Between Women and Music... Sex

More recent scholar books with Villette relevant mentions:

Between Women: Friendship, Desire, and Marriage in Victorian England
Sharon Marcus
Princeton University Press
ISBN-10: 0691128359 (paperback)
ISBN-13: 978-0691128351 (paperback)
ISBN-10: 0691128200 (hardback)
ISBN-13: 978-0691128207 (hardback)

Women in Victorian England wore jewelry made from each other's hair and wrote poems celebrating decades of friendship. They pored over magazines that described the dangerous pleasures of corporal punishment. A few had sexual relationships with each other, exchanged rings and vows, willed each other property, and lived together in long-term partnerships described as marriages. But, as Sharon Marcus shows, these women were not seen as gender outlaws. Their desires were fanned by consumer culture, and their friendships and unions were accepted and even encouraged by family, society, and church. Far from being sexless angels defined only by male desires, Victorian women openly enjoyed looking at and even dominating other women. Their friendships helped realize the ideal of companionate love between men and women celebrated by novels, and their unions influenced politicians and social thinkers to reform marriage law.
Through a close examination of literature, memoirs, letters, domestic magazines, and political debates, Marcus reveals how relationships between women were a crucial component of femininity. Deeply researched, powerfully argued, and filled with original readings of familiar and surprising sources, Between Women overturns everything we thought we knew about Victorian women and the history of marriage and family life. It offers a new paradigm for theorizing gender and sexuality--not just in the Victorian period, but in our own.

Sharon Marcus is Associate Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University. She is the author of Apartment Stories: City and Home in Nineteenth-Century Paris and London.

Chapter two contains the following section: Unamiable Villette: Lucy Snowe's Passion.

The Musical Crowd in English Fiction, 1840-1910 Class, Culture and Nation
Phyllis Weliver
Palgrave MacMillan
9781403999948

Between 1840 and 1910, many best-selling English novels reveal a fascination with the listening audience, musical ensemble, and mass-music movement. This pioneering new book argues that these popular narratives share a perception of musical performance as participating in larger cultural forces, such as ideas about nation. Looking at this cultural thematics also links literature that is not usually discussed together: Charlotte Brontë's Villette is shown to head up a tradition that includes works of fiction by George Meredith, Samuel Butler, George Bernard Shaw, Vernon Lee, and E.M. Forster.
In her original study, Phyllis Weliver examines the theme of the "musical crowd" alongside Victorian social, political, and scientific theories. While usually considered discrete fields today, the fictional works demonstrate that discourses of group management, ethnology, climate, nation, class, and music were highly interactive during a span of at least seventy years. The exchanges between these fields are not readily apparent in looking at the documents produced by the musical profession alone, so fictional works offer unique and significant insight into how various discourses were imagined as mutually constitutive.

Chapter 3 is entitled: Surveillance and Musical Passion in Villette.

Horrifying Sex
Essays on Sexual Difference in Gothic Literature
Edited by Ruth Bienstock Anolik
McFarland Publishers
ISBN 978-0-7864-3014-7
2007

The Gothic moment in literary history arose in the age of the Enlightenment, and the Gothic fascination with the unknown reflects the Enlightenment’s response to the limits of reason. Traditionally, the emblem of the unknown that lurks in the Gothic is the supernatural, the monstrous, and the inhuman. Often overlooked is the observation that Gothic texts are also haunted by figures that represent the mystery of sexuality.
This collection of essays sharpens that observation and asserts that Gothic anxieties about sexuality are likewise rooted in fear of the unknown, represented by sexual practices and desires that either lie hidden or deviate from cultural norms. The first three sections refer to popular as well as marginalized Gothic texts to portray the three prototypes of sexual "deviance": the female sexual Other in "The Fatal Woman"; the male sexual Other in "The Satanic Male"; and the homosexual Other in "Homosexual Horror." The fourth section covers literary works that celebrate sexual difference and question the idea that the sexually "deviant" is socially Other.

Includes: Investigating the Third Story: “Bluebeard” and “Cinderella” in Jane Eyre by Victoria Anderson.

Categories: Books, Scholar