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

This impasse highlights another problem for thinking through masochism: that is, if woman's suffering is indeed normative, then that suffering is somehow more "real"-more fundamentally tied to experience-than the "pretend" masochism of the perverse man who playfully reproduces scenes of violence. As Jonathan Noyes remarks:

On the one hand, masochism is a paradoxical strategy for removing social violence from the sexual scene. It is a limited and controlled enactment of violence, aimed at escaping the punitive and disciplinary function-the subjectivizing function-- which our culture attaches to violence. This is the case even when the masochistic staging produces a violence which is extreme and a hurt which is real. But on the other hand, masochism is a continuation of social violence. It defuses violence, rendering it harmless and profitable, while perpetuating its forms. (14)

According to this logic, if pain is the result of real punishment, then it can't be liberatory, and certainly shouldn't be erotic. Pretend punishment occurs in a fantasy arena where it somehow escapes or nullifies the production of the subject. Real punishment is productive and regulatory. The problem with this kind of bifurcation is that it precludes the eroticization of the real or the regulatory. Or, to put it another way, it denies the possibility that masochism can exist outside of sexual fantasy, or that the real world can contain opportunities for erotic pleasure. Given that we have been able in recent years to theorize the politics of sex, it seems reasonable that we also acknowledge the sexualization of politics, the endless possibilities for everyday encounters, relationships, and objects, to be invested with erotic power. We need to revise our reading of masochism to avoid essentialized divisions between real subject-producing punishment (as a tool of disciplinary power) and fake production-resistant punishment (as parodic practice), and to avoid relying on mutually exclusive definitions of masochism as having to do with either normative femininity or radically perverse masculinity.

Magdalen's role in No Name bears close examination precisely because it allows us to consider the perverse masochistic female. Significantly, Magdalen is an independent agent who is able to act on her own behalf. As she says to Captain Wragge, after she has run away from her friends: "Suppose I am discovered? ... Who has any authority over me? Who can take me back, if I don't choose to go?" (201). More significantly, she uses her independence not to escape the "punitive and disciplinary function ... [of] violence," but to eroticize her encounters with that violence. It is not that she chooses a course of suffering over one of happiness and ease. Indeed, her other option, to accept the loss of her fortune and earn a living as a governess, certainly involves a generous amount of humiliation and pain for Norah, her virtuous sister. The difference in Magdalen's course of action lies in her choosing to desire, to earn her punishment. According to Jonathan Noyes: "masochism is not the love of submissiveness. It is not the pursuit of unpleasure or humiliation. It is a complex set of strategies for transforming submissiveness, pain, and unpleasure into sexual pleasure" (11). Magdalen uses her relative independence to enter into contractual alliances or relationships that allow her to transgress and to be punished.