Ordinary masochisms : agency and desire in Victorian and modernist fiction, by Jennifer Mitchell [Book Review]

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 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".