Human Tigresses, Fractious Angels, and Nursery Saints: Augusta Webster's A Castaway and Victorian Discourses on Prostitution and Women's Sexuality

In Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Aurora Leigh Lady Waldemar tells Aurora that Romney, Aurora's cousin, has "Ignored the Aspasia we all dare to praise, / [in order to aid] other women, dear, we could not name / Because we're decent." ¹ Like Coventry Patmore's heroine in The Angel in the House, who "knows that she should preserve a proper innocence or ignorance of sexual realities," ² decent women are "wise in all [they] ought to know" and "ignorant of all beside." ³ Yet, of course, Lady Waldemar (and Elizabeth Barrett Browning) do name the women they are not supposed to acknowledge, and although Barrett Browning received adverse criticism for referring to the subject, respectable middle-class women were increasingly engaging in relief work with prostitutes and by the late 1860s opposition to the Contagious Diseases Acts. Presumably some of these women had access to some of the "respectable" discourse on prostitution, most of which was created by men, ⁴ with the exception of the Ladies National Association ⁵ and a few women writers of fiction and poetry. ⁶ Prostitutes themselves, however, did not write novels in verse or essays for the Westminster Review. Even when prostitutes were quoted, as in London Labour and the London Poor, scholars argue about the degree to which their voices were representative and unmediated. Karel Williams goes so far as to call the accounts of prostitution in London Labour "tiresome Victorian soft porn," ⁷ an accusation that gains in plausibility when one considers that Bracebridge Hemyng, the author of the section "Prostitution in London," made a living by writing sensation fiction. Suggestions of the prurient might lurk even in the most seriously intentioned discussion of prostitution, however, for it was--after all--a discussion about sex and, particularly, about sexual women. Thus, although it was a subject intimately concerned with women, prostitution was not generally accepted as a woman's subject.

Recent research--most notably that by Michael Mason--has argued that the asexual Victorian woman is a twentieth-century construct. In The Making of Victorian Sexuality he argues that many ordinary people believed that a woman had to experience orgasm in order to conceive, while substantial medical opinion considered sex necessary to the average woman's health. It was even suggested that extra-marital sex and prostitution might sometimes result from women's sexual frustration. ⁸ Yet in much of the material Mason quotes to support his argument, an emphasis on chastity prevails, most vividly in the claim that "a woman of sensibility, who would preserve her chastity, must guard her bosom well . . . [because] it is in the most direct and intimate sympathy with the female generative organs." ⁹ This warning expresses an ideology that fears female sexuality without tight control and links that sexuality to reproduction and illegitimacy. As Mason himself points out, if the pro-sexuality argument were the only voice audible, nineteenth-century Britain "would be unfamiliar to the point of absurdity." ¹⁰ If the sexuality of respectable women was accepted, a desire still existed to contain it within marriage and to draw a clear line between respectable and disreputable women.

Prostitution functioned--in spite of protest and reform movements--by promoting the ideology that respectable women and disreputable ones were fundamentally different and could be kept separate. In Reading, Writing, and Rewriting the Prostitute Body, Shannon Bell argues that "modern discourse on prostitution was part of a broader discursive production of female sexuality which separated the female body into the reproductive [nonsexual, respectable] body and the un(re)productive [sexual disreputable] body" (p. 41). Even if Mason's historical revisionism helps us to complicate these categories, the dominant discourses reveal that, however sexual she might be within marriage, the respectable woman's sexuality was contained within a system that emphasized reproduction and that attempted to...