A new idea of women as pure and sexless began to be fostered. Very broadly speaking, the Victorians wanted to differentiate themselves from morally laxer days and to equate sexual abstinence or control with moral and religious purity – to assure the ascendancy, that is, of restrained ‘female’ sexuality over dissolute ‘male’ ways. The Queen herself, in so far as it matters, was by some accounts quite a bawdy soul, as exemplified by her flirtatious relationship with her servant John Brown.
One sexual legend about her is that she failed to give the Royal assent to an Act of Parliament outlawing lesbianism because she refused to believe such acts could occur between women. In fact, the Criminal Law Amendment Act of 1885 as it was sent for Queen Victoria’s assent did not specify lesbian practices; whether this was because the government withheld mention of such things because it might offend the Queen is not known.
Nevertheless, history being the inexact study it is, the very idea of the sexually pure Victorian woman and her lascivious, cynical, whoring male counterpart is subject to frequent revisionism. No one scholar can alight on a single eternal truth; the best we can do in assessing the status of the orgasm throughout this period is to rely on informed generalisation and anecdotal detail – and to be suspicious of every new theory in case it is the scholarly equivalent of masturbation, the spinning of a new idea for the sheer pleasure of it.
As for the kind of material that could be regarded as evidence, some of the best-known is obscure in origin, while the clearest seems plain enough but needs to be understood in the context of a time when hypocrisy was as much in the ascendant as iron smelting. Take, for instance, the most totemic of supposedly Victorian beliefs about sex, the idea that for women it was a matter of ‘lying back and thinking of England’. It is unclear if anyone ever said this, let alone believed it. Some sources suggest it was ‘a Victorian mother’ instructing her daughter on her wedding night about the birds and the bees. Others say the phrase was coined by Queen Victoria on being asked how best to endure the pain of childbirth.
There is an abundance of source evidence for Victorian women being encouraged to adopt what has been called ‘the clinging-vine personality’ – the art of appearing weak, anxious to lean on strong men and be dominated by them – to be very different, in fact, from Jane Austen’s feisty women. The Encyclopaedia Britannica of 1842 stated how a woman being courted should develop a sweet, modest exterior; she ought to convey her feelings only by a ‘timid blush’ or the ‘faintest of smiles’.
Mrs Sarah Ellis, who wrote a guidebook in the same year called The Women of England, Their Social Duties and Domestic Habits, emphasised the importance for women of recognising ‘the superiority of your husband simply as a man’. Clergymen, teachers and journalists supported this consensus view.
Among the upper and middle classes, sexual desire was swept under the hearthrug (although not necessarily out of existence) by such a movement. By the mid-nineteenth century, the passionate, orgasmic Nature of women, which had been a given – regarded, indeed, as a threat – for thousands of years was missing, presumed dead. Not even marriage was permitted to liberate female desire; decent wives were expected to be willing but passionless sexual partners; ladies did not move during sex, and only consented to it at all to please their husbands and have children. It was not that women were passionless, but that their passion manifested itself in the superior maternal instinct rather than their sex drive. A French author, Auguste Debay, did suggest nonetheless that women should fake orgasms since ‘man likes to have his happiness shared’.
There were other cultural influences, too, dictating that women’s desire for orgasmic pleasure was muted. Staying indoors, out of the sun, and preferably reclining, as was the custom, certainly depleted well-to-do Victorian women’s health and can only have nullified any sex drive that survived the propaganda onslaught against such unrefined thoughts. Some young women drank vinegar or forced themselves to stay up all night in the belief that one or the other would make them appear pale and interesting. The ‘ladylike’ approach to pregnancy, which viewed it as a form of disability requiring ‘confinement’, must also have played havoc with any desire by a woman to express herself as a sensual being.
The fashions of the time, too, seem designed to deplete female libido, even while increasing male desire. Corsets laced tightly to emphasise the (highly sexual) egg-timer figure frequently caused internal injury, lowering still further any chance of a woman consciously wanting sex. Women, according to some accounts, were also expected to wear bathing suits in the bath and remain mostly clothed during sex, which extinguished any last chance of their becoming aroused.
