Wanda's Endings: Transforming the Discourse of Masochism

Abstract

I want to show that the scenario of male masochism as displayed in Leopold von Sacher-Masoch's novella has less to do with the actual pleasure that is felt during physical punishment than with the prescriptive construction of a position for the female subject that is inspired by the iconographic tradition of Venus paintings. The scenes in the novella which include the African servants provide a metonymical tie to the iconography of the cruel woman prescribed by the masochistic fantasy. In my reading of the text, however, the scenes that include the African servants mark, at the same time, the exit of the cruel woman from the masochistic scenario and the entrance into the psychic economy of sadism which follows a completely different dynamics and which disempowers the male masochist and his control over Venus in Furs. When Rümelin as Wanda von Sacher-Masoch begins to write novellas herself, her cruel women no longer subject themselves to the space and location afforded to them within the male fantasy.