Self-Abuse and Sublimation: Masturbatory Aesthetics and Literary Criticism in the Long Nineteenth Century

"Self-Abuse and Sublimation: Masturbatory Aesthetics and Literary Criticism in the Long Nineteenth Century" presents various aspects by which our current pejorative uses of the term "masturbatory" encodes anxieties about the sexuality and aesthetics of individuation and social participation that we have inherited from British eighteenth- and nineteenth-century discourses on masturbation. It looks to gothic and sensation novels (James Hogg's Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner, Mary Elizabeth Braddon's Lady Audley's Secret, and Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray) and landmark texts in modern literary and aesthetic criticism (by Leo Bersani, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, D. A. Miller, and Michael Fried) as discursive sites where our vernacular use of the "masturbatory" has its roots, and where autoeroticism traces out the constitutive contradictions of the supposedly autonomous individual. By paying attention to the seemingly trivial aesthetic category of the "masturbatory," this dissertation argues for its importance in indexing the limits and liminalities of aesthetics and sexuality, as well as of individual autonomy and its conflicts with social reality. Though "Everybody masturbates" is now less an open secret than an axiom, less an occasion for shame than a mundane reassurance of collective fantasies of sexual egalitarianism, the "masturbatory" continues to point toward the troubling interfaces of individual autonomy and nonsovereign relationality, the private and the public, and sexual experience and aesthetic representation.