Sexuality in Victorian Fiction

Rejecting stereotypical notions of Victorian sexual repression, Allen argues that rather than being seen as attempting to repress sex and sexuality, 19th-century English literature and culture should be seen as attempting to produce and construct, and hence control, the sexual.

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Rejecting stereotypical notions of Victorian sexual repression, Dennis W. Allen argues for the central importance of sexuality in 19th-century English literature and culture. He combines insights from historicist, feminist and psychoanalytic critical theory to demonstrate that the erotic reserve of the Victorian novel reflects the difficulty of inserting Victorian ideas of sex and sexuality into the larger ideological framework of 19th-century English culture. Allen draws on Michel Foucault's theories of the history of sexuality, as well as the recent work of such critics as D.A. Miller and Mary Poovey, to argue that the sexual was perceived by Victorians as chaotic, anarchic and resistant to rational categorisation. In engaging and original readings of Jane Austen's "Pride and Prejudice" (1813), Elizabeth Gaskell's "Cranford" (1853), Charles Dicken's "Bleak House" (1852-53) and Oscar Wilde's "Picture of Dorian Gray" (1891), Allen shows that these novels must be seen less as attempts to repress sex and sexuality than as efforts to produce and construct, and hence control, the sexual.
Illuminating these familiar texts from new perspectives, "Sexuality in Victorian Fiction" demonstrates that an awareness of the sexual strategies of Victorian fiction is essential to understanding 19th-century perceptions not only of the body, gender, identity and sexual preference, but also of the nature of representation itself.