of feminist studies. The article has found billingsgate language, or the language of marketplace, a fertile ground to investigate patriarchy and objectification. It contends that billingsgate language, which hails a ludic-carnivalesque exposure of present patriarchal biases against women and imbalanced gender power relations, is pregnant with a power of deconstruction that overturns present social orders in favour of gender equalities.

Compersion: An Alternative to Jealousy?

AbstractCompersion is an important concept for non-monogamous people. Often described as jealousy's opposite, compersion labels positive feelings toward the intimacy of a beloved with other people. Since many people think jealousy is ordinary, intransigent, and even appropriate, compersion can seem psychologically and ethically dubious. I make the case for compersion, arguing it focuses on the flourishing of others and is thus not akin to pride, vicarious enjoyment, or masochistic pleasure. People cultivate compersion by softening their propensity to be jealous and by attending to the flourishing of others, which requires them to tackle entitlement and temper vulnerability. I argue that jealousy is not a valuable emotional disposition; its instrumental benefits are minor, unstable, and have to be traded against the harms of aggression. Arguments that conclude that jealousy is a virtue rest on contentious premises and overlook the practical question as to whether jealousy and compersion could be cultivated together.

Marianne Noble, Rethinking Sympathy and Human Contact in Nineteenth-Century American Literature: Hawthorne, Douglass, Stowe, Dickinson

The title of Marianne Noble’s new book lays out unambiguously her bold ambition, which is no less than to “rethink sympathy and human contact.” After exploring The Masochistic Pleasures of Sentimental Literature in her first monograph (2000), she now offers to investigate the ways in which four writers from the 1850s and 1860s – Hawthorne, Douglass, Stowe, and Dickinson – revisited and revised their initial understanding of sympathy over the course of their careers. Her method consists in foc...

Patterns of Male/Erotic Fantasy in Coover’s “The Babysitter”

The paper aims at studying the patterns of the male fantasy in Robert Coover’s erotically charged short story, “The Babysitter”. The story centres on the image of a Babysitter stepping into a bathtub for having a shower while the phone in the living room rings, driving her out of the tub to answer it by the time the towel wrapping her pulls off giving a view of her naked body. In a rapid succession of one hundred and seven fragmented paragraphs, this image vividly recurs in and rolls up through the fantasies to fantasies of its male characters, blurring and overlapping these, creating fresh new versions of the story from the Babysitter being raped to the Babysitter saved from being raped. The study examines a clear line of development in the fantasies of each of these characters. Considering age, sexual orientation, experiments, adjustment and satisfaction, personality, and other socio-cultural variables, it (re)conceptualizes their fantasies as falling into certain patterns like obsessive, childlike, romantic, or deviant. And, finally and most importantly, it explores the binary power relation embedded in these fantasies wherein the Babysitter poses a fetish, an inanimate, sexualized object while the fantasies around her confirm to male/sexual power, violence, and masochistic pleasure. The research approaches the fantasies with psycho-feminist viewpoints.

Painfully Funny: Cringe Comedy, Benign Masochism, and Not-So-Benign Violations

Cringe comedies differ from traditional embarrassment humour by being explicitly aimed at evoking not just the positive emotion of amusement but also the decidedly negative emotion of vicarious embarrassment (i.e. ‘cringe’) in their audiences. Drawing on Warren and McGraw’s benign violation theory of humour and the concept of benign masochism, I offer a biocultural account of how they achieve this effect and why audiences counterintuitively seem to find it enjoyable. I argue that whereas a farce like Fawlty Towers (1975-1979) employs psychological distance in order to render its embarrassing violations thoroughly benign and thus singularly conducive to amusement, cringe comedies like The Office (2001-2003) and The Inbetweeners (2008-2010) comparatively decrease psychological distance in order also to evoke high levels of vicarious embarrassment. Finally, I argue that audiences find benignly masochistic pleasure in such cringe-inducing media because they offer vicarious experiences with social worst-case scenarios.

