User:Rwalrath/Culture of Perversion in the Romantic Period

Perversion and Culture in the Romantic Era is the Romantic Era's societal view of sexuality and gender roles beginning in science and trickling into the consideration of the function and value of aesthetics and sexuality. Natural order that was thought to have been previously accepted in society’s culture was disrupted during the Romantic Period through the era’s examination of the ambiguous nature of sexuality and the convoluted role sex and gender played. The examination of sexual pleasure and its seeming lack of function allowed for an initial consideration in the medical realm of sex as a perverse act void of function. “To the extent that sexuality then separated pleasure from reproductive function, it became perverse, like aesthetics,” Richard C. Sha writes, examining the role of pleasure and its lack of purpose. The consideration of the perversity of sex and desire as indentified from a medical standpoint carried over to culture in the 1800’s, as gender roles and constructs were being disputed by poets such as Mary Wollstonecraft and Percy Shelley.

Perversion in Science
The Romantic Period was a time when science was looking for a function and end result for all organisms and activities, as Nagle writes, “Romanticism is a primarily a search for the product.” He continues this issue further by lamenting the lack of product in regards to the activation of our senses. This lack of production and process creates space for perversion. The new examination in the Romantic Period of the unoccupied and functionless space left between sexual pleasure and reproduction gave way to the discussion of the existence of perversion in replace of purpose in the realm of sexuality. “Romantic era was an attempt to counter the alienation experienced by humankind in the wake of the scientific revolution by engendering a sense of unity between the human mind and nature” and sexuality helped to unify both sexes from a scientific standpoint. Through the initial noted awareness of the useless organs our bodies possess, this phenomenon of a gap between the lack of function coupled with the presence of sexual desire was examined with under the label of perversion. Sexual excitement lacked a notable function and occurred purely under the irrational and bestial level of. As discussed by Richard Sha, sexuality could only come about when perversion shifted from “localized in organs to instinct.” The valueless value of aesthetics leaves sexuality for the perverse and uninhibited part of the mind that is unable to be focalized, and therefore is perverted.

A Shift in Gender Roles
The socially uncontested consideration of gender in culture up till the Romantic Era allowed for an understanding of women as the lesser sex. The value of women was to maintain an aesthetic value and a balance between innocence and sexual desirability. Wollstonecraft writes to highlight the role of the softer sex, “If, then, it can be fairly deduced from the present conduct of the sex, from the prevalent fondness for pleasure which takes place of ambition and those nobler passions that open and enlarge the soul, that the instruction which women have hitherto received has only tended, with the constitution of civil society, to render them insignificant objects of desire.” Through sex women were turned into objects acted upon. Sex was an act on women and without desire, and if there was desire she was thought to be perverse herself. Women were valued for their beauty and their aesthetic value, and usually used to compliment man and his qualities. This is exemplified in Romantic Poetry, and as Anne Mellor writes, women were used to elevate men through how, “he ignores her human otherness in order to impose his own metaphors.” The inherent struggle within humans to balance reason with our sexual and perverse instinct is not acceptably existant within women given women’s role of pleasure providers, not receivers. Sexual perversion is contrived through Rochester’s Poetry through the consideration of what we desire to do versus what we ought to do. The lack of restraints on our actions gives way to the perverse actions and the allowance of excess. The the struggle humanity faces is between our instincts and our knowledge and the added complication of the the perverse that accompanies our instinct. The divine guidance and our bestial instinct pull at us from both directions to feign order and moral piousness. The freedom that comes from sexual pleasure is not to be equally shared between sexes given women’s subordination and societal roles, so Romantic poetry and culture paints an innocent woman who is dominated by man’s pleasure. The tear between her rational innocence and her tactile side creates a perverse reaction when sexual encounters did occur. The understanding of women as the subordinate and complimentary sex is put into question through the deliberation of sexual desire as an instinctual form of perversion that bypasses function or ability to discriminate between the sexes. Women intellectuals of the Romantic Era were not readily accepted and were defined by men through their perversity that created an imbalance in nature. As Richard Dellamora writes, “women’s passions for reading novels agitate the human heart, upsetting the balance between duty and desire.”  When women do work in men’s poetry in the Romantic era they are perverse and oftentimes prostitutes. In Wordsworth’s The Prelude, a known and promiscuous woman, as Sonia Hofkosh describes, “discloses what is at stake in the author’s claims to “professional privilege as she displays at once her sexual difference and the threat to the structure of differentiation upon which those claims are grounded.” Hofkosh illustrates the Romantic Era’s view of the women who bring to light their sexuality, for this woman who even is distinguished through her sexuality is unnatural. Despite this typified gender and role of sexuality for women laid out in the Romantic Period, voices of independent women operating through understandings of equal values of the genders were arising. The ability for both sexes to experience sexual pleasures and equally relish in this perversity spoke to a natural function.

Instinct and Culture
Though women were notably considered unnatural if they experienced sexual pleasure, it was in fact, the very core nature of human, ingrained in instinct, to have such aesthetic pleasures. Through the previous stated understanding of the equality of instinctual perverseness, they argue that nature was being disrupted would be unfounded given the homage of instinct within nature and its inability to be recreated more purely in any other form. The shallow value assigned to women as the pleasers of men and the aesthetically pleasing sex seemed to belittle the sex after it was found this instinct of receiving sexual pleasure wasn’t limited to men. Though purposeless, sexual pleasure is instinctual and mutual, equality that opened up the role of women for something greater than what was innate in everyone. As discussed in Susan J. Wolfson’s The Shiftings of Gender in British Romanticism, the cultural creation of gender was examined and the natural order of hierarchy was beginning to be questioned by intellectuals and poets in the Romantic Era. The acceptance of the a-sexual woman was dismissed and the constructs of the feminine and masculine and their natural submissive and dominant titles were blurred by women writers who undertook male pseudonyms in literature to become, “free natural and unconventional.”  This natural self wrote unconstrained by sexual or gender roles, and equality of thought was allowed though unbeknown to the individuals unaware of such pseudonyms. The perverse is innate and unrelated to our productive functions.