Victorian erotica is a genre of sexual art and literature which emerged in the Victorian era of 19th-century Britain. Victorian erotica emerged as a product of a Victorian sexual culture. The Victorian era was characterized by paradox of rigid morality and anti-sensualism, but also by an obsession with sex. Sex was a main social topic, with progressive and enlightened thought pushing for sexual restriction and repression. Overpopulation was a societal concern for the Victorians, thought to be the cause of famine, disease, and war. To curb the threats of overpopulation (especially of the poor) and to solve other social issues that were arising at the time, sex was socially regulated and controlled. New sexual categories emerged as a response, defining normal and abnormal sex. Heterosexual sex between married couples became the only form of sex socially and morally permissible. Sexual pleasure and desire beyond heterosexual marriage was labelled as deviant, considered to be sinful and sinister. Such deviant forms included masturbation, homosexuality, prostitution and pornography. Procreation was the primary goal of sex, removing it from the public, and placing it in the domestic. Yet, Victorian anti-sexual attitudes were contradictory of genuine Victorian life, with sex underlying much of the cultural practice. Sex was simultaneously repressed and proliferated. Sex was featured in medical manuals such as The Sexual Impulse by Havelock Ellis and Functions and Disorders of Reproductive Organs by William Acton, and in cultural magazines like The Penny Magazine and The Rambler. Sex was popular in entertainment, with much of Victorian theatre, art and literature including and expressing sexual and sensual themes.
General
Historian Peter Webb writes that there are two categories of Victorian erotica: on the one hand the expressive writings of Oscar Wilde and Swinburne, and on the other hand the "coldly calculated indulgence in male fantasy" such as is found in The Memoirs of Dolly Morton, where women are depicted merely as sex objects.
Art and literature provided Victorians with an avenue to express transgressive and repressed sexual desire. Sex was a prominent feature in much of Victorian art, especially in theatre and literature. Sex was often illustrated by stories of deviance and scandal. It is argued that some Victorian erotica rests on techniques of implication and allusion to sexual desires and activity, such as in the works of Wilde, Dickens, and Field. Yet there are also explicitly sexual works, as compiled in Henry Spencer Ashbee's Forbidden Books of the Victorians, in which the books describe sex in much erotic detail. Such Victorian works include The Romance of Lust, My Secret Life, and Venus in Furs. Additional Victorian artists and authors include Aubrey Beardsley (the illustrator of Wilde's Salome), and, of course, many literary and artistic works by "Anonymous."
The female sexual object
A main component of Victorian erotica was the female sexual object. Women were increasingly being defined in terms of femininity, subordination, and the object of sexual desire. Aesthetic and medical procedures were targeting women to accentuate their sex appeal. In real Victorian life, female sexuality was problematic, and was only to be expressed in terms of domestic life.
On the stage, in art, or in literature, women were inscribed with sexuality, positioned as the sexual object. Societal expectations tied women to ideas of purity and virginity. Erotic plot lines and themes sought to shatter these expectations, crafting women as whores, prostitutes, and adulterers. Women were symbol of vice and temptation. Men were thought to be victims of the female seductress, and were the primary spectators and consumers of female erotica. Themes of same-sex erotica was avoided.
Erotic stimulation was usually implied or suggested. Female erotica was marked through clothing, hairstyles, corseted silhouettes, shoes and headgear. Explicit nudity was rare, with arousal coming from the process of undressing. Rather than the breast or buttocks, legs were a major source of sexual arousal. Veiling and silhouetting were popular modes of titillation, with brief uncovering of legs, or silhouetted outlines of naked women creating voyeuristic arousal.