Afterword: the other Victorians

Summary

Examining the construction of popular, potentially “decadent” genres allows us to see something of the attitudes that shaped Victorians' perceptions of gender and reading in relation to beliefs about the body. The development of a discourse of a somatized popular culture with the rise of mass literacy in the nineteenth century evolved to account for and include debates on national and international politics, the “science” of race, the “nature” of gender, and the “ethics” of health. However, as stated in the Introduction, every history is an exercise in analysis of the culture and historical moment that produces that history as well as of the subject at hand. The workings of Victorian metaphors of cultural production and consumption and physical and political health are “readable” by us and important to us in part because those discursive structures remain present today. Obviously, these constructions have been bequeathed to different cultures in different configurations and have been reshaped by varying circumstances. They have had to encompass new national and international relationships, a host of new media, and a changing set of aesthetic standards. Yet some similarity of structure remains in the construction of the healthy, appropriate, “epic” body of culture in its relations to its representation and the representation of its consumers. My purpose here is not to give a survey of these differences or even to discuss a single example in detail, but to indicate a couple of broad connections with examples from my own late twentieth-century US American cultural environment, and raise some salient questions.