Asexual Epidemics, Detectives and Spinsters: the construction of pathological asexuality in Victorian fiction

背景我的论文将询问维多利亚时期文学、文化和医学中无性恋概念的发展。当时的医学话语构建了对无性恋的病理性理解，诊断缺乏性欲的人性冷淡。我将把辛普森博士1834年关于寒冷的演讲视为对寒冷的文化焦虑发展的开始，调查他们日益增长的存在，直到他们达到顶峰。正如我的研究将证明的那样，这种对性冷淡的担忧可以追溯到英国小说中，19世纪的小说使用了从医学文献中提取的关于性冷淡的词汇。考虑到小说和医学之间的相互关系，我还会争辩说，维多利亚时代的人物塑造创造了一种性冷淡的性别刻板印象，这种刻板印象仍然影响着当代的性学研究。我的研究源于最近一次呼吁将无性恋正常化为一种性取向，并建立在开创性的批评之上，比如德克的《看不见的取向》(2014)。考虑到维多利亚时代的散文小说，我将揭示这些小说是如何产生长期影响的，继续影响着围绕无性恋的文化话语。这个项目分为三个部分：首先，我将询问男性冷漠的发展，探索勃朗特的《S·简·爱》和艾略特的《米德尔马契》中无性男性作为病理的刻画。通过分析柯南·道尔的《神探夏洛克·福尔摩斯》，我将探讨男性无性恋是如何发展成19世纪末无性知识分子的形象，这对当代无性恋者的表现产生了影响。其次，我认为维多利亚时代的医生以两种截然相反的方式污蔑女性无性恋：威廉·阿克顿认为女性缺乏性欲，而休伊特等外科医生则将女性冷漠病理性地视为临床问题。这翻译成了19世纪关于处女和老处女的叙事比喻。我将重点介绍这些人物在狄更斯的全部作品中的演变，盖斯凯尔的露丝，吉辛的奇怪的女人，哈代的无名的裘德，以及摩尔的独身。最后，在阅读威尔斯的科学浪漫小说时，我将把无性恋的重塑视为一条进化轨迹，在其中，大脑中的无性恋外星人代表着人类可能的未来。意义我的项目将在两个方面推动这一领域的发展：第一，它揭示了19世纪英国非小说写作中无性焦虑的持续存在；第二，它讨论了维多利亚时代的小说作为无性恋争论的场所。文学批评考察了维多利亚时代的“性节制”的概念，如亚当斯的“丹迪与沙漠圣徒”(1995)。此外，劳勒和曼厄姆的《文学与医学》(2021年)和鲍尔的性学文化史已经证明了文学和医学在性病理学发展中的相互作用关系。然而，19世纪的英国无性恋者焦虑是一个新的研究领域。性史学家，尤其是摩尔和克雷尔，已经注意到19世纪欧洲写作中无性恋人物的突出地位，他们将冷漠作为医学文学范畴的概念是我研究的基础。我在这些研究的基础上，追踪了冷漠在英国跨越学科界限的出现。LGBTQ+自我倡导团体对无性恋史的需求越来越大，最著名的是世界上最大的在线无性恋者社区AVEN(无性恋者可见性和教育网络)。我的研究贡献了英国维多利亚时期关于无性恋的文学和医学著作的首批历史之一。

Context My thesis will interrogate the development of the concept of asexuality in Victorian literature, culture and medicine. The medical discourse of the age constructed a pathologized understanding of asexuality, diagnosing individuals lacking sexual drives with frigidity. I will consider Dr Simpson's 1834 lecture on frigidity as the onset of the development of cultural anxieties regarding frigidity, investigating their growing presence until their apex at the fin de siècle. As my research will evidence, this concern with sexual coldness is traceable within British fiction, with nineteenth-century fiction employing vocabulary drawn from medical texts on frigidity. By considering the relationship between fiction and medicine as reciprocal, I will also argue that Victorian character construction created a gendered stereotype of the frigid persona that still affects contemporary sexological studies. My research stems from a recent call to normalise asexuality as a sexual orientation, and builds on ground-breaking criticism such as Decker's The Invisible Orientation (2014). Considering Victorian prose fiction, I will reveal how these novels have a longstanding influence, continuing to affect cultural discourses surrounding asexuality. This project is divided into three components: first, I will interrogate the development of male frigidity, exploring the portrayal of asexual masculinity as pathology in Brontë's Jane Eyre and Eliot's Middlemarch. Analysing Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes, I will investigate how male asexuality developed into the late-nineteenth-century figure of the asexual intellectual, which influences contemporary asexual representation. Second, I will argue that Victorian doctors stigmatised female asexuality in two opposing ways: William Acton considered women as devoid of sexual desire, while surgeons such as Hewitt pathologized female frigidity as a clinical problem. This translated into the nineteenth-century narrative tropes of the virgin and the spinster. I will highlight the evolution of these figures in Dickens' oeuvre, Gaskell's Ruth, Gissing's Odd Women, Hardy's Jude the Obscure, and Moore's Celibates. Finally, reading Wells' scientific romances, I will consider the fin de siècle reframing of asexuality as an evolutionary trajectory, in which the cerebral, asexual aliens represent possible futures for humanity. Significance My project will advance the field in two ways: first, it reveals the continuous presence of asexual anxieties in nineteenth-century British non-fiction writing; second, it discusses Victorian fiction as a site where asexuality was contested. Literary criticism has examined the concept of Victorian 'sexual continence', as in Adams's Dandies and Desert Saints (1995). Furthermore, Lawlor and Mangham's Literature and Medicine (2021) and Bauer's cultural histories of sexology have demonstrated the reciprocal relationship between literature and medicine in the development of sexual pathologies. Yet, nineteenth-century British asexual anxiety is a new area for research. The prominence of asexual figures in nineteenth-century European writing has been noted by sexual historians, particularly Moore and Cryle, whose conceptualisation of frigidity as a medico-literary category is fundamental to my research. I build on these studies to trace frigidity's emergence across disciplinary boundaries in Britain. There is growing demand for histories of asexuality from LGBTQ+ self-advocacy groups, most notably AVEN (Asexual Visibility and Education Network), the world's largest online asexual community. My research contributes one of the first histories of British Victorian literary and medical writing on asexuality.