Ignorance of the female form on the part of men was endemic. The art critic John Ruskin, despite having seen the classical statuary of Paris and Venice, was allegedly so shocked when he saw his young wife Effie’s pubic hair for the first time that he went into apoplectic spasms and later confided in the Queen herself that there was something wrong with his wife. It is hard to imagine Effie Ruskin’s self-esteem, as we would term it now, let alone sexual desire, surviving her husband’s horrified reaction to her body; he never consummated the marriage. Robert and Elizabeth Barrett-Browning short-circuited any such marital awkwardness by never seeing one another naked – a very common occurrence in nineteenth-century marriages. Theodore Watts Dunton, Algernon Charles Swinburne’s literary agent, was treated to his first glimpse of female breasts on his deathbed. Watts Dunton was married, but had never seen a woman naked; his nurse bared all at a kindly friend’s request. (It is interesting, considering how visual men’s orgasmic experience is, to speculate on how very frustrated Victorian men must have been when sex was entirely about fumbling in the dark.)
The Victorian anti-sex fashion reached ludicrous excesses. With female legs never seen in public and rarely in private, it became a mark of indelicacy to offer a lady a leg of chicken (‘dark meat’). She would automatically be given breast, or rather ‘white meat’. ‘Victorian’ Americans took this level of refinement further still; just as they later invented ‘English muffins’ that are unknown in England, they reportedly took the English habit of modesty regarding legs a stage further by fitting the piano legs in some homes with elaborate crinolines. Perhaps they were being ironic, or it was simply an amusing fashion statement. Perhaps not.
There was one important group of women, however, in Victorian cities who were considered by the intelligentsia to possess boundless sexual desire. This was the poor who despite bad food and living conditions and consequent ruinous health were regarded as being an indefatigable repository of sexuality, forever producing illegitimate children by their ceaseless demand for sex.
Here, we cut into the still darker meat of Victorian sexuality. For the middle-class male mind, sexually starved as a result of its own imposition of sexlessness on ‘respectable’ women, could not stop dreaming of the terrifying but tempting forbidden treat that prostitution might provide. Poor urban women, rosy-cheeked country girls and cheap, plentiful female servants all appeared to the Victorian man as potential prostitutes.
They were the nineteenth-century equivalent of the witches that frightened and fascinated the Medieval mind. Using prostitutes, fantasising about them, or simply harrumphing about their supposed ubiquity were all ways in which Victorian men seemed to get in touch with their libidinous self. Street girls had been plentiful enough a hundred years earlier, but now pretty much any attractive single woman was regarded as a prostitute. Respectable working- or clerical-class courting couples in places like Clapham Common in London would be mistaken by outraged middle-class residents for prostitutes with their clients and reported to the police.
This moral panic, a rank mixture of obsession and repulsion, led to hugely exaggerated figures for the real numbers of prostitutes operating in cities (50,000 according to one contemporary estimate in London in 1850) as well as a disastrously confused notion of what genuine street women’s motivation was. Whereas today prostitutes and other ‘sex workers�
�� happily – proudly, often – acknowledge that they are motivated primarily by economics and are no more or less likely than the average woman to enjoy sex, in the Victorian world view, if a woman enjoyed sex, it was a sure sign that she was a ‘prostitute’.
Any amount of speculation can be entered into as to the below-the-line machinations in the male mind that led to this bizarre conclusion. It would not be far off the mark to suggest that men found themselves caught between the expectation that they should be strong, dominant and initiate sexual activity, and the often embarrassing reality that they were rather incompetent at it. In such a bind, it would be all too easy, rather than try to satisfy a critical wife, to buy sex from a seller who was not bothered how competent the purchaser was, so long as he paid up. It is tempting, but untrue nonetheless, to assert that all middle-class Victorian men used prostitutes. Equally, to argue that many women colluded in their respectable husbands’ obsession with prostitution is bound to be a distortion of reality; yet we have Sarah Ellis arguing in her book that a woman should consider herself lucky if her husband saw prostitutes, because it meant she herself would not have to endure endless pregnancies.
