Shannon Draucker 
Sounding Bodies 
Acoustical Science and Musical Erotics in Victorian Literature

Can the concert hall be as erotic as the bedroom? Many Victorian writers believed so. In the mid-nineteenth century, acoustical scientists such as Hermann von Helmholtz and John Tyndall described music as a set of physical vibrations that tickled the ear, excited the nerves, and precipitated muscular convulsions. In turn, writers—from canonical figures such as George Eliot and Thomas Hardy, to New Women novelists like Sarah Grand and Bertha Thomas, to anonymous authors of underground pornography—depicted bodily sensations and experiences in unusually explicit ways. These writers used scenes of music listening and performance to intervene in urgent conversations about gender and sexuality and explore issues of agency, pleasure, violence, desire, and kinship.
Sounding Bodies shows how both classical music and Victorian literature, while often considered bastions of conservatism and repression, represented powerful sites for feminist and queer politics.

Tabla de materias

List of Illustrations

Acknowledgments



Introduction The Erotic Symphony




Part One: Sounds and Bodies



1. Hearing, Touching, Feeling Sound: Acoustical Science in Nineteenth-Century Britain




Part Two: Genders



2. Bare Arms and Quivering Nerves: The ‘Lady Violinist’ Novels of Mary Augusta Ward and M. E. Francis



3.Cross-Dressing Violinists and Music/Gender Performance in
The Heavenly Twins and The Violin-Player




Part Three: Sexualities



4. Dangerous Vibrations: Musical Rape in George Eliot and Thomas Hardy



5. Orgasm in the Orchestra Box: Teleny’s Musical Pornography




Part Four: Intimacies



6. Fiddle Feelings: Human-Instrument Intimacies in Dickens, Eliot, Trollope, and Hardy



7. Musical Hauntings and Otherworldly Erotics in
The Lost Stradivarius and ‘A Wicked Voice’



Coda Re-vitalizing Contemporary Classical Music



Notes

Bibliography

Index

Sobre el autor

Shannon Draucker is Assistant Professor of English at Siena College.