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Imperial Masochism John Kucich. Imperial Masochism: British Fiction, Fantasy, and Social Class. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007. xi + 258 pp. $35.00
MUCH has been said in recent years about British imperialism, especially its assumptions about race and gender. In Imperial Masochism, John Kucich takes up one of the less examined aspects of imperialism: how the concept of masochism, or suffering as a method of control, contributed to imperialism's assumptions about class. Kucich, who first published several of the chapters in this book as articles, examines the connections among masochism, imperialism, and class in the work of late-nineteenth-century writers such as Robert Louis Stevenson, Olive Schreiner, Rudyard Kipling, and Joseph Conrad. These connections in late-nineteenth-century writing were important, since this was the period in which building support for imperialist projects became particularly necessary. As Kucich indicates, writers such as Kipling and Stevenson "helped foster a fundamentally masochistic ethos of British masculinity, in which the ability to absorb pain stoically-or even ecstatically-was greatly prized." Still, anti-imperialist and anti-bourgeois writers, such as Stevenson (who became anti-imperialist as a result of his travel in the South Seas) and Schreiner, were able to use masochism to resist discourse that assumed capitalist self-interest.
In laying out his argument about these connections, Kucich critiques a purely sexualized definition of masochism, in which pain and suffering is attached to oedipal conflict; instead, he uses a relational psychology definition, where "any pursuit of physical pain, suffering, or humiliation that generates phantasmic, omnipotent compensation for narcissistic trauma" qualifies as masochism. This definition, Kucich explains, has its limits (for example, "deferred gratification that facilitates achievement" does not qualify under this definition), but it also allows for a wide range of human behavior, including "humble acts" as masochistic, such as "deferring to a spouse so as to redirect ... annihilative rage." Further, Kucich lays out four categories of the "omnipotent fantasy" central to this definition of masochism ("fantasies of total control over others, fantasies about the annihilation of others, fantasies that maintain the omnipotence of others, and fantasies of solitary omnipotence") but is careful to point out that these four categories are not exclusive. By drawing on relational psychology, Kucich avoids reducing masochism to sexual acts, which is important, given the broader topic of imperialism and...