Bad examples: children, servants and masturbation in nineteenth-century France
This article examines a corpus of nineteenth-century French instructional texts offering guidance to bourgeois readers on the training and governance of domestic servants, and focuses on how these texts construct the relationship between servants and children in such a way as to sexualize both. Oper...
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| Format: | Journal article |
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University of Texas Press
2013
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| author | Counter, A |
| author_facet | Counter, A |
| author_sort | Counter, A |
| collection | OXFORD |
| description | This article examines a corpus of nineteenth-century French instructional texts offering guidance to bourgeois readers on the training and governance of domestic servants, and focuses on how these texts construct the relationship between servants and children in such a way as to sexualize both. Operating within a broadly Foucauldian paradigm, the article considers how masturbation appears as the ultimate symbol of sexual knowledge in the period. Like much of the contemporaneous medical writing previously examined by Michel Foucault and Thomas Laqueur, the instructional literature understands infantile masturbation as indicative of the contagious spread of sexual knowledge within the bourgeois home, the abject agent of which was often taken to be the servant, whose “bad example” was thought to have a corrupting effect on ignorant infants. Yet the interest of these texts lies in their simultaneous advancement of another, contradictory argument: servants, they suggest, are themselves impressionable, childlike innocents who are corrupted by the example of their degenerate bourgeois employers. In a significant deviation from the more familiar patterns of thought considered by Foucault, then, these texts ultimately elaborate a worldview in which the transmission of sexual knowledge by (bad) example is multi-directional and inescapable, and in which sexual “corruption” – that is, sexuality as such – appears as a fundamental part of the human condition. This in turn is related to an underlying ideological difference between this instructional literature and the better-known medical discourse: while the latter is pointedly secular and positivist, the former is Catholic in outlook, and consequently sceptical as to the value and even the possibility of scientific knowledge. As such, these texts represent an important contribution to our understanding of nineteenth-century ideas on sexuality. |
| first_indexed | 2024-03-06T20:45:37Z |
| format | Journal article |
| id | oxford-uuid:35c709b4-5853-4078-8b0d-03105dae6aae |
| institution | University of Oxford |
| last_indexed | 2024-03-06T20:45:37Z |
| publishDate | 2013 |
| publisher | University of Texas Press |
| record_format | dspace |
| spelling | oxford-uuid:35c709b4-5853-4078-8b0d-03105dae6aae2022-03-26T13:33:58ZBad examples: children, servants and masturbation in nineteenth-century FranceJournal articlehttp://purl.org/coar/resource_type/c_dcae04bcuuid:35c709b4-5853-4078-8b0d-03105dae6aaeSymplectic Elements at OxfordUniversity of Texas Press2013Counter, AThis article examines a corpus of nineteenth-century French instructional texts offering guidance to bourgeois readers on the training and governance of domestic servants, and focuses on how these texts construct the relationship between servants and children in such a way as to sexualize both. Operating within a broadly Foucauldian paradigm, the article considers how masturbation appears as the ultimate symbol of sexual knowledge in the period. Like much of the contemporaneous medical writing previously examined by Michel Foucault and Thomas Laqueur, the instructional literature understands infantile masturbation as indicative of the contagious spread of sexual knowledge within the bourgeois home, the abject agent of which was often taken to be the servant, whose “bad example” was thought to have a corrupting effect on ignorant infants. Yet the interest of these texts lies in their simultaneous advancement of another, contradictory argument: servants, they suggest, are themselves impressionable, childlike innocents who are corrupted by the example of their degenerate bourgeois employers. In a significant deviation from the more familiar patterns of thought considered by Foucault, then, these texts ultimately elaborate a worldview in which the transmission of sexual knowledge by (bad) example is multi-directional and inescapable, and in which sexual “corruption” – that is, sexuality as such – appears as a fundamental part of the human condition. This in turn is related to an underlying ideological difference between this instructional literature and the better-known medical discourse: while the latter is pointedly secular and positivist, the former is Catholic in outlook, and consequently sceptical as to the value and even the possibility of scientific knowledge. As such, these texts represent an important contribution to our understanding of nineteenth-century ideas on sexuality. |
| spellingShingle | Counter, A Bad examples: children, servants and masturbation in nineteenth-century France |
| title | Bad examples: children, servants and masturbation in nineteenth-century France |
| title_full | Bad examples: children, servants and masturbation in nineteenth-century France |
| title_fullStr | Bad examples: children, servants and masturbation in nineteenth-century France |
| title_full_unstemmed | Bad examples: children, servants and masturbation in nineteenth-century France |
| title_short | Bad examples: children, servants and masturbation in nineteenth-century France |
| title_sort | bad examples children servants and masturbation in nineteenth century france |
| work_keys_str_mv | AT countera badexampleschildrenservantsandmasturbationinnineteenthcenturyfrance |