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This book examines the figure of the virgin, a symbol central to many aspects of society and sexuality in nineteenth-century England, and its effects on the Victorian literary imagination. Studying the virgin as a social, sexual, and literary phenomenon, the volume contributes to current critical accounts of the relations among the body and language, gender, and discourse.
These essays explore the ways in which virginity is not a natural ideal but a complex cultural and literary sign. The authors rethink the virginal as a textual counter-example to the idealization of "natural sexuality."
"It collects some of the finest critics of Victorian literature; these critics interpret specific texts in ways illuminated by the shared emphasis on the centrality and paradoxicality of virginity. The topic is sexy, and interesting for that reason alone, and these authors are successful in doing the topic justice." — Lori Lefkovitz, Kenyon College
Acknowledgments
Part 1 Virginal Texts
Chapter 1 The Virgin Body as Victorian Text: An Introduction
Lloyd Davis
Chapter 2 Virginal Sex, Vaginal Text: The "Folds" of Frankenstein
Gerhard Joseph
Chapter 3 The Reader and the Virgin: What Next?
L. J. Swingle
Chapter 4 White Narratology: Gender and Reference in Wilkie Collins's The Woman in White
Diane Elam
Part 2 Virginal Poeisis
Chapter 5 Representation and Repristination: Virginity in The Ring and the Book
Herbert F. Tucker
Chapter 6 Becoming the Poet: The Feminine Poet-Speaker in the Work of Elizabeth Barrett Browning
Dolores DeLuise with Michael Timko
Chapter 7 The Frozen Fountain: Christina Rossetti, the Virgin Model, and Youthful Pre-Raphaelitism
Barbara Garlick
Chapter 8 Like a Virgin: Coventry Patmore's Still Unknown Eros
John Maynard
Part 3 Virgin de Siècle
Chapter 9 What Lily Knew: Virginity in the 1890s
Adrienne Auslander Munich
Chapter 10 Confessing and Editing: The Politics of Purity in Hardy's Tess
Susan David Bernstein
Chapter 11 Gender and Sexual Dis-Ease in Dracula
Jeffrey L. Spear
Chapter 12 "The Inner Chambers of All Nameless Sin": The Beetle, Gothic Female Sexuality, and Oriental Barbarism
Kelly Hurley
Notes
Contributors
Index