The Victorian period saw extensive scientific experimentation with sound wave physics and proliferating public interest in the new knowledge acoustical studies yielded. And yet, given Victorians' keen interest in acoustical sciences and their ripple effects in adjacent intellectual discourses, sound and music have received less attention from scholarship in Victorian studies than one might expect. Shannon Draucker's Sounding Bodies: Acoustical Science and Musical Erotics in Victorian Literature addresses this gap by arguing that descriptions of musical encounter in literary writing do more than index how the Victorian intellectual milieu thought about the science of sound; they offer very particular spaces for ideological maneuvers, particularly where gendered power, sexual embodiment, and erotic experience are concerned. In this way, Draucker provides a thorough account of major outcomes in soundwave research, music culture, and physiological science in the period. Sounding Bodies makes a compelling case for understanding what might at first seem like a niche intellectual history as truly intertwined with major topics of interest in Victorian studies today.

Although Sounding Bodies focuses primarily on examples of prose narration of musical performance and listening, Draucker opens with a reading of Amy Levy's 1884 poem, "Sinfonia Eroica: To Sylvia." The poem distills many of the provocative potentialities the rest of the book locates in musical erotics; in this poem, heard music is undeniably embodied, its vibratory erotic energy is explicit. Indeed, the intimate connectivity it generates between the player and the speaker, as Draucker argues, opens a space where queer desires and erotic pleasures--between the speaker typically read as female and the woman performer, but also between the human bodies in the audience and the non-human but vitally animated music itself--are evoked as natural effects of musical encounter. Beginning with a provocatively intriguing question this poem prompts, "Is the concert hall more erotic than the bedroom?" (1), Sounding Bodies shows that rather than only using music as an "extended metaphor for love-making" (2), Victorian writers often took seriously the "visceral aspects of aesthetic experience" music involves (18). Sounding Bodies explores the frequent presence of corporeal musical aesthetics in fiction of the period and compellingly shows how the specific information yielded by acoustical science of the period offers the legitimizing power of scientific research in order to "[enable] some of Victorian literature's most explicit representations of erotic corporeality" (5) and to frame "music making and listening as opportunities to imagine gendered and sexual subversion" in radically productive ways (15).

Sounding Bodies organizes seven chapters into four parts. Whereas parts two, three, and four each include two relatively brief chapters, allowing each to put fine points on various ideological outcomes of the particular approaches to musical erotics they explore, the first part, "Sounds and Bodies," includes just the first chapter. This enables the conceptual space needed to thoroughly establish the scientific grounds that inform Draucker's examination of music culture and the widespread influence of acoustical experimentation in the Victorian period. Chapter one deftly metabolizes of an enormous volume and variety of non-literary nineteenth-century writing on the topic. As Draucker puts it, "Nineteenth-century acoustical science was dominated by two specific branches of study, which [Hermann von] Helmholtz called"physical acoustics" (focused on sound wave frequencies themselves, and their physical behavior) and "physiological acoustics" (26), which "centered on sound's interactions with the human ear and with the nerves and muscles of the rest of the body" (27).

Draucker glosses an efficient pre-history for the ideas she centers, but Sounding Bodies focuses especially on the latter portion of the nineteenth century when, thanks in no small part to John Tyndall's popular demonstrations, acoustical research had become a popular topic as well as an urgent controversy. Draucker elegantly teases apart philosophical handwringing in the period on the parts of many influential thinkers, from music critics to scientists, who found it difficult to relinquish a conviction that music's metaphysical powers should not and could not be reduced to 'brutal calculations,' as music critic François-Joseph Fétis put it (qtd. in Draucker 40). This chapter ultimately shows that by the end of the century, "acoustical science had circulated so widely throughout Victorian culture that it could be mobilized for almost any ideological agenda" (46). Crucially, Draucker points out that the ideas about embodied musical experience and the powers of sonic pulsation were (and in many ways still are) applied in service of exclusionary and controlling agendas, that certain kinds of musical performance have been limited to privileged groups, and that in the late nineteenth-century context, "'educational' uses of music often had troubling classist, racist, and colonialist implications" (46). This is an important point that Draucker returns to in her coda.

