The Shattering of the Self: Violence, Subjectivity, and Early Modern Texts.(Book Review)

Publication: CLIO

Publication Date: 22-MAR-03

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COPYRIGHT 2003 Indiana University, Purdue University of Fort Wayne

By Cynthia Marshall. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002. xii + 216 pages.

A welcome counterbalance to a literary criticism increasingly devoted to tracing the emergence of modern subjectivities, Cynthia Marshall's The Shattering of the Self argues that early modern texts frequently deploy and ask readers to take pleasure in images of self-dissolution. Ranging over a variety of early modern texts and genres, from the lovesick Petrarchan sonnet sequences of the 1590s, to John Foxe's lurid accounts of martyrdom in the Acts and Monuments (1583), to the theater of Shakespeare and Ford, Marshall's text traces the early modern period's fascination with the negation of the individual subject, a fascination that haunts and problematizes narratives, literary critical and historical, that chart the rise of an increasingly autonomous and self-contained individual. Yet The Shattering of the Self does more than expose, simply and repeatedly, a fundamentally fragmented self, imaged forth in the texts it examines. Instead, Marshall asks how readers and audiences might come to find such dissolutions of the self enjoyable.

Indebted to Lacan's placement of language in the gap between the unconscious and the subject (see Marshall, "Psychoanalyzing the Prepsychoanalytic Subject," PMLA 117 [October 2002]: 1208), Marshall's analysis explores the textual and theatrical encounters that produce or depend upon self-shattering pleasure. The name for this pleasure is, of course, primary masochism, and the first chapter of The Shattering of the Self goes to great lengths to explain exactly how this concept differs from simply reveling in self-punishment or victimhood. In the course of charting how Freud ultimately and laboriously comes around to the notion of primary masochism (36-41), and how Lacan links this primal masochism to signification and language acquisition (52), Marshall's opening chapter provides a compelling account of the limitations of historicist literary studies, Greenblattian new historicism in particular: "although Greenblatt sees the subject as challenged and even imperiled by the existence of shaping forces, he does...

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