Pleasure Bound: Victorian Sex Rebels and the New Eroticism by Deborah Lutz (2011)
One recalls Victorians as people who covered the legs of pianos to avoid sexual allusions.. But Deborah Lutz “. . . took a somewhat divergent stance, one attuned to this culture as not so much ‘more repressed’ than ours, but as profoundly different from it.”
I don’t believe she succeeded here. Yes, the Victorians were profoundly different to some extent. But the mores of the era reverberate today, in art, literature, religion and public attitude.
This isn’t a 101 book. The author jumps into a description of the life of Gabrielle Rossetti, casting it in a fictional tone. The first part of the book devolved (for me, ymmv) into an alphabet soup of Important Victorian Characters, most of whom I was only glancingly familiar with and some I’d never heard of. It took a while to sort them all out.
The author’s contention that the collaboration of these people - Rossetti, William Morris, and explorer Richard Burton, among others - created an atmosphere that eventually became the underpinnings of the gay rights movement is marginally persuasive. Sexual behavior that we think of as “liberated” were, as Lutz tells us, all there in Victorian London. They were just an open secret. And sometimes prosecutable at law, depending upon your politics and patrons.
Overall, the writing was not as smooth as I would hope, and Ms. Lutz handles the conflict between thematic narrative and temporal narrative by ignoring it, to the detriment of her work. But there is much to take away from this exploration of Victorian sexuality and the arts.