Masochistic Modernism

Masochistic Modernisms:A Reading of Eliot and Woolf

Eve SorumUniversity of Michigan

In Virginia Woolf ’s penultimate diary entry, made as German planes fl ew

over London and as she began her fi nal descent into illness, she proclaims,

“No: I intend no introspection. [. . .] Observe perpetually. [. . .] Observe my

own despondency. By that means it becomes serviceable. Or so I hope” (Diary

V 357–58). In these words we see kernels of a modernist aesthetic—a sense of

both resiliency and despair in the face of terrifying mental, social, and politi-

cal events, and the determination to make some use of this situation through

a creative act. By taking Gilles Deleuze’s explanation of the formal nature of

masochism one step further, I argue that this modernist aesthetic depends on a

dynamics of suff ering and compensation that can be described as masochism.¹ I

would like to forge a stronger connection between these two systems of order-

ing the world—literary aesthetics and masochism—by suggesting that atten-

tion to this surface link will reveal the ways in which a masochistic ordering

through pain actually defi nes key modernist aesthetic philosophies.

Looking through the lens of masochism, therefore, I propose a rereading

of the work and aesthetic philosophies of two major modernists, T. S. Eliot

and Virginia Woolf. I have chosen these two writers because they are viewed

as canonical representatives of high modernism, and they both wrote a number

of pieces that proclaim their aesthetic visions. Focusing on Eliot and Woolf

also means that that I can probe the manifestation of a masochistic aesthetics

in poetry and in fi ction, as well as in their stylistically and tonally contrasting

essays. Even when these writers examine a similar dynamic—for example, the

relationship between reader and text, as we will see in Eliot’s “Tradition and the

Individual Talent” and Woolf ’s “On Being Ill”—they formulate the interaction

in tellingly diff erent ways. Th us, pairing them allows for an exploration of the

variations within a masochistic aesthetics.

Derek Young

muse stamp

26 Journal of Modern Literature

My project involves a shift in critical focus: instead of thinking primarily

about how modernist literature orders a chaotic world, I examine how Eliot

and Woolf ’s aesthetic philosophies depend on this chaos. In other words, the

suff ering, pain, self-sacrifi ce, and disorientation are precisely what enable acts

of literary creation, and the artist comes into being through exposure to such

shattering experiences. Reading Eliot and Woolf through masochism, there-

fore, gives us a new way to conceive of a modernism that feeds off of suff ering

for its sense of meaning. Th e aesthetics of Eliot and Woolf are what I will call a

masochistic aesthetics—a manifestation of a particularly modernist conception

of the artist and her project, in which creativity and self-destruction are linked

in inextricable and productive ways. Identifying the latent masochism in their

works does not diminish our view of Eliot’s and Woolf ’s novels and poems as

brilliant aesthetic achievements; it does, however, redirect our attention to the

simultaneous dependence on and rejection of the fi ssures, sacrifi ces, and gaps

that produce these pieces of literature. Th e darker side of this inquiry, of course,

revolves around the perhaps unanswerable question of whether suff ering,

however successfully it produces meaning and order, can ever be worthwhile.

In the past decades, numerous critics of Eliot and Woolf have touched on

the relationship between suff ering, alienation, or loss and the writers’ literary

production. Maud Ellmann provides a thorough reading of Eliot’s theory of

impersonality as she explores how his poems “compose and decompose the self ”

(15). Roger Poole rereads Woolf ’s mental breakdowns through her novels in an

attempt to understand the biographical through the literary, while Shirley Pan-

ken takes the opposite approach by examining the ways in which Woolf works

through her emotional and psychological problems in her writing. Work done

on trauma, mourning, and the Great War has opened up new ways of reading

the writing of these modernists. Tammy Clewell argues that, in “her sustained

eff ort to confront the legacy of the war, Woolf repeatedly sought not to heal

wartime wounds, but to keep them open” (198), thereby initiating a discussion

of the way that absence and loss fi gure as essential elements in Woolf ’s writing.

More broadly, Karen DeMeester claims in the fi rst line of her essay on Mrs.

Dalloway that “Modernist literature is a literature of trauma,” but is “ill-suited y

for depicting recovery” (649).

Approaching Eliot and Woolf ’s writing and aesthetic theories by using

masochism as a defi ning term allows us to see how modernist art’s foundation

in paradox necessitates an act of coping or compensation—an attempt to make

sense of the inherently sense-assaulting modern encounters with industrializa-

tion, capitalism, war, political turmoil, and the increasingly prevalent theories

of a fragmented self. Grappling with the paradoxes of modern life, I argue,

shapes modernist aesthetics into a system that both relies on and chooses pain,

even while it tries to control it through aesthetic rationalizations. In other

words, the fragmenting and frightening assaults of the modern world become

Masochistic Modernisms: Eliot and Woolf 27

desired as experiences and potentially necessary in order to create art. As later

examples will show, this relationship explicitly emerges in the writings of Eliot

and Woolf. By cultivating an aesthetic philosophy that demands the subjection

of the artist-self to acts of pain or self-sacrifi ce, these writers operate within a

system of masochistic control. In this system, pain becomes an essential part

of the coping strategy, since the control of pain is a central element of literary

creation.

Masochism is therefore more useful as a metaphor that illuminates cer-

tain literary acts than as a label that describes T. S. Eliot and Virginia Woolf.

Masochistic readings of the psychoanalytic variety tend to focus on the familial

relations that have produced the masochist. Indeed, Charles Bernheimer off ers

an analysis of this type, examining and identifying Woolf ’s masochism as a

narcissistic act that involves an “impulse to fracture the self ’s wholeness and

submit to the other’s violence” (188). Th ough he looks at both Woolf ’s novels

and her autobiographical writing, Bernheimer is primarily interested in expos-

ing, through psychoanalysis, the way that Woolf constructs herself as a subject

and the shock and disruption at the core of this construction. While his read-

ing off ers many insights for the student of masochism, it does not enable an

understanding of Woolf ’s aesthetics. Th us my inquiry involves a relocation of

the subject of masochism; when masochism is enacted in the aesthetic realm,

both the artist and the artwork—the text, in these cases—manifest the signs

of these traumas of pain and compensation. Unsurprisingly, the fragmentation

in form that so often acts as the hallmark of modernist writing is also a sign of

the masochistic dynamic at work in its production.

