The Late Nineteenth Century: A Multiplicity of Genres

In this chapter, we will see how, during the period 1880–1930, a set of propositions about frigidity came to be elaborated and disseminated. In a range of contexts that we are about to describe, it came to be affirmed that many women who seemed cold and unfeeling at the outset might be awakened to pleasure by intercourse with a virile male. In other cases, it was affirmed that cold demeanour in a woman was the result of a perverse denial of her natural dependence on men. Women blocked by the shape of their bodies from the full satisfaction of procreative pleasure might still offer the prospect of a form of sexual excitement despite being constrained by enforced chastity. And others might long for ‘normal’ sexual pleasure while only experiencing desire, occasionally and exceptionally, as the utter loss of self-control. In short, sexual coldness was not so much the mere absence of pleasure that had for so long been given the name ‘female impotence’. Anaphrodisia came to be spoken of primarily as a terrible malfunction of desire, as frigidity became for the first time an object of common knowledge and a commonplace generalization. In this chapter, we will consider where and how this set of routine propositions emerged. In order to do so, we must look in some hitherto unexplored places.