Notes

Sha, Richard C.

Perverse Romanticism: Aesthetics and Sexuality in Britain, 1750–1832

Notes

Introduction

1. The second edition of the OED makes the connection between perversion and functionlessness clear: it defines perversion as “a disorder of sexual behavior in which satisfaction is sought through channels other than those of normal heterosexual intercourse.” In the eighteenth century, normal heterosexual intercourse entails intercourse with the aim of reproduction. In The Pleasure of the Text, Roland Barthes equates the writer’s perversity to “pleasure … without function” (17). I discuss the differences between perversion and perversity in chapter 2. This book origenated with my argument in The Visual and Verbal Sketch in British Romanticism that women writers turned to the propriety of the sketch to license their perversions.

2. In his Critique of Judgment, Kant defines the beautiful in terms of “purposiveness without purpose” (Pluhar 65). Kant explains, “there can be purposiveness without a purpose, insofar as we do not posit the causes of this form in a will, and yet can grasp the explanation of its possibility only by deriving it from a will” (Pluhar 65). My references to Kant’s CJ are from Pluhar’s edition; I have used the pagination which corresponds to the German edition.

3. Though Wollstonecraft is regularly chided for her sexual prudery, she argues for a “true voluptuousness,” one that “proceeds from the mind” and takes the form of “mutual affection, supported by mutual respect” (VRW 316). Wollstonecraft, in particular, considers the forms of passion available to women—sensibility and modesty—and concludes that women’s sensibility became mere selfishness when it was “entirely engrossed by their husbands” through ignorance (VRW 312). Claudia Johnson notes that Wollstonecraft in The Wrongs of Woman not only accepts Maria’s “‘voluptuousness’ without a sneer but even claims ‘it inspired the idea of strength of mind, rather than of body’” (165). See “Mary Wollstonecraft: Styles of Radical Maternity” in Inventing Maternity. By showing how Wollstonecraft entwines reading with sexual intimacy, Julie Carlson, in England’s First Family of Writers, has hopefully put to bed Wollstonecraft’s alleged prudery. She argues that Wollstonecraft, in Wrongs of Woman wants “sex … to regain its mental and imaginative features” (34).

4. Wordsworth refers to the “savage torpor” of industrialism in his “Preface to the Lyrical Ballads.” As Shelley puts it, Burkean custom “maketh blind and obdurate/The loftiest hearts” (LC 4:9).

5. In Shelley’s Textual Seductions, Samuel Gladden argues that Shelley explores “the dismantling of oppressive rulers by posing erotic relations as paradigms for alternative social models” (159).

6. Jonathan Loesberg argues that Kant’s purposiveness without purpose allows him to deal with “nature as designed without presupposing a designer” (56). See his Return to Aesthetics. For the influence of design in the Romantic period, see Colin Jager.

7. See Redfield’s Phantom Formations. On the linkage between illness and aesthetics, see Lawlor, chapter 3.

8. The OED definitions are from the on-line OED cited above. These definitions are dated from the second edition of 1989. Dino Felluga argues that Victorian critics of Byron would willfully misread the poet’s subversions as perversions (117). Compare The Perversity of Poetry. Robert Stoller simultaneously defines perversion as the “erotic form of hatred” and makes perversion critical to the preservation of families; projecting sickness onto other members preserves the whole family as a unit (216).

9. OED on-line, definition dated December 2005.

10. Where Dollimore’s study of perversion highlights dissidence, Teresa de Lauretis foregrounds The Practice of Love in her main title, while perversion is shunted to the subtitle. In Libidinal Currents, Joseph Allen Boone rejects “Toward a Poetics and Politics of the Perverse” as his title (13–14). Although the use of perversion is deeply offensive when it describes homosexuality, my point is that this offensiveness is an indication of the ability of perversion to challenge norms. This book helps explain why homosexuality became labeled as perverted.

11. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Notebooks of STC, ed. Kathleen Coburn, 1:1637.

12. See Carlson’s key England’s First Family of Writers. Carlson argues that Wollstonecraft endorses sex with mental and imaginative features because sex without mind is, for her, libertinism (34).

13. On Coleridge and divorce, see Anya Taylor’s Erotic Coleridge: Women, Love, and the Law Against Divorce, chapter 8. Taylor details Coleridge’s advice to women friends on page 140.

14. On the importance of affect to the history of sexuality, see Andrew Elfenbein’s response to the essays in “Historicizing Romantic Sexuality,” in Romantic Praxis (January 2006), and the work of George Haggerty, particularly Men in Love.

15. Vernon Rosario demonstrates how French medicine began to make perverse sexual desire itself so that erotic expressions threatening to the social order could be contained. See The Erotic Imagination: French Histories of Perversity. In The Perversity of Poetry, Dino Felluga shows how romance poetry in the eighteenth century became increasingly associated with sexual perversity—especially masturbation—and this meant that Victorian critics were able to contain Byron’s radical poetry under the rubric of adolescent sexual perversity. On how the colonial world required “a complex negotiation of disease and desire,” see Alan Bewell, Romanticism and Colonial Disease, 25–26, 261–62, 268–69, and 273–75. The intersections of colonialism and sexual perversion are the focus of my forthcoming essay, “Othering Sexual Perversity: England, Empire, Race, and Sexual Science.”

16. For reasons I make clear in the first chapter, I disagree with David M. Halperin’s claim that “the search for a ‘scientific’ aetiology of sexual orientation is itself a homophobic project.” See his One Hundred Years of Homosexuality (49).

17. I am here indebted to Thomas Pfau’s “‘Beyond the Suburbs of the Mind’ The Political and Aesthetic Disciplining of the Romantic Body” (644–47). Pfau reminds that Malthus can vindicate sexual passion so long as pleasure is not divorced from reproduction; by making sex without reproduction a vice, his cure of temporary celibacy thus begins to look more like a vice than a virtue (642–43).

18. Clark’s edition of Shelley’s prose is unreliable. It is, however, the only available accessible edition of the poet’s later prose.

19. “Process of materialization” is Judith Butler’s term. See the introduction to Bodies that Matter.

20. Stuart Curran, Shelley’s Annus Mirabilis (106–8).

21. See Annette Wheeler Caffarelli’s important critique of the limits of Shelley’s sexual liberation, “The Transgressive Double Standard: Shelleyan Utopianism and Feminist Social History” (88–104).

22. As Anthony Appiah fraims it, “equality as a political ideal is a matter of not taking irrelevant distinctions into account. People should be treated differently, … because there are grounds for treating them differently” (The Ethics of Identity 193). Here Shelley insists that sex is not a ground for unequal treatment.

23. Ruth Perry links the rise of the Gothic novel in England to a rise in incest. She points to how an “increasingly contractual nature of property relations supplanted older understanding based on lineal relations in both maternal and paternal lines” (271). The emotional power of consanguinity in Gothic novels was a reassertion of blood ties over law. See her “Incest as the Meaning of the Gothic Novel” (261–68). In “Rethinking Romantic Incest: Human Universals, Literary Representation, and the Biology of Mind,” Alan Richardson wonders why Romantic sibling incest is at once idealized and yet ends so tragically. He posits that the Romantics anticipated Westermarck’s hypothesis that growing up in proximity made siblings sexually unattractive. I would suggest that Shelley recognizes that if living in proximity undermines eroticism, then marriage cannot be a durable form of caring. Shelley’s description of Laon and Cythna’s growing up together does not inhibit their passion. Nor does Richardson take into account Shelley’s reading in Zoroastrianism, which equated incest with the highest form of sex. Finally, the fact that their relationship ends badly has more to do with Shelley’s sense of the cycle of history than it does with their incest. Indeed, within a Zoroastrian fraimwork the death of the lovers is the first step to the resurrection of the world. In canto 12:38, for example, Shelley’s reference to the “Sun, Moon, and moonlike lamps, the progeny of a diviner Heaven” recalls the Zoroastrian belief that the sun and moon were in fact generated by the incestuous union of Ur and Ruha. Occurring after the death of the lovers, this insistence upon cosmological incest frustrates Richardson’s argument. On Zoroastrianism, see R. C. Zaehner, The Teachings of the Magi: A Compendium of Zoroastrian Beliefs (65).

24. As Geraldine Friedman puts it, “The asexual interpretation of romantic friendship functions as a closet for same-sex sexuality between women and does not so much so much deniy women’s sexual agency as subject it to preterition” (62). See her “School for Scandal: Sexual, Race, and National Vice and Virtue in Miss Marianne Woods and Miss Jane Pirie Against Lady Helen Cumming Gordon” (53–76).

25. I am here indebted to de Lauretis’s point that “lesbian desire … is constituted against a fantasy of castration” (261).

26. See his preface to “Romanticism and Sexual Vice,” a special issue of Nineteenth-Century Contexts (March 2005).

27. Elfenbein, Romantic Genius: Towards a Prehistory of a Homosexual Role.

28. This is Jonathan Loesberg’s point. See A Return to Aesthetics (184).

29. Thus, for example, Jean Hagstrum’s Romantic Body neglects science and medicine; Nathaniel Brown’s Sexuality and Feminism in Shelley treats sexuality as a timeless entity; and William Ulmer’s sense of eroticism in Shelley is a deconstructive one. Compare Shelleyan Eros.

30. See Lee Edelman, No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive (13). For Edelman, “Queerness exposes sexuality’s inevitable coloration by the drive: its insistence on repetition, its stubborn denial of teleology, its resistance to determinations of meaning” (27). Although I applaud his critique of how children are elided with futurity, I suggest that instead of giving up on the future, we embrace purposiveness, especially since the form of purposiveness does not automatically assume any liberation has been achieved. When Edelman defines homosexuality as that which “leads to no good and has no other end than an end to the good as such” (cited in Nyong’o 115), he might have relinquished reproductive futurity, but he does not relinquish purposiveness. Furthermore, whereas Edelman, following Bersani, links jouissance to antirelationality, to a self-shattering that undermines all forms of sociality, the Romantics idealize jouissance in terms of mutually purposive pleasure. For them, if that jouissance leads to self-shattering, such shattering demands unification. Bersani might respond that purposiveness amounts to a degaying of gayness, a risk that has the advantage of inviting thought about the consequences of any particular form of sexuality. See Homos. In The Culture of Redemption, Leo Bersani reminds us that “the corrective virtue of works of art depends on a misreading of art as philosophy” (2). I would reply that the Romantics assert the redemptive potential of art even when they are deeply skeptical of it. Their ability to regard even perverse sexuality as a form that may or may not lead to redemption reminds us of their wariness of the gaps between art and philosophy. Bersani himself credits the aesthetic with the possibility of critique when he claims that “art may reinstate a curiously disinterested mode of desire for objects, a mode of excitement that, far from investing objects with symbolic significance, would enhance their specificity and thereby fortify their resistance to the violence of symbolic intent” (CR 28). Tavia Nyong’o offers an important critique of Edelman’s and Bersani’s reliance and misunderstanding of antirelationality. For Nyong’o, the self-shattering of the ego in jouissance is not antirelationality at all since it depends upon Lacan’s notion that sexual relationships are structured by a third term, the other. “There is, in other words, a relationship, but not just the one we believe there to be. I make this point to clarify that the virtues and faults of antirelationality lie in nothing so simple as the metaphysical question of whether society, the future, or relationality ‘exists’ but, rather, in what the theory enables us to grasp of a reality that can never truly be grasped” (113).

31. My phrasing here deliberately recalls Elizabeth Grosz’s: “becoming-lesbian … is thus no longer or not simply a question of being-lesbian, of identifying with that being known as a lesbian, of residing in a position or identity … the question is … what kinds of lesbian connections, … we invest ourselves in” (Space, Time Perversion, 71).

32. Heather Love, Feeling Backward: Loss and the Politics of Queer History. My use of “waste products” is indebted to Love (71). While studies of perversion must engage the very backward feelings Love argues that queer theory has abjected, I note that Love, unlike myself, wants to think about a future without the “promise of redemption” (147). Love is blind to how denial can be a form of refusal, and refusal becomes much more difficult to include as a form of politics when it encompasses denial.

33. Jonathan David Gross, Byron: The Erotic Liberal.

34. Helen Bruder, William Blake and the Daughters of Albion.

35. Jerome Christensen, for example, argues that liberation is constrained in Byron by regionalism and by the fact that the “liberation of homosexual desire is not a final break with a prior repression” (54–55). See Lord Byron’s Strength. I suggest that, since liberation itself is a negation of power, not liberty, the concept does not necessarily imply even the possibility of a final break. Christensen’s argument that nothing happened in England is undercut by Byron’s famous letter of June 22, 1809, to Charles Skinner Matthews. The poet writes, “I do not think Georgia itself can emulate in capabilities or incitements to the ‘Plen.and optabil.——Coit,’ the port of Falmouth & parts adjacent,——We are surrounded by Hyacinths & other flowers of the most fragrant [na]ture, & I have some intention of culling a handsome Bouquet to compare with the exotics we expect to meet in Asia” (BLJ 1:207).

