Julia Jarcho, a playwright and associate professor at Brown University, delves into the fascinating link between writing and masochism in her new book. She discusses Freud's concepts of pleasure from pain, illustrating how narratives transform personal traumas into deeper explorations of desire. Jarcho examines the self-effacement seen in Ibsen and James, as well as love triangles through mimetic theory. She also analyzes the complexities of masochism in motherhood and how these themes reveal significant insights into societal challenges and individual identities.
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insights INSIGHT
Masochism as Narrative
Masochism involves taking pleasure from pain, particularly through narrative.
It's about telling stories about the pleasure derived from pain.
insights INSIGHT
Desire's Failure in Masochism
Masochistic desire is unreliable and subject to failure.
Pain becomes a way to manage and contain this failing desire.
insights INSIGHT
Masochistic Fantasy and Failure
In Gateskill's story, the masochist's failure of desire is a key part of the fantasy.
This failure creates a cycle of wanting because gratification is never achieved.
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In "Throw Yourself Away: Writing and Masochism," Julia Jarcho explores the intricate connection between the desire to write and masochistic tendencies. Through insightful analyses of literary and dramatic works, Jarcho challenges conventional understandings of masochism as a pleasure-making system. She examines how masochism reworks and revitalizes failures of desire, offering a nuanced perspective on authorship and the creative process. The book delves into the complexities of masochism as a response to harmful social structures, presenting a critical examination of both masochism and the act of writing itself. Jarcho's work ultimately reconsiders how writing and subjects are affected by the excesses and depths of masochistic desire.
Venus in Furs
Leopold von Sacher-Masoch
Leopold von Sacher-Masoch's "Venus in Furs" is a novella that explores themes of dominance, submission, and sexual power dynamics. Published in 1870, the story follows the relationship between Severin, a man who enjoys being dominated, and Wanda, a woman who wields considerable power over him. The novella's exploration of masochism and sadomasochism is groundbreaking for its time, and it has had a lasting impact on literature and psychology. The complex relationship between Severin and Wanda is central to the narrative, highlighting the psychological and emotional aspects of their interactions. The book's influence extends beyond its literary merit, as the term "masochism" is derived from the author's name.
Coldness and Cruelty
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Willis
In Throw Yourself Away: Writing and Masochism(Cambridge University Press, 2024), Julia Jarcho proposes that the desire to write is inextricably bound up with masochistic desires. In a series of readings that engage American and European works of fiction, drama, and theory from the late nineteenth through the early twenty-first centuries, Jarcho tests the limits of masochism as a pleasure-making economy. Reading Henry James, Henrik Ibsen, Mary Gaitskill, and Adrienne Kennedy alongside Sigmund Freud, Gilles Deleuze, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Leo Bersani and others, Jarcho investigates the ways in which masochism rewrites and reinvigorates failures of desire, which critics have otherwise thought of as dead-ending masochism. Jarcho asks particularly difficult questions of masochism as a response to injurious social structures, which yield less uniformly white, searching, and uneasy views of both masochism and authorship. Throw Yourself Away reconsiders how writing and subjects are undone by the excesses and recesses of masochistic desire, which keeps the prospect of pleasure so painfully, so deliciously at bay.
New Books in Sex, Sexuality, and Sex Work 
