This chapter was published in The Cambridge Companion to the Body in Literature, ed.

David Hillman
and Ulrika Maude (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), pp. 101-115.

Literary Sexualities
Heike Bauer

Sexuality and Modernity
Sexuality is not the product of fiction, but literary and philosophical works can
lay claim to having inspired the terms and concepts in which we think about
modern sexuality. The coinage of a modern vocabulary of sex including words
such as homosexuality and fetishism is tightly bound up with the complex
exigencies of Western modernity and marked by a proliferation of sciences that
sought to establish precarious truths about racialized and gendered bodies
whose past and anticipated future were at the core of anxious theorizing about
progress and civilization. This is not to say, as Lisa Downing has pointed out, that
sexuality in modernity can be understood simply in terms of negative
representation and prohibition.1 But at a time when the boundaries of different
European states expanded, collapsed and competed in the violent struggles that
accompanied the formation of modern nations and their aggressive colonial
expansion, scientific investigations of sex understood to mean both gender and
sexual acts became central to the way in which the nineteenth-century
articulated its norms and ideals and sought to control transgression and
deviation. According to Michel Foucaults famous formulation, sexuality emerged
as the correlative of that slowly developed discursive practice which constitutes
the scientia sexualis, marking a profound shift in the production of the subject, a
shift which turned the sexual body into the focus of scientific enquiry and made
it central to the deployment of power in the West.2 Yet while this development is
located at a particular historical moment and shaped by the political,

This chapter was published in The Cambridge Companion to the Body in Literature, ed. David Hillman
and Ulrika Maude (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), pp. 101-115.

technological and social transformations of the later nineteenth-century, the

conceptualization of sexuality and related ideas about identity and the body
is defined as much by its continuities with the past as it is as a modern
invention.3

The critical consensus is that the conceptualization of sexuality is intimately
linked to fundamental questions about the body, its role in defining what it
means to be human and the governing of the kinds of subjects are admitted into
social existence, whether individually or collectively. Yet the precise meanings of
sexuality remain contested. The influential theorist Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, who
defines sexuality as the array of acts, expectations, narratives, pleasures,
identity-formations, and knowledges, in both women and men, that tends to
cluster most densely around certain genital sensations but is not adequately
defined by them, has argued that sexuality resists neat classification precisely
because it represents the full spectrum of positions between the most intimate
and the most social, the most predetermined and the most aleatory, the most
physically rooted and the most symbolically infused, the most innate and the
most learned, the most autonomous and the most relational traits of being.4

As sexuality is a contingent concept, dependent in its meanings on context and
interpretation, attention to the literariness of sexuality is critical for
understanding the complex and often paradoxical constitution of the modern
sexual body as both a conduit of individual desires and feelings and the subject of
collective articulations of Western modernity. We need to consider sexualitys
conceptual debts to literary and cultural representations; its formal articulation

This chapter was published in The Cambridge Companion to the Body in Literature, ed. David Hillman
and Ulrika Maude (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), pp. 101-115.

through the generic conventions of the case study, a new narrative genre that
transformed auto/biographical accounts into objects of scientific study; and the
fact that fiction, and to a lesser extent poetry, played a crucial role in the
development, interpretation and popularization of sexual ideas, to gain fuller
insights into the construction and reception of sexual norms and knowledges
and the social and political contexts that shaped both sexuality and modernity.

A Science of Sexual Bodies
The most influential critical studies of modern sexuality tend to begin with an
examination of the emergence of sexology, the field of investigation and
professional practice that devoted sustained scientific attention to sex. 5
Sexology has its origins in medical developments and related forensic enquiries
that, from the late eighteenth-century onwards, shaped scientific and political
debate. Initially at least, the studies of sexual behavior and the bodies involved
focused largely on debates about crime and punishment, and related questions
about pathology and perversion. In the 1840s and 1850s, for example, the
French forensic doctor Ambrose Tardieu studied the size and shape of penises
and male anuses, believing that these measurements of the body would allow
him to establish a scientific framework that would allow the identification of
men who had penetrative sex with other men, either actively or passively. 6
The evidence gleaned from such examinations was intended for use in the
courtroom, in Tardieus case primarily in relation to cases of sexual abuse
against children, but also to identify sodomites.7 While Tardieus attempts at
reading the body in this way ultimately proved futile and while he belonged to
the last generation of sex researchers who conceptualized men who had sex with

This chapter was published in The Cambridge Companion to the Body in Literature, ed. David Hillman
and Ulrika Maude (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), pp. 101-115.

other men primarily in terms of the sex acts committed the idea that sexual
activity left a physical imprint on the body retained currency into the twentieth
century.