The really damning charge that can be levelled against the Victorian man is that of prurience rather than the use of prostitutes. The prohibitions and restrictions of the age fostered a spirit of unhealthy, even grotesque, obsession over precisely what was going on under ladies’ (or, in America, even pianos’) crinolines. For instance, a single mother hoping to leave her baby at London’s Foundling Hospital had to give the male admissions panel a detailed record of her sexual relationship with the child’s father. The panel would want to know every detail – where the trysts had taken place, the Nature and intensity of her feelings and desire. She would also have to give names and details of those who could corroborate her story such as doctors, relatives, employers, and even provide ‘proof such as love letters. The pious hope was that the woman would be able to show her good faith had been betrayed, that she had succumbed to sexual passion only after a promise of marriage had been made, or else been taken advantage of totally against her will. Her conduct since falling pregnant had to be unimpeachable, her means non-existent, and the child under the age of one.
An ‘official’ myth of generalised male degeneracy accompanied the porcelain-skinned, sexless archetype of the middle-class Victorian lady. The idea, at least, of the fornicating Victorian bogeyman is supported by popular literature of the time, particularly that of Dickens, and by British legislation. The 1857 Divorce Act, according to Joan Smith, provided that a man could divorce his wife on the grounds of her adultery. A husband, however, who was ‘a little profligate’, in the words of one of the act’s sponsors, could not be penalised by divorce.
There is certainly evidence that out of Victorian repression arose a great hunger for fantasy sex besides real prostitution. Sales of pornography boomed, albeit smut of a pitiful standard compared to John Cleland’s. Victorian pornography, with one possible exception as we shall see later, was largely joyless and suffused with violent sadomasochism. None of it suggests that its buyers were sexually sophisticated or sensual by today’s frames of reference.
Yet familiar as the archetype is of the hypocritical, waxed-moustached, middle-class Victorian seducer, it is far easier to pinpoint evidentially the anguished Ruskin type, suffering from the male version of the vapours because of his own sex’s dissolute excesses. Thus we find John Addington Symonds, the gay (but vehemently anti-gay in public) poet, critic and historian, writing of his time at Harrow School: ‘Talk in the dormitories and the studies was incredibly obscene. Here and there one could not avoid seeing acts of onanism, mutual masturbation, the sports of naked boys in bed together. There was no refinement, no sentiment, no passion; nothing but animal lust in these occurrences. They filled me with disgust and loathing.’
Or there is Gerard Manley Hopkins, so obsessed with sex as sinful that he recorded every instance of his own masturbation in his journal under the code ‘O.H.’ (Old Habits). He used the same abbreviation for nocturnal emissions, which he seemed to regard as even more heinous. Then we have Gladstone, famed for his missions to rescue prostitutes; although there is no account of his ever having sex with them, he acknowledged feeling inappropriate temptation. His diaries duly record his practice of self-flagellation. The shamelessly carnal poet Swinburne was another notorious flagellant but, as a bohemian, had no qualms about getting others to do his flagellation for him. He was, accordingly, a customer of a North London brothel renowned for its birching facilities.
Other progressive Victorian era literary characters were less apologetic about their sexuality. This is Walt Whitman, radical American journalist, formerly an innovative teacher who permitted his students to call him by his first name and devised learning games for them in arithmetic and spelling, writing in 1860 in his poem ‘Children of Adam’:
It is I, you women, I make my way, I am stern, acrid, large, undissuadable, but I love you,
I do not hurt you any more than is necessary for you,
I pour the stuff to start sons and daughters fit for these States,
I press with slow rude muscle,
I brace myself effectually, I listen to no entreaties,
I dare not withdraw till I deposit what has so long accumulated within me.
Another Victorian male who bravely admitted his erotic interest and, by the by, changed the face of sexuality in the Western world was the retired British Army officer Richard Burton who, along with his fellow members of the Karma Shastra Society, such as Algernon Charles Swinburne, translated and published the Kamasutra in 1883.
