Victorian novels and the history of sexual desire

A history of sexual desire? Are not the intimate intensities of mind and body that go by that name as insulated from the mass and massive public events that we commonly call history as hunger or pain? Is not the heart filled with passion always the same old story, a drama whose costume may vary from period to period, but whose script remains essentially unchanged? But while much that we experience as sexual desire seems a largely immutable condition of human (and perhaps not just human) existence, the scope and shape of the meanings that we attach to this experience are decided by a complex of historical forces, not least of which, for those of us who live in its aftermath, is the Victorian novel itself. Thus, for example, the great expectation, usually observed in the breach, that sexual bonds will culminate in marriage, or its contemporary cognate, the Permanent Relationship, finds its most eloquent propagations in what one of their critics calls “our books,” the novels whose promise of romance we know by heart as surely as we have forgotten the details of their plots. If we continue to acknowledge, typically in the privacy of our own disappointments, as universal truth a vision of sexual desire as the engine and origin of a partnership at least lifelong, this is in no small part because of the sentimental education we receive from the Victorian novel and its afterlife in more recent narrative forms. If, against often overwhelming evidence to the contrary, we persist in perceiving the halo of “happily ever after” light up the object of our sexual affections, that is in no small part because books like Jane Eyre (1847) and Middlemarch (1872) have taught us so well to do so.