This is a novel book about some very novel novels. Or so they appear to the modern reader who is long past Freud and well versed in Foucauldian critique. Foucault argued that Victorians were not repressing a natural sexuality reposing in bodily drives but rather that sexuality itself is a highly malleable and very modern social construction through which subjects experience their very selves. The novelty of Axel Nissen's short and highly readable book is that he introduces us to a mid-Victorian world where the familiar binaries of gender and sexuality – normalized masculine and feminine roles within a dominant heteronormativity – are parsed quite differently, both in fictional characterizations and in memoirs and tracts framed, at least, as nonfiction. In a sense fiction wins here, because its inherent deniability allowed experimental liberties in representation, often stabilized, of course, by normalizing narratives and conventional characters. It also represents a realm of the imagination where unconventional intellects could simply let rip, as they do in Nissen's exuberant study.
The exuberance relates to a very queer world indeed, which constantly shocks the modern reader. In some ways it seems freer, and in other ways more controlled. Overall it is rather like finding everything turned round ninety degrees. Nissen is careful to present his reconstructed social imaginaries as spaces of contestation and debate, and in the later period of the 1870s he demonstrates the emergence of a value terrain familiar to us. Nonetheless we get a clear picture of another country.
This is a world where physical sexuality is decisively subordinated to friendly feelings and intense emotional attachments, even between married couples. In marriage, brother–sister relationships were recommended, once reproductive duties were done. As a “fallen” or animal activity, sexual relations were only tolerated within marriage, and degradation was a very mixed and rather undifferentiated bag indeed: male seducers, female prostitutes, libertines and hedonists. But there was little concern as to the specifics of sex relations – same or opposite – within these categories of disgust. The “closet” of the time was a “straight” one, where “bachelor trouble” vis-à-vis unmarried and married women (and prostitutes) was the main moral panic.
The book includes numerous decidedly racy passages from various sources where men sing the physical praises of other men in highly emotional terms, surpassing the love they would – or actually do – feel for a woman. Nissen challenges the modern reader to enter a world where this is not about sex, even if there is every reason to think it takes place. Similarly, and perhaps even more astonishingly, for some scientific authorities of the time masturbation was demonized as a highly dangerous practice, and all the more so when done in solitude, where morbid and unhealthy ideas and emotions might emerge to attack one's character fatally. Boys who could not but indulge were therefore advised to do it together, thus in a social setting which would be more wholesome.
Nissen's material is American in setting and almost wholly by authorship. The familiar names in the study are William Dean Howells, Bret Harte, Mark Twain and Henry James, and there are numerous lesser-known and semi-forgotten gems. While the American milieu is very well characterized and differentiated, it is something of a mystery why we are in the United States in the first place. I think we were owed a chapter on that, but readers who already frame their interests that way, and are interested in mid-century American culture, should surely read this eye-popping work.
