Male Masochism in the Religious Lyrics of Donne and Crashaw

Male Masochism in the Religious Lyrics of Donne and Crashaw

The impetus of my psychoanalytic exploration of male masochism in

Donne and Crashaw occurs in Richard Rambuss's "Pleasure and Devotion:

The Body of Jesus and Seventeenth-Century Religious Lyric," in which

he opens up possibilities for reading eroticism (especially

homoeroticism) in early modern representations of Christ's body. In

this analysis, Rambuss opposes Caroline Walker Bynum who, in response

to Leo Steinberg's The Sexuality of Christ in Renaissance Art, claims

that depictions of Christ's genitalia (the focus of Steinberg's work)

can only be regarded as erotic from a modern standpoint, for such

representations in historical context, before the advent of modern

sexuality, could not have rendered "sexual" meanings for their

audiences but only those signifying reproduction. As Rambuss points

out, Bynum's analysis denies the possibility of reading the

erotic--especially the homoerotic--in medieval/Renaissance

representation (268), for it works on the underlying assumption that

such meanings are structured according to the false binary of

"sexual/generative." Conversely, In Rambuss's view, "the body [is] at

least potentially sexualized, as a truly polysemous surface where

various significances and expressions--including a variety of erotic

ones--compete and collude with each other in making the body

meaningful" (268).

This is where my exploration begins. Rather than "delimit the erotic,"

I wish to investigate what is potentially sexual in

seventeenth-century religious poetry (here that of Donne and Crashaw),

tracing not only "same-sex" desire "spun out from and around Christ's

body," as Rambuss has done but also examining libidinal economie...

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...ery of a different strain of

masochism than that which Freud labeled "moral"--"Christian masochism"

(197).

[3] In "The Economic Problem of Masochism," Freud identifies three

types of masochism: 1) Primary or erotogenic--the bodily association

of pain and sexual excitement; 2) feminine--the desire to be beaten;

and 3) moral--the self-inflicted torture of one's ego by the superego

(161). My term, erotic masochism, would include the "erotogenic" and

"feminine" in a Freudian framework.

[4] Jean Laplanche, in Life and Death in Psychoanalysis, has shown the

role of such transition in the human subject's "sexualization," or

movement from non-sexual to "sexualized" drives. In erotic forms of

sadism and masochism, the subject transforms [via a "prop"] non-sexual

aggression into a desire for sexual aggression, directed at others or

against the self (85-102).