Unruly Appetites and Social Margins

Illegal texts and illicit sex define victorian pornography. Like many pornographic works of the time, The Romance of Lust was published anonymously, with its origins open to much conjecture. Several reissues of the novel attribute authorship to pornographer Edward Sellon, whose involvement appears doubtful, given his suicide in 1866 (Ashbee, Index 391) and the fact that Henry Spencer Ashbee, the Victorian bibliographer of sexual texts, does not mention his involvement in the novel's provenance.Footnote ¹⁰ From the scant clues provided by Ashbee, it is his friend, William Simpson Potter, who was anything from the novel's author to its co-author or editor.Footnote ¹¹ Born in 1805, Potter was a successful businessman, an avid traveler, and a collector of a “remarkable” collection of erotic pictures, photographs, engravings, and bric-a-brac (Ashbee, Catena xlix–l). If the novel is indeed the result of more than one pen – and there are clues to suggest that it is – the identities of all involved will perhaps never be known.Footnote ¹² Peter Mendes, however, ventures that Potter was part of a coterie called the Cannibal Club (8–9). While outwardly respectable and privileged, the members of the group were, in fundamental ways, outside respectability, suspended between the cultural center and its sexual margins.Footnote ¹³ If Mendes is correct, and if Potter were simply the co-writer or compiler of the novel, then the other key contributors were likely to have originated from this group. Mendes (237) and Sigel (“Rise” 105) suggest co-authorship in a round-robin style by these potential members of the Cannibal Club: Richard Monckton Milnes (Lord Houghton), a member of parliament, poet, and supporter of women's rights, whose collection of erotica was surpassed only by that of his friend Ashbee; Sir James Plaisted Wilde (Lord Penzance), a divorce court judge who contributed to divorce reform enabling women greater abilities to escape abusive husbands; Frederick Popham Pike, a barrister; James Campbell Reddie (whom Ashbee simply calls James Campbell), an extensive collector of pornography, who presented Ashbee with his three-volume manuscript bibliography of erotic literature shortly before the former's death in 1878 (Ashbee, Catena xlix); George Augustus Sala, a writer and friend of Charles Dickens; and Edward Bellamy, a flagellant.

A surviving letter from Potter to Milnes reveals them to be friends with a mutual interest in pornography.Footnote ¹⁴ Milnes had been at Trinity College, Cambridge, with Plaisted Wilde, who was the presiding judge in the 1866 divorce trial of George Henry Cavendish versus Emily Victorine Elizabeth Cavendish and Count Gaston de la Rochefoucauld (Mendes 237). The appendix of The Romance of Lust reproduces letters included in the trial from Rochefoucauld to Emily Cavendish, the explicit contents of which clearly had an influence on the novel. Mendes believes that the novel was published by William Lazenby (alias D. Cameron) and was probably his first publication (4–5, 236). He also contends that many of the original works published by Lazenby/Cameron originated from the Cannibal Club (7). After his arrest in 1876, it seems that Lazenby re-emerged in 1878 or 1879 as D. Cameron and published the majority of pornographic writings produced between 1879 and 1883–84 (4–5). Under the pseudonym of “Thoms Judd,” he appears to have taken over Potter's final address at Cornwall Residences, Clarence Gate (Regents Park), renting the place from 1880–86, according to the P.O. Directory (7, 236–37). Potter's penultimate address, at 1 Adam Street, Adelphi, was around the corner from Bellamy, who moved into the Adam Street address in 1883 (7). These examples are suggestive of Potter's membership of the Cannibal Club. Nonetheless, the possibility of his involvement with the group, as well as the novel's co-authorship by its members, is ultimately speculative. I am thus reluctant to confidently assign the novel's authorship to the Cannibal Club.

Regardless of whether the author/s were members of the Cannibal Club, the novel is inarguably true to the notion of radical tastes and consumption. In The Romance of Lust, as elsewhere, activities of the mouth hold a key part in playing out and articulating sexual transgressions. Ravenous appetites are notable in George Augustus Sala's 1868 translation of Martial's infamous Epigram 67, from book 7 of the Epigrams. The highly sexed matron, Philaenis, “drains of spend twelve cunts a day,” downs “two quarts of wine,” greedily consumes “pounds of steak,” and will “gamahuche [girls] for hours, / Their juicy quim she devours” (Martial 488–89). While the tone of the satirist's piece is viciously biting, Terry Castle notes that the works of ancient Greek and Roman authors “provided educated readers [since the Renaissance] with useful erotic information as well as striking and sometimes liberating images of homosexual love” (488).Footnote ¹⁵ With humor, the author/s of The Romance of Lust appreciated the extent to which their work participates in the intertwining of foreign tongues, as we see in the following example: “The dear Benson, too, was a perfect mistress of the [Italian] Count's tongue, as well she might be, having it so often in her mouth; and as it is a soft language that lends itself to love and lust, it became ours in all our orgies” (4: 330). Lips and mouths are thresholds and liminal spaces where tongues can meet. The pun on “tongue,” so apt in this scene, unites separate meanings and associations into an orgy of linguistic play; the unenlightened person, it suggests, knows only one tongue.

