“You choose to misunderstand. I know my duty. One cannot be too scrupulous at such a juncture.”
This exchange has taken place without their daring to look at each other’s faces. She dropped her head, in a very plain and mutinous disagreement. He rose and stood behind her.
“It is no more than a formality. But such formalities matter.”
She stared obstinately down.
“I am weary of Lyme. I see you less here than in town.”
He smiled. “That is absurd.”
“It seems less.”
A sullen little line had set about her mouth. She would not be mollified. He went and stood in front of the fireplace, his arm on the mantelpiece, smiling down at her; but it was a smile without humor, a mask. He did not like her when she was willful; it contrasted too strongly with her elaborate clothes, all designed to show a total inadequacy outside the domestic interior. The thin end of the sensible clothes wedge had been inserted in society by the disgraceful Mrs. Bloomer a decade and a half before the year of which I write; but that early attempt at the trouser suit had been comprehensively defeated by the crinoline—a small fact of considerable significance in our understanding of the Victorians. They were offered sense; and chose a six-foot folly unparalleled in the most folly-ridden of minor arts.
However, in the silence that followed Charles was not meditating on the idiocy of high fashion, but on how to leave without more to-do. Fortunately for him Tina had at the same time been reflecting on her position: it was after all rather maidservantish (Aunt Tranter had explained why Mary was not able to answer the waking bell) to make such a fuss about a brief absence. Besides, male vanity lay in being obeyed; female, in using obedience to have the ultimate victory. A time would come when Charles should be made to pay for his cruelty. Her little smile up at him was repentant.
“You will write every day?”
He reached down and touched her cheek. “I promise.”
“And return as soon as you can?”
“Just as soon as I can expedite matters with Montague.”
“I shall write to Papa with strict orders to send you straight back.”
Charles seized his opportunity. “And I shall bear the letter, if you write it at once. I leave in an hour.”
She stood then and held out her hands. She wished to be kissed. He could not bring himself to kiss her on the mouth. So he grasped her shoulders and lightly embraced her on both temples. He then made to go. But for some odd reason he stopped. Ernestina stared demurely and meekly in front of her—at his dark blue cravat with its pearl pin. Why Charles could not get away was not immediately apparent; in fact two hands were hooded firmly in his lower waistcoat pockets. He understood the price of his release, and paid it. No worlds fell, no inner roar, no darkness shrouded eyes and ears, as he stood pressing his lips upon hers for several seconds. But Ernestina was very prettily dressed; a vision, perhaps more a tactile impression, of a tender little white body entered Charles’s mind. Her head turned against his shoulder, she nestled against him; and as he patted and stroked and murmured a few foolish words, he found himself most suddenly embarrassed. There was a distinct stir in his loins. There had always been Ernestina’s humor, her odd little piques and whims of emotion, a promise of certain buried wildnesses… a willingness to learn perversity, one day to bite timidly but deliciously on forbidden fruit. What Charles unconsciously felt was perhaps no more than the ageless attraction of shallow-minded women: that one may make of them what one wants. What he felt consciously was a sense of pollution: to feel carnal desire now, when he had touched another woman’s lips that morning!
He kissed Ernestina rather hastily on the crown of her head, gently disengaged her ringers from their holds, kissed them in turn, then left.
He still had an ordeal, since Mary was standing by the door with his hat and gloves. Her eyes were down, but her cheeks were red. He glanced back at the closed door of the room he had left as he drew on his gloves.
“Sam has explained the circumstances of this morning?”
“Yes, sir.”
“You… understand?”
“Yes, sir.”
He took off a glove again and felt in his waistcoat pocket. Mary did not take a step back, though she lowered her head still further.
“Oh sir, I doan’ want that.”
But she already had it. A moment later she had closed the door on Charles. Very slowly she opened her small—and I’m afraid, rather red—hand and stared at the small golden coin in its palm. Then she put it between her white teeth and bit it, as she had always seen her father do, to make sure it was not brass; not that she could tell one from the other by bite, but biting somehow proved it was gold; just as being on the Undercliff proved it was sin.
