Various thoughts on love and sex in the 19th century
Various thoughts on love and sex in the 19th century
Perhaps aptly, “Alice Mitchell as a ‘Case of Sexual Perversion'” was published by a Comstock: T. Griswold Comstock. His analysis was appalling, in my opinion. There was indeed something wrong with Alice Mitchell – some sort of mental disorder that caused her to murder another woman. There seems to be something wrong with T. Griswold Comstock as well – the “perversion” in his analysis is not the fact that Mitchell murdered, but the fact that she was gay, and that he attributed her violent actions to her “sexual perversion.” In a discussion of what drove a woman to murder, I fail to see how his extended discussion of “Sadismus” and “Masochismus” (199) fits in, except to set a foundation for his unsupported assertion that “Subjects like Alice Mitchell, who come under the classification of ‘Urnings,’ are all given to cruelties to the lower animals. This seems to have been the case with her, as proved by the evidence at the trial.” (199) Comstock vaguely alludes to Krafft-Ebing’s book but provides no specific examples.
Moreover, I was appalled at Comstock’s targeting of women. “Insanity in such cases is more liable to be transmitted from mother to offspring of the same sex than any male issue.” (201) Once again, he provided no support for such a statement besides the fact that Alice Mitchell’s mother was also, according to his account, insane.
I’m sure that these ideas, as part of scientia sexualis and the pervading societal idea of “cleanliness,” were held rather commonly, but it’s shocking to see an actual example of such discourse.
Aside from this –
The accounts of bosom buddies, romantic love, and marital slavery all project different images of sex in this area, which only affirms how complex American society in the 19th century was. I don’t doubt any of these accounts – it makes total sense that “female relationships were frequently supported and paralleled by severe social restrictions on intimacy between young men and women” (206), but also that, at the same time, “married or unmarried, American Victorians recognized and expressed sexual desire, interest, and passion” (230). I don’t think that these two ideas are incongruous, but I do wonder about different attitudes about sex depending on class, which none of the essays this week seem to address. The authors seem to imply that these social and sexual norms were spread throughout Victorian society, but something tells me this isn’t the case.
Romantic love was an idea heralded by literature, so it would make sense that romantic love, in the full bodied sense expressed by Karen Lystra (229-237), was restricted to those with some education. In the late 19th century, about 15% of the country was illiterate, so it’s questionable whether or not the ideas of romantic love could have been expressed throughout the entire population. (http://nces.ed.gov/naal/lit_history.asp#illiteracy). Then again, I don’t know very much about courtship and arranged marriages during this period, so perhaps this argument is misplaced.
Tags: discourse, education, homosexuality, insanity, perversion, scientia sexualis
