How Sexuality is Presented in Literary Texts

by Poppy Goad

The constraints of gender follow the precedent of culture and civilisation. Our sexuality can define who we are and how we are perceived by society. Moreover, it is society that dictates how our sexuality should be revealed; thus this stunted separation of gender has cultivated a sexual repression of both male and females alike. More specifically, female repression has been a prevalent issue throughout time; female sexual expression has traditionally been regarded as sinful and monstrous.

Sexuality can also be seen not merely as a construct of society, but as identification, an establishment of a self. However, this façade can lead to corruption and sexual identity can lead to madness. In Jean Rhys Wide Sargasso Sea, we watch as the protagonist Antoinette loses her identity and sexuality through the repression she faces in the imperial landscape dominated by white men. A retelling of the life of the madwoman ‘Bertha’ in Jane Eyre, Wide Sargasso Sea focuses on her dissolve into madness. Rhys choses to contrast to Bronte’s painting of Rochester as the tragic hero, who is seen as restricted and plagued by his mad wife in Jane Eyre, alternatively presented him as the tragic villain, who drove his young wife to madness through the oppression he commanded. We begin to see differences in the characters of Antoinette and Jane: although both are oppressed by the dominant sexual gender, Jane fabricates a resounding stubborn courage that adheres to the feminist theme of the text. However, Jane is faced with physical boundaries, her hardship and suffering is visceral and concrete, whereas Antoinette faces psychological struggle and torment. The ideology and implicit expectations of femininity are now the faces of oppression, rather than the physical difference and treatment of her gender. This creates a repression that is more potent and dangerous, through its psychological battleground: ‘For Antoinette, even happiness is not real and elicits fear’, Rhys elaborates. In the face of this, Antoinette is described as virtually helpless. She seems to invite her suffering in, rarely protecting herself from the absence of love and humanity she receives from those around her; both from her mother and from Rochester (who is never explicitly named).

The irony of Antoinette’s situation resides in the fact that her fear of the masculine imperial world becomes the very thing she comes to rely on. As Maggie Humm comments, ‘All women characters in Rhys’s fictions are mercilessly exposed to the financial and gendered constraints of the imperial world’. Antoinette’s helplessness derives from an unloving childhood, the lack of communication she received resulting in her own identity to become easily malleable by others. One observation of this is how she conflates ideas of sex and death. Following Antoinette’s hyperbolic assertion that she will surely die if Rochester says to, Rochester suddenly exclaims ‘”Die then! Die!” I watched her die many times…Very soon she was as eager for what’s called loving as I was – more lost and drowned afterwards’. This shows how Antoinette does not show the stereotypical hesitance or fear that clouded sexual intercourse for women at the time. This sexual promiscuity is presented almost masculine in its eagerness for sexual gratification. Rochester earlier observes how ‘She threw like a boy, with a sure graceful movement’. Antoinette’s lack of stereotypical femininity for the time period correlates with Rochester’s dismissal of her love. It is clear that he sees her as merely an object, a possession: ‘I did not love her. I was thirsty for her, but that is not love. I felt very little tenderness for her, she was a stranger to me, a stranger who did not think or feel as I did’. Sex and lust becomes the only form of communication between Rochester and Antoinette, this carnal devotion creating a void which love does not fill. As Barbara Ann Schapiro notes, ‘Both characters are furious at being unrealized by each other’, which correlates with the idea that to transcend deep-set gender norms in a patriarchal society is hopeless; the difference of male and female sexuality cannot be breached. As the text progresses, Rochester begins to call Antoinette ‘Bertha’, foreshadowing the tormented ‘man-woman’ that her future has planned and alluding to Rochester’s impending erasure of ‘Antoinette’ and a disintegration of her own identity and sexuality.

