With the aquarium, the unnerving sexual variation of marine life moved from ocean depths—which was a gothic scene for Victorians—into the inner sanctum of social order and bodily regulation, the aristocratic home. Efforts to know, classify, and conquer the oceanic, and otherwise capture nature for visual pleasure, resulted in a counterconquest of the home by monsters and sexual deviants. Brunner writes, “While visitors [of aquariums] were searching for a new experience, they were also afraid of what they might discover. They fought it, not willing to believe or understand what appeared before their eyes” (8). A boundary project, the aquarium never fulfilled the promise of containment or supremacy of the visualizing eye over the fluidity of seawater; at best it remained a leaky apparatus that fueled the sexual anxieties of Europeans.
Eva Hayward, Sensational Jellyfish: Aquarium Affects and the Matter of Immersion