Underlying Eliot’s and Woolf ’s theories of art are the paradoxes seen in so

many works of this period: a desire for unifi cation in the face of disintegration,

the imperative to “make it new” embedded in a strong dependence on the past,

and a sense of both the radical potential of art and the artist’s isolation in the

modern world.² Marshall Berman provides a broadly inclusive and useful start-

ing point, defi ning “modernism as any attempt by modern men and women to

become subjects as well as objects of modernization, to get a grip on the modern

world and make themselves at home in it” (5). His formulation of the modernist

project presents modernism as primarily concerned with creating order out of

chaos, producing meaning out of fragments. Similarly, although David Harvey

describes Dionysian “creative destruction” as fundamental to modern art, he

also focuses on the primarily reconstructive project at the heart: “how to repre-

sent the eternal and the immutable in the midst of all the chaos” (20, emphasist

in the original) in order to reveal “what it still took to be the true nature of a

unifi ed, though complex, underlying reality” (30). Berman, Harvey, and other

critics’ readings of modernism usefully illuminate the desire for unifi cation that

drives artistic creation. Yet this interpretation can be pushed one step further

by introducing the category of masochism, allowing underlying dependencies


and relationships to emerge and clarifying the motivations behind the creative

production. In fact, the focus by both the artists and the critics on the com-

pensatory function of the art and literature is exactly what signals the presence

of a masochistic dynamic hidden below.

If modernism manifests a set of inherently paradoxical dilemmas as cen-

tral to its production, the same can be said for masochism. In “Th e Economic

Problem of Masochism” (1924) Freud claimed that erotogenic masochism,

characterized by the formula “pleasure in pain” (161), is the basis of the two

other forms he identifi es, feminine and moral masochism. A process of substi-

tution and transformation is therefore at the basis of what he calls “primary”

masochism (the secondary form is sadism turned inward), in which the death

instinct and the libido fuse and take the self as their object. Th e sexualized

nature of masochism (specifi cally within the Oedipal cycle) remains predomi-

nant for Freud; even moral masochism, which fi rst seems to have “loosened its

connection with what we recognize as sexuality” (165), still has sexuality at its

base because, as Kaja Silverman puts it, the moral masochist off ers up his ego

as “the erotogenic zone of choice.”³

I would argue that even masochism that does not work within that explicitly

sexualized dynamic exhibits a paradoxical system of exchange. Th e compensa-

tory pleasure can take the form of feelings of power, control, and agency—not

necessarily (though potentially) sexualized forms of pleasure. One explana-

tion of this form of masochism is developed and described by the relational

theorists, Jack and Kerry Kelly Novick, in their study Fearful Symmetry.⁴ Th e

Novicks locate masochism not simply as an Oedipal manifestation, but as

preoedipally determined and linked to the mother (or, in more contemporary

formulations, to the ungendered caregiver), rather than to the father. Masoch-

ism emerges in these preoedipal situations as an “adaptation to a pathological

situation” (20) when the mother does not provide the attention and stimulus the

infant craves. Th e infant responds by engaging in masochistic acts that provide

a sense of control or “delusions of omnipotence.”⁵ Th e Novicks attribute this

reaction to “the failure of reality”—the reality of the mother-infant connec-

tion—“that forces the child to turn to omnipotent solutions” (61). Th eir theory

takes masochism out of an exclusively sexual relationship, reformulating it as a

psychological structure engaged in a project of regeneration and compensation.

Extending this link to modernist aesthetics, therefore, allows us to see both

the ways in which art acts as an enabling force that produces feelings of control

or omnipotence in the artist and how these feelings of power are inextricably

tied to the experience of pain, making it diffi cult to step out of this circle of

suff ering and aesthetic gratifi cation.

I will examine Eliot’s criticism and poetry, Woolf ’s non-fi ction and fi c-

tion. By doing this I hope not only to explore the more didactic formulations

of their aesthetics but also the practice of these ideas in their creative work.


Signifi cantly, both Eliot and Woolf ’s aesthetic statements that provide the

foundation for my argument are written during times of war (1917 and 1940,

respectively)—a fact that should be present in background as we think about

the masochistic foundations of their theories, although I do not focus explic-

itly on the function of war. Th is study is only a preliminary map of modernist

masochisms. Yet I suspect that a more broadly ranging analysis would uncover

the same dynamics at work in such diverse writers as Gertrude Stein, E. M.

Forster, Ezra Pound, Marianne Moore, and D. H. Lawrence, to name a few.

ELIOT’S SURRENDER OF SELF

In the mournful year after the end of World War I, T.S. Eliot wrote his now

canonical statement, “Tradition and the Individual Talent.” In it, he asserts that

a poet must have “the historical sense” that allows him to see that “the whole of

the literature of Europe from Homer and within it the whole of the literature

of his own country has a simultaneous existence and composes a simultaneous

order” (38).⁶ On one level this claim displays Eliot’s oblique response to the

overwhelming problem of imagining a contemporary writing community when

almost literally surrounded by the dead of the war—a position analogous to

that “pathological situation” seen by the Novicks as the catalyst of masochistic

behavior. His imperative that “you must set him [the poet], for contrast and

comparison, among the dead” (“Tradition” 38) resonates eerily in the moment.

On another level, however, his focus on the historical sense points to an aes-

thetics of self-sacrifi ce and self-denial, as well as a morbid fascination with

what has been lost.