Finding the Good in Grief: What Augustine Knew that Meursault Could Not

ABSTRACT:Meursault, the protagonist of Camus's The Stranger, was unable to experience grief at his mother's death—and was in fact condemned for this inability. Should Meursault's inability to grieve be pitied, or should it be welcomed inasmuch as grief is a painful and highly distressing experience? With the assistance of Augustine's remarks on grief in his Confessions, I argue that Meursault's plight is to be pitied. The emotional pains of grief are genuine and cannot be recast either as masochistic pleasures or as instrumental costs to be borne in exchange for grief's benefits. These pains are instead experienced as good inasmuch as they are components of a complex valuable experience. More specifically, because we experience grief at the deaths of those with whom we stand in identity-constituting relationships, grief is both a powerful source of, and motivator for, substantial self-knowledge.

The Penumbral Theory of Masochistic Pleasure

Being whipped, getting a deep-tissue massage, eating hot chili peppers, running marathons, and getting tattooed are all painful. Sometimes they are also pleasant—or so many people claim. Masochistic pleasure consists in finding such experiences pleasant in addition to, and because of, the pain. Masochistic pleasure presents a philosophical puzzle. Pains hurt, they feel bad, and are aversive. Pleasures do the opposite. Thus many assume that the idea of a pleasant pain is downright unintelligible. I disagree. I claim that cases of pleasant pains are more common than many philosophers suppose, and that they have no essential connection to either sex or psychopathology. I review several attempts to account for masochism that preserve the intuition that nothing can be both pleasant and painful at once. These account for some, but not all, cases of masochism. The stubborn remainder, I argue, are sensations that are genuinely pleasant and painful at once. I give an account of how that might be, focusing on boundary-pushing aspects of masochistic pleasure that have been largely overlooked in the literature. I show how, properly understood, pain and pleasure can coexist—and also why it is very rare for them to actually do so.

A Question of Values: Narrative Consciousness in El mismo mar de todos los veranos

Esther Tusquets has been accused of promoting conformist and masculinist values in her writing by some feminist critics. The first two novels of her trilogy conclude with troubling rape scenes in which the protagonist and victim is partly complicit, and in which she takes masochistic pleasure. It has been said, with respect to her first novel, El mismo mar de todos los veranos, that this amounts to a betrayal by the author of both her character and her reader. Feminist texts are meant to be subversive; Tusquets' novels are anything but subversive when they allow for such a violent reimposition of the status quo. The values they subscribe to are therefore highly dubious. But is this a fair judgement? How does the reader determine the values of a text? Using narrative theory, I will argue that through a closer exploration of narrative consciousness in this novel we can make a more nuanced assessment of the text's 'value structure' (Chatman 1990). I will further argue that an analysis of narrative consciousn...

Marketing the Avant-garde: Co-opted Scholarship?

The first Russian avant-garde maintains a prominent position within intellectual and critical discourse. The present paper offers an unorthodox explanation for this by identifying the avant-garde's contract with the reader, which promotes the writer as a prophetic genius, while demanding abeyance and worship from the reader, offering him/her masochistic pleasure. Mainstream avant-garde scholarship, in its turn, certifies the avant-garde's claims as its true essence and markets its product as exceptional. These pressures create a dilemma for contemporary scholars. Choosing the co-opted approach elevates further the rating of the avant-garde, avant-garde studies and the scholar's own work, but means engaging in mythmaking, whereas choosing a nonco-opted reading reduces the value of the avant-garde and the scholar, generating accusations by mainstream critics of a non-scholarly attitude toward the subject.

Rethinking Gendered Perversion and Degeneration in Visions of Sadism and Masochism, 1886–1930

