Sexuality In Nineteenth Century Research Articles

The Silent Victim: Rape and Sexuality in Giacinta and ‘Tortura’ by Luigi Capuana

ABSTRACT This article explores how Luigi Capuana addresses the theme of rape and female sexuality in his first novel, Giacinta, and the short story ‘Tortura’. It investigates how the author engages with post-traumatic effects, female agency and subjectivity through the depiction of female acts of resistance. Through a reading of treatises on nineteenth-century sexuality and sociological studies on the topic, it offers a more nuanced understanding of how Capuana represents the drama of sexual violence. It is argued that Capuana’s scientific interests and verista aesthetic principles constitute a driving force for interrogating the ills of a static, male-dominated society and that his scientific gaze on the female ‘other’ does more than represent her as a disruptive force. The article shows that his exploration of sexuality reveals signs of rupture in the normative conception of gender roles where sexual violence and subjection are condoned and normalised by a masculine scientific discourse.

Sex, Politics, and Social Change in the Eighteenth and the Nineteenth Centuries

The eighteenth-century "sexual revolution" cannot simply be explained as a consequence of economic or institutional factors -- industrialization, agricultural revolution, secularization, or legal hindrances to marriages. The example of western Valais (Switzerland) shows that we have to deal with a complex configuration of factors. The micro-historical approach reveals that in the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century sexuality -- and above all illicit sexuality -- was a highly subversive force that was considerably linked to political innovation and probably more generally to historical change. Nonmarital sexuality was clearly tied to political dissent and to innovative ways of behavior, both among the social elites and the common people. This behavior patterns influenced crucial evolutions in the social, cultural, and economic history of the region.

Sexuality in Nineteenth-Century England: the social context of illegitimacy in rural Kent

More bad history has been written about sex than any other subject. Our ignorance about the sexual attitudes and behaviour of people in the past is compounded by a desire to rush to rash generalisation. This is unfortunate, for (consciously or not) our perceptions of the present are shaped by our assumptions about the past. Britain's current preoccupation with ‘Victorian values’ is but a politically visible example of a more general phenomenon. And, more specifically, we do not know a great deal about lower-class sexuality in nineteenth-century England. There are studies of bourgeois desires and sensibilities, but little on the mores of the vast bulk of the population.As Jean Robin has demonstrated recently, one of the most fruitful approaches to the subject is the detailed local study – the micro-study. It may not appeal to those with a penchant for the broad sweep, but such an approach can provide a useful entry into the sexual habits of the people of the past. This article is intended as a follow-up to Robin's work. It deals with a part of rural Kent and, like Robin's work, it covers an aspect of nineteenth-century sexuality – in this case, the social context of illegitimacy. More particularly, this study (and here I differ from Robin) will question the usefulness of the concept of a ‘bastardy-prone sub-society’ (more of which later), a term still favoured by many historical sociologists. The experience of rural Kent suggests that bearing children outside marriage should be seen not as a form of deviancy but rather as part of normal sexual culture.

'A New Morality': Left-wing Intellectuals on Sexuality in Weimar Germany

A glance at recent historical publications teaches us that the study of sexuality and sexual behaviour is becoming a respectable subject in cultural history. An important example is Peter Gay's study From Victoria to Freud. Starting from a dusty collection of letters and diaries, he takes us on a tour through the landscape of late nineteenth-century sexuality in all its fascinating details. The fact that Gay uses Freud as his Baedeker on this itinerary more or less obscures the possible relation between sexual moral and political concepts. Fortunately, however, this aspect of ideas on sexuality has been explored in Mosse's Nationalism and Sexuality. Mosse convincingly relates the obsession with respectability to the efforts to strengthen the state and the nation by nationalism.' He focuses on the ideas of late nineteenthcentury and twentieth-century conservatives, proto-nazis and nazis in Germany. Consequently, left-wing ideas and especially left-wing opinions on sexuality during the Weimar period remained outside the scope of his study. Despite the abundance of studies on the Weimar Republic, this theme is still by and large a white spot on the map. This article will try to remedy this omission in part by describing the opinions of those left-wing intellectuals who were advocates of the new sexuality that arose in Germany in the wake of the first world war. The attitudes toward sexuality, aside from their intrinsic interest, shed considerable light on the modernizing and democratic potential of these left-wing intellectuals. The right-wing neo-konservative intellectuals, being the intellectual predecessors of nazi ideology, have received the most attention from historians, but this should not obscure the vital democratic traditions which were an integral part of Weimar's political life. Besides neglect of important sources such as the Weltbiihne, the main reason for this omission is that the significance of ideas on

The Magdalen in Modern Times: The Mythology of the Fallen Woman in Pre-Raphaelite Painting

