End-of-the-Century Birth Throes : SEXUAL ANARCHY <i> by Elaine Showalter (Viking: $19.95, paper; 304 pp.)</i>

Elaine Showalter is a distinguished feminist critic whose new book, “Sexual Anarchy,” is a provocative comparison of the last years of the 19th Century (the fin de siecle ) with the final decade of our own. Her view is optimistic, as she chooses to view the 1990s as “the embryonic stirrings of a new order, a future that is utopian rather than apocalyptic.” She soundly rejects the idea that our century’s “terminal decade” is in “the death throes of a diseased society and the winding down of an exhausted culture.”

In effect, she is agreeing that history is indeed doomed to repeat itself, and even though we have begun the 1990s describing the decade with words like exhaustion, malaise, epidemic and violence, (pretty much the same terms as were used in the 1890s), we can cheer ourselves up if only by thinking back to the early years of this century and the renewal and change inspired by modernism and all that the term has come to mean.

Showalter, chairperson of the department of English at Princeton and a specialist in Victorian literature, has written what might well be called a “crossover” book; that is, one that is solidly grounded in a vast range of scholarship but also informative and appealing to a general audience. She describes the book she has written as being about the “myths, metaphors and images of sexual crises and apocalypse that marked both the late 19th Century and our own . . . and its representations in English and American literature, art and film.

Her book is primarily a study of the great writers of the 19th Century (and this is where it most satisfies), but her stated aim is to treat the “images rather than issues” and to show how fiction reflects the historical development of sexuality through comparisons with contemporary novels and films. A quick glance at some of her chapters will give an idea of how she goes about this.

To discuss women’s options, for example, she uses George Gissing’s “The Odd Women” (published in 1891) to represent those who for whatever reason could not or would not marry, who “undermined the comfortable binary system of Victorian sexuality and gender roles.” Comparing this to Gail Godwin’s “The Odd Woman” (1975), she makes the point that “representations of the single woman do not seem to have changed much since the fin de siecle. “

Showalter reinforces her view by contrasting Henry James’ 1886 novel about the condition of women, “The Bostonians,” with the 1984 Merchant & Ivory film that starred Vanessa Redgrave and Christopher Reeve. Although she finds James’ view of unmarried women harsh, she views the film as “even less optimistic about the prospects of the modern odd woman,” and from that she glides gracefully into a discussion ranging from articles in the New York Times Magazine (“Why Wed? The Ambivalent American Bachelor”) to serious feminist studies such as Andrea Dworkin’s “Intercourse,” which states flatly that “sexual intercourse is the basis and symbol of women’s oppression.” Throughout this chapter, Showalter roams authoritatively through British, American and even Continental history and culture, citing examples from Punch to Havelock Ellis and Freud to sustain her views.

Showalter both amuses and informs in her discussion of how the realism of “Queen George” (Eliot) led naturally to the great male “King Romance” writers: Kipling, H. Rider Haggard, Robert Louis Stevenson. Again, she makes some nice ironic points by contrasting Kipling’s “The Man Who Would Be King” with John Huston’s 1975 film of the same name starring Michael Caine and Sean Connery.

This allows her to glide into an explication of one of the most important novels of the turn of the century, Joseph Conrad’s “Heart of Darkness,” which she rightly sees as “an expose of imperialism and an allegory of male bonding and the flight from women.” Then she contrasts Conrad’s novel with Francis Ford Coppola’s film version, “Apocalypse Now,” much of which is filtered through the perceptions of Eleanor Coppola’s journal about how the film was made on location in the Philippines.

Showalter also buttresses her literary musings with examples from her own experience. She relates the fussing, fuming and foibles of academic conferences with a light, ironic touch, and her account of participating in a New York City “porn tour” with the group Women Against Pornography is harrowing simply because much of what she saw is on the one hand so ordinary and banal, on the other so upsetting.

She makes serious comparisons of the great fear syphilis inspired in the 19th Century and the terror that AIDS has produced in our own, but she ends her discussion with a fine note of optimism. If we consider the history of syphilis, she argues, we can be confident that some medical miracle will come along to end the AIDS epidemic as well. Showalter shares the British feminist critic Lynn Segal’s belief that fighting this disease (and by extension, all other social injustices and afflictions) will do away with “evasion and hypocrisy around sex,” and thus will lead naturally to “more equal sexual relations between women and men and the recognition of sexual diversity.” Then and then only, Showalter agrees, can “the sexual revolution begin in earnest.”

She begins and ends her book with a paragraph about the Genitron, the huge time machine that hangs above the entrance to the Musee Beaubourg in Paris, counting down the final years, minutes and seconds of our century. To stand in front of the Genitron is both awe-inspiring and frightening: Most viewers describe themselves as being almost paralyzed in the face of time’s swift and relentless ticking away, but Showalter, as she does throughout the book, chooses to regard the inexorable passage of time positively.

Just as time cannot be stopped or turned back, neither in her analogy should we “legislate or intimidate men and women into the shame and repression of the past.” Fear, she argues, should not “push us into a cruel homophobia, make us abandon our commitment to women’s sexual autonomy.”

Although some may view our present-day society as a kind of “frightening sexual anarchy,” for her, it is “the birth throes of a new sexual democracy.”