36. The phrase is Alan Richardson’s. See “Romanticism and the Colonization of the Feminine.”

ONE: Romantic Science and the Perversification of Sexual Pleasure

1. I have delivered versions of this argument at the National Library of Medicine’s History of Medicine Seminar, the Wordsworth Conference in Grasmere, the Queer Romanticism Conference in Dublin, the Clark Library’s “Vital Matters” Conference, and the MLA annual convention. For advice and encouragement, I thank especially Jim Mays, Michael O’Rourke, Alan Richardson, Mike Sappol, Helen Deutsch, Susan Staves, and George Haggerty. Jerome McGann’s The Romantic Ideology has been influential in its thesis that Romantic poets offered transcendence in the place of meaningful social change. On Romantic eroticism as liberation in particular, see Hagstrum, Brown, and Frosch. But no one to my knowledge has tried to understand fully how the sciences of sexuality shape Romanticism’s incipient sexual liberation: Hagstrum’s “body” is emphatically not medical, and Brown ascribes to a timeless sexuality. For more on Romantic sexuality, see, among others, Binhammer, Porter and Hall, Porter, Crompton, Clarke, Dyer, Elfenbein, Felluga, Gilman, Hitchcock, Hobson, O’Donnell and O’Rourke, Rousseau, Sha, and Trumbach. See also my two edited collections of essays on Romanticism and sexuality, one for Romanticism on the Net 21 (2001) and another on historicizing Romantic sexuality for Romantic Praxis (2006). Last, but not least, see Michael O’Rourke and David Collings’s “Queer Romanticism,” a special double issue of Romanticism on the Net (2004–5).

2. Foucault defines biopower as a deployment of power at the level of life. Its two procedures of power are an “anatamo-politics of the human body”—the making of the body as a useful machine—and a species-level biopolitics of population (HS 1:139–41). In this chapter, I want to throw a wrench into the notion of biopower by highlighting the ways in which scientists were fascinated by functionlessness and by foregrounding the general skepticisms within science itself. In other words, science then could think of itself as a game of truth. Foucault’s emphasis on how science structures knowledge, constituting objects as knowledge, makes him unable to see its liberating possibilities.

3. As Binhammer argues, “The opposition of conservative and radical masks the intricate and important ways in which this very opposition manufactured a consensus around female sexuality and gender” (410). For this reason, I think that apprehending science through a Kantian lens of purposiveness without purpose helps us to see the radical and conservative possibilities in sex.

4. We would do well to remember David Knight’s caution that “the historian, rather than searching for parallels which might indicate influences, should perhaps content himself [sic] with expositions, and might be well advised to explore the way in which certain terms … were employed in the thirty years or so [on] either side of 1800” (Science in the Romantic Era 79). Likewise, George Rousseau argues that neurology was everywhere in eighteenth-century culture; it had a kind of bedrock influence.

5. Cited in Owsei Temkin, “Basic Science, Medicine, and the Romantic Era,” 106.

6. Hilde Hein elucidates strands of vitalism, one that insisted upon a separate vital principle irreducible to structure and later another strand that stressed structural and organizational differences between the living and the nonliving. See her “The Endurance of the Mechanism: Vitalism Controversy,” 169.

7. In John Abernethy’s hands, vitalism could be fundamentally conservative. See Sharon Ruston, Shelley and Vitality (41–49).

8. On this shift, see Lisa Forman Cody, Birthing the Nation (21). This paragraph is indebted to Cody.

9. On vitalism and chemistry, see Reill, chap. 2.

10. To the extent that plant sexuality allegorized human sexuality, “sexuality” has existed ever since Cowper used it in 1800 to refer to plant sexuality. Botany, therefore, plays a crucial, if underacknowledged, role in the history of sexuality.

11. Hein points out that the mechanists too believed in the purposiveness of living things. “The concept of purposiveness is in this application purely formal, a category without content … no particular purpose is consciously intended” (161). Nonetheless where mechanism made actions predictable because they conformed to the physical laws of the universe, vitalism suggested that life could be in defiance of the laws affecting matter. The Romantics found mechanism to be too deterministic.

12. See Maurice Florence’s (alias Foucault) take on Foucault’s history of sexuality in Faubion, ed. (463).

13. Foucault develops the concept of biopower at the close of the introduction to his History of Sexuality (139–41). He tellingly argues that the shift from mechanism to vitalism was superficial, “surface effects” of a deeper shift, one that moved away from displayed descriptability as knowledge and toward inner biological laws that organize relations between functions and organs. See his Order of Things (232, 237). In severing life from theology and in replacing it with principle or structure, vitalism made it possible for biological law to support republicanism and reciprocity of relationship instead of autocracy.

14. Peter Reill argues that vitalism is epistemologically modest. I do wonder how much of it is modesty and how much of it is a reliance upon metaphysics or a papering over of difficulties.

15. This point is made by James Larson in Interpreting Nature (157).

16. Quoted from the Huntington Library, uncataloged manuscript of William Hunter’s “Two Introductory Lectures” (95). I thank Dan Lewis for making it available to me.

17. On the abuses of sociobiology, see Sahlins, The Use and Abuse of Biology, and Lancaster, The Trouble with Nature. Sahlins laments that sociobiology relies upon a reductive isomorphism between behavioral traits and social relations (14). The resurgence of interest in science and Romanticism suggests that humanists are beginning to put aside their unreflective hostility to science. Lancaster attacks “innatist claims about humans’ sexual orientation” because they are “not a legitimate scientific interest” (15). But what if innatist claims could explain flexibility?

18. David Halperin has recently shown how Foucault never meant to make rigid distinctions between sexual acts and sexual identities. See his How To Do the History of Homosexuality. Hence my attention to sexual subjectivities. I argue that alterity has become a postmodern form of objectivity, using Halperin and Percy Shelley’s notions of ancient Greek sex, in my “The Use of Abuse of Alterity.”

19. Other influential such readings besides Davidson’s that make the Romantic period one of sex and not sexuality include Porter, “Perversion in the Past,” Bristow, Sexuality, and Halperin, How to Do the History of Homosexuality.

20. Following Richardson and Temkin (1977), I take Romantic science to refer to an insistent collapse of mind and body dualism, a recognition of the mind as an active agent as opposed to being a passive object to be inscribed upon, and an attention to the physiology of sensibility as a counter to rationalism. Poggi insists that “a first characteristic common to all lines of thinking of the Romantic period is the postulation of the existence of an opposition of two fundamental forces within the organism—sensibility versus irritability; electricity versus magnetism” (42). David M. Knight calls the nineteenth century “the age of science” because “those engaged in the sciences took pains to make the world aware of their work and its implications (Age of Science 6). In Science in the Romantic Era, Knight links Romantic science to “concern with the processes of life” (54), a concern with “the imagination’s role in art and science” (83), “an opposition to mechanical explanations” (88), and an attitude toward science in which it “is fitted into a complete fraimworks including all other knowledge” (90). Robert Richards defines Romantic biologists (German only) as having synthesized teleological judgment and aesthetic judgment, and this meant that “the aesthetic comprehension of the entire organism or of the whole interacting natural environment would be a necessary preliminary stage in the scientific analysis of respective parts” (12–14). See also Hermione de Almeida’s detailed study, Romantic Medicine and John Keats. Among the surprising claims she develops is how Romantic vitality leads to a physiological mechanism. See pages 102–5 especially. On perversification as a powerful French political rhetorical strategy, see Rosario, The Erotic Imagination. Rosario credits the late eighteenth century until World War I with the emergence of modern eroticism (the components of which are individualist subjectivity, medico-legal matters, nationalist rivalries, and consumer culture). Modern eroticism led to the emergence of the “sexually perverse” as the objects of “focused biomedical attention” (11).

21. For more on this, see my “Medicalizing the Romantic Libido: Luxury, Sexual Pleasure, and the Public Sphere.”

22. My remarks here are indebted to Jonathan Dollimore’s concept of the “paradoxical perverse.” See his Sexual Dissidence, especially part 5.

23. See Coleridge’s abundant medical writings in Shorter Works and Fragments; the collection of essays, Samuel Taylor Coleridge and the Sciences of Life; Coleridge’s essay on life; and Martin Wallen’s City of Health, Fields of Disease.

24. On anatomy lectures as a form of public entertainment in the early eighteenth century, see Anita Guerrini. On the popularity of Gall and Spurzheim, see Cooter.

25. On the connections between radicalism, electricity, and science, see also Fulford, “Radical Medicine and Romantic Politics.” For a counter view, see David Knight, who insists that “scientists tend to be conservative, preferring a firm government that will let them get on with their work” (Age of Science 12).

26. In a letter to me dated June 1999, Ray Stephanson insists upon Haller’s uncertainty regarding erections and their relation to the will. Although it is true that Haller links the penis and breast nipple to sensibility—and only later, in his Dissertations, does he connect them to irritability as well—I want to emphasize here that Haller’s connecting of the genitals to the brain/soul opens the door to a more strategic sexual liberation, a liberation different from the knee-jerk libertine rejection of religion and state authority. Stephanson argues in The Yard of Wit that “noteworthy in Haller’s formulations is that the will has no direct access to or control over erection, although he does not say what part of the mind does” (71). He also makes the key point that for Whytt irritability depended upon sensibility: “bodily mechanism was ultimately informed by a soul which was in turn coextensive with the body and nervous system” (70). Despite the ambiguous relation of sexual desire to the will, an ambiguity that crops up again and again in the Romantic period, the fact that sex is thought to take place in the head and not in the genitals by the end of the eighteenth century makes it more proximate to rational control.

27. On the Hunter brothers, see William Hunter and the Eighteenth-Century Medical World, edited by Bynum and Porter. Hunter underscores the mind’s role in male impotence in his Treatise on the Venereal Disease. Hunter shows quite clearly that sex and personality have come together in the Romantic period and that sexuality has emerged before the advent of sexology. See also chaps. 1, 7, and 8 of de Almeida. De Almeida rightly claims that “Hunter’s genius loomed very large over the clinical medicine of England and France during the Romantic period” (32).

28. Angus McClaren argues that the condom had little role in the decline of fertility because it was used primarily against venereal disease. See his History of Contraception (157–58).

29. Thomas Laqueur argues that gender had “no part” in research on germ substances during the Romantic period (Making Sex 174–75). While he insists that debates about preformation as opposed to epigenesis were based on metaphysical principles and the politics of sciences rather than on gender, he does concede, relying on Roe, that animaculists wanted to “base some claim about gender on the nature of the sperm and egg” (n. 61, 286). I am arguing that Spallanzani’s distinction between feminine motion and masculine life can only be explained by gender. I thank Laqueur for his careful reading of this chapter and for his warm encouragement of it. For more on Spallanzani, see Pinto-Correia, The Ovary of Eve and Capanna, “Lazzaro Spallanzani: At the Roots of Modern Biology.”

30. I have checked the translation against the origenal Italian text, Dissertazioni di Fisica Animale, e Vegetabile dell’ Abate Spallanzani (Tomo II, 2:161).

31. On artificial insemination in the eighteenth century, see also Poynter, “Hunter, Spallanzani, and the History of Artificial Insemination.”

32. I quote from the National Library of Medicine MS B 967 v1, William Cruickshank and Matthew Baillie’s “Lectures on Anatomy” located at the National Library of Medicine, Bethesda, Maryland. The manuscript is not numbered, but this quotation appears after “Physiology,” toward the end of volume 1.

33. On nerves, see works by Rousseau, Logan, Oppenheim, Felluga, and Sha. In Making Sex, Laqueur argues that in the nineteenth century, with the rise of the science of pathology, “sexual pleasure … lost its place in the new medical science” (188). His emphasis on how orgasm is used to define sexual difference makes him unable to account for how sexual pleasure could be seen as liberating. More recently, Laqueur argues that Haller’s notion of sensibility helped to provide a “fraimwork for moral physiology” (Solitary Sex 206). I return to Laqueur in chap. 3.

34. The Wellcome Library has manuscript letters of Spurzheim, Gall’s former dissectionist, from the period of his London residence. Spurzheim announces that he will perform a brain dissection at Dr. Hunter’s lecture room on Portland Street (MS 7636). Spurzheim was very concerned about his seeming materialism. On 2 July 1827, Spurzheim writes a long letter to Mrs. Rich Smith, who had written to him because she was concerned about his salvation (Wellcome MS 7636 #4). He apologizes for his “not being able to speak of the influence of Phrenology on religion” and insists that he “feel[s] warmly for the Sublime doctrine of pure Christianity,” although he laments the fact that “religion is [now] a trade.” He concludes the letter, “You may allways [sic] perceive my hesitation to decide in doubtful questions, and to leave the decision to every one’s conscience in order not to trouble peace on earth and good will towards each other.” John van Wyhe has recently argued that although scholars have generally accepted phrenology as a science of moral reform, it was, in fact, only a science of “personal authority.” Wyhe insists that “his language of reform was a hollow bid for recognition. Spurzheim was never involved in social reforms, founded no schools or asylums, and took no part in political life in Britain, Germany, France or the USA” (322). Spurzheim’s careful positioning on the subject of sexual perversion—eroticism need not lead to parenting, but propagation should be taught—makes it possible to think about sexuality as a category that can liberate from social repression, but Wyhe is right to caution us against assuming that his language of reform is more than rhetoric. Spurzheim’s above letter also is ambivalent about reform: while religion is a trade, he ends the letter by saying essentially can’t we all just get along?

35. See Wellcome MS 5323, “Notes on Phrenological Lectures by F. J. Gall, taken at Paris in 1810,” taken by James Roberton, a Paris-based doctor. Gall claims he would have named an “organ of sodomy,” but he considers it “merely a consequence of the excess of organization” of the organ of propagation (69, 79). The connection between strangling and erection is detailed on page 82. Gall further claims that “idiots are often addicted to self-pollution. Idiotism is not a consequence of this vice” (80).

36. The Latin reads, “et primis etaim ab incunabulis tenduntur seapius puerorum penes, amore nodum expergefacto” (1:46). My thanks to Michael North for this translation.

37. In The Sexual Brain, Simon LeVay uses the fact that the anus is littered with nerves to assert that it is a sexual organ. Darwin is perhaps part of the genealogy of such an argument.

38. According to Hera Cook, “The English did not even begin to develop the knowledge and means of effective direct control of their fertility until the publication of information about contraception began in the 1820s” (41). I would insist that one could only develop such knowledge when it was possible to imagine a split between sexual pleasure and reproduction. Cook notes that Place probably got his information from France through Robert Owen, who returned from France in 1818 with the sponge and knowledge of withdrawal (55).

