Critical Survey

In her study of the relationship between sex, gender, and social change in Britain since 1880, Lesley Hall justifies her starting date by pointing out that ‘recent historians of the nineteenth century have perceived a definite change in sexual attitudes, and in ways of talking about and dealing with sexual issues, around 1880’. She suggests that this marks the beginnings of ‘certain ways of thinking about sex which are essentially “modern”’. This special edition, which focuses on readings of texts published from the 1870s to the late 1920s, examines these ‘modern’ ways of conceptualising sex in relation to the dangerous figure of the sexually active woman and to female sexuality in general. It takes its impetus from such recent developments in the historicizing of sexuality that have designated the fin de siècle and early twentieth century as particularly important for understanding the early formation of ‘new’ female sexual identities. At this time the new science of sexology, the development of psychoanalysis, the social purity movement, the rise of the New Woman and the proliferation of more sexually explicit texts all contributed to increased public debates about the nature of female sexuality. As Frank Mort has argued, this was a period when social purists and feminists increasingly felt compelled to ‘speak out about sex’ and ‘to confront the conspiracy of silence and shame which surrounded the subject’, a confrontation which also took place in New Woman fiction.

The most intricate element shared by both psychoanalysis and gothic narratives is their preoccupation with the past and its complex impact on the genesis and state of the present. This is the case from a historical and cultural perspective as well as from the point of view of subjectivity and identity. Who are we, how do we relate to the world around us, and what threatens our sense of ‘being present/in the present’ – these questions are at the centre of any psychoanalytic inquiry and simultaneously seem to inform what could be referred to as a gothic narrative structure. The concept of haunting, the hidden spectre in the past/of the past ready to strike when we least expect it are intrinsic to both the psychoanalytic discourse per se and any tale of horror and terror where an unsuspecting hero (or more often a heroine) has to develop strategies to fight off the unspeakable monstrosities attacking him or her. Thus, what Victor Sage and Allan Lloyd Smith regard as particular to the Gothic: ‘it is a language, often an anti-historicising language, which provides writers with the critical means of transferring an idea of the otherness of the past into the present’ could also be defined as a specific element of any psychoanalytic discourse.

Psychopathia Sexualis (first published in German in 1886, in English in 1892) by the German sexologist Richard von Krafft-Ebing (1840–1903) was amongst the first works in the new discipline to argue that homosexuality was part of nature and could thus not be condemned. Here the voices of real-life homosexuals were for the first time recorded, and these case studies led Krafft-Ebing to the belief that homosexuality was not an acquired vice. The idea of the ‘naturalness’ of homosexuality was at its time radical. Accordingly, the sexual knowledge was disseminated in a somewhat conspiratorial manner, as it was ostensibly directed solely at medical and legal practitioners ‘to exclude the lay reader’. The work nevertheless gained publicity far beyond the specialist realm. I argue that this was partly due to the fact that Krafft-Ebing’s medical book provided an exciting erotic stimulus. The real interest of many of its lay readers derived from its sexually explicit content, in other words Psychopathia Sexualis was a source for sexual kicks. This notion can be traced in Radclyffe Hall’s classic lesbian novel The Well of Loneliness (1928), where it shines a new light on the construction of the novel’s ‘sexually inverted’ protagonist.

The social purity ‘crusade’ that gathered force after 1885 initiated a change both in ways of representing prostitution and in public opinion about ways of dealing with the sexually deviant woman. Since the 1860s the police had been granted the power under the Contagious Diseases Acts to apprehend women of doubtful virtue in the streets and insist that they be medically examined; if found to be diseased, they could then be detained in lock hospitals. Once these acts were repealed in 1885, prostitutes had greater freedom but were also kept under surveillance by philanthropists and the medical profession. A variety of discourses constructed the prostitute either as an innocent victim of male lust or as a ‘demon’ and ‘contagion of evil’. Judith Walkowitz has argued that such an ideological framework excluded the experience of women who drifted into this lifestyle temporarily, and provided ‘a restrictive and moralistic image’ of the fallen woman. Arguably, literary representations of prostitutes tended to flesh out the potentially restrictive images used in feminist, medical and periodical writing on the subject, though no form of discourse was immune to the strong influence of the language of purity used by the members of the National Vigilance Association (NVA) and its advocates.

