Unstable Bodies: Victorian Representations of Sexuality and Maternity (review)

While some academic books take a lot of plodding, this did not. Jill Matus is thoughtful and writes well. She gives her readers five interesting essays examining literary, medical, and “social” texts between the 1840s and 1870s in Victorian England. Each essay explores images in canonical and noncanonical literature. The author develops insights into the intermingled definitions and images (as well as realities) of womanhood, maternity, and female sexuality. Matus’s approach follows deconstructionist lines similar to those employed by Mary Poovey in her important Uneven Developments: The Ideological Work of Gender in Mid-Victorian England (1988). She also draws upon the work of Ludmilla Jordanova, George Levine, Thomas Laqueur, Judith Butler, and Nancy Cott. One of her stated aims is to “historicise the work of Victorian novelists in relation to biomedical and social scientific discussions of sexuality and maternity, and to consider particularly how women’s writing participated in and shaped the way Victorian culture represented sexuality” (p. 4). Her chief conclusion is that images and representations of women were much more malleable and “unstable” than has been acknowledged: she argues that popular and medical texts discussed the instability of actual bodies, and that such textual representations were themselves an “unstable body” of discourse.

The introduction, which is especially clear, carefully sets up the substantive chapters and facilitates access for a broader audience. In chapter 1, “Sexual Slippage and Approximation in Victorian Biomedical Discourse,” Matus examines representations of sex as dynamic processes influenced by nonbiological environmental factors. She explores works ranging from Wilkie Collins’s Woman in White to James Young Simpson’s article on “Hermaphroditism.” Her discussion of the sociocultural contingency of sexuality is well taken, if not entirely original.

Matus also explores representations of working-class female sexuality and portrayals of the “moral mother” with particular reference to Mary Barton. Instead of focusing on the class dynamics and the working conditions of the poor, as so many Gaskell scholars have done, she centers our attention on depictions of women’s lives, roles, and behavior. She elegantly considers metaphors and convincingly establishes her point about the instability of women’s roles and the discourse surrounding them. Although comparison with middle-class images in Gaskell’s North and South could have been constructive, this section of the book is impressive.

So too is Matus’s examination of the images and discourse involving the “underside” of Victorian society—desire, prostitution, and passionlessness. Particular emphasis is placed on the Brontë sisters’ Agnes Grey and Villette. Matus uses Foucault’s “gaze” to analyze, for example, Lucy’s interest in exotic art during her time abroad in Villette. This approach works and fits neatly with the “instability” theme.

The fourth and fifth chapters treat, respectively, maternal deviance—using Adam Bede, among other works—and references to Saint Teresa (or Theresa) and the Madonna in Middlemarch. The latter essay demonstrates both the strengths and the weaknesses of the book. Matus carefully uncovers many aspects that an untrained reader would miss, drawing out subtleties and analyzing them effectively. However, her own “gaze” sometimes carries her quite far from the novel itself. George Eliot referred to Theresa only in her short prelude to Middlemarch, and otherwise one could read the entire novel without any real thought of the saint (as most readers probably have done). In brief, Matus builds a large case on a flimsy and presentistic base of evidence.

As a professor of English, Matus brings to this material the detail-seeking eye of a textual analyst. In addition, she has the imagination to illuminate elements that have often been overlooked by many, including historians. Unfortunately, too frequently this same imagination leads her far from the novels she discusses and prompts her to gloss the books too heavily with her own rather than the authors’ views. Matus’s account also suffers from a lack of historical understanding of the history of medicine and science. She repeatedly refers to Victorian “biomedical” texts, an...