• Journal of English Language & Literature
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• v.54 no.4
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• pp.443-459
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• 2008

This paper examines the discourse of masturbation in modern England and aims to re-draw the map of male sexuality related to such issues as nation, empire, family, and economy. It argues that the discourse of masturbation in modern England reflects national anxieties for the future of empire and an economic concern for unproductive sexual behavior, which were the main factors to transform masturbation into "solitary vice." The anxieties about empire and British dominance were constituted as the core of the anti-masturbation discourse on the boys. The imperial destiny was regarded to depend on the protection of the middle- and upper-class boys from the harmful psychological and physiological effects of masturbation represented in Lawrence's "The Rocking-Horse Winner." In the case of a single male, the concern for masturbation is constructed as a concern about economy, family, and human solidarity. As seen in Eliot's Silas Marner, the act of masturbation was condemned as the fulfillment of illegitimate sexual desire outside the familial sphere and a commercial economy, and thus without the possibility of human community. Silas Marner and Meredith's The Ordeal of Richard Feverel show the ways of reconstituting sexual others as normalized subjects: Boys were forced to be asexual through the regime of surveillance; and a single male was required to enroll in a remedial course on familial respectability.