Perversely pleasurable history of pain
Of course, not all the pain (or pleasure) described here is of the self-administered variety. Torments of quite remarkable ingenuity were routinely applied by State and Church in order to control the unruly. These, too, are documented here: this is not a book for the squeamish. Central to its argument is a distinction the author draws between Catholic and Protestant attitudes to suffering, with the concept of martyrdom as a route to sainthood being, one might infer, an essential part of pre-Reformation tradition, whereas by the mid-seventeenth century, a certain unease at the notion of self-mortification as synonymous with sanctity is apparent from contemporary accounts – most of them, it has to be said, anti-Catholic in tone. All this is authoritatively argued, with recourse to a wide range of material, some of it scurrilous; in deprecating the alleged excesses of Catholic saints, seventeenth century Protestant commentaries often verged on the pornographic.
Having dealt at length with the relationship between religion and suffering, Yamamoto-Wilson then moves on to what – for this reader at least – seems the most interesting part of his book, which is an analysis of the changing role of women in early modern discourse about pain and pleasure. Traditional concepts of female submissiveness and stoicism in the face of suffering are here subverted by the notion – popularised through the conventions of courtly love – of female ‘cruelty’. From this time on, the author argues, the language of love became inextricably entwined with the language of suffering, and the way was paved for the emergence of all the cruel mistresses, femme fatales and Venuses in furs with which modern literature, and society, has become all-too familiar. The final chapter, entitled ‘The Emergence of the Dominatrix’, offers a beguiling, post-Freudian textual analysis of a notorious passage in the writings of St Jerome. Having read it, and the chapters leading up to it, in this absorbing and thoughtful history of human society’s ‘special relationship’ to pain, one can never regard devotional literature – or indeed, any literature – in quite the same way again.
A.C. Koning
Pain, Pleasure and Perversity (Ashgate 2013) by John Yamamoto-Wilson is a fine book. It is a work of considerable learning and is equipped with a meticulous bibliographical apparatus as befits a contribution to scholarly discourse. It is clear that Yamamoto-Wilson’s arguments are based on extensive reading in primary and secondary sources and his conclusions are finely nuanced. I do, however, think that this is a book not without appeal to the general reader with an interest in the history of ideas and religion, which is the context in which I offer these thoughts.
Yamamoto-Wilson subjects early modern translations of several key texts to close intertextual scrutiny. He notes the contrast between Protestant/Northern and Catholic/Southern attitudes to pain and pleasure. The discussions of contemporary and near-contemporary translations of stoic and epicurean texts, hagiographies including St Jerome’s Life of Saint Paul the Hermit and martyrologies are particularly fascinating. He also analyses texts as diverse as Samuel Butler’s Hudibras, John Bunyan’s works, Cervantes’s Don Quixote and Mary Wroth’s Urania. He then goes on to show that normative readings from the earlier part of the century are gradually extended to include sexualised dimensions by the end of the century. In particular he points out that whilst references to almost the entire range of human sexual practice can be identified in texts from the written record back to antiquity, references to masochism are not seen until the 18th century.
