By the Victorian age a noticeable shift in sexual relations was getting under way, especially amongst the bourgeoisie. We love to depict the Victorians as prudish moralists who would blanche at the mention of sexual pleasure. Sex in marriage was for procreation not recreation. Husbands were stern and upright bastions of Christian virtue (although making occasional trips to prostitutes to vent their sexual energies). Wives were dutifully focused on cake-baking and child-rearing, and as tightly buttoned up in their attitudes as in their corsets.18
That might be the image, but it is far from the truth. In fact, the diaries and private letters of bourgeois women in the Victorian era reveal that a small but growing number of them were exploring erotic pleasures, especially in the privacy of the marital bedroom. This was the case not only in England but in North America where, as social historians point out, Victorian culture also extended its reach.19 A celebrated example is the New England socialite Mabel Loomis Todd, an accomplished pianist, painter and editor who enjoyed an undoubtedly steamy sex life with her astronomer husband, David Peck Todd. Mabel’s diaries are an unusually open record of what they got up to. An entry for early 1881, when she was twenty-four years old, reads: ‘8:30am. What a lifetime of happiness I have had since about 5 A.M.,’ followed at the end of the day by ‘#16 (o)’, her secret symbols denoting that it was the sixteenth time she’d had sex that year, and that it had been accompanied by an orgasm.20 Their sexual athleticism, which relied on the classic contraception devices of the rhythm method and coitus interruptus, was signalled by euphemistic entries such as ‘Oh! my oriental morning’ or ‘a little Heaven just after dinner’.21 Married life for the Todds was also filled with sensual rituals. ‘Every night,’ Mabel wrote, ‘he undressed me on the bright Turkey rug before the fire, & then wrapped me up to keep me warm while he put hot bricks in the bed.’ In the morning would come ‘the grapes or figs or apples on which he always regaled me before breakfast’.22
Mabel was a thoroughly modern woman who revelled in her sexual freedom. She not only, in her own words, ‘flirted outrageously’ with the young male students at Amherst College, where her husband taught – she also took a lover. For more than a decade she had an affair with a much older married man, Austin Dickinson, brother of the poet Emily Dickinson. Everyone knew about Mabel’s man on the side, including her husband, but in their polite society nobody spoke about it publicly. The semi-clandestine relationship proved a strain on their marriages, but for Mabel it was a price worth paying for both exciting sex and emotional affection. David Todd’s tolerance of the affair may have helped to cover up his own marital infidelities.23 All this more than a century before Ashley Madison.
The increasing desire amongst some middle-class women for sexual equality in the bedroom was part of the broader movement for gender equality in Britain and the United States that helped to create what is known as ‘first-wave feminism’, referring to the struggle for legal rights such as women’s suffrage in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In other words, sexual hedonism became an expression of political empowerment. More and more women, particularly those who were relatively wealthy and educated, were expecting and demanding equal treatment in both private and public life. They were out to overturn the subordination of women that characterised the age of Samuel Pepys, and what happened between the sheets was a vital aspect of this.24 Of course, the sexual liberation of women like Mabel Loomis Todd, or others such as the writer George Eliot (who lived, as Mary Ann Evans, in scandalous unhallowed union with the philosopher G.H. Lewes), didn’t immediately usher in an era of women on top. It was the early beginnings of a long period of social struggle and cultural change, spurred on by factors such as the gradual admission of women to universities, the arrival of the pill in 1960, and the challenge to patriarchy issued by books such as Germaine Greer’s The Female Eunuch in 1970. In a world where domestic violence and rape remain all too common, it is a struggle that still continues.
Mabel’s references to a ‘Turkey rug’ and her ‘oriental morning’ are revealing of another aspect of sexual life amongst the middle and upper classes in the nineteenth century: the craze for ‘the East’. This was far more than the fad for Persian carpets and Japanese lacquer furniture: the Orient also evoked fantasies of erotic sensuality and passionate carpe diem living that were the opposite of sober Victorian Christianity. Such fantasies were encouraged by Richard Burton’s notoriously explicit translation of the Arabian Nights in 1885, and of the fifteenth-century Arabic erotic manual The Perfumed Garden, with its risqué chapters describing sexual positions including ‘frog fashion’, ‘the rainbow arch’ and the intriguing ‘screw of Archimedes’.25 But the attractions of Eastern sensuality were nowhere better expressed than in the remarkable popularity of the Rubáiyát of Omár Khayyám, a long poem by the eccentric English scholar Edward FitzGerald, based on his loose translation of verses by the eleventh-century Persian poet and mathematician Omár Khayyám.
