Exquisite Masochism: Marriage, Sex, and the Novel Form by Claire Jarvis (review)

Exquisite Masochism "began with a simple question: How do respectable novelists describe sex and still maintain a decent distance from pornography?" (vii). So I expected to find descriptions of sexual intercourse, somewhere in between the figurative that would pass muster with Mudie's or Podsnap and graphic, explicit scenes of genital sexuality. I found instead a focus on "sensually frozen" (30) scenes of desire that characterize the sexual relationships in Wuthering Heights; on the control a woman in Trollope exercises over her fiancé in the "suspended" (44) state of their engagement; on the "masochistic suspension" (102) in which Sue Bridehead holds Jude; and on the way "nongenital sexual expressions" and "erotic connection[s]" "best inspired by rejection" come to "appear warped and psychologically damaging" (3) in D. H. Lawrence.

In attending to the masochism of that forestalled urge in Wuthering Heights—Heathcliff on his knees with his arms wrapped around Catherine, who has "seized his hair" and says "I wish I could hold you till we were both dead" (qtd. in Jarvis 44), for example—Jarvis focuses on the ways in which "Catherine controls Heathcliff" (45). Similarly, in directing our attention to moments in Can You Forgive Her and The Way We Live Now when Glencora M'Cluskie and Winifred Hurtle exploit the art of "masochistic waiting," Jarvis identifies scenes where Trollope "offer[s] some space for feminine agency" (89), which she links to Sue Bridehead's power to create borders and barriers, managing almost "always [to] hold off physical contact" (102) with Jude, even as "her quivering body evidences her desire to retrench" (109). "In Lawrence," however, she finds that "the masochistic pair has lost its sexual charge, and the dominant woman her narrative power and interest" (115). While Brontë, Trollope, and Hardy "used depictions of cruelty and pain to stand in for depictions of sexual life" (117) and demonstrate the power their heroines find in the erotics of postponement, in Lawrence the masochistic power play is presented in opposition to the "deep sexual compatibility" his novels "more broadly endorse" (118). "No longer is marriage a legitimating tool for sex as such," Jarvis argues, a phenomenon she links to "the rapidly changing social position of women," which Lawrence details in Ursula's and Gudrun's plots, "as they develop careers and political views as well as familiar and romantic ties" (115).

In focusing on depictions of the sex that Catherine and Heathcliff don't have and the "delayed gratification, delayed to the point that the delay itself produces sexual sensation" (94) that characterizes Jude's desire, Jarvis demonstrates that "withholding sex, in the Victorian novel, is a perverse way of having it" (viii). "Reading nongenital sex as central to Victorian erotic life" (viii) and to the gender politics of Victorian marriage, Jarvis promises "insight into Victorian debates around illicit sexuality, marriage, and feminism" (17). But she does not engage with those debates or with recent analyses of the Victorian novel concerned with the violence inherent in and allowed under the patriarchal construction of marriage. Matrimonial cruelty, bigamy, adultery—these are not a part of the exploration of "marriage, sex, and the novel form" promised by the subtitle—curious omissions given that one of the shaping arguments of this book is that "the domestic novel's materialism—by which I mean its emphasis on the financial and physical realities that most often motivate the romantic plot—is directly related to its form" (2). With a pronounced tendency to relegate the ways in which marriage was re-understood and the legislation that expanded the rights of married women in the Victorian period to the footnotes, Jarvis sets up an argument that, by her own admission, "takes historical shape without resting on a historical foundation" (2). "While what follows describes how the novel form develops in concert with these social and legal transitions," she explains, "my argument stresses the formally conspicuous scenes that, I argue, link these disparate texts...