He notes “As the century progressed the focus of the debate. . .moved away from theological arguments about the nature and necessity of suffering and the relative merits of penance and repentance, towards discrediting the idea that lustful desires could be driven out by punishing the body.” (p79) And a little later we read “Slowly and by degrees, the idea that self-chastisement does not work because of the way in which Catholics perform it started to give way to the idea that it cannot work because of its very nature.” (p94)
But he is careful not to read back into the 17th century an over-determined psychoanalytical perspective, whilst providing the reader with an appropriate context for the understanding of the development of ideas about sado-masochism. In particular Yamamoto-Wilson makes use of an approach to sado-masochism as formulated in the work of Katherine Fowkes. (“…although it is critical that the masochist’s suffering appears to stem from another, the pain is actually self-inflicted.”) Despite the fact that these comments of Fowkes set in a Lacaninan framework are made in relation to the role of supernatural agency in mainstream comedic film, the general point is well made. If that other is God, then God is only the cause of the suffering insofar as He “engages with the repentant sinner in a covenantal agreement, the terms of which are defined by the sinners’s own sense of what constitutes fair payment in restitution of the sins he or she has committed.” (Yamamoto-Wilson p43)
Yamamoto-Wilson is a considerable linguist and the section discussing the intertextuality of Cervantes’s Don Quixote and Ribadeneira’s Life of Ignatius Loyola is full of interest. Referring to the works of the protestant writer, Edward Stillingfleet, Yamamoto-Wilson points out that “by linking Ignatius with the fictional Quixote, [Stillingfleet] deconstructs him as an embodiment of an ancient tradition and recasts him as a fool trying to turn the mythic past into a magical present, in which delusion, not grace, transforms sufferings and humiliations into glory and splendour.” (p111)
Yamamoto-Wilson also examines the linkage particularly in Catholic discourse between self-mortification and cruelty to others, “if true kindness to one’s own soul is best expressed by severity and harshness, then true kindness to others must take the same form.” (p132) From a modern perspective this certainly looks like a perverse interpretation of the compassion we are enjoined to extend to others by the New Testament. Yamamoto-Wilson explains this incongruity by “the Catholic tendency to stress compassion in terms of the forgiveness of God for his fallen creatures contrasts with the Protestant emphasis on the compassion of humans for each other…” (p141) But there seems to be a considerable gulf between belief and practice in each case.
If there is a criticism to be made of Yamamoto-Wilson’s thesis, it is that those of us who have been brought up in the Western tradition are already inscribed to some extent with the dichotomies he anatomises. So even at this remove an element of bias within the schematics he advances (penance/repentance, Catholic/Protestant, South/North) can creep into the analysis.
For example in a nice passage towards the end of the book he states “for Protestants, the question of whether one was indeed among the elect was a source of continual anxiety and soul-searching, Catholics simply had to keep the accounts straight in their reckoning with God and, if they fell a bit behind in this world, they could catch up in Purgatory in the next.” (p160)
But for someone who was brought up as a Roman Catholic this seems to me to neglect the jeopardy posed by mortal sin as taught in the catechism. I’m not sure what constituted a mortal sin in the 17th century, but to a mid-20th century schoolboy the scope of mortal sin seemed alarmingly wide. And to die encumbered with a mortal sin meant eternal damnation. So there was still anxiety, even though that anxiety could be assuaged by means of confession, contrition and absolution. But perhaps I am just exemplifying here the old joke about the difference between the Protestant atheist and the Catholic atheist.
Finally the chapters on gender and sexual politics have much to recommend them. Yamamoto-Wilson discusses the position of women like Aphra Behn and Mary Wroth in the context of the possibilities available to woman (writers) for self-actualisation. In contrast he also discusses the ways in which the Protestant subject could be gendered as a female – particularly in the writings of the early Quakers who scandalously allowed women to speak at their meetings.
Other reviewers have focussed on the content, the excellent background of research and attention to primary texts, and the contribution this text makes to the study of 17th C attitudes to pain and suffering. I would like to focus on a different aspect of this work. Yamamoto-Wilson is examining multiple versions of texts with a complex interaction of translation and adaptation. Much of the variation between these texts is explained in terms of the differing attitudes to pain and suffering in different areas of continental Europe and in Britain, and especially in relation to the different religious backgrounds of the writers. In other words this is a text packed with data and discussion which powerfully illuminates the biases and uses of translation as an ideological tool. This book should be fascinating reading for anyone with an interest or background in translation studies, and particularly interesting to people concerned with the role of ideological manipulation in translation.
Trespassers Will
Breaking new ground in history of sexuality
John Yamamoto-Wilson is an expert on the vast, but largely hidden, influence of Spanish Catholic writing on Protestant England in the 17th century. In this book, he ventures into a larger field, in the company of many psychologists and historians of religion who in recent decades have focused on the latent or overt erotic dimensions of religious literature.
