SEDUCTION AND SERVITUDE: THE EROTICS OF WOMEN’S CAPTIVITY NARRATIVES A Dissertation Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of Cornell University In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy by Susan Lillian Hall January 2008 © 2008 Susan Lillian Hall SEDUCTION AND SERVITUDE: THE EROTICS OF WOMEN’S CAPTIVITY NARRATIVES Susan Lillian Hall, Ph. D. Cornell University My dissertation considers narratives of Indian captivity and antebellum slavery in relation to erotic novels that depict fantasies of willing enslavement. While carefully evaluating the historical context of each narrative, I focus on the psychic dimensions of domination and submission in order to identify desire and agency and then to question when and if desire determines agency. The psychoanalytic model of the seduction fantasy proposes that the eroticization of and the desire for submission may be linked to a structural foundation of human subjectivity. By acknowledging the possibility of a subject’s masochistic relationship to the Other, I interrogate the psychic foundation of the desire for submission; such a desire raises an uncomfortable but necessary questioning of both the extent to which and the ways in which a captive is complicit in her servitude. I offer an innovative approach to captivity literature through the development of a transhistorical account of the psychical conditions of servitude by showing that the captive’s ability to act as an agent of her own will is subject to both external and internal constraints: the orders of her captors, various historical and material conditions, and her unconscious fantasies, especially her relationship to the psychical Other. My first two chapters examine Mary Rowlandson’s The Sovereignty and Goodness of God and Catharine Sedgwick’s Hope Leslie, respectively. I argue that the captives’ expressions of masochistic desire are linked to colonial political agendas concerning racial hierarchies and territorial expansion. Next I turn to Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl in which Jacobs endures masochistic suffering to move toward a political goal of freedom. Chapter four focuses on Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale; like Jacobs, Atwood demonstrates the perils of being objectified in servitude. Atwood also explores the constraints of a social and symbolic order that tends to limit expressions of a woman’s desire to fantasies envisioned by the male subject. The final chapter considers Pauline Réage’s Story of O; it presents the most dramatic and definite example of a consenting captive, allowing me to untangle the complicated relationship between femininity and masochism in psychoanalytic theory. BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH Susan Hall was born and raised in Pennsylvania. She graduated summa cum laude with a B.A. in English from Washington and Lee University in 1997, where she wrote an honors thesis on the works of Edith Wharton. She then traveled to New Zealand on a Fulbright scholarship, and she earned a M.A. in English with first class honours from the University of Auckland, where she completed a thesis on the works of Willa Cather and Katherine Mansfield. At Cornell University, she earned a M.A. in English in 2005 and a Ph.D. in English in January 2008. She currently lives in Lexington, VA, where she is a Visiting Assistant Professor of English at Washington and Lee University. iii This dissertation is dedicated to my family for all of the love and support that they have given me over the years. iv ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I gratefully acknowledge the advice, guidance, training, and support of various individuals who have made this work possible. As chair of my committee, Shirley Samuels provided valuable critical insight and a fine example of how to be an active researcher and a committed teacher. She also gave me the freedom to pursue this project, and she helped me to see the ways in which my various interests converged in my dissertation. Tracy McNulty sparked my interest in psychoanalysis, and her scholarship and teaching inspired me to take my research in a new direction. She was unfailingly generous with her time, and her input helped me to develop an original approach to captivity literature. Ellis Hanson offered detail feedback on each chapter of this dissertation, and his comments helped me to clarify both the readings and the arguments of my chapters. Throughout the development of this project, Laura Brown gave me insightful comments about the main issues of this dissertation, and her readings of various drafts were crucial to the construction of my argument about captivity literature. Lastly, I would like to thank Jim Warren, Professor of English at Washington and Lee University. Jim supervised my honors thesis on Edith Wharton, and, without his encouragement, I never would have majored in English. I would also like to thank Meghan Freeman and Rick Bogel who both provided instructive comments on chapter five. I