Madame Thistlethwaite's Chastisement Academy and Corset-Parlour
September 9, 2013 12:45 PM Subscribe
A side conversation in this otherwise serious thread is about how Victorian sexuality was actually pretty extensive. And now I'm interested in learning more. You know, for research.
Recommend anything? Non-fiction and fiction resources of all rating levels welcome. Mostly anything that will help me best understand the essential ... flavor ... of what naughty people were doing in drawing rooms.
Recommend anything? Non-fiction and fiction resources of all rating levels welcome. Mostly anything that will help me best understand the essential ... flavor ... of what naughty people were doing in drawing rooms.
And there's The Making of the Modern Body, and Thomas Laqueur's work in general, which is very much academic litcrit/cult-stud.
posted by holgate at 1:16 PM on September 9, 2013 [1 favorite]
posted by holgate at 1:16 PM on September 9, 2013 [1 favorite]
If you're interested in academic nonfiction, I really like what I've read by Lesley Hall on this period; she tends to be reasonable and skeptical about some of the wilder myths. Here's her bibliography on Victorian sexuality and her publications on the Victorians.
May be worth looking at this one:
Michael Mason, The Making of Victorian Sexuality, and The Making of Victorian Sexual Attitudes, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994
posted by Jeanne at 1:27 PM on September 9, 2013
May be worth looking at this one:
Michael Mason, The Making of Victorian Sexuality, and The Making of Victorian Sexual Attitudes, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994
posted by Jeanne at 1:27 PM on September 9, 2013
Best answer: Well, my goodness. When I was just a little thing, I used to brazenly go into Pickwick Bookstores (before they became B.Dalton Pickwick) and purchase books about sex and sexy books. Among them was the collection "My Secret Life" which I really thought was just some made up bs by someone who wanted to paint his (boring-ish, repetitive) fantasy life with a literary stroke. Later, though, I saw that the collected works were taken seriously as a look into one man's experience.
posted by janey47 at 1:28 PM on September 9, 2013
posted by janey47 at 1:28 PM on September 9, 2013
Oh, also The Pearl, which I vaguely recall was less repetitive than My Secret Life, but I can't guarantee a thing, it was so long ago.
posted by janey47 at 1:30 PM on September 9, 2013 [1 favorite]
posted by janey47 at 1:30 PM on September 9, 2013 [1 favorite]
Fiction-wise, I'd try The Crimson Petal and the White or Fingersmith. They're novels, and there's more to their plots than sex. But sex and the sex/porn industry plays a central role in each.
posted by Diablevert at 1:43 PM on September 9, 2013 [1 favorite]
posted by Diablevert at 1:43 PM on September 9, 2013 [1 favorite]
You might be interested in:
Pleasure Bound: Victorian Sex Rebels and the New Eroticism
Imperial Leather: Race, Sex, and Gender in the Colonial Contest (only partially about the Victorians but good nevertheless)
posted by WidgetAlley at 1:57 PM on September 9, 2013 [1 favorite]
Pleasure Bound: Victorian Sex Rebels and the New Eroticism
Imperial Leather: Race, Sex, and Gender in the Colonial Contest (only partially about the Victorians but good nevertheless)
posted by WidgetAlley at 1:57 PM on September 9, 2013 [1 favorite]
There's also Fern Riddell, whose Twitter feed is something of a trawl through this field—lots of juicy links—and whose book will be out early next year. (And she hasn't even finished her PhD yet.)
posted by lapsangsouchong at 2:02 PM on September 9, 2013
posted by lapsangsouchong at 2:02 PM on September 9, 2013
Seconding Hall and Mason, along with Lucy Bland's Banishing the Beast (which has some truly horrifying anecdotes, so not if you want "juicy"). An old classic is Steven Marcus' The Other Victorians, but it has some issues (it over-relies on porn to make its generalizations, for starters). I'd avoid Ronald Pearsall's The Worm in the Bud, which is showing its age even more than Marcus. Peter Gay's multivolume The Bourgeois Experience: Victoria to Freud has a ton about sex, with a lot of primary documents, although there are questions about the way in which he extrapolates from his data. Louis Crompton's Byron and Greek Love, although a little dated, is a readable introduction to 19th-c. attitudes to homosexuality. For Victorian art and sexuality, see Lynda Nead's Myths of Sexuality, Alison Smith's The Victorian Nude, and the Tate Britain exhibition catalog Exposed: The Victorian Nude. Serious studies of Victorian prostitution include Judith Walkowitz's Prostitution and Victorian Society and Paula Bartley's Prostitution; see also Walkowitz's City of Dreadful Delight, about sexual sensationalism.
