How Musical Science Shaped Representations of Gender and Sexuality in British Literature, 1850-1914

FAIN: FT-286167-22

Shannon Burke Draucker
Siena College (Loudonville, NY 12211-1462)

Research and writing towards a book on Victorian authors’ understanding of music and musical science, 1850–1914. 

My book, Sounding Bodies: Music Physiology and the Queer Overtones of Victorian Literature, argues that new scientific discoveries of music’s effects on the body fundamentally shifted how Victorian writers captured corporeal life. As acoustical scientists like Hermann von Helmholtz and John Tyndall learned that music could penetrate the ear, tickle the nerves, and excite the muscles, Victorian writers embraced new opportunities to explicitly represent bodily sensations of pleasure, desire, and intimacy. From Thomas Hardy to Vernon Lee, Victorian writers drew on music physiology to depict and defend those whose gender presentations, sexual desires, and preferred forms of intimacy incited social stigma, legal punishment, or even violence. Though often associated with prudish or conservative attitudes towards gender and sexuality, Victorian literature was in fact full of subversive representations of embodied life.