Unauthorized Pleasures: Accounts of Victorian Erotic Experience

by Ellen Bayuk Rosenman

Recent books and exhibitions have shown that Victorians were not so straitlaced about sexual matters as has been popularly assumed. Ellen Bayuk Rosenman's engrossing and enlightening book proves that the Victorians were extraordinarily articulate and resourceful when it came to expressing their sexual desires. Narratives of erotic experience were written, justified to the conservative culture, and circulated for the pleasure of readers. Rosenman's exploration of masculinity and femininity in Victorian sexual storytelling includes an account of the "spermatorrhea panic" that terrified the men of Britain, tells of Theresa Longworth's erotic revisions of the romance plot, and takes up the exhaustive, even exhausting, pornographic epic My Secret Life.

Drawing on social history, court cases, medical literature, popular novels, and the diaries and letters of everyday life, Rosenman looks beyond the usual sexual suspects―homosexuals and prostitutes, for example―to address a range of pleasures that emerged from the ideological structures meant to contain them. She asserts that, however powerful ideology is, it does not script erotic repertoires in definitive or predictable ways, and that individuals can find ways of evading or easing its constraints.

Genres: History, Victorian, Nonfiction

248 pages, Paperback

First published April 1, 2003

Reviews

[Mir · Rating 5 out of 5]

Although sensationalist at times, this collection of essays on gender, sexuality, and mores in Victorian Britain manages to remain scholarly while presenting material in a lively, readable prose that will appeal to educated lay readers as well as academics.

Topics range from medical scares to biography to news reportage.