ANDREW H MILLER AND jAMES ELI ADAMS.

ANDREW H MILLER AND jAMES ELI ADAMS, ED Sexualities in Victorian Britain (Bloomington: Indiana UP 1996) pp 239 $3995

This collection of essays from the journal Victorian Studies, an historical, some literarycritical, and all fascinating, focuses in succession a topic that's been in the spotlight since before the aged Queen died. Sex in Victorian Britain was the first topic the Edwardians seized forward to decry their parents' hypocrisy, and Victorian sex has seldom been unexamined since. Nevertheless, fresh developments in queer theory/studies, following from the pioneering work forward homosexuality of the 1970s and 80 have proffered new possibilities for reading the ways the Victorians had sex talked about sex and wrote about other things yet really meant sex. This essay collection doesn't limit itself to sex acts. Instead, it quick in emergenciess some ways of thinking about sexuality that pass beyond gay/straight, practicing/nonpracticing. For example, in his nicely-titled essay "When the vital principle Had Hips," Herbert Tucker contemplates on Victorian poetry's ways of giving material substance to the soul and, necessarily, giving sex to that body. The chief part isn't the first thing that get tos to mind as a topic for a collection forward sexuality, and in thinking about the way it is inflection for sexed and then sexualized, one is forced to think beyond the Freud-to-Foucault traditional frames outlined by way of the editors in their thorough and useful (especially for teaching) introduction.

The mostly theoretical of the essays in the collection, Jonathan Dollimore's "Perversion, Degeneration, and the Death Drive," stands gone out in its un-Victorianness, largely because of Dollimore's fearless pronouncements about "our culture" and for what cause concepts such as perversion and degeneration reveal changing understandings of the self of evil, of divinity. Not that his essay is all theorizing: it is based in readings of couple novels, Heart of Darkness and Death in Venice, in relation to the universals of perversion and degeneracy. on the other hand the main thrust of the piece is to challenge our understanding of the interrelationships between Victorian degeneracy theory and its cousin, the general [i]or[/i] abstract notion of the perverse. As Dollimore explains, "Degeneracy theory imagined extensive evolutionary connections between sexual perversion, primitivism and race; the sexual falsify was identified with the primitive and vice versa" (99) And, of course, the universal of the primitive had direct racial significance. The essay somewhat annoyingly assumes a on a level of familiarity with Dollimore's Sexual Dissidence; this assumption means that his conception of the "perverse dynamic" is under-explained for novel readers. But the essay is clear about the stakes of the general [i]or[/i] abstract notions of degeneracy and perversion in relation to evolutionary theory as well as psychoanalytic theory, and it is an important contribution to our understanding of degeneracy theory's implications for sexuality.

Moving into the more traditional territory of Victorian studies, the couple essays in the collection that focus greatest in quantity concertedly on novel-reading are from Margaret Homans and Deborah Epstein Nord, and the two find new things to say about female sexuality in the Victorian novel. Homans is affaired with the implication of the novel in the Victorian effort to make the middle class equal England in general, and I mean no slight when I say that it is a capital essay for undergraduates, for whom the middle class-its standards, pleasures, mores, education-is and always has been the world in general. Nord's essay forward the polluted city and female sexuality in Dickens also gazes at the construction of the middle class and pairs well with Homans, offering a compelling reading of Bleak House and its creation in Esther Summerson and her family history of"the entire emotion from taintedness to purity, from a blighted female sexuality to the promise of nothing les than social regeneration" (55) This change follows Dickens's failure, in Dombey and Son to present a real challenge to patriarchal values: Dickens is unable to stick with Edith Dombey and sustain the powerful critique he had embodied in her and her situation, says Nord.

Rosemary Jann examines by what mode Darwin tripped over himself in attempting to retain a notion of female sexual choice being responsible for evolution in animals while he wanted to assert that male sexual choice was the prevailing style of selection in humans. The essay gazes at Darwin's responses to Victorian anthropology and his attempts to theorize human behavior the two as consistent with sexual selection as he had outlined it initially and as consistent with dominant ideology about sex and race. How could Darwin account for "savage" sexual patterns in light of his pronouncements about humans' ne for, basically, an English middle-class family structure? Of all the collection, this essay and Dollimore's tackle in the greatest degree directly the issue of race, and Jann furnishs a valuable reading of Darwin as a shaper of Victorian ideas about race. An essay more directly onward race or imperialism and sexuality would have been a natural for inclusion in this collection; Ronald Hyam's profoundly antifeminist Empire and Sexuality (1991) certainly did not say it all upon the topic.