“Tradition and the Individual Talent” calls for an understanding of “the

dead” that does not simply involve an intellectual grasp of history.⁷ Instead,⁷

achieving a deep consciousness of the past requires self-sacrifi ce. Only then

can the poet understand his place in the tradition—both how his writing fi ts

into it and how it changes when he is added. “What happens,” Eliot writes, “is

a continual surrender of himself as he is at the moment to something which is

more valuable. Th e progress of an artist is a continual self-sacrifi ce, a continual

extinction of personality” (40). Eliot’s formulation entails both the loss of self

and the gain of an omnipotent sense of belonging and control. To explain this

“process of depersonalization” (40), Eliot likens the poet to a platinum fi la-

ment—highly sensitive—that catalyzes miraculous reactions between gases,

without appearing to have changed in the slightest. Th is metaphor, despite its

use of scientifi c terminology, embodies a certain fantasy about the poet’s role,

suggesting that the poet can go through the most emotionally rigorous events

and come out virtually unscathed, having emptied himself of all harmful, per-

sonal emotions and translated only the most impersonal ideas into his work.

Descriptions of the poet as medium or as receptacle, two other analogies that


Eliot uses to describe this desired state, refl ect the almost torturously passive

role that he expects the poet to assume. Eliot’s turn to science also suggests the

ways in which his theory positions, or wants to position, the poet as distinct

and separate from the messy machinations of human emotion that taint poetry

with human vulnerability.

Th e ways in which this formulation allows for both an omnipotent distanc-

ing and a potential escape from all threatening emotion suggest its connections

to a relational form of masochism. In these terms, writing poetry allows the

poet to absent himself from the world and its traumas. As Eliot writes near the

end of the essay, “[p]oetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from

emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personal-

ity” (43). His choice of the word “escape” reveals the nature of the act; poetry

becomes an almost desperate attempt to cope with emotion and personality,

both of them too volatile and personal to be safe.⁸

Yet in order to perform this escape from emotion and personality, the

poet must sacrifi ce those same elements. Th is entails surrender to the liter-

ary canon—to its history and its future possibilities—as well as surrender to

the poetry itself. In his essay, surrender takes the form of a martyrdom that

is complete, sincere, and dedicated “wholly to the work to be done” (44). Self-

sacrifi ce is thus at the origin of poetic creation. In other words, in so far as

Eliot claims that art is and should be impersonal, this art depends upon—even

demands—the self-sacrifi ce of the artist. Moreover, this sacrifi ce cannot be

easy, for the “escape” is relevant only if there is emotion and personality from

which to escape. As Eliot rather cattily remarks, “of course, only those who

have personality and emotions know what it means to want to escape from these

things” (43). Th e phrase “to want to escape” sets up the masochistic structure of

this aesthetics; the true artist will desire the act of self-sacrifi ce. At the heart

of Eliot’s literary aesthetics, therefore, is the masochistic artist who willingly

surrenders his emotions and personality to a grand project of creation.

Th e poet, however, is not the only fi gure in Eliot’s philosophy who engages

in that form of surrender. Th e literary critic, too, must renounce his own per-

sonality in order to understand the text fully. Frank Kermode quotes a letter

written by Eliot in 1935 in which he describes this aspect of criticism:

You don’t really criticize any author to whom you have never surrendered your-

self. . . . Even just the bewildering minute counts; you have to give yourself up,

and then recover yourself, and the third moment is having something to say,

before you have wholly forgotten both surrender and recovery. Of course the self

recovered is never the same as the self before it was given. (13)

As in writing poetry, the origin of criticism is an act of “surrender” and sacri-

fi ce to the literary text. Th e intellect comes in only after the surrender and the

subsequent “recovery,” a stage in which the self reasserts itself and regains its


voice, while still retaining the impression of its surrender. Yet it would be naïve

to assume, Eliot warns, that the “self recovered” is an enriched and bettered

self; the danger of surrender is that you may lose as much as you gain. Criti-

cism marks the critic, for the moments of surrender inscribe themselves on the

mental self. Th e compensation for these changes, however, makes the potential

danger and pain worthwhile: the sacrifi ce allows the critic to see, in some par-

ticular way, the “truth” of the literary work or, as Eliot puts it, “the object as

it really is” (“Th e Perfect Critic” 57). Th us the critic depends on, even desires,

that moment of surrender, just as the poet willingly will renounce emotion

and personality for the sake of his art.

Th e masochistic basis of Eliot’s aesthetic emerges in his poetry, as well

as in his criticism, though now infl ected with a sense of the suff ering, as well

as the self-sacrifi ce, that underlies creation. Th e fi rst lines of the piece that

John Paul Riquelme called “the prose counterpart” (29) of “Tradition and the

Individual Talent”—“Th e Waste Land” (1922)—transfer this dynamic onto

the natural world:

April is the cruelest month, breeding

Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing

Memory and desire, stirring

Dull roots with spring rain. (1–4)

Th e poem connects creative generation with pain and cruelty, suggesting per-

petuation and rebirth, although without the hope and enthusiasm that usually

surround such acts. April’s cruelty resides precisely in its creative power; its

attempts to breed, mix, and stir, trying to squeeze life out of the dead land,

reveal its delight in acts of torment and suff ering. Th is horror at creation and

despair over its victims resonate throughout the poem, especially at the moment

in which the narrative voice plaintively asks, “Th at corpse you planted last year

in your garden, / Has it begun to sprout? Will it bloom this year?” (71–72).

Th ese lines frighteningly literalize the metaphorical connection among sac-

rifi ce, death, and creativity seen in Eliot’s criticism. New growth will sprout

from the fertile body of a corpse, yet this growth will always bear the taint of

its origin.⁹

On the textual level, the poem enacts the poet’s sacrifi ce almost to an

extreme: its form directly manifests the surrender of emotion and personality

that Eliot calls for in “Tradition and the Individual Talent.” Th e text fore-

grounds fragmentation and fracture with the striking absence of a cohesive

poetic voice; the poet is relegated to the periphery of the page. F. R. Leavis

praises this choice in his important statement on “Th e Waste Land”: “the devel-

opment of impersonality [. . .] reaches an extreme limit: it would be diffi cult to

imagine a completer transcendence of the individual self ” (91). Leavis’s focus

on transcendence gestures to the compensatory rewards that this masochistic


aesthetic achieves. Although the poet must surrender himself to his work, he

gains a sense of control. Although the poet’s voice does not occupy a position

of omniscient prominence, the melding of multiple voices implies a mastery

over the diverse tradition of literature.¹⁰

Th e language and style of “Th e Waste Land,” however, make the com-

pensations for this dynamic of sacrifi ce and control seem less real. Th e poet’s

partial control almost disappears at points in the poem, suggesting that the

poet is as much lost in as operating within the tradition. In the fi rst stanza, for

example, the multitude of voices quickly takes over the introductory speaker,

transforming the lines into an anarchy of expression.

