• 1 Romantic Science and the Perversification of Sexual Pleasure
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• Johns Hopkins University Press
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CHAPTER ONE
Romantic Science and the
Perversification of Sexual Pleasure

During the Romantic period, the sciences of sexuality and of sexual pleasure (neurology, botany, natural history, biology, and anatomy) acknowledged the perverseness of human sexuality, its resistance to reproductive telos and discipline. This conception of perversity helps explain why the Romantics constructed what Blake called “the lineaments of gratified desire” as a potential, if problematic, site of social liberation. This scientific uncoupling of sexual pleasure from reproduction opens up the possibility for sexuality to become a site of liberation. Such reminders, moreover, may help Romanticism move out from under the shadow of a Romantic ideology that impoverishes it by reading Romantic politics in terms of a transcendence that offers false imaginative consolations for social problems. By contrast, I ask why the Romantics linked sexuality with liberation and why, after Michel Foucault, it is so difficult to take seriously the notion of sexual liberation, to see sexual liberation as more than mere hedonism. Attention to Romanticism’s sexual liberation instead of transcendence will result in a less escapist Romanticism, one that sought nothing less than the transformation of basic human relationships.¹ Such reorientation may remind us of how science in the Romantic era was about so much more than a monolithic discourse of Foucauldian “biopower.”² It is against Foucault that science could enable resistance as well as domination.

Foregrounding the perverseness of pleasure suspends the automatic linking of pleasure with either the conservation of or undermining of power.³ By turning to science, I am able to explain why Romantics as diverse as Byron, Blake, Anna Seward, the Shelleys, and Wollstonecraft begin to organize their emancipatory politics around the axis of sexuality and indicate how much has to be in place—contra Barthesian readings of jouissance/desire—for sexuality to become linked with liberation. Percy Shelley, for example, was skeptical of “the purposes for which the sexual instinct are supposed to have existed” (D. Clark 223). And although critics have chided Wollstonecraft 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). Even though that desire masks itself as presocial, it is actually antisocial, which means desire is constructed but also functions against construction. Rather than assuming, like Barthes and Marcuse, that jouissance is a ground that always already disrupts the repressive work of civilization, I ask what enables the Romantics to enlist various constructions of the body and desire in service of social liberation. In brief, I suggest that they turn to science to construct a notion of sexual pleasure that is separable from reproduction and marriage and, in so doing, construct desire and pleasure so that they can enable personal autonomy, meaningful consent based on shared erotic pleasure, the choice of whether or not to reproduce, and conscious opposition to both organized religion and the enemies of democracy. It was to this end that the radical Richard Carlisle hoped that “the sexual commerce … may be made a pleasure, independent of the dread of conception that blasts the prospects and happiness of the female” (41). That fertility rates “rose with increasing speed throughout the eighteenth century until they peaked in 1816” meant that there was much to dread (Cook 11). In any case, apprehending sex without regard to purpose enabled it to become a form of equality.

To the extent the sciences of sexuality then understood pleasure to be perverse—turning away from the supposed naturalness of function—the scientific enterprise helped connect sex with liberation. Science has always had an important influence on the ways in which we think about our bodies and its pleasures.⁴ The influence of vitalism in the Romantic period meant that at very least sexual desire could be transgressive and unpredictable since even if human bodies were subject to natural laws, the operation of natural laws upon the vitalist body now meant that the body actively modified those laws (Temkin 1977 361). Vitalism was the belief in fundamental differences between the living and nonliving, differences that could not be reduced to chemical or mechanical laws but could be located in a living principle or in structural and organizational differences. For Coleridge, “to explain organization itself we must assume a principle of Life independent of organization.”⁵

Vitalism made it imperative to study reproduction.⁶ Because clocks could not reproduce themselves and organisms could, life became increasingly divorced from death and sexuality became a means to understand that living principle. Vitalism frustrated all forms of mechanism because organisms reproduced themselves. Because vitalism stressed interconnections between individuals and the species, as well as sympathies between species, vitalist thinkers began to turn away from thinking of organisms in terms of absolutism and hierarchy and instead began to think in terms of images of consent and sympathy linking all forces of nature (Reill 154). Vitalism thus had a democratizing edge to it,⁷ one enhanced by the breakdown of the body into vital organs that did not need centralizing control.

The shift in vocabulary from generation to reproduction, moreover, meant that the biblical associations and hierarchical kin relations associated with generation began to give way to a more democratic language of reproduction, a language that leveled distinctions between humans and beasts but insisted upon interconnections between animals and man.⁸ In his Natural History (1749), the Compte du Buffon substituted reproduction for generation; the word entered into English in the 1780s. This unfortunately paved the way for women to be linked more with other animals than they were with humankind. Nonetheless, whereas generation imbued sexuality with hierarchy, reproduction simultaneously loosened the strictures of hierarchy and condensed that hierarchy in terms of gender. This condensation of hierarchy into gender would make gender a place to think about hierarchy and the extent to which hierarchies were necessary or natural.

The reach of vitalism was deep, and it began to make serious inroads to such disciplines as natural history and even chemistry: the index of this was that chemistry was clothed in the language of reproduction and affinity. Before 1750, like particles were thought to attract like. After the middle of the century, opposites were taken to attract. As chemicals and elements began to be understood in terms of reproduction, affinity was heterosexualized and the erotic affinities of difference became paramount.⁹ Vitalism also suffused botany. It is no accident that the word “sexuality” originates in reference to plants, for they helped make sexuality visible.¹⁰ Unlike humans, who hid their genitals, plant genitals were open to inspection without any sophisticated technology. Whereas Linneaus used the morphological differences between male and female plants as the basis for his taxonomy, Buffon took him to task for categorizing on the basis of superficial similarities. Despite their fundamental disagreements, both made sexuality central: Linneaus by using sexual organs of plants as the basis for taxonomy, Buffon for making reproduction the criterion for a species. Animals that could not reproduce with one another could not by definition be of the same species.

Vitalism helped effect a shift away from preformation and toward epigenesis, and this shift too helped to make sexuality rife for liberation. Preformation was allied with theological absolutism since God had preformed all human beings within the ovary of Eve or the sperm of Adam, but epigenesis in the late eighteenth century became widely accepted over preformation because it defined each new birth as a new formation, a theory that accounted for variability but implied the existence of an invisible vital force that could organize living matter into complex forms. As Peter Reill puts it, “Epigenesis threatened established authority, questioning foundations established to worship God and venerate social hierarchies” (159–60). The reasons for this growing acceptance of epigenesis were that nature was increasingly understood to be self-generating, that preformation had a hard time accounting for variation and monstrosity, and that preformation could not explain resemblance between parents and offspring. But if epigenesis helped divorce God from matter by necessitating that parts of the body be produced successively, it gave the Romantics a way of thinking about the purposiveness of life without a predetermined form or purpose.¹¹ In short, life itself was perverse.

Because vitalism put such a primacy upon connectedness and sympathy, it is but a small step away from Romanticism and its reliance upon feeling. Vitalism, therefore, relied upon metaphors of human interaction and was a key means by which society turned to the nature of living things to rethink its social contracts. In the same way that electricity could galvanize dead bodies into a semblance of life, the French and American revolutions could have an electrifying effect on the body. Vitalism promised an always shifting dynamic body and so made bodies susceptible to change even as it endowed life with a purposiveness instead of purpose. Thus, if sexuality objectified the subject for himself in Foucault’s formulation,¹² vitalism mandated that living beings resist the status of object and opened the door to sexual subjectivity.

Although vitalism would seem to play a crucial role in the development of what Foucault calls biopower insofar as life thereby “enters into the order of knowledge and power,” I want to underscore key differences (Foucault HS 1: 142). In order for vitalism to be connected with liberation, it cannot be reduced to Foucauldian biopower, which he defines as a two-fold strategy of suffusing life with power. On the one hand, the body as machine was reduced to instrumentality. On the other hand, the body as species mandated control over population, fertility, mortality, and health.¹³ Foucault continues, “Broadly speaking, at the juncture of the ‘body’ and ‘population,’ sex became a crucial target of a power organized around the management of life rather than the menace of death” (HS 1:147). For one, not only did vitalists reject the notion of the body as predictable machine, insisting upon its ability to self-generate, but they also had an epistemological skepticism that resisted the transformation of life into knowledge and power.¹⁴ Caspar Wolff, the discoverer of the female ovary in humans, admitted that there were complexities to generation beyond his deductive procedure.¹⁵ Perhaps the most famous anatomist and man-midwife of his day, William Hunter began his 1784 anatomical lectures by “avowing great ignorance, in many of the most considerable questions relating to animal operations; such as, sensation, motion, respiration, digestion, generation, & c. In my opinion all these subjects are much less understood, than most people think them.”¹⁶ Two, in making life a principle that could not be delivered by empirical science, vitalists endowed life with purposiveness but not purpose, a conceptual maneuver that enabled life at very least to be in excess of function if not at odds with it. When coupled with the vitalist distancing of the living principle or life force from God, vitalists opened the door to bodies and organs not reducible to function. The gap between organ and vital force is the place where instrumentality is challenged. To the extent that vitalism and attention to the nature of the life force made sexuality central to living things, vitalism also offset physical determinism.

It is no accident that in the Romantic period, physiology, the study of living bodies, would come to define itself against dead anatomy and supercede it. The important surgeon and anatomist John Hunter would even locate life in the coagulating powers of the blood: the dynamic and fluid nature of the blood as life meant that the body could not be a static entity. It was Hunter’s assertion that the testicles and ovaries produced fluids—what we now know to be hormones—that led to the manifestation of physical sex. Even then, sex was not a fixed thing. Indeed, when John Abernethy, president of the Royal College of Surgeons and teacher of William Lawrence, Percy Shelley’s friend and doctor, credits Hunter with the vitalist claim that “life does not depend on organization” (1815 14), he makes it clear that anatomy is far from destiny, that physical determinism does little to explain human life. That by the end of the eighteenth century sex was thought to take place in the head, not the genitals, meant that sexuality could now become central to psychology.

