Chapter 4, “New Sensuality: A Sexual Education in Desire and Pleasure,” begins in 1926, when a young married woman, Hilde R., wrote to an advice column to complain about her “cold” marriage. To cope, she admitted to reading romance novels for pleasure. Many sex reformers derided such novels for being sexually repressive and regressive. Why, then, did Hilde R. and women like her derive so much pleasure from reading them? This chapter argues that romance novels were part of a larger body of “bad books” that emerged at the fin de siècle as a scandalous form of early sexual education and knowledge, even though they were not necessarily intended to be read that way. Women read these books—including the Italian sexologist Paolo Mantegazza’s Physiology of Love (1874), the German author E. Marlitt’s romance novel Goldelse (1866), and the Austrian women’s rights activist Grete Meisel-Hess’s Fanny Roth (1902)—not for “facts” about sexuality, but to learn about their personal desire: to recognize and experience it in their bodies as well as to feel pleasure. While bourgeois morality conceived of desire as being opposite to love, this literature effectively framed it as being part and parcel of love and of woman’s subjectivity. Although the full-fledged sex reform movement that emerged in Vienna by the interwar period made “objective” sexual knowledge more accessible to women, it encouraged them not only to recognize and experience their subjective, personal desire, but to pursue and fulfill it with their spouses. Unsurprisingly, even though bad books did not emphasize that desire be pursued and fulfilled with the body of another and therefore seemed old-fashioned or even sexually repressed, new women such as Hilde R. continued reading them, precisely because, I suggest, such books enabled them to find pleasure in something that both sexological tracts and the reform movement ignored: the personal experience of desire. (25)
---
“As a 24-year-old married woman, I still long madly for the romantic hero of my girlish dreams,” Hilde R. wrote in her letter to the advice column in Bettauers Wochenschrift (Bettauer’s Weekly), a sex reform newspaper, in 1926. “Our marriage is so cold,” she continued, “that when I look more closely, [I notice] that my heart is frozen. No tenderness, no passion!” Hilde R. turned to romance novels to find solace. “I devour Courths-Mahler novels, imagine myself to be the heroine.”
Hilde R. was not the only woman devouring novels by the hugely popular author Hedwig Courths-Mahler. According to an article from 1922, Courths-Mahler’s readership consisted of around five million German speakers. A library in Vienna reported having sixty copies of every one of her novels—and she published over two hundred—making her one of the most widely read authors in Vienna at the time. Known for her sweetly sentimental prose, the reading of which the contemporary journalist and writer Hugo Bettauer likened to spooning up a bowl of sugary condensed milk, Courths-Mahler was beloved by her mostly female readership and reviled by sex reformers and the avant-garde intelligentsia. (145)
---
This chapter begins with an overview of fin-de-siècle bourgeois morality, which cast sensual desire as opposite and inferior to holy love. It also considers how women transgressing bourgeois morality would justify it by describing sensual desire as spiritual. The first section, “Learning from Bad Books,” proceeds to analyze “bad books,” so-called tasteless or immoral books that women surreptitiously read for pleasure. I will provide close readings of three such bad books—an erotic text, a romance novel [E. Marlitt’s romance novel Goldelse (1866)], and an emancipation novel—and historically imagine how they shaped women’s recognition and experience of sensual desire, which came to be seen and felt as related to love instead of opposed to it. The second section, “An Interwar Sexual Education,” explores how the interwar sex reform movement, spearheaded by figures such as Bettauer, drew on some on these ideas about women’s desire while simultaneously emphasizing something else—namely, its pursuit and fulfillment in the form of sexual intercourse. As I trace these continuities and discontinuities, I examine how sensual desire and pleasure became an aspect of new womanhood and how, to reiterate a central point of this book, this sensuality contributed to the transformation of what it meant to be a woman. In fact, toward the end of this chapter, I show how, for many Viennese women by the late 1920s and early 1930s, a cold marriage was grounds for separation or divorce. (150)
---
sentimental works of fiction such as sappy romance novels with happy endings were believed to awaken and thereby “ravage” readers’ fantasies, giving them a false picture of reality. (158)
---
One of the most popular romantic fiction authors of the late nineteenth century was the realist writer E. Marlitt, the pseudonym used by Eugenie John (1825–1887), who achieved fame through her serialized novels in the widely circulated Gartenlaube (Garden Arbor) magazine from 1866 onward. Her avid readership consisted of mostly women from the middle classes and numbered in the hundreds of thousands. Her novels were eventually published in their entirety as beautifully designed, illustrated editions to be purchased at bookstores or borrowed from libraries, thereby ensuring Marlitt’s popularity into the twentieth century, years after her death. (163)
See Chapter 4:
---
---
---
---