In fact, like the more thoughtful Victorian Sadists, Vatsyayana’s vision simply encompassed an entire range of possible sexual responses to violence. He described these ways of striking as ‘peculiar to the people of the southern countries’ and opined that ‘the practice of them is painful, barbarous, and base, and quite unworthy of imitation’. With characteristic relativism, he went on to add that ‘the various modes of enjoyment are not for all times or for all persons, but they should only be used at the proper time, and in the proper countries and places’. Burton the sexual anthropologist could not have put it better. And Burton knew it. He wanted to use Vatsyayana to show that the cool, relativist permissiveness that his own sexual studies had led him to espouse had deep and ancient roots. For Burton, publishing the Kamasutra was not only a matter of playing out his private desires in public; his literary transgression had a political purpose.
Burton’s famed skill with the sword may have deserted him in age, but he was still eager to take on his old enemies – the censors, the prudes and the hypocrites – in print. And the Kamasutra was his chosen weapon. He shared with Arbuthnot the sense that the hitherto hidden, erotic side of the Sanskrit literary tradition needed to be exposed. And as an inveterate self-publisher, he longed to expose the hypocrisy of sexual censorship. He wanted to use the Kamasutra to prick Victorian society out of its sleep of sexual ignorance, be it pretended or actual.
Arbuthnot was right behind him. In Early Ideas, he revealed that he considered the Kamasutra to be ‘simple and good’. It proved, he claimed, that ‘the Hindoos of that age possessed a civilization far in advance of our own at that time, while the exact details of everything to be done by husbands and wives seem to point out that marriage obligations were fully recognized at that period’. ‘Marriage obligations’ were much on the mind of this former long-term bachelor. Arbuthnot believed that ancient Hindu civilization was not only ‘far in advance of our own at that time’ but more sophisticated than the English society of his own time. He skimmed over the fact that the Kamasutra discussed sex in a wide range of contexts, including with ‘other men’s wives’, and co-opted it for the cause of advocating sexual pleasure within marriage. The ‘Preface’ to the 1883 Kamasutra – which, on the grounds of style alone, was almost certainly written by Arbuthnot, although presumably with Burton’s help or at least agreement – ended with a similarly heartfelt plea. It concluded that too many Englishmen were completely ignorant of ‘certain matters intimately connected with their private, domestic and social life’, and that this ignorance had ‘unfortunately wrecked many a man and many a woman’. ‘Wrecked’ was a strong word, a word that placed sexuality at the core of what constituted a man – or a woman.
Burton was no less passionate about the need for sex education. ‘The England of our day,’ he wrote in 1888, ‘would fain bring up both sexes and keep all ages in profound ignorance of sexual and intersexual relations.’ ‘The consequences of that imbecility,’ he warned, ‘are particularly cruel and afflicting’ – especially for virgin brides. ‘How often do we hear women in Society lamenting that they have absolutely no knowledge of their own physiology; and at what heavy price must this fruit of the knowledge-tree be bought by the young first entering life? Shall we ever understand that ignorance is not innocence?’ Burton claimed he had heard of brides in their thirties ‘who had not the slightest suspicion concerning what complaisance was expected of them’. He blamed the parents: ‘out of mauvaise honte, the besetting sin of the respectable classes, neither father nor mother would venture to enlighten the elderly innocents’. One of his favourite after-dinner stories was that of the newly-wed husband who ascended the stairs to his young bride in bed, only to find her chloroformed and unconscious, with a note beside her on the pillow saying, ‘Mamma says you’re to do what you like.’ The darker side of the joke – and Burton’s serious point – lies not just in the bride’s inability to accept her own sexual nature, but in the sexual horrors that may have been visited on the bride’s mother by her inept, careless or brutal husband.
In correspondence with Henry Spencer Ashbee, Arbuthnot enlarged on the same theme. ‘It is difficult to get Englishmen to acknowledge that matrimonial happiness may in many cases be attained by a careful study of the passions of a wife, that is to say admitting that a wife be allowed to feel passion,’ he wrote.