In a larger view, we can profit from the complex, flexible, and often ironic ways in which Romantic scientists and poets understood the body and sex. Girded by Foucault and his keen awareness of how science passes itself as knowledge/power, social constructionism has long made the body and science enemies insofar as it claims that by making something socially constructed we have thereby made it open to change.¹⁷ Nature and the body, by contrast, are considered impervious to change. The fantasy of biological fixity has had an even more unfortunate influence on the history of sexuality, where the standard Foucauldian wisdom is that the move from sex to sexuality—from sex as acts, or merely as one dimension of human life that may include sexual subjectivity, to sex as a totalizing feature of identity—did not take place until the advent of sexology in the 1860s, when the homosexual became a personage.¹⁸ To take an important recent example of this kind of history, Arnold Davidson’s Emergence of Sexuality insists that sexuality could only emerge as a coherent style of reasoning with the advent of psychology in the nineteenth century.¹⁹ Before sexuality emerged, there was sex, a regime under which anatomy was destiny. This not only makes Romantic sex mere foreplay to the real thing but also the conflation of sex with anatomy rigidifies sex so that it seems antithetical to liberation. This chapter will show why the Romantics could not think in terms of biological or sexual fixity and why “one’s sexual identity” was not “exhausted by anatomical sex” in the Romantic period (Davidson 36).

Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick has challenged this easy binary opposition between the fixity of biology and the elasticity of culture by asking what makes us think that culture is any easier to change than biology (1990 41). Recent developments in science suggest that it is high time to rethink biological fixity from the ground up and look at the nuanced ways in which science recognizes the role of culture. To wit, Matt Ridley has pointedly refuted the fantasy that biological genes determine behavior. He argues in Genome that “our biology is at the mercy of our behavior” (1999 157) and points to how behavior changes the levels of cortisol in our bodies. Because cortisol works as an on/off switch for genes, behavior in effect changes biology. Neural Darwinism suggests that neural networks are shaped by behavioral choices. Hence, Steven Pinker highlights the fact that “innate structure evolve[s] in an animal that also learns” (1997 177).

Anticipating Ridley and Pinker, the Romantics knew that neither the body nor science were given enemies because they understood that ontological narratives can be used for liberating ends, that living bodies were in the state of dynamic flux, that biology hardly excluded culture, and that desire was elastic. Sensationalist psychology sought to understand how custom and habit were inscribed upon the body, whether through vibration or through association. The schoolboy Coleridge worried about habit’s ability to become “securely grafted … on … nature” (Shorter Works 1:4). Because scientists had to be so careful to avoid the charge of materialism, they thought carefully around physical determinism, arguing that living bodies were essentially different from dead ones and that the existence of organs only indicated propensities or perceived effects, not realities. Coleridge, for instance, warned that “visible surface and power of any kind, much more the power of life, are ideas which the very forms of the human understanding make it impossible to identify” (Hints towards the Formation 35). By essentializing an epistemological gap between visible surface and powers, Coleridge made it more difficult to think of biology in terms of Ozymandian fixity. Our tin ear to the nuances of science says more about our need to make science about logocentrism and the tyranny that results from it than it does about the limitations of science itself. That natural history was really an allegory of human history meant that sexuality could be understood as an allegory of power. We see this most clearly in William Blake, who equates that “false/and generating love” with the “pretense to destroy love” (Jerusalem 17:25–26 E 161). Finally, Karl Figlio has shown how the biomedical sciences in the eighteenth century “focuss[ed] increasingly upon the limits and methodology of knowledge, rather than upon the existence and essence of substances” (1975 183), and this methodological shift enhanced Romantic skepticism about the fixity of the body, especially ideas that sought to naturalize hierarchies.

Romantic Science and the Perversification of Pleasure

By “perversification,” I mean the ways in which the seemingly natural and normative connection between pleasure and function was undermined, an undermining that allowed sex to be thought of as a form of purposiveness.²⁰ The sciences, by contrast, helped separate reproduction and pleasure. Romantic poets and scientists thus claimed that pleasure was either an unnecessary or insufficient cause of reproduction and suggested that there was no necessary causal connection between pleasure and reproduction. This uncoupling of sexual pleasure from reproduction makes it possible to link pleasure with liberation. Linnaean botany, conversely, helped undermine the prevailing wisdom that perverse or unnatural forms of sexuality were by nature unproductive; Linnaean botany gave the lie to the uselessness of perverse forms of sexuality by showing how productive plant polygamy, hermaphroditism, and gender bending could be. From the Abbe Spallanzani’s work on artificial insemination and on the minute amount of spermatic fluid needed to achieve “efficacy,” through the famous anatomist John Hunter’s removal of a sow’s ovary to see what, if anything, happens to fertility as a result, to the localization of sexuality to the brain and the imagination, this double breach between normative pleasure and reproduction, and between perverse pleasure and sterility, became increasingly difficult to ignore. If this scientific perverseness made sexual pleasure, contra Foucault and Thomas Laqueur, a potential and meaningful site of antagonism against church and aristocracy, then perhaps the symptom of this cultural anxiety was the obsessive condensation of unproductive sexuality onto masturbation.²¹

To explore this perversification within Romantic science is to see how cultural norms are both maintained and challenged.²² Perversity’s location at the center of heterosexual pleasure means that the unnatural/natural binary refuses to stabilize. Although we now perceive the perverse to be completely alien to dominant culture in part because we take for granted the pathology of perversity, science in the Romantic period struggles to come to grips with the fact that perversion is within heterosexual pleasure, that it refuses to remain external to mainstream sex. Perversity in this period thus resists pathology in part because, as Georges Canguilhem has brilliantly shown, the science of pathology is instrumental to the consolidation of the norm. Scientists therefore had to construe the norm from pathological specimens. Perversity’s very inherence to culture, thus gives it the potential to challenge dominant values: in particular, the role and value placed on function itself. The fact that it does so from within threatens the very idea of the norm in ways that Foucault’s notion of “‘reverse’ discourse”—whereby “homosexuality began to speak on its own behalf” (HS 1:101)—simply cannot account for. I want to emphasize here as well Sedgwick’s caution that consequences of positions cannot be anticipated in advance because they cannot be known in advance (1990 27–39).

The sciences, of course, were then far from cordoned off from the learned middle class in the way they are now, in part because aesthetic apprehension and scientific apprehension were not considered to be opposites (Richards 12). Coleridge, for example, read, owned, or had access to books by most of the scientists discussed here. He not only often attended medical lectures (Coffman and Harris), but also wrote an essay on physiology called Hints towards the Formation of a More Comprehensive Theory of Life.²³ Romantic culture’s emphasis on feeling and on a mind-body reciprocity led scientists and poets to explore human sexuality in unprecedented ways. They asked what sexuality could tell us about the interaction between the body and mind, especially because many believed as did Coleridge that the “plastic life or the power of the Germ [seed] … is the manifestation of distinct essence in the all-common Matter” (Shorter Works 2:873). Was pleasure necessary for reproduction, and, if not, what might sexual intimacy have to teach us about human equality, genuine intersubjectivity, and freedom? And was sexual desire a biological imperative? The stakes were indeed high in the answer to this question: the rationalist Godwin’s insistence that it was not did not stop Malthus from making “passion between the sexes” one of the incontrovertible laws of human nature. Blake, Coleridge, and the Shelleys consorted with scientists and doctors like George Fordyce, Mary Wollstonecraft’s midwife; James Gillman; and the radical surgeon William Lawrence; and doctors such as Erasmus Darwin turned to poetry to make sexuality the most important feature of organic life (A. Richardson 7). Galvani’s popular lectures on medical electricity became fodder for Frankenstein, whereas Gall’s and Spurzheim’s phrenological lectures were forms of public entertainment.²⁴ Even though more popular medical writings on sexuality such as Aristotle’s Masterpiece ostensibly instructed readers on how to achieve fertility, Godwin and Wollstone-craft studied it to avoid pregnancy (St. Clair 500–501). Although they thought they were separating sexual pleasure from function, the ensuing birth of the future Mary Shelley reminds us that everyone then had some stake in sexual knowledge.

