This course examines nineteenth- and early twentieth century fiction to investigate representations of elective celibacy and reluctant abstinence. It will explore the narrative effects of absent or inhibited desire and its subversive potential, specifically in the context of the popular marriage-plot of the Victorian novel. It will consider abstinence as a political response to individual desire and also broader cultures of sexuality in the context of contemporary biological concerns about sexual health and disease, birth control, and eugenic philosophy. This course will reveal how celibacy — whatever its motivations for individual characters — was one way that authors challenged normative understandings of gender, sexuality, love and marriage in the decades around the turn of the twentieth century.