Many a life has been wasted and the best feelings of a young woman outraged by the rough exercise of what truly become the husband’s ‘rights’, and all the innate delicate sentiments and illusions of the virgin bride are ruthlessly trampled on when the curtains close round the couch on what is vulgarly called the ‘first night’. The master either swoops down on his prey like a vulture or, what is just as bad, sins by ignorance, appearing to the trembling creature either as a cruel brute or a stupid bungling fool.
Arbuthnot’s and Burton’s depiction of the horrors of sexual ignorance should not be entirely trusted. ‘Victorianism’, in its more extreme, aggressively anti-sensual forms, was effectively constructed by its opponents – and Burton and Arbuthnot were among the first to define the enemy. The truth about sexual satisfaction, or lack of it, in Victorian marriages is less clear. Recent studies have turned up new evidence suggesting that Victorians were as sexually competent and enthusiastic as people of any other era. The age-old belief that the woman had to have an orgasm in order to conceive was still widespread, after all, and many Victorian doctors actually advised couples who could not conceive to try foreplay. Lecturing to the Royal College of Physicians in 1883, the Scottish gynaecologist J. Matthews Duncan presented his survey of sterile women. Among 190 respondents, 152 felt sexual desire and 134 claimed to have orgasms. Duncan could therefore concur with what he called the ‘almost universal opinion’: that ‘in women, desire and pleasure are in every case present, or are in every case called forth by the proper stimulants’.
Many more surveys and anecdotes, however, confirm Arbuthnot’s and Burton’s view. James Russell Price, a contemporary Chicago physician who castigated parents for not educating their children ‘in matters of sex hygiene’, interviewed one hundred women who sought legal separation from their husbands. Sixty-eight of them attested to sexual trauma on their wedding night, one eighteen-year-old bride avowing that she was utterly incapable of forgiving or forgetting how her husband locked the bedroom door on their first night together and raped her.
Elizabeth Blackwell, the first American woman to gain a degree in medicine and the author, in 1884, of The Human Element in Sex, blamed ‘the prevalent fallacy that sexual passion is the almost exclusive attribute of men’. The fallacy was certainly well represented in the medical establishment. H. Newell Martin’s textbook, The Human Body (1881), cites a doctor as saying that sex is at best ‘a nuisance to the majority of women belonging to the most luxurious classes of society’, while William Acton, a doctor of medicine and the author of the influential textbook The Functions and Disorders of the Reproductive Organs (1857), notoriously maintained that ‘the majority of women, happily for them, are not much troubled with sexual feeling of any kind’.
Acton in general, and this quotation in particular, are sometimes presented as exemplifying ‘Victorian’ attitudes. In fact, far from being the arch-villain of Victorian sexual repression, as he has often been presented, Acton was partly motivated by concern for the sexual sufferings of ‘the modest English female’ suddenly introduced, in the aftermath of her marriage, to ‘what in most instances is to her, at least, a most painful and distressing climax to her other agitations’. Acton, indeed, agreed with Elizabeth Blackwell, who wrote that ‘at the very time when marriage love seems to unite them most closely, when her husband’s welcome kisses and caresses seem to bring them into profound union, comes an act which mentally separates them, and which is often either indifferent or repugnant to her’.
The problem was not biology, but cultural expectations. Women were ‘not truthfully instructed in relation to the central force of human emotion and action�
�, Blackwell wrote, and they remained woefully ignorant of ‘the intense physical pleasure which attends the caresses of love’. Sex education, according to Blackwell, was what women sorely needed. The problem was that there was precious little on the subject to be found in print that wasn’t outright pornography, fringe medical literature – such as Blackwell’s own book – or bizarrely dated. Men were no less in need of expert help. ‘Walter’, the prolific seducer and hero of My Secret Life, finally discovers the secret of the clitoris in a dog-eared sex manual known as Aristotle’s Masterpiece, though it had precious little to do with Aristotle, having been written (and regularly rewritten) in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. But the Masterpiece was not easy to come by in the censorious 1880s, and in any case it was far more interested in conception than in what it described as ‘venery’.