Summer surprised us, coming over the Strarbergersee

With a shower of rain; we stopped in the colonnade,

And went on in sunlight, into the Hofgarten,

And drank coff ee, and talked for an hour.

Bin gar keine Russin, stamm’ aus Lituaen, echt deutsch.¹¹

And when we were children, staying at the arch-duke’s,

My cousin’s, he took me out on a sled,

And I was frightened. He said, Marie,

Marie, hold on tight. And down we went.

In the mountains, there you feel free.

I read, much of the night, and go south in winter. (8–18)

Th e voice shifts between languages, memories, and—most importantly—

between the personas that it represents. In other places, the fragmentation

of the narrative voice becomes a system of literary reference, so that within a

few lines we can move from Baudelaire to Dante: “Unreal City, / Under the

brow fog of a winter dawn, / A crowd fl owed over London Bridge, so many,

/ I had not thought death had undone so many” (60–64). “Th e Waste Land”

expresses chaos and fragmentation even as it tries to make sense of them as a

coherent script. Th is tension raises the question of whether suff ering can fi nally

be compensated for by art. We must ask if the fragments fi nally overwhelm the

poet—a view of many critics and contemporaries of Eliot¹²—rather than the

poet mastering the fragments.

Th e last section of the poem, “What the Th under Said,” revisits the role of

suff ering in an enigmatic and moving chorus. A voice of thunder articulates the

sound “Da” three times (401, 411, 418). Eliot’s note translates this reference,

citing the Buddhist story in which the word “Da” was interpreted to mean three

diff erent things by three separate groups—give, sympathize, control—with

each meaning correct in its own way.¹³ Unsurprisingly, these three meanings

set up the sequence of Eliot’s masochistic aesthetics. Th e writer must fi rst give

himself up (the ideal of self-sacrifi ce), an act that will then allow him to sym-

pathize with or understand his place in the tradition. Finally, the writer will


gain a sense of power as he realizes his own place in this tradition—though

the order he creates may be messy and fragmented, our experience of the poem

warns. In these last lines of the poem, when the thunder asks, “What has been

given?” another disembodied voice (which seems closely aligned to the poetic

voice) replies:

My friend, blood shaking my heart

Th e awful daring of a moment’s surrender

Which an age of prudence can never retract

By this, and this only, we have existed (402–406)

Th e gift of “a moment’s surrender” describes the simultaneously terrifying

and exulting act of self-sacrifi ce. Maud Ellmann, using terms that resonate

with my project, claims that the poem “stages the ritual of its own destruc-

tion” (109), and these lines suggest that surrender itself defi nes and shapes

existence. “Th ese fragments I have shored against my ruins” (431), the poetic

voice concludes, reiterating the compensatory nature of this poetic act. As

Brooker and Bentley point out, the fragments—nursery-rhyme doggerel, lines

from Dante’s Purgatorio, a phrase from Latin verse and one from Tenny-

son and Swinburne—“have in common the motif of singing which persists

through loss and transforms disaster into art” (204). Breaking this cycle of

pain and compensation seems improbable, however, when Eliot gives us lines

from Th e Spanish Tragedy that point to the way in which art promotes self-y

destruction—in this case Hieronymo’s biting off of his tongue.¹⁴ In this literary ⁴

shoring up of fragments, Eliot engages in a modern literary cycle of pain and

pleasure, helplessness and mastery.

WOOLF’S “SUDDEN VIOLENT SHOCK”

Unlike with Eliot, who sets his essays up to be viewed more in an historical

than in a personal context, an analysis of the masochistic aesthetics in the writ-

ing of Virigina Woolf inevitably begins with a turn to the writing that connects

her life and her work. In the last year of her life, Virginia Woolf began writing

a memoir entitled “A Sketch of the Past.” Although this document was never

fully revised and published in her lifetime, it contains one of her most impor-

tant aesthetic statements.¹⁵ As she muses about her fi rst childhood memories,

Woolf describes the occurrence of “exceptional moments” (“Sketch” 72) that

stand out in her mind with clarity and power. Th ese moments, however, are not

remarkable simply for their ability to stand out; they are integral components

of Woolf ’s theory of writing and the writer. Th ey center around three shocks

from early childhood: the fi rst during a fi ght with her brother Th oby in which

she decides to stop hitting and simply endure his blows (“Just as I raised my

fi st to hit him, I felt: why hurt another person? I dropped my hand instantly,


and stood there, and let him beat me” (71)); the second—a positive experience

that may have occurred at some later point in childhood—when she gazes at

a fl ower and realizes that the fl ower and the earth are part of a larger whole;

and the third when the news of an adult friend’s suicide becomes horrifyingly

connected to an apple tree looming in the dusk. With care she outlines the

eff ects of these shocks:

