While music often appears as a “code” for sexual desire in Victorian literature, this article explores music's presence in a text for which no veiled language was needed: the anonymously published pornographic novella Teleny (1893). The authors of Teleny invoke emerging scientific discourses about music physiology to draw explicit parallels between musical and sexual encounters—as when the protagonist Camille orgasms in response to the vibrations of his lover's piano music. In such moments, Teleny offers an insistent defense of queer desire as a natural process rooted in the organic and often involuntary actions of the muscles and nerves—a particularly powerful intervention at a time when sexual “inversion” was most often denigrated as unnatural. In its use of biological science in the service of sexual representation—science that many twenty-first-century queer theorists might deem “essentialist”—Teleny presents a compelling challenge to scholars grappling with conversations about normativity, resistance, utopian desires, and idealized cultural objects.
...MoreSimilar Citations
Book
Dawson, Gowan;
(2007)
Darwin, Literature and Victorian Respectability
Chapter
Bauer, Heike;
(2006)
Scholars, Scientists and Sexual Inverts: Authority and Sexology in Nineteenth-Century Britain
Chapter
Lunbeck, Elizabeth;
(2012)
The Narcissistic Homosexual: Genealogy of a Myth
Book
Finn, Michael R.;
(2009)
Hysteria, Hypnotism, the Spirits, and Pornography: Fin-de-siècle Cultural Discourses in the Decadent Rachilde
Book
Sean M. Quinlan;
(2021)
Morbid Undercurrents: Medical Subcultures in Postrevolutionary France
Article
Bristow, Joseph;
(2007)
Remapping the Sites of Modern Gay History: Legal Reform, Medico-Legal Thought, Homosexual Scandal, Erotic Geography
Article
Jennings, Rebecca;
(2008)
“The Most Uninhibited Party They'd Ever Been To”: The Postwar Encounter between Psychiatry and the British Lesbian, 1945--1971
Chapter
Gladfelder, Hal;
(2006)
Plague Spots
Book
Colantuono, Anthony;
(2010)
Titian, Colonna and the Renaissance Science of Procreation: Equicola's Seasons of Desire
Article
Christopher Harrington;
(2022)
“Cut it, woman”: Masculinity, Nectar, and the Orgasm in Charlotte Brontë's Shirley (1849)
Book
Sha, Richard C.;
(2009)
Perverse Romanticism: Aesthetics and Sexuality in Britain, 1750--1832
Thesis
Ashley Elizabeth Bashaw;
(2015)
Mapping the Vagina: Nineteenth-Century Narratives of Scientific Specularity
Thesis
Nichols, Marcia D.;
(2010)
The Man-Midwife's Tale: Re-Reading Male-Authored Midwifery Guides in Britain and America, 1750--1820
Article
Kris Taylor;
(2019)
Pornography Addiction: The Fabrication of a Transient Sexual Disease
Article
Jeffrey Escoffier;
(2020)
Every Detail Counts: Robert Stoller, Perversion and the Production of Pornography
Book
Dames, Nicholas;
(2007)
The Physiology of the Novel: Reading, Neural Science, and the Form of Victorian Fiction
Article
Beccalossi, Chiara;
(2009)
The Origin of Italian Sexological Studies: Female Sexual Inversion, ca. 1870--1900
Article
Reed, Matt T.;
(2001)
Historicizing inversion: Or, how to make a homosexual
Article
Rodolfo John Alaniz;
(2024)
Havelock Ellis, Sexology, and Sexual Selection in Post-Darwinian Evolutionary Biology
Thesis
Rothe, Johanna;
(2014)
Psychoanalysis, Sexuality, and Nationality in Late Habsburg Austria
Be the first to comment!