Pleasure Bound Victorian Sex Rebels and the New Eroticism (Audible Audio Edition) Deborah Lutz Cat Gould Audible Studios Books
Download As PDF : Pleasure Bound Victorian Sex Rebels and the New Eroticism (Audible Audio Edition) Deborah Lutz Cat Gould Audible Studios Books
A smart, provocative account of the erotic current running just beneath the surface of a stuffy and stifling Victorian London.
In 1860s London, two loosely overlapping groups of bohemians - the Cannibal Club and the Aesthetes - challenged the buttoned-up Victorian propriety to promote erotic freedom and expression. Sensually attuned and politically radical, they were among the most influential thinkers and artists of the day, from Richard Burton to Dante Gabriel Rossetti and William Morris. These iconoclasts not only navigated the fringes of sexual deviance with their bodies but also carried the pleasures of the body into their work, creating a taboo-loving counterculture whose reverberations can be felt today.
In this stunning and nuanced exposé of the Victorian London we thought we knew, Deborah Lutz takes us beyond the eyebrow-raising practices of these sex rebels, showing us how their work uncovered troubles that ran beneath the surface of the larger social fabric the struggle for women's emancipation, the dissolution of traditional religions, and the pressing need to expand accepted forms of sexual expression.
Pleasure Bound Victorian Sex Rebels and the New Eroticism (Audible Audio Edition) Deborah Lutz Cat Gould Audible Studios Books
The title of this book: "Pleasure Bound: Victorian Sex Rebels and the New Eroticism" sums up the contents very well. The writing is eloquent and readable. I recommend this to anyone trying to understand the remarkable and revolutionary undercurrents of sexuality in Victorian society. I especially valued the account of Swinburne. Also the discussion of Simeon Solomon, his family, his friendship with Swinburne, his remarkable paintings --- all of this I found extremely valuable. Lutz calls Solomon our first gay painter. I had read nothing about Solomon before this and want to study his work. This is a book I will keep in my library.Product details
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Pleasure Bound Victorian Sex Rebels and the New Eroticism (Audible Audio Edition) Deborah Lutz Cat Gould Audible Studios Books Reviews
Deborah Lutz gets full marks for writing an amalgam of intriguing stories about some of Victorian England's most free-thinking sexual spirits, larded with an overlay of light analytical commentary. It's pretty clear she had a swell time reading all she could about the underbelly of Victorian society, and she revels in relating all the best tidbits she found. Surely it is no secret that there was a juicy subculture of pornography, brothels, and sexual experimentation going on at the time (or any time in history, for that matter), but the personalities she chooses to illustrate her thesis are very entertaining exemplars.
The book serves as an excellent introduction to characters who've been memorialized by scores of more thorough biographies Richard Francis Burton, A. C. Swinburne, Henry Spencer Ashbee (whose bio, "The Erotomaniac," by Ian Gibson, is a work of remarkable research), Dante Gabriel Rossetti and the Pre-Raphaelites, and a number of others. It's evident that Lutz admires these free-thinkers and adventurers, and she ably shares her enthusiasm for them. Soon you'll know all about "fladge porn" and the heartbreak of spermatorrhea and dozens of other erotic oddments-- it was a time of tremendous ferment and taboo-breaking, and there's much to praise in the actions of those who flouted the conventions of the era to open new doors of honesty and scholarship. To truly be yourself in any age is an act of courage. Lutz salutes these men (and several women) who broke the shackles of repression to be true to themselves and their desires.
This is a lovely book about Pre-Raphaelite art and the poetry of various Victorian writers. The title is quite misleading. I regret to say I feel as if I have been duped.
This book refers to, but does not tell the stories of the people who populate its pages. It mentions a certain author frequented prostitutes but says nothing more about this fact. There are of course stories of Victorian eroticism to be told, but this book does not do so.
Love, love, loooooooove.
This was not the book I expected to read. Now mostly I don't like reviewers who criticize a book for what they thought it should have been, but in this case I feel it bears mentioning that "Pleasure Bound" is not so much an academic study of the sexual mores of Victorian England, but rather a kind biographical study of the figures Lutz identifies as sexual rebels.
In all honesty, the goings-on in this group don't seem all that rebellious given that the Victorians were notorious for honoring the form of propriety over the actual fact of it. The age of consent was surprisingly low, and prostitution was staggeringly wide-spread. It's true that there were laws against homosexual behavior, but they focused on sodomy -- anal intercourse -- and were also subject to something of a double standard. The rich and well-connected would have to rub the noses of the public in their sexual antics in order to suffer unduly for them.
What I think Lutz was aiming at -- and it's always awkward to try to second guess any author, so take this with a grain of salt -- is to show how the artists of the day were exploring beyond the limits society placed on their sexual expression. Which is what artists do. And certainly Lutz succeeds in this, with a lot of detail about both Gabriel and Christina Rossetti, Swinburne, William Morris and his wife, Jane; Simeon Solomon, who was one of the least known artists in the Pre-Raphaelite sphere; and Sir Richard Burton and his wife, Isabel. In fact, in some cases it seems to be a bit too much detail, not in the sense of being salacious, but in the sense of having very little to do with the central focus of the book.
I would also question the author's assertion that the artists' communes/collectives of both Rossetti and Morris were in any way indications of latent homosexuality. (At least that's the way I read what was presented.) There were few female artists working in the same areas as the PRB in those days. Those who were connected with these men were either relatives or prostitutes. To be other than that, a single woman involved in some sort of live-in situation, was to invite comparison with the latter.
In general, "Pleasure Bound" is an interesting and informative read, but it does often ramble, and I can't help but feel that it's a bit forced in terms of its central argument. Still, if you're a student or fan of the era or any of the personalities Lutz is writing about, you will almost certainly find something to interest, inform or intrigue you.
Despite the mildly salacious subtitle, this is a sober, intelligent retelling of the lives of the Pre-Raphaelite circle, adding on the Arts and Crafts movement and the life of Sir Richard Burton, the explorer. And while the author does examine at length the contribution these personages made to the sexual undercurrents of the time (sexual writings such as the Kama Sutra and flagellation literature, paintings that could be interpreted either as religious or sexual ecstasy), the social, cultural and historical framework extends the picture beyond the libidinous.
Although well researched, there is little new here that hasn't been documented by previous writers such as Steven Marcus or Peter Gay, who helped effectively explode the myth of the prurient Victorians. And Ms. Lutz's writing style, while clear, is often uninspired. The organization by theme rather than sequence allows for some repetition.
Nonetheless the story she has to tell is consistently interesting, especially if the reader comes uninformed, even when it doesn't wander within the realm of the erotic, and serves as a good introduction to some fascinating personalities.
The title of this book "Pleasure Bound Victorian Sex Rebels and the New Eroticism" sums up the contents very well. The writing is eloquent and readable. I recommend this to anyone trying to understand the remarkable and revolutionary undercurrents of sexuality in Victorian society. I especially valued the account of Swinburne. Also the discussion of Simeon Solomon, his family, his friendship with Swinburne, his remarkable paintings --- all of this I found extremely valuable. Lutz calls Solomon our first gay painter. I had read nothing about Solomon before this and want to study his work. This is a book I will keep in my library.
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