Parallel Lives

by Phyllis Rose

  By the time they discussed the matter, in the days that followed, John had as many good reasons for deferring the consummation of his marriage as his parents had for not attending the ceremony. Most centred around his aversion to children and the hindrance they would be to his work. Moreover, he had married principally for companionship, and if Effie were pregnant or nursing a child she would be unable to accompany him on his travels abroad. Moreover, children would ruin her beauty. If he knew of any methods besides abstinence for limiting birth, he certainly did not let on. When Effie ventured to suggest that the production of children was the purpose of matrimony and that to abstain from having them was unnatural, perhaps sacrilegious, John cited the Church’s sanction of chastity and reminded her that the holiest people in the history of Christianity had been chaste. He was eloquent in conversation, a master of argument. Effie fell into a somewhat bewildered, somewhat relieved, acquiescent silence. Tolstoy talks of the psychological law ‘which compels a man who commits actions under the greatest compulsion, to supply in his imagination a whole series of retrospective reflections to prove his freedom to himself’. Certainly this crucial event in Ruskin’s life was produced under compulsion; but so quickly and effectively did his conscious mind go to work supplying reasons why it ought to have happened that he never in later months and years seems to have doubted that not consummating his marriage was the rational and obvious thing to do.

  In the interests of a broad and yet specific understanding of Victorian sexuality, let us return to the Ruskins’ room at Blair Atholl and the moment of greatest ambiguity, that between the removal of Effie’s dress and the chaste embrace. What did Ruskin feel at that moment? What was going through his mind? Incredibly, we may know this. Unprotected by post-Freudian self-consciousness, Ruskin limpidly admitted to his lawyer, years later, that when he slipped the dress from Effie’s shoulders, he did not like what he saw. He had imagined women to be different from what he saw she was. He believed there was something wrong with her body: it was not as lovely as her face; it was ‘not formed to excite passion’; it checked passion completely. Effie’s body disgusted him.4

  No one who has thought about this surprising turn of events has seriously entertained the possibility that Effie’s body was deformed or blemished in any way. Neither the doctors who examined her in her divorce suit nor her second husband seems to have found anything unusual about her body; she would become the mother of eight children. According to Mary Lutyens, who has spent years studying the Ruskins’ marriage, what disgusted John about Effie’s body was probably her pubic hair. She reasons that John had never seen a naked woman in his life and that even the representations of the female nude he had seen in art were either censored or highly idealised, like classical statues. He expected therefore a smooth, hairless, small-breasted body, essentially a pre-adolescent body and the signs of sexual maturity on Effie’s body (it may have been no more than her breasts – the gown may never have slipped much below her shoulders) disconcerted and dismayed him. The fact that Ruskin in later life was attracted to very young girls, falling in love at the age of forty with a ten-year-old, supports the conjecture that his image of the ideal female body was immature.5

  This explanation of what happened on Ruskin’s wedding night is almost too good to be true. It offers proof of the radical innocence of the Victorians, a state of mind so unfamiliar as to be positively quaint, a state of culture more exotic than the promiscuity of Margaret Mead’s Samoans. It offers what to my mind is an even more seductive proof, that art has a more powerful hold on the imagination than experience, that we realise only what we are prepared to know. The story is so good that one resists accepting it, and Mary Lutyens herself has come to distrust it, having discovered evidence that Ruskin was not so innocent about mature female nudity as she had previously believed. In a taunting letter to his parents, he mentions having seen drawings of ‘naked bawds’, presumably pornographic drawings, in the possession of his rakish friends Lords March and Ware when he was at Oxford. But Ruskin’s purpose in flinging the ‘naked bawds’ in his parents’ faces was to rebuke them for their snobbish encouragement of his friendship with the great and titled, to suggest that aristocrats could be a corrupting influence. The drawings Lords March and Ware showed him may have been pornographic in intent without being explicit about female anatomy; the women depicted might have been shielding themselves in tantalising ways; even Playboy centrefolds don’t reveal everything (or didn’t until recently).