The shift from sodomy to the homosexual, or from acts to identities, which is
commonly seen to be indicative of the emergence of the modern sexual subject,
resulted not from a transformative moment but from a slow and convoluted
process of thinking about sex in the context of scientific and social concerns.
These debates blurred the boundaries between expert and lay stakeholders.
From around the mid nineteenth-century, and in the wake of Charles Darwins
evolutionary biology, scholars, scientists and lay people turned to the sexual
body to ask questions about the individual and about the temporality of human
existence. Initially focusing specifically on questions of heredity and
reproduction, the body here came to be understood as a product of the past and
a marker of the future, a measure by which individuals and larger groups of
people could be identified and classified in relation to normative ideals about
civilization and progress. In the 1880s and 1890s scientific and popular debates
shifted more specifically toward attention to sexual acts and desires that
deviated from the reproductive norm. A diverse band of psychiatrists,
neurologists, forensic experts, literary scholars and other thinkers and
professionals started to publish privately and through specialised publishers on
topics related to sexual perversion and the more affirmatively titled Greek
love, sexual inversion and homosexuality.8

This chapter was published in The Cambridge Companion to the Body in Literature, ed. David Hillman
and Ulrika Maude (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), pp. 101-115.

Same-sex sexuality was initially conceptualized in terms of a gendered misfit

between body and soul. In the 1860s, the Hanoverian lawyer Karl Heinrich
Ulrichs published a series of pamphlets on what he called the riddle of man-
manly love in which he laid out what became known as the theory of sexual
inversion. 9 According to Ulrichs, a man who loved other men had a female soul
inside his male body, a conceptualization of sexuality that extended the Cartesian
mind-body dualism to include a consideration of both gender and sexual desire.
Ulrichs called these men-loving-men with whom he identified Urnings, a
term derived from Platos Symposium which was sometimes translated into
English as Uranian.10 The word competed with other freshly-coined terms
including homosexuality, first used by the Hungarian Karl Maria Kertenby (also
known as Benkert) in 1869, which would eventually replace Ulrichss vocabulary
even as his conception of same-sex sexuality as gender inversion retained
currency in scientific and popular debates.

The history of the emergence of same-sex terminology indicates that the modern
sexual body was both a gendered and a class-construct. It was the political
upheavals that preceded the formation of a German Empire in 1871 that
prompted Ulrichs to write about love between men. As a lawyer and a lover of
men, he foresaw the danger that after unification of the German states, the
penal code of powerful Prussia would be enforced in smaller states, such as his
native Hanover, which followed the French Napolonic Code. This was a
problem for men who loved men because unlike the Napolonic Code and its
variations, the Prussian penal code explicitly criminalized unnatural and illicit
behaviour and punished it with a one-day-to-five -year prison sentence and an

This chapter was published in The Cambridge Companion to the Body in Literature, ed. David Hillman
and Ulrika Maude (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), pp. 101-115.

optional revocation of the offenders civil rights.11 Women, whose civil rights
were extremely restricted at the time, and who were not franchised and were
and only slowly gaining rights to property, did not feature in this legislation. This
is indicative of wider assumptions about the female sexual body as a mere
reproductive vessel. Ulrichs himself treated the existence of female same-sex
sexuality as an exercise in logic. He explained that because he knew of the
existence of love between men he assumed that love between women must also
exist even though he did not personally know any women who loved women. It
would take another twenty years or so before the existence of the female orgasm
became more widely accepted.

While Ulrichs legal training helped him anticipate the disturbing criminalization
of homosexuality, it was his classical education that gave him the language to talk
about sex between men in affirmative terms. Linda Dowling, in her studies of
Victorian Hellenism, has shown that classical literature, art and philosophy
opened up affirmative homophile representations to the privileged men of the
nineteenth-century world. One of the most influential literary figures of the time,
Walter Pater, published essays on the Renaissance and a novel, Marius the
Epicurean (1885), which staked a claim for the senses as the key mediator
between life and art. Paters work inspired many writers and poets associated
with the Aesthetic Movement whose lives and work have shaped modern lesbian
and gay history, such as Oscar Wilde, Arthur Symonds, Vernon Lee and the niece-
and-aunt collaboration publishing under the name pseudonym Michael Field,
and he also influenced modernist writers such as Virginia Woolf and T.S. Eliot.12
While women such as Lee and Michael Field came to aestheticism via literary

This chapter was published in The Cambridge Companion to the Body in Literature, ed. David Hillman
and Ulrika Maude (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), pp. 101-115.

culture, some men became acquainted with these new philosophies of art, desire
and the body through changes in the university curriculum.13 For instance,
Benjamin Jowitts introduction of Plato to the classical curriculum at Oxford
formally introduced students such as John Addington Symonds to Greek ideas
and ideals about love between men. Symonds, who went on to become one of the
most influential literary critics of the Victorian period, also wrote, together with
English sexologist Havelock Ellis, the first the first full-length English study of
homosexuality, Sexual Inversion (1897).14 Of course, this is not to say that Greek
philosophy promoted same-sex desire. But, in a society where same-sex desire
was mostly unspeakable the affirmative textual encounters with love between
men enabled many men to find an affirmative language for their desires and
what Symonds calls the sanction of the love which had been ruling [him] from
childhood.15

