The role of psychology, the relationship with culture, and a profile of today’s main cultural psychologies (and pathologies).

8. Disgrace is read in its relation to numerous unacknowledged narrative influences, including Richardsons Clarissa and Tolstoys Resurrection.

Surrealism’s apparent hostility towards the novel was directed more towards the nineteenth-century realist tradition, whereas the movement was strongly attracted to the Gothic novel through its affinity with Romanticism and the celebration of the imagination. It looked back, too, to the pre-rational era of medievalism, celebrating motifs such as the castle, magic, and the supernatural, often framed within the literary device of the narrative journey of discovery, frequented by unnatural events and as exemplified in the writings of Ann Radcliffe and Matthew Lewis. This chapter finds its focus in the writings of three women: Ithell Colquhoun’s Goose of Hermogenes (1961), an alchemical-erotic journey of self-discovery; Valentine Penrose’s Erzsébet Báthory: La comtesse sanglante (1962), a poetic reinterpretation of a woman whose bloody career ended with her immurement in her own castle; and the poet Joyce Mansour’s Les gisants satisfaits (1958), a savagely erotic reworking of the trope of the persecuted woman. All three focus on the expression of the experience of the female body, with a particular emphasis upon the sensory in the work of Penrose and Mansour, while Colquhoun’s concern lies ultimately in spiritual development. All three refigure the model of the Gothic in post-war surrealist writing.

Sex-linked killing is based upon a combination of factors. Michael Apter uses the English killer Neville Heath to emphasize one of these: the irresistible lure of excitement. It is unclear what factors in life led Heath down this pathological route. A bomber pilot in World War II, Heath was reckless and disorganized, exemplifying not just sensation seeking but also sexual sadism. It would appear that Heath’s level of brain arousal had a tendency to be well below the optimal level for comfort. Therefore, he engaged in a range of daredevil reckless activities in an attempt to elevate arousal. Tall, charming and handsome, Heath exemplifies where sexual desire can combine with a desire to elevate arousal. Despite admitting that the evidence suggested his guilt, Heath reported having no memory of the killings, pointing to the possibility of dissociation. Heath was judged as sane and fit to plead and was executed.

This chapter reviews what is known about the interpersonal style of people with antisocial personality and psychopathy, concluding that antisocial individuals have a cold, vindictive and hostile interpersonal style and that they lack the motivation to engage in an empathic way with others. The triarchic view of human selfhood– the self as social actor, as motivated agent and as autobiographical author – is introduced as a framework within which the antisocial individual might be understood from a first-person perspective. So-called dark traits are considered, particularly their role in sexual offending and sexual sadism. It is suggested the ‘dark traits’ construct might be expanded to include paranoia, moral disengagement, spitefulness and greed. The concept of ‘emotion goals’ is introduced and considered in relation to a quadripartite typology of violence that sees violence as reflecting appetitive versus aversive motivation interacting with an impulsive versus controlled dimension.

Building on Gustavo Pellón’s classification of Spanish-American novels as documentary novels (novela testimonio), historical novels, detective novels, and marginalized novels, this chapter places them into two groups of psychoanalytic categories: voyeurism/exhibitionism and sadism/masochism, that influence the identity of the subject. The schematic voyeurism-exhibitionism/sadism-masochism in the novels explored in this chapter places focus on concepts that imply an Ego placing its gaze on the world; it acknowledges that we are in constant repetition, learning how to deal with the levels of violence and pain, which, in essence, is translated into how to deal with the Eros and Death drives. Examining Rosario Tijeras by Jorge Franco as a case study, the chapter explores the applicability of psychoanalysis as it applies to these texts and considers some of the other categories of novels that emerge from this larger, complex cultural context of Latin American literature.

While the first two-thirds of the book focus on the immiserating aspects of bondage, this fourth part recognises its pleasures. Looking back to the trope of the slave or soldier of love in Roman elegy as a rejection of the values of Roman imperialism, this chapter shows how relations of domination, bondage and resistance have infused amorous lyric for two millennia. It examines another lacuna – the missing foot in elegiac distich – in relation to castration, and the effeminisation of the lyric speaker. In Ovid’s elegies the female beloved is momentarily the triumphator who drives her captive lover before her like a slave, before the domination of the female beloved by the male speaker is reasserted through sadistic violence. An examination of Marlowe’s prosody shows how he re-queers this speaker, intermingling militarism and eroticism, masculine heroism and effeminate otium, paradoxically challenging the authority of Augustan and Tudor sexual norms through failure.

In Masoch’s novel Venus in Furs, three ‘Negresses’ magically appear at the moment that the speaker signs away his legal rights to life. This fantasy is an example of how actual bondage and historical slavery shape the sadomasochistic imagination. This chapter traces that imagination through poems by Algernon Charles Swinburne and Gerard Manley Hopkins, written at the height of Victorian sexology. It looks at the metaphor of the plough or the ploughman in relation to bondage and Hopkins’s class politics, and at the flagellation fantasies in Swinburne’s poetry (including his juvenile compositions), and the way that those poems fetishise the foot, mouth and ‘bum’. It discusses the theatricality and suspension of agency involved in masochism in relation to specific examples of colonial violence, to challenge the idea that the voluntary submission to constraint in radical sex practices can undermine forms of social domination.

This chapter explores how Charles Darwin’s ideas about structural and functional anomalies in plants, animals and humans inspired the new Gothic monsters to be found in the work of Grant Allen, H. G. Wells, Robert Louis Stevenson, Bram Stoker and Arthur Machen. It traces the ways in which these writers reimagined human genealogies in light of evolutionary biology, materialism and Darwinist criminal anthropology. Sadistic criminals whose degenerate minds and bodies threatened civilised society, and atavistic flesh-eating plants whose natural ‘criminality’ was coaxed out by sadistic experimental scientists, are part of a significant reimagining of both biological and cultural history in the last half of the century. Indeed, through these types of biological monsters, Gothic writers challenged some of the most cherished ideas that Victorians held about their cultural heritage. Knowledge about human descent, the biology of human and animal abnormality, and criminal compulsions that dwelt in the ‘protoplasm’, largely negated the ideals of the age of chivalry – the medieval origins of the higher-order values that supposedly defined the human as exceptional.