Unstable Bodies

by Matus, Jill L.

• ISBN13: 9780719043482
• ISBN10: 0719043484
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 1995-03-01
• Publisher: Manchester Univ Pr

Summary

Jill Matus uses bio-medical, social scientific and literary texts to interrogate Victorian concepts of sexual difference. Departing from the usual critical focus on Victorian conceptions of the sexes as incommensurably different, she emphasises the powerful effects in Victorian culture of notions of sexual instability and approximation.
While ideas about mutable or ambiguous sexuality provoked fear and fascination, they also served Victorian middle-class ideology by offering 'scientific' ways of constructing racial, class and national identity in terms of the body.
Throughout this period fierce public debates raged around prostitution, infanticide, working-class sexuality, female reproduction and domesticity. Drawing on works by Elizabeth Gaskell, George Eliot and the Brontes, Matus explores the dialogue between literary and other discourses of sexuality.
Unstable bodies will be an essential reference work for students and scholars working in Victorian literary and cultural studies, feminist studies, and the history of sexuality.

Author Biography

Jill L. Matus is an Associate Professor of English at the University of Toronto, Scarborough College.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements
Introduction: Unstable bodies	p. 1
Sexual slippage and approximation in Victorian biomedical discourse	p. 21
Sex as a continuum	p. 25
Nature and culture	p. 36
The sexual instincts	p. 40
The politics of instability	p. 47
The making of the moral mother: working class sexuality in Mary Barton	p. 56
Confession, secrecy and exhibition	p. 89
Agnes Grey and the 'animal side of life'	p. 90
Passionlessness and prostitution in Ruth	p. 113
Looking at Cleopatra: the exhibition and expression of desire in Villette	p. 131
Maternal deviance	p. 157
Wet-nurses, infanticide and the discourse of motherhood	p. 157
'The unnaturalness of her crime': maternal instinct in Adam Bede	p. 167
Sorrow on the Sea: The business of maternity	p. 179
Madness and badness: Lady Audley's Secret	p. 186
From hysteria to maternity: Saint Teresa and the Madonna in Middlemarch	p. 213
Conclusion	p. 249
Select bibliography	p. 251
Index	p. 269
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