Science helped bring together the Romantics’ interest in democracy and sexuality. Scientists often came from backgrounds of religious dissent: by 1750, the finest physicians were dissenters by religion (Porter 1997 and Bynum 4). That so many physicians rejected careers in the clergy meant that science was informed by an “ecclesiastes interruptus.” These backgrounds made many scientists of the period keenly aware of the unjust benefits derived from hierarchies within the profession and without. Dissent also made many interested in a fundamentally democratic body, a shared body and nervous system, rather than a body differentiated by class. At the same time the French Revolution showed that the king’s body was just a body and could be beheaded, poverty was no longer considered to be a natural state (Arendt 14–15). Hence, sensibility in this period shifts from being an elite marker of distinction to a generally human quality. And the Romantics thereby began to insist that the poet’s feelings differ from those of others not in kind but in degree. Where Jan Golinski has shown how Priestley “turned to the public manifestation of phenomena produced by instruments … as a potent means to undermine the illegitimate authority of corrupt religious and political institutions” (96), Alan Richardson has argued that materialist theories of the brain underpinned much of revolutionary Romantic culture (2). Dorothy and Roy Porter foreground the breakdown of hierarchies in the medical profession of the eighteenth century and the pluralist dimensions of medicine (18–19, 26–28), and Roy Porter elsewhere shows the links between social and medical radicalism (1992). John Keats’s teacher, Astley Cooper, expressed Jacobin ideas in his medical lectures (de Almeida 104). Thomas Beddoes in particular was so ardently devoted to the French Revolution that he quit his post as reader in chemistry at Oxford to open his Pneumatic Institute outside Bristol (Porter 1992 216). If Romanticism can be understood in terms of revolution, then, the sciences of sexuality played a major role in the ideological ferment of the age. I rehearse these examples to remind us that science could have a more vexed relationship to what Foucault calls “biopower” than Foucault’s collapse of sexuality and power allows for.²⁵

I begin with Albrecht von Haller, the most influential physiologist of his age, because he was the first to argue that the genitals and breast nipple had a “proportionable degree of sensibility” (1755 30), meaning by this that they “transmitted impressions to the soul” (1755 23).²⁶ Refuting the Scottish physician Robert Whytt’s 1751 claim that the mind had no influence on the genitals—that erection and ejaculation could be explained by “spontaneous” muscular irritable contractions—Haller suggested in his Dissertation on the Sensible and Irritable Parts of Animals (1752–53 in Latin; 1755 English translation by S. A. Tissot) that the brain and mind and especially the imagination triggered tumescence. Whereas Whytt linked the genitals to “spontaneity,” a term that Whytt used to signify “not with any conscious exertion of the mind’s power,” Haller insisted upon a connection between sensibility and the soul, and noted that “the soul is a being which is conscious of itself” (1755 38). “Spontaneity” thus threatened to debase human will into mere animal instinct. For Haller, “irritability is independent of the soul and the will” (ibid.). Whytt, by contrast, claimed that “men do not eat, drink, or propagate their kind, from deliberate views of preserving their species, but merely in consequence of the uneasy sensation of hunger, thirst, etc.” (288). Later, in his Observations on Nature, Whytt ascribed erection to the “stimulus communicated to the nerves of the genital parts by the semen” (27). By making sexual desire a kind of unconscious reflex response to an “uneasy sensation,” Whytt could rely upon a predictable sentient principle—a ubiquitous immaterial soul that could feel stimuli and respond purposefully—that would in the end both prove the existence of God and do God’s reproductive bidding (Rocca 98).

Haller’s contention that the genitals were connected with sensibility and consciousness, by contrast, opened the door to human interference with God’s fiat to be fruitful and multiply. Whytt’s spontaneity, his making of sexuality as a science of immediacy, had its price insofar as the body had little choice but to reproduce. Haller further links man’s soul with rebellion when he writes, “The brutes, properly so called are restrained by wise laws, which in them are invariably executed; whereas, on the contrary, the soul frequently rebels against these laws, in man” (1755 xxx). Haller understands “voluptuous ideas [as] the most proper stimulus to put them [the constriction of veins] in motion” (1755 45); these ideas come from the conscious mind, over which we have control. Only when sexuality became tethered to the brain could sexual liberation become reflective and therefore meaningful because it could now be part of a deliberate strategy. And once a kind of muscular irritation no longer explains sexual desire, that desire becomes less predictable and less “spontaneously” reproductive.

John Hunter, the famous anatomist and surgeon, would later explicitly detail potentially perverse consequences of this nascently conscious sexuality: performance anxiety, the possibility of deceiving others that one is a man of gallantry when one has “no passion for the female sex” (1861 269) and an aestheticized but potentially sterile sexuality.²⁷ Hunter, we might recall, was called in to examine Byron’s clubfoot; Hunter recommended a special shoe that would help him to walk (Marchand 1957 1:25–26), and Coleridge singled him out for praise as a scientist whom “mankind would love and revere” (cited in Knight 1998 101). In 1786, Hunter argued that impotence depended upon the state of the mind: complete action in those parts [of generation] cannot take place without perfect harmony of body and mind” (1786 201). In his posthumously published Essays and Observations on Natural History (1861), Hunter elaborates on the connections between conscious desire and deceit: “no man is so fond of being thought a man of gallantry as he who has no passion for the female sex, yet would feel proud if it were conceived he had always some intrigue on his hands, even at the expense of the reputation of the innocent; while the man who is really passionately fond of the sex, and perhaps their dupe, would rather choose to hide that turn of mind, as if it were a defect” (269). Could Hunter have had Byron in mind with his first example? Sex is here understood as a conscious ploy: the one who has no erotic feelings for women is the one most eager to parade signs of his heterosexuality. Insofar as Hunter figures heterosexuality/gallantry as a performative compensation for its lack, perversion inheres at the very center of culture, even masquerading as the norm.

Hunter also allows us to see that the very aestheticization of sexuality is also its perversion: “A man has an appetite to enjoy a woman; but if the mind has formed itself to any particular woman, the appetite or enjoyment can be suspended till the object is presented; and the more the mind interferes, the greater stress will be laid upon this relation: the mere sexual enjoyment will be almost forgot, and the whole pursuit will be after the particular quality of the appetite” (1861 273). Here the mind is in danger of blocking conception—it “interferes,” “suspends,” and almost allows the forgetting of appetite—even as it aestheticizes sexual enjoyment into taste. The problem with this aestheticization—a Kantian rendering of sexuality into a kind of purposiveness without purpose—is of course that lusting after quality is perilously close to being perverse: Hunter clarifies that the “natural man” will thereby be refined away. Zizek frames it this way: “Our libido get[s] ‘stuck’ onto a particular object, condemned to circulate around it forever” (62). Perversity became aligned more closely with nature when Kant insisted that the assumption that there is nothing gratuitous in the world and that all is for good had no place in the natural sciences other than as an enabling fiction (Larson 179). Because science had no insight into transcendental principles and acts but could not do without the principle of purpose in relation to the products of nature, nature was purposive. This perspective gave scientists a heuristic device that could guide them when mechanical principles were inadequate (Larson 181); nonetheless, Kant made it clear that purposiveness could not be constitutive of nature (Pluhar 379). Hunter continues, “The temporary appetites, as venery, become in time blunted … and he begins to lose the substance in pursuit of the qualities, refining away the natural man becoming rather ideal, whence arise ‘taste,’ ‘graces,’ etc.” (1861 270). As taste transmogrifies the materiality of the body into the ideal, the danger is that the body and its pleasures will melt away into the thin air of Godwinian perfectibility.

Hunter had a longstanding distrust of the mind’s taste and its role in redefining the sexual enjoyment. In 1786, in the first edition to his Treatise on the Venereal Disease, he ignited a firestorm of controversy when he claimed that masturbation was actually less harmful to the body than natural intercourse for the sake of intercourse. His critics were so shrill in their criticism that Hunter expurgated these remarks in the second edition of the work, published in 1788. Here is what Hunter initially wrote:

I think I may affirm that this act [masturbation] in itself does less harm to the constitution in general than the natural. That the natural with common women, or as such as we are indifferent about, does less harm to the constitution than when it is not so selfish, and where the affections for the woman are also concerned. Where it is only a constitutional act it is simple, and only one action takes place; but where the mind becomes interested, it is worked up to a degree of enthusiasm, increasing the sensibility of the body and disposition for action; and when the complete action takes place it is with proportional violence; and in proportion to the violence is the degree of debility produced or injury done to the constitution. (200)

Hunter makes the astounding claim that sex with a woman you love or find beautiful is actually more harmful to the constitution than masturbation or sex with a common woman (prostitute). Once the mind becomes involved in the sexual act, sensibility is intensified and the violence that ejaculation does to the body is also intensified. By a medical standard, then, a standard that judges the relative healthiness of the activity, heterosexual intercourse with someone you love or find beautiful is actually more perverse than masturbation, because the pathological consequences of sex with affection are much more dire. More shocking was the fact that Hunter was thus flouting the accepted medical belief that sex with love actually helped to restore the losses to the spermatic economy. Even though Hunter links bourgeois sex with pathology, he nonetheless facilitates the creation of what Gayle Rubin calls the “charmed circle” of sexuality whereby heterosexual reproduction is accorded more validity and humanity than nonreproductive sex. The very need to distinguish between “simple” sex as merely constitutional (sex) and “complex” sex as affectionate (sexuality) helps to make affectionate heterosexual intercourse fully human, if diseased. The upshot of all this is which is more perverse, masturbation/prostitution or middle-class married reproductive sex?

If Haller’s linking of sensibility to erections of the breast nipple and penis insinuated a gap between sexual pleasure and reproduction, one intensified by John Hunter, Lazzaro Spallanzani’s work on artificial fecundation—what we would today call artificial insemination—and on the semen widened that gap considerably. This is despite the fact that Spallanzani mistakenly thought that the semen was responsible for conception, not the sperm, which he thought were merely parasitic worms. In his Tracts on the Nature of Animals and Vegetables (1799), Spallanzani speculated that although the vermiculi were “not immediate authors of generation,” some of them might “cause … venereal pleasures” (193). Once pleasure is no longer enslaved to reproduction, sexual liberation becomes possible because desire can now be its own end. Percy Shelley orders Spallanzani’s work in “either English or Italian” in December 1812 (Jones 1:344). Shelley was not only skeptical of “the purposes for which the sexual instinct are supposed to have existed”—namely, reproduction—(D. Clark 223), but also wrote in a still-unpublished manuscript that “any student of anatomy must be aware of an innocent, small and almost imperceptible precaution by which all consequences [of sexual intercourse] are prevented” (Pierpont Morgan Library, New York MS MA 408).