Clearly, the experience of (alternative) tongues, whether physical, symbolic, or linguistic, proves more potent, more delectable than convention, than the missionary position. And so it is that Charlie, the protagonist of the novel, enjoys “another sweet embrace of lips and tongues” with his school friend Harry (3: 233); delights in being “tongued [in] the rosy orifice” by his clergyman uncle (3: 209); falls on his knees, “glue[s]” his lips to “the delicious spot” between Mrs Benson's legs, and pushes in his tongue (1: 23); “greedily devour[s]” Miss Evelyn's “delicious discharge” and licks her clitoris to sexual climax (1: 81); savors Miss Frankland's “luscious moisture,” which tastes “as sweet and delicious as cream,” and then slips his tongue “into her bottom-hole, evidently to her excessive delight” (2: 143). The taste of luscious food and drink thus describes the taste of the other on the tongue. Conversely, the consumption of refreshments accompanies other oral pleasures, specifically of the verbal kind; enjoying a much-needed break from an orgy, male and female characters guzzle “at least a bottle of champagne apiece, in the midst of delightful and exciting bawdy wit and obscene stories” (4: 326). The author/s, then, describe the multiple flavors of sex, of sex talk, and of bodies, as sweet and delicious, not distasteful or unpalatable. Gustatory pleasures and graphic sex (sex with gusto) are savored as parts of a unified tongue, a tongue linked seductively to the delicious materiality and playful potential of language.

The Liminality of the Governess

The romance of lust follows the sexual exploits of its narrator, Charlie Roberts, from the age of 15 years onward. Physically, Charlie is unremarkable in all ways but one. In the tradition of modern pornography, he possesses an enormous penis, “the masterpiece of Nature,” as one character playfully puts it (3: 254). The story begins with Charlie's sexual play with his two sisters. Charlie also lusts after his governess, Miss Evelyn, but it is an older woman, Mrs Benson, who initiates and educates him in the ways of sex. He seduces his sisters and Miss Evelyn. The governess soon after finds herself pregnant with Charlie's child, marries a suitor, and leaves Charlie momentarily heartbroken. From there, Charlie's exploits extend to his next governess (Miss Frankland), his aunt and uncle, family friends, an Italian count, and chance acquaintances. He comes into his inheritance and obtains a law degree. At the age of 25 he marries Miss Frankland, now the widowed and wealthy Mrs Nixon. The newlyweds travel to France and Italy. They adopt the daughter of the Italian count and live happily ever after in incestuous love. The novel features an array of sexual acts, including voyeurism, incest, pedophilia, female-male sex, male-male sex, female-female sex, threesomes, group sex, oral sex, anal sex, sex with dildos, and flagellation (a favorite of the English pornographic tradition).Footnote ¹⁶

The reader is introduced to Miss Frankland when she first arrives at Charlie's home, following the departure of Miss Evelyn. Charlie's description of his new governess offers perhaps the only real sense of mystery in the novel:

Charlie's first impression of Miss Frankland leads him to declare that “[we] at once dreaded her becoming our governess, as we felt we should not only have one who would master us, but who would also be severe in every way” (2: 121). Of course, he later learns that “she had made it a sine qua non that she should have carte blanche as to the use of the rod.”

Physically, Miss Frankland is not a typical English heroine. Indeed, we later learn that she is half Greek, a point to which I will return. Perhaps surprisingly, her “coal black” hair, “very thick eyebrows,” “downy moustache,” and hairy neck elicit neither negativity nor disgust from Charlie. On the contrary, these features soon provoke immense fascination and desire. Charlie's initial reaction to Miss Frankland's appearance is in stark contrast to Walter Hartright's shock at the sight of the hirsute Marian Halcombe in Wilkie Collins's The Woman in White (1859–60). Upon seeing Marian's face, Walter memorably exclaims, “[t]he lady is ugly!” (31; ch. 6). Continuing, he says,

Commenting on this description, Susan David Bernstein notes that Marian's body “is a conglomeration of diverse parts that blur gender and racial categories, further accented by simian strains through her large jaw, hairiness, and low forehead” (72). By the minute, however, Marian's seemingly masculine and atavistic features become more pleasing to Walter; very soon, he describes her expression as “bright, frank, and intelligent,” “her dark face, lighting up with a smile, and softening and growing womanly the moment she began to speak” (32). Similarly, Miss Frankland's unconventional features are softened, in Charlie's estimation, by “an appearance of face, expression, and person that might well be styled a fine woman” (2: 120–21).