  In any case, the theory of body hair trauma, while probably valid to some extent, is insufficient to explain what happened on the Ruskins’ wedding night. The ignorance in the case was not so clear and simple. It was ignorance mixed with self-deception, an unfamiliarity with women combined with a vivid and yet wholly unrealistic imaginative vision of what they should be – both physically and morally – added to motives and aversions so deeply buried in the subconscious that I hardly dare speculate upon them, except to say that a man who has been brought up virtually alone, who was rarely allowed playmates, whose mother followed him to Oxford, taking lodgings there for the term and saw him every evening after dinner as well as for prayers on Sundays, a man who has had the greatest experiences of his life in the company of his parents and still lives in their house at an age close to thirty will not have an easy time in following the Biblical injunction to leave his father and mother and cleave unto his wife, an injunction no one would have bothered to write down had it been an easy thing to do in the best of circumstances.6 Rarely has unconscious motivation beckoned so invitingly as in the case of Ruskin, who cared more about stones than people, who preferred little girls to grown women, who instructed a nation in taste and morality, who went mad and saw snakes. Ruskin’s sexuality is a rich field for psychoanalytic speculation, but I for one would not venture to guess why one child, kept under close guard by overprotective and earnest parents, should grow up sexually disturbed, perhaps impotent and another, raised similarly, should develop into healthy sexual maturity. Moreover, I am concerned more generally with Victorian sexuality and with the light poor Ruskin’s fiasco sheds on it. So instead of seeking the peculiarly Ruskinian in Ruskin’s wedding night, I would like to look for the typical.

  With pre-marital chastity demanded absolutely of middle-class women (suggested but not required for men), the Victorian wedding night, a supercharged transition from innocence to experience, could hardly have been easy, may well have been a barbaric trial for at least one, and sometimes for both, of the newly married pair. Ignorance about sex, too often made the guarantee of innocence, increased a woman’s terror; all her training in purity was suddenly countered by a demand for the performance of dark deeds about which she had no specific knowledge. Edith Jones, for one, on the verge of becoming Edith Wharton, confronted her mother and begged to be told ‘what marriage was really like’. ‘I’m afraid, Mamma – I want to know what will happen to me.’ Mrs Jones said that surely Edith had seen pictures and statues. Hadn’t she noticed that men were different from women? According to her biographer, Edith still understood nothing, but her mother had gone the limit. ‘Then for heaven’s sake,’ she said, ‘don’t ask me any more silly questions. You can’t be as stupid as you pretend.’7 Marie Stopes, the great propagandist for sex education, wrote her best-selling Married Love in the belief that ignorance about sex, which she perceived to be widespread (this is after World War I), was an obstacle to marital happiness. Her passion on this subject stemmed from her own early experiences. This highly educated Englishwoman, with an advanced degree from a German university, was married in 1911 to a botanist. It took six months before she realised that something was lacking in her marriage and more time and research in the British Museum before she realised what it was. Like Effie Ruskin over fifty years before her, she was found to be a virgin and granted an annulment of her marriage.

  One Victorian couple confronted the problem of wedding-night trauma with amazing candour. Charles Kingsley, the clergyman novelist, wrote t
o his fiancée, Frances Grenfell: ‘I have been thinking over your terror at seeing me undressed and I feel that I should have the same feeling in a minor degree to you, till I had learnt to bear the blaze of your naked beauty. You do not know how often a man is struck powerless in body and mind on his wedding night.’8 The Kingsleys were perhaps unusual in their reverence for marital sex: both of them had flirted with Puseyism and been drawn to celibacy, so that the sexual side of marriage represented for both an important religious commitment.9 Partly as religious self-mortification, partly in response to his fear that too sudden intimacy would lead to impotence, they decided to defer the consummation of their marriage. A few weeks before their wedding in 1844, the future Mrs Kingsley sent her fiancé a scenario for their wedding night:

  After dinner I shall perhaps feel worn out so I shall just lie on your bosom and say nothing but feel a great deal, and you will be very loving and call me your poor child. And then you will perhaps show me your Life of St Elizabeth, your wedding gift. And then after tea we will go up to rest! We will undress and bathe and then you will come to my room, and we will kiss and love very much and read psalms aloud together and then we will kneel down and pray in our night dresses. Oh! What solemn bliss! How hallowing! And then you will take me up in your arms, will you not? And lay me down in bed. And then you will extinguish our light and come to me! How I will open my arms to you and then sink into yours! And you will kiss me and clasp me and we will praise God alone in the dark night with His eye shining down upon us and His love enclosing us. After a time we shall sleep!

