ABSTRACT
Female onanism, in Keats's poetry, incorporates a sense of refuge and mental autonomy that spring from the inability to achieve satisfaction in reality. This chapter discusses Keats's contemporaries and examines Keats's poetry within the wider context of the liberal-conservative debate concerning female sexuality. Keats's romances come to address the subject of female sexuality and social morality. While Keats's early work also deals with sexuality and sensuousness, his sentimentalism and 'boyish imagination', as he terms it in his introduction to Endymion, mar the seriousness of his writings. Keats's romances disclose the limitations of female veneration as it forces women to fulfil their desires only through imagination and not by means of physical connection. The definition of masturbation as a private act removed from social connectedness combines it with romance and romantic idealisation. Anti-masturbatory literature continuously emphasises the close connection between masturbation and the private pleasures of imagination.
