Abstract
What is the problem of sexual love? The very concept of sexual love is an impure category, if the reader will pardon the pun: it is neither inclusive of all representations and practices of sexuality, nor is it always fully synonymous with an idealized mythos of romantic love. Rather, sexual love as desire, act or affect is constituted by the highly charged intersection of sexuality and romantic love, a space where gender is imagined and enacted. What Havelock Ellis called the ‘problem’ of modern Western society clearly has enormous implications for understanding the construction of gender in our culture. The focus of my study will be on representations of the relation between women and sexual love in four major British novelists because these works have revealed a particularly vexed relation between love and sexuality, between definitions of womanhood and the way these are constructed through the deadly serious play of sexual love.
And now that the problem of religion has practically been settled, and the problem of labour has at last been placed on a practical foundation, the question of sex … stands before the coming generations as the chief problem for solution.
Havelock Ellis, ‘General Preface’, Studies in the Psychology of Sex, 1897
Sex is still a problem because whatever the current sexological steps to orgasmic happiness, at a more fundamental level many of the ideologies surrounding ‘sex’ have remained unchanged over the last hundred years…. Above all, sex remains the endorsement of gender.
Lynne Segal, ‘Sensual Uncertainty, or Why the Clitoris is not Enough’, Sex and Love: New Thoughts on Old Contradictions, 1983
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Notes
The ambiguous, uncharted and shifting nature of sexuality has made it a special point of controversy to feminists, who are concerned with the political relation of women to their sexuality. See, for example, Carol Vance, ‘Pleasure and Danger: Toward a Politics of Sexuality’: ‘Sexuality is simultaneously a domain of restriction, repression and danger as well as a domain of exploration, pleasure and agency’, in Pleasure and Danger: Exploring Female Sexuality (Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1984), ed. Carol Vance, p. 1;
and Catharine R. Stimpson and Ethel Spector Person, eds., Women: Sex and Sexuality (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980).
The literature on sexuality as the intersection between gender and society has become increasingly interdisciplinary in recent decades; some examples are Susan Rubin Suleiman, ed., The Female Body in Western Culture: Contemporary Perspectives (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1986);
Nancy Armstrong and Leonard Tennenhouse, eds., The Ideology of Conduct: Essays in Literature and the History of Sexuality (New York and London: Methuen, 1987);
Pat Caplan, ed., The Cultural Construction of Sexuality (London: Tavistock Press, 1987);
Catherine Gallagher and Thomas Laqueur, eds., The Making of the Modern Body (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987);
Kathy Peiss and Christina Simmons, eds., Passion and Power: Sexuality in History (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1988);
Lynn Hunt, ed., Eroticism and the Body Politic (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1990).
For the construction of women, culture and nature, see Michele Rosaldo and Louise Lamphere, eds., Woman, Culture and Society (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1974);
and Sherry Ortner and H. Whitehead, eds., Sexual Meanings: The Cultural Construction of Gender and Sexuality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981).
One should note, however, that there is a range of views on the construction of gender identity among feminists of various disciplines; for an informative discussion of the implications of these perspectives, see Martha Vicinus, ‘Sexuality and Power: A Review of Current Work in the History of Sexuality’, Feminist Studies 8 (1982): 133–56;
Sue Cartledge and Joanna Ryan, eds., Sex and Love: New Thoughts on Old Contradictions (London: The Women’s Press, 1983), especially Wendy Hollway, ‘Heterosexual Sex: Power and Desire for the Other’;
Joan Cocks, The Oppositional Imagination: Feminism, Critique and Political Theory (London and New York: Routledge, 1989);
Janet Holland et al., ‘Power and Desire: The Embodiment of Female Sexuality’, Feminist Review 46 (1994): 21–38.
Ellen Ross and Rayna Rapp, ‘Sex and Society: A Research Note from Social History and Anthropology’, in The Powers of Desire: The Politics of Sexuality, ed. Ann Snitow, Christine Stansell and Sharon Thompson (New York: Monthly Review, 1983), p. 51.
For a survey of changing theories of sexuality, see Don Milligan, Sex-life: A Critical Commentary on the History of Sexuality (London: Pluto Press, 1993).