What can an innocent country virgin know of sin? The question requires an answer. Meanwhile, Charles can get up to London on his own.
35
In you resides my single power.
Of sweet continuance here.
Hardy, Her Immortality
At the infirmary many girls of 14 years of age, and even girls of 13, up to 17 years of age, have been brought in pregnant to be confined here. The girls have acknowledged that their ruin has taken place… in going or returning from their (agricultural) work. Girls and boys of this age go five, six, or seven miles to work, walking in droves along the roads and by-lanes. I have myself witnessed gross indecencies between boys and girls of 14 to 16 years of age. I saw once a young girl insulted by some five or six boys on the roadside. Other older persons were about 20 or 30 yards off, but they took no notice. The girl was calling out, which caused me to stop. I have also seen boys bathing in the brooks, and girls between 13 and 19 looking on from the bank.
Children’s Employment Commission Report (1867)
What are we faced with in the nineteenth century? An age where woman was sacred; and where you could buy a thirteen-year-old girl for a few pounds—a few shillings, if you wanted her for only an hour or two. Where more churches were built than in the whole previous history of the country; and where one in sixty houses in London was a brothel (the modern ratio would be nearer one in six thousand). Where the sanctity of marriage (and chastity before marriage) was proclaimed from every pulpit, in every newspaper editorial and public utterance; and where never—or hardly ever—have so many great public figures, from the future king down, led scandalous private lives. Where the penal system was progressively humanized; and flagellation so rife that a Frenchman set out quite seriously to prove that the Marquis de Sade must have had English ancestry. Where the female body had never been so hidden from view; and where every sculptor was judged by his ability to carve naked women. Where there is not a single novel, play or poem of literary distinction that ever goes beyond the sensuality of a kiss, where Dr. Bowdler (the date of whose death, 1825, reminds us that the Victorian ethos was in being long before the strict threshold of the age) was widely considered a public benefactor; and where the output of pornography has never been exceeded. Where the excretory functions were never referred to; and where the sanitation remained—the flushing lavatory came late in the age and remained a luxury well up to 1900—so primitive that there can have been few houses, and few streets, where one was not constantly reminded of them. Where it was universally maintained that women do not have orgasms; and yet every prostitute was taught to simulate them. Where there was an enormous progress and liberation in every other field of human activity; and nothing but tyranny in the most personal and fundamental.
At first sight the answer seems clear—it is the business of sublimation. The Victorians poured their libido into those other fields; as if some genie of evolution, feeling lazy, said to himself: We need some progress, so let us dam and divert this one great canal and see what happens.
While conceding a partial truth to the theory of sublimation, I sometimes wonder if this does not lead us into the error of supposing the Victorians were not in fact highly sexed. But they were quite as highly sexed a
s our own century—and, in spite of the fact that we have sex thrown at us night and day (as the Victorians had religion), far more preoccupied with it than we really are. They were certainly preoccupied by love, and devoted far more of their arts to it than we do ours. Nor can Malthus and the lack of birth-control appliances [9] quite account for the fact that they bred like rabbits and worshiped fertility far more ardently than we do. Nor does our century fall behind in the matter of progress and liberalization; and yet we can hardly maintain that that is because we have so much sublimated energy to spare. I have seen the Naughty Nineties represented as a reaction to many decades of abstinence; I believe it was merely the publication of what had hitherto been private, and I suspect we are in reality dealing with a human constant: the difference is a vocabulary, a degree of metaphor.
The Victorians chose to be serious about something we treat rather lightly, and the way they expressed their seriousness was not to talk openly about sex, just as part of our way is the very reverse. But these “ways” of being serious are mere conventions. The fact behind them remains constant.
