The sex experts reinforced the sexual differentiation undergirding modern culture, a culture still dependent upon women’s ideological work in making heterosexuality safe for consumption. See Birken’s excellent Consuming Desire on the promise of genderlessness for the culture of consumption. By 1875, Orson S. Fowler would publish his theory of creative sexual science, explaining why «beautiful women enkindle, but homely allay, desire» (136). As American culture became sexualized, physical intimacy became first a fact of science, then an aesthetic experience. Nineteenth-century Social Gospel fiction tells this story repeatedly: some men and women are born ugly, born to belong to the mills or the working class. After all, how could one alter what was «in the blood?» More important, the Social Gospel reformers led to the development of the pernicious doctrines of the eugenicists, such as those in the 1860s and 70s who promoted «family studies» as a way to root out dysgenic blood in American communities. When these efforts failed, social engineering came into vogue as a way to contain the proliferation of the unruly masses, considered to be reproducing at an unparalleled rate. Susan Gillman expertly documents Pauline Hopkins’s subversion of these earlier doctrines in Of One Blood, arguing that Hopkins revises the term «blood» as something that simultaneously signified both «a mystical vision of (black) racial distinctiveness and interracial harmony, while it remained a biologism, rooted in racial and social inequities» (61). By having «blood» mean both visionary and נערות ליווי בתל אביב נערות ליווי בבת ים באשקלון essentialist thinking, Hopkins–as Gillman contends–promotes transculturation, an exchange between cultures achieved in large part by the mixing of bloods.
Whether because of «blood or vice or poverty» (259), the novel of reform depends on an inherent sense that change in the social situation is impossible because of essential differences between social classes. 7 The mid-nineteenth-century discourse of beauty–and its subsequent commodification–produced another discourse of ugliness, often manifested in dark skin, deformity, and immoral behavior as blood related. Not surprisingly, this discourse was also transmitted through the popular literature of the 1860s and 1870s; their writing gave credence to the ethnologists’ decrees of racial and class traits inherited through the blood. Middle-class beauty rituals were not just skin deep, but psychological, probably inherited traits. After refusing Dirk’s offer of marriage, נערות ליווי she dejectedly returns to her room and ponders her sexual purity: «She felt as if her life had just been through a ‘house-cleaning.’ It was clean and washed, and proper and right, and as it should be, and drearily in order forever.» When she ponders her future, נערות ליווי בפתח תקווה she vaguely refers to the sexuality she will be missing: «‘I don’t see why I couldn’t have had that, leastways,’ she cried between her hands. ‘I haven’t ever had much else. I don’t see why that should go too'» (287). In case you loved this information and you would want to receive much more information about 21babe generously visit our own website. She wants to have had something to offset the drudgery of working-class labor.
She eventually turns to ministering and preaching, but her first choice–as it was for Nynee, as it was for Catty–was sexuality. From Wharton and Dreiser to Ferber and נערות ליווי באשקלון נערות ליווי בהרצליה בכפר סבא רעננה Fitzgerald, fictions now played out these new fantasies of liberation through sexuality. American Literature 68.3 (Sep. 1996): 555-86. Warren, Kenneth W. Black and White Strangers: Race and American Literary Realism. ALH 10.2 (Summer 1998): 239-65. Curtis, Susan. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1998. London, Jack. Yet even Sip’s self-assessment is bland compared to the narrator’s description of Sip’s dysgenic sister, Catty: «A girl possibly of fifteen years,–a girl with a low forehead, with wandering eyes, with a dull stoop to the head, with long, lithe, magnetic fingers, with a thick, dropping under lip,–a girl walled up and walled in from that labyrinth of sympathies, that difficult evolution of brain from beast, the gorgeous peril of that play at good and evil which we call life, except at the wandering eyes, and at the long, lithe, magnetic fingers. An ugly girl» (86). The only passion that can break through her dysgenic state is Perley Kelso’s sympathy, which she offers «for love’s sake» (88). Rather than charity, acts of sympathy become a confirmation of the «blood» as the source of irreconcilable difference between the leisure and working classes.
The ugly girl was a product of her society in multiple forms: a wayward and untrained worker, a misguided consumer, a sexual sport. Hence, sexual reform was not really much of an issue with these reformers. 130) 7. Eric Sundquist also claims in To Wake the Nations that debates about blood were common in racialist thinking, and African-American historiographers as well as fictionists often complicated the issue of blood and heredity by invoking Africanist consciousness or the advantages of miscegenation. These family studies often generated conclusions that linked–in Rafter’s phrase–«maternal culpability» to familial degeneracy. This construction links sex and work, not sex as work–either as reproduction or prostitution. Thus, Catty’s anomalous appearance augurs a strangely new idea in Victorian America about sexuality: physical pleasure. Contraception and Abortion in 19th-Century America. Fuller’s intellect notwithstanding, ugliness once provided the very rationale for sexual intimacy or pleasure, a topic that Douglas banishes from her antebellum literary history. Focusing on the conspiracy between middle-class women and the clergy, Douglas misses the process of sexualization that their sentimentalism masked.
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