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

Cynthia Marshall's elegant book focuses on counter-individualistic forces in early modern England. For Marshall, the marked and repeated focus on "self-shattering," pain, and dismemberment in numerous texts of the period is an outcropping of this opposing movement to the emerging subject. Textual self-shattering offered "temporary respite from the accumulating pressures of individual selfhood," thus promoting such individuality in the long run (4). The grander picture of Renaissance selfhood that Marshall promotes is, accordingly, of a dual tradition: one was forming the modern autonomous self (according to the Buckhardtian grand-narrative of "the birth" of "the individual"), whilst another textual network paved an alternative route for thinking about subjectivity (5), a tradition involving a paradoxical affirmation of the self precisely at moments of self-negation (13), facilitating and structuring manners of pleasure that are predicated on an interplay between disowned and recuperated selfhood.

In addition to presenting a corrective to the pre-eighties tendency to project onto the history of the subject a linear picture of (Renaissance) creation followed by uninterrupted amplification, the more exciting move that the book stages is a deep reading of masochism that is then applied to early modern (and, by implication, our own) constructions of pleasure. Marshall convincingly traces the evolution of Freud's account of masochism, its transformation from a mere sexual perversion parasitic on primary sadism into a constitutive existential drive that shapes the death instinct: a fundamental desire for self-undoing precisely as the subject is being constituted. Freud's account of masochism bears significant ramifications for the self (delineated by Leo Bersani and Jean Laplanche, and endorsed by Marshall), which is conceptualized no longer as an essentially stable entity that is consistently upheld but as a tentative construct that is created so as to be dismantled (41). The book then projects such intra-psychic dynamics on early modern England: while the early modern subject is being historically formed, modalities of pleasure-seeking that involve self-dismantling are being created, sought, and commodified.

Self-shattering is exemplified by "an erotics of violence" that is tapped by different aesthetic productions (drama, poetry, and didactic literature). The move from the particularities of self-formation to literary and dramatic texts is accommodated by the book through a Lacanian conceptualization: literary and dramatic forms of pleasure are essentially masochistic because of an internal tension between language and subjectivity. Based on Lacan's account of the fraught relations between language and selfhood — language as enabling and forming subjectivity while at the same time transferring experience into a symbolic realm of loss in which words replace the reality of things — Marshall is able to pinpoint literary and dramatic exchanges as sites that are particularly given to offering pleasures of solidification and dissolution, and this even more so in a transition phase in the historical constitution of the self.

Marshall's first examples are English Petrarchan sonnet-sequences that solder masochistic self-humiliation and self-objectification of the lover, coupled with what strikes Marshall as sadistic images of rape and obliteration of the beloved. She then moves to Foxe's Acts and Monuments, a highly popular account of the torments of Protestant martyrs at the hand of Catholics. The detailed descriptions of the tortures produce modes of aesthetic consumption and fascination that weave together voyeurism, masochistic identification, and literal acts of somatic disappearance. A chapter is devoted to Titus Andronicus in which Marshall argues that the play anticipates (and is itself a form of) pornography, activating as it does visual pleasure which is itself occasioned by an implicit characterizing of violence and mutilated bodies in ways that disturbingly sexualize these bodies. The play resists familiar forms of identification, structuring a response that demands viewers to either avoid Lavinia's mutilated and violated body (through empathy, repulsion, and horror), or to momentarily allow themselves to masochistically identify with a shattered subject. The book's final chapter is a reading of Ford's The Broken...