See Arnold I. Davidson, ‘Sex and the Emergence of Sexuality’, Critical Inquiry 14 (1987): 16–48;
the idea of sexuality as a category in history is explored by David M. Halperin, ‘Is There a History of Sexuality?’, History and Theory 28 (1989): 257–74;
Jeffrey Weeks, Sex, Politics and Society: The Regulation of Sexuality since 1800 (London: Longman, 1989) and many others.
See Peter Laipson, ‘From Boudoir to Bookstore: Writing the History of Sexuality’, Comparative Studies in Society and History 34 (1992): 636–44.
Michel Foucault, Preface to The History of Sexuality, Vol. II, in Paul Rabinow, ed., The Foucault Reader (New York: Pantheon, 1984), p. 338.
J. Michelet, ‘On Love’, reproduced in Susan Bell and Karen Offen, eds., Women, Family and Freedom, Vol. I: The Debate in Documents, 1750–1880 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1983).
Roland Barthes, Mythologies (New York: Hill & Wang, 1972), p. 143.
Nina Auerbach, Woman and the Demon: The Life of a Victorian Myth (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1982);
Nancy Armstrong, Desire and Domestic Fiction: A Political History of the Novel (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987);
Mary Poovey, Uneven Developments: The Ideological Work of Gender in Mid-Victorian England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988).
Judith L. Newton and Deborah Rosenfelt, eds., Feminist Criticism and Social Change (New York and London: Methuen, 1985), p. xxi.
See also Newton’s Women, Power and Subversion (Athens, Ga: University of Georgia Press, 1981), which redefines power to show how women were able to conceptualize their own ‘influence’ as a form of power.
For a useful study of the relation of ‘femininity’ to power, see Sandra Bartky’s Femininity and Domination: Studies in the Phenomenology of Oppression (London and New York: Routledge, 1990).
Lawrence Senelick, ‘Ladykillers and Lady Killers: Recent Popular Victoriana’, Victorian Studies, 21 (1978): 494.
Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Vol. I: An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Random House, 1980), p. 69.
Some of the best-known studies of Victorian sexuality have been Gordon Haight, ‘Male Chastity in the Nineteenth Century’, Contemporary Review, 219 (1971), pp. 252–62,
and Keith Thomas, ‘Double Standard’, Journal of the History of Ideas 20 (1959): 195–216 on chastity; Peter Cominos, who related the ideal of chastity to the accumulation of wealth under capitalism in ‘Late Victorian Sexual Respectability and the Social System’, International Review of Social History, 8 (1963): 18, 33–4.
Steven Marcus, The Other Victorians (New York: Basic Books, 1966), p. 2, who pioneered the idea that the Victorian sensibility was ‘problematic’;
Ben Barker-Benfield, ‘Spermatic Economy: A Nineteenth Century View of Sexuality’, Feminist Studies, 1 (1972): 45–66, reiterated the metaphor of the Victorian male body as an economic system: Michel Foucault criticized this hypothesis to great effect in The History of Sexuality, Vol. I (New York: Pantheon, 1978), pp. 5–6. See Sarah J. Stage, ‘Out of the Attic: Studies of Victorian Sexuality’, American Quarterly, 27 (1975);
and F. Barry Smith, ‘Sexuality in Britain, 1800–1900: Some Suggested Revisions’, in A Widening Sphere: Changing Roles of Victorian Women, ed. Martha Vicinus (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1977) for the burgeoning social history of the 1970s.
Peter Gay, The Bourgeois Experience: Victoria to Freud, Vol. I of Education of the Senses (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984); Jeffrey Weeks, Sex, Politics and Society;
and Françoise Barret-Ducrocq, Love in the Time of Victoria: Sexuality, Class and Gender in Nineteenth Century London (London: Verso, 1991) are representative of more recent work in the field.
Sexuality and Victorian Literature, ed. Don R. Cox (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1984), pp. 264–5;
and Sexuality and Subordination: Interdisciplinary Studies of Gender in the Nineteenth Century, ed. Susan Mendus and Jane Rendall (London and New York: Routledge, 1989) are collections on sexual themes in literature and culture;
Lynda Nead’s Myths of Sexuality: Representations of Women in Victorian Britain (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1988) examines sexuality in the visual arts of the period.
