LA PETITE MORT

"Pornography, S&M, gay 'cruising', cross-dressing - these don't sound like relics of the Victorian era. We think of it as a time of buttoned-up prudery and repression - and it was - but loosen the corset of 1860s England and out spills the kink.

In Pleasure Bound: Victorian Sex Rebels and the New Eroticism, Deborah Lutz writes about the seedier side of 19th century London - anonymous sex, flagellation brothels and spanking porn, for starters. (...) Lutz, a professor of Victorian literature and culture at Long Island University, focuses on a small group of bawdy iconoclasts including explorer Richard Burton, Pre-Raphaelite painters Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Simeon Solomon, poet Christina Rossetti - Dante's sister - and poet Algernon Charles Swinburne. These rebels got off, so to speak, on breaking taboos and challenging sexual mores - through their work and, sometimes, their personal exploits. (...)

Venus Verticordia - Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1868)

The Victorians often eroticized death. Why is that?

That's a very ancient idea, the linkage of sex and death. But for the Victorians this sort of cult of mourning developed. Death became this almost erotic thing. (...) So many of these romantic poets and painters started to create paintings of beautiful women or men dying, or writing poetry about the longing that comes when someone is dying. There's also this French term 'petite mort', which is the 'little death'. The idea is that when you have an orgasm you lose yourself. Orgasm is a climax and death is an extreme climax to your life". (entrevista integral aqui)

Leituras complementares: aqui, aqui e aqui.

(2011)