Sexuality and marriage

Abstract

In fiction by men this century, representations of heterosexual behaviour have often been nothing more than an increasingly detailed vulgarisation of entrenched beliefs and prejudices about women’s sexual roles as servicer and victim of men. In Sexual Politics, Kate Millett’s analyses of fiction by Henry Miller, Norman Mailer and D. H. Lawrence reveal in their work a consistent dehumanising of women in men’s sexual behaviour towards them.¹ Their fiction could be said to act as a partial mirror of life which is tarnished by bias and prejudice. Gaps and blind spots, which feminists such as Millett have tried to expose, abound in their work. Yet, although women this century have become increasingly free to write openly in fiction about sexual relations, not many have used this possibility to advantage in order to reveal the inequality of women’s sexual roles vis-à-vis those of men.