The Catholic scientist Spallanzani’s unwitting divorce of sexual pleasure from reproduction was fivefold. By clothing frogs in taffeta shorts and by placing open vessels of semen within another vessel to the sides of which the eggs had adhered, permitting any aura to escape near eggs, Spallanzani proved definitively that there must be physical contact between semen and egg in order for reproduction to occur. He thus showed in 1780 that there was no such thing as seminal aura, an immaterial means of fecundation. Charles Bonnet had already conveyed to his friend his doubts that an immaterial aura could have such material effects. Because William Harvey could not see any trace of male semen in the female genital ducts of the mammals and birds he dissected, Harvey insisted that male semen had no material contribution at all to make to the egg, but rather was the provider of an energizing essence—the legacy of Aristotle’s pneuma—by which the egg became fertile, an essence that was free to dissolve away the moment matter had been vitalized. Until Spallanzani disproved the notion of seminal aura, condoms could not be considered an effective form of birth control because an aura could presumably transcend any physical barrier. Condoms were considered primarily “armor” against venereal contamination. In Edmund Curll’s The Potent Ally, for instance, a poet praises the cundum: with it, “he fears no dangers from the doxies,/… and scorns their poxes” (27). The demonstrated materiality of the semen meant that it could be stopped using various barrier methods.²⁸

Spallanzani also queries why the “tenacious and amorous embraces, which sometimes last 40 days” of frogs continue so long after fecundation (1769 46–47); his research into how little semen was actually needed for reproductive “efficacy” meant that sexual pleasure was enormously wasteful; his experiments to determine the strength of the spark of life in which he added liquids like oil, wine, and lemon juice to the semen or exposed semen to tobacco fumes could be used, contra Spallanzani’s intent, to prevent that very efficacy, and his substitution of a warmed syringe filled with semen implied that pleasure might merely be ancillary to reproduction. By putting an end to the Aristotlean theory that the active sperm infuses the otherwise inert menstrual blood of the female with life, a theory made popular in the eighteenth century by the best-selling book of sexual knowledge, Aristotle’s Masterpiece, Spallanzani strengthened the cause of ovism—the idea that all life was preformed in the ovary—and thereby undermined one key biological basis for male superiority.²⁹ Haller had insisted that the female belongs entirely to the female, that, entire, it exists before fecundation.

Much of Spallanzani’s 1780 Dissertations Relative to the Natural History of Animals and Vegetables, translated into English in 1784 by the father of the poet/physician and friend of Coleridge, the elder Thomas Beddoes, sought to clarify and quantify the nature of “the prolific virtue of semen.” Part of what he was trying to understand was why frogs continue to mount and remount the female even after seminal discharge, why their “ardour” so exceeds function. Spallanzani marvels, “Such is the ardour of the males, that after the discharge is finished, and they have quitted the female, they will return to her again, and embrace her for several hours” (2:34). To his consternation, that ardor could outweigh the need for safety, hunger, and severe pain. Even after Spallanzani amputated both thighs of his male frogs and pricked them repeatedly with needles “till blood issued out at every puncture” and beheaded them, they would not give up their embraces (2:72–74). Neither pleasure nor function could explain such intense sexual desire, making normative desire perverse. When normal heterosexual pleasure cannot claim ontological priority over perverse or functionless pleasure, desire cannot be reduced to an engine of repression or biopower. Moreover, when reduced to reproduction, sex becomes animal instinct. Heteronormativity thus simultaneously normalizes and bankrupts human sexuality.

Spallanzani also wanted to figure out just how much semen was necessary for conception. He writes, “Three grains of semen mixed with twelve or eighteen ozs [sic] of water will communicate to the mixture its prolific virtue” (cited in Gasking 135). This led him to determine that the weight of the particles of semen spread throughout the water drop was merely one three billionth of a grain. He concludes not only that “the quantity of seed which effects impregnation is small beyond conception” (1784 2:216), but also that “the surplus does not contribute at all to fecundation” (2:170). “I cannot therefore imagine,” Spallanzani admits, “what purpose the surplus of seed can serve, and am obliged to consider it useless” (2:170). Spallanzani then asks if this “discovery may be extended to man” (2:217). He posits that this extrapolation is “in some measure probable” (2:171).

What then to make of this perverse expense of spirit, this waste of semen? Erasmus Darwin would suggest that “waste” was really a form of providential “wise superfluity,” the way that nature “ensured the continuance of her species of animals” (Zoonomia 1801 2:209), although he later argues that excess nutrition is the cause of monstrosity (2:228). One might ask how a wise superfluity was also the cause of monstrosity. Spallanzani briefly suggests that the excess seed might act as a stimulant to the fetus’s heart and as a kind of nutrition for the fetus (1784 2:173, 174), although he had eleven years earlier raised considerable skepticism about this theory because the “juices of the mother” often provide both “stimulation and nutrition” and because “the eggs of tadpoles [had] unfold[ed] themselves considerably before fecundation,” meaning that circulation and therefore life had to already be in effect for nutrition to have occurred (1769 45). Spallanzani argues, “We are obliged to infer that these maternal juices are themselves that kind of stimul[i] of which the seminal liquor is supposed to be in birds. Consequently the heart in the germ of the tadpole, must beat sufficiently to produce a circulation of fluids, without an insuperable impediment from the solid” (1769 45). The “uselessness” of the majority of male semen coupled with his paradoxical sense of the seed’s active fecundating power engenders a panicked justification of waste. Why else would Spallanzani return to an already rejected hypothesis, one that was contraindicated by much of his own empirical evidence and his own commitment to ovism? Given his insistence that “truth can only be attained by the constant success of repeated experiments (1784 2:62), what would lead him to violate his own standards of truth? Certainly returning to the theory that sperm stimulated the fetus compromised the activating powers of the female.

Spallanzani’s conundrum is this: on the one hand, as an ovist, he wants to insist that “the young belong originally to the female” (1784 2:161). For this reason, he made no distinction between unfertilized eggs and tadpoles, calling them by the same name (Gasking 135). Also for this reason, Spallanzani dismissed spermatic worms as mere parasites, preferring instead to credit the seminal fluid with the fecundating virtue. Even though Spallanzani went to great lengths to prove the animality of sperm thereby refuting Buffon’s argument that sperm operated blindly and mechanically, and despite the fact that this animality could look like the living principle, his faith in ovism leads him to render spermatic animality in the form of a negation of life—a parasitical life—rather than life itself. The analogy of sperm to parasite helps Spallanzani to make sense of animality that is not to be mistaken for the origin of life. Although he had tried to ascertain the function of these worms, even momentarily entertaining the possibility that the worms “cause the venereal pleasures,” Spallanzani conceded that this is “beyond the sphere of human knowledge,” forgetting that he had already designated any references to “the mysteries of generation” as an excuse for “idleness” (1799 193–94; 1784 2:iii). On the other hand, he cannot ignore the fact that the female cannot create life without contact with the semen, a fact that might justify male activeness over female passivity. Therefore, Spallanzani trumpets the fact that “previously to the influence of the seed, there was a beginning of motion and life” (1784 2:161).

Spallanzani must, however, immediately qualify such feminine powers of activation because females cannot create life on their own. The experimenting priest thus solves his conundrum by insisting that “the young belong originally to the female, while the male only furnishes a fluid, which determines them to assume motion and life” (1784 2:161). Here semen determines life. He elaborates, “I would not indeed assert that these little organized bodies are without motion before they experience the action of the masculine liquor…. Growth implies nutrition, nutrition the circulation of fluids, and circulation depends upon the pulsation of the heart. I therefore conceive, that, previously to the influence of the seed, there was a beginning of motion and life, but in a degree exceedingly dull and languid, from the extreme slowness of the movement of the fluids” (2:161). He concludes, “Hence tadpoles would never be so rapidly evolved, or attain that sensible animation, which we denominate life, if they were not subjected to the influence of the seminal fluid” (2:161).

By creating a distinction between weak feminine powers of activation and strong masculine powers of activation, Spallanzani can have his ovist cake and eat it, too. Although he must concede that female activation is weaker than male activation, and although he initially asserts that semen “determine them to assume life,” Spallanzani does not quite credit males with bestowing life; rather, he makes a nominalist distinction between the activating powers we can see and therefore associate with life and the activating powers we cannot. He underscores that the distinction is one of name only when he writes, “The influence of the seminal fluid … raises them [tadpoles] from a state of apparent shapelessness and immobility, and produces a due unfolding of the limbs, and evident motion, and active life” (2:161).³⁰ The difference between “apparent immobility” and “evident motion” reminds us that just because weaker activation does not look like activation, this does not mean that females are not responsible for life. After all, both growth and nutrition precede masculine activation. Although Spallanzani’s backhanded crediting of females with activating life begins to unravel a gendered hierarchy that insisted that males are active and females are passive, his emphasis on the stronger and more visible masculine powers and his sense that female activation was more passive than male activation could be used to support the very gender hierarchy he sought to undermine. These gendered distinctions are very much with us to this day: in Im/Partial Science (1995), microbiologist Bonnie Spanier shows how biology textbooks still inscribe feminine passivity onto the egg and masculine activeness onto the sperm when in fact the egg has active cilia that draw in the sperm.

Such justification of waste was all the more necessary given Spallanzani’s successful artificial insemination of a female spaniel. Spallanzani claimed that he obtained the seed of a male dog by “spontaneous emission” (1784 2:250).³¹ Using a syringe warmed to body temperature, Spallanzani injected nineteen grains of semen into a bitch in heat, who had remained in isolation. Three whelps were delivered. Spallanzani proclaimed, “I have no difficulty in believing, that we shall be able to give birth to some large animals, without the concurrence of the two sexes, provided we have recourse to the simple mechanical device employed by me” (2:198), and he blustered, “I have succeeded as well, as if the male himself had performed his function” (2: ii). Such a “simple mechanical device,” then, had the power to supplement procreative pleasure and helped demonstrate that female sexual pleasure was unnecessary for conception to occur, and that so long as semen could be obtained by “spontaneous emission,” male pleasure too might be ancillary to reproduction. As the Scottish doctor, R. Couper, put it, “Syringes could not communicate or meet with joy” (41).

