Sexualities in Victorian Britain (review)

Another study of Victorian sexuality! even I, fellow perpetrator, was tempted to exclaim. Yet the subject proves fascinating as sex itself, as inexhaustibly stimulating to Victorian discourse and our discourse on Victorian discourse as Viagra. We continue to enact Foucault’s assertion of an ever-growing discourse of sexuality as we reflect on its primary place of origin for modernity.

The especial strength of this fine set of essays is indeed its openness to diverse, sometimes even new, directions for spinning out this discourse. The editors, Andrew H. Miller and James Eli Adams, build on the eclectic range of their editorial experience to bring in writers from a number of disciplines outside of their home bases in Victorian literature. Three of the ten essays (and note that this is a select not an omnibus collection, which is confirmed by the general high quality of the essays) offer new thinking in sociology or history of sexology and science. I found Ornella Moscucci’s addition to her work on Victorian gynecology, a study of the comparative politics of clitoridectomy and circumcision, really a new take on what might have seemed an exhausted subject. The implied comparison between circumcision, our common sexual rite, and clitoridectomy, the abomination of the other, gives the subject controversial dimensions. One is pleased to see how even those often-so-wrong Victorian gynecologists threw a clitoridectomist from their fraternity, though Moscucci’s historically informed account avoids a triumphalist perspective, even granting a certain pathos to Dr. Baker Brown’s fall and decline and noting the careerist motives driving the profession’s decision. Circumcision, that barbarity to males (?) was by contrast welcomed not only for reasons of sanitation but from cultural preference for sexual control and admiration of Jewish racial survival—which shows how plastic racial as well as sexual discourses could be. Because these are our discussions too, I think the author should have provided more contemporary perspective on the issue of circumcision. Do we, too, practice obscene rites? History cannot be an escape from our history.

I also liked the historical study by Camilla Townsend in which she explores what can be said of an historically specific (as we now like to say) transvestite Sarah Geals, a working-class woman who was sentenced to five years penal servitude for attempting to shoot her boss—with perhaps some cause since he had married her long-term female companion and adversely changed her terms of employment when he found that she was not the male shoemaker, William Smith. Townsend provides extremely interesting information on the context of this economic transvestism—a way that a number of women evaded the disparity between male and female compensation. And she is careful not to insist on a clear tale where we are unclear, especially about the domestic and affective relation between Sarah and Caroline, the companion to Sarah vice Mrs. boss. But because we do tell one tale or another in telling history, she interestingly provides two historical approaches. One is the personal tale, as far as we can know it from the evidence; the other uses the incident to study reception of cross-dressing by the society: a productive approach indeed that finds not one Victorian discourse on transvestism but a rainbow hue of positions from middle-class condemnation to working-class understanding.

Townsend admits she cannot know what sexual, private motivations Sarah experienced, but she uses the case, as received in its context, to question the universality of Marjorie Garber’s deconstructive insistence on cross-dressing as metaphorical wire-crossing. Yes, she answers, but maybe not for historically specific, angrily underpaid Sarah-become-William forced to be Sarah again. Martha Vicinus asks similar questions in an essay that bridges literature and sociology, looking at transvestite representation in male impersonation, on the stage, in novels, and on life’s stage. She too finds the representation producing a kind of funhouse effect. Cross-dressers “mean” their diverse receptions. If they perform different meanings...