The Secret Vice: Masturbation in Victorian Fiction and Medical Culture (review)

In his 1929 essay "Pornography and Obscenity," D. H. Lawrence wrote that "there is an element of pornography in nearly all nineteenth-century literature" (Late Esssays and Articles [Cambridge, 2004], 243). For Lawrence, pornography was the product of a masturbatory nineteenth-century literary imagination, and Charlotte Brontë's novel Jane Eyre (1847) an example of "this furtive, sneaking, cunning rubbing of an inflamed spot in the imagination" (244). I have always been struck by Lawrence's sweeping dismissal of pornography, masturbation, and nineteenth-century literature as the "dirty little secret" of British literary culture. He was obviously being provocative in an era of unofficial but state-sanctioned government censorship, but why was he so negatively fixated on masturbation as the explanation for Britain's literary and cultural ills? Diane Mason's study of masturbation as the subject of a medical and social anxiety that filtered through the nineteenth-century literary imagination helps contextualize Lawrence's musings.

Mason maps this discourse of masturbation across a variety of medical writings and novels from the nineteenth century, covering the scientific works of Havelock Ellis, Richard von Krafft-Ebing, and R. V. Pierce, and the literary works of Charles Dickens, Oscar Wilde, and Bram Stoker, among others. With the diffusion of professional and popular medical works warning about loss of virility, reproductive inferiority, and degeneration, this period saw the promulgation of anxieties about masturbation. Mason also gives special attention to the overlooked medical literature on female masturbation that linked the practice to nymphomania and prostitution. Her central proposition, however, is that these paranoid medical warnings about masturbation were incorporated in a surprising variety of ways into mainstream and pornographic fiction. Most interestingly, she argues that the symptoms of masturbation (deathly pallor, sweaty palms, and frail health) evolved into a capacious literary trope that could signal different types of social and sexual deviance—from female promiscuity and lesbian desire in J. S. Le Fanu's Carmilla (1871–72) to sodomy and homosexuality in the underground pornographic novel Teleny (1893). Mason's approach emphasizes the medicalized nature of nineteenth-century fiction while also signalling her primary method of literary analysis.

This book advances our understanding of the history of sexuality by highlighting the complex connections between nineteenth-century sexology and the canonical and noncanonical fiction of the time. Mason breaks down generic distinctions between clinical and popular medical writing, scientific texts and gothic narratives, and literature and pornography. In a chapter from the edited collection International Exposure: Perspectives on Modern European Pornography, 1800–2000 (2005), Lisa Z. Sigel comments astutely on the interrelationship of pornography and sexology in the nineteenth century and suggests the benefits of opening up both fields to comparative scholarship. While Mason makes a similar interdisciplinary move, showing how "pornography blurs into literature as, indeed, does medicine, whether clinical or popular" (35), she nonetheless over-stabilizes these generic categories by repeatedly reading fiction through medical literature. She misses the opportunity to explore a body of pseudoscientific studies that doubled both as science and pornography. Charles Carrington's late-nineteenth-century publications The Ethnology of the Sixth Sense (1899) and The Genital Laws (1900) are examples that could have been included in a study examining relationships among medical texts, fiction, and pornography. I am impressed by this book's comparative instincts, smudging of disciplinary lines, and attention to reviled genres such as pornography, but its use of medical texts to interpret literature symptomatically represents a methodological limitation.

While it examines the discourse of masturbation across a range of nineteenth-century texts, Mason's book does not address the problem of historical and geographical variation. She demonstrates the wide variety of ways in which the masturbation trope was deployed in novels like Our Mutual Friend (1865), The Mystery of Edwin Drood (1870), and Dracula (1897), yet this attention to literary variation is set against a monolithic account of anti-masturbation panic. Most of the clinical and popular medical writing...