I only know that many of these exceptional moments brought with them a pecu-

liar horror and a physical collapse; they seemed dominant; myself passive. Th is

suggests that as one gets older one has a greater power through reason to provide

an explanation; and that this explanation blunts the sledge-hammer force of the

blow. I think this is true, because though I still have the peculiarity that I receive

these sudden shocks, they are now always welcome; after the fi rst surprise, I

always feel instantly that they are particularly valuable. And so I go on to suppose

that the shock-receiving capacity is what makes me a writer. (72, my emphases)rr

Most remarkable in this explanation is her defi nition of the writer as a person

who is uniquely suited to receive shocks—a thoroughly passive characterization

on one level. Reason, experience, or some creative capacity takes control and

transforms the pain into a “valuable” experience. In Woolf ’s terms, the writer,

an intrinsically submissive fi gure, willingly and courageously off ers herself up

to the traumas of life, just as the young Woolf submits her body to her brother’s

blows. Interestingly, in her description of the fi ght with Th oby, Woolf does not

mention any physical pain in relation to the beating, but she does remark on its

psychological eff ect, “a feeling of hopeless sadness”: “It was as if I became aware

of something terrible; and of my own powerlessness” (71). If we transfer this

experience to her description of the writer’s role (as she implicitly does in this

essay), writing becomes fraught with feelings of helplessness even as it tries to

claim the shocks as valuable and productive. In other words, the writer assumes

the role of the masochist.¹⁶

Th e text itself displays the trauma that comes with the masochistic role.

As Woolf writes about the fi ght with Th oby and her own devastated reaction,

the sentences lose their characteristic fl ow, becoming unnaturally choppy and

broken with the insertion of redundant punctuation. Th e unifi ed subject of the

sentence and of the act is dispersed and divided: “I dropped my hand instantly,

and stood there, and let him beat me.” Th e commas unnecessarily separate

each new action from the acting “I,” eff ectively registering the passivity and

self-remove produced by this masochistic submission. In this small way, and at

numerous other points as Woolf describes her aesthetic theory of shocks, the

text (or language itself) becomes the victim of the masochistic impulse, as well

as the fi eld on which a compensatory performance of linguistic control occurs.

Th e text absorbs the shock in the form of a stylistic puncturing.


Woolf herself remarks on the peculiarly painful aspect of two of the child-

hood shocks, versus the pleasurable memory of the fl ower, and she derives from

this diff erence a theory about shock reception. “In the case of the fl ower,” she

writes, “I found a reason; and was thus able to deal with the sensation. I was

not powerless” (“Sketch” 72). Power derives from an ability to assign meaning

and create order in the world—the quintessential modernist quest. Th e shocks

move from acting as isolated moments that poke through the “cotton wool of

daily life” (72) to forming the foundations of an aesthetic philosophy.¹⁷ Th e⁷

shock, she writes,

is a token of some real thing behind appearances; and I make it real by putting it

into words. It is only by putting it into words that I make it whole; this wholeness

means that it has lost its power to hurt me; it gives me, perhaps because by doing

so I take away the pain, a great delight to put the severed parts together. Perhaps

this is the strongest pleasure known to me. [. . .] From this I reach what I might

call a philosophy; at any rate it is a constant idea of mine; that behind the cotton

wool is hidden a pattern; that we—I mean all human beings—are connected with

this; that the whole world is a work of art; that we are parts of the work of art. [. . .]

And this I see when I have a shock. (72)

Woolf ’s characterization sets up the shock as an enemy force, autonomous, with

the destructive power to sever, while she acts as the enabling creator who puts

the pieces together again. Th is act of creation produces a pleasure that Woolf

labels the “strongest” she has known, a sign that mastery over this feeling of

pain grows into mastery over much more. Woolf ’s description transforms these

dynamics of pain and pleasure into a philosophy that bestows an immensely

powerful position to art, giving it, as Elena Gualtieri writes, “a therapeutic

function that is both a liberation and a relief ” (104)—an echo of the psycho-

logical process of compensation that characterizes masochism. Th e search for

meaning also acts as a coping mechanism that transforms the shocks from

purely debilitating to potentially transformative. Pain becomes pleasure and

helplessness is rewritten as power.

As dazzling as her claims are in this passage, we must remember that her

pleasure in connecting the pieces depends upon that original severance. In fact,

Woolf ’s protests about the pleasure and satisfaction she receives from putting

the pieces together immediately suggests that attention is being drawn away

from the foundation of this pleasure—the suff ering and severance. If the shocks

provide the impetus for aesthetic creation, they are integral to the act of writ-

ing. Th e writer, according to this formulation, must place herself in a position

of vulnerability and receptivity to suff ering in order to derive pleasure from

the production of art, as well as to experience an empowering sense of control

over the world at large. Th e Freudian “pleasure in pain” system is circular: the


writer always will not only need, but also desire the painful experience of the

shocks because they allow her “the strongest pleasure” as she transforms them

into art. Th e danger, of course, is that at some point the writer will not be able

to achieve those feelings of power and meaning, and will succumb to the terror

of the shock.

Woolf not only describes a masochistic aesthetics as fundamental in her

own work, she also sees it in the lives and texts of other writers. Already, for

example, in the 1930 piece, “ ‘I am Christina Rossetti,’ ” Woolf ’s reading of

Rossetti’s creative impetus privileges and focuses on the empowering pain

that structures everything. Woolf does not say that Rossetti is inspired by the

same galvanizing shocks we saw in “Sketch of the Past”; she instead attributes

Rossetti’s identity and art to a dark “kernel” at the center of her being—reli-

gion. In Woolf ’s words, “everything in Christina’s life radiated from that knot

of agony and intensity in the center” (56). As in all biography (even in an essay

like this in which the author critiques the impulse to biographize), the descrip-

tion of the subject reveals as much, if not more, about the author herself. Th us,

Woolf ’s choice of the words “agony and intensity” displays her own sense that

pain acts as the motivating power behind an artist’s creation of her own identity

and work.