This socio-cultural context and the fact the medical profession remained largely
closed to women throughout the nineteenth-century explains why, initially at
least, sexology was largely a male business. For while a number of women-who-
love-women took part in sexological research, most famously perhaps Edith Ellis,
the wife of Havelock Ellis who left her husband for a woman, and whose case
study is included in Sexual Inversion, women only gained access to the medical
profession in significant numbers from the early twentieth century onward.
Furthermore, many women activists focused on sexual rights, marriage reform
and birth control, including Edith Ellis, who became a wellknown feminist who
spoke publicly against the institution of marriage and wrote feminists novels
such as Attainment (1909), which critiqued the gendered blind spots of many

This chapter was published in The Cambridge Companion to the Body in Literature, ed. David Hillman
and Ulrika Maude (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), pp. 101-115.

social reform movements. The two most famous and influential early twentieth-
century women associated with sex reform Marie Stopes in England and
Margaret Sanger in the U.S. in turn, campaigned for birth control and sex
education, and they make it clear how closely debates about womens sexuality
remained tied to feminist politics and the demands for womens rights over their
bodies.

The early scientia sexualis was thus defined by a series of male-authored works
that dealt with issues of same-sex sexuality. Influential studies include Richard
von Krafft-Ebings Psychopathia Sexualis, Havelock Elliss seven-volume Studies
in the Psychology of Sex, and the prolific oeuvre of the Jewish homosexual-rights
activist and founder of the first Institute for Sexual Sciences in Berlin, Magnus
Hirschfeld. These works took widely different and sometimes paradoxical
approaches to the body and its social regulation, veering between essentialist
ideas about human nature and what we might now think of as constructivist
ideas about sexual identity formation. For example, Hirschfeld, who was deeply
concerned with the question of social context and actively campaigned for the
decriminalization of homosexuality, also supported eugenics, while his rival
Albert Moll, who sought to cure homosexuality, was critical of eugenics. The
emerging psychoanalytic movement in turn, which turned its focus from somatic
to psychic reality nevertheless still engaged with questions of natural
development and adapted much of the newly-coined vocabulary of
homosexuality and fetishism.16

Sexologys Fictions

This chapter was published in The Cambridge Companion to the Body in Literature, ed. David Hillman
and Ulrika Maude (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), pp. 101-115.

While these political and scientific debates on the surface appear to be far
removed from the literary realm, they were in fact tightly intertwined with
literature and philosophy. Gillian Beer, in her influential study of the relationship
between evolutionary theory and culture, has pointed out that in the nineteenth
century the development of new ideas and knowledge was subject to particular
creative conditions that directly impacted on the way ideas were formulated and
transmitted. She notes that despite the growing fascination with the reaches of
experience beyond the domain of reason, debates were marked by the absence
of an analytic and denotative vocabulary for describing the activities of the
unconscious and the subconscious.17 At the same time, scientists still shared a
common language with educated readers and writers of their time they shared
a literary discourse which was readily available to readers without scientific
training. Their texts could be read very much as literary texts.18

Critics today are turning attention to the fact that literary representations, and,
perhaps even more so, literary methods were crucial to the way sexuality was
articulated in sexology and beyond.19 The work of Richard von Krafft-Ebing
exemplifies this point. A trained psychiatrist, Krafft-Ebing represents the
scientific, disciplinarian approach to sex, which focused on perceived
perversions and constructed elaborate psychopathologies amidst which we find
the first schematized narratives about female and male homosexuality. Yet even
Krafft-Ebing linked the scientific study of sex to the literary realm. In the
Preface to the first edition of Psychopathia Sexualis he writes:

This chapter was published in The Cambridge Companion to the Body in Literature, ed. David Hillman
and Ulrika Maude (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), pp. 101-115.

The poet is the better psychologist for he is swayed rather by sentiment

than by reason, and always treats his subject in a partial fashion.
Although the Physiology of Love provides inexhaustible material for the
poetry of all ages and of all peoples, nevertheless the poet will not
discharge his arduous task adequately without the active co-operation of
natural philosophy and, above all, that of medicine, a science which ever
seeks to trace all psychological manifestations to their anatomical and
physical sources.20

While the passage clearly favours science over poetry, it nevertheless suggests
that a somatic understanding of human sexuality benefits from the insights of the
poets. Krafft-Ebing himself turned to literature to investigate what he thought of
as sexual pathologies and anomalies, to observe deviant sexual practices and to
put a name to them. For while his sexological work was built around the
narratives of women and men who confided to him their sexual secrets and
fantasies, these patients rarely had a name for their desires and practices, which
is why Krafft-Ebing turned to literature to find new words to describe practices
that had not been named before.

