friendship, desire, and marriage in Victorian England by sharon Marcus

The social history of Britain 1815-1914

friendship, desire, and marriage in Victorian England

Q1. Describe the meanings of friendship, desire, and marriage between women in Victorian England?

Answer-.In the book - "friendship, desire, and marriage in Victorian England", Sharon Marcus argues since sexuality, by making laws about reproduction, marriages, and economic exchange, the state regulates women’s bodies primarily in terms of their relationships with men -as a mother wives prostitutes, and female worker competing with male ones -not in terms of their relation to another thus in turn to the relation between women beyond the sexual desire to erotic self fantasy, desire, heightened emotion and strong physical sensation that can be but not are always sexual ones.

Erotic attachments and relationships dear fiend variously by obsession, domination, altruism, nurturing care, reciprocity, unrequitedness, self-sacrifice, memory, and nostalgia can be sexual acts but do not have to be Eroticrelationsn can be formalized individually crafted forms of customized legal  interdependence maintained across physical distance through letter-writing, nurturing physical proximity of household unsanctioned by state but legitimated by social  recognition these acts can be called as sexual but actually they involved genitalia and feeling of sexual arousal leading to the organism but, certainly part of erotic self but not all sexual acts are erotic and many relationships are deeply erotic without being sexual 

Relationships between women in Victorian England, especially the friendship between women flourished a site where the erotic flourished. Erotic creates a realm of deep feeling that isn’t rebellion, although it was common for people in nineteenth-century England to destroy their dairy, many women and their relatives preserved documents containing intense expressions of love between female friends 

The erotic friendships between women thrived in nineteenth-century England because they were considered incapable of becoming sexual since the state-defined sexual acts in terms of the presence of a penis and sexual relationships between women were thus usually excluded from the purview of sexuality. however,r there were many instances of sexual acts between women, mostly literate, educated women, who were able to support themselves through earning and inherited wealth and who is legally single and had the legal right to own their own property and make contracts 

      marriage and friendship refers not simply to individual experiences but also to ways that laws, the police, disciplinary regimes, and economic relation mold gender, sexual acts, biological reproduction, kinship, and marriages, which in turn structure people’s relationship to labor, property, and inheritance and since historian tend to consider that liberalism weakened the power of nineteenth-century England as a state by emphasizing free trade, markets, education, culture, and social norms over the explicitly political and highly organized mechanism of power associated with  the state 

By the nineteenth century, dominant British political thought and culture were characterized by a strong belief in negative liberty and privacy .liberalism argued for the importance of letting market forces rather than governmental regulation decide the matter- for the centrality of local, voluntarist efforts and for the need  to minimize governmental apparatus and limit the power of the ruler over individuals the law concerning marriage, kinship, sex acts changed dramatically throughout the nineteenth century, but still, the state treated subjects differently depending on their gender, class, marital status,nationality,race, and age as well as on where sex acts took place and on whether any money was exchanged for their performance but actually there should be the single legal or social standard of sexual behavior for men and women and all sex acts should be considered outside the state’s  jurisdiction 

There are many sex acts that regulate and protect bodies. English laws concerning the legal status of married women demonstrate that law protects the economic interest and domestic authority of husbands but not wives. The nineteenth-century law concerning women as a wife and mother and married women had no legal identity apart from their husbands, women couldn't own property and were not liable to debt, had no right to their own earnings 

they could file divorce under only limited conditions and most of the time had no parental rights to custody of or contact with children in the event of separation or divorce until 1886, the court even voided legal agreement in which husbands separating from wives voluntarily ceded custody of children to mother, until 1886 Guardian of Infants Acts could widows be the sole guardians of their children.

The law of marital property and divorce also reflected that the state-protected husbands by refusing to regulate them and in so doing this also declined to protect wives and children adoption had no legal existence in England until 1926  because the right of husbands and fathers against government intrusion was so strong that it was unthinkable  for a state to dissolve paternity by transferring it from one party to another .only in 1889 were the first laws passed allowing police to arrest parents who physically harmed their children similarly marital rape was legally impossible because the law posited that in marrying,  a woman had completely given herself to the authority and sexuality  use of her husband, no longer had any powers of consent or dissent relative to him, while other kinds of physical  assault were  less completely condoned, the law deemed some degree violence permissible if husband assaulted wives and only in case of divorce - dissolving a husband’s right over wives 

English law defined husbands as liberal citizens who had the right to protection from state interference but conceived of wives as noncitizens, subject only to the protection and regulation of their spouse. Legislature believed that the protection of the wife from bodily violation by her husband would violate a man’s right of protection from state control 

In the case of sex between men, the state tend to regulatory bodies in case of sex between women, its focus was speech, discourse, and  print the state was more likely to approach lesbian sex in case of  censorship,slander ,scandal sex acts between women entered the court not as a matter of prosecution but as accessories  to heterosexual conflict 

