Modernity and Bourgeois Life
Page 46
The Victorian polyphony
The connection between the radical Godwin and the conservative Malthus embodies one among a number of perhaps paradoxical but revealing and even defining features of nineteenth-century moral belief and action, highlighted for England by Michael Mason, but present elsewhere too. Although there were political radicals who saw sexual enjoyment in a positive light, and conservatives who regarded it more darkly, overall there can be no simple equation of favorable attitudes toward sex with forward-looking perspectives and of negative judgments with backward-looking ones. Contrary to a widespread notion that suspicion of sexual enjoyment and the search for less physical satisfactions were elements in a conservative world-view that set itself against challenges to tradition and authority, many of the most exalted visions of a life free of sensual enjoyment were put forward by liberals and progressives; there was even something utopian about such anti-sensualism. On the other side, even some quite orthodox religious figures affirmed sexual pleasure as a divinely sanctioned dimension of life, giving explicit and even detailed descriptions of it. Anything but monotone, nineteenth-century sexuality was made up of a complex mix of strands and currents, properly dubbed by Porter and Hall the “Victorian polyphony.”20
One element in the mix to be sure, especially in England, was a turn toward greater refinement and reticence after 1815, in part a reaction against the moral tone of the immediately preceding period, in which Revolutionary attacks on traditional manners and decorum were followed by two decades of more or less continuous warfare, contributing to the qualities of libertinism, coarseness, and debauchery associated with the Prince Regent and his circle. Among middle-class people this move drew on the kind of family-centered moralism we considered earlier, given new impetus toward the end of the eighteenth century by the rise of Evangelicalism, the serious and demanding species of Christianity associated with William Wilberforce and Hannah More, which sought to infuse everyday relations with pious principles. But there is evidence for a kind of parallel motion on the part of artisans and workers, provided for instance by the radical tailor and activist Francis Place (1771–1854) in his Autobiography, which contrasted the dissolute, unrestrained, and bawdy tone of lower-middle and working-class life he remembered from his youth with the much more constrained and temperate style he discerned (and sought to document) among the same groups in his own time. The contrast between his own father, a tavern-keeper “governed almost wholly by his passions and animal sensations” and the steady, determined self-control that characterized many artisans from around 1815 was one exhibit in his case, but Place found a similar turn away from obscene speech and unbridled behavior among ordinary navvies. Even if he may have exaggerated the change in order to defend workers against middle-class suspicion of them, the aspirations he expressed were in line with the “respectability” many workers sought to develop in themselves (and which Place denied was imposed on them by their “betters”), not least among those active in the movement to reform Parliament and extend suffrage, particularly the “moral force” (i.e. non-violent) Chartists, of whom Place was a prominent exemplar. The shift he portrayed seems to have no equivalent on the continent, but it suggests that in England at least some outside the middle classes were experiencing something like what Simmel called the “intellectualization of the will” (the postponement of immediate satisfactions) fostered by participation in distant relations, in this case the organized national campaigns for Parliamentary reform.21 Despite the fears many middle-class people harbored about the uncivilized and dangerously immoral lives of workers drawn into mushrooming factory towns and cities, work by recent historians suggests than many laborers and servants of both sexes exhibited moral aspirations much like those of their employers, bravely keeping them alive even inside conditions that made stable ongoing social relations difficult to maintain.22