At the risk of self-linking, I briefly discuss Victorian "code" for sex in mainstream fiction and poetry here. To find Victorians representing sex/desire in action, see the following:
Dante Gabriel Rossetti, "Jenny" (long dramatic monologue by a john who has hired a prostitute for the evening, only for her to fall asleep instead; he winds up thinking about the moral implications of what he's doing); "Nuptial Sleep" from The House of Life (sonnet about postcoital bliss)
A. C. Swinburne, "Anactoria" (lesbian sadomasochism), "The Leper" (necrophilia), "Hermaphroditus" (eroticism and androgyny)
George Meredith, Modern Love (sequence of sixteen-line sonnets about an imploding marriage)
George Eliot, Daniel Deronda (no, nobody ever says "SEX," but Gwendolen Harleth's fear of the erotic and Grandcourt's sexual sadism are both very much on display--from a Victorianist's POV, Eliot is one of the most explicit novelists...)
George Moore's A Drama in Muslin and Esther Waters.
Victorian religious fiction can get amazingly explicit when it feels like it. As a purely random example, Robert Buchanan's The New Abelard, which I read a few days back, is eye-poppingly overt (again, by the standards of Victorian "code") about women's lust. (No, the eponymous protagonist does not suffer Abelard's fate. Bit of a let-down, if you ask me...)
posted by thomas j wise at 3:34 PM on September 9, 2013 [7 favorites]
At the risk of self-linking, I briefly discuss Victorian "code" for sex in mainstream fiction and poetry here. To find Victorians representing sex/desire in action, see the following:
Dante Gabriel Rossetti, "Jenny" (long dramatic monologue by a john who has hired a prostitute for the evening, only for her to fall asleep instead; he winds up thinking about the moral implications of what he's doing); "Nuptial Sleep" from The House of Life (sonnet about postcoital bliss)
A. C. Swinburne, "Anactoria" (lesbian sadomasochism), "The Leper" (necrophilia), "Hermaphroditus" (eroticism and androgyny)
George Meredith, Modern Love (sequence of sixteen-line sonnets about an imploding marriage)
George Eliot, Daniel Deronda (no, nobody ever says "SEX," but Gwendolen Harleth's fear of the erotic and Grandcourt's sexual sadism are both very much on display--from a Victorianist's POV, Eliot is one of the most explicit novelists...)
George Moore's A Drama in Muslin and Esther Waters.
Victorian religious fiction can get amazingly explicit when it feels like it. As a purely random example, Robert Buchanan's The New Abelard, which I read a few days back, is eye-poppingly overt (again, by the standards of Victorian "code") about women's lust. (No, the eponymous protagonist does not suffer Abelard's fate. Bit of a let-down, if you ask me...)
posted by thomas j wise at 3:34 PM on September 9, 2013 [7 favorites]
Wordsworth press has had a Victorian erotica series.
Janey47, the Pickwick was my grandfather's bookstore.
posted by brujita at 3:53 PM on September 9, 2013 [1 favorite]
Janey47, the Pickwick was my grandfather's bookstore.
posted by brujita at 3:53 PM on September 9, 2013 [1 favorite]
Story the Soldiers Wouldn't Tell: Sex in the Civil War
by Thomas P. Lowry M.D.
posted by PJMoore at 4:49 PM on September 9, 2013
by Thomas P. Lowry M.D.
posted by PJMoore at 4:49 PM on September 9, 2013
This thread is closed to new comments.
posted by holgate at 1:12 PM on September 9, 2013