Mabel Loomis Todd displaying her taste for the exotic East, 1896.
The initial publication of the Rubáiyát in 1859 went completely unnoticed: it didn’t sell a single copy in its first two years. But by chance a remaindered copy of FitzGerald’s twenty-page booklet was picked up for a penny by the Celtic scholar Whitley Stokes, who passed it on to Dante Gabriel Rossetti, who subsequently fell in love with it and sang its praises to his Pre-Raphaelite circle. In 1863 John Ruskin declared, ‘I never did – till this day – read anything so glorious’, and from there began a cult of Omár Khayyám that lasted at least until World War One, by which time there were 447 editions of FitzGerald’s translation in circulation. The poem was memorised, quoted and worshipped by a whole generation. Omár Khayyám dining clubs sprang up, and you could even buy Omar tooth powder and playing cards. During the war, dead soldiers were found in the trenches with battered copies in their pockets.26 The attractions of the Rubáiyát are revealed in some of its most famous lines:
Then to the lip of this poor earthen Urn
I lean’d, the Secret of my Life to learn:
And Lip to Lip it murmur’d – ‘While you live
Drink! – for, once dead, you never shall return.’27
The carpe diem calling of the Rubáiyát was unmistakable.28 It was an unapologetic celebration of hedonism, bringing to mind sensuous embraces in jasmine-filled gardens on balmy Arabian nights, accompanied by cups of cool, intoxicating wine. It was a passionate outcry against the unofficial Victorian ideologies of moderation, primness and self-control. But the message was even more radical, for the Rubáiyát was a rejection not just of Christian morality, but of religion itself.29 There is no afterlife, Omár Khayyám seemed to be saying, and since human existence is transient and death will come much faster than we imagine, it’s best to savour its exquisite moments. This heady union of bodily pleasures, religious doubt and impending mortality captured the imagination of its nineteenth-century audience, who were more used to singing pious hymns at church on a Sunday morning. No wonder the writer G.K. Chesterton declared that the Rubáiyát was the bible of the ‘carpe diem religion’.30
The influence of the Rubáiyát on Victorian culture was especially visible in the works of Oscar Wilde, who described it as a ‘masterpiece of art’ and one of his greatest literary loves alongside Shakespeare’s Sonnets.31 FitzGerald’s poem makes its clearest mark on Wilde’s 1890 novel The Picture of Dorian Gray. The character of Lord Henry Wotton is a champion of hedonism who explicitly refers to the sensual allures of ‘wise Omar’, and tempts Dorian to sell his soul for the decadent pleasures of eternal youth:
You have only a few years to live really, perfectly, fully… Time is jealous of you, and wars against your lilies and roses. You will become sallow, and hollow-cheeked, and dull-eyed… Live the wonderful life that is in you! Let nothing be lost upon you. Be always searching for new sensations. Be afraid of nothing… A new Hedonism – that is what our century wants.32
Yet the novel was not simply about the pleasures
and follies of carpe diem hedonism, played out by Dorian remaining in perfect youth while his portrait ages into a horrible mask of creased and craggy callousness. It was about breaking social conventions and challenging the strictures of Victorian morality. This was most evident in the allegedly homoerotic passages (some of them removed by Wilde for later editions) that reinforced the growing public scandal of the author’s homosexuality, and which played a part in his eventual imprisonment for two years for sodomy and gross indecency. Much of the critique focused on the adoration of the painter in the novel, Basil Hallward, for the beautiful young man Dorian, which many reviewers considered immoral filth. Wilde’s real-life lover, Lord Douglas – a devoted fan of The Picture of Dorian Gray – was sixteen years his junior. During Wilde’s trial in 1895, his literary depiction of relationships between older and younger men were used as part of the case against him, with passages of the book being read out in court.33 In the end, Victorian society was not yet ready for the brand of sensual hedonism in Wilde’s novel, or in his life, and ours is only beginning to be after decades of social struggle for gay rights. In Britain, homosexual relationships were not fully decriminalised until 1982, and it was only in 2000 that the Armed Forces removed its ban on LGBT individuals serving openly. Sodomy laws were not overturned in the US until a landmark Supreme Court ruling in 2003. Over seventy countries, mostly in Africa and Asia, retain laws criminalising homosexuality, while it still remains taboo in many religions.
