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· ‘Victorian sex’: Not your great-great-grandfather’s oxymoron.

By MICHAEL LEVENSON [Slate] – Pleasure Bound follows Foucault in claiming that respectable Victorianism had sex leaking out of every decorous pore. Its special claim is that two subcultures—one around Rossetti, one around Burton—were sites of an erotic bohemianism that rose to challenge and finally to defeat the upright followers of the Society for the Suppression of Vice. The Rossetti circle—a network of family members, fellow painters, critics, and poets as well as female models, plucked from lives that were meager or worse—not only generated a London avant-garde, a precursor to the confrontational modernisms of the coming decades, but also risky experiments in living. The first half of the book is a speedy tour through familiar scenes of indulgence, Rossetti among the prostitutes and models, Swinburne in theatrical intoxicated revelry.

At one point Lutz quotes a disappointed Swinburne on the Marquis de Sade: “I looked for some sharp and subtle analysis of lust—some keen dissection of pain and pleasure,” but he found instead that Sade took “bulk and number for greatness.” Lutz is like Sade (and I’m like the disappointed Swinburne) at least in this respect. She collects anecdotes from the standard biographies and correspondence, threading them on a string that loops without knotting. Alongside her principals come flocks of cameo pornographers, itchy writers, and louche painters—and those models. Yet all the protagonists are male, with the women reduced to mere quickly potted biographies. The book leaves the “new eroticism” as a masculine invention. It’s one tryst after another, one flagellation after the next. Tales that have been told many times are condensed here, and we have to ask, Why? Why tell them again, and why offer them as a reader’s digest of short hot flings? And then why assume that transgression is rebellion?

Something happens, though, in the final third of the book that restores faith in ambitious authors and in the glory of sex.

Continued at Slate | More Chronicle & Notices.

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