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

The danger to which Pendril draws Magdalen's attention and which she accepts nonetheless is that the letter is an object capable of polluting the purity of her "virgin hand." Note, however, that Collins refuses to use rape imagery. The thing we see foremost is not penetration, but a grasping hand:

Line by line-without once looking up from the pages before her-Magdalen read those atrocious sentences through, from beginning to end. The other persons assembled in the room, all eagerly looking at her together, saw the dress rising and falling faster and faster over her bosom-saw the hand in which she lightly held the manuscript at the outset, close unconsciously on the paper, and crush it, as she advanced nearer and nearer to the end. (155-56)

For Magdalen, reading the uncle's letter means laying claim to an instrument of the Law that exerts control over her and her sister, and deriving erotic pleasure from the pain it produces.

The uncle's letter becomes emblematic throughout the novel of Magdalen's erotic pleasure in pain: she puts a copy of it, along with a copy of her father's will and a lock of her lover's hair in a white silk purse which she carries in her bosom, taking it out at key moments to re-emphasize the emotional stakes of her plot. Clearly, the law and sexual desire here become intermingled in Magdalen's subjectivity. The purse stands unsubtly for enclosed and pure (white silk) female sexuality, yet the purse is already penetrated by the mechanisms of the law (the will, the uncle's letter) and with the sexualized symbol of her love for Frank (the lock of hair). Furthermore, the objects together symbolically describe her own state of suspense. The will might represent either her own sense of guilt at having caused her father's death or the inherited taint of his bigamy; the letter represents the punishment and suffering she will incur by scheming against her uncle; and the lock of hair represents her ultimate reward for having suffered. As Deleuze writes: "Formally speaking, masochism is a state of waiting.... The masochist waits for pleasure as something that is bound to be late, and expects pain as the condition that will finally ensure (both physically and morally) the advent of pleasure" (71).

It is interesting to note that the purse is productive of Magdalen's pleasure and pain entirely through her own manipulation of it. In a later scene we see how her suspension between her conflicting desires (be a bad girl and win her money back, or be a good girl and quit subjecting herself to punishment) is figured in the purse. While contemplating her ability to use her sexuality to control Noel Vanstone:

'I can twist any man alive round my finger,' she thought, with a smile of superb triumph.... She shrank from following that thought to its end, with a sudden horror of herself: she drew back from the glass, shuddering, and put her hands over her face.... Her eager fingers snatched the little white silk bag from its hiding-place in her bosom; her lips devoured it with silent kisses.... The tears gushed into her eyes. She passionately dried them, restored the bag to its place. (306)