Sexuality In Victorian Era Essay

“Did late Victorians think of homosexuality primarily as a crime, a disease, or something else?”

The late Victorian era of the nineteenth century, has long been synonymously recognised as highly-repressed and morally obsessive. Yet distinct from all preceding eras, there lay a fixation in society in the belief that an individual's sex and sexuality form the most basic core of their identity and indeed of one's social or political standing, and freedom. Though we can acknowledge that the urbanisation and industrialisation of society occurred at different paces influenced by its own geographical distinctions, the population as a whole came to see family structures, gender roles and employment patterns alter. The fragmentation of their communities and pluralisation of values for many was how previously unacknowledged parts of one's social identity came to gain significance and definition; sexuality had been brought to the forefront of Victorian discourse. As I attempt to identify what the popular attitudes towards homosexuality and same-sex behaviour were of this period, it becomes clear that
Where Darwin's theory of evolution introduced the idea of a hierarchal classification of human beings, the works of Cesare Lombroso extended this approach in suggesting that criminals were 'biological atavisms'-throwbacks to an earlier stage of evolution-who were incapable of functioning adequately in the modern world.8Richard Von Krafft-Ebing's work entitled 'Psychopathia Sexualis' presented a equally moralistic view in that monogamous sex for the purposes of procreation was the desirable norm, and anything outside of this description was essentially 'perverse' and 'deviant', a point from which Krafft-Ebing would later argue as a means to decriminalise