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The Victorian Literary Kiss

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 November 2008

Elisabeth G. Gitter
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Extract

This passage from Epipsychidion is Shelley's legacy to the many Victorian writers who were fascinated by the image of the kiss. In these lines, Shelley both alludes to the conceits traditionally used to describe kissing and raises the darker and more complex issues that Victorian writers went on to explore.

Type
Research Article
Information
Victorian Literature and Culture , Volume 13 , Spring 1985 , pp. 165 - 180
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1985

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References

NOTES

1. Quoted in Perella, Nicolas James, The Kiss Sacred and Profane (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969), p. 7.Google Scholar

2. “Three Contributions to the Theory of Sex,” in The Basic Writings of SigmundFreud, trans, and ed. Brill, A. A. (New York: Modern Library, 1938), p. 586.Google Scholar

3. The Earthly Paradise, 4 vols. (London: Longmans, Green, 1905), I, 126.Google Scholar

4. Quoted in Bombaugh, Charles, The Literature of Kissing (Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott, 1876), p. 320.Google Scholar

5. Eliot, George, Adam Bede (New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1966), p. 138.Google Scholar

6. Thackeray, William Makepeace, The History of Pendennis (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1903), pp. 462–63;Google ScholarEliot, George, Middlemarch (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1956), p. 222.Google Scholar

7. Kipling, Rudyard, The Light That Failed (New York: Doubleday, 1922), p. 253.Google Scholar

8. Stoker, Bram, Dracula (New York: Bantam, 1981), p. 304.Google Scholar

9. See, e.g., C.F. Bentley, “The Monster in the Bedroom: Sexual Symbolism in Bram Stoker´s Dracula,” Literature and Psychology, 22 (1972), 30Google Scholar

10. I am indebted to my colleague, Crozier, Robert, for the sacramental interpretation of Dracula´s vampirism. I have also been helped by Nina Auerbach´s discussion of Lucy Westenra and Mina Harker in Woman and the Demon (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1982), pp. 22–24.Google Scholar

11. (New York: Penguin, 1978), p. 81.Google Scholar

12. Baudelaire, Charles, “The Metamorphoses of a Vampire,” trans. Mathews, Jackson, The Flowers of Evil, ed. Marthiel, and Mathews, Jackson, rev. ed. (New York: New Directions, 1962), p. 161.Google Scholar

13. Quoted in Hodin, J.P., Edvard Munch (New York: Praeger, 1972), p. 75Google Scholar

14. I am indebted for my reading of poetry, Rossetti´s to Spector, Stephen S., “Love, Unity, and Desire in the Poetry of Dante Gabriel Rossetti,” ELH, 38 (‘97’). 432–58,Google Scholar and to Riede, David R., Dante Gabriel Rossetti and the Limits of Victorian Vision (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1983), pp. 107–48.Google Scholar

15. Keats and Embarrassment (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974), p. 99.Google Scholar

16. Trans. Douglas, Alfred, in The Plays of Oscar Wilde (Garden City, New York: Dolphin Books, 1966), p. 335.Google Scholar