Woolf ’s essay “On Being Ill” (1930), however, reveals the potentially

destructive and disabling side of a masochistic aesthetics, even as it ostensi-

bly reaches the opposite conclusion. Th e essay circles around the relationship

between illness and literature with slippery rhetorical twists and turns. At

fi rst it seems to assert the incompatibility of illness and art due to the failure of

language: English, quite simply, “has no words for the shiver and the headache”

(“Ill” 11). Th e body and the soul (or mind) are dichotomized, and the body

gains the upper hand in illness, trapping the soul as it “blunts or sharpens,

colours or discolours, turns to wax in the warmth of June, hardens to tallow

in the murk of February” (10). Yet Woolf ’s tone shifts when she turns to the

invalid—a reader who recalls, with some fundamental diff erences, Eliot’s critic,

and whose supine position gives her a special, fatalistic point of view: “It is only

the recumbent who knows what, after all, Nature is at no pains to conceal—that

she in the end will conquer; heat will leave the world; stiff with frost we shall

cease to drag ourselves about the fi elds; ice will lie thick upon factory and

engine; the sun will go out” (16). Even as the invalid reader gains insight into

the workings of the world; however, she is also thrust back in the isolation cell

of illness, for her knowledge confi rms the hostility and loneliness of human

existence.¹⁸ Nature having failed as a source of solace, Woolf turns to literature,

especially the poets. Here illness is enabling, allowing the reader to “grasp what

is beyond their [the poems’] surface meaning, gather instinctively this, that,

and the other” (19). Woolf completes the cycle of suff ering and compensatory

gains with this maneuver: illness and its concomitant pain allow the artist to


see beyond the superfi cial mechanics of the world, but this knowledge proves

too disturbing, and the super-sensitive invalid must turn towards literature.

Here, at last, the invalid can experience some satisfaction and sense of control,

even going so far as to bless her illness for the insight that it allows: “In health,”

she writes, “meaning has encroached upon sound. Our intelligence domineers

over our senses. But in illness, with the police off duty [. . .] the worlds give out

their scent and distil their fl avour, and then, if at last we grasp the meaning,

it is all the richer” (19). Just as Eliot’s critic must surrender himself in order to

understand the text, without being ill, Woolf suggests, the reader cannot fully

appreciate the poetry.

Yet this superfi cially satisfying ploy actually illuminates the foundational

fl aws in her masochistic aesthetics and exposes the suspect logic in any act of

masochism. While such issues seemed less pressing with Eliot, whose poet

and critic sacrifi ced themselves only to the texts, Woolf ’s revelation of the

necessary physiological trauma forces us to ask whether pain and suff ering

are worthwhile, if all they allow is momentary insight into a poem. In the

fi nal pages of “On Being Ill,” instead of facing this question that is implicit

in her musing, Woolf launches into a rambling description of a second-rate

novel (one that illness has allowed her to appreciate). Th e plot of the story

absorbs the narrative fl ow of the essay, and the end of the novel becomes the

essay’s end as well. Appropriately, the novel concludes with a tragic and unre-

deemable death, pointing to the potential climax for the invalid that cannot

be compensated for by an intuitive appreciation of literature. Th e dangerous

connection between illness and death—a connection that makes a farce of the

insistence on the rewards of reading poetry while ill—is safely defl ected onto

a fi ctional narrative. Yet the essay’s clumsy evasion cannot conceal the sense of

the underlying danger of relying on a masochistic aesthetic, especially when

the suff ering occurs in the body as well as in the mind. While suff ering for the

sake of creating art seems rewarding (though still frightening), this essay—and

Woolf ’s own life-long battle against mental illness—reveals the insuffi ciencies

and dangers of the stratagem.

In Woolf ’s novels the location of a masochistic aesthetics becomes increas-

ingly complicated, even as they also allow us to retreat from the more disturbing

question of real bodily harm. Not only do the texts display worries about cohe-

sion, coherence, and unity in their often fragmented, stream-of-consciousness

stories narrated by constantly shifting subjects, but artist-characters in the nov-

els struggle with these same questions. One powerful example of the fi ctional-

ized artist occurs in To the Lighthouse, a book that is interestingly connected

to Woolf ’s own childhood memories of her parents. Woolf, in fact, described

the novel as enacting an exorcism of the memory of her mother, banishing a

ghostly presence that had haunted her for years.¹⁹ Th e actual textual exorcism

is, in many ways, more brutal and ambivalent than Woolf ’s description of her


own feelings would suggest. Lily Briscoe, a spinster painter, stands in for the

modern artist²⁰ who must deal with the beloved, but overwhelming presence of

Mrs. Ramsey—a representative par excellance of Victorian mores. On all levels e

the novel is a picture of Mrs. Ramsey, not only through the fl oating narrative

eye, but also through the painterly eyes of Lily who, in Part I, tries to paint

her picture in front of the rambling summerhouse. Lily’s struggle to be true to

her own aesthetic vision must face the misogyny of the guest, Charles Tansley,

who insists that “Women can’t paint, women can’t write [. . .]” (48) as well as

Mrs. Ramsey’s oppressive insistence that “an unmarried woman has missed the

best of life” (49). Lily’s negotiation of these constraints displays the roots of an

aesthetic masochism—one in which art can be created only when restrictive

infl uences and stifl ing life stories are destroyed or rewritten, even when that

destruction involves the mother fi gure she adores.

Mrs. Ramsey’s death, however, throws the narrative and the characters

into disarray as they try to cope with her now ghostly presence in Part III.²¹

With her easel planted in front of the house once again, Lily, ten years older,

decides to fi nish the painting that she could not complete during her last visit.

