ORCID
https://orcid.org/0009-0008-8029-7049
Date of Award
8-14-2023
Degree Name
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
Degree Type
Dissertation
Abstract
This dissertation excavates a literary history of sexology, the nineteenth-century science of sexuality, in novels published in England from 1890 to 1936. My archive spans the turn of the twentieth century, a moment when previously assured categories of “gender” and “sex” were revealed to be biologically and culturally changeable. I argue that fin-de-siècle writers used the sexological genre of the case study and figure of “the invert” to negotiate the sexual upheaval of their period. At the end of the nineteenth century, sexological figure and form transition easily from science to literature, as I evidence in Gothic novels by Oscar Wilde and Bram Stoker. The First World War then drains the case study of explanatory power, a shift I reveal by juxtaposing E. M. Forster’s record of prewar gay male life with Radclyffe Hall’s tragic account of interwar inversion. “The invert,” conversely, remains a generative figure for novelists long after sexology loses cultural relevance. A metaphor for homosexuality and trans identity, “the invert” condenses diverse experiences of sexuality and gender into a single figure. It is this overdetermined quality, I argue, that motivates the afterlife of a figure capacious enough to anchor both Aldous Huxley’s misogynistic allegory and Virginia Woolf’s feminist satire of the postwar “sex wars.” I close with a reading of Djuna Barnes that explains a trend in my archive in which “the invert” signifies not only queer but writerly identity. Throughout, this dissertation centers the “history” in its subtitle, maintaining historically accurate frameworks and language to insist we think gender and sexuality together at the turn of the century.
Language
English (en)
Chair and Committee
Vincent Sherry
Recommended Citation
Mros, Catherine Elizabeth, "Subject, Scientist, Novelist: A Literary History of Sexology at the Fin de Siècle" (2023). Arts & Sciences Electronic Theses and Dissertations. 3131.
https://openscholarship.wustl.edu/art_sci_etds/3131