Representation and Sexual Difference

In the manner of Foucault's unfinished "History of Sexuality", this work explores conceptions and representations of sexual difference across a whole range of writing, from the works of popular medicine, hygiene and law to psychology, psychoanalysis and literature, between 1830 and 1930. The author claims that sexuality, as a concept, has its origins in the latter half of the 19th-century. He reconstructs Victorian modes of representing sexual difference to study systematically the period's increasing preoccupation with sexology, and the pathology of sexuality. The book traces the complex discursive links between these specialist discourses and a whole cultural perspective on sexual difference and sexuality. The work looks at various approaches to the great sexual imponderable first articulated by Freud, "What does a woman want?" - from T.S. Eliot's to those of D.H. Lawrence and Dorothy Richardson. Dr Heath goes on to review the question of man/woman, and its intriguing analogue, conscious/unconscious, in Hardy's "Jude the Obscure" and Stevenson's "Dr Jeckyll and Mr Hyde".
The book also debates whether literature's implication in these issues is of a different order of complexity, and complicity, from that of other discourses.