The Misfits

Colin Wilson, the internationally acclaimed author of "The Outsider", here turns his attention to another form of alienation: the literary misfit who indulges in taboo sex as a creative force.



"The Misfits" has its starting point in the ideas of a remarkable psychologist of the twentieth century--Dr. Charlotte Bach, who stunned her colleagues after her death when she was revealed to be a man. "She" was considered to be one of the most daring pioneers of "the psychology of sexual aberrations" since Freud. Colin Wilson became one of her close friends and was fascinated by her ideas. But his study of her work led him to conclude that she was fundamentally mistaken. She had failed to understand that the crucial development of sexual experimentation--if not their origin--occurred during the nineteenth century as a result of the explosion of imagination and sensibility known as Romanticism.



According to Wilson, this sensibility became anchored in the collective consciousness and opened up a range of unrestrained impulses, driving the mind to conceive of "superheated" sex practices such as sadomasochism, voyeurism, exhibitionism, to name just a few.



The author traces the history of this imaginatively enhanced sexuality by looking at the life and works of Romantic and post-Romantic writers beginning with the Marquis de Sade through Byron, Gogol, Swinburne to--among others--F. Scott Fitzgerald, James Joyce, Henry Miller, T. E. Lawrence and the Japanese cult figure and novelist Yukio Mishima. Along the way we observe the rise of pornography and study the motivations behind the increasing frequency of sex crimes.



This work on sexual misfits also takes us through the phases of anarchism and rebellious tendencies born in the era of Victorian sexual repression and explains how today's attempts to enrich sexual reality have evolved. As such "The Misfits" shows just how original and persuasive Colin Wilson continues to be on what will always be a controversial subject.