Ordinary Masochisms: Agency and Desire in Victorian and Modernist Fiction by Jennifer Mitchell (review)

Reviewed by: Ordinary Masochisms: Agency and Desire in Victorian and Modernist Fiction by Jennifer Mitchell Alison M. Downham Moore (bio) Ordinary Masochisms: Agency and Desire in Victorian and Modernist Fiction, by Jennifer Mitchell; pp. x + 216. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2020, $85.00. Jennifer Mitchell's Ordinary Masochisms: Agency and Desire in Victorian and Modernist Fiction systematically applies the sexological category of masochism to eight nineteenth- and twentieth-century literary works, following the recent trend in literary studies of using such terms to parse fiction referring to the torturous aspects of love and attraction. Doing so, though, risks reducing the intricacies, subtleties, and plenitude of Victorian portraits of paradoxical motive, internal conflict, and sensory tension. While masochism and sadomasochism were downgraded in the Diagnostic Statistical Manual of the American Psychiatric Association in 2013 in the view that such things were no longer to be considered necessarily pathological, masochism is still held to have exquisite heuristic value among literary scholars influenced by Gilles Deleuze's ahistorical reading of the historian and novelist Leopold von Sacher-Masoch in the 1967 essay Coldness and Cruelty. From the 1940s to the 1970s, masochism became an important concept for Austrian and German psychoanalysts migrating to the United States, and in the 1980s and 1990s it re-emerged as an object of American feminist critique before blossoming as a symbol of postmodern sexuality in Anglophone critical theory. Mitchell leans on all these [End Page 335] twentieth-century iterations of the concept of masochism, "ahistorically" reading it back onto works of Victorian fiction (33). Intriguing though the idea is of a"transhistorical lineage of masochistic subjectivities," this book provides little sense of how writers such as Charlotte Brontë and George Moore could have engaged in an "anticipation of clinical discourse," how Brontë "theorizes masochism even before it is named," or even more anachronistically, how Octave Mirbeau "mimics many of what Deleuze claims as the core components of masochism" (16, 41, 56, 97). The chapters on Brontë's Villette (1853), Moore's A Drama in Muslin (1886) and D. H. Lawrence's The Rainbow (1915) are those most likely to interest readers of this journal, while those on Jean Rhys's Quartet (1928) and on Ian McEwan's The Comfort of Strangers (1981) fall outside the Victorian era. Mitchell's claim is that all these works are related through their common inheritance of a masochistic genealogy, which also includes two renowned French works, Mirbeau's The Torture Garden (1899) and Pauline Réage's The Story of O (1954), as well as Sacher-Masoch's novel Venus in Furs (1870), which originally inspired the Viennese psychiatrist Richard von Krafft-Ebing's slanderous medical neologism of 1886, using Masoch's name. There are several references to the "literary roots" of masochism and "the well-established connection between literature and sexology" (14, 85). But it is unclear precisely what Mitchell thinks is the nature of this connection. It is surely more complex than a matter of sexologists merely formalizing sexual types that had already been fully modeled in the characters of well-known literary texts. We are told that "literary works imagine perversions and pseudoscientific works codify them" (89). But this offers little elucidation of how both literature and sexology participated interdiscursively in what Michel Foucault called an "incitement to discourse" (Histoire de la sexualité, vol. 1 [Gallimard, 1976], 25). Several important scholarly books have indeed probed the relationship between sexual psychiatry's delineation of sadism and masochism as pathologies and nineteenth-century fictional works, especially Romana Byrne's Aesthetic Sexuality: A Literary History of Sadomasochism (2013) and Niklaus Largier's In Praise of the Whip: A Cultural History of Arousal (2007). The central claim of Ordinary Masochisms might also be situated within the larger movement of international scholarship exploring the important conceptual work that nineteenth-century literary works clearly performed in the elaboration of modern sexual possibilities that were nominalized, categorized, and clinically studied by sexual scientists. Mitchell acknowledges that Victorian aestheticizations of suffering, death, disease, disability, and pain were also found in both gothic and decadent genres of fiction and poetry. But curiously she does not pursue the idea of these earlier genres as likely influences on...