While the Victorian home was served by endless household manuals advising on all aspects of domestic economy, few dared venture into the bedroom. Those ‘marriage manuals’ that did were moralizing and restrictive. Pleasure, as often as not, was the enemy – and men remained firmly on top. Arbuthnot and Burton wanted their Kamasutra to fill the gap. In his Preface, Arbuthnot compared the sorry state of the sexual sciences in contemporary England with their detailed treatment by the ancient Hindus. He managed to find just two English texts that ‘also enter into great details of private and domestic life’. The true identity of the author of the first, Every Woman’s Book, was not ‘Dr Waters’, as the 1826 title-page claimed, but the radical republican agitator, Richard Carlile. His tract was part of a modest wave of pamphlets that campaigned for the physical and social wellbeing of women in the 1830s, influenced partly by Malthus’s work on population and partly by the growing medical understanding of the reproductive system. (Every Woman’s Book later influenced Moral Physiology, by the American Congressman and social reformer Robert Dale Owen – a treatise on birth control that prompted Charles Knowlton to write the Fruits of Philosophy, which in turn influenced Arbuthnot.)
Carlile’s goal was to publicize what he called the ‘remedy’ or the ‘physical check’, a device that ‘has long been known to a few in this country, and to the aristocracy in particular’. For the sake of pregnancies that were planned, healthy and legitimate – for the sake, ultimately, of society itself – he described the vaginal sponge, ‘the glove’ (the condom) and the practice of coitus interruptus. Carlile’s advocacy of contraception concealed another agenda: that ‘sexual commerce, where useful and desired, may be made a pleasure’. He embraced what he called ‘the disposition to reproduce’, describing sexuality as ‘a natural passion, or a passion of the body, which we hold in common with every other animal’.
Carlile’s reforming zeal extended to a critique of religion, which he called ‘a mental disease that turns love into a fancied sin, and commits dreadful ravages, in excluding due sexual intercourse’. Western sexual culture, with its assumption of superior morality, was the enemy. ‘The notions of indecency and immorality, which unreasoning minds attach to all discussion about sexual commerce,’ he protested, ‘may be combatted by referring to the history of mankind, and by showing that through all the varied customs of different nations upon the subject, whatever was the prevailing custom was always the moral right of the matter.’ In the hands of Arbuthnot and Burton, the Kamasutra could provide detailed evidence of exactly those ‘varied customs’. It could act as a foundation stone for cultural relativism.
The second work Arbuthnot cited was one of the century’s most influential and subversive sex books. The Elements of Social Science, or Physical, Sexual and Natural Religion was probably originally published in 1854–5, as part of a second wave of tracts on ‘the most important, though unfortunately most neglected, subjects’: birth control and sexual health, with a side-order of sexual libertarianism. Charles Bradlaugh promoted The Elements in his National Reformer – to which the author, Dr George Drysdale, was an anonymous contributor. Sales soared after the Besant and Bradlaugh trial, with 7,000 copies issued in 1876 alone, and by the end of the century The Elements had sold in the region of 100,000 copies, despite being virtually unobtainable in any conventional bookshop.
Almost single-handedly, the book roused Mrs Grundy to a peak of anxiety and repressive fervour. Drysdale began his earnest, passionate work by declaring that ‘there is nothing from which mankind in the present day suffers more, than from the want of reverence of the human body’. He deplored the lack of sex education and appreciation of physical beauty. The ‘sensual passions’, he wrote, ‘are viewed in a most degrading light, and the youth is warned to beware of indulgence in them, and rather to train himself in the vastly nobler enjoyments of the moral and reasoning faculties’. Drysdale professed himself in hope, however, ‘that the time is not far distant… when the subjects of the following pages shall be generally understood, and openly discussed’. Swathes of the book dealt with neo-Malthusian issues of population and the condition of the urban working classes, but there was also sexually explicit material. ‘Spermatorrhea’ and the ‘Evils of abstinence’ were dealt with alongside venereal diseases and menstrual dysfunctions.