In John Hunter’s Observations on Certain Parts of the Animal Economy (1792), one experiment helps to underscore further the perversification of normative sexual pleasure. This essay had already appeared in the Royal Society’s famous Philosophical Transactions (1787). To determine whether women’s limited fertility can be explained by a natural period of fecundity, or whether “repeated acts of propagation” wear out the ovaries, Hunter removes one ovary from a sow to see if the number of pigs produced differs from the output of a perfect sow. Blake identifies Jack Tearguts as John Hunter in his manuscript of the Island in the Moon; Blake may have met him through Joseph Johnson’s radical circle or through his apprenticeship with James Basire, the official engraver to the Royal Society. Blake’s choice of “Tearguts” indicates his knowledge of Hunter’s medical experiments even as it renders Hunter into an object of satire. What those medical experiments made clear was that bodies and culture were far from mutually exclusive categories. Hunter showed that the perfect sow produces eighty-six more piglets than the spayed sow: only eleven more in the first eight farrows, but seventy-five more in farrows nine through thirteen. “It appears,” Hunter concludes, “that the desire for the male continues after the power of breeding is exhausted in the female; and therefore does not altogether depend on the powers of the ovaria to propagate” (88). By unhooking sexual desire and pleasure from the ability to propagate, Hunter suggested that sexual pleasure in fact might be perverse. Hunter’s medical casebooks reveal that he saw male patients “troubled by Erections and Emissions in [their] sleep” (66) because of strictures in the urethra; these nocturnal emissions indicated that pleasure might have no necessary connection to function. Moreover, by showing that repeated acts of propagation do not wear out the ovaries, Hunter weakened the connection between perverse sex and sterility. Having more sex than nature intended was believed to defy reproduction: this was the cultural logic that explained why prostitutes were thought to be barren.

Hunter did not stop with experiments on ovaries. He dealt the seeming natural connection between sexual pleasure and reproduction a more serious blow in 1776, though the results of the first successful human artificial insemination were not published until twenty-three years later in the Royal Society’s Philosophical Transactions in Everard Home’s “An Account of the Dissection of an Hermaphrodite Dog.” Home, John Hunter’s brother-in-law, was entrusted with Hunter’s manuscripts after his death. A man suffering from hypospadias—a deficiency of the urethra behind the scrotum—could ejaculate, but only behind the scrotum. He married and, of course, could not sire children. Hunter advised the husband to prepare a warm syringe to collect the semen and inject it into his wife’s vagina. A successful syringe-induced pregnancy ensued. Although this result would seem to make married heterosexual pleasure definitively perverse, in Home’s published account of the experiment Home makes it clear that “the female organs were still under the influence of coitus” (1799 162). The sundering of sexual pleasure from reproduction was far more subtle. Home only discusses this insemination at all to refute the notion that “imperfection[s] in the structure of the penis” necessitate defects in “the more essential organs of generation” (161–62). Hunter’s patient had a defective penis/urethra but not a defective testicle. Hunter’s success is used to separate the penis, the defective organ that gives the wife pleasure, from the more essential testicles, which make the emission. A failure in one does not indicate a failure in the other; hence, is pleasure truly tied to function? In any case, Hunter’s experiment showed conclusively that perversions—defects of nature—are not necessarily sterile.

Perhaps John Hunter’s demonstration of the perversity of sexual pleasure was not lost on the anatomist William Cruikshank, who sometimes lectured in the place of William Hunter and later carried on in Hunter’s Windmill Street School with Matthew Baillie after Hunter’s death. Refuting the notion that pain was divine punishment for sexual abstinence, Cruickshank claimed “to be of the opinion that abstinence from venery is not punished but Haller has different sentiments on the subject and says that it is punished in females by epilepsy and hysteria & c but to this Mr. C replies why should a woman have these disorders, when she’s married, if these arise from abstinence?”³² When pain can no longer be seen as divine punishment for not having sex, can pleasure be a form of divine reward?

At the same time as artificial insemination becomes possible, the nerves, the organs of sensation and pleasure, are being increasingly pathologized and feminized. If leisure, luxury, sensibility, urbanization, and passivity conspire to refine the leisure-class body, this refinement also makes that body effeminate and perversely sterile. Nerves begin the eighteenth century as masculine signs of strength or virtue and end the century pathologized and feminized into consumption, the uterine furor, menstrual irregularities, and that catch-all pathology, nervous diseases.³³ This enormous shift in thinking about nerves from strength to pathology, from masculinity to feminization, serves to make normative pleasure in Romanticism always on the verge of the perverse. Indeed, neurologists such as Charles Bell, James Vere, and Thomas Laycock suggest that the very aestheticization of the body of feeling is simultaneously a movement toward perversion and pathology. If the nervous system had the potential to heal the Cartesian split between mind and body (Figlio 179), that potential was compromised by the insistent threat of disease. Vere, governor of Bethlehem Hospital, argued that nervousness involved a conflict between lower-order instincts and moral instincts. Such a conflict made sexual desire central to health. Laycock listed ungratified desire, excited love, disappointed affection, and the fashion for women’s cinched-up waists as the underlying causes of nervous diseases for fashionable women (142). He therefore recommended marriage as the cure for hysteria (142). Even a key cure for nervous diseases, opium, helped make sexual pleasure perverse. At the same time that it helped to excite venery, it dulled the semen (Youngquist 93). Moreover, Dr. John Jones claimed that an opium high was even better than a sexual high, the effects comparable to “a permanent gentle Degree of that Pleasure, which modesty forbids the naming of” (cited in Youngquist 93).

Although the phrenologists Gall and Spurzheim insisted that “the function of the cerebellum is to manifest the instinct of reproduction” (Gall 1838 xxxii), their relocation of sexual desire from the testicles to the cerebellum or little brain had perhaps the unintended consequence of making that desire perverse on at least two levels. One, by insisting on mankind’s free will, they undermined this instinct. Two, they also separated sexual desire from parental love. Spurzheim declared that the cerebellum was part of consciousness itself, linking it with “phrenic life” as opposed to “vegetative life” (Anatomy 25). Gall’s ideas were well known in Britain at least since 1800 (Cooter 7), and Spurzheim lived and lectured in London from 1815 to 1832.³⁴ They also made it clear that, although man has “no power over the existence of desires and inclinations which depend upon his organization and the circumstances stimulating it,” the fact that he has multiple cerebral organs of higher order means that he can choose among motives and therefore determine himself (Temkin 1947 285). That the brain was far from an organic unity meant that choice was possible. Of course, such self-determination was compromised by the strength of feelings produced by even a moderately sized cerebellum (Gall 1838 xix). After connecting small cerebellums with effeminacy verging on sodomy, Gall notes that Kant had a small cerebellum (1838 24). To refute charges of materialism, Gall insisted that the existence and size of organs only spoke to the “possibility, not the reality of any passion” (Crabb Robinson 90), and in later works he insisted not only that it was the struggle against one’s own propensities that amounting to moral merit (Origin 6:9) but also that “the genital functions are for the most part subject to the will” (1838 4). Wordsworth’s and Coleridge’s friend, Henry Crabb Robinson, published an English translation of Gall in 1807 (Richardson 2001 36).

Spurzheim shrewdly gentrified the organ of sexual desire—Zeugungstrieb—into the more polite “organ of amativeness” (Cooter 78), and he did so because “it is inaccurate to choose a name according to any abuse of an organ … there can be none of libertinism … the names should express only the propensity” (Physiognomical System 280). He later explained that “amativeness” was in fact more accurate than “propagation,” because this instinct “often acts without there being any intention to continue the species, and is also satisfied in various ways incompatible with such a purpose” (Doctrine 134). Here the substitution of “amativeness” for “propagation” allows the organ to move from reproductive purpose to a Kantian “purposiveness without purpose” insofar as amativeness exceeds generation and reproduction can be irrelevant. Lest he be accused of advocating a kind of perverse amativeness, however, Spurzheim hastens to add that “the disorderly satisfaction of the amative propensity undermines the health of individuals, even of the species; and I think that as soon as young persons understand the difference and the distinction of the sexual functions, they should be taught the laws of propagation” (Doctrine 135). Where Foucault sees the Romantic period as one of “perverse implantation,” an explosion of perversions so that sex can intensify its power, Spurzheim suggests that it was one of heterosexual implantation insofar as he insists that propagation is far from innate: it must be taught. If perverse amativeness is ontologically prior to propagation, and propagation has to be taught, then how can perversion remain unnatural?

By situating the part of the brain devoted to parental love next to the organ of amativeness, Gall and Spurzheim sought to finesse the relationship between the two organs: desire will lead to parenting. The fact that they made these functions separable, that Spurzheim renamed the organ of desire the organ of amativeness as if the name change alone would change the nature of the organ from selfish indulgence to feelings for others, however, meant that pleasure was biologically incommensurate with function. Moreover, when they acknowledged that men had larger organs for desire while women had larger organs for parental love, they implied that, at least in the separate sexes, pleasure was perverse. Crabb Robinson’s translation of Gall went so far as to highlight the “inverse ratio” between the “organ of sexual passion” and the “organ of parenting,” insisting that licentious mothers were generally bad mothers (89). In calling attention to this inverse ratio, Gall explicitly refuted the idea that these two organs were too closely connected “to be distinguished from it” (89). My point here is that Gall and Spurzheim deliberately separated desire from parenting and that this separation could be liberating to the extent that amativeness did not naturally or even necessarily lead to reproduction. Anticipating Freud’s sense that we are all perverts, “amativeness” thus inserted a perversion of both sexual object and sexual aim within human desire.