All the same, we must not let the close ties between such standards of respectability and the Evangelical or “Puritan” currents that were so strong in English culture obscure the existence of very different moral attitudes even among prominent religious figures. Remarkably eroticized visions of sexual relations were put forward both from within the Anglican Church and outside it, in part because the Protestant rejection of religiously enjoined celibacy often led on to affirmations of the sensual side of life. The pleasures invoked were largely confined to married couples, but descriptions of them went far beyond what has often been assumed to be “Victorian.” The Anglican minister Charles Kingsley regarded the erotic satisfactions of marriage in this world as “dim shadows of a union that shall be perfect” in Heaven, and that would involve lying “naked in each other’s arms, clasped together toying with each other’s limbs, buried in each other’s bodies.” Kingsley did not draw the implications from such a prospect many today might wish or expect, since he regarded it as a kind of rationale for his and his wife Fanny’s decision to put off consummating their marriage for a month following the ceremony, despite evidence that their courtship had been intensely arousing sexually for both: the waiting period was intended to prepare them to appreciate better what came after it, just as present physical pleasures were to ready people for those of the afterlife. Among other religious figures and groups who gave a similarly positive valuation to sexual joys were the mystical Swedenborgians (some inside the established Church, others not), and leaders of smaller sects, all of whom in some way regarded bodily pleasure as justified by Christ’s having infused divinity into every part of human nature, a view that encouraged seeing the delights of worldly life as anticipations of much greater bliss to come. Numbers of these people shared with Kingsley a stance toward sex in which, as Mason puts it, “pro-sensualism and anti-sensualism are so curiously intertwined” that they seem to merge into each other.23
These ambiguities were less evident among secular radicals, some of whom sought to expose elite hypocrisies by way of sexual satire, then as before and since (in the words of Porter and Hall) “the great debunker and leveler, toppling the pretensions of the mighty and the ‘moral.’” There was considerable talk about free love among English Owenites, and at least some in the movement seem to have promoted it (we will return to them later). Their attitudes shared much with the “rehabilitation of the flesh” called for by the French Saint-Simonians, a formula echoed by their “Young German” followers, Heine, Karl Gutzkow and others (including the young Engels), and Charles Fourier and his followers put a whole catalogue of passions at the center of their plan for social reorganization.24 But the intertwining of pro- and anti-sensual attitudes found among religious figures appeared in a different way on the secular left, through the presence there of notions about the coming triumph of intellectual over sensual pleasures in just the way Godwin had theorized.
Among progressives who upheld such views were William Hazlitt, the critic who stuck to his positive judgment of the French Revolution well after his friends Wordsworth and Coleridge turned against it, and their utopian associate Robert Southey, who spoke about the “absurdity of supposing that a community which … had obtained the highest state of attainable perfection, should yet be without the virtue of continence.” Similar views were put forth by William Cobbett and even by Francis Place, and they found expression in the circles where John Stuart Mill and Harriet Taylor developed their ideas about equality between men and women. Taylor’s daughter Helen probably expressed the Mills’s views when she wrote (in a letter of 1870) that as time went on “I think it probable that this particular passion will become with men, as it already is with a large number of women, completely under the control of the reason.” What had enabled women to effect this was that, for them, achieving “the gratification of this passion in its highest form,” in a loving and permanent relationship, had long been “conditional upon their restraining it in its lowest”: they had to develop self control in order to gain “the strongest love and admiration of men.” Although “it has not yet been tried what the same conditions will do for men,” Helen Tay
lor believed the example of women showed what the future would be like.25 Such a consequence of equality between the sexes is not what many later reformers hoped from it, but that it could appear as one in nineteenth-century minds helps us to see the sometimes surprising connection to progressive aspirations anti-sensual ideas possessed at the time.
