Tales of Female Sexuality and Scandal: Lauren Beukes’s “Princess” and Archived Asylum Texts

Abstract

In the short story “Princess” (Slipping: Stories, Essays and Other Writing. San Francisco: Tachyon, 2016), Lauren Beukes presents a tale of a princess who discovers her clitoris. Subsequent to this discovery, the princess's sexuality rapidly develops to encompass the pleasures derived from autoeroticism, as well as the sexual acts performed by her handmaid. Yet, the princess's sexual pleasure is only one part of the story. The other part is how society recoils in shock and engages in vehement scolding of the princess's expression of female sexual pleasure. Beukes's tale sparked my curiosity to explore narratives of female sexuality in archived texts. Such an undertaking is motivated by the dearth of historical studies of female sexuality in South Africa. One case in point is the study of female sexuality in the Victorian period, where the primary focus of academic scholarship is on rape and sexual violence. In this article, I seek to broaden the South African narratives of female sexuality in the late nineteenth century to include aspects pertaining to pleasure, as well as to enumerate how female sexual desire was often tied to scandals, public shock, and transgressions of femininity. To achieve this goal, I offer a micro-study of female sexuality at the Grahamstown Lunatic Asylum.