I think, too, there is another common error: of equating a high degree of sexual ignorance with a low degree of sexual pleasure. I have no doubt that when Charles’s and Sarah’s lips touched, very little amatory skill was shown on either side; but I would not deduce any lack of sexual excitement from that. In any case, a much more interesting ratio is between the desire and the ability to fulfill it. Here again we may believe we come off much better than our great-grandparents. But the desire is conditioned by the frequency it is evoked: our world spends a vast amount of its time inviting us to copulate, while our reality is as busy in frustrating us. We are not so frustrated as the Victorians? Perhaps. But if you can only enjoy one apple a day, there’s a great deal to be said against living in an orchard of the wretched things; you might even find apples sweeter if you were allowed only one a week.
So it seems very far from sure that the Victorians did not experience a much keener, because less frequent, sexual pleasure than we do; and that they were not dimly aware of this, and so chose a convention of suppression, repression and silence to maintain the keenness of the pleasure. In a way, by transferring to the public imagination what they left to the private, we are the more Victorian—in the derogatory sense of the word—century, since we have, in destroying so much of the mystery, the difficulty, the aura of the forbidden, destroyed also a great deal of the pleasure. Of course we cannot measure comparative degrees of pleasure; but it may be luckier for us than for the Victorians that we cannot. And in addition their method gave them a bonus of surplus energy. That secrecy, that gap between the sexes which so troubled Charles when Sarah tried to diminish it, certainly produced a greater force, and very often a greater frankness, in every other field.
All of which appears to have led us a long way from Mary, though I recall now that she was very fond of apples. But what she was not was an innocent country virgin, for the very simple reason that the two adjectives were incompatible in her century. The causes are not hard to find.
The vast majority of witnesses and reporters, in every age, belong to the educated class; and this has produced, throughout history, a kind of minority distortion of reality. The prudish puritanity we lend to the Victorians, and rather lazily apply to all classes of Victorian society, is in fact a middle-class view of the middle-class ethos. Dickens’s working-class characters are all very funny (or very pathetic) and an incomparable range of grotesques, but for the cold reality we need to go elsewhere—to Mayhew, the great Commission Reports and the rest; and nowhere more than in this sexual aspect of their lives, which Dickens (who lacked a certain authenticity in his own) and his compeers so totally bowdlerized. The hard—I would rather call it soft, but no matter—fact of Victorian rural England was that what a simpler age called “tasting before you buy” (premarital intercourse, in our current jargon) was the rule, not the exception. Listen to this evidence, from a lady still living. She was born in 1883. Her father was Thomas Hardy’s doctor.
The life of the farm laborer was very different in the Nineteenth Century to what it is now. For instance, among the Dorset peasants, conception before marriage was perfectly normal, and the marriage did not take place until the pregnancy was obvious… The reason was the low wages paid to the workers, and the need to ensure extra hands in the family to earn. [10]
I have now come under the shadow, the very relevant shadow, of the great novelist who towers over this part of England of which I write. When we remember that Hardy was the first to try to break the Victorian middle-class seal over the supposed Pandora’s box of sex, not the least interesting (and certainly the most paradoxical) thing about him is his fanatical protection of the seal of his own and his immediate ancestors’ sex life. Of course that was, and would still remain, his inalienable right. But few literary secrets—this one was not unearthed until the 1950s—have remained so well kept. It, and the reality of Victorian rural England I have tried to suggest in this chapter, answer Edmund Gosse’s famous reproof: “What has Providence done to Mr. Hardy that he should rise up in the arable land of Wessex and shake his fist at his Creator?” He might as reasonably have inquired why the Atreids should have shaken their bronze fists skywards at Mycenae.