The most famous example of sexologys literary inspiration is the coinage of the
terms sadism and masochism, which were derived from the novels of Marquis
de Sade and Leopold von Sacher-Masochs Venus in Furs (1869) respectively.
Sadism, writes Richard von Krafft-Ebing, is so named from the notorious
Marquis de Sade, whose obscene novels treat of lust and cruelty.21 About
masochism he notes in turn that he feel[s] justified in calling this sexual

10

This chapter was published in The Cambridge Companion to the Body in Literature, ed. David Hillman
and Ulrika Maude (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), pp. 101-115.

anomaly Masochism because the author Sacher-Masoch frequently made this

perversion, which up to his time was quite unknown in the scientific world as
such, the substratum of his writings. 22 That for Krafft-Ebing the literary
imagination is not merely the conjurer of sexual fantasies is further reinforced by
his description of Sacher-Masoch as not only the poet of Masochism, but
himself afflicted with this anomaly, noting that although these proofs were
communicated to me without restriction, I refrain from giving them to the
public. 23 These sentences illustrate well the complex role occupied by literature
in the development of the scientia sexualis. For while Krafft-Ebing suggests that
novels are conjurers of sexual perversions, he is equally quick to read the
literary representations back onto the lives of the author. His withholding of
proofs that would substantiate his claims about Sacher-Masochs own sexual
proclivities furthermore indicates the problematic role of sexologists as the
mediators of sexual knowledge, whose self-proclaimed role as keepers of sexual
secrets is undermined by the existence of literary representations aimed at the
wider reading public.

As both sexology and literature were concerned in some ways with rendering
observations of the body in written form, it should come as no surprise that they
shared certain formal features. The narratives fashioned by sexologists out of
letters and face-to-face encounters with women and men who told them about
their sexual desires, developed into a new genre: the case study. Barbara Hardy
has noted that it is hard to take more than a step without narrating.24 For
sexologists such as Krafft-Ebing, the case studies were crucial to the
development of their ideas. Psychopathia Sexualis, which was ostensibly

11

This chapter was published in The Cambridge Companion to the Body in Literature, ed. David Hillman
and Ulrika Maude (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), pp. 101-115.

intended as a reference book for the medical and legal professions but soon
reached wider audiences, grew from a slim first edition to a substantial final
volume thanks to Krafft-Ebings addition of ever-new case studies to the volume.
Some of these case studies were narratives provided by women and men who
had read an earlier edition of Psychopathia Sexualis and sought to provide an
account of their own desires. Later sexological studies, notably Havelock Elliss
and John Addington Symonds work, considered the case study so fundamental
to their practice that they directly approached subjects for information. Their
Sexual Inversion includes anonymised narratives by Symonds himself as well as a
case study written by the English poet and social reformer Edward Carpenter
on Ellis and Symonds request. These case studies were distinguished from other
biographical accounts through the inclusion of what Ellis called elementary
data: information about the health of the subjects parents and any siblings as
well as a detailed account of her or his sexual development.25 This data, which
was used to provide standardized accounts of sexual desire and development,
framed the case studies in terms of larger questions about heredity, the family
and the social environment. While the unreliability of the case study as a
historical record of individual lives has rightly been criticized they were
subjected to the editorial interventions of the sexologists these narratives
nevertheless offer tentative glimpses of the lives of sexual subjects at a point
when the idea of sexual identity was only beginning to be formed. Today, the
case study genre is more famously associated with the work of Sigmund Freud,
who adapted it for use in his psychoanalytic practice both to record sessions
with his patients and to apply his psychoanalytic findings to the interpretation of
art and literature.26 Freuds work, like that of the sexologists, reinforces that the

12

This chapter was published in The Cambridge Companion to the Body in Literature, ed. David Hillman
and Ulrika Maude (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), pp. 101-115.

study of sexuality was a curious amalgam of (auto) biographical data and

fictional forms, as much a product of the imagination than a science.

Literary Inversions
It is in the literary archives of sexuality where we find the most compelling
representations of modern sexual discourses, subjectivities and social norms;
where both the regulation of different forms of intimacy and its effects are
recorded; and where individual and collective feelings and experiences the
hopes and fears attached to the concept of sexuality are articulated. Influential
literary histories of modern sexuality such as the studies by Joseph Bristow,
Laura Doan, and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, among others, have shown that fiction
and poetry played an important role in the emergence of the modern sexual
subject.

For, as Anna Katharina Schaffner points out in her recent Modernism and
Perversion, the conceptual transfer between literature, medicine and
psychology, and between imaginary and scientific narratives, works in both
directions.27 While sexologists turned to literature and philosophy for
inspiration, nineteenth- and early twentieth-century writers engaged with new
sexological theories in their work. Krafft-Ebing and his Psychopathia Sexualis, for
example, appear in novels that played a significant role in initiating wider
debates about lesbianism in Germany and the UK: Aimee Ducs Sind Es Frauen?
Roman ber das Dritte Geschlect (1901) and Radclyffe Halls The Well of
Loneliness (1928) both mention the sexologist to describe the protagonists
sexual identity. Ducs novel calls the women-who-love-women, whose stories the

13

This chapter was published in The Cambridge Companion to the Body in Literature, ed. David Hillman
and Ulrika Maude (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), pp. 101-115.

