As a phenomenon of contemporary British fiction, neo-Victorian literature fascinates us. Beginning in 1966 with Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea and up through Michael Faber’s The Crimson and the Petal (2002), we are drawn to this type of historical fiction for several reasons.  First, they return us to “traditional” storytelling as they critique High Modernism.  They make us, as A.S. Byatt says, “greedy readers.”  We are also intrigued by this type of historical fiction because the Victorians both repel and enchant us. As critics acknowledge, the Victorians seem both strange and familiar.  They are close yet distant from us; they are us and they are the “other.” In our contemporary view, the way they are most different from us is the way they were supposedly unenlightened in regard to sexuality and sexual expression.

Steven Marcus’s seminal study of Victorian sexuality, The Other Victorians: A Study of Sexuality and Pornography in Mid-Victorian England (1966) posited what Michel Foucault calls the “pervasive myth” of Victorian sexual repression and prudery.  Although Foucault contends that Victorian sexual repression is a myth and that discourse about sexuality during the Victorian era was widespread, other more recent studies, such as Michael Mason’s The Making of Victorian Sexuality (1994), present a more complex rendering of Victorian sex and sexuality.  While drawing on nineteenth-century memoirs that identify a sense of moral prudery that pre-dated the Victorian era, Mason also highlights the ways in which the Victorians were not always sexually continent. 

This seminar seeks to consider why we are drawn to neo-Victorian fiction, considering, among other arguments, Cora Kaplan’s claim that we are fascinated with all things neo-Victorian largely because of our prurient interest.  We will also place this sub-genre within a framework of philosophical ideas about erotic love, while exploring to what extent these writers consider other classical notions of love, especially Plato’s and Aristotle’s notions of philia and agape.