The sense of cultural decline which plagued the period was palpable across Europe. Thomas Mann’s great saga of German life, Buddenbrooks (1900), breathes its very essence. Charting four generations of a Lübeck merchant family which rises with great competitive aplomb to the summit of wealth and prestige only to succumb to a mysterious failure of vitality, almost a love affair with its own dissolution, Buddenbrooks has as its central character Thomas, the scion of the third generation. Rigidly conscientious, cultivated, Thomas leads the family to its greatest successes. Yet he cannot shed the sense that he is only wearing a mask of duty, while the energy of maintaining it in place saps his core. His activity is meaningless, his doll-like musical wife an eccentric extravagance who prefers another man, his only son overly sensitive and sickly. His sister Tony, the princess of the family, is urged, against her instincts, into a marriage with a rich suitor that goes wrong, only to engage in another which similarly ends in divorce. At the age of thirty-four, she pronounces her life a waste. Thomas, too, succumbs to failure and weakness; his heir, too frail for life, dies. Migraines, bad teeth, blue shadows beneath the eyes, sickly pallor, nervous exhaustion, suffuse the novel. A once vibrant, meaningful world, bolstered by what the great sociologist Max Weber called ‘the spirit of capitalism and the Protestant ethic’, has come to its end. The dynamism that characterized an epoch has been drained from within: society has grown sick under the weight of its own mores.
In the early 1900s Sigmund Freud drew on his experience of the consulting room to pen his analysis of what ailed bourgeois civilization from within. In ‘Civilized Sexual Morality and Modern Nervous Illness’(1909) he declared that the marital and sexual mores of the bourgeoisie were exacting a toll on Western health. Underpinning his analysis was the then radical notion that ‘In man the sexual instinct does not originally serve the purposes of reproduction at all, but has as its aim the gaining of particular kinds of pleasure.’ As Freud would more particularly state elsewhere, the objects of that sexual aim were diverse, both hetero-and homosexual.
The majority, Freud claimed, were constitutionally unfit to face the task of abstinence that was demanded of them before entering on a late marriage, or indeed throughout life if marriage didn’t occur. ‘Experience teaches us that for most people there is a limit beyond which their constitution cannot comply with the demands of civilization. All who wish to be more noble-minded than their constitution allows fall victims to neurosis; they would have been more healthy if it could have been possible for them to be less good…’ Sublimation, that deflecting of the sexual instincts to higher cultural aims, was open only to a minority–that intermittently, and least easily ‘during the period of ardent and vigorous youth’.
Then, too, the promises of love that marriage held out, after the celibacy of long engagements, were regularly disappointed. Often entered on with too little knowledge of the other sex, shrouded in worries about repeated conception, entailing methods of contraception that hampered satisfactory ends, marital happiness foundered:
Fear of the consequences of sexual intercourse first brings the married couple’s physical affection to an end; and then, as a remoter result, it usually puts a stop as well to the mental sympathy between them, which should have been the successor to their original passionate love. The spiritual disillusionment and bodily deprivation to which most marriages are thus doomed put both partners back in the state they were in before their marriage, except for being the poorer by the loss of an illusion, and they must once more have recourse to their fortitude in mastering and deflecting their sexual instinct.
Pioneering sex surveys backed up Freud’s analysis. In the United States Katherine B. Davis, over a period of almost ten years, explored the sexual and marital lives of 2200 women through lengthy questionnaires. Her wide-ranging sample came from women who had reached marriageable age before the First World War, two-thirds of them born before 1890. The results, published in 1929 in a thick volume entitled Factors in the Sex Lives of Twenty-Two Hundred Women, showed amongst other things, that a quarter of her sample were ‘repelled’ by their initial sexual experience. Little instruction about sex before marriage had been received, and Davis found a high correlation between this, a distaste for sex and unhappiness in marriage.