narrative charts, Krafft-Ebings Kinder [children], while The Well of Loneliness

depicts Krafft-Ebings work alongside that of Karl Heinrich Ulrichs as the key to
its protagonists understanding of her self. Literary texts and figures in turn
worked themselves back into sexological texts: Oscar Wilde, whose only novel,
the homoerotic The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891), has been read as a founding
text for the modern image of male homosexuality, famously entered sexological
discourse himself after his trial in 1895, which was discussed in the work of
major sexologists.28

But fiction also serves as a reminder of the fact that the relationship between
desire and identity is not necessarily negotiated through a set of commonly used
labels. Chris White has argued that in a society where homosexuals are seen as
degenerate, evil, demonic; as gender-traitors, class-traitors, and vicious,
dangerous conspirators against health, work and light, those wishing to write
about homosexuality as a positive, healthy and productive identity were obliged
to find discreet ways and discrete discourses of speaking about themselves, to
each other and the world, and also to invent a literature of their own.29 While for
White the realm of fiction provided an alternative to the scientific and popular
languages of sex, the boundaries between these discursive spheres were in fact
permeable and many writers freely engaged with scientific concepts. The
various engagements with the notion of inversion illustrate this point. Inversion
came to play an important role in the conceptualization of modern sexuality,
specifically in relation to desires and gender expressions that ran against the
heterosexual norm. It features prominently in both scientific and lay discourses
of sex, including sexological works such as Psychopathia Sexualis, and it inspired

14

This chapter was published in The Cambridge Companion to the Body in Literature, ed. David Hillman
and Ulrika Maude (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), pp. 101-115.

the titles of major works of sexology including Ellis and Symonds Sexual
Inversion in England and Marc-Andr Raffalovichs LUranisme: Inversion sexuelle
congnitale (1895) in France.

Less well know is the fact that that engagements with inversion also
underpinned feminist debates of the later nineteenth-century. These debates
tended to focus on issues of gender rather than female same-sex desire. The
emergence of the so-called New Woman, a term coined by the writer Sarah
Grand in 1894, saw women laying claim on male spaces and challenging the
authority of men who had historically held the keys to education, knowledge,
professional life and politics.30 New Woman feminism describes less a uniform
political movement than the insistence that the woman question womens
position in society is key to all aspects of individual and social life. 31 It covers
positions that range from the socially conservative politics of Sarah Grand (who
in her novel, The Heavenly Twins, (1893) critiqued the negative impact of
womens exclusion from realms of medical and scientific knowledge even as she
upheld essentialist ideas about womanhood) to the radical writings of Mona
Caird, who in a series of political articles on Marriage (1888) and in her novels,
most famously The Daughters of Danaeus (1894), critiqued both marriage and
assumptions about the naturalness of maternity.32

In these feminist debates, ideas about inversion were utilised to gendered
effect. While the popular image of the New Woman was of a feminist who
smoked, cycled, educated herself, and often clad herself in masculine breeches
and wore her hair short, literary discussions of the New Woman used the idea of

15

This chapter was published in The Cambridge Companion to the Body in Literature, ed. David Hillman
and Ulrika Maude (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), pp. 101-115.

inversion to make a case for womens emancipation. Olive Schreiner's The Story
of an African Farm (1883), for example, which is generally seen, in the words of
Edith Ellis, as the forerunner of the Womans movement, uses metaphors of
inversion both to critique the oppression of women and the colonial oppression
in her native South Africa.33 In one of the novels most famous passages the
female protagonist, Lyndall, explains to her male friend, Waldo, how women are
made to believe that they are inferior to men: To you [the world] says Work;
and to us it says Seem!, she says, noting that because women are from birth
made to feel that they are less capable than men, many women do lose both
physical strength and mental ability.34 Lyndall goes on to stake a claim for female
inversion, for women to break free from this enforced state of atrophy by laying
claim to physical and mental masculine privileges.35

But while these feminist debates tended to focus on aspects of gender
transgression rather than discussions of female same-sex sexuality, this did not
mean that there were no literary representations of love between women. Some
New Woman writers such as Victoria Cross and Ada Leverson explicitly played
with ideas of gender performativity in their work and used the voices of cross-
dressed and cross-gendered protagonists to explore a queer range of desires.
Both Cross and Leverson wrote short stories which were published in The Yellow
Book, the influential literary periodical associated with the emergence of a
decadent gendered and sexual aesthetic. Next to these prose explorations,
poetry provided the most productive mode for literary explorations of female
same-sex desire. Michael Field famously wrote about love/of woman unto
woman which has no lack in it, and no defect.36 Amy Levy wrote passionate

16

This chapter was published in The Cambridge Companion to the Body in Literature, ed. David Hillman
and Ulrika Maude (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), pp. 101-115.

poetry to the writer Vernon Lee; while in the early twentieth century a diverse
group of poets and writers including H.D., Bryher, Gertrude Stein, Natalie Barney
and Djuna Barnes, amongst others, shaped what has become known as sapphic
modernity.37

