English Studies Forum

The Forum Reviews

Our Hang-ups, Ourselves

Ellen Bayuk Rosenman. Unauthorized Pleasures: Accounts of Victorian Erotic Experience.  Cornell UP, 2003. 231 pgs. $18.95.

By Julianne White, Jacksonville State University

Oh, those wacky Victorians.  No other culture has ever had so many neurotic anxieties with sex (except possibly our own).  Ellen Bayuk Rosenman traces the most prominent of these issues—the spermatorrhea panic, the male gaze in public, female pleasure and the Yelverton marriage story, and the repulsion/attraction of pornography—through the written evidence, and proposes some fascinating theories to explain not only how and why these issues exist, but also what service the “issue-ization” of them performs for the culture as a whole.  What these issues reveal about cultural anxieties, how they marginalize (or maintain the divisions between) genders, races and classes, and how they challenge simplistic notions of Victorian prudery are all explicated brilliantly by Rosenman’s analysis.

            As Rosenman puts it, these issues “emerge, not according to some universal principle but in idiosyncratic way, through the rich particularities of individual texts, social actors, and occasions” (3). Therefore, she does not limit herself to literature; rather, she examines the public writings of some famous doctors, like William Acton, and also many pamphlets that have no stated author but were circulated widely; conduct manuals (but her focus is on conduct manuals for men, not the usual suspects of conduct manuals for women); published (men’s) diaries; previously overlooked or de-canonized novels; and even trial transcripts.  In doing so she places herself squarely in the cultural studies theoretical milieu, affording great credibility to her theories.  This type of approach is necessary in order to recover, or as she puts it, to “reimagine the erotic life of the woman reader” (13).  She must do so because that very life has been so effectively erased by the concomitant male anxiety regarding sexual arousal and eroticism. Although a great deal of scholarly work has been done recently on the erasure of female sexuality by the Victorian culture, Rosenman not only recovers that sexuality, she also maintains that the “woman reader” is “an exemplary seeker of unauthorized pleasures” (13), and points out that the anxious men who sought to control women’s sexuality, were, more importantly, seeking to control their own.

            The first chapter examines the “spermatorrhea panic,” the “spread” of a fictitious disease afflicting thousands of middle-class men, even to the point of causing madness and death.  This “epidemic,” based solely on neuroses about their own desires and states of arousal, not only “represents the extremes to which Victorian culture was willing to go in order to punish the body,” but also “helped to construct the male bourgeois subject, including and especially the modern medical professional” (13).  By identifying and codifying the symptoms as well as the treatment, surgeons, who were emerging into the middle-class during this time, were able to distinguish themselves from quacks, and thus were able to complete their journey into middle-class respectability.  Rosenman claims that “in redefining their relationship to the body, [the spermatorrhea panic] provided them with an ideal opportunity to increase [surgeons’] cultural capital” (28). Leave it to men to turn a neurosis into “cultural capital.”

            However, the most interesting aspect of these anxieties is that they also provided opportunities for women to surreptitiously assert their own erotic experience, in spite of the cultural taboos against such assertions.  Rosenman shows convincingly how in G. W. M. Reynolds’s novel, The Mysteries of London, “male looking makes [female bodies] available for women themselves” (13), since this book sold phenomenally well and women made up a substantial portion of Reynolds’s readership.  Furthermore, the letters of Theresa Longworth display “a rhetoric of active sexual desire from melodrama and romance” (14).  Rosenman claims that Longworth, in writing letters to her lover, “interpreted and revised literary conventions” (14) into her own manifesto of sexuality.  The ensuing details about her relationship with Captain Yelverton revealed in trial transcripts “stage the collision of these revisions with beliefs about female virtue . . . and reveal surprising resources for female eroticism” (14).  In these two chapters, particularly, Rosenman makes good on her promise to  “reimagine the erotic life of the woman reader” (13).

            Finally, the infamous Walter from My Secret Life, the “eleven-volume, sexual memoir-fantasy” (14), enjoys the dual position of being both the privileged and the marginalized.  He is privileged because he is male and of the social class that affords him that privilege, and he is marginalized because he freely revels in sexuality, challenging Victorian notions of “virtuoso asceticism” for middle- and upper-class males. According to Rosenman, “Walter’s pleasures represent a frontal assault on sexual norms” while they also are “utterly conventional, resting on the privileged position of gentleman that gives Walter the social and economic power to stage his erotic theatrics” (14).  In this way, then, My Secret Life provides “consolation” for the many tormenting anxieties and conflicting attitudes regarding sex and desire. But Rosenman’s analysis goes far deeper than this suggests; she further points out that we are at least as neurotic as the Victorians, partly because

we lack a very extensive, nuanced framework for interpreting sexual intercourse itself or for narrating the body’s experiences, perhaps because we have linked erotic experience so deterministically to the sex of the erotic object. My Secret Life sketches one possible framework, using sexual positions as components in a complex grammar of subjectivity and sexual orientation. It challenges our understanding of the relationship between pornography and patriarchy, gender and genre, along with its challenges to sexual and subjective norms. (196)

It is the challenges Walter provides that reveal insights about not only Victorian culture, but our own as well.

            As a final note, I must commend Rosenman for her remarkable honesty (she admits that she was, indeed, aroused in her reading of most of this material) as well as for her refreshing sense of humor—without sacrificing any academic or intellectual integrity. What Rosenman has done in this volume is what she claims is the work done by the texts she analyzes: She “opens up productive, mutually informing relationships—between past and present, lived experience and ideology, popular culture and theoretical paradigms—that both enrich our understanding of Victorian sexuality and illuminate our own search for pleasures” (202).  It seems that the more we understand about the Victorians, the more we understand about ourselves.