ABSTRACT
The most celebrated statement about the appetite-free middle-class woman was made by the mainstream Victorian doctor William Acton. As a general rule, a modest woman seldom desires any sexual gratification for herself. The fallen woman, especially the prostitute, was also an ideologically necessary figure, as Lynda Nead argues in her excellent study of what she calls ‘myths of sexuality’ in the period, and this was for pressing socio-political reasons. Of Michel Foucault’s four sites or bodies, that of the deviant, hysterical or fallen woman was, in the mid- and late 19th-century period, the site of the most discursive anxiety, replaced only at the end of the century, and made very public in the Wilde trials, by the homosexual man. Emma’s hysteria is her body in revolt and Flaubert stuck very closely to the medical notions of the time about the woman’s illness, hysteria.
