This book contends that, in Victorian literature, transgressive desires that cannot be openly acknowledged – whether these be homosexuality, pygmalionism, necrophilia, or paedophilia – are often embedded and encrypted in sculptures. The three-dimensionality of the sculptural body, its ubiquity in Victorian popular culture, its increasing visibility in public galleries, and the full or partial nudity of classical statues on display are some of the key reasons that underpin this phenomenon. It argues that, in such literature, sculpture often functions as a form of textual ‘Secretum’ in which forbidden love becomes available for recovery and circulation by those ‘in the know’, manifesting through sensory signification, through literal and metaphorical forms of tactility, and at the intersections between vision and touch.
Andrew Mangham, Violent women and sensation fiction: crime, medicine and Victorian popular culture, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2007, pp. ix, 247, £50.00 (hardback 978-0-230-54521-2).