Household renovations: Middle-class marital discourse and the dilemma of sexual pleasure and propriety

My dissertation examines manifestations of sexuality in eighteenth- and nineteenthcentury canonical and sensational English novels and their impact on middle-class subjectivity. Much of the previous scholarship focuses on the repression of sexuality and/or the difficulty of expressing it and how repression is needed for middle-class identity, particularly for women. For my project, I draw upon Michel Foucault\u27s rejection of the repressive hypothesis and Pierre Bourdieu\u27s notions of the habitus and various types of capital to analyze the discourses surrounding the middle-class values regarding courtship, marriage, production, and domesticity, and discuss how they are sexualized. I maintain that such discourses are not repressive, but are in fact a mechanism, which I call marital discourse, whereby the middle-class can recognize its own sexuality within the discourse, yet at the same time hide it from other classes who are not familiar with this particular sexuality, and are unable to read it as such. These discourses then give the middle class what I call a double pleasure, resulting from places in the text where they can read and enjoy both sexual pleasure and domesticity. At the same time the middle class enhances their identity by excluding other classes from correctly reading this discourse. This project sheds new light on class subjectivity, sexuality, and reading