Victorian Attitudes toward sexuality and sexual identity

[Victorian Web Home —> Political History —> Social History —> Gender Matters]

[Note: following links to sources at other websites will open new windows. Close them to return to the Victorian Web.]

General

• Victorian Theories of Sexuality (homepage)
• Victorian theories of sex and sexuality — a Brief Introduction
• Gender Defined [In Cyberspace and Critical Theory web]

Heterosexuality: Victorian Notions of Masculinity

• Introduction
• Sex and and Gender in Gilbert & Sullivan
• The Struggle for Manhood in Victorian Fiction
1. Introduction
2. Sons and Heirs: Anne Brontë's The Tenant of Wildfell Hall
3. Unregenerate Boys: Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights and Charles Reade's A Terrible Temptation
4. Youthful Heroics in Thomas Hughes, Dickens and Thackeray
5. The Problems of Hero-Worship
6. Towards "Brave Self-Reliance": Overcoming Frailties
7. A New Kind of Hero: Dickens's Great Expectations and Thackerays's The Adventures of Philip
8. Conclusion: Heroes of Their Own Lives
• The Law of the Father: Victorian Sentimentality and the New Fatherhood
• Trollope's Comfort Romances for Men: Heterosexual Male Heroism in his Work
• “Poor Lost Papa”: Old and New Fathers in Mid- and Late-Victorian Fiction
• Men in Tears: Moral, Physical, and Emotional Exhaustion in the Collins' Sensation Novels
• "Hegemonic masculinity" a more useful phrase for male power than "patriarchy"
• Trollope's sympathetic portraits of non-heroic men
• Masculinity in Charlotte Brontë, E. B. Browning, and Thomas Carlyle
• Men on the Town: Writing Late-Victorian London
• The Victorian Ideal: Male Characters in Jane Eyre and Villette

Heterosexuality: Victorian Notions of Femininity

• Trollope's Heroines
• Women's supposed predilection for clairvoyance and telepathy
• Wilkie Collins and "The Woman Question"
• Wives and Fathers: Fatherhood and Divorce Laws in the Victorian Novel
• The Victorian Custody Novel: Deceived and Deserted Daughters in The Evil Genius
• Leah Price on Women and Reading in Victorian England

Homosocial, Homosexual Sexual Identities: Lesbianism

• Sapphic Lesbianism
• Victorian Lesbianism

Homosocial, Homosexual Sexual Identities: Gay

• Victorian Theories of Inversion and Sexual Inversion
• Homosexual and Homosexuality rarely used before the twentieth century
• Homoerotic elements in British Public School Novels
• Spooning at Victorian Eton
• The Earliest Writers in English on Homosexuality (Columbia U. site)
• John Addington Symonds's defence of homosexuality (Rictor Norton's complex, elegant UK site)

Bisexuality

• Bisexuality as a More Coherent Approach to Sexual Identity

Androgyny and Hermaphroditism

• Hermaphroditism and Pseudo-Hermaphroditism
• Algernon Charles Swinburne and the Philosophy of Androgyny, Hermaphrodeity, and Victorian Sexual Mores
• Manliness in Trollope's Female Characters
• Sandism in reverse: the strange, marmorean beauty of Julia Ward Howe’s The Hermaphrodite

Gender and Science

• Medical and Physiological Understanding of Sexuality
• Contraception — state of knowledge, attitudes (material needed)

Gender and Society

• Wives and Fathers: Fatherhood and Divorce Laws in the Victorian Novel
• Love and Law in Wilkie Collins's Fictional Families
• "The Law of Abduction": Marriage and Divorce in Victorian Sensation and Mission Novels
• Sexual crimes

Bibliographies and Web Resources

• History of Sexuality Resources at Duke University

---

Victorian
Web

Gender
Matters

Last modified 10 February 2021