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Because early Restoration drama revels in the fetishization and objectification of newly introduced female actresses, masochistically represented male characters jar the spectator leading one to ask: why the male masochist in Restoration drama. By examining several plays within the context of a specifically sadomasochistic dialectic, the pathos underneath the "humor," specific psychological ramifications, as well as other aspects begin to emerge. Three early Restoration plays convey one or more male characters masochistically; Thomas ShadwelFs The Virtuoso, Thomas Otway's The Orphan, and Venice Preserved comprise the egregious trinity. In these works, playwrights utilize the male masochist figure to reinforce the paradigm of homosocial society controlled by young, virile, and witty males. Outside of the elite, empowered group males become Othered/feminized and, subsequently, masochistically represented. In order to explain the phenomenon's dramaturgical signification, I begin by examining the period's cultural mechanisms of oppression. Next I examine the ways in which Otway and Shadwell utilize these mechanisms on the stage as a means to further the empowered male's agenda. From socio-historical generalities to dramaturgical specifics, exegesis becomes possible.
Beginning with the milieu, sexual permissiveness marks courtly and, subsequently, all of early Restoration society, and early Restoration drama particularly reflects a frenzy of phallocentric lasciviousness. Mar)' Daly defines patriarchal lechery as phallic lust which fuses together obsession and aggression. According to Daly, "phallic lust begets phallocratie society, that is sadosociety, which is, in fact, pseudosociety," and she contends that "as obsession it specializes in genital fixation and fetishism . . . [and] as aggression it rapes, dismembers, and kills" (1). Phallic lust drives patriarchal society albeit usually covertly or through sublimation; however, this period overtly savors male sexual obsession and aggression, and the stage reflects this overt hostility.1
In addition, the paradigm shift away from cultural identification to individual subjectification constitutes an important factor in the sadomasochistic equation. Prior to the revolution, one's identity centers around cultural units of identity such as king, country, and religion. However, the act of regicide demythicizes the great-chain-of-being world view and provides ontological basis that, for the individual, anything is possible. In Restoration literature and drama this means that "the new subject becomes the location of the new drama of individual conscience" (Barker 70) or that art begins to reflect the Cartesian sense...