After five or so years of marriage, Freud pointed out, men often resorted to the sexual freedom that a ‘double sexual morality’ allowed them. Doubling carried a burden of lies, deceit and self-deception. It was ‘the plainest admission that society itself does not believe in the possibility of enforcing the precepts which it itself has laid down’. For women, the effects of ‘civilized’ sexual morality were even more severe: ‘women, when they are subjected to the disillusionments of marriage, fall ill of severe neuroses which permanently darken their lives’. Marriage had ceased to be a panacea for their nervous troubles. Indeed, Freud elaborated:
the cure for nervous illness arising from marriage would be marital unfaithfulness. But the more strictly a woman has been brought up and the more sternly she has submitted to the demands of civilization, the more she is afraid of taking this way out; and in the conflict between her desires and her sense of duty, she once more seeks refuge in a neurosis. Nothing protects her virtue as securely as an illness.
Bourgeois society had been made sick by its sexual and marital arrangements.
The readiness with which Freud’s ideas were taken up immediately before and increasingly after the First World War points to an underlying dissatisfaction with the ‘sacrifices’ demanded by the late nineteenth century’s prevailing codes of love and marriage. It also indicates that a general erosion of patriarchal power and of the demands of ‘civilized’ double standards had been taking place–sometimes quietly and from within, sometimes more noisily in activism. Women were hardly alone: the bourgeois marriage had been under scrutiny and attack by socialists as well. Engels in The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State (1880) had argued that with capitalism had come ‘the world historical defeat of the female sex. The man took command in the home also, the woman was degraded and reduced to servitude; she became the slave of his lust and a mere instrument for breeding children.’ For progressives, woman’s rightful place had become the new standard of civilization.
All this was attended and abetted by a growth in secularism. The Church’s aegis was under attack during the Third Republic in France, when republicans attempted to secularize education and wean wives away from the dominance of priests, bearers of a paternalism that the Republic’s reformers understood as antithetical to constituting a responsible citizenry. Revolutionary and socialist movements throughout Europe questioned the Church’s reactionary power. Darwinism and the ascendancy of science challenged first principles. ‘God is Dead,’ Nietzsche proclaimed in The Gay Science and again in Thus Spoke Zarathustra, pointing to the death of received wisdom and with it any absolute values.
Increasingly the individual, rather than any paternally dominated family group, had become the measure of both happiness and despair. That individual had also acquired a new and complicated depth in which sexuality played a prominent part. Conjugal settlements were poised for reinvention.
Unconventional Arrangements
The Victorian marriage could never encompass the entire variety of conjugal arrangements that people lived. Writers, artists, actors, revolutionaries, those members of what the French had in the 1840s begun to call Bohemia, had always strained against convention in searching to satisfy the needs of love and individual happiness. Even the redoubtable George Eliot, now seen as a bastion of the more capacious Victorian values, had, as Marian Evans, engaged in a radical marital configuration. In 1854 she had bravely and openly started to live with her lover, the writer George Henry Lewes. A radical, he had an ‘open’ marriage with his wife, with whom he had fathered three children, and took on the care of the three others she had with other men. Needless to say, the Eliot–Lewes intimacy was hardly looked on with favour. Social acceptance was a long, slow proces
s. Thirty-three years on, when Eliot’s work had earned her fame, the couple was finally recognized by ‘society’, in the form of a meeting with Queen Victoria’s daughter Princess Louise who was an admirer of Eliot’s fiction.
But as the century moved towards its end and the new, more unbuckled Edwardian era dawned, a flurry of unconventional intimate relations began to be openly lived. Most of those that have been recorded are still in artistic, literary and progressive circles, but they do signal a gradual undermining of older codes of love and marriage. Torn between tradition and innovation, love had begun to take on an experimental edge. The balance between being faithful to one’s feelings and desires and faithful to one’s spouse and social convention tips in the direction of the first, as if the greater morality lay there.
