Marriage Needs Sex and Some: Desire in The Mill on the Floss and The Odd Women

Abstract

The OED defines “Victorian” as “prudish, strict; old-fashioned, out-dated.” This string of disheartening adjectives reflects the common pejorative stereotype of nineteenth century Britain as stuffy and sexually repressed. Like many stereotypes, this one has some basis in fact: standards of public morality were stricter then than now, and literary representations of sexuality often consisted more of hints or suggestions than graphic specifics. It was also widely asserted that sexual desire, while natural for men, was not so in women. In this essay, Mollie Winter explores how Eliot‘s The Mill on the Floss and Gissing‘s The Odd Women confront these ideas about sexual desire and its place in literature and life. Both novels present their heroines with choices between men who offer love without desire and men who arouse physical passion. In both cases, the first option is shown to be clearly inadequate. But lust also turns out to be highly problematic: while passion may be essential to a happy union, it can also override other important principles. The ideal relationship would seem to be one that balances these different needs, but neither novel provides us with a happy ending that reflects this possibility. Why not? Is it perhaps marriage itself that cannot accommodate the realities of desire? Certainly any novel that raises such a question is anything but stuffy.

Dr. Rohan Maitzen