Although England seems to have been the chief home of such thinking (all Mason’s examples come from there) it was not the only one. In France Auguste Comte (admittedly a person difficult to place along the standard left–right spectrum, but certainly one inspired by Enlightenment notions of progress, albeit combined with older visions of hierarchy) adhered to it. As with Godwin, Comte’s belief in humanity’s desensualized future was partly a projection of his own personality; at various moments in his troubled life he denied himself one or another sort of physical satisfaction, and believed people in the future would follow his example. As Frank Manuel notes, his writings are full of “hints … that sensual gratification denied was transmutable into vast resources of spiritual power of an intellectual or emotional character.” The future he envisioned was one in which the female virtues of feeling and sociability would achieve power over the sheer strength of masculine nature, affecting human physiology itself; there would arise a growing influence “of the nervous on the vascular system,” to the point that the female seed would no longer require help from the male “stimulating fluid” in order to be awakened to life. The masculine role in reproduction could thus disappear, bringing a sharp decline in the power of selfish motives and passions, and preparing the triumph of altruistic and social feeling.26 In a similar way the spiritualist feminist Céline Renooz wrote that as the influence of women grew they would turn sexuality away from the animality male domination imparted to it, so that “peace, calm, happiness” and a “slackening of sexual activity” would ensue.27 These examples testify to the presence of a utopian anti-sensualism among French radicals and progressives quite comparable to what Mason finds in their English counterparts. As with gender and the system of separate spheres, Victorian morality became more controlling in good part through the operation of factors that simultaneously introduced perspectives of autonomy into it, producing an unstable complex of ideas and attitudes whose further development would lead in very different directions.
Male and female sexuality, and the “first night”
One of the things that marks the kind of anti-sensual visions given voice by intellectuals such as Godwin, the Mills, and Comte as utopian is the contrast between them and attitudes toward sex in the population at large. Popular understanding about sex both before and after 1800 owed much to widely circulated manuals based on medical writings, of which the two most prominent were Nicolas Venette’s Conjugal Love (Tableau de l’amour conjugale) and the curiously titled Aristotle’s Masterpiece (the unknown author was surely not the Greek philosopher); the first, published in 1668, was more popular in France and Germany, the second in England, where it first appeared in 1690. Both were straightforward and unembarrassed in their approach to sex and treated it in a primarily functional way, focusing on conception and generation rather than on either the pleasures or anxieties that could accompany sexual relations; part of the reason for this focus was to fend off the charge, early and often made, that the books had the hidden purpose of providing illicit knowledge and stimulation, but it also reflected the less sentimental and more matter-of-fact character of sexual discussion in the period before Enlightenment and romanticism fostered a heightened emphasis on feeling and happiness. Venette all the same spoke about the way sexual pleasure could be followed by disappointment, worried about whether women or men derived greater pleasure from the act (“theirs” lasts longer but “ours” is more intense), and warned parents not to ignore the powerful force of sexual attraction when seeking mates for their children. The pseudo-Aristotle offered advice on how to increase the likelihood of obtaining a male or female child by varying the position of intercourse or the time at which it took place, and reassured husbands both that the absence of blood on the first night was not proof against the bride’s virginity and that a baby born seven months after a wedding had not necessarily been conceived before it.28 Changing standards of decorum and reticence made an impact on this literature. A new edition of the pseudo-Aristotle published soon after 1700 was even more frank than the earlier ones, but a subsequent and final one early in the nineteenth century showed the influence of Evangelicalism by eliminating explicit references to organs and warning against sex with prostitutes, and Porter and Hall think that Venette’s use of sometimes crude language made his work appeal less in the new atmosphere; a revision of the book intended to be more decorous appeared in France in 1863.29
