Article title: “The Grossest Rakes of Fiction”: Re-assessing Gender, Sex and Pornography in Sarah Waters’s Fingersmith
Authors: Claire O’Callaghan
Journal: Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction
Bibliometrics: Published in Vol. 56, Issue 5, pp. 560–575
DOI: 10.1080/00111619.2015.1019399
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
The final sentences in endnote 1 on page 574 of “‘The Grossest Rakes of Fiction’: Re-assessing Gender, Sex and Pornography in Sarah Waters’s Fingersmith” by Claire O’Callaghan require emendation. The revised endnote appears below in full.
Notes
1. In the small number of existent commentaries on the novel, the majority of scholars do not focus on the novel’s sexual politics. Lucie Armitt has examined the role of postfeminism and the gothic in Fingersmith, and Nadine Muller has also read the representation of matrilineal relations in the novel. Cora Kaplan has used Fingersmith as a lens to explore the impact of feminism on Victorian studies, and Mark Llewellyn and Marie Luise Kohlke have both usefully, albeit briefly, explored the relationship between the textual and the sexual—Llewellyn to consider Waters’s use of genre in the novel and Kohlke to elucidate her claims for neo-Victorianism’s sexsationalism. However, there are two substantive commentaries on Fingersmith that have considered Waters’s use of pornography. Kathleen Miller, for instance, has explored how Fingersmith’s neo-Victorian frame engages an anachronistic representation of the Victorians, their pornography industry, and related sexual markets. Miller focuses on the novel’s historicity and “authenticity” in relation to Victorian discourses surrounding pornography. But, as this article suggests, the novel’s historicity also illuminates contemporary feminist debates concerning women, sex, and pornography and engages—in fictional terms—in the ongoing (re)assessment of sexualities in the Victorian period. More relevantly, Nadine Muller has usefully begun to examine the relationship between second and third wave feminist discourse and pornography in the novel. Although building on Muller’s useful insights, I also place Fingersmith in dialogue with lesbian-feminist and queer debates surrounding pornography. I also draw attention to Waters’s use of lesbianism to address gaps in feminist debates.