In court during his notorious trial in 1895, Oscar Wilde delineated the classical delights of the ‘love that dare not speak its name’: all the while his wife, Constance, hovered in the background and never altogether ceased to support him. She didn’t sue for divorce, though she did constrain him, while he was in prison, to give up his rights over their two children. Among its many after-effects, Wilde’s trial brought to public awareness the existence of an illicit homosexual subculture that had largely been invisible to the outside world. The exposure had the perverse consequence of forcing homosexuals to rein in their activities, fearful as they now were of being ‘recognized’ in the glare of limelight.
Few did more in Britain than the writer and social reformer Edward Carpenter to attempt to normalize homosexual arrangements. Despite the 1885 Criminal Law Amendment Act outlawing sexual relations between men, Carpenter in the 1890s began to live openly with his lover, George Merrill, a working-class man from the slums of Sheffield. The relationship was a lifelong one. In his book The Intermediate Sex (1908), Carpenter noted: ‘Eros is a great leveller. Perhaps the true Democracy rests, more firmly than anywhere else, on a sentiment which easily passes the bounds of class and caste, and unites in the closest affection the most estranged ranks of society.’ Both D.H. Lawrence and E.M. Forster were deeply influenced by Carpenter. Lawrence translated Carpenter and Merrill’s relationship into a heterosexual register (merging it with Lady Ottoline Morrell’s affair with a mason on her estate) in Lady Chatterley’s Lover; while Forster was inspired by it to write his early novel Maurice, not published until 1971, after his death, by which time homosexuality had at last been legalized in Britain.
In Howards End (1910) E.M. Forster gave his heroine the phrase which summed up the new ethos: ‘Only connect.’ The understanding of the good life had shifted. The personal, the relational, the passionate–which also permitted congress across class and even gender lines–now weighed more heavily in the human balance than tradition and social convention. Given that in the division of labour which was the Victorian marriage, the emotions had long fallen predominantly into the woman’s sphere, it is perhaps unsurprising that the growing forces for change in woman’s condition should run concomitantly with a cultural shift which prioritized feeling–and also, on occasion, allowed women to pursue their own desires.
D.H. Lawrence met the redoubtable Frieda (von Richthofen) Weekley in Nottingham in 1912. From the ranks of the German aristocracy, she was certainly ‘estranged’ from Lawrence by ‘class and caste’. She was also married and a mother of three. Soon after their first encounter, Lawrence and Frieda eloped to Germany, leaving her children behind. Divorce from Ernest Weekley, an academic at Nottingham University who also taught the evening classes that young Lawrence had attended, soon followed. In Germany, Frieda’s sister Elsa, another free spirit, one of the first women there to do a doctorate in economics, was part of a circle which included Max Weber, with whom she had an affair. The circle also extended to the radical psychoanalyst Otto Gross, with whom Frieda had a brief affair. Gross, a proponent of free love, was involved in various of the pre-war quasi-anarchist, neo-pagan communities in Switzerland–lifestyle laboratories where love threw off the shackles of bourgeois convention.
In France during the belle époque, amongst a Bohemia that mingled with the upper class, a looser sexual morality prevailed than in England. Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette’s largely autobiographical writings, spanning the first half of the twentieth century, provide an insight into the kind of adventurous intimacies that could be lived. They also chart a course which led Colette through all the permutations of a woman’s life, taking us from provincial Burgundy into the inner precincts of the exclusive and all-male Académie Française. An early marriage with the gallivanting literary and theatrical entrepreneur Willy, a papa-mari twenty-four years older than her, had Colette chained in sexual-emotional bondage and living power relations that are echoed in many unions between older, experienced men and younger women–though undoubtedly hers have their own particular belle époque flavour. Colette depicts all this clearly in the Claudine novels which Willy forced her to write, then shamelessly signed himself. They became hugely popular bestsellers, re-enacted on the stage.
In the course of writing the Claudine books Colette engages in her first lesbian affairs, which are shared with Willy. She describes both her pleasures and her jealousy. Scandalous material, perhaps, though Zola had already described the lesbian demi-monde: nor did belle époque husbands bother to rank lesbian loves as adultery. When Colette left Willy, to take up life as a music-hall performer, she created a furore by kissing her then lover, the Marquise de Belbeuf, on stage.