All the same there is evidence that many people continued to regard sex as a physiological necessity, and a proper source of intense physical satisfaction inside marriage. According to the British medical journal The Lancet, chastity was a severe danger to health among women, and more popular writings listed not only hysteria but various other diseases among the possible consequences of suppressing the sex drive. (I will come to some often-remarked-on exceptions in a moment.) Although most people still held that marriage was the only proper place for satisfying it, at least for females, the illogic of such a restriction was recognized by some, for instance the radical William Thompson who waxed indignant (in 1825) that women and girls were allowed no other way than marriage to find the fulfillment everyone needed, while bachelors were permitted “the gratification of every sexual desire.” Robert Nye notes that French medical treatises unhesitatingly assumed the existence of female desire and that failing to satisfy it could damage health. Peter Gay has highlighted a number of remarkable instances showing that people could be very direct both in expecting and describing sexual fulfillment in marriage, as well as some remarkable but probably untypical cases in which spouses from highly respectable families accepted and even encouraged a partner’s extramarital affairs. Courtship letters were sometimes frank in giving vent to passion and physical longing, as were those exchanged between spouses separated by travel or business.30 The widespread and ancient belief that women could only conceive if they experienced orgasm led even people who regarded sex primarily as an inescapable vehicle for having children to accept the rightness of taking pleasure in it; the same notion may have worked in the opposite direction, however, since it implied that preventing women from coming to climax could serve as a means of contraception. Popular medical advisers reminded readers that women “are made to love and to be loved,” using the terms in ways that made clear their sexual reference; there were warnings about having too much sex, but also recommendations that intercourse be enjoyed with gusto.31
There can be no doubt all the same that men and women were very differently placed in regard to sexuality; the idealization of female purity and the attempt to keep knowledge about sex away from young girls had the effect of giving men far greater power in sexual matters. But one consequence of this imbalance was (as John Tosh notes) that the burden of regulating sexual relations and sexual feeling fell more on men too, bringing a range of fears to some, including both the inability to master sex drives and the shame of impotence. There was considerable commentary on these problems in both France and England in the mid century; one patient told a French doctor that impotence was “what all women regard as an insult and rarely pardon.” It is in this context of anxiety that we need to place the often-quoted declaration of the English physician Dr. William Acton that “the majority of women … are not very much troubled with sexual feeling of any kind.” This pronouncement, as Michael Mason insists,
must be seen for what it is: a remark, in a chapter on “Impotence,” from a book aimed at male readers. Its corollary is that “no nervous or feeble young man need, therefore, be deterred from marriage by any exaggerated notion of the duties required of him.” … The famous words are not even consistent with Acton’s implied or stated views on female sexuality elsewhere in Functions an
d Disorders [of the Reproductive Organs (1857)]: when he writes of the ‘efficiency’ of the penis, for example.
Mason adds that such a claim about feminine sexual response was “as far as I know, without a parallel in the sexual literature of the day” (and no one seems to have read more widely in it than he), which to the contrary contains many expressions of surprise in the face of female frigidity. A possible slowness of female response was signaled in the notion that women’s desire had often to be awakened by experience and might otherwise remain dormant, but sex’s importance to life was affirmed in the recognition that women’s health, like men’s, might be endangered by abstinence.32 Too much influenced by Acton’s words, some historians have read them into idealizations of motherhood or celebrations of female purity, giving a one-sided slant to discussions of nineteenth-century sexuality in general.
One topic that helps to illuminate these questions, and that became an increasing focus of public discussion by late in the nineteenth century, was the “problem of the first night,” the initiation of presumably virginal women into sexual life at the moment of marriage. It seems clear that many sheltered young brides everywhere found the discovery of the reality of sex difficult and upsetting, even shocking and disorienting, and people worried about the effects of such an experience on family life. The issue was aired more in France than in England (or in Germany, where Ute Frevert reports some private letters about it, but no public discussion). The reasons for this may have had to do with testimony that suggests that unmarried eighteenth- and nineteenth-century English girls enjoyed significantly more freedom in their social relations and behavior than their French counterparts (a situation partly reversed with marriage, which gave the latter license to behave more freely in public but deprived the former of some of the liberty they had enjoyed before). In addition, foreign travelers in England sometimes thought people there especially enthusiastic about sexual fulfillment in marriage, and some evidence suggests that the French by contrast recommended a higher level of restraint, lest wives stirred by pleasure seek an erotic life of their own, lose their husband’s respect, or recoil from the discovery of their own physicality. To the extent that such notions existed in France, they probably owed a good deal to the effects on French women of the prim and strait-laced education many girls still received in Catholic schools or secular ones that took over their prudish spirit.33 But the anti-clerical reactions provoked by the Church’s persisting power, as well as the survival of the old courtly appreciation of seductive charm are evident in the light-hearted and even comic tone that French discussions of the wedding night could take.