But for all his frankness, Drysdale was just as anxious as William Acton. Both men were greatly concerned by the potentially deleterious effects on the moral constitution of sexuality in general, and ‘solitary indulgence’ in particular. It was only Drysdale’s conclusion that was radical: ‘the true and only remedy for the evils arising from abstinence,’ he urged, ‘is a moderate indulgence in sexual intercourse.’ This noble course of action ‘braces and ennobles body and mind’, he wrote. The Elements was hardly a useful handbook for lovers, however. It could not compete with the Kamasutra. It was also intended for a very different market from Arbuthnot’s and Burton’s book; it was aimed not at the leisured, hedonistic, intellectual classes, but at the low-brow masses. But the book’s most serious failure, from Arbuthnot’s point of view, was that it was steeped in the puritanism of its nonconformist heritage. Drysdale was advocating only moderate indulgence. He actually warned against becoming ‘steeped in sexual indulgences, as some of the southern nations are’, as the inevitable result of such dissipation was that: ‘The mind becomes effeminate, and the nerves lose their tone; the power of thought becomes impaired, cloyed as it were by sweetness.’
This was a fairly standard argument of nineteenth-century imperialism, which liked to compare the active, manly rationalism of the West with the passive, effeminate sensualism of lesser nations; it created the fantasy figure of the dissipated and idle Oriental, feminized by excessive lubricity – and thus ill equipped to run his own country. Arbuthnot and Burton, in contrast, were quite happy to steep themselves in ‘southern’ (or Eastern) sensualism, and they saw the West’s failure to do likewise as hypocrisy based on ignorance – and as a failure, therefore, of the rational mind. In his Preface, Arbuthnot compared the ‘materialistic, realistic and practical point of view’ of the Hindu tradition with Western practices, in which the vast majority thought sexuality ‘to be quite incomprehensible, or… not worthy of their consideration’. If an ancient text from a barbarous country could so far surpass the most scientific-minded Western treatises of the day, then either the East was less stagnant, irrational and backward than had previously been admitted, or the West was less open-minded, rational and forward-thinking.
Arbuthnot cited a third book that was, he claimed, the only work in the English language that was ‘somewhat similar to these works of the Hindoos’. T. Bell’s Kalogynomia or the Laws of Female Beauty was published in London in 1821. It did indeed discuss many of the same topics as the Kamasutra, and at times in such a similar manner that it is tempting to think that Bell must somehow have been acquainted with at least one of the kama shastra texts. He described how people in the East ‘make an almost continuous use of aphrodisiac substances of exciting drugs and of philters’. He also categorized different types of women by their sexual behaviour and the manner of their orgasm – if not by the physical dimen
sions of their vaginas, as the Kamasutra had done. The ‘cold’ woman, Bell observed, has only ‘one evanescent emotion when the paroxysm reaches its crisis’. ‘The warmer, but yet experienced woman,’ he continued, ‘strives to conceal her sensibility and fixes her features; but, some time before the crisis of the passion, that fixity becomes contraction of the features, and their paleness betrays her interior sensation.’ As for the ‘voluptuous’ woman, she is ‘at the first warm, blushing, yielding and free from constraint – successive and gradually increasing chills soon take the place of the flush; – the features seem to contract as well as to become pale; – the eyelids drop over the eyeballs, which are convulsively drawn upward and inward, while the lips are half opened.’ Bell also analysed the phenomenon of orgasm, and discussed whether or not it was related to conception – a question long pondered in both West and East. Like many kama shastra texts (and like William Acton), Bell wondered whether women or men experienced greater sexual pleasure. He concluded that women, having greater ‘sensibility’ in general, had better orgasms, but ultimately ducked the issue by saying ‘it would require a new Tiresias to determine this point’.
The Book of Love- The Story of the Kamasutra Page 16
