Sin and a Tiger Skin: The Stickiness of Elinor Glyn’s Three Weeks

Abstract

This article considers how the press announcements about Elinor Glyn's Three Weeks (1907) and then the reviews of the novel, titillated the reading public. It then considers how sex, pleasure and desire function in the novel, centring on the tiger skin on which the adulterous love affair between Paul Verdayne and the Lady is consummated. The article also considers not only how desire and pleasure are located within the novel, but also how the tiger skin is embedded with those desires and pleasures. Drawing on Sara Ahmed’s work in The Cultural Politics of Emotion (2004) on how emotions and feelings travel, penetrate and stick to particular bodies, the article reflects upon how the circulation of affect, of affective value, can fix the objects of emotions. If an object such as a book which has received a great deal of advance press regarding its possible censoring, or a tiger skin on which an adulterous affair is consummated, is associated with a particular discourse repeatedly, then certain affects will stick to this object. In short, how does a tiger skin come to function as erotic shorthand for sex, pleasure and desire? The tiger skin in Three Weeks became a marker of all these emotions and affects, circulating in the cultural afterlife of this text in significant ways. Considering how the tiger skin functions in the novel complicates the understanding of generic codes and readerly expectations, and how desire is messily articulated.