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Sexuality Archive
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Mistresses and marriage: or, a short history of the Mrs
Posted on May 22, 2013 | No CommentsThe word 'mistress' has a multi-layered history. Today, it generally refers either to a woman an illicit sexual relationship, or, more rarely, to someone who is in perfect control of her art. Both the sexual connotation and the inference of complete competencei date back to at least the later middle ages. -
Victorian and Edwardian Sporting Values
Posted on April 23, 2013 | No CommentsIt was understood that a boy's mind might be overtaken, if care were not taken, by one or both of the twin temptations that the cloistered life of the public school could give rise to - masturbation and homosexuality, the two great unmentionables of the Victorian age. -
“Tell me a story, dear, that is not true”: Love, Historicity, and Transience in A. Mary F. Robinson’s An Italian Garden
Posted on March 8, 2013 | No CommentsThrough a poetic voice compelled to recognize that individual desire is often not reciprocated and that love entails great risk that is itself ennobling, Robinson explores the nature of love that is selfless in that one gives oneself to another, yet selfish in that one comes to need a totality of love not possible in a finite context. Paradoxically, then, love evokes both pleasure and pain. -
My Secret Life and the Sexual Economy of Fin-de-Siècle England
Posted on March 4, 2013 | No CommentsAlthough in 1969 the memoirs were regarded as an obscene publication, they can be read as an important document of sexual history and will be treated as such in this paper. In doing so, it engages with but challenges earlier readings of My Secret Life. -
Sexuality in Jude the Obscure and the Sexuality of the Victorian Era
Posted on February 13, 2013 | No CommentsSexuality has an important role to play in one’s life. Sexual feelings should be given vent to. This paper draws a comparison between the sexuality of the Victorian era and the sexuality of Thomas Hardy’s Jude the Obscure. -
Emotional Intertexts: Female Romantic Friendship and the Anguish of Marriage
Posted on February 11, 2013 | No CommentsIn the decades after the path-breaking work of Lillian Faderman and Caroll Smith- Rosenberg, critical energy was largely directed to questions of the compatibility of female romantic friendship with marriage and the contested erotic content of inter- female intimacy. -
Emergent Identity Masculinity and the Representation of Rape on the Early Modern Stage, 1590-1620
Posted on February 1, 2013 | No CommentsThis thesis is an investigation of the representation of the figure of the man who raped on the early modern stage. -
Actresses As Working Women In the Victorian Theatre
Posted on January 30, 2013 | No CommentsVictorian performers were an unusual socioeconomic group. Unlike other professionals they were recruited from all classes of society. While some performers demonstrated that hard work and sheer talent could overcomeany class disadvantages, there were others who spent their entire careers in poverty... -
The Power of Desire and the Danger of Pleasure: Victorian Sexuality Reconsidered
Posted on January 20, 2013 | No CommentsThese revisionist accounts provide a much needed corrective in our view of Victorian sexuality. Unfortunately, corrective exercises all too often produce their own simplifications. These revisionist accounts have, I believe, replaced the popular stereotype of the repressed Victorian with an overly sanguine, modem image. -
18th century sex manual sells for £550
Posted on January 17, 2013 | No CommentsAristotle's Compleat Master-Piece was written around 1684 and was a sex manual and guide to midwifery. In part, it sets out 'to show at what age young men and virgins are capable of the marriage bed, which, because so many desire before they attend to it, it will be likewise necessary to show the causes of their impetuous desires.' -
“Thy Righteousness is but a menstrual clout”: Sanitary Practices and Prejudice in Early Modern England
Posted on January 7, 2013 | No CommentsAs well as the physical threat that menstrual blood could pose, it might also pose a psychological one: according to an extreme example, a man’s seeing of a woman’s menstrual blood could be enough to cure him of love sickness or infatuation. -
Common Woman to Commodity: Changing Perceptions of Prostitution in Early Modern England, C. 1450-1750
Posted on January 2, 2013 | No CommentsI began this project under the assumption that the modern definition and conception of the term “prostitute” had materialized by the eighteenth century. This is not a difficult conclusion to draw when examining the existing historiography of illicit sexuality in early modern England. -
Household Politics: The View From Early Modern England
Posted on December 17, 2012 | No CommentsThat’s a glimpse of the sort of evidence I’ll canvass in this book. I hope to conjure up a social world full of ornery, funny, sickening, and lethal controversies about gender, patriarchy, misogyny, public and private, and more. -
Women in The Book Of Martyrs as Models of Behavior in Tudor England
Posted on October 24, 2012 | No CommentsFoxe had made the decison to publish his work on the martyrs and the history of the Christian church in English, thus providing him with a much larger audience. As a good humanist, he had first considered Latin (his earliest work on the martyrs, written during his exile, was in Latin) but he felt the English people had the best claim on this information, and it could only reach them in the vernacular. -
Witchcraft and Family: What Can Witchcraft Documents Tell Us About Early Modern Scottish Family Life?
