‘Intellectual suicides’
‘Intellectual suicides’
The Man of Letters in Middlemarch
In her essay Christine Crockett Sharp addresses the body as afflicted by a debilitating search for knowledge and truth, which runs against the doctrine of Victorian muscular masculinity. Masturbation, Sharp demonstrates, provoked horror in the nineteenth-century mind because of its association with a deliberate self-incapacitation. The weakness and impotence that it was believed to induce, allied to its suspiciousness as a solitary pursuit, runs counter to the imperatives underpinning imperial and commercial vigour. In Middlemarch, Casaubon is an etiolated husk of a man not primarily because of the impossibility of his intellectual task but because of his self-inflicted moral wound.
Keywords: Middlemarch, George Eliot, Masturbation, Male body, Reproduction, Casaubon
Liverpool Scholarship Online requires a subscription or purchase to access the full text of books within the service. Public users can however freely search the site and view the abstracts and keywords for each book and chapter.
Please, subscribe or login to access full text content.
If you think you should have access to this title, please contact your librarian.
To troubleshoot, please check our FAQs, and if you can't find the answer there, please contact us.