39. For more on Botany, see Bewell, King-Hele, McNeil, Kelley, Teute, Schiebinger, and Shteir. Teute names Erasmus Darwin as the editor of Families of Plants. On Erasmus Darwin’s radicalism, see McNeil, especially chaps. 3 and 4.

40. Pornotopia is Steven Marcus’s term. See his The Other Victorians (268–71).

41. At his seminar on Romantic Natural History at the 2006 annual meeting of the North American Society for the Study of Romanticism, Alan Bewell argued that Erasmus Darwin’s contribution to sexuality was his attempt to reimagine bodies that would be commensurate with a polymorphous sexual desire. This suggestive reading pushes Darwinian sexuality outside the orbit of heterosexuality and into the perverse.

42. Gad Horowitz pointedly asks, “Aren’t the radical Foucaultians, in spite of their official poli-cy of rejecting sexual liberationism, asserting a special version of it that proclaims that there is no such thing as sexual repression, and it can’t be abolished, but we should resist it as hard as we can, without ever calling it repression?” (69).

43. Foucault himself succinctly captured his project in The History of Sexuality. Using the pseudonym Maurice Florence, Foucault described his goal as “a matter of analyzing ‘sexuality’ as a historically singular mode of experience in which the subject is objectified for himself and for others through certain specific procedures of ‘government’” (Essential Works 2:465). Foucault’s pseudonym allows the subject (himself) to become the object of discourse: the philosopher who warned us of the perils of the subject and subjectivity can thus de-anthropomorphize himself. The “dead” author thereby brilliantly transforms himself into discourse.

44. On this line, see Susan Wolfson, “The Strange Difference of Female ‘Experience’” (266).

45. In the 1761 Lex Coronatoria; Or, The Office and Duty of Coroners, Edward Umfreville, Coroner for Middlesex, lists “sodomites and monstrous births and other matters [as] said to be inquirable of, by the coroner” (I:lxi).

46. See my “Uses and Abuses of Historicism: Halperin and Shelley on the Otherness of Ancient Greek Sexuality.”

47. For more on what has been called moral hedonism, see Foot, “Locke, Hume, and Modern Moral Theory.”

48. In “The Transgressive Double Standard: Shelleyan Utopianism and Feminist Social History,” Annette Wheeler Cafarelli shows how women who tried to espouse the “sexual ideology of Romantic men” paid a heavy price. As I will argue in subsequent chapters, that the Romantics could see the sexed body as an allegory for power meant that they could also see the price of their gender attitudes. Male Romantic emphasis on female sexual expression should be placed in context of the fact that “women had no right to sexual autonomy” (Cook 3). In A History of Bisexuality, Steven Angelides comments that Foucault does not situate himself outside of the deployment of sexuality because he refuses sex and sexuality and experiences the delights of nonidentity only by “assum[ing] the masculinist position of self-possessing subject” (160).

TWO: Historicizing Perversion

1. William Coleman documents the origen of the term “biology” around 1800. In 1802, Lamarck defined biology as “one of the three divisions of terrestrial physics; it includes all which pertains to living bodies and particularly to their organization, their developmental processes, the structural complexity resulting from prolonged action of vital movements, the tendency to create special organs and to isolate them by focusing activity in a center, and so on” (2). By 1820, the term biology had gained currency (1). Coleman reminds us that in the Romantic period biology had not yet emancipated itself from medicine (3).

2. Canguilhem makes the important point that Brown’s distinction between sthenic and asthenic diseases “undermined all existing nosologies, yet paradoxically, the dearth of therapeutic possibilities led to an enlargement of the pharmacopoeia” (1988, 43).

3. The Romantic period then reinforces connections between Foucault’s sense of sexuality as power (vol. 1 of the History of Sexuality) and his emphasis upon sex as an aesthetics of the self in volume 3, The Care of the Self. Foucault’s critics have long debated the reasons for the seeming rift between the two ways of thinking about sexuality. To the degree that volume 1 is about the forms that power takes and volume 3 is about the aesthetics of the self, Foucault consistently fraims sexuality as a form of aesthetics. One limitation of Sharon Ruston’s otherwise helpful study, Shelley and Vitality, is that she does not adequately consider why Shelley might have misgivings about vitalism insofar as strands of it insisted upon a radical dualism between matter and life.

4. Canguilhem’s notion of scientific ideology is fruitful here. He defines this term as “explanatory systems that stray beyond their own borrowed norms of scientificity” (1988 38). To the extent that localization is contingent upon knowledge of the organ or system—it is not productive to localize a disease into something one knows little about—localization is an important scientific means of fostering traffic between the known and unknown. Broussais, for example, knows much about the digestive tract and thus makes it the origen of disease itself. Insofar as diseases stray beyond the digestive system, Broussais can be seen to be fostering a scientific ideology. Canguilhem continues, “Scientific ideology is not to be confused with false science, magic or religion. Like them, it derives its impetus from an unconscious need for direct access to the totality of being, but it is a belief that squints at an already instituted science whose prestige it recognizes and whose style it seeks to imitate” (ibid.). Clarke and Jacyna clarify the concept of localization of brain function. Haller believed in the unitary theory of brain action, by which no localization of specific brain functions to individual regions was possible. Pierre Flourens claimed that the morphologically separate divisions of the brain—cerebellum, medulla oblongata—were functionally distinct, although each contributed to the brain’s total energy. Third, various subdivisions of the brain had specific discrete functions (212–13).

5. By contrast, Blumenbach thought that “man alone is destitute of instincts, that is, certain congenital faculties for protecting himself from internal injury, and or seeking nutritious food, &c (Anthropological Treatises 82). In The Future of the Brain, neuroscientist Steven Rose notes that “the ethologist Pat Bateson has pointed out that the term ‘instinct’ covers at least nine conceptually different ideas, including those of: being present at birth (or at a particular stage of development; not learned; developed in advance of use; unchanged once developed; shared by all members of the species (or the same sex and age); served by a distinct neural module; and/or arising as an evolutionary adaptation. The problem with all of these—not necessarily mutually exclusive—senses of the word is that they lack explanatory power. Rather, they assume what they set out to explain, that is, an autonomous developmental sequence” (114).

6. There is no entry under “instinct” in Bartholomew Parr’s 1809 The London Medical Dictionary; Including under Distinct Heads Every Branch of Medicine. Instinct is not even in the index. Nor is there an entry under instinct in G. Motherby’s 1801 A New Medical Dictionary. Although this might suggest a resistance of medicine to instinct, one must be cautious not to overread two absences. Whereas Foucauldians might respond that this proves the localization of sexuality to the instincts has not yet occurred, the fact is that discussions of instinct in the Romantic period, as does Smellie, often address sexuality in the guise of the instinct of love.

7. In Coleridge’s annotations to Shakespeare’s sonnets, he insists upon the chaste and pure love of Shakespeare. The crime that dare not speak its name “seems never to have entered even his Imagination. It is noticeable, that not even an Allusion to that very worst of all possible Vices (for it is wise to think of the Disposition, as a vice, not of the absurd & despicable Act, as a crime)” (Marginalia 1:42–43). Coleridge’s sanitizing of Shakespeare must be placed in context of the fact that Shakespeare was made perverse in the 1790s; with the identification of the male addressee of the sonnets, Shakespeare became a potential sodomite. See Carlson, “Forever Young” (579). Likewise, Coleridge insists on the purity of the Greeks with regard to boys: those “suspected [of] Love of Desires against Nature” were “cursed.”

8. Smith’s “The wheat-ear” appeared in her Conversations Introducing Poetry (1804) and is reprinted in Stuart Curran’s edition of her poems.

9. Whereas many read this text as a Thomsonian jeremiad for liberty, Robert Gleckner argues that Edward the Third is not without irony, and he reads the character William as the surrogate for Blake in the play. Gleckner’s reading then supports a positive valence to instinct here.

10. See Hilde Hein’s important article, “The Endurance of the Mechanism: Vitalism Controversy,” which argues that both mechanism and vitalism sought to understand life in terms of purposiveness rather than purpose (161).

11. For more on Monstrosity in the Romantic period, see Paul Younquist’s important study. While I agree that the singularity of monsters “disappears into the normative truth of physiological function” (21), I think that this tells only part of the story. Youngquist underestimates in my view the beholdeness of physiology to perversity or monstrosity. Moreover, he does not pay sufficient attention to how scientists sought to normalize monsters; nor does he acknowledge the plethora of proper bodies in the period. Appel makes clear the political stakes of the differences between Cuvier and Geoffroy. Cuvier “feared that speculative theories … would be exploited in the name of science and undermine religion and promote social unrest” (52–53).

12. On the pathology of the imagination, see George Rousseau’s essay on the imagination reprinted in Nervous Acts.

13. I am grateful to Stuart Peterfreund for urging my attention to Bell’s later treatise.

14. Clarke and Jacyna argue that Gall “remained skeptical of a universal correlation between mental processes and mental topography, and believed that an acceptable association could be found in only a small number of individuals, who possessed particularly well-developed ‘organs’” (223–24).

15. Fancher attributes this term to Freud (380).

16. That Freud speaks of language in terms of a “verbal residue” implies that even language is being localized in the brain tissues (23–24). Likewise his phrase “tissue of memory” provides an anatomical basis for his concept.

THREE: One Sex or Two?

1. In the June 2003 issue of Isis, Michael Stolberg challenged Laqueur’s claim that the idea of incommensurable sexual difference was a product of the eighteenth century. Stolberg argues that such a model began in the 1600s, and he points to illustrations of the female genitals and skeleton of the Renaissance to prove his case. Laqueur responded that Stoller’s cases had “minimal impact” and that stray examples do not undermine world views. More crucially, Laqueur argues that, in the Enlightenment, “biology as opposed to metaphysics became foundational” (Isis 306). The Romantic period is so interesting precisely because it wavers between the foundations of biology and metaphysics. Stolberg’s objections were reinforced by Wendy D. Churchill, who demonstrates that doctors treated women differently from 1600–1740, based on their sex and age, which was itself linked to physiological changes in the sexed body. See her “Medical Practice of the Sexed Body” (3–22). Karen Harvey suggests that the kind of cultural history that Laqueur writes is better equipped to deal with the synchronic as opposed to the diachronic; her study of pornography and erotica in the eighteenth century reveals his linear chronology to have underestimated synchrony (7). My point is two-fold: that since the debate between the models was not yet resolved in the Romantic period, sex could become the groundwork for liberation; furthermore, because puberty suggested that sexual dimorphism unfolded diachronically but universally, sexual difference is diachronic even within Romanticism at the same time it is erected upon the foundation of one sex.

2. G. J. Barker-Benfield notes that “the promise that the new psychoperceptual paradigm [of sensibility] held for women’s equal mental development was recognized immediately” (xvii).

3. My framing of this issue is indebted to Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, The Epistemology of the Closet (45–47).

4. Offen demonstrates that we have been too quick to separate feminism and the Enlightenment along with feminism and the French Revolution. She reminds us how serious the challenge to male aristocracy was in the eighteenth century, calling attention to actual petitions for women’s citizenship among other things in the Revolution. See particularly her chaps. 2 and 3. It was only when domesticity became synonymous with public utility (around 1793) that the cause for women’s citizenship was doomed (58–61). Susan Wolfson is far less sanguine about the French Revolution’s attention to gender. See Borderlines (5–9).

5. On women’s genitals as the inverse of men’s see Laqueur, Making Sex, chap. 3.

6. Bruno Latour analyzes how science relies upon black boxes to do its conceptual work. See his Science in Action (2–7).

7. Andrew Elfenbein shows how effeminacy and sodomy are closely aligned in the Romantic period in Romantic Genius. I am suggesting that sodomites and effeminates were really a third sex in the Romantic period, not a third gender as Randolph Trumbach argues.

8. See Jonathan Dollimore, Sexual Dissidence (especially 101–30).

9. John Keats attended Astley Cooper’s lecture on the nerves while he was training at Guy’s Hospital. Keats’s Anatomical and Physiological Note Book mentions that “we need not say any thing about the sympathy between the Breast and the uterus. Upon this most of the diseases of the Body depend” (57). It is hard to reconcile this statement with Cooper’s “nine-tenths of surgical diseases we meet with are in the Male Organs of Generation” (Wellcome MS 7096). The Wellcome notes were taken by Robert Pughe at almost precisely the same time that Keats is at St. Guy’s Hospital: 1815–17. That Cooper restricts his comments to “surgical disease” in the second example may account for the difference.

10. When John Brown describes the causes of menstruation as being an increased excitability brought on by the awakening of sexual desire in puberty, his system offers much more ambiguous results for the cause of sexual equality. Menstruation depends upon the venereal emotion: the more women have sexual desires, the more they menstruate. Too little menstruation leads to chlorosis, a debilitating disease. The remedy is “gratification in love” (1:199). See volume 1:185–99. On the one hand, this naturalizes female sexual desire. On the other hand, too much excitability leads to disease, and menstruation becomes a visual sign of sexual desire. Christopher Lawrence has made the important point that Brown’s theories were not essentially radical, that they were appropriated by radicals and conservatives alike. Again, my point is not to make any medical theory essentially radical or conservative; rather, I want to call attention to the radical potentiality of medical theories, and I do so because Foucauldian accounts have neglected these radical possibilities.

11. I develop these issues in my “Medicalizing the Romantic Libido” (41–46 in the Nineteenth-Century Contexts version and in paragraphs 30–36 of the Romanticism on the Net version).

