more extensive and unaffected pleasure

[lotesse]

Why, when discussing eighteenth-nineteenth(twentieth-)century anti-novel rhetoric, does no one address the discursive parallels with injunctions against onanism/masturbation? (and does anyone know of a book that does? because I would totally read that book.)

Comments

[executrix]

hi, lotesseflower! I think that's a pretty fair description of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's controversial essay, "Jane Austen and the Masturbating Girl."

[lotesse]

YES. God, it's clearly been too long, that one had fallen out of my head. But it's such a widespread trope, one that's been written on so much - how can that essay still be controversial?! it is to boggle.

[executrix]

Yeah, but a lot of people with control over funding don't think that students should ever be exposed to any mention of sexuality other than post-marital procreationi.

And don't forget Rev. Mr. Podsnap's concern about reading that might "bring a blush to the cheek of a young person" and Trollope's boast that he did not think any girl had lost any of her purity by reading his books--I mean, if you ask yourself just what they were worried about.

[lotesse]

Right?! and bloody bugger funding, anyway.

[mecurtin]

I want to read that book, too.

[mecurtin]

Off to find a copy!

[ithiliana]

There's a book--intelllectual history? about novel reading and masturbation and women...goes to Google....I know I've read about it, just never managed to read it, ahahaha.

[ithiliana]

Not the one I remembered--but looks good!

The Secret Vice: Masturbation in Victorian Fiction and Medical Culture, by Diane Mason
Colette Colligan
Victorian Studies
Vol. 52, No. 2 (Winter 2010), pp. 321-322
(article consists of 2 pages)
Published by: Indiana University Press
DOI: 10.2979/VIC.2010.52.2.321
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.2979/VIC.2010.52.2.321

[ithiliana]

This looks interesting!

http://www.english.ucsb.edu/faculty/warner/courses/w00/engl30/StagingReaders.ecf.8.99.htm

[cathexys]

If I recall correctly, that's one of the arguments of lacqeur's solitary Sex, isn't it?

[ithiliana]

This is definitely NOT the one I was thinking of, but it looks graet

http://www.powells.com/biblio/2-9781593761875-0

[ithiliana]

Google FU!

http://mitpress.mit.edu/catalog/item/default.asp?ttype=2&tid=9571

At a time when almost any victimless sexual practice has its public advocates and almost every sexual act is fit for the front page, the easiest, least harmful, and most universal one is embarrassing, discomforting, and genuinely radical when openly acknowledged. Masturbation may be the last taboo. But this is not a holdover from a more benighted age. The ancient world cared little about the subject; it was a backwater of Jewish and Christian teaching about sexuality. In fact, solitary sex as a serious moral issue can be dated with a precision rare in cultural history; Laqueur identifies it with the publication of the anonymous tract Onania in about 1722. Masturbation is a creation of the Enlightenment, of some of its most important figures, and of the most profound changes it unleashed. It is modern. It worried at first not conservatives, but progressives. It was the first truly democratic sexuality that could be of ethical interest for women as much as for men, for boys and girls as much as for their elders.

The book's range is vast. It begins with the prehistory of solitary sex in the Bible and ends with third-wave feminism, conceptual artists, and the Web. It explains how and why this humble and once obscure means of sexual gratification became the evil twin—or the perfect instance—of the great virtues of modern humanity and commercial society: individual moral autonomy and privacy, creativity and the imagination, abundance and desire.

[ineptshieldmaid]

... That's Sedgwick? I have a copy hanging around on my computer, but the file name doesn't have author attribution in it and I'd been thinking it was some weird bit of fan studies or something.

MUST READ. AT ONCE.

[lotesse]

Oh my god, you - this is great! I've got, like, a whole bibliography now! *bows to your superior google-fu, scuttles off the the library*

[ithiliana]

Ha ha! It is! AHAHAHAHAH!

Well, sort of. I certainly think of her as a fangirl.

*ducks*

[ithiliana]

And I lose for not using this icon above...

[ineptshieldmaid]

Well, yes, but better Sedgwick than Catherine Driscoll!

[ithiliana]

Hadn't heard of Driscoll before now, although my general rule is "better Sedgwick than just about 99% of everybody else, WOOTZ*. Why yes, I tend toward fangirlishness my own self!

[ithiliana]

p.s. OMG, great icon!!!!!!

[ineptshieldmaid]

Driscoll is... not too bad, really. I just have METHODOLOGY ISSUES. I prefer my acafen to be literary scholars or historians, and I have ISSUES with cultural theory. Driscoll's article 'The pornography of romance and the romance of pornography' is rooly rooly interesting but she *doesn't cite things*. She keeps telling me things I know - like, say, fanfiction crosses the genre boundaries of romance and pornography - but NOT GIVING ME CITATIONS. I know it's true, but I still want to see her working!

[ineptshieldmaid]

:D thank you!

[ineptshieldmaid]

olitary sex as a serious moral issue can be dated with a precision rare in cultural history; Laqueur identifies it with the publication of the anonymous tract Onania in about 1722

As a medievalist I dispute this assertion!

[ithiliana]

As someone who lives with a medieval historian, I know that a whole slew of people in academia tend to think that everything starts in the "early modern period" and know sod all about the Middle Ages. I don't know Laqueur's training, but I do know the book has had a lot of critical criticism (I keep telling myself I should read it, I just never get around to it--am much more drawn by the other book I mentioned above)

[oursin]

That article would be even more compelling if Sedgwick had actually cited texts contemporary with Jane Austen - what annoys me (being a historian, not a lit person) about that piece is that she picks on French texts from decades later rather than someone like e.g. Beddoes.

[oursin]

Be aware that a lot of what Laqueur presents as his own discovery has been well-known for decades - for heaven's sake, Havelock Ellis pointed out the Onania thing in the 1900s and there has been much subsequent historiography.

He also manages to leave out the entire Victorian era, and I have a lot of other problems with that book, but will leave there as I have to go to work.

[oursin]

It's more about the covert representation of masturbation/masturbating characters in literary texts (an alternative title would be Beyond Uriah Heep: the self-abuser in Victorian Literature) than reading-as-wanking.

My review of this book was the one the journal editors went 'ooops - we lost it, please resend' about.

[oursin]

I was pretty sure that the late, great Roy Porter had written on the subject, but given how prolific he was, not precisely where. I have ascertained that there is a chapter on enlightenment masturbation phobia in The Facts of Life which may give refs to articles etc; plus, he may well have revisited in his work on the English enlightenment.

[oursin]

That is certainly a very weird blurb, since what happens with Onania-mania is that what used to be a sin becomes a medically-dangerous practice. It also gets a different publication date for The Big O than the book itself, which places it about a decade earlier as I recall!

[executrix]

Also, my Thort yesterday was that early modern anti-theatrical writing centered around "Theater is bad, not only because citizens' wives pick up guys at the theater but, in terms of something we actually care about, men get turned on looking at boys in dresses, so euwww!"

Whereas anti-novel polemics (like the ones Austen riffed on wrt 'only a novel')were about women having their passions aroused. Although before they were important novels were usually written by women anyway, so it was women arousing passions in other women with male characters as surrogates and conduits (hi, cathexys!)