Narrating the Victorian Vagina: Charlotte Brontë and the Masturbating Woman

Abstract

In 1989 Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick claimed that the discipline of gynaecology emerged in the nineteenth century as a response to cultural and medical anxieties over female masturbation. Sedgwick, in her controversial article ‘Jane Austen and the Masturbating Girl’, argued for a rereading of Sense and Sensibility (1811) that allowed for the possibility of a homoerotic, or even autoerotic, identity for the novel's Dashwood sisters. While Sedgwick's approach might be described as anachronistic or even exclusionary (it implies that readers who cannot see in Austen's text what Sedgwick sees have been blinded by their own heterosexist assumptions), it does present a useful model for the juxtaposition of historical and literary texts. That is, in forging audacious links between texts in an attempt to reveal what has previously been unsaid, unheard, or unexamined, Sedgwick illustrates the impossibility of locating an objective ‘meaning’ in canonical literary works. In this essay I echo Sedgwick as I explore the rich, albeit tangential, allusiveness produced by the juxtaposition of literary and non-literary texts. In exploring Victorian gynaecological treatises and a novel, Charlotte Bronte's Villette (1853), I identify a provocative cultural narrative of staged propriety and silent restraint. This essay, then, tells the story of how certain Victorian lives intersect and coalesce. What comes into view from the merging of the canonical and the non-canonical, the fictional and the real, is an account of how the individual sexual subject struggles to make sense of its identity in relation to the secret and unspoken complexities of the female body.