Sexual Anarchy

ELT : VOLUME 35:1 1992 allegiances and the unresolved conflicts that yielded the contradictions that puzzle us today. These and other possible directions suggest that other accounts of the life of Mary Augusta Ward will be undertaken. Yet those who approach this biography with suspicion run the risk of overlooking the value in Sutherland's sympathetic commitment to his subject. And certainly any future readings of the life of Mary Augusta Ward will take as their point of departure Sutherland's biography of the woman always known to her public as Mrs. Humphry Ward. Patricia ΟΉβτβ Franklin & Marshall College Sexual Anarchy Elaine Showalter. Sexual Anarchy: Gender and Culture at the Fin de Siècle. New York: Viking, 1990.242 pp. $19.95 EARLY in the introductory chapter to Sexual Anarchy: Gender and Culture at the Fin de Siècle, Elaine Showalter writes that her study "is about the myths, metaphors, and images of sexual crises and apocalypse " in England and America in the late nineteenth century and in our own time as well. She describes herself as dealing in her book with such "representations" of sexual upheaval and anxiety as "the New Woman, the battle between literary kings and queens, sexual surgery and sexual epidemics," which she views as "not merely decorative flourishes" in an objective study of an era, but as "constitutive of the experiences themselves " of the fin de siècle. Writing with lucidity and force, Showalter takes a broad cultural approach to her subject. She bases her work on a wide range of primary materials both literary and non-literary; in addition, she moves easily among numerous secondary works, many of them published within the past decade or so, in a variety of disciplines, including gender studies, psychiatry, sociology, art history and criticism, film history and criticism , histories of medicine and sexuality, feminist theory, and literary criticism. She uses insights from these disciplines to indicate how images and myths are shaped to express the anxieties of sexual identity that grip people's minds and imaginations. Her central resource, however , is the feminist perspective, at once cogent, appropriate, and richly suggestive, that served her brilliantly in the writing of her two earlier book-length studies, A Literature of Their Own: British Women Novelists 80 Book Reviews From Brontë to Lessing (1977) and The Female Malady: Women, Madness , and English Culture, 1830-1980 (1985). Using a phrase of George Gissing's for her title, Showalter centers on a number of developments in the late nineteenth century that helped to foster a sense of sexual anarchy. Principal among these were the "initiatives" of the feminist movement and the rise of the educated, articulate, sexually liberated New Woman; the "emergence and medicalization of the modern homosexual identity," which included a growing sense of solidarity among homosexuals in the face of increasing hostility on the part of society; and the introduction of the decadeni/ aesthetic vision of art and life whose erotic implications frightened the respectable middle class. Unusual ideas and events involving class and, to a lesser degree, race also aroused the feeling in people of sexual boundaries being crossed or limits overstepped. Showalter argues that even the shift in the publication form of novels from the three-volume enterprise, long associated with the proprieties of Victorian family life, to the single-volume work, which tended to foster the expression of unconventional impulses and to undermine narrative closure, helped to intensify the feeling of sweeping changes taking place. Showalter's procedure in most of the ten chapters of her book is to take one image or myth or metaphor both as a subject to be explored in itself and as an organizing principle, or catalyst, for the presentation of related matters. Her explorations and presentations, I might add, are often unexpected and brilliant. A typical chapter begins with a general analysis of an image and moves to a discussion of specific texts, both conventional and unconventional, of the late nineteenth century or very early twentieth century. These texts may include novels, stories, plays, paintings, medical works, psychiatric case histories, and photographs— of a picture in an 1895 medical manual of a syphilitic man, or of Courbet's graphic painting of a woman...