Diane Mason
- Published in print:
- 2008
- Published Online:
- July 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780719077142
- eISBN:
- 9781781701089
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Manchester University Press
- DOI:
- 10.7228/manchester/9780719077142.003.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, 19th-century Literature and Romanticism
This book considers the construction and presentation of the masturbator in nineteenth-century fiction and medical writing, and the implication of him or her in a paradoxically ‘secret’ vice, made ...
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This book considers the construction and presentation of the masturbator in nineteenth-century fiction and medical writing, and the implication of him or her in a paradoxically ‘secret’ vice, made visible to the Victorians through a range of bodily signifiers yet invisible when perceiving the bodies of the late twentieth and twenty-first centuries. It demonstrates how the symptoms of solitary self-abuse may be seen to disclose other textual vices and pathologies. The ongoing debate on Victorian sexuality encloses the related issue of autoerotic behaviour, a field which is both problematic in terms of extent and implication, and dogged by a certain humorous mode of discourse.Less
This book considers the construction and presentation of the masturbator in nineteenth-century fiction and medical writing, and the implication of him or her in a paradoxically ‘secret’ vice, made visible to the Victorians through a range of bodily signifiers yet invisible when perceiving the bodies of the late twentieth and twenty-first centuries. It demonstrates how the symptoms of solitary self-abuse may be seen to disclose other textual vices and pathologies. The ongoing debate on Victorian sexuality encloses the related issue of autoerotic behaviour, a field which is both problematic in terms of extent and implication, and dogged by a certain humorous mode of discourse.
Michael Mason
- Published in print:
- 1994
- Published Online:
- October 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780198122470
- eISBN:
- 9780191671425
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198122470.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, 19th-century and Victorian Literature
At a time when AIDS, abortion, and sexual abuse have become favourite topics of media and academic debate, it is no surprise that the Victorians, with their strong associations with prudery and ...
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At a time when AIDS, abortion, and sexual abuse have become favourite topics of media and academic debate, it is no surprise that the Victorians, with their strong associations with prudery and puritanism, are frequently held up as an example of a sexual culture far different from our own. Yet what did the Victorians really think about sex? What was the reality of their sexual behaviour, and what wider concepts—biological, political, religious—influenced their sexual moralism? This book directly confronts one of the most persistent clichés of modern times. Drawing on varied sources, from popular and professional medical and scientific texts to fiction, evangelical writing, and the work of radicals such as Godwin and Mill, the bok shows how much of our perception of 19th-century sexual culture is simply wrong. Far from being a license for prudery and hypocrisy, Victorian sexual moralism is shown to be in reality a code intelligently embraced by wealthy and poor alike as part of a humane and progressive vision of society's future. The ‘average’ Victorian man was not necessarily the church-going, tyrannical, secretly lecherous, bourgeois “paterfamilias” of modern-day legend, but often an agnostic, radical-minded, sexually continent citizen, with a deliberately restricted number of children. This book argues that there is much in Victorian sexual moralism to teach the complacently libertarian 20th century.Less
At a time when AIDS, abortion, and sexual abuse have become favourite topics of media and academic debate, it is no surprise that the Victorians, with their strong associations with prudery and puritanism, are frequently held up as an example of a sexual culture far different from our own. Yet what did the Victorians really think about sex? What was the reality of their sexual behaviour, and what wider concepts—biological, political, religious—influenced their sexual moralism? This book directly confronts one of the most persistent clichés of modern times. Drawing on varied sources, from popular and professional medical and scientific texts to fiction, evangelical writing, and the work of radicals such as Godwin and Mill, the bok shows how much of our perception of 19th-century sexual culture is simply wrong. Far from being a license for prudery and hypocrisy, Victorian sexual moralism is shown to be in reality a code intelligently embraced by wealthy and poor alike as part of a humane and progressive vision of society's future. The ‘average’ Victorian man was not necessarily the church-going, tyrannical, secretly lecherous, bourgeois “paterfamilias” of modern-day legend, but often an agnostic, radical-minded, sexually continent citizen, with a deliberately restricted number of children. This book argues that there is much in Victorian sexual moralism to teach the complacently libertarian 20th century.
Kate Nichols
- Published in print:
- 2015
- Published Online:
- April 2015
- ISBN:
- 9780199596461
- eISBN:
- 9780191795770
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199596461.003.0006
- Subject:
- Classical Studies, European History: BCE to 500CE
Chapter 5 explores the controversy caused by the Palace’s exhibition of nude sculpture. It unpicks Owen Jones’s claims for Greek sculpture’s moral imperative through writings on beauty, morality, and ...
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Chapter 5 explores the controversy caused by the Palace’s exhibition of nude sculpture. It unpicks Owen Jones’s claims for Greek sculpture’s moral imperative through writings on beauty, morality, and art from Plato and J. J. Winckelmann, to nineteenth-century archaeologists. The chapter examines hostilities to the display of unclothed classical sculpture to the Palace’s new mass audience—especially its polychrome experiments—in the contexts of the artistic and social history of the nude, and Victorian ideas about class, gender, sexuality, and obscenity, to suggest why critics were so preoccupied with the displays of unclothed male bodies rather than the female nude. It offers an analysis of Greek sculpture in mid-century evangelical culture, and as it featured in ‘muscular Christianity’, showing the diversity of Victorian religious responses to ‘heathen’ sculpture.Less
Chapter 5 explores the controversy caused by the Palace’s exhibition of nude sculpture. It unpicks Owen Jones’s claims for Greek sculpture’s moral imperative through writings on beauty, morality, and art from Plato and J. J. Winckelmann, to nineteenth-century archaeologists. The chapter examines hostilities to the display of unclothed classical sculpture to the Palace’s new mass audience—especially its polychrome experiments—in the contexts of the artistic and social history of the nude, and Victorian ideas about class, gender, sexuality, and obscenity, to suggest why critics were so preoccupied with the displays of unclothed male bodies rather than the female nude. It offers an analysis of Greek sculpture in mid-century evangelical culture, and as it featured in ‘muscular Christianity’, showing the diversity of Victorian religious responses to ‘heathen’ sculpture.
