Love's Whipping Boy

Since September 11, 2001, scholars have addressed with renewed fervor the central role of violence in American culture. With Love's Whipping Boy Elizabeth Barnes advances the conversation by reaching back to nineteenth-century literature, mapping an essential national dialectic between violence and sentiment. Drawing on Sigmund Freud's theories of sadism and masochism, Barnes posits that U.S. Protestant theology contributes to the white male's internalization of both aggressor and victim identities, which in turn enables democratic involvement through the promotion of empathy. Historically, a whipping boy received the punishment warranted by a young sovereign-to-be. Nineteenth-century literature contains any number of Christlike disciplined surrogates, but Barnes observes how the disciplining father figures, much like Abraham when ordered to sacrifice Isaac, “are recast ... as the sufferers of the violence they deploy, thereby potentially redeeming violence itself from scandalous ends” (p. 7, emphasis in original). Within this salvific structure, the murderous father and the sacrificial son are one, punishment serves as the deepest expression of love, and aggression is the surest sign of empathy

Aesthetics · Art · Democracy · Dialectic · Empathy · Literature · Political science · Psychoanalysis · Punishment (psychology · Sacrifice · Sentimentality · Sociology · Theology · American Constitutional Law and Politics · Law · Philosophy · Psychology · Social Psychology