Inversion and Queer Liminality in the Nineteenth Century

Chapter 1 reads Victorian authors Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu and George Moore’s construction of the lesbian within the context of the growing discourse of nineteenth-century sexology. Noting the significance that spatial environments played within medical understandings of ‘inversion’, this chapter demonstrates the correlation between sexology and Le Fanu’s and Moore’s representation of the lesbian in Le Fanu’s now-infamous gothic short story ‘Carmilla’ (1872) and Moore’s A Drama in Muslin (1886). I offer a new reading, which contends that ‘Carmilla’ is an interesting case study on the pathologisation of the lesbian body.