The body within these discourses and representations appears multiform, at
times imagined as the extraneous site of the self and its desires, as in Virginia
Woolfs Orlando (1928), and at others represented as a crucial site for identity
formation, as in Radclyffe Halls novel The Well of Loneliness (1928), whose trial
initiated the first public debates about lesbianism in Britain and popularized an
image of lesbian masculinity. The Well of Loneliness was tried for obscenity
despite the fact that it does not directly mention sexual acts and it was banned
from publication in Britain where it would not be sold before 1949. If this tells us
something about the unspeakability of love between women at the time, explicit
representations of sexuality were also a more general taboo. James Joyces
Ulysses (1922) and D.H. Lawrences Lady Chatterleys Lover (1928) were
censored, the former for its depiction of the protagonist, Leopold Bloom,
masturbating on a beach; the latter for its expletive language and explicit sex
scenes that transgressed class boundaries as much as the boundaries of sexual
expression. This may help to explain why, unlike Ulysses, which became available
in the UK in the late 1930s, it took until the trial of 1960 before Lady Chatterleys
Lover became freely available in the U.K.

What these diverse novels and their reception have in common is that they show
that the representation of the sexual body in all its forms is also always tied in to

17

This chapter was published in The Cambridge Companion to the Body in Literature, ed. David Hillman
and Ulrika Maude (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), pp. 101-115.

larger questions about social norms. Despite their differences, these literary
representations of sex share that they make desire, love and intimacy speakable
in ways that would impact on both subjective and collective modes of
identification.

Past Subjects
How to study the history of sexuality remains one of the fundamental questions
in a relatively recently-constituted interdisciplinary field of research that brings
together literary and cultural scholars, historians and other experts interested in
the ways in which sex was experienced and functioned politically, socially and
culturally in the past. This scholarship has shifted away from the idea that the
modern period constitutes a singularly transformative moment in sexual history.
Instead, scholars are turning their attention to continuities and nonlinear points
of convergence that link same-sex lives across time and space.38 While most of
this criticism tends to focus either on issues of identity or its undoing, historian
Laura Doan has recently argued that we need to decentre the homosexual or
queer subject from historical investigations if we want to gain a fuller
understanding of sexuality in the past.39 From the vantage point of the twenty-
first century it is easy to forget, she notes, that the inclination for thinking of
ourselves either as sexual or as sexual beings is relatively recent.40 Doan
critiques existing approaches to the history of sexuality not so much in order to
discard them, but to ask new questions about how intimate relations in the early
twentieth century were understood at the time. Examining the friendships
between a group of women who served during World War I, Doan is less
concerned with reconstructing lesbian identities or deconstructing queer

18

This chapter was published in The Cambridge Companion to the Body in Literature, ed. David Hillman
and Ulrika Maude (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), pp. 101-115.

subjects, then she is with examining the material traces of the lives of these
women to disturb, in her own words, current practices in historicizing
sexuality.41 These twenty-first century critical debates about the history and
historiography of sexuality hold a fractured mirror to debates about sexuality at
the turn of the past century. For what is at stake both now and then are
fundamental questions about the self and its others, and about the role of the
sexual body in defining the relationship between individual and collective forms
of being and their governance within larger structures of power, knowledge and
social organization. Literary and non-literary writings about sexuality allow us
glimpses at the transformations of intimacy into individual and collective modes
of identification that in turn reshape the contours of the sexual body.

19

This chapter was published in The Cambridge Companion to the Body in Literature, ed. David Hillman
and Ulrika Maude (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), pp. 101-115.

1 Lisa Downing, The Cambridge Introduction of Michel Foucault (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2008): 93.
2 Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality Volume 1: an Introduction, trans.

Robert Hurley (London: Penguin Books, 1990): 68. See also Michel Foucault,
Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the Collge de France 1977-1978,
edited by Michel Senellart, translated by Graham Burchell (New York: Picador,
2004).
3 See Martha Vicinus, Intimate Friends: Women Who Loves Women, 1778-1928

(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004); Noreen Giffney, Michelle Sauer and
Diane Watt, The Lesbian Premodern (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011).
4 Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet (Berkley: University of

California Press, 1990): 251 and 252.

5 Early field-defining studies in the modern history of sexuality include Lucy

Bland and Laura Doan (eds), Sexology in Culture: Labeling Bodies and Desires
(Cambridge: Polity Press, 1998); Lawrence Birken, Consuming Desire: Sexual
Science and the Emergence of a Culture of Abundance, 1971-1914 (Ithaca: Cornell
University Press, 1988); Carolyn J. Dean, Sexuality and Modern Western Culture
(New York: Twayne, 1996); Leslie Hall and Roy Porter, The Facts of Life: The
Creation of Sexual Knowledge in Britain, 1650-1950 (New Haven: Yale University
Press, 1995); Jeffrey Weeks, Sex, Politics and Society: The Regulation of Sexuality
Since 1800 (London: Longman, 1981). More recent surveys of the field include
Heike Bauer, English Literary Sexology: Translations of Inversion 1860-1930
(Basignstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009); Joseph Bristow, Sexuality, 2nd ed. (New

20

This chapter was published in The Cambridge Companion to the Body in Literature, ed. David Hillman
and Ulrika Maude (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), pp. 101-115.