Like Marian Halcombe, Miss Frankland's physiognomy abounds in incongruities, her outward form revealing and concealing like a veil. Her “large” mouth signals at once “animal passion”Footnote ¹⁷ and “determined firmness of character” (2: 120). While Miss Frankland would no doubt arouse fear and dread in most children, she also plays out the erotic potential of the governess, who, as a figure of authority – as one who governs the classroom – wields the rod of discipline. “The specter of a dominating woman with strong erotic desires inflects aspects of Victorian culture,” argues Munich (156). In common thinking and the pornographic imagination alike, the governess – a queen over boys and girls – was one such woman. When the painter Simeon Solomon wrote to Swinburne and included a picture with the caption, “The Queen presenting rods to the Schoolmasters of the United Kingdom” (Sigel, GP 54), he could well have added “Governesses” to the mix.

The Victorian governess was at once a domestic and an exotic figure. She was a woman of contradiction, a mystery – or so it seemed. The suspicion she provoked was often a result of her ambiguous, indefinable social position. For an unmarried middle-class woman, however, life as a governess was one of a limited number of genteel options for paid employment, a fact confirmed by Miss Frankland's story. After the death of her father, a clergyman, Miss Frankland chooses to live with her cousin – her first love – for two years. She and her cousin are able to survive on his modest income until her relatives, without suspecting the sexual nature of their relationship, but knowing only the unseemliness of their living together, induce her to undertake a governesship.

On the one hand, the governess held an acceptable social position because her work “strongly resembled the traditionally feminine tasks of the middle-class wife and mother” (Lecaros 27). On the other hand, she was an anomaly, a middle-class woman who occupied an ambiguous position between the mistress of the house and the wage-earning domestic, between the working-class woman and the working man. Due to this blurring of distinctions, “the very figure who theoretically should have defended the naturalness of separate spheres threatened to collapse the difference between them” (Poovey 127). Moreover, her unsettling ambiguity and association with the working-class woman generated fears that the governess “could not protect middle-class values because she could not be trusted to regulate her own sexuality” (131).

The Romance of Lust capitalizes on the governess's liminal status and the fears of her potential for social and sexual transgression. The novel defuses moral alarm through the use of sexual play. While rummaging futilely through Miss Frankland's wardrobe, “with the expectation of finding something smutty” (2: 174), Charlie's disappointed uncle – a clergyman with a fondness for administering the birch on school boys and being flogged by his wife – says to his spouse, “I had begun to suspect that, under a demure exterior, there was lurking an enormous deal of animal passion in that Miss Frankland. . . . [B]ut what have we here? A birch rod! By all that is holy” (2: 175; emphasis added). His wife, governess-like, then orders her husband thus: “Come here, sir, I must whip you, you have not done your duty as you ought lately, and you are a very naughty boy” (2: 176). In reply, her husband acts the part of a schoolboy and begs to be excused, “but his inexorable mistress was not to be moved, and seizing him by the arm, pulled him over her broad and massive thighs.” While the scenario of the reproving governess flogging the misbehaving child is a common one in Victorian pornography, role-playing the situation is also deeply erotic. The latter becomes a fantasy within the fantasy world of the novel. This surfeit transforms a potential cause of moral alarm into a desirable state of affairs.

We see, then, that imagination can make of the governess what it wills, just as it can turn a rod of discipline into an instrument of pleasure. Let us consider another example. Charlie acknowledges that Miss Frankland's system of teaching “was really excellent” (2: 125). Under her instruction, he will become adept in geography, history, modern languages, as well as Greek and Latin. Nonetheless, the quality of her teaching methods becomes secondary to him when he suspects that her first flogging of his sister had “rendered [Miss Frankland] lecherous” (2: 127). The sudden awareness of his governess's latent sexuality shifts his initial childish fear (that she would “master us” [2: 121]) toward arousal (“desire soon painted her with every charm of beauty” [2: 128]) and, finally, to a complete longing to be sexually mastered, flogged: “I felt I must submit” (2: 131). The transformation of fear into desire follows the process of fetishization; as Munich argues, fetish “signals repressed sexual danger for men, defending them against fears of powerful women” (184). At the same time, the governess's sexuality – and the very thought of it – provokes a new development and expansion in Charlie's imagination. Miss Frankland rouses in him an intense craving to submit to another kind of education, one that incorporates the spectrum of sexual experience, what the novel calls “variety.” Variety allows one to experience giving and receiving, penetrating and being penetrated, sex with men and with women, pain and pleasure. And, it includes – in the form of flagellation – fear and desire, danger and excitement, threat and submission.