Whether we look at the diaries of adventurous women like Mabel Loomis Todd, or peruse the pages of the Rubáiyát or The Picture of Dorian Gray, we can see that during the nineteenth century sexual hedonism was not just a matter of private pleasures: it was a potent way to defy social rules and break the boundaries placed on individual liberty and equality. The personal merged with the political. Today in the West, in our age of greater sexual openness and tolerance, this more political aspect of sexual hedonism may not seem so relevant. Yet I believe it is: notwithstanding serious issues such as sex trafficking, sex remains one of the most important realms of life for exploring and expressing freedom and equality that society has to offer. This idea was recognised back in the early 1970s when Alex Comfort, a physician and committed anarchist, wrote The Joy of Sex, a bestselling recipe book for what he called ‘Cordon Bleu sex’. In the introduction, Comfort emphasised that we should view sex as ‘a deeply rewarding form of play’ and pointed out that:
One of the most important uses of play is in expressing a healthy awareness of sexual equality. This involves letting both sexes take turns in controlling the game; sex is no longer what men do to women and women are supposed to enjoy… Sex is the one place where we today can learn to treat people as people.34
The Church may have spent centuries condemning lust, but if sexual hedonism can involve mutuality and reciprocity, then it shifts out of the strictures of individual indulgence into the realm of political equality. It becomes about both me and we, and enables women to be more than just passive objects of pleasure.
There is one other reason why sex has such carpe diem appeal: it’s normally free. There are some exceptions, of course, but in general, sex doesn’t require a trip to the ATM. Between consenting couples (or triples or more), it is free at the point of use. Unlike gourmet dining or binging on coke, sexual delight is known as much by the poor rural farmer as by the noble lord, giving it an egalitarian universality. This very fact means that sex is an inadvertent challenge to consumer society, which tells us that pleasure is something we need to buy in a shopping mall. If that were not enough, sex is pretty much carbon free – unless you happen to be doing it on a plane. It has all the credentials to be the recreation of choice for the global simple living movement.
While a mass outbreak of sexual passion is unlikely to bring down capitalism or solve the climate crisis, and making love has not yet stopped us from making war, sex retains untapped potential as a counter-culture force. So, in the name of carpe diem, gather ye rosebuds while ye may.
WELCOME TO THE PLEASURE DOME
It is a summer afternoon in our garden, and my three-year-old twins have made a startling discovery: spinning. They spin round and round on the grass, arms outstretched, laughing like crazy, staggering around in giddiness when they stop, then collapsing on the ground and watching in fascinated euphoria as the sky whirls in circles above them.
Spinning games are a near-universal phenomenon amongst infants, as are experiments with breath-holding, which can produce similar light-headedness. And it’s not only children who understand the attractions. Exuberant spinning is part of the ritual dances of Sufi dervishes, as well as indigenous Amazonians and Pacific Islanders, with the power to induce a mental state that is almost hallucinogenic.35
The desire to whirl is striking evidence that human beings are drawn to entering altered states of consciousness. More commonly, many of us rely on alcohol and drugs to take us out of ourselves and help us step through the doors of perception. Such efforts have a long history. When the sixteenth-century Franciscan missionary Bernardino de Sahagún was in Mexico, he came upon a traditional Aztec banquet where the festivities began with the eating of a black mushroom, probably the super-powerful hallucinogen Stropharia cubensis. ‘These mushrooms caused them to become intoxicated, to see visions and also to be provoked to lust,’ he wrote, ‘and when they began to feel excited due to the effect of the mushrooms, the Indians started dancing, while some were singing and others weeping.’36
Today we may be surrounded by rules and regulations to prevent ‘substance abuse’, but like the tripping Aztecs and our whirling childhood selves, we can’t stop seeking altered states. Every morning millions of people give themselves a liquid injection of the world’s most popular legal drug, coffee, containing an intense stimulant – caffeine – which accelerates cognitive function and augments the heart rate.37 Legions of smokers can’t get through the day without sucking nicotine into their lungs. Many people treat themselves to a beer or glass of wine at the end of a hard day at work to help their worries float away into a gentle haze. Then there are the multitudes who take pills like Prozac to rescue them from a depressive state or pump them up for a night of partying. In the West we are bound up in a habitually self-medicating culture that uses alcohol and drugs as a quick and easy way of escaping from daily anxieties, as a lubricant for sociability, and as a source of mental stimulation and ecstatic experience, as well as a form of pain relief.
