Victorian Sexual Dissidence (review)

Abstract

According to literary critics, nineteenth-century Britain saw a consolidation of many social norms, especially those involving sex/gender roles and the family. Yet critics seem more convinced of these norms than were most of the authors they analyze. Major Victorian authors departed more or less flagrantly from the norms that literary critics are so eager to see them as underwriting. The most overwrought decadent art looks tame next to the details of Victorian literary biography. I emphasize this point because recent scholarly work on Oscar Wilde and the 1890s has presented a skewed view of Victorian sexual representation, as if Victorian authors were models of propriety until Wilde and his contemporaries unleashed a tide of sexual anarchy. In terms of sheer sexual perversity, decadent writings of the 1890s seem less a sharp break from earlier representations than a continuation or even a toning down of them: Aubrey Beardsley's "The Ballad of a Barber" (1896) is a pale shadow of Robert Browning's "Porphyria's Lover" (1836). [End Page 509]