Rethinking Gendered Perversion and Degeneration in Visions of Sadism and Masochism, 1886–1930 Alison Moore (bio) A large range of texts from the late nineteenth century through the early twentieth century from authoritative medical and psychiatric writings to popular novels and erotica viewed latent masochism as the natural sexuality of women, regarding its manifestation in men’s fantasies as aberrant, effeminate, and degenerate. Another ongoing discussion also elaborated a kind of sadistic or masochistic perversion that followed apparently normative gender roles and yet developed them to a hypernormative extent. This article considers how we might account for this apparent contradiction in late-nineteenth-century texts, looking at how the various images of such desires were related to atavistic explanations of perversion. It then tracks the movement of discourses about sadism, masochism, and gender roles into texts produced in the interwar period, noting how degenerationist motifs were perpetuated in new anxieties about the hypernormative perversions of female masochism and frigidity. Recent scholarship on psychiatric visions of masochism at the fin de siècle has tended to emphasize the alignment of this new pathology with anxieties about gender differentiation. The masochistically passive man and the sadistically predatory woman were commonly pathologized figures in late-nineteenth-century French, German, Italian, and British visions of sexuality, crime, and monsters. As a number of scholars such as John K. Noyes, Suzanne Stewart, and Carol Siegel have shown, the male masochist at the fin de siècle was imagined as perverting normative masculinity by abdicating his penetrative agency and relocating his pleasure in bodily zones other than the penis, which was considered the only legitimate organ of male pleasure.1 Moreover, in flagellation (the most commonly discussed [End Page 138] masochistic pleasure) it is frequently the buttocks that take the role of the primary erotic zone—one associated with humiliation, shame, infantilism, and femininity. Less commonly observed by scholars is the fact that the female sadist implied by the masochistic scenario was also the object of a pathologizing gaze. Depictions of such women appeared less frequently and more ambiguously than depictions of male masochists in fin-de-siècle texts by virtue of prevailing assumptions about women’s weaker sexual drive, making deeply aberrant perversions unlikely to occur in females. So alien was dominance to late-nineteenth-century visions of woman’s nature that a female sadistic agency was only conceivable as a kind of monstrosity. Male masochists, on the other hand, were all too imaginable, reflecting widespread social anxieties about masculinity in middle-class life and confirming visions of national threat and racial degeneration.2 The sexual scenario in which a sadistic female subjected a masochistic male to her will was discussed as perverse in a range of late-nineteenth-century texts because it reversed what was deemed to be a natural gender order in which men dominated women. A number of feminist scholars have argued that visions of heteronormativity as male sadism/female masochism have infiltrated modern cultures through the influence of a generalized cultural misogyny.3 In many such readings the notions of “masochism” and “sadism” are imputed to texts that do not themselves employ such terms, implying that these are real categories of desire with clear and accepted meanings. In this article I consider how gender norms intersected with constructions of sadism and masochism where these terms were specifically invoked in the work of psychiatrists, psychoanalysts, and writers on sexuality across a period when sexual perversion as degeneration was being rethought. From the late nineteenth century on these terms came into use to describe sexual desires for domination and submission in a range of French, German, and British psychiatric and pseudomedical texts. Their elaboration was closely bound to degenerationist visions, and they were frequently discussed in relation to appropriately normative gender roles. Gender-role reversal was not the only criterion used to define sadism and masochism as deviations from an imagined gender-appropriate axis. Just as the frigid woman of late-nineteenth-century sex talk was somehow [End Page 139] perversely that which all women were normatively assumed to be (cool, passive, and less sexual than men), so too the sadistic male and the masochistic female represented aberrations of excess, a kind...

The Literature of Pain

In light of the recent Abu Ghraib prison scandal, this paper examines various works of literature to reveal that people who have prisoners in their power tend to torment their victims. Richard Henry Dana and Herman Melville’s seafaring novels reveal how the captain and his mates assume brutal, godlike powers over the common sailors; T. E. Lawrence describes how the victim’s pain can become a masochistic pleasure; Franz Kafka imagines a state of universal guilt, where the victim, an average man, suffers in the grip of an elaborate torture machine; Fyodor Dostoyevsky and Jacobo Timerman, both political prisoners who survived to describe their terror, and George Orwell, meditating on contemporary totalitarian regimes as he suffered the agonies of medical treatment, transform their pain into art. Such literary works provide insights into the morally ambiguous depths of punishment. Every scene of torture, based on the authors’ experience, observation and imagination, has the same context as those vividly captured in the Abu Ghraib snapshots.

