THE CULTURAL PROBLEM OF MASOCHISM From Nathaniel Hawthorne's infamous lament that "America is now given over to a d-d mob of scribbling women" to William Dean Howells' reluctant submission to the literary judgments of the "court of women," from Leslie Fiedler's Love and Death in the ArnerkanNovel to Ann Douglas' The Feminization ofAmerican Culture, warnings that male sentimentality leads to male masochism echo through United States literary and literary critical canons.2 Most famously, Fiedler complains that a "robust masculine sentimentality, turned out, oddly enough, to have no relevance to the American scene." Rathet, male sentimentalism takes the form of what Fiedler calls, in another context, "an abyssal male masochism."3 As its title suggests, Douglas' Arizona Quarterly Volume 52, Number 1, Spring 1996 Copyright © 1996 by Arizona Board of Regents ISSN 0004- 1 610 Bruce Burgen study of New England sentimental culture bemoans a similar reversal of what she designates as "masculine" and "feminine" values (though Douglas also suggests that sentimentalism fails because it disavows "matriarchal values" or, in other words, never affirms its own masochistic subtext).4 "The liberal minister," Douglas argues, "was pushed into a position increasingly resembling the evolving feminine one. Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, Venus in Furs (1870) I. But as you see, I have taken the blows well the rosy mist of supersensuality has lifted. I was fool enough to let a woman make a slave of me, do you understand? Hence the moral of the tale: whoever allows himself to be whipped deserves to be whipped. For the time being there is only one alternative to be the hammer or the anvil. This can only be when she has the same rights as he and is his equal in education and work. In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:īRUCE BURGETT Masochism and Male Sentimentalism: Charles Brockden Brown's Clara Howard The moral is that woman, as nature created her and as man up to now has found her attractive, is man's enemy she can be his slave or his mistress but never his companion.
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