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The Masochistic Pleasures of Sentimental Literature

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From: Legacy
Date: 20021031
Author:Maddock, Elizabeth

By Marianne Noble. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000. 258 pp. $57/50/$19.95 paper.

When Harriet Beecher Stowe famously urged readers to "feel right" as a mode of political response to her novel Uncle Tom's Cabin, she was undoubtedly not referring to the feelings reported by patients of Freud and Krafft-Ebing, who used the novel as a source for sadomasochistic fantasies and masturbatory pleasures. Yet for Marianne Noble, the response of such readers indicates that they have indeed rightly felt the masochistic erotics central to sentimentalism's power and appeal. In identifying ...

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