‘Being a man,’ Norman Mailer once wrote, ‘is the continuing battle of one ’s life … [One] can hardly ever assume [one] has become a man’. At the turn of the nineteenth century, it was the unbecoming (collapse) of (English) manhood which was foremost in the minds of many male writers. The growing sense of a masculine collective self in crisis can be placed in direct correlation with the advances of the British women’s movement and its destabilization of patriarchal hegemonies. This article examines the way in which, in their endeavour to exorcize the threat of female cultural and sociopolitical agency, anti-feminist male writers pressed New Woman fiction into service as a medium for conservative propaganda. I shall be considering two textual configurations of the turn-of-the-century masculinity complex and its articulations of dread and desire, dystopia and the male free-love plot. Sexual fantasies of women’s reconfinement within the boundaries of male desire, these texts served to defuse, depoliticize and (hetero)sexualize the political and moral/social purist agendas of feminist activists and writers by transforming the New Woman – the agent of feminist rebellion in women’s fiction – into a Sexy Angel in the House.

Presented here is part of an on-going project concerned with nineteenth- century representations of sexuality that play with or deploy power hierarchies for erotic purposes. While there is a growing body of work documenting the ethics, practice, and pleasures of BDSM (a portmanteau acronym meaning Bondage and Domination, Domination and Submission, Sadism and Masochism),2 one cannot of course assume that the ends of the nineteenth century and twentieth century share an understanding of sexual activity where representations of power construct the relationships and acts in a (semi)playful scenario. However, for some BDSM participants the notion of ‘play’ is anathema since they regard BDSM as a lifestyle choice that defines their entire existence.3 Much of the nineteenth-century critical apparatus exercised upon representations of sexual power-play derive from a pathology of desire, the perversion of normative ‘healthy’ sexuality. Terminology is the first difficulty and its problems describe the nature of the theoretical difficulties in engaging with this material. In relation to the kind of material I will be discussing here, the terms most often invoked to define the sexual activity are masochism and sadism, neither of which has a particularly flattering lilt to it, since the words, as commonly defined, describe a self-destructive or destructive violence exercised through sex.

The early novels of Elinor Glyn (1864–1943) were very well received for their ‘originality, wit and high spirits’. They were written at the turn of the century when Glyn was in her early 30s in order to solve financial problems and they are acutely observed accounts of the late Victorian and Edwardian marriage market. She contrasts British high society with continental arrangements to manage wives and mistresses and in doing so tentatively begins to explore the place of sexuality within marriage or more significantly the prospect of extramarital liaisons as young brides become mature women. Biographical accounts of Glyn’s career emphasise the surprise and hurt she felt at the response from the press and society acquaintances to Three Weeks (1907) when it was published. Whereas her other novels were seen as humorous and daring, this is the novel that overstepped the mark. Three Weeks became notorious because its focus is not society manners or pre-nuptial morality, but an adulterous affair that is treated sympathetically, almost reverentially by the authoress. Even more controversially, it is an older woman who seduces a younger man, with the intention of conceiving a child. The gender relations regarding class, culture, money, initiative, status, and more specifically power are unequivocally reversed and celebrated in the expression of a mature woman’s sexual pleasure.

Thirty Two Poems in the Style of Simon Armitage Personality Fuel RENNIE PARKER

Still Life JOHN WESTON

The Poet of Dluga Street DERRICK BUTTRESS

The Undertaking Final Duty SUE DYMOKE

Meditation on Parliament House, Canberra TIM THORNE

An Analysis of his Portrait K.F. PEARSON

Reduced MICHAEL BARTHOLOMEW-BIGGS

Township Historian HUGH UNDERHILL

Black and White by William Scammell After Shakespeare by Desmond Graham MICHAEL MURPHY

I Married the Angel of the North by Peter Mortimer Home Town Burial by Martin R. Johnson Blast by Kevin Fegan DERRICK BUTTRESS

Selected Accidents, Pointless Anecdotes by Peter Violi DAVID BELBIN

Backwork by Ann Drysdale The Planet Iceland by Elsa Corbluth SUE DYMOKE

Moonbathing by Valerie Laws The Whitworth Gun by John Whitworth ADRIAN BUCKNER

The Crocodile’s Head by Jack Debney Mystery in Spiderville by John Hartly Williams JOSEPH PRIDMORE

Faunal by Peter Reading ALAN MAHAR

Notes on contributors