Dick Young: Not So "Young Ideas" on the Barricades in 1968

Some scholars termed 1968 as the year of the barricades, for the world seemingly teetered on the brink of revolutionary change in Algeria, France, Germany, Czechoslovakia, Vietnam, and even the United States. Americans in 1968 lurched from one crisis to the next: the Tet Offensive in Vietnam, the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. and racial unrest in the nation's cities, campus insurrections at such influential institutions of higher learning as Columbia University, the murder of Robert F. Kennedy, the police riot at the Democratic National Convention, and the election of Richard Nixon as President. During this turbulent period, I was making the difficult transition from high school to being the first in my family to attend college. I identified with the youthful activists who were questioning American military and social policies. After all, I had only decided to try my hand at college after learning about the possibility of a college deferment from the draft. I let my hair grow and joined Students for a Democratic Society (SDS). However, at West Texas State University in Canyon, Texas, not exactly a hotbed of radicalism, the three or four students who attended SDS meetings were not about to foster a revolution. But my long hair and revolutionary rhetoric, as opposed to action, were enough to drive a wedge between myself and my father--a hard working man who dropped out of elementary school to pick cotton with his family during the depression era. With the exception of baseball, we seemed to have little in common during the generational conflict of the 1960s. Baseball was the one safe topic. When discussions of politics, religion, and music veered into dangerous terrain, I could always get us back to safety by commenting, How about those Yankees. It appears that baseball was the remaining link with mainstream America for many young men (as well as women) in the 1960s who were questioning the establishment. Thus, after reading such literature as the Berkeley Barb, Black Panther, and Ramparts, I would seek to reconnect with my roots by perusing The Sporting News. It was comforting and therapeutic to lose oneself in the box scores and rekindle the youthful romance with America's pastime. It was reassuring to know that I really was an American and not a freak as some called me. All was again right in the universe, until I encountered the biweekly column by Dick of the New York Daily News. Inappropriately entitled Young Ideas, the column was often vitriolic and suggested that young people who shared my values had no place in Dick Young's real America. Of course, it would have been possible to simply ignore the column, but I took some type of perverse masochistic pleasure in reading Young's prose. The result on my part was often an increase in blood pressure as I angrily tossed my copy of The Sporting News across the room. It was as if by reading I wanted to remind myself that I had crossed a personal Rubicon and could not return to the idyllic pursuits of my youth. For a period in my life, helped convince me to abandon baseball. In the late 1970s, I and many others of my generation, made my peace with my father and the country, returning somewhat into the fold but never totally abandoning my leftist politics of the 1960s. I rediscovered baseball as I began to form a family of my own. It seems that baseball was more forgiving and all encompassing than the ranting of Dick might have one believe. As I move into my late fifties, life is more focused on family and career, with baseball providing considerable comfort and joy as the sport is passed along to another generation. I'm no longer the angry young man, and perhaps now I'm a little more capable of coming to grips with Young. It may now be possible to take a second look at those Young Ideas pieces from 1968 and try to reach some understanding of and why he was so threatened by the youth rebellion of the 1960s. …

BOOK REVIEW: C. C. Barfoot.VICTORIAN KEATS AND ROMANTIC CARLYLE: THE FUSIONS AND CONFUSIONS OF LITERARY PERIODS, Atlanta: Riopi, 1999.

Reading Victorian Keats and Romantic Carlyle is like attending a conference. You hear a number of mediocre papers, many hurriedly written, most only tangentially connected to the usually vague conference theme, but you persist nevertheless, hoping that in the next paper you will catch a glimpse of greatness before it hits the printed page. The thrill is like gambling and, as in any game of chance, you assume that your losses will outweigh your winnings. The fun of it, of course, is in the travel to different climes, the thrill of a talk winning an appreciative hand before a full house, and the added bonus that for twenty minutes you get to deal the cards yourself. Once the conference gets translated into a collection, these latter three no longer apply, but you figure that your search for greatness must at least assume better odds. Not so in this collection of essays edited by C. C. Barfoot and originally delivered at the Ninth Leiden Conference, although even here the gamble eventually does pay off now and again. If anything, the collection makes you long for the masochistic pleasures of the conference round: stale coffee and over-sugared donuts; the furtive glimpse at a stranger's nametag; the guilty thrill of leaving a panel before its close.

