Sounding Bodies

Shows how nineteenth-century discoveries in acoustical science shaped Victorian literary representations of gender, sexuality, and intimacy.

Can the concert hall be as erotic as the bedroom? Many Victorian writers believed so. In the mid-nineteenth century, acoustical scientists such as Hermann von Helmholtz and John Tyndall described music as a set of physical vibrations that tickled the ear, excited the nerves, and precipitated muscular convulsions. In turn, writers-from canonical figures such as George Eliot and Thomas Hardy, to New Women novelists like Sarah Grand and Bertha Thomas, to anonymous authors of underground pornography-depicted bodily sensations and experiences in unusually explicit ways. These writers used scenes of music listening and performance to intervene in urgent conversations about gender and sexuality and explore issues of agency, pleasure, violence, desire, and kinship. Sounding Bodies shows how both classical music and Victorian literature, while often considered bastions of conservatism and repression, represented powerful sites for feminist and queer politics.

This book is freely available in an open access edition thanks to the National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowships Open Book Program-a limited competition designed to make outstanding humanities books available to a wide audience. Learn more at the Fellowships Open Book Program at

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