Yet it can all easily lose its innocence, as revealed in stark and shocking detail in the cult film Trainspotting. Set amongst the poverty-stricken council estates of 1980s Edinburgh, it begins as an extremist homage to heroin use. What people forget, says the narrator Renton, ‘is the pleasure of it… take the best orgasm you’ve ever had, multiply it by a thousand, and you’re still nowhere near it.’ But the film’s opening song, Iggy Pop’s ‘Lust for Life’, loses its lustre as the film progresses. Faced with bleak and meaningless futures, we see desperate addicts shooting up in the squalor of abandoned tenement buildings, wrecking their own and their families’ lives, turning to crime and violence to feed their addictions, and ending up in prison or killing themselves with their habits. Just for good measure, there is also a psychotic alcoholic who disdains drugs but regularly goes on violent drunken rampages. It’s hardly a great advertisement for hedonism.
So how can we negotiate our way between the mind-altering pleasures of drugs and alcohol, and their potential as a slippery slope to self-destruction? What role should artificially transforming our state of consciousness play in carpe diem living?
As a writer, I’m intrigued by the long tradition of literary figures who have turned to drugs and drink in the course of their often wayward careers. There’s something dangerously alluring about knowing that Robert Louis Stevenson allegedly wrote his 60,000-word novel The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde during a six-day cocaine binge in 1885.38 One of the first writers to reflect deeply on the experience of using drugs was the nineteen
th-century poet and opium addict Thomas De Quincey. ‘I am a Hedonist,’ declared De Quincey in his Confessions of an English Opium-Eater, ‘and if you must know why I take opium, that’s the reason why.’ He was enthusiastic about its benefits: it could ‘tranquilise all irritations of the nervous system’, ‘stimulate the capacities of enjoyment’, and ‘sustain through twenty-four consecutive hours the else drooping animal energies’. After taking opium for the first time, on a wet Sunday afternoon in 1804 – apparently to relieve toothache – he was convinced he had discovered ‘the secret of happiness’. Nothing could better it: ‘I do not readily believe that any man, having once tasted the divine luxuries of opium, will afterwards descend to the gross and mortal enjoyments of alcohol’.39
But then there were the dreams. Horrible, haunting, excruciatingly vivid dreams stirred up by a habit that was the equivalent of the daily opium dose for over 300 hospital patients at that time. De Quincey found himself being ‘kissed, with cancerous kisses, by crocodiles’, chased by vengeful Hindu Gods through forests, sacrificed by bloodthirsty priests, and buried for thousands of years ‘in stone coffins, with mummies and sphinxes, in narrow chambers at the heart of eternal pyramids’.40 Such torturous dreamscapes were by no means a universal experience. For some literary users, opium dreams were a doorway to beautiful, voluptuous imagery that stimulated their creative imagination and poetic sensibilities. Probably the most famous opium dream of them all took place in the autumn of 1797, when Samuel Taylor Coleridge dreamed his sumptuously hedonistic poem Kubla Khan, while staying at a remote farmhouse in Porlock, near Exmoor in Somerset. In his own account of what happened, he began writing it down immediately upon waking, describing the enchanted land where Alph the sacred river ran, but was interrupted by a visitor. Returning to his desk, he found that the remainder of the poem had – to his utter annoyance and the literary world’s eternal loss – disappeared from his mind.41
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