The Erotic Imagination: French Histories of Perversity

Readers who approach this book expecting to be titillated will not be disappointed. They may be surprised, however, for it is as eloquent and authoritative as it is evocative.

The masterful text chronicles the modern concept of the “erotic imagination” in France, from the Enlightenment sensibility of the late eighteenth century to the end of World War I in the early twentieth. Vernon Rosario’s main premise is that the modern Western perception of all eroticism as “perverse” dates from these years. His evidence for this view comes from contemporary individuals, novelists, and physicians, who present the fluctuating concept of sexual perversion within the historical and social contexts of their times. This incestuous mix of private, popular, and artistic authority affirms the shady boundary between science and art that often puzzles historians. Rosario shows how “novelists in medical drag and physicians passing incognito as novelists” (p. 110) exchanged information and case histories with little regard for professional elitism. Together, they demonstrate how the definition of eroticism was influenced by such factors as family, class, and culture. In a broader sense, definitions of sexual normalcy and perversion were entangled then, as now, with fears of national enfeeblement, colonial unrest, racial rivalries, depopulation, degeneration, decadence, capitalism, consumerism, and women’s enfranchisement. The book further presents sexual perversion as largely defined by authoritative efforts to constrain it.

Rosario accomplishes his purpose in four chapters, preceded by an introduction and followed by a conclusion and a “Psychoanalytic Supplement” that places Sigmund Freud within the context of the erotic imagination. The historical narrative unfolds chronologically, beginning in the eighteenth century, when sexual perverts were viewed sympathetically as “infected” by corrupt civilization; by the late nineteenth century the tables had turned, and sexual offenders were perceived as infectious agents, capable of polluting society. Chapter 1, devoted to onanism, chronicles the Enlightenment secularization and medicalization of morality and presents compulsive masturbation as a disease of corrupt civilization. Chapter 2 considers the legal aspects of erotomania, and reveals how nineteenth-century physicians, by legitimizing sexual “insanity” in the courts, claimed scientific expertise beyond judicial authority. Chapter 3 examines “inverts,” and demonstrates how, in an era when national strength was synonymous with “manliness,” homosexuality came to embody all the insecurities of the cultural imagination of fin de siècle France. Chapter 4, devoted to fetishism, cleverly links the sexual excitement provided by fetishized objects with fin-de-siècle anxieties over the new bourgeois culture of consumption and mass-production. In the conclusion, it becomes clear that, by the beginning of the twentieth century, the only cure for the “disease” of sexual perversion was home and family. This ploy, heartily recommended by patriarchal authorities seeking to enshrine cultural conformity, is as common now as it was then.

The Erotic Imagination is entertaining and authoritative. If there is a flaw in its fascinating account, perhaps it lies in the author’s lack of recognition that many of the his concepts and theories—erotomania, nymphomania, melancholia, corrupt civilization, the mutual dependence of lay and professional medicine, et cetera—and their politicization, have a long cultural history that predates the eighteenth century. These concepts, revived in the Renaissance and inherited by the seventeenth century, passed, predigested, to our Enlightenment forebearers. This is a long story, and readers may wish to consult Lynn Hunt (ed.), The Invention of Pornography: Obscenity and the Origins of Modernity, 1500–1800 (1993), to complete the historical picture. Speaking of pictures, I could not help but wonder about the role of the visual arts in the formation of the “erotic imagination.” After all, the very word “imagination” evokes the “mind’s eye,” which presses images of reality upon the reasoning brain. But that is another book, and The Erotic Imagination will certainly inspire future authors to investigate the myriad interrelationships among medicine, society, and the arts.