Although Mrs. Ramsey has died, Lily must still grapple with her presence in

order to clear the way for art. She alternates between despair over her absence

and frustration at the way that Mrs. Ramsey managed her life:

Really, she was angry with Mrs. Ramsey. With the brush slightly trembling in

her fi ngers she looked at the hedge, the step, the wall. It was all Mrs. Ramsey’s

doing. She was dead. Here was Lily, at forty-four, wasting her time, unable to

do a thing, standing there, playing at painting, playing at the one thing one did

not play at, and it was all Mrs. Ramsey’s fault. She was dead. Th e step where she

used to sit was empty. She was dead. (149–150)

In this passage we can see the contradictory coexistence of anger and desire for

Mrs. Ramsey’s presence. Mrs. Ramsey at once creates relationships and mean-

ing in the house (“It was Mrs. Ramsey’s doing,” says Lily after she looks at the

scene) and inhibits Lucy’s creative acts. In order to reassert herself and her own

perspective and, ultimately, in order to complete her painting, Lily must reclaim

the world around her, not only making “the hedge, the step, the wall” her own,

but also rewriting the life stories that Mrs. Ramsey so masterfully produced

during her own life.²² Th ough Lily alternates between feelings of dependence

(“She owed it all to her” [161]) and control, she fi nally begins to narrate these

tales in her own voice. Th us the story of the Rayleys, a marriage choreographed

by Mrs. Ramsey, becomes a cautionary tale against marriage, rather than a

narrative of success: “So that was the story of the Rayleys, Lily thought,” after

mulling over their fractures and fi ghts, as well as their eventual reconcilia-

tion in a marriage of friendship, not love. “She imagined herself telling it to

Mrs. Ramsey, who would be full of curiosity to know what had become of the


Rayleys. She would feel a little triumphant, telling Mrs. Ramsey that the mar-

riage had not been a success” (174). Mrs. Ramsey, object of such reverence and

love, must be silenced in order for Lily to create. Th e painting thereby becomes

just as much an act of destruction as construction or, rather, the destruction

itself underlies each creative act. Th e “jar on the nerves” (193) that Lily says

she needs in order to paint—and that she seeks out by returning to the Ramsey

summer house—comes from her painful revisiting of the memories of Mrs.

Ramsey, as well as from her own manipulation of that past. And when the

painting is fi nished, the struggle seems worthwhile, necessary, even if debilitat-

ing. Th e book closes with this moment—sure to pass—of aesthetic consum-

mation. “I have had my vision,” Lily proclaims, yet her “extreme fatigue” (209)

reveals the cost of this creation and recalls Eliot’s claim that “the self recovered

is never the same as the self before it was given” (Kermode 13).²³ Th e moment

of triumph is also a moment of sadness, for it is a victory over the self and all

that it holds dear as much as it is over an antagonistic world. Th us even Woolf ’s

attempt to validate the price of artistic success—a success achieved through

self-infl icted pain—leaves us wondering if the artist, like the masochist, can

ever know whether the cost or the compensation is greater.

Whether based on the impersonal self-sacrifi ce of Eliot’s artist or the

bodily and emotional suff ering of Woolf ’s, these two modernists’ implicitly

masochistic visions present rules of creation. For them, the act of writing is

defi ned by an exchange—suff ering and self-sacrifi ce in return for a privileged

moment of insight—that allows the writer to see, understand, and represent

contemporary realities and truths. Examining Eliot and Woolf reveals two

ways in which modernist writing not only responds to and attempts to portray

the traumas of the age but also how it depends on and defi nes itself in rela-

tion to catastrophe and loss. Th e resonance of this particular literary aesthetic

now needs to be explored in other writers of the period in order to enlarge our

understanding of the myriad ways in which such a process of compensation

might be manifested. Connections between social class and masochism might

be productively investigated in D.H. Lawrence; the masochistic dynamics of

empire—a topic that John Kucich has written about in relation to nineteenth-

century literature²⁴—should be analyzed in texts like Forster’s ⁴ Passage to India

or Graham Greene’s writing on Liberia and Mexico; and texts like Radclyff e

Hall’s Th e Well of Loneliness demand an examination of the connections betweens

self-sacrifi ce, sexuality, and the role of the artist. Broader questions remain: for

example, can we distinguish between an American and a British masochistic

aesthetics or, perhaps, is the American modernist movement less informed by

such a dynamic of pain and compensation? Furthermore, in light of the diff er-

ences between Eliot and Woolf, what is the impact of gender on a masochistic

aesthetics? As this essay attempts to show, attention to the formal and aesthetic

possibilities of masochism will allow readings of modernist texts that clarify


the role of the writer and illuminate the function of submission and suff ering

in the creation of this literature.

Notes

I would like to thank John Kucich, John Fulton, Paul Sorum, Mary-Catherine Harrison, John Cords,

Sumiao Li, and Emily Lutenski for their helpful comments about various drafts.

1. See Chapter 6: “Th e Art of Masoch” in “Coldness and Cruelty.” Here Deleuze focuses on the

“fundamental aesthetic or plastic element” (69) in Sacher-Masoch’s writing, examining the ways in

which the scenes of masochism mimic the formal stillness of works of art. Th erefore, he writes that

“fundamentally, masochism is neither material nor moral, but essentially formal” (74). I am interested

in exploring this aspect of masochism in relation to modernist literary form.

2. A defi nitive discussion of these and other defi ning characteristics of modernist art can be found

in the Malcolm Bradbury and James McFarlane’s essay “Th e Name and Nature of Modernism.”

3. Silverman, 189. See Chapter 5, “Masochism and Male Subjectivity” for a reading of Freud’s

account of masochism. She also discusses the way in which Deleuze places the mother at the center

of masochism, seeing the dynamic as exclusively between mother and son fi gures (or substitutes

thereof).

4. Also see Armando Favazza’s study, Bodies Under Siege, for a non-sexualized view of the masochistic

act of self-mutilation. Favazza writes that patients harm themselves because “it provides temporary

relief from a host of painful symptoms such as anxiety, depersonalization, and desperation,” and “it

touches on the very profound human experiences of salvation, healing, and orderliness” (xix). His

focus on orderliness resonates with my view of Eliot and Woolf ’s masochistic aesthetics.

5. Th e Novicks explain: “In our view it is the failure of reality that forces the child to turn to omnipo-

tent solutions. [. . .] Repeated failures are frustrating and, as research with infants has demonstrated,

soon lead to expressions of helplessness and confusion. Within a month from birth, it can be observed

that such failures produce signs of discomfort or psychic pain and are soon followed by signs of anger

such as gaze aversion. Th is is followed by denial of the source of pain; denial is maintained by the

transformation of pain into fi rst a sign of attachment, then additionally a sign of specialness and

unlimited destructive power, then a sign of equality in every way with oedipal parents, and omnipotent

capacity to coerce parents to gratify all infantile wishes” (61).