Comment on Jill Scharff's Clinical Case

The discussant begins by describing her British Object-Relations perspective. She emphasizes the difference between obstructive or critical forces within the personality which are best described as a part of the self and those which are felt by the patient to have a quality of otherness about them: the latter are better conceptualized as internal objects since this is closer to the patient's subjective experience. The author stresses the importance—in Scharff's patient's inner world—of the useless maternal—and impotent paternal—object. ‘Stupid’ rather than ‘bad’ objects can affect introjective processes and limit the patient's intellectual functioning because, where the world is seen as uninteresting and unstimulating, it is therefore not worth attending to nor learning from. The author also made a further point. She saw the patient's repetitive bitter self-criticisms, although partly arising out of deprivation, depression, and abuse, as also possibly containing an element of masochistic pleasure in suffering and failure. This would raise delicate technical issues in balancing a sensitive approach to the real suffering with a clearly stated recognition of the addictive repetitive masochistic quality which accompanies it and which may be blocking recovery.

The masochistic pleasures of sentimental literature

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.

Machinic Musings with Mumford

Machinic Musings with Mumford

When the Personal Doesn't Become the Political

When the Personal Doesn’t Become the Political Michelle Massé (bio) Further Responses to Marianne Noble on Stowe, Sentiment, and Masochism In “The Ecstasies of Sentimental Wounding in Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” Marianne Noble examines the “sentimental wound,” “a bodily experience of anguish caused by identification with the pain of another.” The wound ostensibly serves as the occasion to heal the breach between people, but can instead become a suppurating injury we take pleasure in probing. In Part I of her essay, Noble argues that the wound “represents a critique of abstract, disembodied notions of personhood” (296), a critique implicitly associated not only with nineteenth-century abolitionism, but with feminism, which also seeks “political transformation through feelings” (295). In Part II, she emphasizes how the wound also can “function as a mechanism for transforming raw violence into ecstatic stimulation” (297), a stimulation, Noble asserts, that is self-gratifying to white women, but which has very little to do with the actual tortured bodies of black people. The vicissitudes of sympathy bring her to conclude that sympathy is “a dangerous form of political thought; but . . . a lack of sympathy is more dangerous” (314). Like Elizabeth Barnes, I appreciate Noble’s analysis of Stowe’s “real presence,” which lets us know the “embodied, affective personhood” of others through “intuition, imagination, and sympathetic responses” (302, 295), her emphasis upon the importance of “real bodies,” and her scepticism about what we might call sentimental feminism, whether in the nineteenth century or today, a sentimentalism that assumes women are “naturally” moral and caring. 1 In reading and re-reading the essay, I find myself engaged by Noble’s general topics: the importance of the “presymbolic voice” (302) in sentimental fiction and the ways in which an appeal based on empathy with pain can become yoked to a masochistic pleasure in pain. I also find myself confused, however, by the larger implications of Noble’s line of reasoning. In thinking through the differences between my own and Noble’s readings of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, specifically, and of masochism, more generally, it seems to me that there is a dissolution of interpretive boundaries and frames within the essay itself that uncannily mirrors the shifting self/other borders she sets out to examine in interpersonal relations. Early and later psychological developmental stages become conflated as Noble traces the paths of masochistic desire that lead to white identification with black suffering in Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Gradations in identification blur into a non-specific “intertwining with the other” (313): neither the eighteenth century’s careful calibration of empathy, sympathy, and compassion, nor modern psychoanalysis’s equally fine distinctions among incorporation and identification, mirroring and merging, are used to suggest degrees of rapport. Levels of representation conflate: there seems to be little difference between someone being whipped—or watching someone being whipped—in a novel and “real” life, or between the “gut feeling” (302) of a reader, the represented agony of a character being beaten, and actual pain. Finally, then, what Noble calls the “anti-individualistic” epistemology of sympathy begins to seem anti-individual in discussion, as characters and readers become aggregate creatures generating predictable responses according to sex, race, and kind of “wound.” And much of this seems at odds with Uncle Tom’s Cabin itself, which questions the adequacy of “right feeling” and represents [End Page 154] the subordinate, whether black or female, as no less capable of sadism than the dominant. The essay’s insistence upon pre-Oedipal or pre-Symbolic merger as the guarantor for what psychoanalyst Jessica Benjamin calls “intersubjectivity” is troubling (e.g., 301, 302, 303, 306). Noble draws extensively upon Benjamin’s key concept, which designates the reciprocal ability “to recognize that other subject as different and yet alike.” 2 Noble’s linking of “intersubjective, non-individuated identities” (295) thus strikes me as a contradiction in terms, and at odds with my own understanding of Benjamin: we can only recognize the other as a subject or self because we are individuated. As Noble herself points out, reunion with “a mother who represents pure plenitude . . . necessarily entails the destruction of individual life, since it eradicates the boundaries of individuality” (307). How, then, does...