If this gap between desire and parenting did not cause enough problems, Gall conceded that “the function, or tendency of the activity of an organ, is graduated according to the degree of its development or excitement” (Origin 1:216). This meant that if the organ were too little developed, “impotence, indifference, or even aversion to the other sex” could result (ibid.). Gall further argued that a “really large” cerebellum would destroy “connubial bliss” (1838 xix), which implies that marriage would not always be able to domesticate the sexual passions. He also had the audacity to claim that “everyone knows there is no proportion between fecundity and the inclination to sexual embraces” (1838 17). Hence, Gall warned, “too ardent a flame may present obstacles to fecundation” and continued that “there are men and women who perform the act of cohabitation only as an act of duty” (1838 17, 23). He added, “I am acquainted with women … who, although they have borne several children, have never experienced the least sensation of pleasure” (17).

Of course, Gall enabled his phrenological system to compensate for such an absence of proportion between desire/pleasure and fecundity: he showed there was a proportion between the size of one’s cerebellum and the sexual inclination even if that proportion could no longer predict reproductive success. Lecturing in Paris in 1810, he blamed “excessive development of the cerebellum” for sodomy, making it clear that he felt sodomy was akin to bestiality.³⁵ By 1835, Gall made “individuals who are tormented with a singular predilection for their own sex” exceptions to his system, remarking instead that they “have in general a small head, delicate features, dimpled hands, and developed breast; whilst females, on the contrary, are masculine in appearance and in manners” (Manual 157–58). The connections between sexual desire and fecundity were further sundered by Gall’s recounting of the fact that some like to be hanged so that they can produce erections. These examples perhaps led him to conclude that “men have always been, and will always be, inclined to all sorts of perverse actions; they have always been, and will always be, tormented by carnal desires” (Origin 1:212). In sum, Gall and Spurzheim underscored numerous gaps between normative sexual pleasure and function, gaps encapsulated in the phrenological axiom that “structure does not reveal function” (Spurzheim Anatomy 204), and they did so in part to avoid charges of materialism and atheism as well as to preserve free will. In this, they were perhaps less than successful: Doctor J. P. Tupper’s Inquiry into Doctor Gall’s System (1819) concluded that his “system furnishes a most fertile source of excuses for the commission of crimes, and is subversive of all civil and social order” (165).

Because neurology emphasized the vast neural networks that connected parts of the body, it made it possible to see the anus itself as an erogenous zone. Although Erasmus Darwin insists that “pleasurable sensation” is “necessary to copulation” (2:261) in Zoonomia (1794), he undermines this connection between pleasure and copulation when he points out that although male nipples “erect on titillation like those of the female” they “seem to be of no further use” (1: 171) and when he discusses priapism (3:77, 3:411). Switching to the more scientific Latin, Darwin also notes that “from their first swaddling clothes, boys’ penises may be reached for more frequently; though love has not yet awakened” (1:46), and this implies that pleasure has no necessary connection to reproduction.³⁶ Alan Richardson comments that “the suggestions of polymorphous or ambiguous sexuality … find resonance in Darwin, who postulates an ‘original single sex’ … that accounts … for the human male’s possession of seemingly useless nipples” (2001 62).

But once pleasure has been located in the anus, it has become definitively perverse. Erasmus Darwin concludes his three-volume Zoonomia with an example of a fifty-year old gentleman who had applied to Darwin for help because of imperfect erections. Darwin writes,

A gentleman about 50 years of age, who had lived too freely, as he informed me, both in respect to wine and women, complained that his desire for the sex remained, and that he occasionally parted with semen, but with the defect of a perfect tensio penis, and that he had tried 20 drops of laudanum, and 20 drops of tincture of cantharides on going to bed without effect; and that as the debility or irritability of the system in this case rather than any mental affection seemed to be part of the cause, he was advised to stimulate the sphincter ani by the introduction of a piece of root ginger, as is done by the horse dealers to sale horses. And however ridiculous the operation may appear, he assured me, that it succeeded; which I suppose might be owing to the sympathy between the sphincter and the penis; which is often the cause of the painful sensation in the former, when a stone at the neck of the bladder affects the latter; and conversely when painful piles affect the rectum, a strangury is sometimes produced by sympathy. (3:505–6)

Although it is true that Darwin recommends the stimulation of the anal sphincter in the service of heterosexual sex, the passage above is nonetheless interesting because it emphasizes the sympathy between the anus and the penis, thus explaining how sodomy can be a form of pleasurable sex, and brings beasts and men in proximity to one another (he learns about this technique from what horse dealers do to their horses to advertise their virility). Despite the fact that anal stimulation is in service of heterosexual sex, Darwin makes a point of noting the procedure’s “ridiculousness” even as he erases his own presence when he dispenses the advice: Darwin noticeably turns to the passive voice at the moment of advice, claiming “he [the patient] was advised.”³⁷ The neurological connection between the anus and penis thus perversely binds together sodomy and heterosexuality, excrement and sexuality, and sodomy and sexual pleasure.

Railing against sodomites, the poet Charles Churchill decries the fact that “Women are kept for nothing but the breed/For pleasure we must have a Ganymede” (“The Times” 20). Freud would later comment that the position of the genitals—“inter urinas et faeces”—was a decisive factor in human sexuality (cited in Dollimore Sexual Dissidence 257). Darwin’s argument is part of the genealogy of how the anus and the genitals became sexual.

My emphasis thus far has been to show how Romantic science enabled scientists and poets to understand normative sexual pleasure as increasingly perverse and make it separable from reproduction. Medical interest in nocturnal emissions, the titillation of the male nipple, and the clitoris, an organ of pleasure with no known function in reproduction, made it clear that pleasure did not necessarily have a function. Now that pleasure had no natural role, it could be constructed as a liberating force rather than as a discovered ground of reality. Such perversification of pleasure was intensified by the multiple strategies of birth control available in the Romantic period: in A History of Contraception, Angus McClaren had detailed herbal contraceptives, the sponge and other barrier methods, the condom, coitus interruptus, abortion, and extended lactation (65–87).³⁸ Wordsworth’s “The Thorn” alludes to infanticide as a possible means of eradicating the consequences of sexual intercourse. Francis Place began distributing his practical contraceptive handbills in 1823 to the working classes from Manchester to London, and it was Place who prompted Richard Carlisle to write Every Woman’s Book, in which he advocated contraception so that the working classes could have pleasurable intercourse without fear of the consequences.

I now focus briefly on Linnaean botany and its introduction into England because Linnaean botany, popularized by Erasmus Darwin’s Botanic Garden (1791), puts lie to perverse forms of sexuality being unproductive. Compounding the gap between normative sexual pleasure and function in this period was a second gap between perverse sex and sterility. Together, these gaps showed that perversity was more about social convention than it was about naturalness: although perversion masks itself as a violation of nature, it is in fact only a violation of outdated social conventions. If heterosexual pleasure was functionless, and if perverse sex could lead to reproduction, then was function a stable natural ground upon which to valorize certain sex acts over others? Linnaean botany thus made it clear that nature herself was teeming with perverts. Moreover, in The Elements of Botany (1775), an exposition of the Linnaean system, the author comments that “no luxuriant flowers are natural, but all monsters; full flowers are eunuchs, and therefore always miscarry; … proliferous flowers increase the deformity” (152). The irony is in the fact that the very flowers that we consider most beautiful are really the ones that are the most monstrous. Not only were many female flowers thought to be “seductive harlots” (Browne 159), but also parent plants incestuously mingled with their offspring (Teute 325).

The perversity of plants is, however, much more complicated than the foregoing suggests. James Jenkinson’s Generic and Specific Description of British Plants highlighted the “promiscuous use” of even staid British plants (1775 xvii). And in the botanical society of Lichfield’s sponsored translation of Carl Linneaus’s Families of Plants (1787), plants were divided into a productive sexual system based almost entirely upon the arrangement and number of male parts, which included hermaphrodite flowers (flowers with stamens/husbands and pistils/wives in the same flower); flowers with as many as twenty males together; polygamous flowers (husbands and wives who live together with their concubines); clandestine flowers, flowers with hidden sexual parts; and flowers that reproduced with “feminine males” or stamens that were inserted on the pistils.³⁹ Polygamous flowers were further divided into: equal polygamy and spurious polygamy, with spurious polygamy—where the “beds of the married occupy the disk, and those of the concubines the circumference”—being yet still further divided into superfluous polygamy, frustraneous polygamy, necessary polygamy, and separate polygamy (lxxx). That polygamy could be necessary in cases where the married females are barren and the concubines fertile meant that bourgeois marriage might not be the best means of reproduction if either the husband or wife were barren or sterile.

It is the category of spurious but necessary polygamy that most renders absurd social conventions that legitimate one form of sexual activity over another. For one, since plants have no legitimating ceremony how does one distinguish between married plants and a male plant and his concubine? Second, what makes the relationship of a male plant and his concubine spurious if multiple sexual partners are deemed natural? And, yet, even within the defiance of social conventions lies the reinscription of those very conventions: the very need to make distinctions between polygamy among married couples, and polygamy between married couples and concubines hints that, although Botany flirted with the idea of a natural pornotopia,⁴⁰ a never-never land where sexuality is untainted by social reality, even polygamy could not do without what Gayle Rubin calls a “charmed circle” whereby certain acts are accorded more validity than others.