Antoinette’s sexuality is reflected in the landscape of Dominica. It’s free and exotic exterior seems to unnerve Rochester, alluding to his separation from Antoinette, as he is a ‘“stranger here...I feel that this place is my enemy and is on your side”’. The landscape symbolises a safe haven and sense of security for Antoinette, and a preservation of her own identity, separate from her husband. However, as the text progresses, this too becomes tainted and corrupted by Rochester’s influence and control. Antoinette exclaims how, ‘”I loved this place and you have turned it into something I hate”’. This is used as an analogy for the corruption and loss of her identity and sanity as, when they move to England, she is locked away in the attic, becoming ‘Bertha’. This repression and destruction of her identity and sexuality through the metaphor of the loss of her landscape alludes to the patriarchal control of imperial masculinity over her gender: she loses her sanity, identity, homeland and sexuality, all through the possessiveness of her husband.

This sexual repression can also be observed in the abstract form of the supernatural, for example, in Bram Stoker’s Dracula. In 1897, when Dracula was published, Victorian moralism prevailed in the depiction of the ‘ideal woman’. The characters of Mina and Lucy are presented as meek and passive at the start of the text, symbolising ‘God’s women, fashioned by His own hand to show us men and other women that there is a heaven where we can enter, and that its light can be here on earth’. This addresses the rigid expectations that were prevalent in the fin de siècle for women at that time, as you would either be expected to uphold an image of chastity and remain pure, or you would be a wife and mother; sexual expression restricted to the confines of your husband’s house. This hyperbolic description of Mina’s perfection infers how she is used to embody the virtues of purity, becoming propaganda for female sexuality in the late 1890s; a two-dimensional incarnation of desired female perfection. The perfect and chaste images of Mina and Lucy in the beginning of the text, both ‘So true, so sweet, so noble, so little an egoist—and that, let me tell you, is much in this age, so sceptical and selfish’ is then juxtaposed with the overtly sexualised presentation of Dracula’s female vampires, thus further establishing Mina and Lucy as personifications of good in paradox to the sinful and lustful embodiment of the female vampires. 

The provocative imagery that the text employs can be interpreted as an indulgence of the Victorian male imagination, a deliberate fantasy of female sexuality, in which, ‘There was a deliberate voluptuousness which was both thrilling and repulsive, and as she arched her neck she actually licked her lips like an animal, till I could see in the moonlight the moisture shining on the scarlet lips and on the red tongue as it lapped the white sharp teeth’. The animalisation of the female vampire acts as a parallel to the shameful and degraded status that women were branded with when their chastity was lost outside of marriage. They were seen as inferior and monstrous, thus reflecting the beast like personification of the female vampire. This overtly erotic characterisation of the vampire’s acts as a polar opposite to all that Mina and Lucy represent, alluding to the impending battle between good and evil that is personified through the purity of Mina and the fight to preserve this façade. However, the argument that the sexualisation of the vampires is for the indulgence of the Victorian male can be seen as justified, Barbara Belford claiming that Stoker developed a ‘coded eroticism’ that prevailed throughout the text, allowing the male reader to be taken ‘in a languorous ecstasy’. Alternatively, Ernest Jones asserts that the latent content of vampirism ‘yields plain indications of most kinds of sexual perversions, and that the belief assumes various forms according as this or that perversion is more prominent’.

Following this gratification of potential male sexual fantasies it can be asserted that the text holds the central motif of controlling and preventing the desire of females and ‘to destroy the threatening mother, she who threatens by becoming desirable’, as claimed by Phyllis Roth. The protagonists watch as Lucy is transformed into a lustful and ‘voluptuous’ creature, waking suddenly with a heightened sexual urge, asking her love Arthur to ‘Kiss me!’, thus her purity becomes tainted with this sinful carnal desire.  It is observed that ‘the sweetness was turned to adamantine, heartless cruelty and the purity to voluptuous wantonness’. Stoker’s use of repeated paradoxes further emphasises the difference in her transformation as the protagonists observe how ‘the lips were crimson with fresh blood, and that the stream had trickled over her chain and stained the purity of her lawn death-robe’. The striking contrast of the red of the blood and the white of her robe draws on the stereotypical connotations of the emotive colours. ‘Red’ is often used in association with lust, desire and sin, and paradoxically ‘white’ with purity and chastity.

