Viragoes, Spermatophagy, and Racial Degeneration: Cultural Contraventions in Josephine Butler’s Meditations on the Levite’s Woman

Abstract

Abstract The exponents of fin-de-siècle literary artistry painted New Woman a lascivious man-eating beast whose emasculating initiatives would check Western European ascent to civilization’s apogee. Unfettered by tradition, her intemperate spirit, blind to the fine(r) things of a “higher” cultural order, would return humankind to a primitive state. Literature and science, it seems, conspire along these lines to curb Late Victorian sexual-social anxiety. In this article, I situate Josephine Butler’s reading of the story of the Levite and his woman (Judges 19) in the stream of a broader challenge to the literary sensibilities of the time. Butler’s voluminous writings from the latter half of the nineteenth century brought a Christian acumen to bear upon a sustained critique of the androcentric and misogynistic persuasion at the heart of a cultural consensus on women’s character and sexuality. Her contention through an astute consideration of the Judges story is that a pervasive masculine animus of lust and rapine is the root of a crippling decline that is moral and religious, not strictly devolutionary. Yet, Butler’s favor for the tropes of the time—female salaciousness, mangled bodies, diseased members, and national degeneration—is resonant of language in the service of a broader consternation respecting the revisionary social-sexual movements afoot. Butler’s co-option of the cultural cadences in currency, I contend, is symptomatic of a shared ethos—that European dominance and splendor is the high-water mark of human achievement. In this respect, I propose, Butler’s critique of fin-de-siècle literary and scientific discourse is ambivalent. In rejecting and replacing the faddish cult of the inordinate woman with the scourge of the intemperate man, she stays, still, within the bounds of a British (and European) masterly optic on the non-European world.