Eroticising Female and Male Bodies: A Linguistic Investigation of a Pornographic Novel from the Victorian Magazine The Pearl

In this article on Sub-Umbra, I firstly discuss the main features and themes of the discourse of pornography and sexuality in the nineteenth century and the linguistic characteristics typifying that discourse. Secondly, I analyze the excerpts from the novel describing female bodies and referring to female and male genitalia where the strategies of the discourse of pornography are more salient. What emerges from this linguistic investigation is that the male narrator’s remarks about those bodies and body parts are consistently furnished by means of valueladen lexemes. Their main discursive function proves to be that of intermingling physical attributes with sexuality and lust, thereby representing those attributes as the causes of sexual desire.