Provoking Pleasure: Erotic Dominance and Submission in the Early American Novel

Helen M Hunt, Purdue University

Abstract

Provoking Pleasure challenges the long-standing view that early American novels—particularly seduction novels—do not represent women’s erotic pleasure positively. For some critics, these novels restrict women’s pleasure by directing erotic desire exclusively towards marriage, punishing women who pursue erotic satisfaction outside of marriage and minimizing the importance of pleasure within it. For others, these novels, at best, condemn a coercive patriarchal system that consistently precludes women’s erotic encounters or rapidly closes them down. My project, however, argues that many of these novels do advance positive representations of female sexuality. They do so by representing the arousing thrills of erotic dominance and submission and by elevating women’s pleasure to a central concern. My project demonstrates the dynamics of dominance and submission within early American novels in two major ways. It illustrates, on the one hand, how women might exercise dominance while maintaining their femininity. It also shows, on the other, how these texts portray submission as active, strategic, pleasurable, and empowering for female characters—even when these submissive women live within a patriarchal society. Hence, my dissertation challenges us to reconsider both women’s submissive pleasure and the nature of domination; it also demonstrates the multi-dimensional ways early American novels represent women’s erotic pleasure, even as problems of violence, incest, patrimony, and coercion complicate that pleasure. Provoking Pleasure also contributes to recent work in feminist and queer theory that has broadened our understanding of eroticism to better account for the vicissitudes of pleasure and affect. It does so by theorizing dominance and submission as positive forms of erotic pleasure and empowerment for women in these early American novels. As such, Provoking Pleasure argues that the erotic dynamics of interpersonal power exchange become a vital tool for literary scholars in reconsidering representations of female sexuality.

Degree

Ph.D.

Advisors

Lukasik, Purdue University.

Subject Area

Literature|Womens studies|Gender studies

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