What can a model of continence based in male physiology have to offer female writers? This chapter argues that the strong opinions that Vernon Lee expressed about sex and its relation to art in her early writing should not be dismissed as the result of repression or parental indoctrination, as they have been by previous critics. Lee, like Johnson, combined Paterian sensuous continence with other nineteenth-century discourses, particularly discussions of sexual health by New Women writers, and the result is central to her theorizing about life, social ethics, and art. She insisted on the harmfulness of sex to both individuals and society, and that those who felt otherwise were suffering from ‘logical misconception’. But Lee was also an aesthete, for whom sensuous experience was extremely important. She worried that continent aestheticism would limit an aesthete’s experience and lead to solipsism and waste. Her answer was a Paterian disciplined love, a reaching out to what is unhealthy and corrupt, whether people, places, or artworks, and learning to filter the good from the bad, to ‘cleanse and recreate it in the fire of intellectual and almost abstract passion’.

The concept of productive sexual continence was widespread in the nineteenth century. Writing on sexual health, medical and otherwise, agreed that excessive sexual activity involved a loss that threatened one’s health or wellbeing, though disagreed over how much was too much. And although suspicion of prolonged continence was common, many inferred that if sex lost something precious then continence must involve gain. The chapter begins with medicine, finding that productive continence was worked into thinking about the sexual body even as conceptions of sexuality and bodily function changed dramatically. It then looks at influential popular and intellectual genres to which a similar concept of continence was important: quack adverts, advice for young men, New Women literature, nineteenth-century Platonism, and the Oxford Movement. In this literature, unlike medical writing, the idea was often extended to women with the justification that sexual activity involved a loss of some spiritual or emotional quality rather than physical substance. It was a concept that would have been very difficult to avoid in the nineteenth century and would have been plausible to both men and women.

The beginning of the twentieth century was also an experiment in how to be female, male, or something in between – far beyond the matter of reproduction. Chapter 3, “Redefining Womanhoods,” examines the new roles some carved out for themselves amid the emerging modern mass culture in the early twentieth century. After a long period of nation- and empire-building – largely characterized by the embrace and adaptation of what became construed somewhat monolithically as “western culture” – the 1910s and 1920s experienced a shift to critical attitudes toward the West that was promoted by both conservative and progressive representatives of the intelligentsia. This chapter focuses on just how new women and modern girls (and modern boys) navigated this turbulent time, a period complicated by the dramatically increasing academic interest in knowing and, eventually, controlling women – as well as the politics of gender relations; the antagonistic relationship between nationalism, imperialism, and internationalism; and the multiple inventions of Japanese traditions

This chapter locates a new cultural anxiety in the late nineteenth century about the woman who under-identifies, that is, refuses or is simply incapable of a feminine standard of emotional identification with literature. The expression of this anxiety, in New Woman novels of the fin de siècle and George Gissing’s New Grub Street and The Odd Women, reveals the ways in which identification can both reinforce and subvert gender categories. In these novels, and in sources ranging from proceedings of the British Medical Association to humor magazines, Victorian commentators blamed women’s apparent detachment from literary identification on the professionalization of their reading, and attributed its symptoms to a kind of sickness or blighted fertility. Women’s emotional disinvestment from literature was depicted as not merely wayward but pathological. More than a century of overt crises about the management of female identification culminated in the fear that women might not emotionally identify with literature at all, validating the book’s larger argument that irrational identification had come to define femininity itself.

Notions of decadence, decline, and decay are intrinsically linked to the history of art. The discipline’s three recognized forefathers ? Giorgio Vasari, Johann Joachim Winckelmann, and Heinrich Wölfflin ? all relied on the concept of decadence (and its antonym, progress) to make sense of the history of the visual arts and to evaluate the art of their times. A developmental model of art was central to the interpretative schemes of these art historians. In this organicist model, earlier developments prepare the stage for what comes later; and after a particular style flourishes for a time, its decline is inevitable as newer styles overtake it. Decadent artists such as Gustave Moreau and Aubrey Beardsley mock aesthetic standards and moral rules, precluding universal appreciation, and proudly so. Decadent artists and decadent audiences are estranged from their society and feel disdain for those who are scandalized by decadent art’s innovative form and immoral subject matter.

As a self-reflexive conceptual category that works by inverting and unsettling commonly held assumptions, decadence has much in common with the device of parody. In England in the early 1890s the self-conscious self-mockery of decadents, dandies, and New Women writers gestured to a robustness and broadening of the decadent tradition. Those New Women writers who used the unorthodoxies of decadence to align themselves against a conservative press did so chiefly via the early volumes of the decadent periodical The Yellow Book between 1894 and 1895. Paradoxically, through the exaggerated appropriation of features of male decadent writing ? egoism, sexual expressiveness, homosexuality ? New Women writers declared their independence from patriarchal literary convention. This chapter discusses the contributions to the Yellow Book of Ella D’Arcy, Ada Leverson, and Victoria Cross, who wrote with a heightened sexual consciousness and a profound sense of disenchantment with contemporary culture in order to raise feminist concerns about sexuality, class, and race.