Behind closed doors: Pornographic uses of the Victorian

This essay argues that the frequency and consistency of Victorian-set or Victorian-influenced pornographic films highlight hardcore’s reliance on class- and gender-related spatial transgression for erotic appeal: boundaries of public and private that the films specifically associate with Victorian social structures. This essay illuminates a self-reflexive pornographic heritage and demonstrates the peculiar tension between sexual repression and sexual perversity evidenced in cultural understandings of both the 19th-century and modern day pornography. I argue that in such films as A Scent of Heather (1980), Memoirs of a Chambermaid (1987), and Victorian Love Letters (2010), 19th-century material culture and technology, including written text, clothing, furniture, and domestic space, are eroticized in pornographic film specifically in connection with gender and class. In so doing, Victorian sexuality is represented in pornography as simultaneously regressive and perverse, as well as intimately tied to the transgression of strict class boundaries; boundaries that, the films seem to suggest, are no longer present in enlightened modern culture.