VICTORIAN EROTICA It must seem paradoxical to people unfamiliar with erotic literature that although Queen Victoria's reign in England defined the limits of human prudery-it was a time when even piano legs were covered with ruffles for modesty's sake-Victorian erotica is the most mechanically licentious in the history of erotic writing. In considering this disparity, however, we must not forget that the Dionysian element--forced from its once prominent place in mainstream literature--was now served by commercial, obsessive writers, those we have been calling pornographers for the past hundred years. The collection of Victorian erotica is so vast it might fill an anteroom in Buckingham Palace, but the few books of any real interest would fit on one small shelf. The erotic writing of the time is so uniform in theme and execution that sketches of a half-dozen books will suffice for an assessment of its position in the history of the genre. Steven Marcus, in his brilliant and indispensable study of Victorian erotica, The Other Victorians (1966), rightfully criticizes its obsessive repetitiousness, but then proceeds to make assumptions about erotic writing in general as if the genre began and ended in the Victorian era:
A pornographic work of fiction characteristically develops by unremitting repetition and minute mechanical variation--the words that may describe this process are again, again, again, and more, more, more.
To argue that Victorian erotica is not of value because of its repetitiousness is one thing, but to include all erotic writing in this argument is quite another. Any fool can see that the problem with Victorian erotica--or indeed, modern erotica done by a formula-is its tiresome monotony. But Marcus doesn't limit his criticism to the repetitious plot action of Victorian writing. What he seems to be implying is that every "pornographic work of fiction" is flawed because it must describe the repetitious nature of the sexual act itself. This is like arguing that biography is an inferior literary form because everyone is born, lives a life, and dies. The facts of anyone's life are basically the same to the statistician, but the interpretation of a particular groan makes all the difference in understanding. One of the characteristics of any of our highest moments is that they are repetitious--or we would like them to be. Any satisfying experience calls for repetition--again, again, more, more--even to excess. Nevertheless, although it is necessary to take issue with some of Marcus' generalizations. The Other Victorians remains the only worthwhile study of Victorian erotica. Bearing in mind that the Victorian era was not only prudish but socially enlightened, it is shocking to come upon a literature of sexuality whose most prominent features are flagellation and the molestation of children. Marcus has coined a word, pornotopia--"that vision which regards all of human experience as a series of exclusively sexual events or conveniences"--that provides an excellent starting point for a summary of erotic writing in the nineteenth century. Surely the most famous autobiography of all time, My Secret Life, is pornotopian. In its American edition (1966) My Secret Life runs to several thousand pages, and on each page the autobiographer--who calls himself Walter--describes one or more sexual encounters. After a few hundred pages of this, even the most receptive reader must stop and wonder about Walter's single-mindedness. My Secret Life is the reductio ad absurdum of the pornotopian vision. However, it is an anomaly in the history of erotic literature. It sums up the repetitious obsessiveness of the era, and as far as we know it is fact and not fiction. It is a record rather than a celebration of the erotic impulse, and despite Marcus' observation that Victorian erotic fiction liked to present itself as factual, there is a gulf between Walter's salacious bookkeeping and the sometimes artful fantasizing found in erotica of the period. Before looking at these period pieces of the erotic imagination, however, let us see what happened to the Dionysian influence. Dionysus is an opponent of order and progress, the ideals of the era. He was banished by it, and his literature forbidden--only to turn up for sale in London's Holywell Street, where in 1834 the Society for the Suppression of Vice found fifty-seven shops engaged in the sale of pornography. The public had rejected honest Dionysian writing, but still desired its forbidden books. The Dionysian impulse had turned inward, and erotic writing was left to pomotopians. Typical of what they wrote is The Pearl. It was the underground Journal of sex for Victorian London from July, 1879, to December, 1880, the Screw magazine of the times. Instead of news. The Pearl published novels, short stories, ballads, and poems. One of the novels, Miss Coote's Confession, or the Voluptuous Experiences of an Old Maid, demonstrates the Victorian interest in flagellation:
... my poor bottom is beginning to be finely pickled, and I can feel the blood trickling down my legs inside my drawers.
Another novel published in The Pearl, My Grandmother's Tale, or May's Account of Her Introduction to the Art of Love, shows an interest in young girls:
"You have a dear little cunt, very fat and plump. But I wonder you have much hair on it. How old are you, Nina?" "Just fifteen, sir."
A few lines are sufficient to illustrate the recurring themes of Victorian erotica. There was something dammed up which found expression in novels that ignored the demands of reality, breaking the continuity between real life and its fictional representation. Nowadays it is expected that much of erotic writing will involve the transcription of personal fantasies, a tendency we can trace back to the Victorian period. Naturally writing that finds no acceptable niche within the real world is going to be artificial, narcissistic, and unrealistic, but each age has its own erotic fantasies. In our age they are closer to historical realities than in Victorian England, but even then there was a connection between erotic fantasy and history. England was at the height of her imperialist phase in India and the Mediterranean when two of the most famous novels of the Victorian age were published: A Night in a Moorish Harem and Venus in India. People at home were familiar with stories told them by colonial relatives and friends of a less restricted sexuality to the south and consequently were receptive to erotic fantasies placed in exotic foreign locales. A Night in a Moorish Harem is written with a florid Victorian fluidity that tastes sugary to the modern palate. It concerns a young naval officer named Lord George Herbert--supposedly the handsomest man in England--whose ship is anchored off Morocco. He goes sailing, falls asleep in his small boat, and when he awakens finds that his boat has drifted near a harem of nine women. Their master is away, so our hero undertakes to satisfy their desires all by himself. Of course, his sexual prowess is nothing short of marvelous; it must be, to fulfill the age-old male fantasy of a personal harem. To flesh out the slim premise of the novel, each harem woman tells Lord George of her previous amours. (This device--a woman telling a man of her past sexual experience in order to titillate him--is repeated over and over in erotic literature.) After hearing one such story. Lord George describes his reaction:
My crest went plunging in, tore through the curtain of her virginity and rammed against her pregnant womb. 'Allah! Allah!' she moaned, tossing her arms wildly upward and rolling her eyes toward heaven. Whether her pain or her pleasure was most exquisite I do not know, but my whole being seemed to center in my loins and gush into the beautiful Moor. Then I sank prostrate and exhausted on her bosom with every desire gratified.
It is explained in the text how a virgin may have been pregnant, but nowhere are euphemisms like "crest" for the penis justified. Victorian prudery had a long reach, capable of influencing even the language of its forbidden books. It also indicates that erotic writers weren't entirely out of touch with historical reality. Despite the strong element of fantasy in their books, they managed to reflect some of the social attitudes of their time about sexuality. A Night in a Moorish Harem is sticky with euphemisms. Sexual histories are substituted for characterization, the plot is advanced solely by Lord George's amazing prowess, and romance veils all. Venus in India by Captain Charles Devereaux is even more of a tribute to the conventions of the age. It is predictably repetitious, euphemistically sweetened, and exotic; but it contains maidens whose protests against sex (although they eventually surrender to passion) are as gushily sincere as any in the popular romantic novels of the period. The indefatigable hero of Venus in India is once again a military officer left stranded with some beautiful maidens; he is a Victorian gentleman stationed in India during the war with the Afghans. Captain Devereaux gets involved with a married woman whose husband is off at the front in the first story of the novel; in the second story, it is the teenaged daughters of his commanding officer who drain his manly energy. (The Victorian word for semen was "spend"; Marcus has pointed out the connection between sex and money this word represents, but not its other Victorian meaning of the expenditure of limited energies.) Victorian Erotica continues... |
