Sexuality and Society Week 2 Victorian attitudes to sex

N. Cott ‘Passionlessness…’ Not accepted for Course Extracts because available in ebooks at quod.lib.umich.edu.pugwash.lib.warwick.ac.uk/c gi/t/text/text-idx?c=acls;idno=heb01630 Also in its original place of publication, the journal Signs (1979), which can also be accessed electronically through the Library catalogue.

Why study the Victorian era? Victorian era is what we compare our own era to, whether in terms of continuity or change. This was a time of radical change, an explosion of interest in sexual matters. Sexuality became central to how the Victorians understood themselves and the social divisions between them. (Victorian era is period between when Queen Victoria ascended to the throne in 1839 to her death in 1901.)

Another reason for giving the Victorians so much attention, at least in this course, is because it shows that sexualities are social constructs. In the case of the Victorians the distinctions between sexualities Middle class/working class, male/ female, white/ colonised follows lines of other social divisions.

Outline Victorian sexual morality Context of the development of Victorian sexual morality Specific moralities constructed around key figures/ subjects: Middle and upper class men Middle class women Middle class children Working class women

Victorian sexual morality- key ideas about it: We have two contrasting ideas about the Victorians- As severely restrained and prudish As rife with sexual exploitation, prostitution, pornography Were they just hypocritical?

Sexuality structured in a dualistic fashion Passionless woman Respectable drawing room morality Celebrate celibacy Sexual ignorance These dualisms identify and stabilise diverse expectations- people’s sexual nature and morality defined by their social position (and vice versa?) Lustful man Sexual underworld Streetwalkers very publicly visible Sexual prurience and fascination

Wider socioeconomic and political context of the development of Victorian sexual concerns Rapid social changes Increasing discipline of economic life Deepening social divisions challenge felt to challenge national unity Both lead >>> to anxiety >>>obsession with need to control and need to regulate Control sexuality, control (own) anxiety. Control- discipline- epitomised by schooling Concerns about health and hygiene But- discipline falls more heavily on some than others- women rather than men, middle classes rather than working classes.

Which figures (constructs) populate this landscape? Men of the upper and middle classes Unlimited sexual access to own wives and servants, prostitutes Legitimated by reference to ‘male sexual urges’- this is a construction of male sexuality as opposite women’s. Towards end of century new emphasis on idea of men of good character exercising sexual self-control

Women of middle classes Seen as lacking carnal desires. We can understand this in terms of Cott’s (1979) notion of ‘passionlessness’. Spread of Evangelical sects provides a vocabulary, and identifies women as an appropriate moral force.

Were middle-class women ‘really’ without sexual desires? Several possibilities: 1.Since sexual desires are universal, it might be argued, they must have just been pretending to fit the expectations 2.They were so psychologically repressed that they genuinely didn’t feel desire – and rationally also, fear childbirth, disease, etc.

Or- switch the question? Not was it true? but rather why was the ideology so attractive to so many? Whose interests did it serve? 1.Ideal of women’s ‘passionlessness’ was never expected to guide women one way or another. It was the ideal that had to be maintained, because it was central to the middle-class image of itself. No empirical evidence for it (and indeed evidence of the opposite usually ignored or denied). Middle- class white women symbolise the nation, its purity and superiority over other classes and peoples. Also men of middle class want to insure/assume that children are their own. Also reassures that girls are tractable, can be married off in the family’s class interest. So it works in men’s interest– and perhaps also the family’s as a whole?. 2.Middle-class women ‘embraced’ the idea themselves because it gave them moral power (the only kind of power available to middle-class women at the time). It gave them a public voice, morality was something they were specially suited to pronounce on.

Conclusions regarding middle-class women ‘passionlessness’ Middle class defines itself in terms of the sexual purity of its womenfolk, in contrast to working class women or supposedly licentious aristocratic women. Sexuality therefore central to the formation of middle-class social identity. But.. ideal of middle class women’s passionlessness always unstable because reminding people of it inevitably also reminded people of its opposite. In some ways this was the Victorians’ main problem. The things they wished to will out of existence they talked about all the time and this actually drew attention to what they were trying to deny and made it more of a problem, and made it more in need of denial, and so on and so on.

We also need to add to this points about Victorian attitudes that will come up in next few weeks: Middle class children also feel the weight of this disciplinary gaze (discuss next week). Working class women disciplined through new laws on prostitution. But working class also have own (new) reasons for disciplining themselves sexually (see Weeks) Middle class women and men also part of a dualistic construction in relation to colonised peoples, seen as lascivious (Week 9).