Pleasure Bound

December 20, 2010
Lutz (The Dangerous Lover), a professor of Victorian literature and culture at Long Island University, explores that era as one of sexual and erotic experimentation, when an artist like Dante Gabriel Rossetti used a prostitute as a model in a painting of Mary Magdalene, and even "respectable gentlemen" sought "young grenadiers" for anonymous sex in public toilets. Artists and writers produced sexually themed writing and painting that unsettled Victorians by evincing radical ideas about sexual freedom, women's rights, and religious doubt. Rossetti brought sensuality to his paintings of sickness and death. His devout yet daring sister Christina's work reforming prostitutes inspired her own lush sensual verse. Richard Burton, the secret agent and explorer, wrote how-to manuals on sexual positions; and Algernon Charles Swinburne published verse on hermaphrodites, bisexuals, sexual sadists, incest, and the femme fatale, and loved being flogged by prostitutes dressed as schoolmasters and mistresses. Lutz's long-winded meanderings often erode the sexiness of her subject matter, but this is a perceptive, thorough assessment of Victorian erotica and those defiant ones who crafted it. 8 pages of color and 5 b&w illus.

November 15, 2010

Illumination of how changing attitudes toward religion and sexuality transformed the arts and culture of Victorian England.

By now it has become widely accepted scholarly knowledge that the Victorian age wasn't as repressed as is commonly caricatured. Lutz (Victorian Literature and Culture/Long Island Univ., C.W. Post; The Dangerous Lover: Gothic Villains, Byronism, and the Nineteenth-Century Seductive Narrative, 2006) attempts to reach beyond an academic readership in her interwoven accounts of the likes of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Richard Burton, Algernon Charles Swinburne and Oscar Wilde. Perhaps the greatest revelations lie in her exhumation of the painter Simeon Solomon, then notorious, now a "forgotten martyr, his art and life a disappearing act perpetuated by his intolerant times." With Darwinism threatening Christianity and art asserting a value higher than conventional morality, poets, painters and pleasure seekers alike felt liberated to explore the "dark, secret places" and find ecstasy in the previously unspeakable. Though she offers plenty of reference to sodomy and sadomasochism, Lutz's prose too often succumbs to cliché—"pains in the neck"; "spread like wildfire"—but generally avoids the overwrought opacity of much academic writing. The author credits the age with reviving the legacies of Blake, Shelley and Keats, and with anticipating the expectation "that it seems somehow 'normal,' that the artist (or, today, movie or rock star) must have a complicated, even scandalous, sexual life." Her cultural criticism resists viewing the era through a contemporary lens, as she acknowledges that the term "homosexual" didn't enter the parlance until the 1880s and that the changing roles of women resist modern feminist revisionism. Yet Lutz reinforces the cultural significance of an era in which "Art (with an unashamed capital A) was more worthy of worship than a stony, distant god."

Neither as steamy as its title nor as impenetrable as the academic stereotype.

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January 1, 2011

Writing about the advice to courtesans in Richard Burton's translation of the Kama Sutra, Lutz (English, C.W. Post, Long Island Univ.; The Dangerous Lover: Gothic Villains, Byronism, and the Nineteenth-Century Seduction Narrative) notes, "No judgments about the profession are found here...it is presented as a legitimate occupation...that requires skill and intelligence." In this compelling look at the men who made up the Cannibal Club and the Aesthetes--two Victorian groups responsible for producing much of the sexually themed writing and painting in mid- to late 19th-century England--Lutz approaches her subject in much the same way. Many critics view Victorians and their sex lives through the lenses of contemporary theoretical frameworks. What Lutz is trying to do here, however, is present glimpses into the often complex working and personal lives of such figures as Burton, William Morris, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, and Algernon Charles Swinburne as they actually were. In doing so, she attempts to place herself and her readers "in these drawing rooms, public urinals, and studios and see them without the layers of cultural accretion that veil our eyes today." VERDICT Although Lutz aims high and is not always successful, her nuanced and fascinating work deserves a wide audience. Recommended.--William D. Walsh, Georgia State Univ., Atlanta

Copyright 2011 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

January 1, 2011
Think of Victorians: what comes to mind? Chairs swathed with fabric so that their wooden legs or limbs did not suggest sex? Uptight men whose wives were angels in the house? Certainly, but what about Oscar Wilde, Algernon Swinburne, Richard Burton? Lutz argues that they defined the period as fully as Victoria herself, draped in endless mourning for her Prince Albert. In this compellingly written multiple biography, Lutz explores two groups that formed themselves around strong personalities: the pre-Raphaelite brotherhood gathered around poet-painter Dante Gabriel Rossetti, and the Cannibal Club founded by explorer Burton. These groups, she argues, created an opening for todays more sexually tolerant society, especially in terms of acceptance of homosexuality. While many of the more flamboyant characters of the period are relatively unknown todayartist Simeon Solomon, for instance, or hedonist Bunny Arbuthnotthose more familiar (William Morris, James McNeill Whistler, Ford Madox Brown) were just as sexually adventurous, with partner exchange, rough trade, and other unconventionalities abounding. Filled with raw and raucous detail, this book is a lasting contribution to understanding a complex and dynamic era.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2011, American Library Association.)