Unauthorized Pleasures

Ellen Bayuk Rosenman is Professor and Chair, Department of English, University of Kentucky. She is the author of The Invisible Presence: Virginia Woolf and the Mother-Daughter Relationship and A Room of One's Own: Women Writers and the Politics of Creativity.

Rosenman's book... conveys an unfailing enthusiasm for often ignored varieties of Victorian sexual expression.... The texts Rosenman discusses allow her to demonstrate her major themes: that men, like women, also felt threatened by sex and an objectifying gaze, that women found ways to express their sexuality, that men found ways to express homoerotic desires, and that pornography opened up possibilities—at least on the imaginative level—for female sexual agency and egalitarian sex between men and women.(Victorian Studies) In her lively revisionary account Ellen Rosenman demonstrates the richness and variety of Victorian sexual practice and discourse.... The most rewarding parts of this highly astute book are perhaps her dashingly entertaining accounts of the Yelverton marriage case (chapter 4) and of My Secret Life (chapter 5). Rosenman is wonderfully sure-footed in tracing the complex ambiguities and contradictions thrown up by Theresa Longworth's deployment of literary and melodramatic tropes in her legal and sexual pursuit of the attractive, shallow and devious Charles Yelverton in a legal case spiced with issues of sexuality, class and female 'self-fashioning'. She is also equal to the endless erotic tableaux rehearsed by 'Walter' in My Secret Life, of which she offers a most enjoyable and pertinent account. In general, Unauthorized Pleasures builds energetically upon earlier work on Victorian sexual identities, and is expert at stressing the provisionality and fluidity of those identities, offering the reader indeed a variety of pleasurable subject positions.(British Association for Victorian Studies Book Reviews) Oh, those wacky Victorians. No other culture has ever had so many neurotic anxieties with sex (except possibly their own). Ellen Bayuck Rosenman traces the most prominent of these issues...through the written evidence, and proposes some fascinating theories to explain not only how and why these issues exist, but also what service the 'issue-ization' of them performs for the culture as a whole. What these issues reveal about cultural anxieties, how they marginalize (or maintain the divisions between) genders, races and classes, and how they challenge simplistic notions of Victorian prudery are all explicated brilliantly by Rosenman's analysis.... As a final note, I must commend Rosenman for her remarkable honesty...as well as for her refreshing sense of humor—without sacrificing any academic or intellectual integrity. What Rosenman has done in this volume is what she claims is the work done by the texts she analyzes.... It seems that the more we understand about the Victorians, the more we understand about ourselves.(English Studies Forum) This most original book is impressive for its penetrating research, thoroughness, scope, objectivity, and personality. The last a rare feature in such a scholarly book. A feminist critic, Rosenman focuses on texts, fiction and nonfiction, that exemplify some aspect of the Victorian attitude toward sex, examining the interplay between gender roles, class, cultural norms, and literary conventions.(Choice)