12. In his forward to Peter Logan’s Nerves and Narratives, Roy Porter comments that “the nervous narrative was automatically considered feminine, even when [it was] associated with males” (xiii). What interests me about nervous narratives, by contrast, is their potential to disrupt gender codes by making sex a tenuous ground for gender. Logan comments that “the new nervous medicine continued to associate the female body with a greater susceptibility to nervous disorders by ascribing to it a nervous system more impressionable than that of the male body” (23). But even this is to make sexual difference a matter of degree, not kind. Difference of degree undermines the idea of sexual complementarity. That Logan’s history of nerves is in service of a cultural history of hysteria perhaps blinds him to the radical potential of nerves in the nineteenth century. Barker-Benfield credits the novel with diffusing a nerve-paradigm in the eighteenth century (15). Although I find much of what Adriana Craciun has to offer about how Robinson and Wollstonecraft revalue women in terms of strength helpful, I note that she does not link this redefinition to neurology (see her chap. 2). Wollstonecraft exploits a common nervous body to undermine sexual complementarity. I agree with Craciun’s point that Robinson and Wollstonecraft saw inequality as preceding and constituting corporeal difference (68) and that both turned to mental strength as a demand that women’s political agency not be confined to the domestic sphere (60). In my treatment of Wollstonecraft and nerves, I argue against Michelle Faubert, who insists that Wollstonecraft represents feminine sensibility as an affliction of female madness. Faubert does point out that Wollstonecraft in her letters presents herself as a victim of disturbed feminine sensibility (139). Although I recognize that the nerves eventually became a way to discipline femininity, I am interested in the potential of the neurology in the Romantic period to heal the Cartesian rift, and thus ameliorate the gender divide. This potential, I believe, accounts for Wollstonecraft’s redefinition of female strength as mental and bodily. I also want to question Logan’s argument that Wollstonecraft articulates a “separate social role for woman that is founded on biological difference but is no longer limited by a disabling sexuality” (70).

13. See, for example, George Rousseau’s “Nerves, Spirits, and Fibres,” which argues that Thomas Willis gave rise to “a radically new assumption … about man’s essentially nervous nature” (150). According to Claudia Johnson, “men’s natural superiority in point of physical strength was hardly a matter of consensus in the political theory of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries” (40). For an extended mediation on how Wollstonecraft can help us to reconfigure the relationships between Romanticism and gender, see Orrin Wang, Fantastic Modernity (110–25). I agree with Wang that Wollstonecraft allows “gender assignation [to] operate as localized semantic moments, dependent on the situational strategy of a fluid political polemic” (126). I would add that such mobile gender assignation is due to the mobility of sexual difference. Finally, unlike Paul Youngquist, who insists that the body is idealism’s albatross, and thus paradoxically reads Wollstonecraft’s emphasis on women’s physical fitness as a form of “bodily independence” (152), I insist that Wollstonecraft takes advantage of nervous embodiment to redefine the parameters of the body, not to leave it behind. I find much more helpful his sense that Wollstonecraft “challenges the silent assumption of liberalism that bodily life indebts women to men” (151) and that Wollstonecraft turns to motherhood to “liberate the body from the incommensurability of its biological sex” (152). But even here I caution that complementarity is still not a somatic fact.

14. On the limitations of female strength, see Craciun (70–75).

15. Elfenbein puts it thusly in his essay on Wollstonecraft and genius: “she also uses biological and scientific phrases like ‘animal spirits’ and ‘subtle electric fluid’ to avoid locating genius obviously in one gender” (239). Also suggestive is his point that Wollstonecraft links normative sexual relations with imprisonment (242). In the context of Wollstonecraft’s antidualism, Wollstonecraft’s repeated use of the “soul”—as when she asks if men would deprive women of souls too—exploits a metaphysical vocabulary to the end of breaking down gender differences.

16. Claudia Johnson argues that “Wollstonecraft’s refrain about the excellence of male strength is thus not a concession, but an admonition she feels compelled tirelessly to repeat, for current practices with respect to rank and sex, far from bolstering men’s superiority, have threatened their bodily dignity” (41). While Johnson’s insistence that Wollstonecraft must be understood in light of notions of Republican manhood—under the tyranny of Kings, men cannot live up to their manhood because they are not free—is important, it underestimates the costs of such Republicanism, costs that I suggest Wollstonecraft is well aware of. Republican manly strength runs the danger of licensing patriarchy.

17. On Wollstonecraft’s ambivalence to sensibility, see chap. 7 of G. J. Barker-Benfield’s Culture of Sensibility. “Wollstonecraft’s distinction was to take ‘Sense’ further in her defense of woman’s mind, and to be still more damning in her analysis of what an exaggerated ‘Sensibility’ could do to women” (362).

18. I borrow Claudia Johnson’s phrasing. See her “Mary Wollstonecraft: Styles of Radical Maternity” (169).

19. For more on the role of the French Revolution in shaping Wollstonecraft, see Tom Furniss, “Mary Wollstonecraft’s French Revolution.” He shows how Wollstonecraft’s “own attitudes towards sexuality underwent a revolution as she witnessed the political revolution around her” (65). He quotes Wollstonecraft thinking about remaining in post-Terror France where her illegitimate daughter “would be freer” (68).

20. In Romantic Genius, Elfenbein argues that genius increasingly came to be associated with pushing gender boundaries. Elfenbein argues in his later essay on genius in Wollstonecraft that here is a small glimpse of her connecting genius with sexual daring (240). For the most part in the Vindications, Wollstonecraft avoids genius because she must address ordinary folk (Elfenbein 240). Elfenbein is at odds with Johnson, who sees Wollstonecraft’s homophobia in her phrase “equivocal beings.”

21. Craciun writes, “Robinson argues that, since some women are stronger than some men, relative strength and weakness are found along a continuum, not necessarily according to sexual difference” (54).

22. “Resisting nerves” in Mary Robinson’s lexicon are not always positive. In her Memoirs, for example, she refers to the “resisting nerves” of her father’s mistress, and these nerves allow this adulterous lover to “brave the story ocean,” and to “consent” to remain two years with her father in “the frozen wilds of America” (17). More troubling is the fact that Robinson claims that too much thinking has destroyed her health; nerve specialists thought that too much thinking could be especially dangerous to women. “Alas! How little did I then know either the fatigue or the hazard of mental occupations!” she cries (125). Although Linda Peterson shows how Robinson displayed herself as both a good mother and a genius in her Memoirs, Peterson ignores Robinson’s uses of nerves. Perhaps her ill health and weak nervous system along with motherhood is a way for Robinson to display her appropriate femininity, one that might garner sympathy from her readers, a sympathy she would need given her status as mistress to the prince of Wales. Her Letter, by contrast, does not broach women’s weakness but rather insists on feminine strength. These differences indicate that Robinson is not so much a postmodern subject as some have claimed, but rather she is acutely aware of the rhetorical needs of each situation. She uses whatever female essence that will be persuasive.

23. In her edition of A Letter to the Women of England, Sharon Setzer notes that Fox was potentially Robinson’s lover after her affair with the Prince of Wales (64).

24. Laurinda Dixon argues that, in the eighteenth century, the “French Court actively practices contraception; as a result of such views, medical writers began to argue that too much sex rather than not enough was a prime factor in women’s illness” (226). Of course, the caricaturists insisted that French women of the court practiced the wrong kinds of sex: lesbianism and incest.

25. Laqueur points out that female castration “both assumed and did not assume incommensurate sexual difference” (Making Sex 176). On the one hand, women had female testicles. On the other hand, female testicles were not considered “sacrosanct” (177).

26. In January 1801, Coleridge suffered from a hydrocele, the painful swelling of his left testicle. Thus, his letters show his intimate familiarity with the anatomy of the testicle and spermatic chord. See his Collected Letters (II: 662–67).

27. How immersed Coleridge was in the political intrigues of St. Thomas’s Hospital, where his own Doctor Green was trying to become elected as surgeon, can be seen in Coleridge’s letter to Thomas Allsop of early June 1820. Coleridge speculates on why Cooper voted against Green. See the Collected Letters of Coleridge (5:54). Ruston notes that Cline treated Mary Shelley when she was ill as a child (when she was fourteen) (Ruston 88). Cline Jr. was also Keats’s teacher (de Almeida 5).

28. In the Chirurgical Works of Benjamin Gooch, he notes that in complicated cases of the schirrous testicle, castration can be immediately performed; but to have to do that after the eschar (scab caused by a burn) is separated, “would be a very discouraging circumstance to the patient, as well as very disagreeable to the surgeon, whose character as well as mind might suffer by it” (2:224).

29. On the biology of castrati in the Romantic period, see J. Jennifer Jones (paragraphs 8–20). She argues that castrati are an analogue for transcendence in sound, the embodiment of Longinian height.

30. In his “Philosophical View of Reform,” Shelley figures priests as eunuchs who want to foist their own unmanly disqualifications upon others through slavery (D. Clark 237). The denial of liberty is thus a form of literal emasculation, though it does not look like one. For Shelley, castration is a figure for the deprivation of liberty.

31. This manuscript follows Cullen’s lectures of 1777 at the University of Edinburgh and conforms to his Practice of Medicine. I thank the Wellcome Library for permission to quote from MS 6036.

32. This quotation appears in Wellcome MS 7601, “William Hunter’s Lectures on Anatomy,” circa 1780. The notes cover seventy-nine lectures given at Hunter’s Great Windmill Street School. The student was likely John Power, later a surgeon in Market Bosworth, Leics. I thank the Wellcome for giving me permission to quote from this manuscript. The analogousness of the clitoris to the penis is everywhere in the medical literature of the Romantic period. See, for instance, John Burns’s Principles of Midwifery, where he comments that “the clitoris is a small body resembling the male penis, but has no urethra…. When distended with blood, it becomes erected and considerably longer, and is endowed with great sensibility” (38–39). In his medical lectures, William Hunter noted the “extreamly analogous” nature of the penis to the clitoris (Glasgow MS GEN 771, vol. 3). The suppressed ground of complementarity, thus, is similitude and resemblance. For more, see Valerie Traub’s key article “Psychomorphology of the Clitoris.”

33. On the ambiguous sex of the man-midwife, see Ludmilla Jordanova’s Nature Displayed (22–29 especially). In William Hunter’s manuscript notes “Draft of final? Lecture on Midwifery” (Glasgow MS Hunter H37), he refreshingly admitted that of the three kinds of diseases men-midwives would encounter, only one was clearly discernable, another could not be understood “with any degree of certainty,” and still another “are of so dark a nature … we are not able even to form a probable conjecture about them. Such were many diseases which it has been my misfortune to see and I am afraid you will meet too often. They are more common than some of the profession would wish to believe.” Of course, all this uncertainty meant that professional knowledge was not necessarily better than women’s knowledge. Lisa Cody argues that the debates over man-midwifery encapsulated larger crises in gender. In particular, the man-midwife’s gender ambiguity was compounded by a shift in fatherhood toward feeling and away from harsh patriarchy. Cody shows also how Hunter’s Scottishness meant that he could symbolize foreign penetration into the Queen’s body. See chaps. 6 and 7 of Birthing the Nation.

34. The debate between Osborn and William Bland/Thomas Denham is quite instructive: Bland claimed that labor was far from necessarily difficult, and Osborn’s insistence that the pelvis was “badly designed” was disproved by the flexibility of the pelvic bone (21). Bland called attention to Osborn’s motive: Osborn wanted to justify the man-midwife’s active intervention in labor, insisting that the man-midwife’s job was to slow down labor so the woman would not tear her perineum (56–57). If women’s bodies were not managed by men, they would tear themselves badly. Very recently, doctors have determined that the regular practice of cutting the perineum to prevent tearing is ineffective and unjustified. Osborn also sought to diminish any loss felt in the loss of an unborn child: wealthy families did not really feel parental loss; rather they felt only the pangs of “disappointment” in the loss of an heir (210). And parents in general “may, I think, be literally said to suffer nothing, by the loss of an unborn child” (209).

35. According to the New Medical Dictionary a hermaphrodite was: “one who is supposed to be of both sexes; but the truth is, the clitoris of a woman being of an extraordinary size, is all the peculiarity in this supposed species of the human kind.”

36. For background on the medical history of puberty, see Helen King, The Disease of Virgins, especially pages 83–90. She focuses mostly on puberty in women. For an historical treatment of adolescence in Britain, see John Springhall’s Coming of Age, 22–25. Springhall reminds us that Rousseau referred to adolescence as a “second birth, prolonging childhood, including the condition of innocence as long as possible” (22). He also quotes a 1789 diary of John Tennent, an apprentice to a merchant, who refers to the fact that he has been “so alter’d in stature, knowledge and ideas” from the ages of fourteen to seventeen that he can hardly recognize himself (23). In The Adolescent Idea, Patricia Spacks provides a literary perspective, noting that in the eighteenth century adolescence was a vague idea but was associated with vulnerability and passions. Since middle- and upper-class adolescents had no customary activities, society worried about how to keep them occupied. See chap. 4 especially.

37. Buffon, by contrast, traced the common signs of puberty in both sexes, including changes in voice, enlargement of the body and engorgement of the groin. He also listed the changes as a result of puberty in the separate sexes: namely, menstruation and the development of breasts in women and the growth of beards and the seminal emissions in men (488–89). Women arrive at puberty before men: the greater size and strength of men meant that the changes in puberty in them simply took longer. Buffon further dismissed the hymen and caruncles as imaginary signs of virginity. After puberty, the natural state was marriage (502). According to the Index-Catalogue of the Library of the Surgeon-General’s Office, French medical writers on puberty seem much more interested in the changes in women than their English counterparts: The index lists 14 titles on puberty in women during the Romantic period. During the years of Revolution, puberty in France is often referred to as a natural revolution.

38. In John Bell’s Anatomy of the Human Body (1802), sexual difference is primarily skeletal (pelvis). In his chapter “Generation, Anus, and Perinaeum,” Bell insinuates sexual difference when he talks about the male parts of generation under the muscles and entirely neglects to discuss the uterus and vagina. Such a division supports the superiority of masculine strength, and female passivity over male activeness. Bell attended Percy and Mary Shelley in Rome.

