THE GOVERNESS, HER BODY, AND THRESHOLDS INTHE ROMANCE OF LUST

Abstract

In his groundbreaking study of Victorian pornography, The Other Victorians, Steven Marcus draws on passages from The Romance of Lust (1873–76) to elucidate his now-famous term, “pornotopia.” To Marcus's mind, this text, like other pornographic novels, has few, if any, redeeming features. While the literary novel fleshes out the lives of its characters, pornography dwells endlessly on fleshly relations, he argues. Pornography, in fact, tends towards utopian fantasy, towards pornotopia. “More than most utopias,” says Marcus, “pornography takes the injunction of its etymology literally – it may be said largely to exist at no place, and to take place in nowhere” (268). In a pornotopia, time is always bedtime (269), life begins not at birth but at the moment of sexual awakening (270), and relations between characters are merely juxtapositions of bodies, body parts, and organs (274). Introducing an orgy scene from The Romance of Lust, Marcus asserts, “[t]his novel comes as close as anything I know to being a pure pornotopia in the sense that almost every human consideration apart from sexuality is excluded from it” (274). Pornography's lack, that is, its apparent disconnection from realistic settings and human relations, is a consequence and sign of human deprivation. “Pornotopia could in fact only have been imagined by persons who have suffered extreme deprivation,” he holds, “and I do not by this mean sexual deprivation in the genital sense alone. . . . The insatiability depicted in it seems to me to be literal insatiability, and the orgies endlessly represented are the visions of permanently hungry men” (273). Thus, “[i]nside of every pornographer there is an infant screaming for the breast from which he has been torn” (274).