Of the many books since the 1960s that claim to overturn the cliche
of Victorian prudery, this is surely the least interesting,
persuasive, and readable. Mason (English/Univ. College, London)
broadly defines the Victorian era as starting with the 1790s - the
Romantic, Regency, or Georgian period - and petering out well
before 1900, his cut-off date. He's certainly done resourceful and
intensive research (check out the mammoth bibliography); his text
considers such varied sources as working-class papers, medical
reports, popular culture, and religious writing. Missing, however,
is analysis of the major cultural landmarks that Peter Gay
illuminates so brilliantly in his still uncompleted series on "the
bourgeois experience." Using imperfectly assimilated sociological
jargon, Mason argues that a crisis in confidence in courtship and
marriage for the first two or three decades of the 19th century
encouraged prostitution and casual sex; that interest in marriage
and concubinage was renewed at mid-century; and that the
introduction of artificial contraception revived sexuality after
1860. The moral "recalibration" that began in the lower classes
with a rise in sexual "moralism," he asserts, became a sign of
political progress throughout the period, touching the middle
classes as well. Considering popular entertainments, housing, class
orientation, and medical attitudes, he finds a discrepancy between
sexual attitudes and behavior - in brief, Victorian hypocrisy - a
discrepancy he criticizes Foucault for overlooking, but one that he
claims anthropologists find in many societies. While the material
is interesting, Mason's focus is so narrow, his writing so gnarled,
his syntax so confusing, his structure so uncertain, that it is
difficult to follow his argument or ascertain the direction in
which he is moving (toward the end he proposes a second volume).
Hard to imagine why anyone would prefer this volume to Gay's, or
even read it afterward. (Kirkus Reviews)
We tend to think of the Victorians as the personification of
prudery and puritanism, a people whose sexual attitudes, practices,
and knowledge differed greatly from our own, to their detriment.
Indeed, even in the midst of the AIDS crisis and our growing
concern about safe sex, the Victorians hardly seem an appealing
role model of sexual behavior. But is this image really very
accurate? What did the Victorians really think about sex? What were
their sex lives like? And what wider concepts--biological,
political, religious--shaped their sexuality?
The Making of Victorian Sexuality directly confronts one of the
most persistent cliches of modern times. Drawing on a wealth of
sources from medical and scientific texts, to popular fiction,
evangelical writing, and the work of radicals such as Godwin and
Mill, Michael Mason shows how much of our perception of
nineteenth-century sexual culture is simply wrong. Covering such
topics as premarital sex, marriage, prostitution, women's
sexuality, and male masturbation, Mason shows that, far from being
a license for prudery and hypocrisy, Victorian sexuality was guided
by a humane and progressive vision of society's future. Mason
reveals that the average Victorian man was not necessarily the
church-going, tyrannical, secretly lecherous, bourgeois pater
familias of modern-day legend, but often an agnostic,
radical-minded, sexually continent citizen, with a deliberately
restricted number of children. He paints a society in which
husbands and wives knew full well about female orgasm and women's
sexuality; where if some specialists believed that nervous
disorders in women, ranging from epilepsy to schizophrenia, were
due to masturbation, most experts emphatically denied the
connection; and where the extensive use of birth control devices
first began (pioneered oddly enough by the bottom of the middle
class: shop-owners, hotel-keepers, and other nonmanual but
nonprofessional and nonmanagerial workers). Furthermore, he points
out that Victorians were the first to concern themselves about sex
education for children, the quality of urban nightlife, commuter
marriages, the competing claims of pleasure and procreation in
married sex, and the rationale of divorce.
Persuasively arguing that there is much in Victorian sexual
moralism of interest to the late twentieth century, this lively and
fascinating study offers a radical challenge to one of the most
enduring myths of our age.
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