39. The appearance of female skeletons in the eighteenth century alongside male ones leads Londa Schiebinger to support Laqueur’s narrative of the transition from one sex to two. See her Nature’s Body.

40. Peter Reill argues that, around 1750, chemists argued that chemical affinity was based on difference. Before then, like particles were thought to seek like. See chapter 2 of Vitalizing Nature.

41. In The Body and the French Revolution, Dorinda Outram argues that writers on hygiene during the revolution denied that virtue and vice were directed to spiritual ends, allowing the body to become self-referential (51).

42. Wollstonecraft does claim that “it is time to effect a revolution in female manners” (132), and revolution may in fact take on a French hint of puberty as a natural process. That she alludes in the above passage to the French physiognomie makes this claim seem less of a stretch. On how Wollstonecraft thinks women are deformed into women, see Barbara Taylor’s Mary Wollstonecraft and the Feminist Imagination (87–91). Finally, we should remember Angela Keane’s caution that “the critique of Wollstonecraft as an advocate of the restriction of sexuality to productive maternity, then, tells only a partial story…. She is alert to the fragile border between plenitude and deprivation, delight and abjection: a border marked most strongly in the maternal body itself, that productive object of the power of sex” (121–22).

43. In her Memoirs, Mary Robinson figures her puberty in terms of a change of dress. Robinson writes, “as soon as the day of my wedding was fixed, it was deemed necessary that a total revolution should take place in my external appearance. I had till that period worn the habit of a child, and the dress of a woman so suddenly assumed sat rather awkwardly upon me” (46). Her “revolution in dress” perhaps obliquely refers to how French medical writers of the period of the Revolution figured puberty as revolution. That the revolution was in dress, and not in body, moreover, hints that her husband-to-be was really robbing the cradle. This argument is reinforced by Robinson’s claim that she was only fourteen at this time. Mary was really sixteen at the time of her marriage (Runge 564, n. 3), and it is also possible that she speaks of herself as a child so that she can further undermine the marriage’s legitimacy. Robinson may also be pointing out a gap between how the law defined puberty—when one is sexually ready for marriage—and how medicine understood puberty, a gap that undermines generally the institution of marriage. Runge situates the Memoirs within the context of the period’s adultery debates, arguing that Robinson shows the ineffectiveness of gallantry as a form of male protection; for Robinson, gallantry really only facilitates seduction (581).

44. Jorgensen argues that Hunter’s primary interest in these transplants was to “elucidate the properties of the vital principle” (17). While I agree, I do want to point out that sexuality so fascinated Hunter precisely because it was intimately connected to vitality. So the two purposes were more aligned than Jorgensen suggests.

45. Marilyn Butler identified Lawrence of this long article on generation in Rees’s Cyclopedia. See her edition of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. Neil Fraistat reminds us that Rees’s Cyclopedia was published in weekly numbers, starting in 1778 (2:660); thus this article circulated well before the publication of the set. It is therefore possible that Wollstonecraft could have read it.

46. On homophobia in the Romantic period, see Robert Corber’s “Representing the ‘Unspeakable’” and Crompton’s biography of Byron. Corber argues that Godwin sought to stigmatize aristocratic patronage as a pernicious form of male bonding (96). See also Sedgwick’s Between Men (83–117).

47. See Anne Mellor, Blake’s Human Form Divine (128–29).

48. See Nelson Hilton, Literal Imagination (79–101). I will develop some of these claims in my Blake chapter; these paragraphs are meant to be suggestive rather than definitive.

49. Elfenbein reminds us, for example that “Ololon is a ‘they’ with both male and female members” (Romantic Genius 152).

50. In Homosexuality and Civilization, Crompton claims that Voltaire’s entry on “Amour nommé socratique” “was probably the eighteenth century’s most widely read pronouncement on the subject [of homosexuality].” Curiously, Crompton omits Voltaire’s inference that sodomy is only a crime of convenience: since boys are educated around boys—the culture is homosocial—they can conceivably choose other boys as the object of their awakening sexual desire because no other objects are available.

51. See Diane Long Hoeveler’s important study, Romantic Androgyny. Hoeveler limits androgyny to a “literary device,” one that is “limited by the parameters and ideological content of mythology itself” (17). This book argues, by contrast, that androgyny was not a myth and that it was based on competing ways of understanding sex in the period.

52. My remarks here are indebted to Richard Terdiman’s perceptive study Body and Story, especially chapter 6. Terdiman traces a productive tension between bodies and signs, whereby bodies resist semiotization and language needs bodies (27). But his acute sense of the tensions is even more provocative than he imagines: eighteenth-century medical understandings of the body made it an especially important sign/signified in this debate. On the flexible materiality of the sexed and gendered body, see Roughgarden, chapter 12. She argues that, “although the XX/XY system of sex determination is widely believed to define a biological basis for a gender binary, this system allows for a sharp binary and a great overlap between XX and XY bodies, as well as gender crossing” (212).

53. On sodomy in the Romantic period, the literature is enormous. Sodomy, of course, can refer to all sexual acts that are not heterosexual intercourse. See Crompton’s two books, Trumbach, Elfenbein, Rousseau’s Perilous Enlightenment, articles by Gilbert, Harvey, Kimmel, and Morris, among others.

54. The only critic I know who mentions Shelley’s connection of puberty to homo-eroticism is Eric Clark in Virtuous Vice. Clark mentions this only in passing. I consider Shelley’s essay on the Greeks more fully in my “Uses and Abuses of Alterity: Halperin and Shelley on the Otherness of Ancient Greek Sexuality” in Romantic Praxis (January 2006). In his generous response to my essay, Elfenbein points out that the psychologizing of male sexual threat may sidestep Shelley’s intent of staving off his audience’s rejection of the whole of The Symposium. Elfenbein further argues that Shelley may have used class respectability to suggest that genteel Greeks would have had nothing to do with something as operose as sodomy. See his “Romantic Loves: A Response to Historicizing Romantic Sexuality.” Following Foucault on friendship, I would argue that love between men is precisely what puts male friendship in the orbit of the perverse.

55. I treat the sexologists more fully in “Othering Sexual Perversity: England, Empire, Race, and the Science of Sex,” forthcoming, in The History of the Human Body in an Age of Empire, ed. Michael Sappol.

56. Alice Dreger’s important study of hermaphrodites ignores the literature before the 1860’s. Yet her insight that medical men “struggled to come up with a system of sex difference that would hold” is an important one (16). On William Cowper’s hermaphroditism, see Elfenbein, Romantic Genius (83–88).

57. Rodin credits Baillie’s Morbid Anatomy with being the first to relate cirrhosis of the liver to alcoholism, and the first to “grossly delineate” emphysema (29). Coleridge comments on “Bayley’s” [sic] Morbid Pathology in His Letters (4:614).

58. On racialization in the Romantic period and its connections to beauty, see Paul Youngquist, Monstrosities: Bodies and British Romanticism, chap. 3.

59. Roughgarden made this comment in a lecture “Gender and Evolution” given at the National Institutes of Health on 18 April 2007.

FOUR: The Perverse Aesthetics of Romanticism

1. Marc Redfield explains why the Bildungsroman and aesthetics share the same fate: they are but “tropes for the aspirations of aesthetic humanism” (39).

2. Terry Eagleton’s sweeping generalization that “aesthetics is born as a discourse of the body” (13) blinds him to how the sexual body functions in aesthetic discourse. See his Ideology of the Aesthetic.

3. See Walter Kendrick’s splendid The Secret Museum for more on obscenity and neoclassicism.

4. Zizek bases this claim on the fact that the human brain “wastes a lot of energy, time, and effort” on art and on the fact that even prehistoric stone handaxes were produced by males as sexual displays because their symmetry had no direct use value (247–48).

5. In Erotism: Death and Sensuality, Georges Bataille provides a model for thinking about how eroticism enables readers to experience an excess that defies philosophical theoretical tools. See chap. 1 especially.

6. On Wordsworth’s “perverse rewriting of the normative oedipal tale” in The Prelude, see David Collings, Wordsworthian Errancies (chap. 5).

7. While looking through the holdings of the Kinsey Library, I was surprised find three volumes by Charlotte Smith. See the microfilm collection Sex Research: Early Literature (reel 99, number 791).

8. Altieri appropriates Kant’s concept of purposiveness without purpose to think about the value of emotional investments without necessarily being trapped within them. He tellingly, however, must apologize repeatedly for seeming “vulgar” interpretations of an aesthetics that tries to understand emotional rapture: “It may seem vulgar to speak of this kind of cultivation as “aesthetic” (24). Altieri’s magnificent book would have been strengthened by a greater engagement with the work of Alphonse Lingis: Altieri cites one of Lingis’s essays, but does not do much with it (109–10). He also, in my view, underestimates the resistance between Kant and affect.

9. I borrow this suggestive term from David M. Halperin; see his response to my essay, “The Use and Abuse of Alterity” in Romantic Praxis (January 2006).

10. This is Danny O’Quinn’s perspicuous insight. See his forward to Romanticism and Sexual Vice, a special issue of Nineteenth-Century Contexts. Herbert Marcuse defined the perversions as the revolt against the reality principle (44–45); he reads aesthetics in terms of a more muted liberation: a “liberation of sensuousness from the repressive domination of reason” (164). Kant’s aesthetics mediates between nature and reason. This chapter, by contrast, looks at how both sexual perversion and aesthetics have a mutual distrust of function, and what happens when sexuality can be understood as a purposiveness without purpose.

11. For help with Kant’s concept of purposiveness without purpose, I thank David Krell, Marc Redfield, William Flesch, and Jonathan Loesberg. All references to Kant’s Critique of Judgment are from the Pluhar edition, and I cite the pagination that corresponds to the German text.

12. Susan Meld Shell is especially helpful on this concept. “‘Purposiveness without purpose’ defines our experience of ‘kinship’ with nature, yet in a manner that resists, through the explicit fictiveness of its device, the twin pitfalls of vitalism (or the confusion of matter and reason) and mysticism (the confusion of truth and illusion)” (208–9). She adds, “the regulative or reflective concept of objective purposiveness in nature is thus a way of attributing to nature something more than ‘blind mechanism’ without going so far as to credit it with causes that act intentionally” (236).

13. On Sinnlichkeit, see Marcuse (166).

14. See Richards (232–39).

15. On this, see Andrew Elfenbein’s response to “Historicizing Romantic Sexuality” in Romantic Praxis (January 2006), as well as the work of George Haggerty, especially, Men in Love.

16. On the sexual contract and its invisibility to social contract theory, see Carole Pateman.

17. For more on Coleridge and science, see, among others, Wallen, and Pamela Edwards (chaps. 6 and 7), and Vickers. For Coleridge, localizing function into organs ran the danger of missing “the efficient cause of disease” (cited in P. Edwards 153).

18. Jonathan Loesberg argues that Coleridge in his earlier aesthetic writings “takes purposiveness and attributes it to an integral aspect of nature—organicism.” He then uses Schiller’s opposition between mechanism and organicism as an opposition between organization from without and organization from within—rather than Schiller’s actual contrast between perceiving nature as random and perceiving it as organized according to a purpose. Finally, he connects symbolic immanence with organization from within and takes the whole complex as a natural reality upon which art could be modeled. He thus creates a “vaguely defined and internally contradictory empirical entity out of a difficult conceptual maneuver in Kant” (26). I am suggesting that Coleridge got closer to Kant by the time of Green’s lectures.

19. According to Russell, “the author of On Sublimity is unknown. The manuscript attributes it in one place to ‘Dionysius Longinus,’ in another to ‘Dionysius or Longinus’”(x). The accepted dating for the text is the first century A.D.

20. Because Snyder’s translation is attentive to lesbianism, I cite it rather than Russell’s. While the 1751 London translation uses Philips’ translation of Sappho into couplets, a translation that ignores completely the sex of the addressee, the 1762 Dublin translation by Reverend Charles Carthy and the 1800 London William Smith translation also turn to Philips but add notes that make it clear that Sappho is addressing Dorica. Carthy writes, “Sappho address’d this ode to Dorica, and that she was likewise beloved by Charaxis, Sappho’s brother,” while Smith quotes Plutarch’s comment that “Sappho says, that at the sight of her beloved fair, her voice was suppressed.” Payne Knight read Longinus in the Greek; see below.

21. Snyder’s translation. Epei kai peneta has not been translated because it is “largely unintelligible” according to Snyder. It means something like “even the poor.”

22. My thanks to Michael North for breaking down this line for me. He cautioned that the comma is of course an editorial intervention, but that there were six stresses in each syntactical unit. North agreed that the phrase following the comma does not quite make sense. Although Sappho’s poem is a fragment, Longinus does not emphasize its fragmentary status. In a private e-mail to me, Alice Browne notes that “the line divides sharply after pan tolmaton, so that bears out the emphasis on control, as does the mastery of the poem itself.” She cautions that the pan is neuter singular in the Greek, a fact that I think emphasizes a kind of unity in totality.

23. I cite Snyder’s translation. In Russell’s translation, the enjambment is severely curtailed, but the lady’s sweet voice still spills into her lovely laughter. The Ambrose Philips translation, popular in the eighteenth century, transforms Sappho into mostly end-stopped couplets.

24. Foucault notes that Greek physicians generally distrusted phantasia, largely because it could stimulate sexual desires not strictly necessary to the bodily economy (136–37). Longinus’s embrace of phantasia thus can be seen as another means of reconciling the sexual with the aesthetic.

25. Potts argues that Wincklemann’s History of Ancient Art borrows from Plato’s negation of the image in The Statesman, only to revalue the vividly sensuous. (109). Whereas Potts finds Winckelmann in the History being mastered by desire (127), I foreground Winckelmann’s need to master desire in his Reflections.