Transgressive Hair

Miss frankland's hair is the most immediate sign of her transgressiveness. While the men in the novel are described in most part by the sizes and shapes of their penises, the women are distinguished by their body parts and hair. For instance, the unloosened tresses of Charlie's aunt are compared to that of Titian's “Magdalen” (2: 170), thereby associating his aunt with the famous biblical figure of sexual transgression. Nonetheless, the “rich profusion of her [fair] ringlets” falls within the realm of conventional femininity. In contrast, Miss Frankland's hair, while equally abundant, is truly extraordinary. When Charlie peeps on Miss Frankland for the first time, this is what he sees:

Charlie has never seen “a more deliciously hairy woman,” is “struck dumb with astonishment and admiration,” and is “dazzled by the extraordinary richness and quantity of that exquisite ornament – hair.” Using the language of physiognomy, he claims that “such excessive growth of hair” could only denote a “passionate and lecherous” personality. His excitement at the full revelation of her hair is such that he soon experiences his first wet dream.

Miss Frankland's hair, “as black as coal,” moves well beyond conventional notions of feminine beauty. Indeed, rather humorously, Charlie later says, “all the lower part of her body was as black as a chimney sweeper's” (2: 131). Likening her hair to the color of coal and a chimney sweeper's body implies something both literally and metaphorically “smutty” (2: 174). Miss Frankland's combined darkness and hirsutism are the surest markers of her social impurity, her monstrousness, if we adopt Jeffrey Jerome Cohen's definition of the cultural “monster” as one who is “transgressive, too sexual, perversely erotic, a lawbreaker” (16). Certainly, as we saw in Charlie's very first description, Miss Frankland's hair oversteps the boundaries of her constrictive dress, protruding as it does from beneath her collar. Her body hair is so abundant, so “excessive [in] growth,” that it might as well be an extension of her pubic hair. In other words, her hair seems to issue forth, both literally and symbolically, from “the lower part of her body.” Ultimately, Miss Frankland's uncontrollable hair sets her apart from “ordinary women,” women whose hair would have conformed to strict social codes which determined, for example, when hair (on the head) could be loosened, to when it must be restrained.

In Representations of Hair in Victorian Literature and Culture, Galia Ofek writes that the Victorians’ “concern with hair as a liminal space” (11) dictated that hair be policed in order to maintain the body politic.Footnote ¹⁸ Citing Mary Douglas's influential work, Purity and Danger, Ofek argues that, in many societies, hair is considered a marginal body part to be monitored, so that the social body can retain its order and hierarchy. As the latter says,

Boundaries, by definition, are spaces that may be crossed or violated (12). Miss Frankland's anomalous hair transgresses the codes of femininity designed to uphold the purity of the body politic. Outside the world of the novel, she would have most certainly been considered a freak, not unlike Julia Pastrana, the so-called Bear Woman, Baboon Lady, and the Ugliest Woman in the World, who toured internationally in the 1850s, and, after dying from childbirth in 1860, was exhibited as an embalmed corpse at the Burlington Gallery. Pastrana, “like other hirsute women, was described as ‘altogether of an oran-outan type’ or ‘the missing link’ – the as yet unidentified zone between humanity and animal life” (56).Footnote ¹⁹ Charles Darwin was interested in her body because it seemed masculine; she was featured in an article published in the prestigious medical journal, the Lancet Footnote ²⁰; and Arthur Munby wrote a poem about her called “Pastrana.” Ofek argues that the ability of Pastrana to haunt the imagination “derived from the liminal nature of her hairiness, which challenged distinct borderlines between male and female anatomies, human and animal life.” These fears reflected and fed into Victorian concerns that such divisions were not exact. Disorderly hair clearly provided a cultural means for social othering, as “fears of monstrous or deviant female sexuality were often implicated in the examination and spectacularization of hirsute women” (57).