  And yet I fear you will yearn so for fuller communion that you will not be so happy as me. And I too perhaps shall yearn, frightened as I am! But every yearning will remind me of our selfdenial, your sorrow for sin, your strength of repentance. And I shall glory in my yearning, please God!10

  The Kingsleys devoted the first four weeks of their honeymoon to becoming comfortable with each other. They studied German, they prayed, they indulged in little acts of tenderness. In the fifth week, their marriage was consummated and a child almost immediately conceived. Lady Susan Chitty, Kingsley’s biographer, believes that a stranger wedding night than his was never passed, but I am struck by the good sense with which the Kingsleys orchestrated their intimacy, modifying a harsh custom with intelligence and flexibility. For the custom of isolating for an extended period of time a newly married couple and asking them to concentrate on what they had been brought up to ignore was a harsh one, and its harshness may explain why Queen Victoria, who had a way of invoking the good of the country to avoid what she didn’t want to do, refused to spend more than three days on honeymoon. The country, she said, could not spare her any longer.

  I began by describing a revolution that did not take place and will now suggest that the sexual failure of the Ruskins’ marriage can be seen as another case of revolution manqué, in that the young Ruskins were, like every newly wed Victorian couple, in the position of having to rebel against all their previous training. Suddenly sex, after years of being proscribed, was approved, encouraged, indeed required. What resulted was sometimes impotence and frigidity, with their attendant train of misunderstandings and hurt feelings, or, less drastically, sex that was not very pleasurable. The Ruskins’ plight was probably less extraordinary and eccentric than one might think at first.11

  The writers whose domestic lives I have chosen to present are by no means a statistically meaningful sample, and I make no claims for their being representative, but it must be mentioned at this point that Thomas Carlyle, too, was probably impotent and his marriage, like Ruskin’s, unconsummated. When Geraldine Jewsbury, the novelist and Jane’s close friend, heard that Froude had been asked to write a biography of Carlyle, she went to him and confided that Carlyle had been ‘one of those persons who ought never to have married’, which she intended and Froude understood to mean that Carlyle was impotent. Froude was not surprised. There had been rumours in the circle of people focussed upon the Carlyles’ house in Chelsea that the marriage was not a real marriage, that it was a marriage for companionship only. Froude had even heard that Jane had thought of leaving Carlyle ‘and as if she had a right to leave him if she pleased’. Once, Carlyle had told Froude that he had a secret which no one would ever know, and that without a knowledge of it, no true biography of him was possible. So Geraldine’s revelations were not unexpected. Froude had thought that perhaps the Carlyles had agreed to do without sex, not wanting children, being so poor, but Geraldine said no. Jane had longed for children, and children were denied her. She never forgave Carlyle the injury which she believed herself to have received.12

  You could call it a solution to the difficulties of sexual adjustment early in marriage that the Ruskins decided to have no sex at all. But ‘solving’ in this unusual way the ‘problem’ of sex threw all the more weight upon the other classic area of conflict between newly married people, their relations with their parents. Modern family therapy talks about a newly wed couple’s need to establish clear boundaries around itself and to assert its new social identity.13 Not surprisingly, Ruskin had as much trouble leaving his father and mother and cleaving to his wife in the social sense as he did in the sexual, and Effie, loyal daughter in a large and loving family, had ties of her own she was loath to undo. When, in 1854, John explained to his lawyer why his wife grew to dislike him with an intensity that amounted to hatred, he said the aversion had nothing to do with their ‘mode of living together’, by which he meant the absence of sex.