Posted on October 15, 2012 | No CommentsA wide range of document-types survive for the early modern period. But random survival rates of potentially detailed docu- ments coupled with their often significant lack of detail about women and the lower orders means that at this stage we do not know even the very basics about family life, let alone people’s subjective thoughts and experiences of family. -
To Converse with the Devil? Speech, Sexuality, and Witchcraft in Early Modern Scotland
Posted on October 15, 2012 | No CommentsIn both of the above cases, the women involved were accused of witchcraft as a consequence of their wilful and disorderly speech; yet, in the course of the witch trial, they were also accused and convicted of participating in an unnatural sexual relationship with the devil. -
The anatomy of beauty in nineteenth-century England
Posted on October 11, 2012 | No CommentsHow then did some nineteenth-century European anatomists come to see human beauty as a branch of science for which they might construct universal laws? -
Deeds Against Nature: women and Crime in Street Literature of Early Modern England
Posted on October 9, 2012 | No CommentsIn early modern England, when news in printed form designed for a large- scale readership was only beginning to develop, accounts of murders committed by women assumed an importance entirely disproportionate in relation to their actual occurrence. -
Victorian Values
Posted on October 6, 2012 | No Comments‘ “Victorian” is an academic epithet with which I feel profoundly uneasy for a number of reasons’, Kate Flint remarked in 2005, arguing that it has led to an unwholesome ‘period fetishism’, together with a limited view of transnational cultures, and an unreflective inclination to pack too many disparate intellectual and social movements into one simple grouping. -
MOVIE REVIEW: BYZANTIUM
Posted on September 11, 2012 | No CommentsThis a review of Neil Jordan's new movie, 'Byzantium', released at the Toronto International Film Festival. -
Finding the Bodies
Posted on September 6, 2012 | No CommentsCastlehaven was a minor peer, but it was rare for the early modern English state to try, much less to behead, a nobleman for anything but treason. Castlehaven is the only peer of whom I am aware who was executed solely for what on the record were sexual crimes... -
The Grotesque Body: Early Modern Representations of Women and the Subversion of the Elizabethan World Picture
Posted on September 2, 2012 | No CommentsThe language of some tragic heroines from the English Renaissance is the first subversive strategy that contributes to uncover the oppressive doings of the hegemonic group. -
The Duke’s Devil and Doctor Lambe’s Darling: A Case Study of the Male Witch in Early Modern England
Posted on August 28, 2012 | No CommentsDuring the early modern period in England changing economic patterns, religious reforms, and social relationships altered gender roles. While the role of women in English society has been well documented by scholars of the early modern period, there are few substantial studies of masculinity for the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. -
Devotion and Piety of English Women, 1480-1620
Posted on August 28, 2012 | No CommentsThese very personal invocations to God were self-reflective and pensive, capturing some early modem English women's desire and need to comprehend the intrinsic complexities of their intimate relationship with God. -
Anne Askew and Margaret Fell: Religious Women in Prison And Technologies of the Self
Posted on August 26, 2012 | No CommentsBoth Anne Askew (1521-1546) and Margaret Fell (1614-1702) were imprisoned and wrote significant writings in jail. In prison Askew wrote The First Examination (1546) and The Latter Examination (1547); Fell wrote Women’s Speaking Justified, Proved and Allowed by the Scriptures (1666). The two Protestants’ imprisonment indicates not only their struggle for freedom of their Protestant belief but also the government’s arbitrary exercise of institutional power over non-conforming women. -
Poisoners, Larcenists, and the Mad Chambermaid: Villainy in Late Victorian Detective Fiction
Posted on August 25, 2012 | No CommentsThe primary fiction chosen for this thesis is in short story form, published in Britain in either periodicals or anthologies during the time period of 1870- 1905...In short, the detective story is centered on the process of unraveling a mystery and exhibiting the unknown for the reader. -