As a highly sexed and hirsute governess, Miss Frankland no doubt challenges distinct borderlines. And yet, her strangeness elicits neither fear nor revulsion from the other characters. Just as Julia Pastrana and Marian Halcombe (who share similarities in description) held a strong appeal or even sexual allure to some Victorians (Collins, “Marian's Moustache” 132; Tromp and Valerius 7, 18 n.30),Footnote ²¹ the novel converts (indeed, perverts) common fears of otherness into desire. As we have seen, Charlie describes Miss Frankland's curls as “beautiful”; he is “dazzled” and “struck dumb with astonishment and admiration”; and he is bursting (quite literally) with sexual excitement at the memory of her hair, “that exquisite ornament” and object of his lust. Though we could argue for the fetishistic nature of his fascination, this explanation would only paint part of the picture.

Miss Frankland's hair, in spite, or perhaps because, of the fact that it is culturally “monstrous,” leads Charlie to conclude that she is a kindred spirit, his sexual equal. In fact, she is to become, as one might say, the love of his life. Of their first sexual encounters, he says, “[w]e satisfied our passions in every way in which they could be indulged. . . . She was surprised at my aptitude, and rejoiced and congratulated herself on having found so powerful and charming a satisfier of her libidinous nature” (2: 139). Later, he informs the reader that she would become “that most lovable of women and best of wives” (4: 352). Marriage, however, neither domesticates nor kills off their sexual exploits. On the contrary, it simply adds fuel to desires, actions, and means. Miss Frankland's unusual marriage proposal to Charlie heralds their unconventional partnership. Now a “very wealthy widow” (4: 349), she pitches the idea to “my darling Charlie” that they travel the continent as husband and wife to indulge in “our love of variety” (4: 352). It is a proposal that a grateful and excited Charlie cannot resist: “Say, beloved of my soul! Why, look how the very idea has raised my prick to instant life. . . . To dedicate my life to the woman I love more than any other is a joy greater than I can express” (4: 352). The only conventional aspect of this open marriage is the genuine and abiding love between Charlie and Miss Frankland. Then again, such deep and lasting affection is certainly uncommon in pornography and perhaps, even, in reality.

Exotic Geographies and the Third Space

The romance of lust appeals to the intersecting discourses of geography and hybridity to account for Miss Frankland's hirsutism and libidinous nature. She is the product of interethnic mixing between an Englishman, that is, a northerner, and a Greek woman, a southerner. In the nineteenth century, the European Mediterranean, known also to northern Europeans as the South, was synonymous with the exotic, specifically, with what Piya Pal-Lapinski calls the “near exotic.”Footnote ²² Although not considered to be entirely exotic, the near exotic was, nonetheless, relatively unfamiliar and therefore open to discursive inscription. For northern Europeans, the South was a surface on which they inscribed either fantasy and liberation or danger and menace.Footnote ²³ In other words, the South was constructed as a realm that could provoke both desire and fear. Commenting on the first supposition, Robert Aldrich argues that the Mediterranean was a place where many visitors believed they could shed their family and cultural restraints (xi). The Romance of Lust shares this viewpoint. After their wedding, Miss Frankland and Charlie embark on an extended honeymoon, a two-year sex tour of the continent. They begin in France, by that time the pornography capital of Europe and to which Miss Frankland is associated by her surname. She and Charlie conclude their tour in Italy, a country to which she is linked by her first name, Florence. The novel knowingly pays homage to Italy, “the spiritual home of obscenity” (to use Sigel's words; “Introduction” 9). For pornographers who set erotic scenarios in that country, “Italy was more than a geographical expression; it became a style, an orientation, and an erotic Utopia.” The first influential pornographic text of the early modern era originated, of course, in Florence.Footnote ²⁴

Nor does the novel neglect the erotic potential of Greece. In explaining why Miss Frankland excels his aunt in “natural wantonness,” Charlie declares, “[the] Greek blood in her veins . . . account[s] for the extreme heat of her lubricity” (2: 181). Within the space of a few pages, we encounter the following descriptions of this heat: “this extraordinary profusion of hair could only grow where nature had implanted the hottest animal passions” (2: 131); “[h]er face was flushed, her eyes shone with all the fire of libidinous passion” (2: 132); “[s]he was as hot as fire” (2: 134); and “Miss Frankland's temperament was far too warm not to quickly set her passions to the highest fucking heat” (2: 135). That Miss Frankland's “lubricity” would be associated with heat is not surprising, considering that northern Europeans had for centuries associated the warmer temperatures of the South with elevated sexual desire. “The hotter the Climate, the stronger are the Inclinations to Venery,” argued a seventeenth-century author (Treatise of Hermaphrodites 19).

