Forming the Normal: Sexology and the British Novel, 1890-1939

By Colin Gillis

Sex became an object of scientific inquiry at the end of the nineteenth century. Early sex researchers focused primarily on the nature and etiology of perversion. In an effort to introduce factually verifiable knowledge to the medical treatment and legal regulation of sex, pioneering sexual scientists like Richard von Krafft-Ebing and Cesare Lombroso catalogued sexual pathologies and debated whether they were caused by hereditary or environmental factors. The first generation of modern sexologists, including Havelock Ellis, Iwan Bloch, and Sigmund Freud, who rose to prominence around the turn of the twentieth century, made normal sexuality the principal subject of sexual science. New research into patterns of development among ostensibly normal children and adults exploded the assumption--crucial for earlier theories of sexuality--that there exists a single, naturally predetermined course of development by which normal sexuality can be achieved. My dissertation proposes that modern British authors revised and ultimately discarded the generic dictates of nineteenth-century realism in reaction to this paradigm shift in sexology.

Literary critics tend to portray sexology and literary modernism as separate, warring entities. Following Michel Foucault, who identifies sexual science as one of the principal mechanisms of power-knowledge, scholars depict sexology as a monolithic body of texts that produced rigid, essentializing categories of identity, which novelists either naively assimilate or heroically undermine. “Forming the Normal” proposes a more dynamic and two-sided understanding of the relationship of influence between sexology and the novel. The narrative innovation typically associated with modernist fiction actually coincides and is bound up with the rejection in sexology of established theories that had derived assumptions about normative sexuality from nineteenth-century novels. The paradigms undergoing transformation in sexology and fiction thus are not only parallel; they are the same: the courtship plot, the development plot (or Bildungsroman), and the sexual awakening plot (which combines elements of both).

My first chapter, an examination of Havelock Ellis’s early career as a literary critic and editor, illustrates the reciprocal interaction between sexology and modernism in England. Like his friend Arthur Symons, with whom he traveled to France in 1890, Ellis played a critical role in the importation of European literary avant-gardes to England and the reinterpretation of British literary traditions. He edited the first edition in English of Henrik Ibsen’s Pillars of Society and Other Plays; wrote essays on works by Ibsen, Huysmans, and Zola; publicly defended Hardy’s controversial later novels; and oversaw the publication of unexpurgated editions of Elizabethan plays. I argue that Ellis’s engagement with avant-garde literature revolutionized his thinking about sex and shaped the development of his major contribution to sexology, Studies in the Psychology of Sex. Inspired by the belief that experimental writers reveal that the ostensibly abnormal man is “the natural man in excelsis,” Ellis revised and restructured his Sex Studies to emphasize the continuity between normative and non-normative sexualities.

The second chapter analyzes H. G. Wells’s engagement with biological theories of female sexuality in Ann Veronica. Biologists and sexologists during the 1890s and 1900s argued that the female body had been constructed, through evolutionary processes, to guide women toward a suitable mate. Reviving the New Woman novel nearly a decade after its heyday, Wells retools the genre to promote this biological conception of femininity. A young biology student who has run away from home, Ann Veronica Stanley consciously takes on what she believes to be her true biological identity. Since she thinks that sexual desire should outweigh social expectations and financial considerations in her selection of a mate, Ann Veronica decides to give up her education and elope with an older, married man. Yet Wells raises doubts about her understanding of biology. Even as Ann Veronica enacts a fantasy of modern womanhood as willed sexual subservience, it also explores the social and political consequences of the distortion of scientific knowledge as it circulates through popular culture.

The third chapter argues that D. H. Lawrence’s Sons and Lovers and The Rainbow diagnose as a pressing social problem the discrepancy between the bodily experience of growing up and the prevailing cultural representations of juvenile development. During the 1900s and 1910s, psychologists and sexologists rejected teleological models for sexual self-formation, suggesting instead that the unruly pleasures and desires of childhood bear no clear relation to sexual life in adulthood. Sons and Lovers and The Rainbow expand the realist proportions of the Bildungsroman to portray the emergence of the subject within the child’s growing body. Sensory impressions during infancy and childhood establish a physiological level of being in Lawrence’s protagonists that is not subject to the progressively structured developmental narrative typically found in novels of formation. In Sons and Lovers, Paul Morel, unable to conceive of life as an adult, remains destitute at the end of the novel. By contrast, the visionary ending of The Rainbow promises a new social order that will be defined through adolescence, not in opposition to it.

The fourth chapter links Joyce’s depiction of masturbation in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Ulysses to the partial legitimization of solitary sexual pleasure in sexology. Ellis’s essay “Auto-erotism” discredits the belief--widely held in the nineteenth century--that masturbation is a physically and psychologically self-destructive habit. I argue that Joyce assimilates Ellis’s conception of autoerotic pleasure as a natural and potentially salubrious sexual outlet. Stephen Dedalus’s furtive masturbatory life becomes a subversive figure for personal and aesthetic autonomy in Portrait. The young artist’s ecstatic discovery of his vocation as an artist through his vision of the bird-girl recalls and fulfills the masturbatory daydreams of his youth. In Joyce’s modern epic, which foregrounds Bloom’s rich and varied autoerotic life, masturbation emerges as a legitimate and pervasive form of sexuality. Joyce uses terms borrowed from Ellis’s Sex Studies to describe the technique for “Nausicaa” in the schema that he gave to Stuart Gilbert--“tumescence” and “detumescence”--and thus provocatively suggests that Bloom’s encounter with Gerty constitutes a complete sexual act.

In the fifth chapter, I turn to Virginia Woolf’s search for forms of subjectivity that are not defined by the gendered sexual body. During the 1910s and 1920s, women psychologists began to question the widely accepted biological theory of sexual variability, which held that men differ in mental and physical traits more greatly than women and that women’s psychic lives are uniquely conditioned by reproductive instincts. In influential articles and monographs, they challenged the empirical evidence for the variability hypothesis and contended that sex differences are caused by environmental factors, not innate characteristics. I relate Woolf’s experimental later works to this early feminist critique of science. Orlando highlights the historical contingency of gender, and A Room of One’s Own attacks the scientific theories of female inferiority that underpin the “rule of patriarchy” in England. The Waves leaves behind traditional novelistic forms, wherein life is experienced primarily through heterosexual courtship and marriage, to explore how friendship (specifically co-ed friendship) might serve as a form of interpersonal relation that transcends the limitations of the gendered sexual body. By depicting the lives of male and female characters through simultaneous, linked monologues, Woolf’s most experimental novel presents embodiment as an experience that is fundamentally similar for men and women and foregrounds a level of mental experience distinct from the body.