  It arose from the steady endeavours of my wife to withdraw me from the influence of my parents, and to get me into close alliance with her own family. She tried to get me to persuade my father to put her brother into his counting house; and was much offended at my refusal to do so; she then lost no opportunity of speaking against both my parents, and, every day, was more bitterly mortified at her failure in influencing me. On one occasion, she having been rude to my mother, I rebuked her firmly; and she never forgave either my mother or me.

  I married her thinking her so young and affectionate that I might influence her as I chose, and make of her just such a wife as I wanted. It appeared that she married me thinking she could make of me just the husband she wanted. I was grieved and disappointed at finding I could not change her, and she was humiliated and irritated at finding she could not change me.14

  Over what pitiful pieces of ground these unheroic matrimonial battles were fought! One might be embarrassed to write of such trivialities were it not for the example and encouragement of George Eliot, who believed it was precisely ‘in these acts called trivialities that the seeds of joy are forever wasted, until men and women look round with haggard faces at the devastation their own waste had made, and say, the earth bears no harvest of sweetness’.15 For example, one of the Ruskins’ most violent early disagreements, the first round in Effie’s protracted battle with her mother-in-law, concerned the care and treatment of a common cold.

  In July of 1848, when the newlyweds were staying with his parents, John developed a cold, and Effie wrote about it to her mother.

  John’s cold is not away yet but it is not so bad as he had with us and I think it would go away with care if Mr and Mrs Ruskin would only let him alone. They are telling him twenty times a day that it is very slight and only nervous, which I think it is. At the same time they talk constantly to him about what he ought to do, and in the morning Mrs Ruskin begins with ‘don’t sit near these towels John they’re damp’ and in the forenoon ‘John you must not read these papers till they are dried.’16

  Effie observed that when John was with her and she refrained from enquiring about it, his health was fine, but that when his parents asked how he was, he would start to cough, giving his father the chance to say, ‘that cough is not going away – I wish you would take care’. Effie was convinced that all the old folks’ fussing about John did more harm than good and that some of their remedies were positively dangerous.

  There was a certain blue pill from which Mrs
Ruskin expected great things. She told John to take one before going to bed. Effie distrusted medicines, preferring not to use them herself, and she stood up with particular vigour against the little blue pill. She said no. Mrs Ruskin said yes. With choice so clearly before him, John, obeying his mother, took the medicine. A year later, trying to explain to his father-in-law the disintegration of his affection for his wife, he would assert that the matter of the little blue pill had been one ‘of very grave importance’.17 It was, he said, the first time since his marriage that his mother had tried to influence him, and Effie had reacted with ‘causeless petulance’. He had rebuked her for it, and Effie had conceived from that moment an implacable resentment of her mother-in-law.

  It was Effie’s turn to be sick at Christmas of 1848, while they were staying at the elder Ruskins’ house at Denmark Hill. She passed a bad two days with cough, cold and a fever at night that left her alternately burning hot and shivering under her blankets. Again Mrs Ruskin was challenged to exercise her medical skill, but this time her prescription was ‘no coddling’. On January 1 the Ruskins had an important dinner party at which J. M. W. Turner was one of the guests. They particularly wanted Effie to come down to dinner. Still feeling ill, but slightly less feverish, Effie managed, when evening came, to go downstairs. But whatever effort she made to leave her room at all was not appreciated by Mr Ruskin, who noted in his diary, ‘Effie not down till Evening.’18 Three days later, another party, and Effie, just as sick, wished to remain in her room. Mrs Ruskin found her in tears when she ought to have been dressing for dinner and scolded her for it. Effie dressed and descended but looked so miserable that one of the guests, a doctor, thinking she was on the verge of fainting, sent her back to bed and prescribed loathsome medicines which she was too weak to refuse. Effie felt all the resentment of those who are not allowed to be miserable in peace. She felt pressured to be cheerful and to fulfil unimportant social obligations when doing so cost her great pain. She thought the Ruskins’ social habits – guests for dinner every night at six and bedtime at one – not conducive to health and believed that in her own home, managing things for herself, she would get well much sooner.