Allusions to sexuality in general—and especially to sexual transgression—are recurrent elements in Virginia Woolf's work, though they are typically coded. Often the sexually fraught situations that occur in Woolf's cityscapes seem far more troubled and guilt-ridden than those taking place outside the confines of the metropolis or in the countryside itself; indeed, sexual encounters in these non-urban locales often seem innocent, idyllic, and blissful. In this article, I examine several contrasting transgressive sexual situations occurring in Jacob's Room (1922). Since similar motifs reverberate in Woolf's other works, I have included in endnotes representative quotations from Mrs. Dalloway (1925) and The Waves (1931) that complement selected passages from Jacob's Room.

In Jacob's Room, a novel that is explicitly engaged in a debate about indecency (70,79), the pattern of contrasts between the pastoral and the urban eroticism includes references to a variety of forbidden desires ranging from illicit love (for example, homosexual desire, adultery, and triangulation), to jealousy and even sexually motivated murder, as well as hints of voyeurism and prostitution. In Jacob's Room, recurrent parallel events are not merely mirrored but refracted—whether they align Betty Flanders's countryside adventures with those of Jacob's more urban activities in Athens and, later, on the Acropolis or whether they reveal that homosexuality at Cambridge is rather differently depicted than homosexuality in London.

In Jacob's Room, the narrator's description of Sopwith, the Cambridge don, is—superficially at least—idyllic. Sopwith routinely entertains “as many as twelve” undergraduates in his rooms, tempting them both with chocolate cake to satisfy their corporeal appetites and “thin silver disks which dissolve in young men's minds like silver, like moonlight” (39). Of course, the passage is an obvious and somewhat mischievous reference to the Cambridge Apostles and their view of the Higher Sodomy, a topic that Julie Anne Taddeo explores extensively in “Plato's Apostles: Edwardian Cambridge and the ‘New Style of Love.’” Later in the novel, during Jacob's engagement in a debate in his friend Simeon's room, argumentation more explicitly fuses Higher Sodomy and undercurrents of sexual excitement. When the young men commence “buzzing and barging about the room, one driving another against the bedroom door, which giving way, in they fell,” their obstreperous behavior verges on erotically playful violence (43).