In the Name of Love: Women. Masochism, and the Gothic (review)
Michelle A. MassÃ©'s In the Name of Love: Women, Masochism, and the Gothic is a response to two questions posed explicitlyÂ—Are Gothic novels masochistic? and "Why do feminists still use Freud?"Â—as well as to two implicit questionsÂ— What is the etiology of masochism? and What is the prognosis? To MassÃ©, certain Gothic texts "internalize and replicate the dynamics of oppression": Pauline RÃ©age's The Story of 0 and Daphne du Maurier's Rebecca present "object relations that reproduce the beating triangle" in Freud's "A Child Is Being Beaten." (Even their readers become complicit.) Other Gothic texts such as Jane Eyre, Atwood's Lady Oracle, and Naylor's Linden Hills resist masochism by playing out the trauma caused by the prohibition of female autonomy (and therefore of identity in the real world), through repetition whose function it is to recognize that trauma. The Gothic can be self-sabotaging: it points to its own eventual cure. The answer, then, to MassÃ©'s first question is yes, only if we grant that works that repudiate "masochistic fantasy" are masochistic.