All About Love: Anatomy of an Unruly Emotion

by Lisa Appignanesi

  Should Mr Right or Miss Right be found, the Victoria and Albert romance had to be lived out according to the edicts of a growing number of marriage handbooks, each of them enjoining the wife to better home management and greater dutifulness to a husband who was permitted a morally and scientifically sanctioned tyranny for the price of ‘protecting’ wife and family. The conjugal balance had moved away from the previous century’s ideal of pleasure for each within a friendly union. ‘A true wife,’ John Ruskin stated, bringing together the disparate tugs of love and power, ‘in her husband’s house, is his servant; it is in his heart that she is Queen.’

  Sexuality, as recent historians have argued, was not in fact so much repressed by the Victorian middle class as kept away from any sphere of display or everyday discussion. For the young, public and parental silence induced ignorance and acted as a form of coercion: it helped, particularly for women, to keep that chastity in place which would ensure the purity of the eventual family line. Illegitimacy remained a blight for child and mother well into the 1950s, and often beyond. Within the private walls of marriage, sex was sanctified. Here chaste–that is, marital–sex and reproduction were tied into one happy or unhappy bundle. Sex found its way into the public sphere only in discourses of self-control, of vice squads battling against working-class immorality or the sins of prostitution. The public medical discourse functioned within the prevailing moral ethos and strengthened it: it tried to curtail either an unruly instinct, gendered male, which brought both syphilis and venereal disease in its wake, or that sapping of energies purportedly caused by solitary sex. An insistence on women’s sexual innocence meant that doctors rarely disclosed a husband’s syphilis to his wife: women were protected from knowledge, but not from the horrors of the disease itself. Medico-surgical interventions–such as clitorodectomy–also set out to ‘normalize’ women’s desire, when it strayed from its sanctioned legitimately reproductive ends.

  In the United States, where social and geographical mobility as well as the diversity of immigrants and races were far greater than in England, public morality was both less stringent and more emphatically linked to self-control–the mark of the middle class. The young were permitted far more freedom: Henry James’s American girls in his transatlantic novels always fall foul of European conventions, though his American matrons are far more burdened by propriety than their European counterparts. Public education in co-ed elementary schools spread during the 1830s and 1840s; by 1890 twice as many girls as boys graduated from high school, while college education was available to those who could afford it. As ever, women’s education had an impact on birth-rates. American family size fell as the century grew older, particularly in urban centres, though not amongst new immigrants, or in the South or West. Interestingly, literature about contraception proliferated in a variety of marriage guides and circulars, as well as in newspaper ads. Public lectures on contraception were frequent, detailing the use of withdrawal methods, condoms and pessaries. The 1875 Comstock Act, which prevented such information circulating through the post, was a response to fears about a declining birth-rate as much as a moral crusade. But informal networks of female friends kept contraceptive knowledge in circulation. As in Britain, the exchange of information about contraception gradually helped to create a climate where sex and reproduction were uncoupled, and sex, for women as well, became a site of pleasure for its own sake, one not specifically linked to marital duty.

  Queen Victoria, mother of nine herself, it is clear from her letters, had a rather unVictorian notion of the link between happiness in marriage and woman’s burden of reproduction. Writing to her seventeen-year-old and recently married eldest daughter on 14 April 1858, she expresses a wish that she should enjoy her recent marriage for a while before embarking on pregnancy. ‘All who love you hope you will be spared this trial for a year yet… If I had had a year of happy enjoyment with dear Papa to myself how happy I would have been!’ Again on 21 April, she writes: ‘What made me so miserable was–to have the two first years of my married life utterly spoilt by this occupation! I could enjoy nothing–not travel about or go about with dear Papa…’

  Victoria’s more general views on love and marriage were equally unVictorian. In 1858, she notes: ‘I think people really marry far too much; it is such a lottery after all, and for a poor woman a very doubtful happiness.’ The theme is reiterated on 16 May 1860, the year before Albert’s death: ‘All marriage is such a lottery–the happiness is always an exchange–though it may be a very happy one–still the poor woman is bodily and morally the husband’s slave. That always sticks in my throat. When I think of a merry, happy, and free young girl–and look at the ailing aching state a young wife is generally doomed to–which you can’t deny is the penalty of marriage.’

  The ills and discontents of the bedchamber–whether occasioned by the trials of frequent pregnancy, ignorance or the moral double standard–would eventually find their way into the Freudian consulting room as hysterias, neuroses or phobias, or into the numerous clinics and spas of the period as neurasthenias or attacks of the vapours. In the public sphere, for years to come, sexuality’s presence remained generally a negative one: linked to prohibition or illness, in total contrast to our own prevailing norms, where pleasure and desire are celebrated–so much so that they arguably produce their own discontents.

