Imperial Masochism

Much has been said in recent years about British imperialism, especially its assumptions about race and gender. In Imperial Masochism, John Kucich takes up one of the less examined aspects of imperialism: how the concept of masochism, or suffering as a method of control, contributed to imperialism's assumptions about class. Kucich, who first published several of the chapters in this book as articles, examines the connections among masochism, imperialism, and class in the work of late-nineteenth-century writers such as Robert Louis Stevenson, Olive Schreiner, Rudyard Kipling, and Joseph Conrad. These connections in late-nineteenth-century writing were important, since this was the period in which building support for imperialist projects became particularly necessary. As Kucich indicates, writers such as Kipling and Stevenson "helped foster a fundamentally masochistic ethos of British masculinity, in which the ability to absorb pain stoically—or even ecstatically—was greatly prized." Still, anti-imperialist and anti-bourgeois writers, such as Stevenson (who became anti-imperialist as a result of his travel in the South Seas) and Schreiner, were able to use masochism to resist discourse that assumed capitalist self-interest.

In laying out his argument about these connections, Kucich critiques a purely sexualized definition of masochism, in which pain and suffering is attached to oedipal conflict; instead, he uses a relational psychology definition, where "any pursuit of physical pain, suffering, or humiliation that generates phantasmic, omnipotent compensation for narcissistic trauma" qualifies as masochism. This definition, Kucich explains, has its limits (for example, "deferred gratification that facilitates achievement" does not qualify under this definition), but it also allows for a wide range of human behavior, including "humble acts" as masochistic, such as "deferring to a spouse so as to redirect … annihilative rage." Further, Kucich lays out four categories of the "omnipotent fantasy" central to this definition of masochism ("fantasies of total control over others, fantasies about the annihilation of others, fantasies that maintain the omnipotence of others, and fantasies of solitary omnipotence") but is careful to point out that these four categories are not exclusive. By drawing on relational psychology, Kucich avoids reducing masochism to sexual acts, which is important, given the broader topic of imperialism and social class. Kucich is able to focus on the control issues so central to imperialism; early in the book, he states that what masochism and the discourses of imperialism and social class share is the "transformation of suffering into convictions of magical power."

With this framework in place, Kucich argues that all four writers in his study use masochism in order to rewrite middle-class ideology about imperialism. Stevenson's South Seas stories become the site for the author's critique of imperialism, something most critics would not expect from a writer who was mostly uninterested in politics for much of his career. Yet Stevenson's failure in these stories was fusing two types of masochism ("melancholic" and "magical"). While Stevenson does achieve a fusion of the two types in some of the European characters, he cannot achieve it in his Samoan characters. This, Kucich argues, exposes Stevenson's tendency to draw on racial stereotypes and shows the limit of his critique of imperialism. Still, Stevenson was able to rewrite middle-class ideology, partly through his use of evangelical discourse about suffering, to provide middle-class readers with an exposé of the corruption of middle-class values in the colonies.

The emphasis on rewriting social class via masochism and evangelical discourse continues in Kucich's chapter on Olive Schreiner, whom he believes was more successful in this endeavour when writing about women's rights than when writing about imperialism. In essays written in the years leading up to the Boer War, Schreiner's defense of the Boers as a viable middle class to link the British elite to native Africans could not appeal to an increasingly staunchly patriotic middle-class audience, and her imposition of evangelicalism onto the Boers, who were more Calvinist than evangelical, was problematic for this audience. Still, Kucich believes that looking at the masochistic elements in...