Dickinson and the Masochistic Aesthetic

Dickinson and the Masochistic Aesthetic Robert McClure Smith (bio) Dickinson scholars have often been intrigued by the poet’s acute sensitivity to relations of domination and submission. 1 But while Gary Lee Stonum has rightly observed that the poet “tends to measure all conceivably bipolar phenomena for their resemblance to the structure of mastery” (18), Camille Paglia’s provocative thesis that Dickinson was a “sadomasochistic imaginist” (629) and even a “female Sade” (624) has — although perhaps not surprisingly, given Paglia’s tendency to excess and prediliction for sentialism — found few critical supporters. Dare one ask then, contrarily, if Dickinson’s poetic explorations of the structure of mastery align her, in any way, with masochism? Or is the very positing of the question in a scholarly context itself a curious masochistic gesture of sorts? Perhaps not, when we consider that in recent years the rethinking of masochistic subjectivity through the psychoanalytic model of fantasy has become an important project for contemporary literary criticism precisely because this model demonstrates how the perversion may assume an oppositional relation to an experience of oppression. 2 Laplanche and Pontalis argue that fantasy is a space or setting in which gendered identity breaks down, in which the subject is elided into the syntax of the scenario, in which no subject position is ever stable or essential. They define the fantasmic as a “mise-en-scène of desire” and “a script . . . capable of dramatization” (318). Fantasy scenarios are specifically constructed in order to permit multiple and shifting identifications. 3 One may extrapolate from this that the fantasy scenario that is the literary text offers a convenient setting from within which gendered identity might be restructured. Thus, a literary text apparently invested in masochism may conceivably subvert the masochistic positioning of the female subject by refusing hermeneutic possession and exploiting masochistic pleasure; that is, pleasure in the loss of a stable identity. Further, by employing techniques of reversal to expose and dramatize power relations, and by enacting those reversals within particular locations, at [End Page 1] textual sites where domination and submission are produced and inscribed, a writer may effectively manipulate and subvert a conventional power paradigm. Moreover, by appealing to masochism, to pleasure in loss, such a writer would not only problematize the strict gendering of the sadomasochistic dynamic but also reveal the subversive potential within masochism itself. With the emphasis shifted from sadistic possession to masochistic loss, the reading process itself would become a means of decentering rather than of stabilizing identity. In short, re-presenting female masochism potentially disturbs the gendered polarities of dominance and submission on a number of different levels of textual representation. It is my contention that Dickinson, who viewed masochistic fantasy’s identification of the role of power in pleasure as not so much the manifestation of female “false consciousness” but as a stark realism, and who was, as a writer, intensely aware of the crucial role of power in sex, gender, and sexual representations, does just that: she develops a subversive masochistic aesthetic that, by staging the thematics of domination and submission within a text, works against and undoes power hierarchies, showing how they, like sexual identity itself, are fragile and fluid entities. In creating these tableaux vivants, Dickinson succinctly demonstrates how masochistic fantasy, by eluding the usual constraints on power and pleasure, can create a representative space, a mise-en-scène of desire, from within which poet and readers alike are able to explore and demystify the brutal conjunction of power and pleasure in intersubjective relations. Indisputably, Dickinson’s readers frequently confront a female speaker whose narrative emphasizes her own passivity, weakness and insignificance. That speaker is locationally dwarfed by her proximity to the powerful presence of a superior masculine force. When that force is personified and addressed as God, Lover, Father, King, Emperor, Lord or Master, the speaker’s relative powerlessness defines the relationship. Within such a system of established hierarchy, the speaker often characterizes herself as the tiny Daisy juxtaposed to the “Immortal Alps” (#124) and the “Himmaleh” (#481) or unflatteringly paired with the “Great Caesar!” (#102) who is “Her Lord” (#339). 4 Clark Griffith observes that the lover-figure of the poems frequently “arrives...