Miss Frankland's southern heritage accounts also for her tremendous wealth of hair. The reader is informed that she is the daughter of a Greek woman and a high church clergyman of the Church of England, “a man of great erudition, who had taken the highest honours at Oxford” (4: 387). Miss Frankland's sexually charged parents are described thus:

Charlie explains that from her mother Miss Frankland has inherited “all that deliciously haired body,” and from both parents “her intensely lascivious passions.” Miss Frankland's hybrid body merges two ethnic identities to create a “third space” and move beyond the fantasy of national purity.Footnote ²⁵ In the process of explaining her heritage, the novel disrupts Cartesian dualisms (England as mind, Greece as body). We see that Mediterranean passions are not wholly other to, or conflicting with, English intellect, just as the hair of Miss Frankland's mother combines the conventionally feminine (curls that reach the heels) with the stereotypically masculine (abundant facial and body hair). The novel problematizes its very use of cultural stereotypes of northerners and southerners by alluding to the coexistence of mutual and abundant lust. Miss Frankland, as a child of both the north and the south, has inherited her father's intellect, her mother's beauty, and both her parents’ “intensely lascivious passions.” She is heir to the best of the English and of the Mediterranean, and the glue that binds these qualities is desire.

Female Ejaculation and Elongated ClitorisesFootnote ²⁶

The prevailing belief in the victorian era was that men and women possessed radically different sexual physiologies. In Making Sex, Thomas Laqueur argues that this model of physiology (what he calls the two-sex model) worked in conjunction with the ideology of the separate spheres, appealed to “[a] biology of sexual incommensurability,” and legitimized as “natural” the subordination of women to men (196). The ascendancy of this model, however, is comparatively recent. Laqueur's study charts a common belief, held for thousands of years in Europe until the late eighteenth century, that women possessed the same genitals as men, except that that their genitals were inside their bodies. Under this one-sex model, sex was based not on difference but on degrees of similarity; instead of being divided by their anatomies, men and women were linked by a common, albeit male, one.

As with several pornographic works from the Victorian era, such as My Secret Life and The Simple Tale of Susan Aked (c. 1892), The Romance of Lust references the earlier model of anatomy through its frequent depiction of female ejaculation. For example, in describing a sexual episode with Miss Frankland, Charlie states, “we both poured a tribute of sperm into each other's mouths, and both greedily swallowed it” (2: 144). The author/s of the novel would have encountered the concept of female ejaculation in the eighteenth-century classic, Fanny Hill (1748–49), which, as Sigel notes, continued to gain prestige in the nineteenth century (“Introduction” 11).Footnote ²⁷ Female ejaculation externalizes female pleasure, while mutual ejaculation denotes shared gratification; Fanny Hill calls her responding “floods of bliss” and “liquid sweets” (57) a “delicious return” (56). Moreover, female ejaculation resembles its male equivalent in its messiness. Thus, in Charlie's first sexual experience with Miss Frankland, he declares, “she poured over my chin and breast a perfect torrent of sperm” (2: 134). A few minutes later, in a different sexual position, Miss Frankland “immediately followed my discharge with another, so copious that it spurted all over my thighs.” Similarly, in an episode with his aunt, Charlie says she “spurt[ed] out a very torrent of sperm, all over my face and neck” (2: 193); and, with Miss Evelyn, “I had so licked her clitoris as to make her spend most copiously again” (1: 81). These female bodies aren't simply leaky; they gush in jouissance, in “ecstatic joy” (2: 193). Unlike Richard von Krafft-Ebing's Psychopathia Sexualis (1886), The Romance of Lust does not pathologize female ejaculation as a symptom of homosexuality and/or hermaphroditism (Krafft-Ebing 400, 435). Indeed, it steadfastly refuses to pathologize atypical bodies, acts, and desires.

The plenteousness of male and female ejaculations flies in the face of the middle-class Victorian virtues of decorum, self-control, and moderation.Footnote ²⁸ It is tantamount to a dismissal of the ideological and medical contexts that provided the conditions for the spermatorrhea panic/epidemic to take place among middle-class men, the “treatment” for which was often expensive, painful, and astonishingly invasive.Footnote ²⁹ The diagnosis of spermatorrhea pathologized the effects of (sexual) excess, inscribing on the body one's moral failure to achieve continence and containment.Footnote ³⁰The Romance of Lust eschews the bourgeois logic of economics, which favors “saving” (or sexual reserve) in favor of “spending” (or ejaculating). Merl Storr points out that “the Victorian sexual imaginary mirrors the middle-class concerns of the day with commerce and economy, where thrift is the overriding principle for the regulation of both body and purse” (81). It is no surprise, then, that in his insistent call for men to control their “animal passions,” urologist William Acton uses the words, “lavishly expend,” “economise . . . funds,” and “bankruptcy” (15).Footnote ³¹ The prudent must consume sex frugally and spend wisely; to employ a phrase by Foucault, his or her sexuality must be “economically useful and politically conservative” (37).

