A victim in search of a torturer: Reading masochism in Wilkie Collins's No Name

Novel: A Forum on Fiction, Spring 2000 by Jones, Anna

I want to be careful here when I posit Magdalen as a masochistic heroine. Masochism and femininity have typically been considered as either redundant or incompatible terms. As Jonathan Noyes' writes in his insightful work The Mastery of Submission: Inventions of Masochism:

The masochist's body was invented in the late nineteenth century as a machine that could do one of two things, depending on how it was regarded, how it was used, or where it was positioned. It could reduce socially nonproductive aggressivity to an individual pathology, or it could transform social control into sexual pleasure. The one use of the masochist's body supports the project of socially sanctioned aggression and the various stereotypes society has developed in order to invest cultural identity with aggressivity. The other use of the masochist's body subverts this project, initiating an unsettling process whereby cultural identity is parodied, masqueraded, and appropriated in the name of pleasure. These two uses initiate all the conflicts surrounding masochism as we understand it today. (9-10)

It is not, I think, too much of an overstatement to say that these two uses of masochism have been gendered for critics and proponents of masochism: the normative (reassuring) kind attached to feminine interpellation, the "unsettling" parodic kind attached to masculine perversion.4 This paradox arises from as far back as Freud's "The Economic Problem of Masochism" in which he describes the masochistic fantasy as placing "the subject in a characteristically female situation ... that is, being castrated, or copulated with, or giving birth to a baby" (277). In other words, the perverse fantasies of the male masochist constitute normative female experience. There is no room to imagine a female perversion that might be called masochistic-women are, by definition, masochists.

Following this logic, feminist literary critics have tended to elide the terms femininity, passivity, and masochism, thereby reading scenes of female suffering as satisfying some sinister, masculine-identified "gaze."5 In Schools of Sympathy: Gender and Identification through the Novel, Nancy Roberts describes the role of such protagonists as Clarissa, Tess, Isabel Archer, and Hester Prynne in precisely these terms:

In the figure of the heroine/victim is conjoined the activity of the hero and the passivity of the victim. Such a conjunction raises perplexing problems. One of these is that the "heroism" or "greatness" of the heroine is measured by means other than her actions. For she can do, can move, very little. (After all, as victim she is less an actor than one who is acted upon.) Her heroism is measured instead by the pity and sympathy she elicits from others, by the extent to which she moves them (us) .... [She] is placed as an icon, the purpose of which is to draw and invite our response. Often she is represented as having little life or character of her own. (6)6

In this way, masochism becomes the big blank of passivity, of status quo, of the lack of radical potential for women.