Romanticism and Sexuality - A Special Issue of Romanticism On the Net

We have grown so accustomed to linking Romanticism with transcendence and the visionary that sexuality—a term that refers to a quasi-medical discourse that encompasses both one's sexed being and sexual desire—would seem to promise little insight into Romanticism. And while our attention to Romantic ideology has enabled us to reread this transcendence as a kind of political denial that is, in Alan Liu's deconstructive formulation, paradoxically a Romantic form of engagement, we have yet to consider fully the vexed relations between Romanticism, sexuality, and politics. Why is Orc, Blake's embodiment of revolution, so insistently sexualized? What happens to Frankenstein when it is understood against contemporaneous medical attempts to deny women's essential contributions to generation? In a larger view, will romanticism look as ideological and escapist when we take seriously their investment in sexual liberation? I can only proffer here a working hypothesis: that understanding how Romanticism is informed by such scientific and medical developments as the first human artificial insemination in 1776, Spallanzani's work on sperm and artificial insemination, the sexualizing of the brain, John Hunter's transplantation of the ovary of a hen into a rooster along with his studies of the descent of the testicle in the foetus, and the discovery of the female ovum in 1827, will challenge our assumptions about Romantic transcendence and our understanding of the politics of Romanticism. Romantic writers were far better read in medicine than we tend to remember: Byron consulted popular health manuals by Adair and Solomon; Coleridge read deeply in his physician, James Gillman's, library; Percy Shelley ordered Spallanzani's complete works and immersed himself in the vitalist controversy, while Mary Shelley read Gall and Spurzheim; Blake engraved plates for medical literature published by Joseph Johnson; and Keats, of course, was trained as a physician. For one, if artificial insemination helped to widen the gaps between sexual pleasure and reproductive function, then sexuality might enable meaningful liberation insofar as it is no longer necessarily chained to instrumentality. For another, since sexual desire itself was understood less in terms of a bodily urge and more in terms of a mental act by the end of the eighteenth century, this internalization of sexual desire was met with a host of strategies conflating the mind and body: physiognomy, emphasis on connections between the brain and nervous system, the materialization of the mind into the brain. Such strategies helped to make the sexualized brain readable; hence, physiological and neurological understandings of the body regularly resisted the very separation of body and mind that underwrites transcendence. Finally, how does the notion of Romanticism as a displaced politics alter when we turn our attention away from transcendence and towards the idea of sexual liberation? By that I mean what informs the Romantic turn to sexuality as a category where meaningful liberation is possible? This gap in our knowledge about sexuality in the Romantic period is even more surprising given the spate of recent work on gender and Romanticism. I only have space to single out a few important works here: Andrew Elfenbein's Romantic Genius and Claudia Johnson's Equivocal Beings. Elfenbein's important study revises our understanding of Romantic transcendence insofar as he shows how gender experimentation and rebellion against heterosexuality became constituitive features of genius and the sublime. But Elfenbein's confidence in the fact that sexual experimentation is inseparable from gender experimentation—he argues that "although recent critics have separated sexuality and gender, the distinction did not exist in the eighteenth century"—underestimates the fluidity of biological sex in the Romantic period, not to mention the eighteenth-century construction of heterosexual intercourse as normative sexuality. Claudia Johnson's magisterial book has helped …