  As the century moved on, love within the idealized Victorian marriage came under increasing strain. The proliferation of marriage guidebooks instilling the division of sexual labour, with the male as lord and protector and ‘the poor woman… bodily and morally the husband’s slave,’ itself suggests that imposing the conjugal ideal was proving difficult. Perhaps this was the case even for the Queen herself, who, after the death of Albert, rumour would have it, engaged in an affair, certainly a close relationship, with John Brown. Victoria, however, was hardly a champion of the rights of her female subjects. Having read a report of an 1870 suffrage meeting, she flew into a rage:

  The Queen is most anxious to enlist everyone who can speak or write to join in checking this mad, wicked folly of ‘Woman’s Rights’, with all its attendant horrors, on which her poor feeble sex is bent, forgetting every sense of womanly feeling and propriety. Lady —— ought to get a GOOD WHIPPING. It is a subject which makes the Queen so furious that she cannot contain herself. God created men and women different–then let them remain each in their own position… Woman would become the most hateful, heartless, and disgusting of human beings were she allowed to unsex herself; and where would be the protection which man was intended to give the weaker sex?

  Yet agitation by and on behalf of women went on, and led to marked shifts within Victoria’s reign: women, it seemed, and in the first instance, wives, needed protection from men, as much as their protection. If they were to be more than property, they needed to be able to control their own. The 1870 Married Women’s Property Act, which allowed wives control of their personal property and income, marked the first substantive legal change in women’s status. Much of the credit for the Act belongs to John Stuart Mill, elected to Parliament five years earlier, and his wife Harriet Taylor Mill, his long-time interlocutor and, as some have claimed, his occasional co-author, most notably in The Subjection of Women. The passage of the Act was seen by conservatives as a step towards the Americanization of English institutions: various American states had recently passed such measures. By separating man and wife into separate legal entities, the Act seemed to some to be a licence to equality and, hence, immorality. As the conservative MP Harry Raikes heatedly argued, the Act undermined the entire institution of respectable marriage: in a marital quarrel, any wife would be free to say, ‘I have my own property, and if you don’t like me, I can go and live with somebody who does.’

  Despite resistance by both sexes and after much lobbying, the Act was extended in 1882 to give women full separate legal identities: the right to enter into contracts and dispose of property by sale, gift or will. For a woman subject to violence from her hu
sband, the Act allowed for applications to be made for an order to protect her earnings and property and not to be visited by her abusive husband without consent. A mother’s legal custody of her children up to the age of ten, and maintenance, were further provisions.

  Such legal changes were crucial steps in the slow and always uneven road towards altering the everyday inequalities at least of middle-class Victorian marriage and the morality that underpinned it. Alongside these came a host of other forces for change. One was the growth in democracy itself.

  Republican Marriage

  The progressive policy-makers of the Third Republic in France provide a clear, modern indication of the way the institution of marriage is conceived by the state as a form both of regulation and of control of a wayward populace. Our contemporary debates about gay marriage or about marriage-inducing taxation can be read as recent equivalents of a parallel problematic.

  Guided by a reformist agenda, the Third Republic introduced a new Constitution in 1875. This established universal male suffrage. All men were now autonomous citizens with political rights. But how to make men into responsible voting citizens? After what for the French was the traumatic defeat by Germany in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870, followed immediately by the violent upheavals of the Commune, masculinity itself seemed unstable. A national loss of confidence ensued, together with a worry about what some considered had been ‘deviant’ male excess. How to temper the male into a citizen?

  Part of the answer, for the political elite, seemed to lie in propagating a particular vision of marriage. A loving and sexualized marriage, they argued, was a character-forming terrain in which the male, ever prone to wildness and crises during adolescence, instability and potentially irresponsible sexuality, could be contained and turned towards sociable ends. Through loving marriage, he would both learn responsibility and find satisfaction with an equal who was also other. Thus conjugal love, that union of body, mind and soul between two different yet complementary people who would engender more, emerged as a route to citizenship. A selfless, altruistic union which was also pleasurable would provide an important foundation for the shaping of responsible male citizens and sociability itself, the very glue of society. Marriage, for the Third Republic’s reformers, thus became both model and modelling ground for a good life.

  Within this marital settlement the political class conceived of woman as ‘other’, in both her vulnerability and her sensitivity. Not constituted for citizenly independence (and not granted suffrage in France until 1944), woman required care. Conjugal love provided that necessary protection and in turn allowed women to protect those other vulnerable entities, children. Odd as it may now seem, this was imagined as a progressive and anti-patriarchal union. Thinkers such as Henri Marion considered women ‘morally’ equal. Their ‘vital solidarity’ in union had to be won. Brutality was seen as odious in marriage, as was paternal repression.