Part two ("Genders") focuses both of its chapters on violinists. Here Draucker opens some of the project's major motivations concerning the subversive possibilities of musical erotics. "Physiological science," she argues, "is not always antagonistic to radical ideas about gender but can in fact be crucial for their articulation" (53). Chapter two examines "'Lady Violinist' Novels" as venues for a new kind of feminine musical character. In contrast with more familiar figure of the amateur lady pianist, Draucker shows that subversive 'lady violinist' characters emerge in the late nineteenth century. Beginning with these characters is extremely effective. Draucker establishes a relationship between the examples she will emphasize and the musical scenes and character types focused on amateur pianists and vocalists most readers of Victorian fiction will recognize. She also uses 'lady violinists' in order to foreground shifts in gendered music culture toward the end of the century, both as a result of the spread of acoustical knowledge and because of (slow) social and institutional progress. These characters, she points out, might be contextualized with their real-life fin-de-siècle musical colleagues, whose growing public presence inspired some hostility (55). In two novels--Mary Augusta Ward's Robert Elsmere and M.E. Francis's Duenna of a Genius--Draucker examines musician characters who resist "the siren and diva stereotypes found in earlier texts" (54). Instead, she shows, these novels ask readers take seriously the professionalism and musical capabilities of their characters. They also center the corporeal powers of music, showing how the scientific principles covered in chapter one can bolster fictional depictions of music-making and listening.

Chapter three turns to novels featuring another character type that may be unfamiliar to many readers--the "cross-dressing female violinist" (80)--in readings of Bertha Thomas's The Violin-Player and Sarah Grand's The Heavenly Twins. Here, Draucker explores two novels that she argues prioritize narrative representation of "musical bodies" over gender, offering a new musical gender politics. As Draucker argues, "Where Ward and Francis insist on reclaiming the unique powers of patently female performers, Grand and Thomas explore the possibilities that emerge when women are able to, however temporarily, set aside their gender altogether" (82). While the array of violinist careers in these novels meet different ends that offer their characters varying degrees of "escape" from "the social codes that dominate Victorian women's lives" (83), Draucker shows that for each, playing music is a radically fulfilling and physiologically profound act.

Part three ("Sexualities") turns to give serious consideration to how Victorian novels engage with the implications of music as an art form that necessarily involves production of material vibrations that can create resonance between sounding and listening bodies. Musical encounter, as Draucker shows us the Victorians understood it, is a matter of 'penetration' (102); the potential beauty in this fact involves intense forms of intimacy and reciprocity it may yield, but as this portion of the study finds, it can also be a tool of sexual violence. Chapter four takes up the latter possibility by examining scenes of "musical rape" in George Eliot's The Mill on the Floss and Thomas Hardy's Desperate Remedies and "The Fiddler of the Reels." As Draucker argues, "if rape is something that, like sex, can occur aurally as well as genitally, scenes of male musical influence emerge not as figurative nods to future harms but as potent moments of harm in and of themselves" (104-5). An especially compelling yield of this way of reading musical power is the new reading of Maggie Tulliver and Stephen Guest that Draucker offers, which observes how Eliot's novel "[foregrounds] the phenomenological horrors of gendered and sexual violence" (109) and explores the difficulties in "fully recognizing, naming, and pinpointing the exact contours of rape" (115).

Draucker's chapter five maintains an interest in thinking through music-making as an explicit scene of sexual encounter, but offers a "reparative" counterpart to the previous chapter's discussion of musical rape (128). Draucker turns to the anonymous novel, Teleny, in order to explore how music might offer certain affordances for Victorian pornography. By framing the erotically affecting powers of music as "natural" and "universal" to the entire concert hall audience (132), an understanding of music facilitated by the science of sound, Draucker argues, Teleny "pushes back against nineteenth-century sexological discourses that framed homosexuals' musical proclivities as components of their disordered nervous systems" (132). Draucker goes a step further than existing critical work on Teleny, arguing that by using sonic materiality as a basis for its deeply embodied its musical erotics, the novel expands the definitional boundaries of sex and possible sexual partners. Music itself is a sexual actor in this reading.

