Inventing "Victorian" Sexuality in the 18th Century

The motif of the passionless woman was invented by medical writers in the 18th century in England and then promulgated more generally initially via fiction. This totally upended the previous idea of female sexual desire, envisioning women’s sexuality as entirely distinct from men’s. This reversal can be seen especially sharply in realist novels, where early 18th century texts acknowledge the sexual desire of the heroines while novels later in the century develop the domestic novel genre that promulgates an image of female modesty that prevents both the experience and the expression of desire in women. But this image of the passionless woman was necessarily accompanied by two other literary types, although they were less featured in the texts: the masculine lesbian and the femme.

The passionless woman was not a natural emergence from British culture but was entirely a creation of medical theory in the context of the two-sex model. Medical discourse then infiltrated more popular literature such as moral tracts and anti-masturbation literature which incited specific anxieties about women’s sexuality. The idea that women were (or should be) naturally devoid of sexual desire needed to account for the feelings and behaviors of actual women by pathologizing it. Where earlier centuries would have assumed that women’s unlicensed desires would express themselves in fornication or adultery, now the fear was that it would manifest as private activity, including sexual activity with other women. If society pressured women to behave as if they had no heterosexual desires, then the remaining outlets for sexual activity were necessarily those that did not involve men.

Lesbianism was conceived in two conflicting ways: as mutual masturbation, that is, a reflexive and parallel activity between two women; or in the form of the masculinized lesbian who represents desire in a female body directed toward another woman who herself fits the passionless model. The femme partner in this last version points out the contradictions in the system as she is both “normal” woman and a participant in deviant desire.

[Note: Although this article talks about social changes in the 18th century, much of the evidence in that century can be considered the propaganda that tries to drive changes in everyday attitudes, with the general spread of those attitudes falling more in the 19th century.]

The next section of the article extensively reviews the historical theory around the shift from a one-sex model to a two-sex model and the associated changes in theories about sexual experiences and anatomical functions.

The change In theory necessitated a change in conduct literature aimed at women. Previously, control of women’s sexuality focused on lecturing women to control their sexual behavior, assuming that sexual desire was the baseline. But under the new model that assumed women were modest by nature, there was no need to impose modesty, rather the focus turned towards framing immodesty as unnatural and unwomanly.

Although literature was one instrument in spreading the new image of the passionless woman, it existed primarily in literary texts such as the domestic novel, while more popular forms of literature continued to include a wide range of images of female sexuality. [Note: It seems to me that this could be viewed as a class divide rather than a literary divide.]

The next section of the article focuses on the social panic over masturbation. Previously masturbation had been viewed as a moral issue in being a form of non-procreative sexual activity. The new model viewed it more in the context of medical and health issues, as might seem natural given that the whole idea derived from medical theories. While some early 18th century medical manuals allowed for positive uses of female stimulation to relieve certain medical problems, the genre of anti-masturbation literature was already arising and treating the act both as a cause and effect of mental and physical disease.

Anti-masturbation literature saw no clear distinction between solitary masturbation by women and mutual masturbation, that is, lesbianism. Female masturbation could be viewed both as a result of some bodily abnormality and as causing both physiological and medical abnormal conditions. The image of clitoral enlargement and clitoral penetration, which had begun circulating among medical discourse of the 17th century, now appears in masturbation literature as an accepted fact.

There is now created a causal chain whereby female sexual enjoyment is defined as masturbation, masturbation is tantamount to lesbianism, and therefore all female eroticism is pathology. Two ideas were promulgated that were in direct contradiction to the theory that women were naturally passionless. The first was the problem that if a directed campaign was necessary to discourage and eliminate masturbation this was in complete conflict with the idea that women were naturally passionless. They could not simultaneously experience no sexual desire and yet be addicted to masturbation. The second issue was the focus on female anatomy as the site of female eroticism and the insistence that sexual activity would revise the body into masculinity both physiological and psychological. That is, female sexual experience naturally creates lesbians.

While the 17th century had developed medical theories of the macro-clitoral tribade, the 18th century borrowed part of that idea, but rearranged cause and effect, such that rather than anatomy causing lesbian desire, it is the practice of lesbianism that causes aberrant anatomy.

Accompanying these changes in theories about desire and sexuality, are social changes in ideas about marriage and heterosexuality. When it was assumed that desire was not restricted by gender, then the controls on the expression of desire were largely moral. With the rise of the idea of companionate marriage and the restriction of authorized desire to that which occurred within marriage, there was a revision in the boundaries of what counted as sexual acts. Where heterosexuality had previously required mutual desire between male and female, now it only required male desire and female acceptance. Female desire had been redefined as inherently unnatural and unfeminine.

The 18th century realist fiction that served as propaganda for the passionless woman didn’t exclude lesbian figures, although it rarely explicitly identified them as such. Rather, the lesbian character serves to represent inappropriate female desire, which is to say any expressed female desire. She represents dangerous sexuality that must be rejected and punished. But at the same time this article points out that the lesbian character has also been domesticated. She belongs within the British setting of the novel rather than representing a foreign figure or one displaced in time to the classical era.

In literature, the ideal passionless woman can never desire the male character. Therefore she represents the fear that women will always choose women. And yet the femme character—the feminine woman who chooses a masculine woman as the object of her desire—presents an inherent contradiction. She appears everywhere in literature as the foil of the masculine lesbian: the wife of the female husband, the heroine enticed by the transgressive mannish friend. And yet she is culturally illegible. Given that she is not permitted to experience desire on her own, the object of her desire is illogical. Conversely if she does experience desire, then she is unfeminine and must become the masculine lesbian instead of desiring her.

The final sections of the paper examine the autobiography of actress Charlotte Charke and the fictionalized version of the trial of Mary Hamilton and how they fit in with this motif both as a literary works and as biographies.

In conclusion, the paper re-emphasizes that the idea of the passionless woman was an invention—one that needed to be imposed and propagandized in order to become normalized in society. At the same time, it was an idea that required the existence of a masculine lesbian figure and a nearly invisible femme figure in order to accommodate the ghost of female desire that had been banished from normative society.