6. For a reading of Eliot’s theory of tradition and an analysis of its development over the course of

his career, see Richard Shusterman’s essay, “Th e Concept of Tradition: Its Progress and Potential.”

7. See John Paul Riquelme’s discussion of Eliot’s relationship to the past in Harmony of Dissonances:

T.S. Eliot, Romanticism, and Imagination. Riquelme calls for a more nuanced reading of “Tradition

and the Individual Talent” that recognizes that the past is not simply known or accepted in Eliot’s

theory, since “the poet’s labor, and also the critic’s, begins not by turning from or toward the past but

instead by trying to fi nd out what the past might be” (20).

8. In Confl icts in Consciousness: T.S. Eliot’s Poetry and Criticism, David Spurr discusses the way in

which such evacuation of the self is preparation for Eliot’s “adoption of a Christian persona” in his

later poetry. Th us, after his conversion, Eliot believed that “the individual must purge himself of his

own being in order to be fi lled by God” (Spurr xvii)—a form of self-abnegation that could also be

read in relation to masochism.

9. Of course, my opening comments about the connection between the First World War and Eliot’s

theory of the ever-present dead in “Tradition and the Individual Talent” resonate even more in Th e

Waste Land. As Lois A. Cuddy and David H. Hirsch note in their introduction to dd Critical Essays on

T. S. Eliot’s Th e Wasteland, the poem was fi rst seen as “an expression of negation, futility, and despair


over the emptiness of life after World War I” (1). Th at view continues; for example, in Writing War

in the Twentieth Century, Margot Norris analyzes the way in which the poem is haunted both by “the

poetic dead voices of the literary tradition [. . .] and the voiceless war dead” (51).

10. John T. Mayer in “Th e Waste Land: Eliot’s Play of Voices,” also sees such a valedictory element indd

the poem, in which the cacophony of diff erent voices in the poem allows the narrating protagonist to

“see life in a new way and to shape a new identity,” ultimately resulting in “a supreme epiphany that

redefi nes the meaning of life and death” (266).

11. “I am not Russian, I come from Lithuania, a genuine German.”

12. For example, John Xiros Cooper in a selection from T.S. Eliot and the Politics of Voice argues that e

though the textual discontinuity of the poem can be seen as “a critique of settled forms of coherence”

(233), ultimately the “closural construction” is “precarious” (234). Th is matter is also discussed in

Leavis’s article. Leavis, of course, wants to insist on the unity and organization of the poem.

13. Of course, as Jewel Spears Brooker and Joseph Bentley point out, there is no meaning in the “Da”

that the thunder makes, and there are several diff erent interpreters who give meaning to those sounds.

See chapter 7 in Reading Th e Waste Land: Modernism and the Limits of Interpretation.

14. See Brooker and Bentley for their detailed reading of these last lines. Th ey write that the “Philomela

myth is part of the web of allusions here, for Hieronymo does to himself what King Tereus did to

Philomela. Th e result of the fi rst mutilation is the use of terrible wrong in the service of music, but the

result of the second—Hieronymo’s—is the use of poetry in the service of madness and silence” (206).

I would stress Eliot’s use of an example that involves self-mutilation—a sign of the way in which the

artist’s creative compensation may be overshadowed by the toll the creative act takes on him.

15. For a reading of this piece that explores the relationship between writing and memory, see

Chapter 4 in Elena Gualtieri’s Virginia Woolf ’s Essays: Sketching the Past. Also see Karen Schiff ’s

essay “Moments of Reading and Woolf ’s Literary Criticism” for a discussion of the relation between

the “moments of being” discussed in “A Sketch of the Past” and the reading experience. Beth Carole

Rosenberg and Jeanne Dubino’s introduction to Virginia Woolf and the Essay discusses more generally y

the changing perspectives on Woolf ’s essays.

16. In “Refusing to Hit Back: Virginia Woolf and the Impersonality Question,” Lisa Low reads this

passage as Woolf ’s rejection of the “I”—an evacuation of the self that is consistent with my reading

of this piece.

17. See Liesl M. Olsen’s essay, “Virginia Woolf ’s ‘cotton wool of daily life’ ” for a reading of the role of

ordinary life in Woolf ’s texts. Olsen argues that “Woolf ’s modernism [. . .] is deeply invested, stylisti-

cally and ideologically, in representing the ordinary” (43)—the “non-being” (“Sketch” 70) from which

the shocks emerge.

18. Woolf fi rmly links solitude and creativity in her diary, claiming that “Six weeks in bed would

make a masterpiece of Moths [later Th e Waves]” (s Diary III 254).

19. Woolf writes, “Until I was in the forties—I could settle the date by seeing when I wrote To the

Lighthouse, but I am too casual here to bother to do it—the presence of my mother obsessed me. [. . . ]

when it was written, I ceased to be obsessed by my mother. I no longer hear her voice; I do not see her.

I suppose that I did for myself what psycho-analysts do for their patients” (“Sketch” 80–81).

20. Alex Zwerdling, for example, in Virginia Woolf and the Real World, calls Lily a “surrogate” for

Woolf (200).

21. Zwerdling reads Part III as refl ecting “the post-Victorian world Bloomsbury successfully created

for itself ” (195), but he also acknowledges that we cannot see “Woolf ’s novel as a liberation fable”

(200) because of Lily’s deep attachment to Mrs. Ramsey.

22. As Elizabeth Abel writes in Virginia Woolf and the Fictions of Psychoanalysis, Woolf confl ates “Lily’s

aesthetic and psychological tasks” (69).


23. As Oddvar Holmesland notes in Form as Compensation for Life, Woolf writes that it is “as if she

saw it clear for a second” (Lighthouse 209; quoted by Holmesland, 145).

24. See John Kucich’s article on “Olive Schreiner, Masochism, and Omnipotence: Strategies of a

Preoedipal Politics.”

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Masochistic Modernism

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