Unstable bodies : Victorian representations of sexuality and maternity
Jill Matus uses bio-medical, social scientific and literary texts to interrogate Victorian concepts of sexual difference. Departing from the usual critical focus on Victorian conceptions of the sexes as incommensurably different, she emphasises the powerful effects in Victorian culture of notions of sexual instability and approximation. While ideas about mutable or ambiguous sexuality provoked fear and fascination, they also served Victorian middle-class ideology by offering 'scientific' ways of constructing racial, class and national identity in terms of the body. Throughout this period fierce public debates raged around prostitution, infanticide, working-class sexuality, female reproduction and domesticity. Drawing on works by Elizabeth Gaskell, George Eliot and the Brontes, Matus explores the dialogue between literary and other discourses of sexuality. Unstable bodies will be an essential reference work for students and scholars working in Victorian literary and cultural studies, feminist studies, and the history of sexuality
Print Book, English, ©1995
Manchester University Press ; Distributed exclusively in the USA and Canada by St. Martin's Press, Manchester, New York, ©1995
History
280 pages : illustration ; 22 cm
9780719043475, 9780719043482, 0719043476, 0719043484
30919385
Introduction: Unstable bodies
Ch. 1. Sexual slippage and approximation in Victorian biomedical discourse. Sex as a continuum. Nature and culture. The sexual instincts. The politics of instability
Ch. 2. The making of the moral mother: working class sexuality in Mary Barton
Ch. 3. Confession, secrecy and exhibition. Agnes Grey and the 'animal side of life'. Passionlessness and prostitution in Ruth. Looking at Cleopatra: the exhibition and expression of desire in Villette
Ch. 4. Maternal deviance. Wet-nurses, infanticide and the discourse of motherhood. 'The unnaturalness of her crime': maternal instinct in Adam Bede. Sorrow on the Sea: The business of maternity. Madness and badness: Lady Audley's Secret
Ch. 5. From hysteria to maternity: Saint Teresa and the Madonna in Middlemarch