Burton, a Devon-born Arabist, had been by turns an explorer, linguist, ethnologist, professional treasure hunter and Crimean War spy. While in India, he undertook with Forster Fitzgerald Arbuthnot, a colonial civil servant whom he had befriended, a study of brothels staffed by boys and eunuchs. Burton converted to Islam and underwent adult circumcision. Back in England he enjoyed, by all accounts, a free-ranging and very modern sexual relationship with his wife Isabel, and with other women and other men, including possibly the now-retired Arbuthnot whom he always referred to as ‘Bunny’. Isabel was reportedly the envy of all who heard the rumours because Burton was reputed to excel in the art of cunnilingus. When he died, however, Isabel burned all his unpublished work and gave free rein to a prudish streak that must have been present all the time.
It was doctors and lawyers, practically all male, who formed the vanguard of Victorian sexual repression. Literary Victorians, and prolific ‘ordinary’ diary and letter writers, provide the surviving evidence that these pompous professionals’ outpourings on sex were not necessarily taken very seriously.
Most Victorian doctors considered sexual desire in women to be pathological and warned that female sexual excitement and indulgence could damage their reproductive organs and urinary system. Even enlightened doctors who knew the ‘secrets’ of women’s desire considered it inappropriate to let them speak about it themselves. They conducted research and diagnoses by asking husbands instead. Freud’s breakthrough in the next century was primarily in letting women speak for themselves about their sex life, even if he did then re-cast much of their testimony in the likeness of his own Victorian prejudices.
Victorian physicians were generally quite clued up on anatomical fact. An 1836 gynaecological textbook reports that ‘the lower part of the vagina and the clitoris are possessed of a high degree of sensibility’. It explains that while in some women these erogenous areas are ‘the seat of venereal feelings from excitement, in others, such feelings are altogether absent’. Other medical authorities confirmed that the clitoris underwent erection, and even acknowledged female ejaculation. The way the socio-political prejudices of the age reasserted themselves, however, was in the near total consensus that women were quite capable of playing host to all this physiological turmoil without being disturbed by any feelings unbecoming to their sex. A Parisian doctor, Adam Raciborski, argued in
1844 that 75 per cent of women only ‘endure’ sex with their husbands.
In England Dr William Acton, FRCS, a prominent venereologist, set out in 1857 the most direct manifesto yet for the idealised sexlessness of the modern woman: ‘Many of the best mothers, wives and managers of households, know little of or are careless about sexual indulgences. Love of home, children, and of domestic duties are the only passions they feel … A modest woman seldom desires any sexual gratification for herself. She submits to her husband’s embraces, but principally to gratify him and, but for the desire of maternity, would far rather be relieved from his attentions … The married woman has no desire to be placed on the footing of a mistress.’
Curiously, it is Dr Acton who debunks the contemporary idea that prostitutes became so as a result of their excessive sensuality; that was too ridiculous even for him.
The United States Surgeon General, an ex-Army man called William Hammond, was in accord with Acton’s principal statements, averring himself of the belief that decent women felt not the slightest pleasure during intercourse. And Isaac Ray, an American gynaecologist, opined in 1866: ‘In the sexual evolution, strange thoughts, extraordinary feelings, unseasonable appetites, criminal impulses, may haunt a mind at other times unviolent and pure.’
Roy Porter’s Medical History of Humanity identifies a more ominous stage yet in the growth of prudery: the point when theory turned to practice and surgical ‘cures’ for women’s sexuality ‘grew widespread’. Surgery, specifically unnecessary hysterectomies, clitoridectomy and cauterisation of the clitoris, began to be sought by husbands concerned about their wives’ sexual feelings. ‘Abuse of gynaecological surgery to control women culminated in the work of Isaac Baker Brown (1812-73), a London surgeon who specialised in clitoridectomies on women whom he or their husbands judged oversexed, as evinced by masturbation or “nymphomania”,’ Porter recounts.
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