The early modern demographic dynamic : celibates and celibacy in seventeenth-century England
Posted on August 20, 2012 | No CommentsBut by failing to investigate shifts in the nature and extent of celibacy from a more holistic perspective, historians have also failed to appreciate the overall impact of a rise in the proportion of lifelong celibates on the economy, society and culture of Tudor and Stuart England. -
Melancholy and the Idle Lifestyle in the Eighteenth Century
Posted on August 19, 2012 | No CommentsThe thesis considers Johnson‘s preoccupation with idleness as a symptom of his melancholy, a notion that has received little critical attention. Shenstone‘s experience is used to illustrate the depressing effect that a retired lifestyle could have on the individual. -
Good Reads for the Dog Days of Summer
Posted on August 18, 2012 | No CommentsSee summer off with these fun reads! -
Blunting lances and razing towers : masculine performance and early Tudor reforms
Posted on August 14, 2012 | No CommentsIn 1531, at the height of Henry VIII’s reign, a respected knight with a rising fortune and a gift for letters endeavored to find a metaphor that would help illustrate the characteristics of true nobility. -
Emasculated subjects and subjugated wives: discourses of domination in John Banks’s Vertue Betray’d (1682)
Posted on July 22, 2012 | No CommentsBetween 1681 and 1704, John Banks prepared for the stage four tragedies dealing with British history; three of them were centered on the meteoric rise and fall of doomed queens: Anne Boleyn, Mary Queen of Scots and Lady Jane Gray. -
John Jarret and Roaring Dick of Dover: Popular Attitudes toward Drinking in Seventeenth-Century England
Posted on July 19, 2012 | No CommentsThis essay argues that a certain type of source, the seventeenth-century broadside ballad, may provide some insight into the attitudes held toward drinking by those at the lower end of the social scale. -
Female Body as Geosomatic Apotrope in Chaucer, Shakespeare, and Middleton
Posted on July 19, 2012 | No CommentsAs a geographic trope transposed to literary discourse, discovery remains closely linked to the desire for possession. Postcolonial criticism has sought to deconstruct the feminized and sexualized discourses of geographic places and spaces as objects of desire, invasion, and annexation. -
Athletic “Womanhood”: Exploring Sources for Female Sport in Victorian and Edwardian England
Posted on July 11, 2012 | No CommentsWe need to know what women did, how they felt about themselves and their experiences, and how far sport contributed to the reshaping of the image of women in this critical period. -
Staging Executions: The Theater of Punishment in Early Modern England
Posted on July 6, 2012 | No CommentsIn 1571, the first permanent structure for public hangings was constructed at Tyburn. Attending public hangings at “Tyburn tree,” as well as other forms of public punishment was a popular pastime in Elizabethan and Stuart England. Events we would now call “entertainment” in early modern England were fairly limited. -
Adultery in Early Stuart England
Posted on July 6, 2012 | No CommentsBut spectacles of sexual transgression could not only be seen in theatres. Rhymes and broadside ballads sung at street corners or markets, or hung up on walls of taverns and private houses told of lusty bachelors and maidens, of unfaithful, slothful, or violent husbands and wives. -
The Cultural and Ideological Significance of Representations of Boudica During the Reigns of Elizabeth I and James I
Posted on June 3, 2012 | No CommentsFascinated by the British myth of Boudica I began my research into her life and times with the ambition of writing a story. Curious to know what others before me had produced in this field I started to look at representations of Boudica by other historical novelists. I also wanted to understand how the historical Boudica of 60 AD had been transfigured over the years into the icon we have of her today. -
Icons of Divinity: Portraits of Elizabeth I
Posted on June 3, 2012 | No CommentsThis image of Elizabeth invites comparison and contrast with the body of Henry VIII, famously portrayed by Holbein as an icon of masculinity and power, now in the National Portrait Gallery, London. -