  Loving, sexual marriage thus both shaped citizens and engendered pleasure. It regulated male extremes and provided satisfaction as well as protection for women. So the reformers of the Third Republic promoted the ideal of conjugal love above marriage based on property or patriarchal wish and enshrined it in their new secular education programme, where women teachers with their capacity for affection rather than patriarchal authority also played a substantial part. Ever contested by more conservative patriarchal forces, though, this ideal republican model of the good citizenly and sexual marriage could be neither quickly nor evenly instituted. It became part of the Third Republic’s ongoing cultural conversation and only gradually won ascendance. Progressive as it undoubtedly was in certain respects, it nonetheless left out of its thinking an essential and increasingly noisy force: women’s independence.

  Decline of an Institution

  Ibsen’s A Doll’s House premiered to a scandalized public in Copenhagen in December 1879. The play dramatized what would become known over the final decades of the century as ‘the woman question’–the canker at the core of respectable marriage. Brought up to be her ‘Papa’s doll-child’ only to become her husband Torvald’s ever pleasing ‘doll-wife’, its heroine, Nora, has never become a human being. In the third act of the play, after recognizing the growing estrangement between her husband and herself, she breaks free. To Torvald’s statement that ‘before everything else, you’re a wife and a mother’ Nora replies, ‘I don’t believe that any longer. I believe that before everything else I’m a human being–just as you are… Or at any rate I shall try to become one.’ She needs to leave the doll’s house before she can become an individual, become fully human–a full partner in that ongoing conversation that makes and shapes conjugal life. Her slamming of the door on marriage and children marks the play’s end.

  A Doll’s House didn’t have a British or American production until ten years later, but Nora’s slamming door resonated in pamphlets and on platforms, her cause taken up by liberal males as well as by campaigning women. Interrogated, the sanctified institution of Victorian marriage with its well delineated separate spheres began to crumble under the weight of its own self-sacrifices.

  In 1888, the Scottish feminist novelist and essayist, Mona Caird wrote an article entitled ‘Marriage’ for the Westminster Review. She pronounced the institution a failure because it made the wife a piece of property, wholly subservient to her husband, and initiated a bond in which her virtues and honour, or dishonour, became his. The Daily Telegraph invited readers to respond. Over the next two months twenty-seven thousand replies came in from women as well as men, even a few from the working class, detailing the tragedies and successes of marriage. They included portraits of drunken, abusive husbands, plaints of growing incompatibilities, stories of desertion and pleas for simpler means of separation. They also included portraits of marriages made happy by the patience of wives, the joy in children and grandchildren, and a reiteration of the willing subjection and frailties of woman–backed up by God and science–which necessitated her protection by the paternal male. Today’s blogosphere could not have done better.

  The increasing championing of education and rights for women; the insistence that women were not inferior beings ever best served by pleasing and by obedience to a superior masculine will and intelligence; the agitation of highly placed women in the public sphere, as philanthropists, suffragettes or campaigners for moral and social reform; the growing ranks of both single and married women demanding greater access to the professions and economic independence–all played a crucial part in the slow shift towards a different vision of marriage. So, too, did the very presence of an increasingly vocal and visible working and underclass who presented patterns of love, sex and marriage radically different from the ideal. Women constrained by the need to work and by poverty could hardly, whatever their aspirations, be pleasing reproductive household angels, buoyed by the labour of servants. Nor could the wages allotted to their husbands alone sustain a family.

  Growing agitation by workers and by women fed into the anxiety about degeneration and the decline of the race that plagued the last years of the century. Men, it seemed, were cracking under the burden of duty–to work, to business, to nation, to God–alongside family obligations. Household violence, recourse to drink and illicit sex spread, and not only through the labouring classes. The clenched lips and fists of respectability and empire-building were taking their toll on the male psyche.

  The prolific writer and philosopher Herbert Spencer, who had coined the phrase ‘survival of the fittest’, too often wrongly attributed to Darwin, is a case in point. Spencer, whom George Eliot had once wanted to marry, served as the model for the petty, dictatorial Casaubon in Middlemarch, forever in search of a complete system of knowledge. He was a vocal opponent of John Stuart Mill. In Spencer’s vision, the patriarchal family was the model favoured by nature. Women were designed for domesticity. Their submissiveness, intuition and skills in deception, he wrote, were specialized functions, arming them for the business of rearing healthy offspring. Any deviation from
that course, any move on their part towards education or intellectual aspiration, would inevitably lead to nervous ills and to the decline of the species. But that very ‘nature’ which underpinned the Victorian domestic arrangements Spencer championed didn’t seem to extend to his own. He never married or fathered children. He also suffered from numerous breakdowns, those unspecific neurasthenias so characteristic of the time.

  In the last two decades of the nineteenth century and the first two of the twentieth, birth-rates fell sharply in Western Europe and America. Eros and reproduction were becoming unbound. Ideals of sexual purity for middle-class women played their part in this, shadowed, as they were, by the growth of prostitution. In the US in the 1890s almost half of women with husbands in the professions or in business had two or fewer children. By 1910, almost two-thirds of families had no more than two. In France, the government instituted pro-natalist programmes to reward mothers.