The progression of Lucy, from a chaste embodiment of expected Victorian female moralism, to a lustful and sexually expressive vampire, the very antithesis of traditional Victorian standards, helps to illustrate the underlying concept of residing sexual desire in all females. This is alluded to as Dracula addresses the remaining male protagonists declaring, ‘Your girls that you all love are mine already; and through them you and others shall yet be mine’. This illustrates the central misogynistic viewpoint of the text; that women’s desires are ungovernable and will soon leave men poised for a costly fall from grace. As Judith Weissman expressed; the male ‘fight to destroy Dracula and to restore Mina in her purity is really a fight for control over women’ and a fight to repress the knowledge that ‘women’s sexual appetites are greater than men’s’.

Following the progressive social change of the twentieth century, sexual repression became less about oppression in a male dominated society and more of a repression of individual sexuality. For example, in Jeanette Winterson’s Oranges are not the Only Fruit, the central motif focuses on the repression of sexual orientation under a pious upbringing and all-consuming religious environment. Following the teachings of the Christian faith, the protagonist Jeanette is taught that right and wrong are definitive, and the world consists of binary oppositions. However, Jeanette’s homosexuality places her outside the binary of gender roles, establishing a separation from the traditions and social expectancies that have consumed her childhood. This is akin to the previous texts as, although the protagonist is facing the repression of her sexuality in a different time period, it is shown how control of female sexuality has transcended the decades, and thus created a construct of what femininity and female sexuality should be.

This theme of constructed female sexuality is prevalent when Jeanette’s mother buys a new raincoat to replace the own she has torn. The raincoat is a putrid pink and is hated by Jeanette; however, she is forced to wear the garment by her Christian Fundamentalist adoptive mother. The garment embodies the ideology of her pious femininity that remains paramount in her mother’s strict upbringing. However, she sees this façade as what it is: a mask, drawing likeness to the novel The Man in the Iron Mask by Alexandre Dumas. The raincoat symbolises the restrictions of her expression of sexual orientation due to the ‘mask’ of her gender and religion that has dictated her sexuality, and thus her identity.

However, feminist postmodern writers, for example, Julia Kristen and Monique Witting, alongside Winterson, have argued for the insignificance of sexuality, proposing that the concept of gender is socially constructed, not biologically inherent. This can be seen in works such as Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night where it is argued, through the ambiguity of gender, the importance gender holds in relation to sexuality and sexual expression. Both texts aim to establush how sexuality is a constructed façade merely through the ideals of moral standing that dictate culture in any specific time period. It can be universally observed how the taxonomy of sexuality and gender is prioritised above sexual expression; however, it should be in the foreground of our generation to observe the unreality of this facade constructed. This follows the teachings of previous literary works like Oranges are not the Only Fruit and Twelfth Night that have shed light, intentionally or unknowingly, on the prevalent issues of the repression of female sexuality.

Moreover, it is clear that the sexual repression of females that prevailed in the nineteenth century has digressed to fester in a more psychological prudence. This is observed in the progression of exterior to interior female oppression from Bronte’s Jane Eyre to Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea and is also explicit in Winterson’s Oranges are not the Only Fruit. Later texts, such as Dracula show a clear misogynistic conception of female sexuality, characterising its expression as sinful and shameful. This theme, although transcendent across the centuries, has been transposed to repression, not on the broad scale of gender standards, but to individual oppression in specific cultures and civilisations. Thus, it becomes clear that female sexuality is not repressed by an opposing sex, but by a predestined establishment of culture in which females fall inferior, consequently beginning a repression of female sexuality through its expression, identity and orientation.