In The Romance of Lust, “copious” is a word often used to describe the amount of “spending” by female characters. In fact, the women spend much more than do the men. For instance, Charlie tells us that his aunt “paid down two tributes to Priapus to my one” (2: 192; emphasis added). “Twice we indulged in this excess,” says Charlie of the orgy scene quoted by Marcus, “the women going off half a dozen times to my once” (4: 335). Excessive? Yes. But this extravagance makes sense if we remember that middle-class Victorian women had more rules governing their behaviors than did men. In other words, women had more obstacles, more thresholds to breach. The excesses issuing forth from permeable female bodily margins attest to the force – the “torrent” – required to break down the “floodgates” that kept women in and prevented them from escaping or “going off.” To use one example, Harry's mother, Mrs Dale, is described as “a woman of very warm passions, and the long pent-up seclusion she had kept herself in with regard to our sex being once broken, now that the floodgates were opened, there was no resisting the torrent of her lascivious passions” (3: 254; emphasis added). This and other expressions of violent eruption and unrepentant spending show women overcoming regulations guarding their bodies and purses. Miss Frankland in particular embodies a fear come true: that “the governess could not protect middle-class values because she could not be trusted to regulate her own sexuality” (Poovey 131). Indeed, as avid sexual consumers and unrepentant spendthrifts, she and Charlie pay several visits to a French brothel on their honeymoon. If the word “redemption” is from the Latin redimere, signifying “buy back,” then obviously Miss Frankland chooses something else altogether.

The Romance of Lust adheres to the one-sex model of physiology in its depiction of one of the novel's truly striking elements: Miss Frankland's exceptionally – unthriftily – long clitoris. While hers is not the only stand-out clitoris in the novel, it is the standard against which other well-developed clitorises are measured. Hence, Mrs Dale has a clitoris that is “charmingly developed, about half the length of Miss Frankland's, and not so thick” (3: 254). Moreover, she will give birth to a girl who will have “a larger clitoris than Miss Frankland” (3: 270). Laqueur argues that the earliest writers on the clitoris regarded the organ as a female penis. Not discounting the notion of the one-sex model, these writers simply assumed the vagina was like a penis whereas the clitoris was one, though smaller (65). Following this logic, the novel compares Mrs Dale's clitoris to “a little boy's cock” (3: 267); Charlie claims that, in her excitation, “Master Clitoris raised his head, and came out of his corner in full stand” (3: 254). Miss Frankland's “deep red clitoris, . . . as long and as thick as the middle finger of a man” (2: 133), is likewise a masculinized organ; Charlie's sister, Lizzie, calls it “a doodle” (2: 155), and Charlie refers at one point to the “fine long clitoris, stiff as a penis” (4: 335). Like a penis, her clitoris expands and becomes tumescent in arousal. The organ rivals her hair in the element of spectacle and in its ungoverned and uncontrollable excess. As bodily margins of extraordinary dimensions that can literally grow, Miss Frankland's clitoris and hair command further attention to their very existence and otherness. Furthermore, the proximity of the clitoris to the pubic hair only serves to intensify the two as sites of unruly desire. Thus, in arousal, Miss Frankland's “long red clitoris stood out from the dense black mass of hair which covered not only her belly and mount [sic], but all down and around her cunt.”

Despite her capacity to menstruate (2: 149) and the inheritance of her abundant hair from her mother, Miss Frankland's combined qualities of an elongated clitoris, hirsutism, a substantial sex drive, and an apparent inability to bear children, suggest that she might be a hermaphrodite. For instance, three Victorian articles about female hermaphrodites in the Lancet note in their respective case studies an elongated clitoris, hirsutism, attraction to women and, in two of the articles (Hills 129; Loney 625), strong sexual drives.Footnote ³² Moreover, the seventeenth-century French physician, Nicholas Venette, writing about five types of hermaphrodites, includes a category of women who possess exceptionally large clitorises. Such women, according to Venette, are called tribades (by the Greeks) and ribaudes (by the French), and their clitorises are so large that they can pleasure other women (Roodenburg 100). Because most pre-Victorian treatises on hermaphrodites discuss sex acts between women, women with large clitorises, perhaps because of their hotter-than-usual temperaments, were believed to have an inclination towards sex with other women.Footnote ³³

