| The Masochistic Pleasures of Sentimental Literature Subjects: Sex in literature.; Pleasure in literature.; Masochism in literature.; Sentimentalism in literature.; Erotic literature American; American literature; Women and literature; Psychoanalysis and literature; American literature; For generations, critics have noticed in nineteenth-century American women's sentimentality a streak of masochism, but their discussions of it have over-simplified its complex relationship to women's power. Marianne Noble argues that tropes of eroticized domination in sentimental literature must be recognized for what they were: a double-edged sword of both oppression and empowerment. She begins by exploring the cultural forces that came together to create this ideology of desire, particularly Protestant discourses relating suffering to love and middle-class discourses of "true womanhood." She goes on to demonstrate how sentimental literature takes advantage of the expressive power in the convergence of these two discourses to imagine women's romantic desire. Therefore, in sentimental literature, images of eroticized domination are not antithetical to female pleasure but rather can be constitutive of it. The book, however, does not simply celebrate that fact. In readings of Warner's The Wide Wide World , Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin , and Dickinson's sentimental poetry, it addresses the complex benefits and costs of nineteenth-century women's literary masochism. Ultimately it shows how these authors both exploited and were shaped by this discursive practice. Marianne Noble is Associate Professor of Literature at American University, where she teaches nineteenth-century American literature and introductory courses in literary theory and creative writing. She has published widely in numerous journals. |