Male Masochism in the Religious Lyrics of Donne and Crashaw Essay

Male Masochism in the Religious Lyrics of Donne and CrashawThe impetus of my psychoanalytic exploration of male masochism inDonne and Crashaw occurs in Richard Rambusss Pleasure and DevotionThe consistence of Jesus and Seventeenth-Century Religious Lyric, in whichhe opens up possibilities for reading eroticism (especiallyhomoeroticism) in early modern representations of Christs dust. Inthis analysis, Rambuss opposes Caroline Walker Bynum who, in chemical reactionto Leo Steinbergs The Sexuality of Christ in Renaissance Art, claimsthat depictions of Christs genitalia (the focus of Steinbergs work)can only be regarded as erotic from a modern standpoint, for much(prenominal)representations in historical context, before the advent of modernsexuality, could not have rendered sexual meanings for theiraudiences but only those signifying reproduction. As Rambuss pointsout, Bynums analysis denies the possibility of reading theerotic--especially the homoerotic--in chivalrous/Renaissancerep resentation (268), for it works on the underlying assumption thatsuch meanings are structured according to the false binary ofsexual/generative. Conversely, In Rambusss view, the body is atleast potentially sexualized, as a truly polysemous surface wherevarious significances and expressions--including a variety of eroticones--compete and collude with each former(a) in making the bodymeaningful (268).This is where my exploration begins. Rather than delimit the erotic,I wish to investigate what is potentially sexual inseventeenth-century religious poetry (here that of Donne and Crashaw),tracing not only same-sex go for spun out from and around Christsbody, as Rambuss has done but also examining libidinal economie... ...ery of a different strain ofmasochism than that which Freud labeled moral--Christian masochism(197).3 In The Economic Problem of Masochism, Freud identifies threetypes of masochism 1) Primary or erotogenic--the bodily associationof pain and sexual excitement 2) femin ine--the desire to be beatenand 3) moral--the self-inflicted torture of ones ego by the superego(161). My term, erotic masochism, would include the erotogenic andfeminine in a Freudian framework.4 Jean Laplanche, in Life and Death in Psychoanalysis, has shown therole of such transition in the human subjects sexualization, ormovement from non-sexual to sexualized drives. In erotic forms ofsadism and masochism, the subject transforms via a prop non-sexualaggression into a desire for sexual aggression, directed at others oragainst the self (85-102).