17 - Sex: Hypnosis, Hormones, Birth Control and the Modernist Body

Summary

Towards the end of A Room of One’s Own (1929), Virginia Woolf introduces the imaginary figure of Mary Carmichael, the young female author of a book called Life’s Adventure. Carmichael represents a new generation of modern writers that has the potential to ‘light a torch in that vast chamber where nobody has yet been’ (Woolf 2001: 72). Woolf’s narrator hopes that Carmichael will write in novel ways about aspects of life that have not yet received adequate treatment in literature, including love, desire and intimate friendship between women, the experiences of the ‘harlot’ and ‘courtesan’, and other previously obscure or taboo topics (Woolf 2001: 76). The name of Woolf’s modern author is a reference to Marie Carmichael Stopes, a trained palaeobotanist, who, by the end of the 1920s, had established herself as the leader of the British birth control movement and as a key voice in eugenic circles. She had also made a name for herself as the author of marital and sexual advice literature, including the bestseller Married Love (1918). Woolf’s nod to Stopes’s controversial work suggests that the production of modern literature, especially by women, was inevitably connected not only with questions around sexuality, the body and reproduction, but also with scientific and technological innovation, including birth control.

Following Woolf’s lead, this chapter explores the link between modernist literature, scientific and eugenic constructions of bodily sex and sexuality, and new technologies of intimacy and the body. Literary modernism and sexual science emerged in tandem in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century (Bauer 2009; Kahan 2019; Leng 2018; Peppis 2014; Schaffner 2011). The modernist period is also associated with an acceleration of technologies that opened up new ways of understanding and controlling sex and sexuality. This chapter focuses on three interrelated technological interventions that played a prominent role in sexual scientific and literary modernist writings: hypnosis and attempts to influence sexual orientation, hormonal interventions to control physical markers of sex and age, and birth control. While sexual scientists and literary writers were often drawn to the idea that human bodies and desires could be manipulated and controlled, the chapter also demonstrates that scientific and literary authors were equally fascinated by the potential inadequacies and productive uncertainties associated with modern technologies.