Scenes of Unveiling

This paper asks what approaches to sex writing might tell us about critical readers’ ways of relating to texts. When we read and interpret writing about sex, there is often an implied and unspoken missing link between reader and text, a tendency to disavow our own sexual investments and our own perspectives of desire. The paper explores scenes of sexual revelation and unveiling in Charlotte Brontë’s novels, where characters reveal their desires to each other and tacitly or explicitly negotiate sexual roles, and considers the processes of self-unveiling involved in their interpretation. What are the risks and the joys of this kind of intimate reading – for the characters, and for the reader? What are the missing links between desire and critical interpretation, and could we allow one to become a form of the other?

wrote a Ph.D thesis about what I ended up calling sexual power dynamics in the novels of Charlotte Brontë. Sometimes I wanted to call it something else, something that felt more direct: BDSM, or sadomasochism, or kink. But sadomasochism, the term most critics who write about these kinds of sexual practices in Brontë’s work use, felt too specific for my purposes.Investments in giving or experiencing pain is just one of the sexual currents in Brontë’s work: several of the characters that I wrote about, and that I perceive as decidedly kinky, show little interest in pain as such.

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ISSN: 2202-2546

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