Perverse Romanticism: Aesthetics and Sexuality in Britain, 1750–1832 (review)

'The Italian ethics are the most singular ever met with', Byron wrote to Thomas Moore on 25 March 1817: 'The perversion, not only of action, but of reasoning, is singular in the women. It is not that they do not consider the thing itself as wrong, and very wrong, but love (the sentiment of love) is not merely an excuse for it, but makes it an actual virtue, provided it is disinterested, and not a caprice, and is confined to one object.' Richard C. Sha's fine study takes Byron's theme of 'perversion' in a different direction from the ethical, demonstrating how Romantic medical writing about the perverse influenced literary Romanticism. Sha's concern is primarily with the six male canonical poets, and he draws insightfully on passages from Blake's Jerusalem, Shelley's Laon and Cythna and the Cenci, and Byron's Don Juan to show how perversion was a theme central to these writers, though he also discusses Mary Wollstonecraft and Mary Robinson at some length. Some of the most effective passages in Sha's book are to be found in his analyses of particular literary texts in the light of close theoretical engagements with contemporary medical literature. For instance, he reminds readers that Shelley asked for a copy of Thomas Trotter's View of the Nervous Temperament (1807), a fact that leads into an insightful and inspired reading of Victor as a victim of nervous disease in Mary Shelley's Frankenstein.

In the first chapter, on 'Romantic Science and the Perversification of Sexual Pleasure', Sha observes how writers as diverse as Byron, Blake, Anna Seward, the Shelleys and Wollstonecraft organised their emancipatory politics around the axis of sexuality. In the course of his argument Sha notes 'how much has to be in place – contra Barthesian readings of jouissance/desire – for sexuality to become linked with liberation'. Sha goes on to claim that the Romantics turned to science to construct a notion of sexual pleasure separate from reproduction and marriage. As one of many examples, Sha points out that during the Romantic period the field of physiology defined itself against dead anatomy. 'The important surgeon and anatomist John Hunter would even locate life in the coagulating powers of the blood: the dynamic and fluid nature of the blood as life meant that the body could not be a static entity.' Other writings discussed in this chapter include Albrecht von Haller's Dissertation on the Sensible and Irritable Parts of Animals (1755), Lazzarro Spallanzani's Dissertations Relative to the Natural History of Animals and Vegetables (1780), John Hunter's Observations on Certain Parts of the Animal Economy (1792) and Erasmus Darwin's Zoonamia (1801). Sha argues that for Darwin botany naturalised erotic diversity. Drawing on Foucault's assertion that 'saying yes to sex is not saying no to power', he goes on to claim that scientists working during the Romantic period, such as Franz Gall, had already warned readers not to mistake pleasure for liberty. The poets added their own voice to this chorus, with Shelley equating unbridled lust with tyranny in The Cenci, and Byron warning that 'headlong passions form their proper woes' in Canto V of Don Juan.

In the following chapter, Sha challenges the notion that the nineteenth century witnessed a shift from perversity to perversion (from thinking about perversity as a vice to linking it to psychology and identity). During the Romantic period, writers viewed sexuality 'as a kind of purposiveness without purpose'. 'By separating sexual pleasure from reproduction and by linking it instead with purposive mutuality, Romantic writers such as Hunter, Blake, Byron and Shelley made it possible to think about sexuality as a form of disinterestedness rather than selfishness.' Gall's 'organ of sexual love', Bell's phantom penis, Geoffroy's monsters and Cuvier's taxonomy based on function anticipate the concept of physiological localisation. Sha concludes that the turn to psychiatric identity as the...