Abstract
Mid-nineteenth-century American culture witnessed the rise of an urban sexual culture that featured prominently in the genre of city mystery fiction. This chapter explores the cultural function of the representations of urban sexuality and womanhood in selected city mystery novels to shed light on the ways in which the genre’s serialized and ambiguous imaginations of urban female sexuality both contributed to and challenged the (re)production of normative American cultural notions of gender, the city, and social order.
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Notes
- 1.
City mystery novels draw on a variety of literary and generic traditions, including the romance and travel writing (cf. Knight 10).
- 2.
Likewise, Reynolds and Gladman suggest about Thompson’s City Crimes that “[t]hose who really know the city, it is implied, are not the middle-class people able to traverse a variety of neighborhoods and look at them as distanced observers, but the lower-class denizens of a neighborhood who know what is concealed behind its facades and beneath its streets” (li).
- 3.
Many of the texts published at this time (re)produced the masturbation scare that swept the American nation in the nineteenth century.
- 4.
Though no author is indicated on the cover of Eliza Mead, the American Antiquarian Society lists the novel as possibly written by Osgood Bradbury.
- 5.
Moudrov refers to this strategy as an example of “didactic sensationalism” (97).
- 6.
On the relation of Thompson’s novels to the free love movement, cf. Reynolds and Gladman xl–xli.
- 7.
One of his main female characters even shares the name with the heroine of the English text.
- 8.
On Thompson’s use of pseudonyms, cf. Erickson, “New Books” 281.
- 9.
On Thompson’s readership, cf. Reynolds and Gladman xxxviii.
- 10.
Venus in Boston includes a scene in which a female character gazes at a male naked body, which is likened by the narrator to Apollo Belvedere, “one of those rare combinations of strength and beauty” (147), before the shocking revelation that he is a criminal. The protagonist of Adolene Wellmont attracts female suitors while cross-dressing as a man, and a male character in City Crimes expresses homoerotic desires.
- 11.
For a detailed discussion of the differences between European city mysteries and New England city mysteries, such as those written by Bradbury, see Zboray and Zboray.
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Steinhoff, H. (2019). Of Ladies, Fruit Girls, and Brothel Madams: Womanhood and Female Sexuality in American City Mystery Novels. In: Stein, D., Wiele, L. (eds) Nineteenth-Century Serial Narrative in Transnational Perspective, 1830s−1860s. Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-15895-8_13
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