would also like to thank the organizers and the participants in Cornell’s English Department Roundtable who read an earlier version of chapter five; again, I would like to thank Meghan for moderating this event and for providing such detailed, intelligent, and generous feedback on this chapter. The questions and feedback that I received during the roundtable clarified certain points of my argument, and I’m grateful to those who participated in this event. I’m also thankful to the members of Cornell’s Psychoanalysis Reading Group; among v those, I’d especially like to thank Daniel Wilson, Wyatt Bonikowski, and Becky Colesworthy. The lively and collegial conversations about Freud and Lacan greatly aided in my comprehension of psychoanalytic concepts. I would also like to thank Jade Ferguson who commented on an earlier draft of chapter three; Jade pushed me to articulate a compelling argument about this chapter. She also encouraged me to think carefully about the conceptual framework of my project, and I’m grateful for her interest and for the encouragement that she gave me. I presented an earlier version of chapter four at “The Spatial Unconscious: The Sixth Annual Psychoanalytic Symposium,” at the University of California, Berkeley, in May of 2006, and I received valuable insights at this symposium, which helped me to sharpen my argument in this chapter. Chapter four has been significantly revised and expanded from an earlier version, “Waiting Room: Empty Space in The Handmaid’s Tale,” which is forthcoming in (a): a journal of culture and the unconscious 6.2 (2006). I feel very lucky to have met such wonderful people during my years as a graduate student at Cornell. I know that I have lifelong friends among many of my graduate school colleagues, and my success in graduate school is due in no small measure to the love and support of my friends. A special thanks is due to George McCormick for all of the major and minor ways in which he has supported me during the writing of this dissertation. I’m very thankful for his intelligence, generosity, good nature, and most of all for his love. vi TABLE OF CONTENTS Biographical Sketch iii Dedication iv Acknowledgments v Introduction 1 Chapter 1: Seduction and Subversive Desire in Rowlandson’s 18 The Sovereignty and Goodness of God Chapter 2: Desire and Duty: The Exercise of Feminine Agency in 44 Sedgwick’s Hope Leslie Chapter3: Designs of Her Own: A Perilous Journey from Slave Girl 86 to Free Woman in Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl Chapter 4: What Does a Woman Want?: Desire and Seduction in 110 Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale Chapter 5: The Dissolution of the Dialectic of Domination and 144 Submission in Réage’s Story of O Coda: Eroticism and Servitude 186 Works Cited 189 vii INTRODUCTION Seduction and servitude, two main topics of women’s captivity literature, highlight the entanglement of desire and agency that play out in the female captive’s account of her captivity experience. Contemporary captivity literature, like the autobiographical accounts from earlier centuries, reveals that power relations between master and slave, captor and captive, are unstable and subject to contestation through inversions of authority and through the psychic relations between the two parties. In my study of captivity literature, I examine a wide range of captivity narratives in order to study seduction as a mode of amorous discourse, a strategy of subversion, and an unconscious fantasy. I consider autobiographical narratives that describe being held hostage in a foreign culture in relation to erotic novels that depict fantasies of willing enslavement. From a historical and generic standpoint, Mary Rowlandson’s The Sovereignty and Goodness of God is the foundational narrative of women’s captivity literature; it introduces the dynamic of domination and submission that recurs in later captivity texts by Catharine Sedgwick, Harriet Jacobs, Pauline Réage, and Margaret Atwood. Various theories of seduction stress the uncertain distribution of power between seducer and seduced, and the following terms associated with seduction demonstrate the ambiguity but also the richness of the concept: fantasy and reality, consent and coercion, and lastly, allurement and rape. The terms fluctuate between seemingly contradictory poles, but it is in the very oscillation between these poles that an opportunity arises to locate both the female captive’s exercise of agency and the expression of her desire. Through the use of seductive ploys, I show how captive female figures challenge patriarchal familial arrangements and racist social structures as they trouble, 1 or possibly even overturn, these oppressive systems. Thus, seduction presents itself as a possible mode of resistance for those who are slaves and captives. Contemporary captivity literature by writers like Pauline Réage and Margaret Atwood engages in a critique of the symbolic order understood as language and as the social rules governing co-existence.