The Victorian Age has long been associated with a harsh, repressive, and contradictory sexual puritanism, a puritanism which, allied with moral hypocrisy, marched arm in arm with a flourishing pornography. It was an age when the authoritarian paterfamilias presided over the institutionalisation of the double standard, while the purity of the pedastalised mother and wife depended on the degradation of the fallen woman, and when sex was publicly, indeed ostentatiously denied, only to flourish in the fertile undergrowth. Yet simultaneously and apparently paradoxically, the nineteenth century saw the debate about sexuality explode. Far from the age experiencing a regime of silence and total suppression, sex became a major issue in Victorian discourse and political practice. It pervaded the social consciousness, from the widespread statistically-based discussions of the birth rate, death rate, life expectancy, and fertility to the urgent controversies over public health, housing, birth control, and prostitution. Moreover, particularly in the latter part of the era, a new taxonomic and labelling zeal attempted to classify 'scientifically' the characteristics and increasingly the aetiologies of the forms of sexual variety, and thereby helped to construct them as objects of study and as sexual categories. But this explosion in the debate about sexuality should not be taken as signifying a sharp break at the turn of the nineteenth century or at the accession of Queen Victoria or whatever. On the contrary, the changing symbolic role of sexuality was a product of long and complex changes, changes unevenly enforced over the population as a whole, and it coexisted with strong elements of continuity, especially with regard to the central organising significance of Christianity.
2006-09-08
16:45:08
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lward35206
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Other - Arts & Humanities