Masochism, literature, and aesthetic form

Drawing inspiration from Gilles Deleuze’s conceptualization of masochism as an obsession with a perfect form, this essay argues that masochism offers literary critics opportunities to reconsider questions of beauty and form in literature. I use John Keats’s “Lamia,” Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, and James Joyce’s “The Dead” as case studies to examine how literary works incorporate masochism as a means of reflecting on their own creative processes—and how they would impact their readers. Masochism in literature first helps authors to conceive beautiful forms. The imperfections of these forms, in turn, allows the artists to re-create or revise those original forms to come up with better versions. In this process, texts about masochism open up complex affective dimensions of pleasure, pain, beauty, destruction, and slowness.