One Hundred Years of Masochism: Literary Texts, Social and Cultural Contexts (review)

Michael C. Finke and Carl Niekerk, eds. One Hundred Years of Masochism: Literary Texts, Social and Cultural Contexts. Psychoanalysis and Culture, no. 10. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2000. viii + 215 pp. $30.00; Hfl. 70.00 (paperbound, 90-420-0657-9).

During the initial boom years of the history of sexuality, so much scholarly energy was devoted to the history of homosexuality that it often seemed that nineteenth-century sexology had constructed no other perversion. At long last, these other Others are beginning to emerge in the annals of scholarship. Masochism has had a good run recently, and the present volume of essays should raise its profile further.

Like most collections, this is a volume of uneven quality. Most of the contributors are literary critics and their essays are devoted to analyzing literary works from a broadly psychoanalytic perspective, inflected as usual by concepts derived from queer theory and feminist and postcolonial studies. This blend, of course, is characteristic of much recent American work in the humanities, as is the urge to dismantle the traditional literary canon. In Victor Taylor's essay in this collection, which deals with the bondage novels of Elissa Ward, he is even forced to admit that one pertinent image "is too explicit to reproduce here" (p. 60 n. 3) and he directs readers to a Web site called hardkink.hotsex.com! It's not the Web site that shocks the jaded academic reader, but the thought that we still have any taboos left. Taylor's essay is actually one of the best pieces in the volume, showing clearly how, for the masochist, "pleasure does not come entirely from the whip, but from the masochist's manipulation of the hand holding the whip" (p. 65).

Another excellent piece is Robert Tobin's "Masochism and Identity." By examining the few case histories of female masochists in Richard von Krafft-Ebing's monumental Psychopathia sexualis, Tobin establishes that the creation of the masochistic identity was not simply a case of a medical label's being stuck forcibly on an unwilling group. Rather, it was a case of the "perverts" and the medical profession collaborating secretly (and perhaps unsuspectingly) with one another to create new forms of pleasure. Similar arguments, of course, have been applied to the construction of the homosexual identity. Tobin now stands them on their head, claiming that it was homosexual identity formation that was a masochistic process. The problem with the essay is that it bases its sweeping claims simply on three or four cases reported by Krafft-Ebing: this may suffice in the hermetic world of lit crit, but probably not elsewhere.

The canons of German and Russian literature provide much grist to our authors' mills. Goethe's young Werther, of course, is presented as the "typical masochist, willing to suffer emotional and physical pain to secure the gratification of his/her desires" (p. 106). Somewhat more adventurous is Joachim Pfeiffer's contention that Goethe's celebration of Prometheus, while challenging masochistic Christian asceticism, betrayed the poet's attachment to "a punishment fantasy that clearly demonstrates affinities with the Christian theology of retribution" (p. 111). Russian literature is represented by Turgenev, who is shown by Michael Finke to have been a model for Sacher-Masoch himself, and by Tolstoy, who, we are informed by Daniel Rancour-Laferriere, implied through his self-abnegation that "one needs to sin in order to live" because only the consciousness of our total worthlessness can drive us toward God (p. 168). A similar argument is proffered by Carl Niekerk with regard to the Dutch author Multatuli and his quasi-autobiographical colonialist hero, Max Havelaar.

Except for Barbara Hyams's admirable biographical analysis of Sacher-Masoch's cultural politics, there is little in this volume of immediate relevance to historians. Nevertheless, those who have not yet abandoned psychoanalysis as a historical tool might find some of the essays worthy...