SOURCE: Shannon, Elizabeth. Review of Sexual Anarchy: Gender and Culture at the Fin-de-Siècle, by Elaine Showalter. Commonweal 118, no. 21 (6 December 1991): 728.

In the following review, Shannon offers high praise for Showalter's scholarly examination of “social, sexual, and political attitudes” in Sexual Anarchy.

There is one book I especially want to recommend this year, Elaine Showalter's Sexual Anarchy: Gender and Culture at the Fin-de-Siècle. Showalter is both engaging and scholarly in comparing social, sexual, and political attitudes prevalent at the end of the nineteenth century to our own fin de siècle. The parallels she discusses are fascinating in their similarities, but depressing in their recurrence.

She discusses literature, art, and film, both American and English, and finds that the fin de siècle brings with it an earthquake of social and sexual upheavals, and that this occurs cyclically, perhaps caused by a “sense of an ending.” She quotes...