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Gender Roles and Sexuality in Victorian Literature, edited by Christopher Parker; pp. xii + 194. Aldershot, England: Scolar Press; Brookfield, VT: Ashgate Publishing Company, 1995, 39.95, $59.95.
Do not be fooled by the title. Christopher Parker's collection of essays, Gender Roles and Sexuality in Victorian Literature, is not strictly a work of literary criticism so much as a study of Victorian literature as an historical phenomenon. Parker has collected eight essays which explore the debates about sexuality in England from the 1850s to the end of the Victorian era by examining the way these debates are represented in newspapers, magazines, letters, and non-canonical literature. The essays cover a wide range of subjects, and together they demonstrate that any attempts to characterize easily the era's attitude toward sexuality will necessarily be reductive. As Parker writes in his Introduction, "as much effort, in the mid and late Victorian era, was put into debating and challenging those [so-called 'Victorian' attitudes] as into maintaining them" (21).
Parker's Introduction provides a good survey of these debates. On one side of the issue were the early feminists, who argued that women should be educated for more than marriage, and that men and women should strive to attain the desirable qualities of both sexes. These views contradicted more conservative beliefs about the "natural" differences between the sexes which had become popular with the middle class (and which Victoria and Albert represented for so many). In many cases, "manly ideals" (courage, dignity, seriousness) were elevated to "human ideals" (10) and female ideals (gentleness, kindness, active sympathy) were desirable only in the home "and certainly not in literature" (12)....