Sex in the Summer-House

Abstract

Janice Niemann, “Sex in the Summer-House: Setting in Victorian Pornography” (pp. 42–69) Despite scholarship on the history and publication of pornography, on laws surrounding Victorian pornography, and on pornography’s mutually informative relationship with nineteenth-century medical texts, actual Victorian pornographic texts remain relatively understudied. Taking up Lisa Sigel’s call to action that specific “motifs in nineteenth-century pornography deserve closer study,” and responding to previous scholars who have identified setting in Victorian pornography as largely inconsequential, I suggest that certain settings have significant literary impacts in Victorian pornography. Adopting the summer-house as a test case in three Victorian pornographic texts—The Romance of Lust (1873–76), Venus in India (1889), and Lovely Nights of Young Girls (c. 1895)—I investigate specific moments of sex in the summer-house, arguing that the liminality of summer-house settings facilitates character behavior and genre performance being pushed to their own liminal boundaries. Ultimately, I posit that the literary summer-house is a recognizable trope in Victorian pornography, and one that asks us to reexamine the impact of specific settings in the genre. Note: this paper discusses underage sex, incest, and rape.