My study employs the feminist psychoanalytic theory of Jessica Benjamin and Nancy Chodorow in order to describe and analyze the sado-masochistic paradigm which structures many female-authored Gothic novels, and which is implicit in some earlier male-authored texts as well. Beginning with an examination of the Satanic "hero" in influential works by John Milton and Samuel Richardson, I proceed to analyze Gothic novels by five women: Ann Radcliffe, Charlotte Dacre, Lady Caroline Lamb, Charlotte Bronte, and Emily Bronte. I am concerned, as is Benjamin, with exploring why a woman would choose to structure male-female relations (whether fictional or real) along the apparently oppressive axis of sado-masochism. Although more than a generation of readers had been warned by novelists such as Dacre and Lamb not to succumb to the glamorous seductions of men such as Zofloya and Glenarvon, when we come to the novels of the Brontes, we read the stories of women who marry such men. At issue are some essential controversies about the psychology of women, including Freud's assignment of a "natural" passivity and masochism to women, and some feminist debates about whether the marriages that conclude these novels constitute proto-feminist revisionings of the oppressive institution of marriage, or are merely conventional romantic rationalizations for women's continuing submission to the patriarchal status quo. I argue that women's use of the sado-masochistically informed paradigm to structure relations between men and women both reflects their perception of contemporary male-female psychological dynamics and propels them to imagine a less polarized pattern of engagement with the other, one which, if troubled by conflicts with the larger social world, yet may be sustained in the more private arena of marriage.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:UMASS/oai:scholarworks.umass.edu:dissertations-8253 |
| Date | 01 January 1992 |
| Creators | Moore, Alice Frances |
| Publisher | ScholarWorks@UMass Amherst |
| Source Sets | University of Massachusetts, Amherst |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | text |
| Source | Doctoral Dissertations Available from Proquest |
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