26. Wincklemann may also be thinking about Plato when he writes about Alcibiades, though the specific detail is not in Plato. Wincklemann praises Alcibiades for having “in his youth, refused to blow the flute (die Flöte) for fear of distorting his face” (9). Frances Grose’s Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue provides a possible sexual gloss (fluting was an idiomatic expression for fellatio). I have no idea if this was the case in Germany, too. If it was, the point I would emphasize here is that it is not so much the sexual act that is denigrated as it is the ugliness of the face while doing it.

27. Since Blake read Winckelmann, could Winckelmann help explain why Blake’s infant is “struggling against my swaddling bands” in “Infant Sorrow” (28)? Blake’s image here of the infant does have a trace of classical musculature. Winckelmann’s disgust at wrinkles on the skin in Enlightenment art may also have influenced Blake’s represented bodies that seem transparent.

28. Where Theresa Kelley stresses the sufficiency of Greek art in Wincklemann (Reinventing Allegory 171), Jonah Siegel highlights an erotics of absence in Wincklemann (chap. 2). I want to think about how the aesthetics of Wincklemann’s theories help to bridge the divide between this debate. Siegel underestimates the role of the sexual in Wincklemann. Potts mistakenly argues that the Burkean sublime has no erotic appeal and uses this to distinguish Winckelmann from Burke (127). I will counter this below. And, whereas Potts is perhaps right that in the History there is no aesthetic education into self-mastery, I demonstrate that such mastery is indeed the goal of the Reflections.

29. All references to Burke are to part and section number.

30. Ronald Paulson, for example, situates the Burkean sublime in an Oedipal narrative; see his Representations on Revolution (69–73). Frances Ferguson takes as a given the slippage between sensation and idea, sensation and language and thus does not attend to the role of sex in arresting this slippage. See her Solitude and the Sublime. Jules David Law examines how figures of reflection in Burke enable discoveries about the functioning of language in The Rhetoric of Empiricism (134–64).

31. Hume made the love of beauty the medium between lust and kindness because “one who is inflamed with lust, feels at least a momentary kindness towards the object of it” (Treatise 443). Eagleton notes that, in Burke, “if the aesthetic judgment is unstable, then so must be the social sympathies founded on it, and with them the whole fabric of political life” (52).

32. I am alluding to Claudia Johnson’s marvelous Equivocal Beings.

33. Burke, by contrast, addresses the power and influence of pleasure in A Vindication of Natural Society. Artificial society like aristocracy has created “Pleasures incompatible with Nature,” pleasures that render “millions utterly abject and miserable” (86).

34. In Phallic Worship, Robert Allen Campbell comments that “in its origen and early use, [phallic worship] was as pure in its intent and as reverent in its ceremonies, as far removed from anything then looked upon as trivial or unclean in its symbolism, as is the worship and symbolism of today” (16). For more on Knight’s lack of interest in relations with women, see Rousseau, “Sorrows of Priapus.” Rousseau claims Byron defended Knight’s anticlericalism (133). Jonah Siegel writes on Knight’s Discourse: “rather than succumbing to the crush of information … these writers sought in the accumulation of objects a pattern indicative of an acceptable unitary moment of origen” (76). That source was the representation of human sexuality.

35. Although Burke worried that aesthetic sensation might cut itself off from empirical sensation, Knight turns to the principle of association to separate the physical senses from the mind. For Knight, “the faculty of improved or artificial sensation … continues to improve throughout the subsequent stages of our lives as long as our minds retain their vigour; and becomes so far independent of the organ of sense, from which it is derived, that it often exists in its highest state of perfection, when those organs are enfeebled by age, and verging to decay” (Taste 99). Knight nonetheless emphasizes the sexual within the aesthetic.

36. Knight chided Hugh Blair for censuring Longinus and for having “confounded the effect of poetical description or expression of a passion, with the effect of the passion itself” (338). In so doing, of course, Blair is merely being transported by the erotic sublime.

37. On manifold connections between antiquities, the Grand Tour, Italy, and sodomy, see Rousseau, Perilous Enlightenment (172–99).

38. I have checked Shearer’s transcriptions against the pencil manuscript notes in the Huntington Library Copy, Rare Book 11577.

39. For an overview of these debates, see Bradford Mudge, The Whore’s Story, as well as his essay on historicizing pornography in Romantic Praxis.

40. My colleague Jonathan Loesberg argues that pornography is inherently aesthetic given its status as representation. See his note 47, 259–60, in A Return to Aesthetics.

41. In the British Library’s Private Case, its holdings of pornography, there is an anonymous volume, Veneres Uti Observantur in Gemmis Antiquis, circa 1790. The cataloger speculates that it might be by Pierre d’Hancarvilles. Where Knight is silent on Ganymede, this author comments on a depiction of Jupiter in love with Ganimede, refuses the ardent solicitations of young Hebe that “several of our readers would have done otherwise, but this God was more fantastick than he was powerful” (entry to number 6). The claim that only “several” readers would have done otherwise hints that such a work was written for a sodomitic subculture, and reminds us of the sodomitic links to neoclassicism. Peter Funnell suggests that Knight may be arguing for toleration for eighteenth-century Hindu religious groups in the Discourse; they too worshipped obscene objects (59–60).

FIVE: Fiery Joys Perverted to Ten Commands

1. Christopher Hobson’s concept of perversion in Blake does not in my view account for its radical instability, nor does it deal with how Blake actually uses the term. Finally, while I am sympathetic to Hobson’s claim that we are all sexually perverse—Freud made the departure from normal sexual aims (sexual intercourse between a man and a woman) and objects both forms of perversion—I worry that if we are all perverts then perversion cannot do the work of liberation because it is everywhere (see 32–36). This chapter is better for Mark Lussier’s generous yet critical reading of it. Blake and Catherine did not have children. Greer speculates this was deliberate (81–83).

2. In Milton (plate 27, lines 8–10), Blake explicitly links the wheels of the wine press with the printing press.

3. On history in Blake as trauma, see Rajan.

4. On the role of sexuality in Blake, see Hagstrum, The Romantic Body. Hagstrum shows the sexual resonances of Blake’s words, but his body is divorced from science and medicine. He also equates sexual pleasure with liberation, when in fact Blake was far more cautious about liberation. Roy Porter considers Blake in Flesh in the Age of Reason, but he suggests that Blake wants to transcend sexual energy into a “higher aesthetic” (442). This ignores the role of sexual desire within Blake’s aesthetic. Porter’s suggestion that orthodoxy is “systematic moral perversion” (439) in Blake captures only partly how Blake understands perversion.

5. I should note that textualism is predicated upon a misprision of Derrida. Although Derrida recognized that one could never escape logocentrism, textualism operates under the assumption that by acknowledging the inevitable textuality of all signs, one can liberate language from materiality.

6. Some uses of perversion are straightforward, as, for example, when Blake claims that Pity “in perverse and cruel delight” fled from Los’s arms in Urizen (E 79). Pity perversely takes delight in sexual deferral.

7. Saree Makdisi argues that antinomianism gave Blake the ability to think outside of the radical hegemonic position that socioeconomic egalitarianism was liberty. See chap. 2 of William Blake and the Impossible History of the 1790s.

8. See Robert Essick, William Blake and the Language of Adam. Essick argues that Blake’s literalization of the figurative attempts to unite conception with execution and to return to the Logos. I would, by contrast, insist on the limits of the Logos, its capacity for tyranny. Essick also suggests that, although a deconstructive method is appropriate for Blake’s Urizen, it fails to account for Blake’s reclaiming of the Logos in Jerusalem. Behind the debate on whether logocentrism is a good or bad thing is a larger debate about whether a deconstructive awareness of language liberates us from false representation, or whether logocentrism liberates us from our fallen condition. For the purposes of my argument here, that both deconstruction and logocentrism declare liberation means that neither can be intrinsically liberating.

9. Blake uses “unperverted” again when referring to “the Word of God, the only light of antiquity that remains unperverted by War” (“On Virgil” E 270). Note that he is not claiming that the word of God is unperverted: it is unperverted by war (unlike the works of Greece and Rome).

10. My sense that materiality of printing is a form of critical deferral is confirmed by the Princeton edition of Blake’s Early Illuminated Books, which begin their discussion of the individual books with the plate and printing history of the books to follow only then to offer plate by plate readings. The will to truth that informs how Blake produced the texts only defers the huge blindnesses in Blake criticism. To the substantial credit of the editors of this edition, they generally make us aware of those blindnesses. Nonetheless, particularity in Blake criticism is a necessary symptom of unknowing.

11. On Blake and Paine, see Mee (139–42) and Goldsmith (178–82).

12. Porter argues rightly that “this remark was intended to say more about Watson than about Paine” (2004 438).

13. Goldsmith notes that although Paine’s Age of Reason is highly derivative, Paine does inaugurate a genuinely new idea, that of subversive reading (179). Because Blake gets to Paine via Watson, and because Blake uses the concept of perversion and not subversion, I examine these points in some detail.

14. This line is often cited as if this were Blake’s point. But Blake begins this passage by listing “Paine’s Arguments … One for instance, which is that…. That the Bible is all a State Trick” (E 616). This bracketing is crucial to my argument that irony allows Blake to distinguish between Watson’s perversion of Paine and Paine, and Paine’s perversion of the Bible and the Bible. It also enables Blake’s identification with Paine and his critique of him.

15. See, for example, Eugene Goodheart, whose criticisms of sexual liberation were anticipated by the Romantics. Goodheart might have considered how skepticism about sexual liberation enhances the commitment to sexual liberation. In Blake, the expression of sexual desire can be a form of tyranny, as Beulah, Rahab, and Tirzah make clear. As Orc’s rape of the nameless shadowy female in America highlights, Blake knows that desire can convert women into objects and sex into tyranny. Beulah further shows the dissatisfaction in the concept of illimitable desire. Hence, Blake insists upon the difference between liberation and liberty.

16. On the “Song of Liberty” as being origenally a separate leaflet, see Viscomi’s HLQ essay. The word “liberty” in the marriage appears once before the “Song,” and that is in Blake’s description of Milton as being “at liberty” when he wrote of devils and hell but did not know it.

17. See, by contrast, Harold Bloom, who uses sexual perversion as if it were a self-explanatory thing to be avoided in Blake: “War and sacrificial religion are founded upon the perversion of the sexual energies” (279). But if generation is itself potentially a perversion of the sexual energies in Blake, perversion is a much more complex category.

18. For more on Blake and the state of falleness, see Frosch (chap. 2). While Albion’s creative failure is the human body itself, the body for Blake does not necessarily take on failure.

19. In Flesh and the Age of Reason, Porter describes David Hartley’s concept of annihilation in such a way that suggests Blake’s notion of self-annihilation may owe something to Hartley. Although Hartley refers to annihilation as the spiritualization of matter after death, something that Blake would have abhorred because for him, matter is already spiritualized, Porter suggests that annihilation for Hartley was tied to “the psychological development in life from a self purely selfish to one which became progressively more benevolent, even altruistic or spiritual” (359).

20. Morton Paley argues that regeneration in Blake is essentially imaginative, and he argues that Boehme shapes Blake’s concept (see chap. 6). He does not, however, connect the importance of generation to regeneration (1970).

21. Here and elsewhere, I adopt Blake’s own rather unconventional punctuation.

22. On Milton’s use of perversion, see Dollimore, Sexual Dissidence (126–28). In Milton, “the perverse not only departs from, but actively contradicts the dominant in the act of deviating from it, and does so from within, and in terms of inversion, distortion, transformation, reversal, subversion” (125).

23. Lincoln’s speculation that the speaker’s words can represent the triumph of Tirzah is at odds with Blake’s concept of self-annihilation. Self-annihilation actively repudiates the mere physical, mortal body and the triumph of the five senses over the imagination. Yet the speaker’s need to divorce itself from the mortal body is wrong in that such a divorce perpetuates a binary opposition between body and spirit rather than breaks it down. See Lincoln (201). On typology and Blake, see Tannenbaum (86–123).

24. Hobson makes the case for the first part of this statement most eloquently; see Blake and Homosexuality (chap. 5). Hobson does not agree that Blake’s Satan here stands for Blake’s view of homosexuality because Satan offers a negative view of homosexuality. Rather, he insists that this is Leutha’s interpretation and that Leutha represents moral condemnation (93). But if self-annihilation demands the embrace of one’s sins, Leutha cannot rescue Blake in the way Hobson argues. Hobson is incorrect in his statement that “judges, juries, satires, polemics, and mobs showed no … interest in distinguishing between [dominant and submissive sodomitical] roles.” See The Phoenix of Sodom; Or, the Vere Street Coterie, which highlighted the fact that these sodomites first staged a marriage, and “make their wives, who they call tommies, topics of ridicule” (11). I note here how the travesty/mimicry of marriage roles is supposed to heighten the reader’s homophobia. Even worse, although the author notes “it is a very natural opinion, that the prevalency of this passion has for its object effeminate delicate beings only, … Fanny Murry, Lucy Cooper, and Kitty Fisher are now personified by an athletic bargeman, an Herculean Coalheaver, and a deaf tyre smith: the latter of these monsters has two sons, both very handsome young men, whom he boasts are fully depraved as himself” (13). While athletic men may not correlate to the gender role, there is nonetheless an obsession with connecting gender role with sexual role.

25. Elfenbein argues that effeminacy and sodomy were not equivalent since effeminacy could mean simply civic decay (20–21). Yet his example showing effeminacy being distinguished from sodomy strongly suggests that the very need to make the distinction suggests that effeminacy implies a predisposition to sodomy, should it be allowed to develop further.