York: Routledge, 2011); H.G. Cocks and Matt Houlbrook (eds), Palgrave Advances
in the Modern History of Sexuality (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2005); A Cultural
History of Sexuality, 6 vols, general editor Julie Peakman (London: Berg, 2010);
and Sarah Toulalan and Kate Fisher (eds), The Routledge History of Sex and the
Body, 1500 to the Present (Abingdon: Routledge, 2013). Important recent studies
of national and local histories include Chiara Beccalossi, Female Sexual Inversion:
Same-Sex Desires in Italian And British Sexology c. 1870-1920 (Basingstoke:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2012); Matt Cook, London and the Culture of Homosexuality
1885-1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003); Laura Doan,
Fashioning Sapphism: The Origins of Modern English Lesbian Culture (New York:
Columbia University Press, 2001); Janice M. Irvine, Disorders of Desire: Sexuality
and Gender in Modern American Sexology (Philadelphia: Temple University Press,
2005).
6 See Vernon Rosario, The Erotic Imagination: French Histories of Perversity

(Oxford: Oxford University Press): 73-78.

7 For a more detailed analyses of the debates, see Ivan Crozier, The Anus of the

Sodomite in Nineteenth-Century Medical Discourse, in Christopher E. Forth and

Ivan Crozier (eds), Body Parts: Critical Explorations in Corporeality (Maryland:
Lexington, 2005): 65 -84.
8 Many of the most influential sexological texts are brought together in Lucy

Bland and Laura Doan (eds), Sexology Uncensored: The Documents of Sexual
Science (Cambridge: Polity, 1998).
9 Reprinted as Karl Heinrich Ulrichs, Forschungen ber das Rthsel der

mannmnnlichen Liebe, ed. Hubert Kennedy. 4 Vols (Berlin: Verlag rosa Winkel,

21

This chapter was published in The Cambridge Companion to the Body in Literature, ed. David Hillman
and Ulrika Maude (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), pp. 101-115.

1994).
10 Numa Numantius [Karl Heinrich Ulrichs], Vindex (Leipzig: Selbstverlag des

Verfassers, 1864): 1.
11 See Anon, Paragraph 175, Jahrbuch fr sexuelle Zwischenstufen 1 (1899): 136;

John C. Fout, Sexual Politics in Wilhelmine Germany: The Male Gender Crisis,
Moral Purity and Homophobia, in Forbidden History: The State, Society, and the
Regulation of Sexuality in Modern Europe, ed. John C. Fout (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1992): 259-292; Dagmar Herzog, Sex After Fascism: Memory and
Morality in Twentieth-Century Germany (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University
Press, 2005): 83-96. See also the documentary Paragraph 175 (dir. Rob Epstein
and Jeffrey Friedman, 2000).
12

See, for instance, Laurel Brake, Lesley Higgins and Carolyn Williams (eds),

Walter Pater: Transparencies of Desire (Greenboro: ELT, 2002); Richard

Dellamora, Masculine Desire: The Sexual Politics of Victorian Aestheticism (Chapel
Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1990); Denis Denisoff, Aestheticism and
Sexual Parody, 1840-1940 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002);
Stefano Evangelisto, British Aestheticism and Ancient Greece: Hellenism,
Reception, Gods in Exile (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009).
13 Linda Dowling, Language and Decadence in the Victorian Fin de Sicle

(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986), and Hellenism and Homosexuality

in Victorian Oxford (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994).
14 It was first published in German translation in 1896. See also Sean Brady, John

Addington Symonds (1840-1893) and Homosexuality: A Critical Edition of Sources

(Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012); Havelock Ellis and John Addington

22

This chapter was published in The Cambridge Companion to the Body in Literature, ed. David Hillman
and Ulrika Maude (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), pp. 101-115.

Symonds, Sexual Inversion, edited by Ivan Crozier (Basingstoke: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2008).
15 John Addington Symonds, The Memoirs of John Addington Symonds, ed. Phyllis

Grosskurth (London: Hutchinson, 1984): p. 85.

16 See Volkmar Sigusch, The Sexologist Moll Between Sigmund Freud and

Magnus Hirschfeld, Medical History Vol. 56 No. 2 (2012): 84-200.

