Michelle A. Masse "In the Name of Love: Women, Masochism and the Gothic." Reading Women Writing.
This book is essential reading for scholars and students in the fields of gender studies, critical, psychoanalytic, and novel theory, as well as Victorian and contemporary fiction
Michelle A. Massé's In the "Name of Love: Women, Masochism, and the Gothic" is a response to two questions posed explicitly—Are Gothic novels masochistic? and "Why do feminists still use Freud?"—as well as to two implicit questions—What is the etiology of masochism? and What is the prognosis?
To Massé, certain Gothic texts "internalize and replicate the dynamics of oppression": Pauline Réage's The Story of O and Daphne du Maurier's Rebecca present "object relations that reproduce the beating triangle" in Freud's "A Child Is Being Beaten." (Even their readers become complicit.) Other Gothic texts such as Jane Eyre, Atwood's Lady Oracle, and Naylor's Linden Hills resist masochism by playing out the trauma caused by the prohibition of female autonomy (and therefore of identity in the real world), through repetition whose function it is to recognize that trauma. The Gothic can be self-sabotaging: it points to its own eventual cure. The answer, then, to Massé's first question is yes, only if we grant that works that repudiate "masochistic fantasy" are masochistic.
Massé assumes that masochism is a cultural construction, produced primarily by Western culture's gender arrangements (which the Gothic reflects, shapes, and resists)
Paperback, 1992.