It is a simple point but a crucial one, and provides the framework for my discussion. In this paper2 I want to establish the way in which paintings and other forms of cultural representation participated in the definition of sexual behaviour and respectability during the nineteenth century. The fallen woman has long been recognised as a popular theme for artists and writers during the nineteenth century. Indeed, this recognition has been built into the monolithic edifice of morality. It is a well-established and familiar concept: those repressive and hypocritical Victorians, publicly advocating strict codes of chastity whilst privately endorsing a massive system of prostitution and pornography. Art historians have been content to notice the proliferation of the fallen woman in Victorian art and to confine themselves to narrow questions of artistic influence and iconographic development. They have struggled to identify the literary and pictorial sources of particular paintings and to establish the first artist in the nineteenth century to depict a modern fallen woman.3 Whilst these questions have a limited local interest, the answers they provide have nothing to do with history. The works of art have been successfully kept in a social and political vacuum penetrated only by art or artists. This paper seeks to relocate images of women in Victorian high art within a specific history, that is, the history of sexuality; and to demonstrate that these paintings actively constructed meanings, values and morals. The discussion will not be confined to Pre-Raphaelite painting but will examine a range of images produced during the middle decades of the nineteenth century. It is a commonly-held belief that sexuality is an overpowering natural force, that it is instinctive and innate. It is believed to be biologically determined and is regarded as the most basic and fundamental drive in the human animal. This understanding of sexuality is known as essentialism. The concept of essentialism has been fundamentally challenged by the theory that sexuality is historically constructed, that it has historical conditions of existence and is socioculturally determined. Using this theory it is possible to identify the particular construction of sexuality in Victorian society and to understand the meaning and significance given to the sexual at this time. In The History of Sexuality, Michel Foucault rejected the notion that the history of sexuality in the nineteenth century could be seen in terms of repression and suggested instead that sexual behaviour is organised through mechanisms of definition and regulation.4 Thus in the nineteenth century sexuality is organised through the definition of a norm of social and sexual behaviour and of forms of deviancy the categorization of respectable and non-respectable practices and the differentiation between licit and illicit sex. Rather than seeing the Victorian age, therefore, as a period of silence and suppression regarding sex, we must begin to understand the nineteenth century in terms of a constant and persistent definition and re-definition of acceptable sexual behaviour. The most central form of sexual categorization is along lines of gender. Sexuality has been constructed for men and women in terms of difference. The male sexual urge is thought of as active, aggressive and spontaneous whilst female sexuality is defined in relation to the male, it is understood as weak, passive and responsive. The categories masculine and feminine have been defined on the basis of biological differences but are reinforced through medical, legal and other social practices. In the nineteenth century, with the establishment of the new medical profession, a whole field of inquiry into sexuality was opened up, a field which carried the status of a science. The new medical specialists asserted that women were entirely dominated by their reproductive systems.5 There were many competing and conflicting ideas concerning the question of female sexual desire, but many experts agreed that the respectable woman did not experience sexual drives and that her pleasure and desire for sex (if at all) was for the pleasure of reproduction and satisfying her partner.6 The man, on the other hand, was seen to have a natural and healthy desire for sex. It was a double standard of morality sexual desire was regarded in the man as normal and unavoidable, but was seen in the woman as deviant and pathological. Female sexuality was thus defined in terms of a central opposition between the pure and the

Masochism and Philosemitism: The Strange Case of Leopold von Sacher-Masoch

In the history of nineteenth-century sexuality, the erotic novels of Leopold von Sacher-Masoch occupy an important place as the literary source for the term 'masochism'. Writing primarily in the 1860s, 1870s and 1880s, Sacher-Masoch won a wide audience for his pornographic tales. But it is less well known today that in the same period he also wrote a long series of 'tales of the ghetto' which are distinguished by ardent philosemitism. In the following remarks, I shall investigate the congruence between eroticism and philosemitism in the writings of this peculiar Austrian author. The rapid industrialization of Central Europe in the second half of the nineteenth century brought with it the destruction of traditional village life and a corresponding nostalgia for this vanishing idyllic world. The literary genre of Dorfgeschichten, pioneered by the German-Jewish author Berthold Auerbach, was part of the attempt to recapture through fiction what modernity had destroyed. Within the category of Dorfgeschichten literary historians have identified a particular subgenre called Ghettogeschichten which sought to satisfy the thirst of the German-reading public for medieval romance with stories of the still-traditional Jewish communities of Eastern Europe.' The discovery of the 'ghetto' (a romantic misnomer from a strictly historical point of view) must be understood as a kind of literary mirror image to the rise of modern antisemitism. While nineteenthcentury antisemites since the Enlightenment saw in the Jews a backward and primitive people still mired in the Middle Ages, the authors of the Ghettogeschichten Leopold Kompert, Karl Emil

Nineteenth-Century Sexuality and the "Sexual Revolution" of the Progressive Era

This essay is an attempt to investigate the present state of our historical understanding of sexuality in the United States in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In the pages that follow, I make no claim to present new evidence about sexuality during this period; rather, my essay does argue that if some of our present assumptions are probed, many of our conclusions about the history of sexual attitudes and practice will be called into question. I propose to suggest that our view of nineteenth-century sexuality has been at least partly distorted. One reason for this is that the vocal demands of physicians and moral reformers for a more rigid sexual ideology have often been used as descriptions of the actual sexual habits and practices of the general population. The assumption that most nineteenth-century Americans were puritanical about sex has led, in turn, to a second confusion: that the increased public discussion of sexual matters in the early twentieth century signalled a "sexual revolution."