17 Gillian Beer, Darwins Plots: Evolutionary Narrative in Darwin, George Eliot and

Nineteenth-Century Fiction ([1983]. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press): 10

18 Gillian Beer, Darwins Plots: 4
19 Important studies of the literary and cultural dimensions of modern sexuality

include Heather Love, Feeling Backward: Loss and the Politics of Queer History
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007); Hugh Stevens and Caroline
Howlett (eds), Modernist Sexualities (Manchester: University of Manchester
Press, 2000); Anna Katharina Schaffner, Modernism and Perversion (Basingstoke:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2013).
20 Richard von Krafft-Ebing, Psychopathia Sexualis: With Especial Reference to the

Antipathic Sexual Instinct, trans. by F.J. Rebman from the 12th German edition
(New York: Eugenics Publishing Company, 1934): vi.
21 Krafft-Ebing, Psychopathia Sexualis: 80.
22 Krafft-Ebing, Psychopathia Sexualis: 132.
23 Krafft-Ebing, Psychopathia Sexualis: 132.
24 Barbara Hardy, Tellers and Listeners: The Narrative Imagination (London:

Athlone, 1975): 4.
25 Havelock Ellis, A Study of British Genius (London: Hurst and Blackett, 1904):

23

This chapter was published in The Cambridge Companion to the Body in Literature, ed. David Hillman
and Ulrika Maude (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), pp. 101-115.

16.
26

See Adam Phillipss essay on The Freudian Body in this volume for more on

Freud.
27 Schaffner, Modernism and Perversion: 23.
28 See Alan Sinfield, The Wilde Century: Effeminacy, Oscar Wilde, and the Queer

Moment (New York: Columbia, 1994), and the more recent reassessments of
Wildes influence, Joseph Bristow (ed.), Oscar Wilde and Modern Culture: The
Making of a Legend (Athens: University of Ohio Press, 2008); Stefano Evangelista
(ed.), Oscar Wildes Reception in Europe (London: Continuum, 2010).
29 Chris White, Modes of Defence, in her (ed.), Nineteenth-Century Writings on

Homosexuality (London: Routledge, 1999): 116.

30 Sarah Grand, The New Aspect of the Woman Question, North American Review

158 (1894): 270-276.

31 See Ann Heilmann, New Woman Strategies: Sarah Grand, Olive Schreiner, and

Mona Caird (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004); Sally Ledger, The
New Woman: Fiction and Feminism at the Fin de Sicle (Manchester: Manchester
University Press, 1997); Teresa Mangum, Married, Middlebrow, and Militant:
Sarah Grand and the New Woman Novel (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan
Press, 1998); Carolyn Christensen Nelson (ed.), A New Woman Reader: Fiction,
Articles and Drama of the 1890s (Toronto: Broadview, 2000); Angelique
Richardson and Chris Willis (eds), The New Woman in Fiction and Fact: Fin-de-
Sicle Feminisms (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2001); Elaine Showalter (ed.),
Daughters of Decadence: Women Writers of the Fin-De-Sicle (London: Virago,
1993).

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This chapter was published in The Cambridge Companion to the Body in Literature, ed. David Hillman
and Ulrika Maude (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), pp. 101-115.

32 For a discussion of New Woman contexts see, for instance, Lucy Bland,
Banishing the Beast: Feminism, Sex and Morality (London: Tauris, 2001); Ann
Heilmann and Margaret Beetham, New Woman Hybridities: Femininity, Feminism
and International Consumer Culture, 1880-1930 (London: Routledge, 2004);
Angelique Richardson, Love and Eugenics in the Nineteenth Century: Rational
Reproduction and the New Woman (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003).
33 Mrs H. Ellis, Stories and Essays Volume 1 (Berkeley: Free Spirit Press, 1924):

42. See also Joseph Bristow, Introduction, in Olive Schreiner, The Story of an
African Farm (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), pp. vii- xxix; Carolyn
Burdett, Olive Schreiner and the Progress of Feminism, Evolution, Gender and
Empire (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2001).
34 Olive Schreiner, The Story of an African Farm (Oxford: Oxford University Press,

1998): 154.
35 See also Olive Schreiner, Woman and Labour (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1911):

54-55. Morag Shiach Modernism, Labour, and Selfhood in British Literature and
Culture, 1980-1930 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004).
36 Michael Field, The Tragedy of Pardon: Diane (1911), Act III. Reprinted in Chris

White (ed.), Nineteenth-Century Writings on Homosexuality (London: Routledge,

1999): 264. See also Marion Thain and Ana Parejo Vadillo (eds), Michael Field:
The Poet (Toronto: Broadview, 2009).
37 Laura Doan and Jane Garrity (eds), Sapphic Modernities: Sexuality, Women, and

National Culture (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 1996). See also Diana

Collecott, H.D. and Sapphic Modernism 1910-1950 (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1999); Doan, Fashioning Sapphism; Erin G. Carlston, Thinking

25

This chapter was published in The Cambridge Companion to the Body in Literature, ed. David Hillman
and Ulrika Maude (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), pp. 101-115.

Fascism: Sapphic Modernism and Fascist Modernity (Stanford: University of
Stanford Press, 1998).
38 See Martha Vicinus, Intimate Friends: Women Who Loves Women, 1778-1928

(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004); Noreen Giffney, Michelle Sauer and
Diane Watt, The Lesbian Premodern (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011).
39 Laura Doan, Disturbing Practices: History, Sexuality, and Womens Experiences

of Modern War (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013): 2.

40 Doan, Disturbing Practices: 11.
41

Doan, Disturbing Practices: 2.

26