This chapter examines the law of nullity of marriage to consider how deception has affected the existence or validity of consent. It articulates important differences between void and voidable marriages, arguing that these speak to the public and private sides of marriage, respectively. It also showcases the range of deceptions that have been considered legally significant, situating these within the cultural framework outlined in Chapter 1. On top of this, the chapter argues that the range of qualifying deceptions has often been justified with reference to public policy or convention on the basis that the relevant information would typically be important to an intimate partner or that its disclosure would serve a collective interest or value. The chapter concludes by suggesting that changes in the law of nullity, and a small number of related areas of law, demonstrate that there is still a desire for legal recognition of the wrongs and harms associated with inducing intimate relationships, even as these have shifted over time.

George Moore spent a large portion of his career writing joyously and explicitly about sex. Sex meant everything to Moore, and he occasionally mused that it was a ‘fluid’ or ‘rhythm’ that connected and vitalized all things in the world. But at the end of his three-volume autobiography Hail and Farewell (1911–14) he not only declared the onset of age-related sexual impotence, but also claimed that it was this that was finally going to make him a great artist. His newly imposed continence was going to make him intellectually and artistically strong and would give him the authority and charisma of a prophet. He had said similar things elsewhere, and his descriptions of the dangers of excessive sexuality closely follow those of Victorian medical texts. This chapter teases out this line of thinking in Moore’s writing about art and artists, and particularly his connection of this potently continent art with Walter Pater. The chapter shows how different sexual ideas can exist side by side in the work of a single person or even a single text, and how productive continence can often be found in surprising places.

Chapter 2 examines the largely overlooked writings of nineteenth-century clinicians, scientists, lawyers, and jurists who actually called for a third sex to be added alongside the ranks of “male” and “female” because, quite plainly, there were individuals for whom no “true sex” could be identified. The inflexibility of the Napoleonic Code, which required that all infants be sexed as either male or female at birth, was challenged by doctors and legal forensics experts who believed either that the Code was out of step with scientific progress, or that it did not do enough to protect citizens from “hermaphrodites.” In sensationalized court cases that riveted domestic and international audiences – both scientific and lay – doctors and jurists struggled to reconcile cases of “doubtful sex” with scientific evidence, social welfare, and the Code itself. Intersex people came into conflict with the law from the moment of their birth. Jurisconsults enthusiastically contradicted one another about the veracity of sex determinations, while influential men labored to revise laws regarding birth certificates, marriage, divorce, and inheritance. Ultimately, the only party remaining silent on “hermaphrodism” was the Code itself, ensuring that a legal blind spot only increased the visibility of those it tried not to see.

This chapter investigates how Donne’s ‘To His Mistress Going to Bed’ and Thomas Nashe’s Choice of Valentines make cultural use of Amores 1.5 and 3.7. Framing the analysis through articulations of power and impotence, we see how literary representations of sexual performance or failure reveal covert engagements with questions of politicised myth-making and story-telling. Sex is read here as a vocabulary which has a potent place in the support and subversion of the Augustan and Elizabethan regimes.