Useful dangers, peculiar pleasures

This is the tentative title of my dissertation project, and this is the 979-word version of the prospectus. Subtitle: “Theorizing Sadomasochism in Literary, Narrative, and Queer Studies.” I really would prefer doing without a colon, alas . . .

As always, any suggestions or critiques are appreciated.

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Sadomasochism is the propulsory term of my project, the primary purpose of which is to complicate the way sadomasochism, as theme and form, functions among and between the disciplines of literary, narrative, and queer studies. My project will trace, and sometimes invent, a genealogy between the sadomasochistic themes and practices burgeoning in nineteenth century British literature and culture, through to the sadomasochism practiced in subcultures in the contemporary United States. This project will grapple with three moments in particular: one, the emergence and importance of sadomasochism as both theme and form for nineteenth century British culture; two, the obsession with sadomasochism by contemporary queer theorists working in the nineteenth century; and three, the continual use of the themes and forms of sadomasochism, often indirectly, by narrative theory. Using nineteenth century British literature and culture as a place to begin, but not necessarily a place to remain, I envision this project as creating a queer narrative theory of the erotic from the forms and themes of sadomasochism.

This will not be a chronological project, but rather a movement between and among disciplines, histories, theories, and texts. Through these circumlocutions, cruisings, and general déjà-vu, I hope to build bridges between these epistemologies in order complicate our understanding of sadomasochism, while using this re-vision of sadomasochism to sustain the connections between the literary, the queer, the narrative. To put it simply, the peculiar archive of sadomasochism steals from each of these critical modes—literary, narrative, and queer—while simultaneously creating each of these critical modes. This archive of sadomasochism can help to shed light on shared values, which can in turn help to illuminate a number of texts not typically thought of as “queer.” In other words, critical and literary texts that rely on the themes and/or forms of sadomasochism are marked by queerness at both thematic and formal levels. Perhaps most important, to build an archive of sadomasochism will help to understand a different relationship to literary history, one that functions through affect, anachronism, and analogy.

The introduction to this project will survey and complicate the way that sadomasochism has been conceptualized, by reading theorists such as Michel Foucault, Linda Hart, Gilles Deleuze, Gayle Rubin, and Sigmund Freud. Out of all of the chapters, this is anticipated to be the most chronological, beginning with a consideration of how and under what terms sadomasochism entered the nineteenth century epistemological moment, spending the most time with Freud’s complicated and paradoxical history with the term. While, initially, in Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, Freud places sadism and masochism fully within the realm of the perversions, his inquiries into “the origins of the instincts” lead him “to assign,” in a footnote, “a peculiar position . . . to the pair of opposites constituted by sadism and masochism, and to place them outside of the class of the remaining ‘perversions’” (24 fn.3, emphases mine). Even early in the conceptual history of sadomasochism, its peculiar and dialectical position is drawn as a movement between the perverse and the normal; and for Freud, “the pair of opposites” comes to serve as the very structure of erotic relationships. While the other leading theorists of sadomasochism immediately complicate its psychoanalytic beginnings, the paradox identified by Freud remains one of the enduring formal characteristics of sadomasochism, as it emerges in literary and critical texts, and as it functions in cultural practices.

The fact that formal elements of sadomasochistic cultural practices can also be read in literary and critical texts leads to the focus of the second chapter of my project, which will begin to explore this relationship between text and practice by taking a close look at the nineteenth century relationship between Hannah Cullwick and Arthur Munby. Most critics tend to resist thinking of their clearly fetishistic, power-play relationship in terms of sadomasochism. Images and writings from their relationship will be analyzed alongside contemporary popular discourse on BDSM (bondage & discipline, dominance & submission, sadism & masochism) practice in order to begin to articulate the particular erotics of sadomasochism, beyond the simple definition of “pleasure from pain.” The formal elements of BDSM erotics include suspense, plotting, paradox, and self-referentiality. This chapter will also begin to gesture toward an understanding of the queerness of sadomasochistic erotics.

The next three chapters of my project will each combine literary, narrative, and queer epistemologies in a reading of one or two nineteenth century authors in light of sadomasochistic themes and forms. Narrative theories of plots and plotting—particularly in terms of suspense, delay, and prolongation—will be explored alongside Charles Dickens’ Bleak House and Algernon Charles Swinburne’s poems (particularly “Anactoria”), and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s infamous essay “A Poem is Being Written” and Peter Brooks’ Reading for the Plot. The themes and forms of paradox will be explored in relation to Oscar Wilde’s De Profundis and Swinburne’s use of Hellenic meter, with a return to Sedgwick’s “A Poem is Being Written” and an encounter with Barthes’ The Pleasure of the Text. Finally, first-person narration as an intensely self-referential sadomasochistic voice will be read through Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre and Villette, and D.A. Miller’s Bringing Out Barthes.

My project will conclude with an exploration of the type of subjectivity created through these formal elements, in order to begin to theorize the sadomasochistic subject in contemporary culture. Contemporary sadomasochistic practice has been critiqued for its elitism, for its dependence on fantasy and subsequent distance from real-world conditions, for its patriarchal reiterations, and for its overwhelming whiteness. A project that attempts to bring together formal and thematic elements of contemporary sadomasochistic practices into re-visions of canonical nineteenth century texts would not seem particularly immune to these criticisms. While dealing directly with these criticisms, I also wish to explore the potential of sadomasochistic erotics to help understand the relationship between the literary and cultural practice, between queer and narrative theory, and between the pains of writing and the pleasures of reading.