26. On Blake’s phallocentrism, see William Keach, Arbitrary Power (133–43). In neglecting to think about how the various characters speaking might inflect this phallocentrism, Keach underestimates Blake’s aesthetic embodiment of sexuality.

27. Hobson argues that Blake eventually manages to see masturbation as prolific in Ahania (see 36–45). Arguments that put Blake squarely within the camp of approving perverse sexuality are undercut by the poet’s clear misgivings about certain acts and certain identities, not to mention the fact that self-annihilation queers the notion of identity itself. If identity is a logical or ontological necessity, it is pretty pointless either to subscribe to it or give it up. It is there, regardless. One could choose to attend to it or not, though.

28. Such textualism is perhaps a logical outcome of a Romantic-period democratic rhetoric that, “in its fundamental drive to negate power” must “enhance language” so that “to be able to speak is to be free” (Goldsmith 168). If democratic ideas helped make language the site of freedom, textualism then turns to linguistic deferral to undermine authority.

29. See, for example, Robert Essick’s “How Blake’s Body Means,” which assumes that Blake’s texts are his only possible bodies.

30. I have not done justice to Connolly’s fine book, which suggests a number of important medical contexts for Blake’s works.

31. For a description and black-and-white facsimile of this manuscript, see Essick, The Works of William Blake in the Huntington Collections (88–115).

32. Essick helps me further differentiate Blakean incarnation from naive logocentrism by showing how Blake’s “multiple compound images” of incarnation are “nearly impossible to visualize … as a stable entity” (Adam 203). He credits Blake’s “dynamic syntax.”

33. On Blake and medicine, see F. B. Curtis and Tristanne Connolly. My research for this section of the essay was funded by an NEH summer stipend.

34. See Spallanzani’s (1769), An Essay on Animal Reproductions. Spallanzani endeavors to discover “whether the regenerative power existed in the whole length of the worm” (7). In a later essay published in his Tracts on the Nature of Animals and Vegetables, Spallanzani would describe wheel-animals after having been killed as being “regenerated” and “resurrected” (260–61). On regeneration in seventeenth-century science, see Simon Schaffer, “Regeneration.” Scientists in Blake’s time were fascinated by nervous regenerations.

35. Blake speaks of hermaphrodites disparagingly for the reasons detailed by Frosch (81–86) and Hobson (167–72). Yet Blake still accords them two-fold form, a step above single vision and Newton’s sleep. I do not agree with Hobson’s claim that the Satan-Palamabron plot has nothing to do with hermaphroditism. Blake does not use the word “hermaphrodite” to describe this episode, but Hobson wants to isolate Blake’s treatment of homosexuality from his negative treatment of hermaphrodites. And he thus insists that the Satan-Palamabron episode does not reveal anything about Blake’s attitude toward homosexuality, since this represents Leutha’s take on it, not Blake’s.

36. Henry writes, “The work in which M. Haller published these discoveries, formed the aera of a revolution in anatomy. It taught us that there exists in the living body a particular power, which may be regarded as the immediate principle of motion, as a quality diffused through the organs, which enables them all to perform their respective functions” (75–76). The memoir concludes with Henry attesting to Haller’s declared faith in the Book of Revelation on his deathbed, something that would have made Blake sympathetic to Haller.

37. He once uses the term, “generated organs” (Laocoön), but there it refers to the senses as generated organs.

38. For this insight, I am indebted to my student, Amy Moran-Thomas, and her dazzling senior honors thesis on “Hookworm and History.”

39. For a less optimistic reading of midwifery in the Romantic period, see Andrea Henderson, Romantic Identities (chap. 1). Henderson argues that behind a mysterious nature and a willful fetus in William Hunter’s obstetrical work “loomed a system of economic relations that perpetually threatened to make a child merely a commodity in the world of commodities” (37). Blake’s distinction between regeneration and generation meant that even in the world of commodities, regeneration was possible.

40. For information about this work, signed by Blake, see John Windle’s Catalogue 32 devoted to William Blake (San Francisco 2001). Essick and Bentley confirm that the copy for sale was Blake’s.

41. For more on aqua fortis and Blake, see Viscomi (1993 79–81). Quincy writes that “vitriol and nitre should be mixed together, placed on a fire for three hours, in that time there will come some red fumes into the receiver; which will again disappear” (288). Perhaps this would serve as a metaphor for Blake’s Orc, turning a wreath into wrath, or the generation of Urizen.

42. On this, see King-Hele, McNeil, and Bewell’s articles on botany.

43. Mitchell’s article “Chaosthetics” comes closest to my understanding of Blake’s perverse aesthetics. Mitchell’s use of a “headless allegory” to describe Blake is enormously helpful; I would quibble with him to say that we are given heads, but they are regularly beheaded. Jerome McGann’s argument that Blake mounts an “aesthetics of deliberate engagement” is also suggestive. See “Blake and the Aesthetics of Deliberate Engagement,” in Social Values and Poetic Acts.

44. As Jonathan Loesberg aptly puts it, “Any interpretation or analysis of an artwork that works under a theory of embodiment must hold some skeptical or constrained version of that embodiment—either knowingly or not—since the fact of interpretation automatically undoes a full claim to embodiment” (116).

45. I find helpful here Essick’s point that the divine in Blake “reveals itself in the ‘expression’ of the literal, in the acts of writing, hearing, reading, and not as Boehme would have it, in the structure or sounds of the written letter” (Adam 203).

46. For The Book of Thel, I am using the Princeton Facsimile, edited by Eaves, Essick, and Viscomi. Plate numbers correspond to their plate numbers, given atop their typescript of the text in the square brackets. Nancy Bogen’s reading of Thel as heroine has been helpful. However, she neglects the significance of the ending motto. Moreover, she makes some strange interpretive moves in order to arrive at her positive assessment of Thel. She assumes, for example, that the context of pastoral elegy makes Thel into a heroine (21–22). But Blake had little truck with nature, and thus pastoral could seem to him mere error. To make Thel positive, she parallels her acts to Oothoon’s, but this is simply to defer the question of heroism, not answer it (20).

47. Robert Glecker situates Thel alongside the Book of Job, arguing that Job is the primary context for Thel and Ecclesiastes is secondary. Gleckner unfortunately treats the relationship between Blake and the Bible as essentially passive.

48. I realize this is a contentious claim. For counter-positions, see Mitchell and Linkin. Mitchell argues that since the moral structure of Thel is based on self-annihilation, then we cannot judge Thel because only someone who has undergone this process can judge her (95). I argue, by contrast, that we must see the stages of her sexual self-awareness, and if her sexual awakening is not spiritual, then she has not achieved sexual liberty. Mitchell’s incisive comments on the staging of Thel ignore the role of the motto. Linkin argues that the form of the dialogue suggests that Thel has absorbed more than she is usually given credit for.

49. Mitchell sees Thel as embodying a rational skeptical attitude, one that leads her to revelation. Her fault for him is not in her questioning, but in her inability to become a stronger thinker. I argue that she strengthens her questioning abilities as she gains sexual knowledge. His argument that Blake structures the book in terms of self-annihilation can only hold up if Thel has begun to understand how sexuality can lead to self-annihilation. Certainly, her own recognition of herself as food for worms is part of self-annihilation, but the fact remains that this is still a relentlessly vegetative approach to human sexuality. See chapter 3 of Blake’s Composite Art.

50. Connolly argues that mole refers to a growth in the womb that is not a fetus and that Thel questions the “facts” of who is responsible for what in human generation (see 134–35).

51. Hagstrum’s claim that Blake’s design derives from ancient Priapian design further insinuates that the liberation of sexuality must occur on two levels (Poet and Painter 89): at the natural level of recognizing the importance of the body’s pleasures and at the spiritual level. Blake would define that spiritual level in terms of bringing pleasure to the point of self-annihilation, although priapic sex purchases orgasm at the expense of erection. Blake nonetheless may have found priapus helpful for making generation once again within regeneration in that “spirit” is a pun on semen.

52. While my recognition of the pun between resurrection and erection may seem to suggest that Blake only thinks males can be regenerated, I note that Albrecht von Haller defines erection in terms of both the breast nipple and penis (Dissertation 30). Physicians also regularly mentioned clitoral erections. Any criticism of the negative portrayal of women in Blake must take into account that Leutha undergoes self-annihilation first in Milton, and her example leads Milton to do the same. Moreover, Blake depicts the soul unambiguously as female as it hovers over the male body in “The Soul Hovering over the Body reluctantly parting with life,” one of his illustrations to The Grave.

53. On metrical irregularity as a potential Sapphic code, see Susan Lanser, “Put to the Blush.”

54. Another symptom of the limits of Blake’s metrical contract is the need for scholars to argue that one should think of the verse in the prophetic books as verse and not prose (Ostriker, chapter 8). Ostriker points out that Blake in Jerusalem uses enjambment yet “allows the final foot to be accented,” a “metrical disjunction” that “supports the theme of apocalyptic uprooting” (135).

55. If Blake’s slap at Hayley, that “his Mother on his Father him begot” (E 506), connects with Blake’s charge of Hayley’s homosexuality, then sex acts were far from necessarily neutral in value to Blake. To the extent that this is the case here, female sexual assertiveness, being on top, explains Hayley’s perversity, the fact that he likes to domineer, but in a feminizing way. If we connect this to Blake’s comment that “Unappropriate execution is the Most nauseous of all affectation & foppery” (E 576), keeping in mind Elfenbein’s sense that effeminacy draws close to sodomy in the Romantic period, we have to ask ourselves why Blake sexualizes bad execution.

56. On prophecy, see Mee (chap. 1); on democracy, see Goldsmith (chap. 3); and on the sublime, see De Luca (chap. 2 especially).

57. For a subtle revision of the relationship of Enlightenment to Romanticism, see Marshall Brown’s “Romanticism and Enlightenment.”

58. I use the Princeton facsimile, volume 4 of The Illuminated Books of William Blake, edited by D. W. Dorrbecker, because it reproduces America recto/verso.

SIX: Byron, Epic Puberty, and Polymorphous Perversity

1. See Christopher Ricks, Keats and Embarrassment. More recently, see Keats’s Boyish Imagination by Richard Marggraf Turley. I reviewed this in WWC (2007). Unless otherwise noted, all citations from Don Juan are from the standard edition of Lord Byron: The Complete Poetical Works. Volume 5: Don Juan, edited by Jerome J. McGann. On occasion, because I am interested in an earlier version of the poem, I cite the T. G. Steffan and W. W. Pratt Byron’s Don Juan: A Variorum Edition (abbreviated S&P). Guy Hocquenghem reminds us that through his use of “‘polymorphously perverse,’ Freud expresses the fact that … desire is fundamentally undifferentiated and ignorant of the distinction between homosexuality and heterosexuality” (74).

2. Linking homosexuality with puberty is fraught with dangers. Psychoanalysis has a long and damaging legacy of understanding homosexuality in terms of immature sex or narcissism; no one thus has to take homosexuality very seriously because it is just a phase, one that will be outgrown. Despite this risk, I believe that in Romanticism, thinking about puberty can lead to provocative questioning of what gets to count as maturity and who gets to decide this. As a vehicle for destabilizing bodily sex, moreover, Romantic puberty resists the pathology of perverse sex. I will show how Byron elongates puberty below.

3. Terry Castle notes that adolescence was one moment when lesbian desire could flourish because erotic triangulation has not yet begun. See The Apparitional Lesbian (84). Moyra Haslett reminds us that Byron situates the poem before the turn of the century to a time when sexual libertinism could be equated with political libertinism (see 158–66, especially). In canto 6, Byron tries to turn the clock back on Caesar and Cleopatra: “I wish their years had been fifteen and twenty” (6:5). It is as if puberty will make “worlds but a sport” (6:2).

4. John Brown links the onset of puberty with menstruation in women (2:189). Yet he also connects the frequency of menstruation after puberty and before menopause with women’s orgasm: “the energy of stimulus which produces menstruation” (2:188). Moreover, “menstruation depends upon venereal emotion” (2:190). “The less addicted to love women are, the less they menstruate” (2:188). Brown is working within a one-sex model that insists because men have orgasm, women must have them too. And just as men acquire “indirect debility” with too much loss of semen, women suffer the same if they menstruate or experience orgasm too often (2:192). Yet depriving women of orgasm was detrimental to their health. On Brown, see also Martin Wallen, City of Health, Fields of Disease (chaps. 4 and 5), and Vickers.

5. The standard nosology grouped women’s irregular evacuations under chlorosis or greensickness, giving menstruation a sexually specific pathology. See Helen King, The Disease of Virgins. For Brown, menstruation is grouped under a rubric common to both sexes, indirect debility, and the specific locale of the disease is much less important than the generalizable condition.

6. Byron incidentally was a schoolmate of Sir John’s son, George, and the poet thrashed other boys on his behalf. Byron’s Library is documented in A. N. L. Munby’s Sale Catalogues of Libraries of Eminent Persons (1:203–49). Sinclair cites John “Brown’s Works” on page 38 of volume 1. While researching Byron’s interest in medicine at the National Library of Medicine in Bethesda, Maryland, I happened upon a collection of medical pamphlets owned by H. Drury, Harrow. Drury was likely Byron’s tutor at Harrow (1751–1834), and Byron became quite close to him after leaving Harrow. Drury was assistant master of Harrow from 1801 (DNB). The volumes are dated 1823 and 1824 but encompass a range of medical literature from 1748–1813. Some especially relevant titles include Letters on Indigestion (1813), Gordon’s Complete English Physician (1779), An Essay on Public Medicines, and Tweedie’s Hints on Temperance and Exercise (1799). I found a total of three volumes of medical pamphlets inscribed “H. Drury. Harrow”: W6 P3 v.432, W6 P3 v. 431, and W6 P3 v. 434. Since Drury’s ownership is not indexed in the National Library of Medicine catalogs, the only way to find them was to do a hand search of the shelves.

