Unauthorized Pleasures: Accounts of Victorian Erotic Experience
Recent books and exhibitions have shown that Victorians were not so straitlaced about sexual matters as has been popularly assumed. Ellen Bayuk Rosenman's engrossing and enlightening book proves that the Victorians were extraordinarily articulate and resourceful when it came to expressing their sexual desires. Narratives of erotic experience were written, justified to the conservative culture, and circulated for the pleasure of readers. Rosenman's exploration of masculinity and femininity in Victorian sexual storytelling includes an account of the "spermatorrhea panic" that terrified the men of Britain, tells of Theresa Longworth's erotic revisions of the romance plot, and takes up the exhaustive, even exhausting, pornographic epic My Secret Life.
Drawing on social history, court cases, medical literature, popular novels, and the diaries and letters of everyday life, Rosenman looks beyond the usual sexual suspects—homosexuals and prostitutes, for example—to address a range of pleasures that emerged from the ideological structures meant to contain them. She asserts that, however powerful ideology is, it does not script erotic repertoires in definitive or predictable ways, and that individuals can find ways of evading or easing its constraints.
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Unauthorized Pleasures: Accounts of Victorian Erotic Experience
Recent books and exhibitions have shown that Victorians were not so straitlaced about sexual matters as has been popularly assumed. Ellen Bayuk Rosenman's engrossing and enlightening book proves that the Victorians were extraordinarily articulate and resourceful when it came to expressing their sexual desires. Narratives of erotic experience were written, justified to the conservative culture, and circulated for the pleasure of readers. Rosenman's exploration of masculinity and femininity in Victorian sexual storytelling includes an account of the "spermatorrhea panic" that terrified the men of Britain, tells of Theresa Longworth's erotic revisions of the romance plot, and takes up the exhaustive, even exhausting, pornographic epic My Secret Life.
Drawing on social history, court cases, medical literature, popular novels, and the diaries and letters of everyday life, Rosenman looks beyond the usual sexual suspects—homosexuals and prostitutes, for example—to address a range of pleasures that emerged from the ideological structures meant to contain them. She asserts that, however powerful ideology is, it does not script erotic repertoires in definitive or predictable ways, and that individuals can find ways of evading or easing its constraints.
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Unauthorized Pleasures: Accounts of Victorian Erotic Experience
Recent books and exhibitions have shown that Victorians were not so straitlaced about sexual matters as has been popularly assumed. Ellen Bayuk Rosenman's engrossing and enlightening book proves that the Victorians were extraordinarily articulate and resourceful when it came to expressing their sexual desires. Narratives of erotic experience were written, justified to the conservative culture, and circulated for the pleasure of readers. Rosenman's exploration of masculinity and femininity in Victorian sexual storytelling includes an account of the "spermatorrhea panic" that terrified the men of Britain, tells of Theresa Longworth's erotic revisions of the romance plot, and takes up the exhaustive, even exhausting, pornographic epic My Secret Life.
Drawing on social history, court cases, medical literature, popular novels, and the diaries and letters of everyday life, Rosenman looks beyond the usual sexual suspects—homosexuals and prostitutes, for example—to address a range of pleasures that emerged from the ideological structures meant to contain them. She asserts that, however powerful ideology is, it does not script erotic repertoires in definitive or predictable ways, and that individuals can find ways of evading or easing its constraints.
Ellen Bayuk Rosenman is Professor and Chair, Department of English, University of Kentucky. She is the author of The Invisible Presence: Virginia Woolf and the Mother-Daughter Relationship and A Room of One's Own: Women Writers and the Politics of Creativity.
Table of Contents
List of Illustrations
vii
Acknowledgments
ix
Introduction: Seeking Pleasure in Victorian Britain
1
1.
Body Doubles: The Spermatorrhea Panic
16
2.
The Man on the Street: Gender, Vision, and the City
50
3.
Spectacular Women: The Mysteries of London and Female Pleasure
87
4.
Theresa Longworth and the Yelverton Marriage Story: How to Write Your Own Romance
I found this an extremely engrossing book, unflaggingly intelligent, lucid, and witty. Timely and distinctive in its analysis of Victorian sexuality, it draws on a broad array of prose representation, familiar and obscure, literary as well as more broadly social and legal. I think it will be greeted, both in and out of academia, as an exciting and important contribution to an area of tremendous current interest.
Elizabeth Langland
In this engaging book, Ellen Rosenman takes us on a lively tour of the erotic byways of Victorian Britain. Adopting an idiosyncratic approach to her subject, Rosenman acquaints her readers with a rich and multifaceted continuum of desires. With specific and memorable detail, Rosenman gives us a new appreciation for the amatory exuberance and excess of the age.
Lisabet Sarai
Unauthorized Pleasures is engaging, at times fascinating.... As a resource for the authors who would like to paint a richer, more nuanced picture of Victorian sexuality, I would recommend this book, which packs a world of fascinating detail in its two hundred pages.