There was a host of affairs with men, too, and a second marriage to a leading political journalist. In La Vagabonde, published in France in 1911 when she was thirty-eight, Colette calls love ‘that hairshirt which sticks to the skin where love is born and tightens its grip as it grows’. The greatest obstacle to her escape from its torture, ‘a hundred times more dangerous than the greedy beast [of lust,] is the abandoned child who trembles inside of me, weak, nervous, ready to stretch out her arms and beg: “Don’t leave me alone!”’ Throughout her life, her biographer Judith Thurman writes, Colette yearned to love and to believe in love. The two rarely coincided, though she engaged in many of the possible permutations. She had her first child in 1913 at the age of forty, went off to report from the front line during the Great War; and at forty-seven engaged in a passionate affair with her stepson before embarking on another marriage with a man seventeen years younger than her, the most peaceful of her long, bold and ardent life.
In Britain, differently inflected experiments in loving similarly engaged the young in the pre-and immediately post-war period. Within the intellectual elite that was the extended Bloomsbury circle, love’s preferred form was the serially lived triangle, both homo-and hetero-erotic. As the journalist Kingsley Martin quipped, ‘In Bloomsbury all the couples are triangles and live in squares.’ To take just one of many examples, Lytton Strachey had a variety of homosexual lovers, briefly proposed to Virginia Woolf, took up in 1917 with the painter Dora Carrington, who was pursued by the artist Mark Gertler but was passionately in love with Lytton. Dora and Lytton lived together until his death some seventeen years later. In the meantime Ralph Partridge, with whom Lytton was in love, wooed Dora, whom he married, though she carried on living with Lytton, who remained homosexual.
All this is known from multifarious books and films documenting Bloomsbury lives. What is clear is that although Bloomsbury forms of coupling were not widespread, their influence, given the prominence of Bloomsbury ideas in the media, on the loosening of conventions in Britain in the aftermath of that vast shaking-up of hierarchies that the First World War produced, was hardly minimal. The new emphasis on ‘feeling’, on a desire for self-fulfilment, crucially by women as well as men, abutted against older strictures and gradually dismantled the rigid edifice of dutiful marriage, though its idealized ghost remained, ever to be reinvoked by politicians intent on ‘family values’.
Already in 1909 H.G. Wells’s novel Ann Veronica, his portrait of the new emancipated woman, had created a stir by breaching old moral taboos. Denounced as
a ‘sex-problem’ novel, targeted by the Spectator in a campaign against ‘poisonous literature’ and banned from the circulating libraries which ensured a writer’s income, the novel was prescient. Based on Wells’s own affairs, the fiction lived out a future in which ‘feeling’ came first. Wells’s vivid heroine tapped into the changing times and gave her name to countless other Ann Veronicas, satirized and censured in the press for their independent aspirations and their attempts to define a new kind of love and marriage.
Lively, pretty, intelligent, Ann Veronica is the daughter of an old-fashioned Victorian father who thinks that women are either angels or fallen (if secretly desirable) creatures. He would palpably prefer to keep his daughter by his side. Ann Veronica is both told that love and marriage are the paths open to her and made to feel that it is immoral to show too much interest in them.
During her school days, especially her earlier school days, the world had been very explicit with her, telling her what to do, what not to do, giving her lessons to learn and games to play and interests of the most suitable and various kinds. Presently she woke up to the fact that there was a considerable group of interests called being in love and getting married, with certain attractive and amusing subsidiary developments, such as flirtation and ‘being interested’ in people of the opposite sex. She approached this field with her usual liveliness of apprehension. But here she met with a check. These interests her world promptly, through the agency of schoolmistresses, older school-mates, her aunt, and a number of other responsible and authoritative people, assured her she must on no account think about… It was, in fact, a group of interests quite unlike any other group, peculiar and special, and one to be thoroughly ashamed of.
All About Love: Anatomy of an Unruly Emotion Page 18