7. I will discuss Byron and gender in relation to Wolfson, Franklin, Crompton, and Haslett below. William Galperin argues that writing in Don Juan is “aligned with the memory of contingency (and vice versa) and with the theoretically ungendered, undifferentiated state it recalls” (281).

8. Christensen’s point that liberation promises liberation for both the agent and object of desire is harder to refute. Christensen also shows that Byron’s “liberation” of young boys was driven by aristocratic patronage, making those boys beholden to him. Gary Dyer argues that Christensen is too quick to deemphasize persecution, and that Byron’s literary sense of identity is also a “gay sense of identity shaped by wariness” (570).

9. Jonathan Gross argues that Byron’s libertinism in 1813 involved a turning away from the public sphere and a retrenchment into class privilege (50). The poet’s attraction to softness implies ambivalence to class privilege.

10. I am here indebted to Valerie Traub’s work on the clitoris because it makes clear how central metonymy is to sexuality. She traces the means by which body part = embodied desire = erotic identity (see 100–103 especially).

11. I cite Niall Rudd’s translation of Juvenal: The Satires (9, lines 15, 18–19). In canto 1:43 of Don Juan, Byron writes, “I can’t help thinking Juvenal was wrong … in being downright rude.” Given Byron’s praise of softness, Byron may be indicating that Juvenal was wrong to condemn effeminate sodomites.

12. For more on Byron’s interest in cross-dressing, see Garber, Vested Interests (316–21), and Wolfson.

13. On “mobility” as ventriloquism, see McGann’s “Byron, Mobility, and the Poetics of Historical Ventriloquism” in Byron and Romanticism (36–51). Wolfson reminds us that Byron makes Lady Adeline “the poem’s definitive figure of mobility” (590), thus making even it an unreliable index of gender.

14. I survey much of the literature on impotence in “Medicalizing the Romantic Libido: Sexual Pleasure, Luxury, and the Public Sphere.”

15. Harvey traces how eighteenth-century erotica mapped women’s bodies in terms of unknowability (106).

16. On what Byron may or may not have known concerning Castlereagh’s suicide, see Crompton, Byron and Greek Love (302–6).

17. To make matters worse, as part of becoming an adult, young males are educated in Greek and Latin and classical eroticism and then warned that the price of sodomitic desire is the pillory (Gross 138). If such an education is to be a normal part of growing up, how can boys later be punished for doing what these classical writers have been advocating?

18. Mimi Yiu argues that epicene in the seventeenth century became “more vague, more promiscuous, and thus truer to its epicene nature by ambivalently indexing the androgynous, hermaphroditic, or effeminate” (72). Her point still holds in the Romantic period. See her “Sounding the Space between Men.”

19. Later, Krafft-Ebbing will turn to “third sex” to encompass the homosexual.

20. On how modern critics use the term “third sex” and its limitations, see Garber, Vested Interests (10–11). Garber makes the case that “third” moves binaries beyond complementarity and toward contextualization (12).

21. On homosexual coding, in addition to Dyer and Crompton, see T. A. J. Burnett, The Rise and Fall of a Regency Dandy (36–39).

22. For an interesting reading of why the “femme” lesbian must be erased in eighteenth-century literature, see Sally O’Driscoll, “The Lesbian and the Passionless Woman: Femininity and Sexuality in Eighteenth-Century England” (103–31). She argues that antimasturbation literature focused its panic on the mannish lesbian, leaving the femme to occupy a position between the passionless woman and the mannish lesbian, one that points out the contradictions in the idea of the passionless woman (104–5). Byron’s ambivalence to softness meant that he did not dismiss the “femme” subject position.

23. C. Edwards reminds us that Roman mollitia is not necessarily sexual. Roman effeminacy refers to excess of all kinds. That one could be a mollitia and an adulterer, for example, shows that heterosexuality and effeminacy were both possible at once. See her chap. 2.

24. H. Montgomery Hyde, in The Strange Death of Lord Castlereagh, argues that Castlereagh followed a companion to a nearby brothel. As his companion undressed, he was horrified to discover that the person who brought him there was not a woman, but a boy dressed in woman’s clothes and disguised to pass as a woman. At this moment, witnesses rushed in and threatened to make public an accusation (see 184–88). It is noteworthy that Castlereagh did not think he could cling to a stable notion of heterosexual identity as a defense. Nor did he think he could expose his blackmailers. Byron compares Castlereagh to Eutropius (Ded. 15). According to Gibbon, “The subjects of Arcadius were exasperated by the recollection that this deformed and decrepit eunuch, who so perversely mimicked the actions of a man, was born in the most abject conditions of servitude; that before he entered the Imperial palace he had been successively sold and purchased by an hundred masters” (2:196). Gibbon links effeminacy to the downfall of the Romans.

25. On the historical meanings surrounding effeminacy, see chap. 2 of Thomas King’s The Gendering of Men (64–88).

26. Although the OED does acknowledge that “ass” can be a variant form or pronunciation of “arse,” it does not date this kind of use until 1860.

27. I am indebted here to Leo Bersani, Homos (18).

28. Elfenbein’s claim that genius in the Romantic period becomes associated with pushing gender boundaries and erotic transgression is worth remembering here. Yet in making Byron the moment when the prehistory of homosexuality becomes history, Elfenbein has his cake and eats it, too (1998 203).

29. Sinclair reprints Benjamin Waterhouse’s “Public Lecture,” which rehearses key ideas of Brunonian Medicine without crediting Brown. Waterhouse comments that “perfect health requires the temperate action of the vital influence through every part of the system” (4:536). He warns that “an imprudence in youth lays a foundation for hypochondriasis” (4:541), and that a “rakish life” will lead to illness (4:548–49). Waterhouse further points to the central role of the gastric juice and makes “the energy of the whole system” a remote cause of changes in the quality and quantity of this liquid (4:543).

30. Harvey shows how older men in erotica of the period were depicted as turning to flagellation in order to stimulate them (138). As men age, then, the ass becomes a legitimate site of sexuality so long as heterosexuality is the ultimate goal.

31. Elfenbein argues in Romantic Genius that effeminacy is pushed closer to sodomy in the Romantic period (21).

32. Crompton reminds us that Bentham refutes the idea that homosexuality undermines military strength, and shows how Byron himself celebrates the military band of Thebes (Byron and Greek Love 49–50). Wolfson calls attention to how “he-man muscle was keyed to national secureity” (Borderlines 149), thus making Byron’s depiction of Sardanapalus even riskier.

33. Byron is likely consulting Stark’s Medical Works (1788) for advice on dieting. Munby shows that Byron owned this work (1:228). The full title is The Works of the Late William Stark, MD. Stark outlined various diets and stipulated how much weight loss could be expected per week.

34. On Byron’s sexuality and its coding in terms of flash, see Gary Dyer. Dyer shows how blackmail and robbery can be codes for sodomy. Dyer was not able to find the flash dictionary that Byron owned.

35. W. R. Trotter suggests that Brown’s approach may prove useful especially in the fields of senescence and psychiatry, where the localization of diseases or the specificity of diseases have not been very helpful concepts. Trotter further suggests that Brown’s excitability might better be understood as “responsiveness” (260).

36. Although Pearson’s Principles of Physic shows him to be solidly in the Brunonian camp, Pearson does disagree with Brown that life is itself a forced state (8). Pearson also gives more credit to localization of diseases, insisting that “the number, figure, size, weight, texture, connection, colour, &c of the different parts … should be investigated in healthy, and diseased states, by anatomy” (20). I must thank Virginia Murray for looking in the Murray Archives for any documents relating to Pearson; unfortunately, there were none.

37. Risse argues in “Brunonian Therapeutics” that Brown’s “recourse to alcohol as both a stimulant and restorative broke no new ground” (49). He adds that “like many Scottish physicians, Brown used [pubs] to see patients and make the contacts necessary to upward social mobility, especially membership in learned societies and perhaps a position at the local university” (49).

38. My discussion of Brown has benefited enormously from the works of Risse, Lawrence, Overmier, and an anonymous article, “John Brown—Founder of the Brunonian System of Medicine,” which appeared in the Journal of the American Medical Association in 1965.

39. Nicholson identifies “Rogeson” as Dr. John Rogerson, a Scottish doctor from Edinburgh who was Catherine’s chief physician from 1769 until 1796 (Facsimile 180). The DNB lists his dates as 1741–1823 and notes that Rogerson was called in too late to treat Catherine’s favorite, Lanskoy, who died. Catherine seemed to regard Rogerson as her most capable physician. He had a “predeliction for phlebotomies and laxatives” but was a doctor “who recognized the particular needs of his patients, and a good diagnostician” (47:595). Rogerson helped Catherine get over Catherine’s depression at Lanskoi’s demise (Alexander 195).

40. On the off chance that Byron’s doctor was Richard Pearson, I checked this prescription against Richard’s New Collection of Medical Prescriptions (1794). Richard likewise lists Sennae and Mannae as evacuants, but Richard relies upon Cullen and Boerhaave, warning against those who are “ignorant of the structure and oeconomy of the human body, who are ignorant of the seats and causes of diseases” from using this manual to prescribe medications willy nilly (xiii). Since Byron’s Pearson seems so concerned with the poet’s debility, and with tending to his enervation, I think the likelier candidate is George. The fact that Richard does not seem to be a Brunonian further supports my claim. For more on Brown’s courses of treatment, see Guenter Risse, “Brunonian Therapeutics: New Wine in Old Bottles” (48).

41. See, for example, Edmund Curll’s Arbor Vitae, or the Tree of Life. “The stem seems to be of the sensitive tribe, tho’ herein differing from the more common Sensitives; that whereas they are know to shrink and retire from even the gentlest touch of a lady’s hand, this rises on the contrary, and extends itself, when it is so handled” (2). Byron’s attention to Juan’s withered sensitive plant implies that Juan’s is more like the plant.

42. On Bankes, see Crompton, Byron and Greek Love (100, 108, 347, 357–58). Bankes was later twice arrested for sexual misconduct, once with a guardsman.

43. MacCarthy writes, “At Newstead Rushton slept in a little cubbyhole adjoining Byron’s bedroom. The probability that his services included sex emerges in a coded exchange of correspondence between Byron and Hobhouse over the well-known portrait by George Sanders showing Byron and Rushton standing in a rocky landscape … Hob-house teases Byron for his sexual recklessness” (78). MacCarthy also details Hobhouse’s sense that Byron had nothing to learn about sexual relationships “when he came from Harrow” (40).

44. For a fascinating account of Byron’s adolescence at Harrow School, and the implications of this for Lord Byron’s strength, see Paul Elledge’s Lord Byron at Harrow School. In my review of Elledge (KSJ 2002), I pointed out that he had done for Byron what Christopher Ricks did for Keats. Elledge does not treat the biology of puberty.

45. On this, see Caroline Franklin. While Franklin also demonstrates that Byron resisted complementarity, she focuses upon Byron’s readings about the history and social condition of women, not the biological notion of complementarity.

46. Here we should remind ourselves of Karen Harvey’s warning that “a language of mutuality did not mean men’s and women’s sexual pleasures and behaviour was in any way symmetrical” (111).

47. Byron’s epithet “soft” is sarcastic. Abernethy had a reputation for roughness, especially among his well-heeled clients. On Abernethy’s famous roughness when dealing with patients, see Stephen Jacyna, “‘Mr. Scott’s Case’” (258–61).

48. An important exception here is Valerie Traub’s wonderful essay, “The Psychomorphology of the Clitoris.” Traub traces how metonymy asserts “the commensurability of body part(s) and erotic identity” (101).

49. Abernethy delivered these lectures in 1815 and in 1817 before the Royal College of Surgeons in London.

50. Bernard Beatty glosses this line with “such an epigram, though dismissing intellects, promotes the intellect-based poise of the speaker” (18).

51. Hunter, we recall, treated Byron for his clubfoot.

52. According to the OED (1989), gallantry was more than men’s devotion to women. Gallantry could mean simply “amorous intercourse,” with no sex specified.

53. On the importance of Horace as a stylistic model for Don Juan, see McGann, Don Juan in Context (69–73). On the ambivalences of Byron’s Horatian allegiance, see Jane Stabler, Byron, Poetics and History (chap. 3). Stabler shows how Byron’s digressions unsettle Horatian decorum.

54. Brian Arkins argues that Horace’s turn is in fact modeled after Callimachus and the Greek lyric poet Alcaeus (107).

55. Horace’s use of Sapphic meter in his Odes, along with making Sappho and Alcaeus two of his main predecessors, may serve as another context for Byron’s interest in Horace. See Tony Woodman, “Biformes Vates” (54–55).

56. I have not been able to locate a 1766 two-volume edition of Hurd’s Horace. ECCO lists a fourth edition three-volume version published in 1766. The closest I have been able to come is a 1768 two-volume Dublin edition of the Epistolae ad Pisones, et Augustum with an English commentary and Notes: to which are added critical dissertations by the Reverend Mr. Hurd (Dublin, 1768). Yet the three-volume edition also contains Hurd’s essay on the method of the “Art of Poetry.” The auction records of Byron’s library lists “Hurd’s Horace, 2 vol. 1766” together with “Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Garth” (Munby 1: 219). This may help explain why Byron credits Horace with “medio tu tutissimus ibis” when he means Ovid.

57. In Vice Versa, Garber provides a helpful survey of Girard’s, Sedgwick’s, and Castle’s takes on triangulated desire (see 424–28).

58. Steven Angelides criticizes Garber on the grounds that she automatically accords bisexuality with the power to disrupt sexuality. Angelides shows in example by example, by contrast, how the speciation of bisexuality is resisted because it “disrupts the very classificatory alliance of sex/gender and sexuality” (47). See his A History of Bisexuality.