Exquisite Masochism: Marriage, Sex, and the Novel Form

by Claire Jarvis

Overview

A groundbreaking approach to the Victorian marriage plot.

How did realist novelists in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries hint at sex while maintaining a safe distance from pornography? Metaphors helped: waves, oceans, blooms, and illuminations were all deployed in respectable realist novels to allude to the sexual act, allowing writers to portray companionate marriage while avoiding graphic description. But in Exquisite Masochism, Claire Jarvis argues that some Victorian novelists went even further, pushing formal boundaries by slyly developing scenes of displaced erotic desire to suggest impropriety, perversion, and danger.

Through close readings of canonical works by Emily Brontë, Anthony Trollope, Thomas Hardy, and a modernist outlier, D. H. Lawrence, Jarvis reveals how writers’ varied use of specific character types—the dominant woman and the submissive man—in conjunction with decadent, descriptive scenes of sexual refusal creates a strong counter-narrative hinting at relationships beyond patriarchal and companionate marriage structures. By focusing on the exquisitely masochistic pleasure brought about by freezing, or suspending, the sexual charge, and by depicting quasi-contractual states on the periphery of marriage, including engagement, adultery, and widowhood, novelists disrupted the marriage plot’s insistence that erotic drives remain unfulfilled and that sexual connection could be satisfied only by genital act.

Complicating our understanding of Victorian marriage ideology’s more well-trodden focus on a productive, nation-building ideal, Exquisite Masochism offers fascinating insight into our own culture’s debates around illicit sexuality, marriage, reproduction, and feminism.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781421419930
Publisher:	Johns Hopkins University Press
Publication date:	06/15/2016
Pages:	224
Product dimensions:	5.90(w) x 9.10(h) x 0.90(d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Claire Jarvis is an assistant professor of English at Stanford University.

Table of Contents

Preface vii

Acknowledgments xiii

1 Making Scenes 1

2 The Grasp of Wuthering Heights 25

3 Buoyed Up: Trollope 56

4 Hideously Multiplied: Jude the Obscure 90

5 Dead Gems: Lawrence 114

Conclusion 155

Notes 165

Index 195

What People are Saying About This

Elsie Michie

Like a sensitive film critic, Claire Jarvis urges readers to resist the forward movement of narrative and turn to scenes of stasis that recur in novels ranging from 1847 to 1928.  Exquisite Masochism uncovers a hitherto unexplored world of sexual tension and unspoken contracts, of dynamism and dominance, of pleasure and pain. This book will be essential reading for those interested in sex, gender, and the history of the novel form

Nicholas Dames

A rare first book, Exquisite Masochism represents the remarkable debut of a significant voice in the field. Claire Jarvis mounts a complicated, multifaceted argument about the ideological and affective role played by marriage in Victorian narrative. This wide-ranging, eclectic, and propulsive book will be an event in novel studies.

Michael Clune

Exquisite Masochism discovers a perverse Victorian philosophy of desire in a pattern of frozen postures, unobtrusively distributed across some of our most familiar novels. Claire Jarvis's fusion of subtlety and system shows us what academic literary criticism at its best can do.

From the Publisher

Destined to be a classic, Exquisite Masochism gives a new depth of thinking to central topics of the novel and turns received wisdom inside out. Love, desire, depiction, but also delay, refusal, and dispersed artistic energy—Jarvis takes us through core scenes of the Victorian and modernist novel to recalibrate our sense of their force and form. The book’s tremendous importance extends beyond literature, to our imaginations of marriage, individuality, pleasure, and erotic life and their place in art and society.
—Mark Greif, author of The Age of the Crisis of Man

A rare first book, Exquisite Masochism represents the remarkable debut of a significant voice in the field. Claire Jarvis mounts a complicated, multifaceted argument about the ideological and affective role played by marriage in Victorian narrative. This wide-ranging, eclectic, and propulsive book will be an event in novel studies.
—Nicholas Dames, Columbia University, author of The Physiology of the Novel: Reading, Neural Science, and the Form of Victorian Fiction

Exquisite Masochism discovers a perverse Victorian philosophy of desire in a pattern of frozen postures, unobtrusively distributed across some of our most familiar novels. Claire Jarvis's fusion of subtlety and system shows us what academic literary criticism at its best can do.
—Michael Clune, Case Western Reserve University

Like a sensitive film critic, Claire Jarvis urges readers to resist the forward movement of narrative and turn to scenes of stasis that recur in novels ranging from 1847 to 1928.  Exquisite Masochism uncovers a hitherto unexplored world of sexual tension and unspoken contracts, of dynamism and dominance, of pleasure and pain. This book will be essential reading for those interested in sex, gender, and the history of the novel form
—Elsie Michie, Louisiana State University

Mark Greif

Destined to be a classic, Exquisite Masochism gives a new depth of thinking to central topics of the novel and turns received wisdom inside out. Love, desire, depiction, but also delay, refusal, and dispersed artistic energy—Jarvis takes us through core scenes of the Victorian and modernist novel to recalibrate our sense of their force and form. The book’s tremendous importance extends beyond literature, to our imaginations of marriage, individuality, pleasure, and erotic life and their place in art and society.

Editorial Reviews

Jarvis opens new avenues of criticism to work that is often oversimplified. Highly recommended.
—Choice

. . . an engaging cultural study, with applications wider than nineteenth-century literature.
—Times Literary Supplement

Jarvis’s elegant prose has its own beat too, which makes Exquisite Masochism a pleasurable as well as persuasive read.
—Review of English Studies

. . . illuminating and original . . .
—Los Angeles Review of Books

At this moment in the profession, with so much work dedicated to reunderstanding the way we read now, Jarvis’s emphasis on literary form is resonant and welcome.
—Studies in the Novel

Both Marsh and Jarvis have found interesting ideas about female agency in the nineteenth century . . .
—SEL Studies in English Literature 1500-1900

Exquisite Masochism offers a fresh approach to the Victorian marriage plot and provocative, new readings of familiar texts... Jarvis is a deft critic and her readings show the value of attending closely to long descriptive passages in novels... Jarvis's commitment to close reading resonates with recent efforts to rethink the place of form and formalism in Victorian studies.
—Melissa J. Ganz, Victorian Studies

From the Publisher

Jarvis opens new avenues of criticism to work that is often oversimplified. Highly recommended.

Choice

Jarvis’s elegant prose has its own beat too, which makes Exquisite Masochism a pleasurable as well as persuasive read.

Review of English Studies

Both Marsh and Jarvis have found interesting ideas about female agency in the nineteenth century . . .

SEL Studies in English Literature 1500-1900

. . . an engaging cultural study, with applications wider than nineteenth-century literature.

Times Literary Supplement

. . . illuminating and original . . .

Los Angeles Review of Books

Exquisite Masochism offers a fresh approach to the Victorian marriage plot and provocative, new readings of familiar texts... Jarvis is a deft critic and her readings show the value of attending closely to long descriptive passages in novels... Jarvis's commitment to close reading resonates with recent efforts to rethink the place of form and formalism in Victorian studies.

Victorian Studies - Melissa J. Ganz

At this moment in the profession, with so much work dedicated to reunderstanding the way we read now, Jarvis’s emphasis on literary form is resonant and welcome.

Studies in the Novel