The state’s tendency to regulate, police, and punish sex between men more frequently than those between women leads to the surprising insight that men, despite enjoying greater freedom,power and , mobility than women, were subject to a greater degree of state control 

When it came to their sexual behavior and capacity to govern their sexual behavior and selves in general perhaps state didn’t operate with a strictly hetero sexuality definition of sex rather it recognized that sex between men existed but refused to confer on it the legitimacy it according to most sex acts transacted between  men and women 

Ironically, the belief that women were not sexual beings meant that the privileged class constituted by those possessing penises also became subject to more intense, harsher sexual regulation, even when engaged in the nebulous, nonpenetrative, and even when covered by the gross indecency

State’s definition of sex, friendship, and marriages 

The nineteenth-century state-defined sexuality as what men could and could not, should and should not do, and what they had the  right to do without state inferences, for example In victorian England by deeming sex acts between men to be legitimate objects of regulation defined male homosexuality as an exception to male citizen’s definitional freedom from undue state interferences conversely, the state-aligned male heterosexuality with citizenship and with negative liberty by declining to regulate most sex acts between men and women Only toward the end of the century did this permissive attitude towards male sexuality began to change 

There were a range of relations the victorian state had to sexuality -

1. The  control of the gendered body, such as criminalizing sex between men in victorian England 

2. The protection of the gendered body, such as defending weak girls against predatory men 

3. The Designation of certain bodies, relations and acts as beyond its control, such as paternal rights in legitimate offspring or husband's rights to sexual intercourse at will with their wives 

4. The refusal to recognize certain relations and acts as even existing, such as adopted

Thus, Foucauldian argument that the concept of sexuality is inseparable from the state, that sexuality is a node in the web  spun by governmentality,and that  both sexuality and state experienced growth spurts in nineteenth-century  England and he developed the concept of  governmentality  to express the ways that the state was not simply exercising top-down power but was itself inseparable from the softer regime that endowed human being with a sense of subjectivity that includes within it a proclivity for being governed 

Foucault insisted that modern power was not wielded over preexisting bodies and desires rather discourse and institution and the state created subjects by designating which bodies, acts, and desires to constrain. Whether conceived of as a challenge to state control, defined  as that which the state  could not and should not control, sexuality is thus  a concept inextricable from that of the state thus Foucault emphasizes that power could take many complex  forms that it involved creative production as much  as it did  despotic suppression, but precisely because he emphasize the complex nature of power and he assigned to modern  state a startling extension  role in the production of sexuality hence English state used sexuality to  produce the subjects it  governs and to  designate which kind of bodies can and cannot be a citizen 

Eroticism and state 

There  are also areas of human existence  that the state more or less neglects and does not  heed to it that it is neglecting and that neglect by the state can be highly beneficial to the  social and psychological lives of those neglecting sexuality and governmentality  aren’t  everything, despite such expansive concept 

By making laws about reproduction, marriage, and, economical exchange, the state-regulated women’s bodies primarily in terms of their relationship with men as mothers, wives, prostitutes, and female workers competing with male ones in terms of their relation to one another.

female marriage is an example of the state failing not only to regulate sexual acts but also neglecting an opportunity to control the broader between male and female. in female marriage one partner was overtly masculine, such cross-gendered marriage perceive sexual relationship between in Victorian England 

        Rather than that sex between women could not possible, female marriages flourished because women were mostly accepted because they so closely resembled female friendship, which the state ignored and society celebrated means it closely resemble several different kinds of relationships between women that were considered part of  femininity including friendship 

Sociologists identify  the  voluntary preferential nature of the bond between friends as friendship, which means that to engage in female friendship, a certain amount of liberation from other ties thus female friendship enjoyed social privilege but not state’s  inferences erotic 

Friendship helped to establish social networking, distribute  status  and information 

and secure class and gender identities and it is beyond state control as existed between men and women 

1. The erotic self  has never been fully defined by the state’s control, protection or recognition 

2. State oversight, in sense of supervision, is not the only path to greater freedom of sexual expression but less constrained embodiment and hierarchies 

Whenever a state  gained greater authority than religion, it becomes a deciding  force  in defining  its subject's sexuality  through laws that overtly sanction or criminalize specific  sexual acts  or person and by deciding what kind of violence will be considered  legitimate and illegitimate and their fore who needs regulation who require protection by deciding  not to  regulate certain kind of sexual  expression and aggression and to protect other, the state defines sexuality  through its oversight of legislative, policing and, courts and incites  even in most rebellious citizens to frame  their own  sexuality  in terms of appeal  to state  but   the state is not exhaustive  and there are many areas to overlook not a conscious decision 

Thus friendship doesn’t exemplify the free will and choice vaunted by liberalism but friendship was more often glorified for promoting a capacity for untrammeled feeling that cohered with the ideological expectation of middle-class English Women in Victorian England in the nineteenth century.