Implicit in the medical discourses of hermaphroditism, however, is a sense of uneasiness surrounding (unorthodox) female desires. Medicine took an ideological turn with the early modern belief that a tribade enacted the traditional role of the male during sex by playing the active part of rubbing rather than being rubbed against (Laqueur 136). Tribades were thus charged with ideological disruption, “not because they violated heterosexuality but because they played out – literally embodied – radical, culturally unacceptable reversals of prestige and power” (53). The anxiety here is not so much over what is allegedly imprinted on the body, but over the actions of the body of the transgressor. We likewise encounter this disquietude around women's desires in the Victorian era in two of the Lancet case studies of female hermaphrodites. In a case study from 1856, 28-year-old Jane W—, admitted to the “lunatic ward” of Macclesfield Workhouse, refuses to be washed (because of her atypical body), has “very depraved” tastes because “she will eat old poultices with great delight,” and sometimes “annoy[s]” the young women in her ward with “[h]er amatory propensities” (Loney 624, 625). In a case study from 1873, 42-year-old M. C—, admitted to the Norfolk County Asylum in 1865, “suffering from mania with occasional paroxysms of violence,” avoids bathing in the presence of others, and in the last five months “has behaved most indecently to two attendants, towards whom she [has] evinced strong sexual passions: full doses of bromide of potassium soon allayed this amorous tendency” (Hills 129). The author concludes that “[i]t is not uncommon to find hirsute females amongst the insane” (130). These case studies suggest that what is imprinted on the gender-ambiguous bodies of these women is their very otherness, not simply their alleged physical, psychological, and behavioral differences but also their same-sex desires and their sexual assertiveness.

While the collective signs on Miss Frankland's body point to hermaphroditism, the other characters’ reaction towards her body is unlike that which we have seen in the medical literature on hermaphroditism. Far from feeling pity, scorn, or fear, their enthrallment with her ambiguously sexed body clearly mirrors their reaction to her hair. Her body – and the passion it invokes in both men and women – could be read as code for ambiguous sexual desires and unbecoming (including “unwomanly”) behaviors. We find on her body the socially objectionable features exhibited in one form or another by the other female characters, whether it be hirsutism, a long clitoris, a substantial sex drive, or a lack of biological children. Just as Miss Frankland combines these aspects of the other female characters, the female characters embody and enact the unorthodoxies imputed to the hermaphrodite. The novel uses the terms tribadism and tribadic to denote same-sex attraction and acts between women in general. These terms indicate that which is understood, in the language of the novel, as natural, not as a mark of a medical disorder. As Charlie says matter-of-factly, “[t]he glorious and wonderfully hairy body of the Frankland perfectly astonished [the women], and raised their tribadic passions to fever heat” (4: 333). The Romance of Lust therefore rubs up against the anxieties underpinning medical assumptions of female hermaphrodites who seek out and engage in sex with women. In so doing, the novel seeks not to reinstate these assumptions but to explore and play out their transgressive potential for women more generally. It implies that any number of women – whether hirsute, well-endowed, or otherwise – are capable of desiring and seeking out pleasure with women. In other words, the novel depathologizes and presents as commonplace the sexual desires and acts that are often assigned to an atypical female body.

The most important point for this essay is not whether a governess with a three-inch clitoris ever existed, but why such a woman would exist in a late Victorian work of fiction. Miss Frankland's body defies discrete categories, in the same way that her sexual attractions resist firm classification. What she does with her clitoris provides us with the novel's most powerful examples of female agency and disruption of social borders. In one scene, Miss Frankland takes on the “active” sexual role by buggering Charlie with her clitoris: “the fancy seized her to bugger me with her clitoris. Of course, I made no objection; on the contrary, sucking it up to a proper stiffness, I placed myself on my hands and knees in the most favourable position to satisfy her erotic fancy” (2: 145). Thus, with her clitoris she is able to, as it were, “top” the man who possesses the largest prick in the novel. I conclude, however, with Miss Frankland's “tribadic junction” (4: 335) with a woman. At one point, her “fine long clitoris” penetrates the anus of the fair Mrs Egerton who is simultaneously “riding St George on [Charlie's] big prick.” The choice of Mrs Egerton is significant, for Charlie informs us that Miss Frankland's “greatest letch was to fuck very fair young women with her long and capable clitoris.” With the acting out of this “letch,” the novel playfully sexualizes the fear/fantasy that the English body politic, like a fair woman, might be penetrated by an alien invader from the South. Boundaries, as we have seen, are by their very definition spaces that can be crossed or violated. Multiple boundaries – of nationhood, sexuality, and decorum – are crossed when a fair, conventionally beautiful woman is penetrated by a dark, hairy woman's lengthy clitoris, and when the two finish off by spending profusely.