ALICE IN
PORNOLAND
FEMINIST MEDIA STUDIES
Edited by Carol Stabile
Series Editorial Board
Mary Beltrn, Department of Radio-Television-Film, University of TexasAustin
Radhika Gajjala, American Cultural Studies, Bowling Green University
Mary L. Gray, Department of Communication and Culture, Indiana University; Senior Researcher, Microsoft Research
Bambi Haggins, Arizona State University, Tempe
Mary Beth Haralovich, University of Arizona, Tucson
Heather Hendershot, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Michele Hilmes, University of WisconsinMadison
Nina Huntemann, Suffolk University
Elana Levine, University of WisconsinMilwaukee
Robin Means-Coleman, University of Michigan
Mireille Miller-Young, UC Santa Barbara
Isabel Molina-Guzmn, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Laurie Ouellette, Communication Studies, University of Minnesota
Carrie Rentschler, McGill University
Kim Sawchuk, Concordia University
Leslie Steeves, University of Oregon
Rebecca Wanzo, Washington University
A list of books in the series appears at the end of this book.
ALICE IN
PORNOLAND
Hardcore Encounters
with the Victorian Gothic
LAURA HELEN MARKS
2018 by the Board of Trustees
of the University of Illinois
All rights reserved
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Marks, Laura Helen, 1981 author.
Title: Alice in pornoland : hardcore encounters with the Victorian gothic / Laura Helen Marks.
Description: Urbana : University of Illinois Press, [2018] | Series: Feminist media studies | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2018034000 | ISBN 9780252042140 (hardcover : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780252083853 (paperback : alk. paper)
Subjects: LCSH : Pornographic filmsHistory and criticism. | Film adaptationsHistory and criticism. | English fiction19th centuryFilm adaptations.
Classification: LCC PN 1995.9. S 45 M 27 2018 | DDC 791.43/6538dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018034000
Portions of chapter 1 were previously published in Behind Closed Doors: Pornographic Uses of the Victorian, Sexualities 17.12, 159-175. Copyright (c) 2014 SAGE Publications. Reprinted by permission of SAGE Publications.
Portions of chapter 4 were previously published in A Strangely Mingled Monster: Gender and Spatial Transgression in the Hardcore Metropolis of Paul Thomass Jekyll & Hyde, Neo-Victorian Cities: Reassessing Urban Politics and Poetics , ed. Marie-Luise Kohlke and Christian Gutleben (Boston: Brill-Rodopi, 2015), 247282. Reprinted by permission of Koninklijke Brill NV.
ISBN 9780252050886 (e-book)
Cover illustration: Adapted from a promotional poster for the film Alice in Wonderland: An X-Rated Musical Comedy, 1976 (director, Bud Townsend; producer, William Osco)
CONTENTS
ILLUSTRATIONS
PREFACE
One of the beneficial side effects of the Victorian prohibitions of sex is that a residue of sexual fantasy found its way into many mainstream outlets. Repression necessarily forced the writers and artists of the time to find metaphorsterrestrial or supernaturalthat gave voice to their unexpressed desires.
Wash West, adult filmmaker
Pornographys favorite terrain is the tender spots where the individual psyche collides with the historical process of molding social subjects.
Laura Kipnis, Bound and Gagged
This project came about in circuitous, unintentional fashion. A graduate student at Louisiana State University, I was interested in pornographic parody and appropriation. Then, I was required to take a nineteenth-century course. I had come to the end of my coursework, but my failure to pay attention to grad school guidelines meant that in order to move forward, only one course offered at that time would satisfy requirements: Dickens. I was reluctant, to say the least. This course had absolutely nothing to do with my area of research, and I wasnt particularly interested in Dickens. With a roll of my eyes, I signed up. Looking back on this moment, I thank the powers that be that I was forced to take the class. In an effort to render the course more useful to me, I casually investigated the existence of Dickens porn. I quickly discovered Shaun Costellos The Passions of Carol (1975), an adaptation of A Christmas Carol . At that time, I was at the lower point of an incredibly steep learning curve and simplistically imagined (or hoped) that pornography routinely offered subversive renditions of gender. I was excited to watch a film that, by virtue of its unsimulated sex, would offer some kind of defiant response to traditional, Victorian gender norms. Instead, I discovered something much more unusual and contradictory. Yes, the film does in some way subvert treasured notions of femininity, sexual activity, maternity, and childhood. Yet it is also shot through with a strangely conservative condemnation of autonomous sexual women seizing control of their sexuality as a commodity. The mere presence of sex, I realized, does not necessarily equate to a revolutionary or sociopolitically subversive text. In fact, the film is remarkably faithful to Dickens, conservative in its condemnation of sexual capital, particularly when controlled by women, while the sexual representations are by turns sweet, perverse, exciting, and depressing.
The Passions of Carol shook up my understanding of pornography. Prior to this point, I uncritically accepted what I had been told: pornographic depictions are designed to be arousing; porn is a series of sex scenes with, if youre lucky, some plot in between. I had never stopped to question what this actually meantwhat constituted arousal and what constituted plot. Moreover, a former anti-porn feminist, I approached pornographic films in these early years with caution, reading their gender politics quite literally and ignoring my own complicated responses.
The contradictions and oscillating gender dynamics I found operating in porn are the inspiration for this project. Here, I seek to explore the contradictions foregrounded by the neo-Victorian Gothic and to interrogate how and why pornographers persist in drawing pornographic substance and meaning from the Victorian Gothic. Thus, while I do not consider myself a Victorianist, Victorianist ventures such as historical and cultural contextualization and literary analysis are nevertheless imperative to an understanding of the films I address. Likewise, understanding the pornographies and sexual attitudes of the Victorian era informs much of my investigation of the films I explore. I feel this project has much to offer in terms of Victorian studies. Shifting our frame of reference for Victorian studies to include the pornographic afterlives of its cultural projects can illuminate understandings of the Victorian, understandings of pornography, and the legacies of the Victorians in terms of sexual representation. In turn, bringing Victorian studies into the fold of porn studies, and drawing film and literature together, can illuminate the important connections between the legitimate and illegitimatemedia and cultural spaces that we are told are entirely separate but in fact work in tandem with one another.
While the films I discuss shed new light on Victorian culture and art, my interest here is in the culture text of the Victorian; the particular Victorianness that pornography prefers, and the particular mythologies of the Victorian era that fuel pornographic fantasies. I explore what these persistent uses and subsequent conflicts suggest about pornography as a genre. Pornography seeks to speak the unspoken, to lay it all out there sexually, in a culture that demonizes sex. Many pornographers such as Wash West understand the Victorians as having to resort to metaphor in order to speak their repressed sexual desires, and yet what of the wealth of Victorian pornography? Are the Victorians all that different from us in their supposed struggles with sexuality and representation? If we use porn as a lens, the answer is a resounding and simultaneous yes/no, for pornography constructs quite contradictory, flexible, and playful notions of the Victorian for pornographic transgression. The particular construct or novel of choice in a given pornographic film depends on what forms of sex, what types of bodies, and what materializations of gender the film seeks to explore. At the same time, the chosen context and novel will inflect the film with particular formulations of race, gender, and class.
