Modernism and Perversion: Sexual Deviance in Sexology and Literature, 1850–1930 by Anna Katharina Schaffner (review)

This book locates itself in a space of interchange between literary and historical studies. That is not because of any wavering disciplinary allegiance on the author’s part but because she wishes to give an account of a period during which writing about sexuality regularly involved cross-disciplinary traffic between sexology and psychoanalysis, on the one hand, and literary fiction, on the other. The object of her study is the richness and complexity of that interchange itself, and she lays out its constituent elements by dividing her study into two parts. The first part, which will offer relatively easy access to most readers of the Journal of the History of Sexuality, is an intellectual history of perversion theories as they took shape in Europe toward the end of the nineteenth century (19). Close attention is paid in this section to examples taken from literature as they occur in Krafft-Ebing, Ellis, Binet, and others. The second section, articulated in a manner that historians of sexuality may find less familiar, is a reading of works by D. H. Lawrence, Thomas Mann, Proust, and others that shows how these writers explore—and indeed practice—forms of perversion in fiction.

The logic of a two-part exposition should not lead readers to think that it is ever just a matter for Schaffner of sexological concepts emerging fully formed in “scientific” contexts, then being straightforwardly rendered into literature as made-to-order themes. It is certainly true that Krafft-Ebing, for example, created what Schaffner calls “an extensive repository of late-nineteenth-century sexual deviance, which Freud and various modernist artists were to raid” (48). But it is equally true that this list and others akin to it already included examples taken from fiction. Those examples were in fact allowed to “serve as evidence” of perversions in the writings of sexologists, so that the direction of influence was effectively circular (22). Fictional and clinical “observations” were typically put on the same level, without any recognition of the possibility that fiction might involve distancing or contradiction within a given text (51, 135).

The second part of the study analyzes what writers of fiction actually made of perversion at a time when perversion was serving as a prime topic for sexology. Novelists were generally committed to the view that literary fiction was more than a mere rehearsal of sexological knowledge, being convinced that “literary representations have the power not only to represent but also to shape sexual fantasies” (54). This is a key point for Schaffner, but what she has to say about it may be somewhat clouded by disagreement with other scholars about just what counts as literature. When Vernon Rosario, in his history of late nineteenth-century erotic narrative in French, discusses the novels of Armand Dubarry, Schaffner seems to reproach him for his failure to recognize the potentially polyvalent and open-ended qualities of literary meaning.¹ But the novels of Dubarry, like those of so many other French middle-brow novelists of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, generally succeeded in enclosing the interpretation of their stories in self-confirming thematic routines. They relentlessly worked out the narrative consequences of “perversions” such as homosexuality and nymphomania, while their habits of thinking were reiterated and reinforced by what Schaffner calls the “purely plot-based readings of literary texts” offered by sexologists (88). That was a significant historical phenomenon, as Rosario and others have shown, but it is simply not what Schaffner herself means by “literature.”

The high modernist fiction on which she focuses her attention was not content simply to tell stories about perversion; it was, she argues, literature self-consciously perverted. The cohort of semirespectable French novelists, including such now-forgotten figures as Armand Dubarry and Adolphe Belot, does not figure here. Nor even do Guy de Maupassant and Rachilde, even though their works are...