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 Body of delivery boy and Seventeenth-Century Religious Lyric, in whichhe opens up possibilities for reading eroticism (especiallyhomoeroticism) in early ultramodern representations of Christs dust. Inthis analysis, Rambuss opposes Caroline Walker Bynum who, in receiptto Leo Steinbergs The Sexuality of Christ in Renaissance Art, claimsthat depictions of Christs genitalia (the focal point of Steinbergs work)can only be regarded as erotic from a modern standpoint, for suchrepresentations in historical context, before the advent of modernsexuality, could non have rendered sexual meanings for theiraudiences and only those signifying reproduction. As Rambuss pointsout, Bynums analysis denies the conjecture of reading theerotic--especially the homoerotic--in medieval/Renaissancerepresentation (268), for it works on the profound assumption thatsuch meanings are structured according to the false double star ofsexual/generative. Conversely, In Rambusss view, the body is atleast potentially sexualized, as a truly polysemous surface wherevarious significances and expressions--including a pattern of eroticones--compete and collude with each other in making the bodymeaningful (268).This is where my exploration begins. Rather than delimit the erotic,I wish to check up on what is potentially sexual inseventeenth-century religious poetry (here that of Donne and Crashaw),tracing non only same-sex desire 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 virtuous--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) maidenly-- the desire to be beatenand 3) moral--the ego-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 expiry 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-sexual trespass into a desire for sexual aggression, directed at others oragainst the self (85-102).