For other works on sexuality in nineteenth-century America, see Linda Gordon, Woman’s Body, Woman’s Right: A Social History of Birth Control in America (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1976);
Daniel Scott-Smith, ‘Family Limitation, Sexual Control and Domestic Feminism in Victorian America’, Feminist Studies, 1 (1973): 40–57;
Nancy Cott, ‘Passionlessness: An Interpretation of Victorian Sexual Ideology, 1790–1850’, Signs, 4 (1978): 229–33.
See A. Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Idea, III, for a nineteenth-century view of the relations between sexuality and the problematic human will. John Reed’s Victorian Will (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1989) is a rich source for the consideration of the role played by the construct called ‘the will’ in Victorian culture.
See also John H. Smith’s interesting work on ‘Abulia: Sexuality and Diseases of the Will in the Late Nineteenth Century’, Genders 6 (1989): 102–24, which explores ‘abulia’, the clinical term for diseases of the will and a male counterpart of hysteria. ‘Weakness of the will’ in males was seen as an alternative state to ‘increase of the will, inordinate desire’.
There has been a considerable feminist reliance on Foucauldian theory, as well as a reconsideration and critique of his conception of power, too numerous to mention here, as in Biddy Martin, ‘Feminism, Criticism and Foucault’, New German Critique 27 (1982): 3–30;
Jana Sawicki, Disciplining Foucault: Feminism, Power and the Body (London and New York: Routledge, 1991);
and Nancy Hartsock, ‘Foucault on Power: A Theory for Women?’, in Linda Nicholson, ed., Feminism/Postmodernism (New York and London: Routledge, 1990).
See the exchange between Isaac Balbus and Jana Sawicki in After Foucault: Humanistic Knowledge, Postmodern Challenges, ed. Jonathan Arac (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1988).
Nead, Myths of Sexuality, p. 5; see also Sally Shuttleworth, ‘Empowering Fictions: The History of Sexuality and the Novel’, Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation 30 (1989): 51–61, for contradictory versions of womanhood: ‘From the late 18th century onwards, women were figured both as angelic creatures in full possession of an interiorized selfhood and as biological organisms whose primary function was to subordinate subjectivity to the material process of social reproduction’ (p. 58).
Karl Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, trans. Martin Milligan (New York: International Publishing Co., 1961), p. 101.
Nancy Armstrong’s Desire and Domestic Fiction is particularly helpful in tracing the complex relations of desire, textual structure and political ideology in the history of the novel. See also Linda Hunt, A Woman’s Portion: Ideology, Culture, and the British Female Novel Tradition (New York: Garland Press, 1988).
Martha Vicinus, ‘Sexuality and Power: A Review of Current Work in the History of Sexuality’, Feminist Studies 8 (1982): 133–56.
See also Barbara Harlow, Resistance Literature (New York: Methuen, 1987); and Newton, Woman, Power and Subversion.
Elizabeth Hardwick, Seduction and Betrayal (New York: Random House, 1972);
Patricia Meyer Spacks, The Female Imagination (New York: Knopf, 1975);
Ellen Moers, Literary Women (New York: Doubleday and Co., 1976);
Elaine Showalter, A Literature of their Own: British Women Novelists from Brontë to Lessing (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1977);
and Nancy K. Miller, ‘Emphasis Added’, among others, have all discussed the prominence in nineteenth-century literature of the heroine who sacrifices herself or is sacrificed. A somewhat different view which emphasizes the importance of self-denial to women’s own interests can be found in Kathleen Blake, Love and the Woman Question in Victorian Literature: The Art of Self-Postponement (Totowa, NJ: Barnes and Noble Books, 1983).
John Kucich in Repression in Victorian Fiction: Charlotte Bronte, George Eliot and Charles Dickens (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987) interestingly reworks the traditional psychological notion of ‘repression’ to look at the ways that desire and the repression of desire together constitute an interlocking organization of selfhood in Victorian fiction.
See Lloyd Davis, ed., Virginal Sexuality and Textuality in Victorian Literature (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1993).
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© 1997 Susan Ostrov Weisser
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Weisser, S.O. (1997). Sexual Possibilities and Impossibilities. In: Women and Sexual Love in the British Novel, 1740–1880. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230377349_1
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