Male Masochism in the Religious Lyrics of Donne and Crashaw Essay

Male Masochism in the apparitional Lyrics of Donne and CrashawThe impetus of my psychoanalytic exploration of male masochism inDonne and Crashaw occurs in Richard Rambusss delectation and DevotionThe Body of Jesus and Seventeenth-Century Religious Lyric, in whichhe opens up possibilities for reading eroticism (especiallyhomoeroticism) in early modern bureaus of Christs body. Inthis analysis, Rambuss opposes Carolean Walker Bynum who, in responseto Leo Steinbergs The Sexuality of Christ in Renaissance Art, claimsthat depictions of Christs genitalia (the focus of Steinbergs work)can besides be regarded as erotic from a modern standpoint, for suchrepresentations in historical context, in the lead the advent of modernintimateity, 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 medieval/Renaissancerepresentation (268), fo r it works on the underlying assumption thatsuch meanings are structure according to the false binary ofsexual/generative. Conversely, In Rambusss view, the body is atleast potentially sexualized, as a truly polysemous come forth wherevarious significances and expressions--including a variety of eroticones--compete and collude with each separate in making the bodymeaningful (268).This is where my exploration begins. Rather than describe the erotic,I wish to investigate what is potentially sexual inseventeenth-century apparitional poetry (here that of Donne and Crashaw),tracing not only same-sex desire spun out from and round Christsbody, as Rambuss has done but also examining libidinal economie... ...ery of a variant 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) feminine--the desi re 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 denim Laplanche, in Life and Death in Psychoanalysis, has shown therole of such regeneration in the human undefendables 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, say at others oragainst the self (85-102).