Modernism: Sex & Pleasure

One of the best blog posts I've read in recent years is by Miriam Burstein, a.k.a. The Little Professor, entitled "No Sex Please, We're Victorian: A Handy-Dandy Guide to Code Words." In this seriohumorous essay, Burstein considers the tropes that take the place of explicit representations of sex in Victorian novels: pink handkerchiefs, white beds, swooning. For all of Burstein's comic touch—one which renders her online writing generally delightful to read—she offers some very useful equipment for reading sex in literary texts. Such reading is not only a problem in Victorian literature, which has a perhaps undeserved reputation for repressing desire and pleasure, for covering bodily concerns and delights (as well as piano legs) in acres of floor-length petticoat and steel-ribbed corsets.

On the contrary, supposedly, modernist texts open the bedroom door to the most intimate acts and deepest perversions. Why this door was finally opened has been a subject of speculation across modernist studies for the last decade, giving rise to some truly excellent work. Allison Pease's Modernism, Mass Culture, and the Aesthetics of Obscenity (2000) illuminates the links among pornographic texts, an emerging modernist aesthetic, and the tensions between high and mass cultures. Radical Modernism and Sexuality: Freud, Reich, D. H. Lawrence and Beyond (2005) by David Seelow takes a different approach but one that has been no less significant in theorizing sex in early twentieth-century cultural production, focusing on the rise of sexology and scientific sexual discourse.

The intersecting threads of research into sex and modernism—the aesthetic, the discursive, the scientific—have proven immensely fruitful and offer scholars a means to expand their thinking about the topic beyond simply reading it as a move against the Victorians and their repressive attitudes, a view which has itself been complicated by work by Helena Michie and Sharon Marcus exploring sexed and sexual Victorians. The place of pornography in the literary marketplace, the avant-garde tendency toward experimentation with outré forms and aesthetic and literary strategies, the anxieties engendered by the newly emergent study of sex and sexuality: all contributed to a modernist engagement with sex, desire, and pleasure that speaks both to and against past and present.

The material study of cultural and discursive practices around sex including censorship, erotic postcards, hygiene manuals, as well as the more explicit moments in novels such as Ulysses and Lady Chatterley's Lover has given scholars of the period a great deal of insight into the construction and understanding of private life in modernity. Tonya Krouse, in her more narrowly focused The Opposite of Desire: Sex and Pleasure in the Modernist Novel, proposes to make a contribution to this work. She offers as a framework for her discussion of Lawrence, Woolf, and Joyce the distinction Michel Foucault makes between ars erotica and scientia sexualis in The History of Sexuality. According to Foucault, ars erotica is the stance that characterizes "Eastern" attitudes toward sex, infused by pleasure. On the other hand, scientia sexualis, a "Western" attitude which emerged as part of modernity, focuses on extracting the truth about sex, namely through confession, although it could be more broadly applied to scientistic attitudes toward sex. For Krouse, we might read modernist authors and their "scenes of sex" through this Foucauldian framework in order to understand how they reclaim pleasure from a discourse of sexuality that would seem to limit its pursuit. (Incidentally, she does not really engage with the postcolonial complexities of Foucault's categories. She also uses "sex" and "sexuality" interchangeably without explaining why, which raises a number of theoretical problems.) Krouse's main argument seems to be that modernist authors use scenes of explicit sex, particularly scenes in which characters are experiencing pleasure, to problematize an easy dichotomy between ars erotica and scientia sexualis. In the face of an increasingly "modern" attitude toward sex, as might be found in the work of Havelock Ellis, Krafft-Ebbing, and of course Freud, modernist authors offer a means of resistance through the...