Imagining the pain and peril of seventeenth-century childbirth: travail and deliverance in the making of an early modern world
Posted on March 26, 2012 | No CommentsAlice Thornton’s accounts of the pains and perils of childbirth, including this passage on the birth of her fifth child, have attracted the attention of a number of recent historians as particularly detailed and evocative examples of personal testimony to the experience of giving birth in the early modern period. -
To “Bring Down the Flowers”: The Cultural Context of Abortion Law in Early Modern England
Posted on March 25, 2012 | No Comments...their concerns with abortion were based on its providing a means to enable or conceal extra-marital sex, not on any condemnation of abortion per se. -
Writing the Self? Love and the Letter in England, c. 1660–c. 1760
Posted on February 15, 2012 | No CommentsBefore we examine the socio-cultural meanings of Ursula’s letters, and what they tell us about emotional experience and expression in long eighteenth-century England, we need to consider their circumstances of production. -
From Maiden to Matron: Victorian Heroines and the Creation of Domestic Identity
Posted on February 14, 2012 | No CommentsFor the Victorian heroine, no goal is as important to her happiness, social position and financial security as a successful courtship that leads to a successful marriage with a suitable man. -
The anatomy of Charles Dickens: a study of bodily vulnerability in his novels
Posted on February 7, 2012 | No CommentsThis dissertation concludes that the body’s vulnerability is not only a continual presence in Dickens’s novels but is an under-examined yet fundamental element in what makes his writing style distinctive and what makes his work continually popular. -
Warning, Familiarity and Ridicule: Tracing the Theatrical Representation of the Witch in Early Modern England
Posted on February 1, 2012 | No CommentsThe image of the witch and the vehicle of the theatre seem to be a natural fit. The spectacle inherent in the supernatural aspects of the witch provided a wealth of vivid opportunities for the employing the latest in scenic and technical advances and for experimenting with the possibilities for new special effects. -
English Assimilation and Invasion From Outside the Empire: Problems of the Outsider in England in Bram Stoker’s Dracula
Posted on February 1, 2012 | No CommentsNo matter how relevant the novel may seem to current readers, it would be foolish to ignore the ways in which Dracula excited emotions in its earliest readers. Late Victorian English citizens would have viewed the novel through a number of different lenses that 21st century readers may be unable to appreciate. -
Courtship and Marriage Rituals in Seventeenth Century England
Posted on January 27, 2012 | No CommentsThis thesis will examine the more personal side of courtship and marriage, through the use of seventeenth century diaries and letters. -
Victoria’s feminist Legacy: how nineteenth-century women imagined the queen
Posted on December 14, 2011 | No CommentsI am interested in women who inspire their fellow women to challenge gender roles without explicitly being feminists themselves. Examples—real and fictional—as varied as Joan of Arc, Jane Eyre, and Janis Joplin have had a powerful emotional resonance with women, and the fact that they avoid articulating political positions about gender makes them available to a wider audience. -
All Singing, All Dancing
Posted on November 22, 2011 | No CommentsSexually explicit jigs were a major part of the attraction of the Elizabethan, Jacobean and Restoration stage, as Lucie Skeaping explains. -
An ideal woman : literary, parliamentary, and sexual representations of model femininity in mid-Victorian England
Posted on November 18, 2011 | No CommentsMiddle-class women of the Victorian era experienced isolation from various aspects of society, in favor of removal to the “woman‟s sphere” of hearth and home. -
Ophelia, the Singing Corpse: Pleasure and the Gaze in Where the Wild Roses Grow
Posted on October 9, 2011 | No CommentsOphelia, the Singing Corpse: Pleasure and the Gaze in Where the Wild Roses Grow Zeleny, Rachael Baitch (University of Delaware, USA) Neo-Victorian Studies 3:2 (2010) Abstract This essay deconstructs a very...