Drawing on the resources of the great library in Cambridge he has gathered fascinating material on 17th century conceptions of pain. Michel Foucault saw this century as a threshold in the growth of modern insight into sexuality. Yamamoto-Wilson confirms that a major shift in consciousness, mirrored in polemical religious literature, took place in this period.
At the start of the century, people were at ease with inflicting pain on others as just chastisement and on themselves as penance. Relish in public executions or in the exquisite agonies of martyrs was normal and natural. By century’s end, however, a modern taboo on pain was put in place, and the infringement of that taboo could be identified as a sexual transgression, both by pornographers and by moralists.
The increased knowingness about sexual perversity supplied Protestant polemic against Catholic attitudes with new ammunition. Blind obedience, self-abasement, and self-flagellation became discredited by association with sexual masochism, and inquisitorial cruelty was no longer denounced merely as unjust but also as kinky. Becoming self-conscious, religious authors toned down their lurid accounts of pain and humiliation inflicted on self and others.
Sadism and masochism are presumably as old as humanity, though they are named after two moderns, and though they became the topic of scientific investigation only with Krafft-Ebing, Havelock Ellis, and Freud. The author mentions ‘the broad consensus that “most sexual practices have been known and enjoyed throughout history, but masochism is a rare exception which spread through Western society during the early modern period” (Roy Baumeister).’ Such stolid declarations raise a troubling objection to the psychological probing of ancient texts. It is true that though delight in cruelty was always known as a perversion, the idea that surrender to a dominator who inflicts pain could be a source of perverse delight rarely surfaced.
But are the texts silent because we have not put the right questions? When Junichiro Tanizaki projected masochistic fantasies back into medieval Japanese history, was he indulging in perverse anachronism, or lighting up a discreet strand in the sources? Yamamoto-Wilson brings out some strands that are irrefutable. Already in the 15th century Pico della Mirandola wrote on erotic flagellation, perhaps referring to his own behavior. Reticence was imperative, for a German treatise of 1639 warns that such an abomination would merit being burnt to death.
Yet once one is clued in to the psychology of masochism old texts reveal new meanings, opening an extraordinarily rich field of inquiry. As the author observes, ‘masochism is not discussed prior to the early modern period, not because it is nowhere, but because it is everywhere.’ The utter dependency of a newborn child, and the final abandonment of one¡¯s life to the gods in death, show how radically surrender to a higher power marks human existence.
The first clear discussion of masochism in English, in 1655, refers to someone who ‘took a singular pleasure in being whipped, even unto blood.’ But we can surely find insights into sadomasochism that go far beyond such plodding observations if we read between the lines of the Elizabethan and Jacobean playwrights, who produced a vast theater of cruelty.
Straining at the limits of his remit to study religious texts, Yamamoto-Wilson finds in Thomas Nashe, his fellow Cambridge-man, a rich mine of sadomasochistic play, and in Mary Wroth’s ‘Urania’ (1621), ‘an unabashed paean to the erotics of suffering and cruelty in all their forms.’ He allays feminist scruples by the astute observation that even the scenes of masochistic submission are subverting the notions of dominance and submission in complex ways.
The religious literature cited has just as many astonishing moments, beginning with Tertullian’s laughter at the sufferings of the damned (echoed by Richard Baxter: ‘the God of mercy himself shall laugh at them’) and St Jerome’s lurid account of a dominatrix, which all his translators toned down. But the author is less concerned with a theological critique of this rhetorical heritage than with its anthropological texture. He is primarily a literary critic, and this discipline has its own compass. There is a light sprinkling of Freud and Lacan, but thankfully no attempt to police the texts by any modern orthodoxy.
I hope that Yamamoto-Wilson goes on to tackle one of the great writers of the period, Webster, say, or Donne, along the lines of enquiry here opened up. A modern knowingness about sadomasochism brought to bear on these explosively rich authors might uncover unsuspected forms of knowledge in them that would nourish a fascinating dialogue between the 21st century and the 17th.
Joseph O’Leary