Part four ("Intimacies") further explores how musical erotics might include aural and vibrational encounters that not only move the entire body but can also potentially involve non-human partners. The book's final two chapters take this conceptual flexibility in two quite different directions: Chapter six considers music instruments as erotic agents, while chapter seven examines supernatural musical erotics of haunting. Dracker begins chapter six with an epigraph from a contemporary novel--Gabrielle Zevin's Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow (2022)--which highlights her study's interest in tracing the sometimes surprising resonances we might find between Victorian depictions of musical intimacy and questions we continue to grapple with today. This launches readings of Dombey and Son's Mr. Morfin and his cello alongside similar human-instrument relationships in Anthony Trollope's The Warden and Hardy's "Haunting Fingers." Draucker also returns to The Mill on the Floss, this time examining Maggie's intimate relationship to the piano itself. Draucker does more than just pointing out how these Victorian human-instrument intimacies resonate with those we might find in contemporary fiction, going so far as to identify versions of eroticism and "alternative social relations" (151) that trouble anthropocentric ideas about intimacy. These identifications intersect compellingly with recent theoretical work in performance studies as well as queer and feminist theory even as they draw directly upon an awareness of "the bodily processes involved in music making" as well as "the corporeal lives of instruments themselves" made available by Victorian acoustical research (155).

The final chapter considers the musical ghost, a character that the chapter's opening points out appears fairly often in Victorian literature. As Draucker suggests, there is a conceptual resonance between ghosts and music; both are "invisible, intangible, and ephemeral" (169). Though Draucker briefly glosses an array of musical ghosts, this chapter focuses on John Meade Falkner's The Lost Stradivarius and Vernon Lee's "A Wicked Voice," showing how both narratives use sound to materialize the erotic encounters "that vibrate rooms and make human listeners throb and moan in response," generating a "queer erotics of contact between the past and the present" (173).

Sounding Bodies turns to the present at its end. In her coda, Draucker asks her reader to consider the power of Western music's institutionalization as a mechanism by which physiological aspects of musical experience continue to be denied or suppressed, but also at times exploited, in the name of political and aesthetic agendas. But its attitude is ultimately hopeful: how, Draucker asks, might we apply the awareness of embodied musical encounter we have inherited from the Victorians in order to make the concert hall a more inclusive space for the accommodation of mutual thrills amongst a multitude of bodies?

A strength of Draucker's study is the breadth it covers in terms of literary genre as well as the array of conceptual outcomes it locates in the varied treatments of musical bodies to be found across its examples. Draucker purposefully traces productive resonances between each reading. The literary texts Sounding Bodies takes up are works in which fictional narratives of musical encounter generally do two things: they take seriously the embodied particularities of sonic experiences; and they explore the erotic possibilities of music in light of sonic corporeality in ways that open questions around power and agency, gender performativity, and sexual sociality. Sounding Bodies thus makes important contributions to the field on the basis of its detailed cultural history of Victorian music culture's intersections with scientific experimentation as well as the work it does to connect these cultural histories with contemporary work in feminist and queer theory. The latter theoretical investment sometimes seems to ever so slightly outweigh other possible conceptual avenues we might take in reading Victorian representations of sounding and listening, though musicology and performance studies do certainly play key roles in Draucker's readings. As a result, Sounding Bodies opens space for further conversation around connections we might draw between Victorian acoustical thought and, say, contemporary work in sound studies theory. Naomi Cumming's work in The Sonic Self: Musical Subjectivity and Signification, for example, which draws upon Cumming's training as a violinist, could be an especially interesting interlocutor. An exhaustive conversation about the conceptual possibilities of the period's acousticians is overdue in Victorian studies, and the beautifully focused, thoughtful readings Draucker offers in Sounding Bodies are a provocative launch. Draucker makes a convincing case not only for the value in paying close attention to what happens in bodies during moments of musical encounter throughout Victorian fiction, but also for the need to regard acoustical science as one of the most influential fields of intellectual experimentation in the period.

Elizabeth Weybright is Term Lecturer in First-Year Writing at Barnard College