All of this “natural” erotic diversity put considerable pressure on the notion that reproductive sex between married couples was the only kind of procreative and therefore legitimate sex because flowers so successfully reproduced under so many differing “domestic” arrangements. Clandestine flowers in particular were perhaps a gibe against the 1753 Clandestine Marriage Act, which made all marriages illegal unless banns had been publicly proclaimed in the couple’s parish previous to the ceremony. This was to discourage the wealthy from marrying without parental consent. If flowers “married” clandestinely, why should the clandestine marriage of human beings be illegal? Not even Erasmus Darwin’s technically perfect rhyming couplets, insisting on the propriety of pairs, could monogamize the kinds of plant polygamy that the doctor, father of two illegitimate daughters himself, so eagerly cataloged in his Botanic Garden. Indeed, Darwin’s couplets had much to discipline. Darwin was careful to praise the virtue of the monogamous Canna or Indian reed and to wag his finger at more licentious forms of “plant hymen” (BG 4:183). As Fredrika Teute points out, Darwin’s “sexual-social fantasy was not just the provenance of men; women partook of liberation too” (333). Alan Bewell comments that “by the 1790s, botanical pastoralism took a decidedly revolutionary turn, as it began to question explicitly the universality of European sexual customs and attitudes, notably the institution of marriage and concepts of sexual difference” (1996 184–85).⁴¹ And Janet Browne highlights the radical implications of Darwin’s materialism: “there was a great deal of ambiguous materialism, possibly even atheism, in Darwin’s outspoken rejection of traditional Anglican ethics in favor of the supposed sexual freedoms of classical antiquity” (161).

Linneaus’s and Darwin’s critics recognized how botany was naturalizing erotic diversity; they sought to counter this by insisting upon the perversity of Linneaus’s terms or the sloppiness of his scientific methods. Critics thus called attention to the “harlotry” of plants and the promiscuousness of pollen, arguing that nature could hardly have intended such perverse forms of sexuality (Schiebinger 30). Spallanzani insisted that botany would have been better served had Linneaus first determined whether the husbands he cataloged had “performed their office,” before he erected a system of classification that relied so heavily on counting husbands (1784 2:424). Colin Milne, author of A Botanical Dictionary (1778), carped that, although many have extolled the ease of Linneaus’s system, that ease “only exists in theory”; moreover, “none of the classes are [sic] completely natural, though some … might have been rendered such, without any material violence to the principles of the method” (“Chart Showing the Sexual System of Linneaus”). Not only is Linneaus guilty of perverting plants, but his very system of classification also is enshrining perversion—“material violence” to nature—within science itself.

In light of all these radical implications of the loves of the plants, it is no accident that Byron and his circle code their homosexuality in botanical terms. Charles Matthews writes to Byron, “I take it that the flowers you will be most desirous of culling will be of the class nogynia” (cited in Crompton 1985 129; Dyer 568). In one fell swoop, Byron and his friends could attack religion, return to a liberating classical sexuality, one that could conceive of pederasty as being a higher form of love than married heterosexual love, and undermine heteronormativity.

Foucault, Science, and Sexual Liberation

Now that I have laid out some of the medical grounds for why sexuality could become coupled with liberation during Romanticism, we are equipped to reexamine Foucault’s legacy for the history of sexuality in the Romantic period. Michel Foucault has almost single-handedly made sexual liberation seem like a quaint delusion. Foucault’s skepticism about sexual liberation is grounded upon two premises. The first is that the repression/liberation binary opposition reduces power to working in a crude juridical form and thus cannot address how pleasure becomes power. Hence, Foucault argues that “saying yes to sex is not saying no to power” (HS 1:157). But this is not news to scientists working in the Romantic period: Franz Gall warned his readers not to mistake pleasure for liberty. Gall insisted, “It is this satisfaction which misleads the individual, and makes him imagine that in this case he acts with freedom” (Origin 1:212). Nor is it news to Percy Shelley, who equated unbridled lust with tyranny, or to Byron, who warned that “headlong passions form their proper woes” (DJ 5:6). Foucault has influenced the historian of sexuality Jeffrey Weeks to dismiss sexual liberation as a “delusion, a God that failed” (13).

Foucault’s second ground for skepticism is based on his sense that liberation movements have accepted the basic principle that there is such a thing as “life,” about which knowledge can be had, and that sexuality is one area of such knowledge. For Foucault, sex is not a ground reality beneath the historical formation of sexuality: getting beyond sexuality to sex does not in fact move beyond power. Hence, he writes, “the rallying point for the counterattack against the deployment of sexuality ought not to be sex-desire, but bodies and pleasures” (HS 1:157).⁴² One might ask here how it is that “bodies and pleasures” stand outside of “biopower” while sexual desire doesn’t. Foucault seems to suggest that while pleasure is a form of power, it is not a form of knowledge, and he therefore thinks it can be a rallying point for resistance. His archeology of the sciences accordingly shows again and again how science as a discipline organizes the “truth games” of sexuality without allowing them to be seen as truth games.⁴³

The Romantics anticipated both of these skepticisms, yet they still held onto the possibility of meaningful sexual liberation. But why? If pleasure and sex as well as sexuality exist within a grid of power/knowledge, there is no need to give up liberation in favor of pleasure because both pleasure and liberation have the same possibilities and liabilities. The Romantics realized that pleasure and sexuality could be worked for both resistance and domination.

Like Foucault, the Romantics too could be skeptical that sexual liberation was meaningful liberation. If the gaps between normative sexual pleasure and function helped to make sexual liberation seem possible, this gap also enabled the Romantics to recognize the gaps between pleasure and liberation and between liberation and liberty. In Percy Shelley’s concepts of “anarchy” and “wanton,” referring to a spoiled and lascivious child (Reiman and Fraistat [R&F] 2002 266), an individual guided by the whims of desire, he consistently denounces a libertine sensualism that is merely hedonism. Where Blake’s notion of Beulah points to the fecklessness of vegetative sex and sexual permissiveness, his depiction of Vala as “Sexual Death living on accusation of Sin & Judgment” (Jerusalem 64:22 E 215) indicates his acknowledgment of how sex becomes power. Moreover, Blake suggests that because women are falsely taught to value chastity as a virtue, it is difficult for them to know their own desires. And although feminist critics have argued that Blakean sexual liberation is for men only, Blake has female Earth acknowledge that “free Love [can be] with bondage bound” (“Earth’s Answer” E 19).⁴⁴

For Blake, sexuality can be liberating only if it leads to self-annihilation, the loss of all forms of self-righteousness including male egotism. Byron’s emphasis on the youthful Don Juan’s effeminacy undermines any neat equation of pleasure and subversion. Nor do the Romantics understand sexual desire and pleasure as intrinsically liberating; in fact, they insist that sexual permissiveness can mask oppression under pleasure and that sexual intimacy is short-lived and must be subsumed under a more durable form of caring. Percy Shelley deliberately contrasts the tyrant Othman’s rape of Cyntha with the pastoral, mutual, and incestuous embraces of Cyntha and Laon precisely to underscore the potential abuses of desire. If the Romantics bought into the notion that despots, Oriental or otherwise, invariably manifested their political tyranny in sexual terms, one’s sexual conduct could be a symptom of a larger despotism. Shelley’s paradoxical definition of wisdom and love as “but slaves of equality” (Laon’s Song of Liberty, RI, stanza 3), signals his skepticism that desire is necessarily tantamount to liberty. Shelley in fact argued that “the conviction that wedlock is indissoluble holds out the strongest of all temptations to the perverse” (R&F 2:253). Because marriage encouraged selfishness and the idea of women as property, Shelley turned instead to sibling incest as a paradigmatic sexual relationship of equality.

Consider too Thel’s highly ambiguous entry into sexual knowledge—her final acts are to shriek and flee—not to mention Orc’s rapes. By linking sex and rape, the poet entertained the notion that “the value of sexuality itself is to demean the seriousness of efforts to redeem it” (Bersani “Rectum” 222). Blake shows that, if desire is an impetus for revolution, the disruptiveness of desire cannot be controlled even by the liberator. Blake thus anticipates a charge that Jonathan Dollimore levels against queer activists: desire is only disruptive for everyone else since the queer activist is never undone by desire. Dollimore thus muses that the “rhetoric of liberation” in much queer theory “is a cover for the self-empowerment of a politically conservative kind,” a kind of empowerment that contains desire under identity (Literature 25). Blake’s Orc, by contrast, is constantly on the verge of becoming another (Jesus, Luvah, etc.). For Blake, desire will not be contained by identity and ego, and it potentially shatters them both.

The Romantics also understood the gaps between liberation from something and the general condition of freedom. Hannah Arendt incisively claims that “liberation may be the condition of freedom but by no means leads automatically to it; that the notion of liberty implied in liberation can only be negative; and hence, that even the intention of liberating is not identical with the desire for freedom” (On Revolution 22), and her point was hardly lost on Romantic artists. Percy Shelley in Laon and Cythna shows that recently liberated peoples often resort to vengeance and murder in the name of justice: once freed from the Tyrant Othman, the people cry, “He who judged let him be brought/To judgement! blood for blood cries from the soil …” (5:32). Laon intervenes, however, demanding, “What call ye justice? Is there one who ne’er/In secret thought has wished another’s ill?—/Are ye all pure?” (5:34). Of course, Shelley’s insistence that the failures of the French Revolution did not undermine the idea of revolution itself leads the poet to ask in his Preface, “Can he who the day before was a trampled slave suddenly become liberal minded, forbearing, and independent?” Shelley further recognized that the criteria of liberation can be set so high that they are unreachable: “such a degree of unmingled good was expected as it was impossible to realize” (Preface). The poet’s central image of “An Eagle and a Serpent wreathed in fight” thus serves as a reminder that liberation and domination are inextricably intertwined. That both the serpent and the eagle symbolize liberation and repression furthers Shelley’s anticipation of Foucault, that liberation is not freedom, but is, contra Foucault, a necessary step on the way to freedom. Although the serpent initially serves as an emblem of freedom, by Canto 9 it becomes an emblem of hate in the “snaky folds” of the heart (9:21) and “serpent Custom’s tooth” (9:27). By giving custom serpentine teeth, Shelley overturns Burke’s claim that custom was the foundation of British Liberty.

