Sexualizing Intellectual Modernity

Abstract

Abstract The final modernity story in this book is the story of the development of modern knowledge, of a modern scientific way of seeing the world. This story is told primarily in the anthropology of myth and ritual. The chapter shows how James Frazer’s sexualized theory of cultural production emerged out of the intersection of anthropological and literary writing in the 1880s, specifically around figures like Andrew Lang and H. Rider Haggard, who anthropologized the distinction between realism and romance. It reads novels without traditional marriage plots—Haggard’s She (1886–7) and Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the d’Urbervilles (1891)—that were self-consciously written with reference to a newly anthropologized theory of romance that recasts the relationship between myth and realism. The sexual plots of these novels situate themselves as explicitly “other” to the marriage plots of realist domestic fiction, and yet also as historically and causally related to them. Ultimately, the sexualized modernity story of myth becomes part of a literary modernity story.