For the Romantics, it was difficult to imagine biological sex as a ground reality for the simple reason that biology itself was a nascent discipline, only just beginning to understand the implications of life and the differences between the physical sciences and biology. Not only did vitalism complicate the very possibility of a ground reality, since that ground was always in flux, but the skepticism explicitly within science itself also further ironizes that ground. That medical jurisprudence as in its formative stages—Samuel Farr published the first English book on medical jurisprudence in 1788—meant that such disciplines were just beginning to teach others what the bodily signs of consent, murder, especially infanticide, or false pregnancy and how to interpret them.⁴⁵ Whereas Foucault thought of the natural sciences as his enduring enemy because they constrain sex and sexuality and yet naturalize these constraints, I have tried here to suggest how the Romantics could perceive the sciences to be helpful to liberation because the sciences (1) repeatedly showed the resistance of sexual pleasure to reproductive function, a resistance that made it difficult to consolidate heterosexual sex into heteronormativity; (2) had more nuanced and flexible understandings of ontology and ontological narratives than we now do; and (3) demonstrated that historical constructions could facilitate both resistance as well as power/knowledge. To the extent that it was possible for the Romantics to see sex as a Foucauldian truth game, Blake, Hunt, Shelley, and Byron realized that they could use the insights of science for their own liberating ends. Yet this does not mean that embodiment could not be therapeutic because it might locate utopianism within the body and make subversion biological, thereby rendering it difficult to eradicate.

Fredric Jameson may help us to think about how sexual liberation then could be meaningful. He argues that, in order for pleasure to become “genuinely political, if it is to evade the complacencies of hedonism—[it] must always in one way or another also be able to stand as a figure for the transformation of social relations as a whole” (74). Building upon Jameson’s work, I suggest that Romantic writers and scientists recognized how others used sex as a powerful form of allegory for political power, an allegory that is occluded by claims to naturalness and transparent representation. By turning to sexual intimacy to think about meaningful consent and genuine intersubjectivity, Blake, Hunt, and the Shelleys made pleasure an allegory for human relationships generally. Hence Blake, on the one hand, links Orcian revolution with sexual desire yet, on the other hand, insistently demarcates between fallen and unfallen love, thus rendering sex multiple and allegorical. I have argued that, because Percy Shelley could not imagine sodomy as pleasurable in his essay on the “Manners of the Ancient Greeks,” he therefore could not imagine that anyone would consent to it.⁴⁶

Why, despite these considerable skepticisms, did the Romantics cling to sexual liberation? Insofar as liberation mandated that repressors be identified, the Romantics found the targets of Malthus, the church and state, enabled them to channel fruitfully their liberating energies. Hannah Arendt reminds us that the “fruits of liberation” are the “removal of restraint” and the ability to move about freely: “these are the [very] condition of freedom” (25). And whereas Foucault insisted that liberation did not dismantle power, but merely extended its grasp (Dean 283), the Romantics found the always shifting ground of the sexed body made it possible to “perceive subordination, where differentials of power seem necessary, as oppression, a site of potential antagonism” (Laclau and Mouffe 153). Indeed shifting representations of the body made it possible to see how subordination masks oppression, how gender inequality is no longer justified. In the words of Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, the Romantics could now “identify the conditions in which a relation of subordination becomes a relation of oppression and thereby constitutes itself into the site of an antagonism” (153). Laclau and Mouffe’s example, we should recall, is Mary Wollstonecraft, who pointedly argued that women must have physical exercise; she reasoned that if women were allowed to arrive at “perfection of body, … we may know how far the natural superiority of man extends” (VRW 182–83). The sciences thus made it possible to “propose the different forms of inequality as illegitimate and anti-natural, and thus make them equivalent as forms of oppression” (Laclau and Mouffe 155). As Shelley’s Cyntha puts it, “Never will peace and human nature meet/Till free and equal man and woman greet/Domestic peace” (Laon and Cythna 2:37). Because Cyntha must have power in order to dethrone the tyrant Othman, Shelley sees liberation not so much as a liberation from power, but as a reorganization of how power works.

Part of the reason why historians of sexuality such as Weeks are so skeptical of sexual liberation is that he was and we are so removed from an eighteenth-century philosophical tradition that understood pleasure itself as a moral category. Locke’s moral hedonism stipulated that pleasure is good and pain is bad; Burke sought to solidify these distinctions in his Enquiry into the Origins of the Sublime and Beautiful. Our own skepticism that pleasure is feckless or merely self-indulgent thus renders a work like Jeremy Bentham’s A Table of the Springs of Action as being impossibly strange. Bentham grounded virtue in pleasure and vice in pain.⁴⁷ And he concluded that “legislators, moralists, and divines, finding [sexual desire] operating, to so great an extent, and with so efficient a force, in opposition to their views and endeavors, make unceasing war upon it” (18). If Bentham helps us to see why sexual desire would logically become a primary site of antagonism in this period, he also reminds us that pleasure could achieve moral ends. Bentham also puts further pressure on Foucault’s privileging of bodies and pleasures as opposed to liberation, since pleasure is so clearly tied to knowledge. Of course, when Bentham has to concede that the pederast finds “intense pleasure” in “odious and disgusting acts”—“it gives him pleasure” (“Essay on Paederasty” 94–95), pleasure would prove to be a problematic ground for morality. He thus justifies the decriminalization of sodomy on the grounds that the desire for severe punishment of sodomy is based upon an even more unnatural (more unnatural than sodomy) hatred of sexual pleasure and the fact that the punishment, hanging, inflicts more harm than the offense itself. “Moral antipathy is the more ready when the idea of pleasure, especially of intense pleasure, is connected with that of the act by which the antipathy is excited” (95), thunders Bentham.

In sum, Romantic skepticism about sexual liberation makes it possible to revisit and revalue this concept and necessary to rethink the extent to which pleasure can lead to positive social change. By replacing function with a kind of purposive, if perverse, mutuality, the Romantics made it possible to use sexuality as an index of mutuality and, in so doing, gauge the extent to which liberation had been achieved and for whom, especially since the gaps between liberation and liberty were a given.

I now turn to the work of the sociologist Anthony Giddens because it suggests both a counter-narrative to the Foucauldian history of sexuality and the possibility of thinking about sexual liberation as meaningful. Whereas Foucault’s skepticism about sexual liberation is helpful for articulating the Romantic’ own skepticism about it, Foucault has made the reasons for the Romantic valuing of sexual liberation opaque. Giddens allows us to understand why.

Giddens himself critiques Foucault on the grounds that “power moves in mysterious ways in Foucault’s writings, and history as the actively made achievement of human subjects scarcely exists” (24). Moreover, because Foucault writes a history of sexuality without intimacy, Giddens argues that Foucault cannot acknowledge the democraticization of sexuality. In The Transformation of Intimacy, Giddens argues that plastic sexuality, sexuality freed from the needs of reproduction, began in the late eighteenth century as a means of limiting family size, and he insists that plastic sexuality is necessary for emancipatory intimacy, “a transactional negotiation of personal ties by equals” (2–3). Giddens is not blind to the “deep psychological, as well as economic differences between the sexes [that] stand in the way of the achievement of an ethical framework for a democratic personal order” (188), but he argues that this utopian ideal is offset by what he sees as a “trend of development of modern societies toward their realization” (188). Changes in sexual attitudes have been emancipatory even if they have not achieved emancipation (172). In constantly weighing the utopic elements of sexual liberation against measurable political change, both Giddens and the Romantics well before him, I suggest, make an important if unacknowledged contribution to the achievement of emancipatory intimacy as the basis for societal liberty, even if their own practices fall considerably short of this ideal.⁴⁸ Blake’s depictions of fellatio in Milton thus eroticize what otherwise might remain an abstract concept, brotherhood. And when Coleridge wrote in his notebook, “I desire because I love, and [I do] not imagine I love because I desire” (no. 3284), he anticipates Giddens insofar as he rejects a necessary connection between sex and power and chooses instead the possibility of mutual love as the basis for social relations. As Shelley’s Laon and Cythna and Queen Mab, Byron’s Manfred and Don Juan, Anna Seward’s “Llangollen Vale,” and Blake’s Jerusalem all attest, the Romantics were at least theoretically committed to what Giddens calls a “pure relationship,” a “situation where a social relation is entered into for its own sake, for what can be derived by each person from a sustained association with one another; and which is continued only so far as it is thought by both parties to deliver enough satisfaction for each individual to stay within it” (58). As Romanticism continues to reevaluate the impact of gender on its canon, we would do well to remember this possibility. And as more nuanced understandings of the role of science and sex in the Romantic period are attained, we might gain a richer sense of its contexts, politics, aesthetics, and pleasures. Finally, the Romantics might help us to think about how liberation and sexuality became linked in the first place so that both together might enable some meaningful resistance.

I give the final word to Hannah Arendt, who writes of the age of the American and French revolutions that “the eagerness to liberate and to build a new house where freedom can dwell, is unprecedented and unequaled in all of human history” (28). Perhaps in the Romantic period that house could be the human body.