This is not the place to penetrate far into the shadows beside Egdon Heath. What is definitely known is that in 1867 Hardy, then twenty-seven years old, returned to Dorset from his architectural studies in London and fell profoundly in love with his sixteen-year-old cousin Tryphena. They became engaged. Five years later, and incomprehensibly, the engagement was broken. Though not absolutely proven, it now seems clear that the engagement was broken by the revelation to Hardy of a very sinister skeleton in the family cupboard: Tryphena was not his cousin, but his illegitimate half-sister’s illegitimate daughter. Countless poems of Hardy’s hint at it: “At the wicket gate,” “She did not turn,” “Her immortality” [11] and many others; and that there were several recent illegitimacies on the maternal side in his family is proven. Hardy himself was born “five months from the altar.” The pious have sometimes maintained that he broke his engagement for class reasons—he was too much the rising young master to put up with a simple Dorset girl. It is true he did marry above himself in 1874—to the disastrously insensitive Lavinia Gifford. But Tryphena was an exceptional young woman; she became the headmistress of a Plymouth school at the age of twenty, having passed out fifth from her teachers’ training college in London. It is difficult not to accept that some terrible family secret was what really forced them to separate. It was a fortunate secret, of course, in one way, since never was an English genius so devoted and indebted to one muse and one muse only. It gives us all his greatest love elegies. It gave us Sue Bridehead and Tess, who are pure Tryphena in spirit; and Jude the Obscure is even tacitly dedicated to her in Hardy’s own preface—“The scheme was laid down in 1890… some of the circumstances being suggested by the death of a woman…” Tryphena, by then married to another man, had died in that year.
This tension, then—between lust and renunciation, undying recollection and undying repression, lyrical surrender and tragic duty, between the sordid facts and their noble use—energizes and explains one of the age’s greatest writers; and beyond him, structures the whole age itself. It is this I have digressed to remind you of.
So let us descend to our own sheep. You will guess now why Sam and Mary were on their way to the barn; and as it was not the first time they had gone there, you will perhaps understand better Mary’s tears… and why she knew a little more about sin than one might have suspected at first sight of her nineteen-year-old face; or would have suspected, had one passed through Dorchester later that same year, from the face of a better educated though three years younger girl in the real world; who stands, inscrutable for eternity now, beside the pale young architect newly returned from his dreary five years in the capital and about to become (“Till the flame had eaten her breasts, and mouth and hair”) the pe
rfect emblem of his age’s greatest mystery.
36
But on her forehead sits a fire:
She sets her forward countenance
And leaps into the future chance,
Submitting all things to desire.
Tennyson, In Memoriam (1850)
Exeter, a hundred years ago, was a great deal farther from the capital than it is today; and it therefore still provided for itself some of the wicked amenities all Britain now flocks to London to enjoy. It would be an exaggeration to say that the city had a red light quarter in 1867; for all that it had a distinctly louche area, rather away from the center of the town and the carbolic presence of the Cathedral. It occupied a part of the city that slopes down towards the river, once, in the days (already well past in 1867) when it was a considerable port, the heart of Exeter life. It consisted of a warren of streets still with many Tudor houses, badly lit, malodorous, teeming. There were brothels there, and dance halls and gin places; but rather more frequent were variously undone girls and women—unmarried mothers, mistresses, a whole population in retreat from the claustrophobic villages and small towns of Devon. It was notoriously a place to hide, in short; crammed with cheap lodging houses and inns like that one described by Sarah in Weymouth, safe sanctuaries from the stern moral tide that swept elsewhere through the life of the country. Exeter was, in all this, no exception—all the larger provincial towns of the time had to find room for this unfortunate army of female wounded in the battle for universal masculine purity.
In a street on the fringe of this area there stood a row of Georgian terrace houses. No doubt they had when built enjoyed a pleasant prospect down towards the river. But warehouses had gone up and blocked that view; the houses had most visibly lost self-confidence in their natural elegance. Their woodwork lacked paint, their roofs tiles, the door panels were split. One or two were still private residences; but a central block of five, made shabbily uniform by a blasphemous application of dull brown paint to the original brick, declared themselves in a long wooden sign over the central doorway of the five to be a hotel—Endicott’s Family Hotel, to be precise. It was owned, and administered (as the wooden sign also informed passers-by) by Mrs. Martha Endicott, whose chief characteristic may be said to have been a sublime lack of curiosity about her clientele. She was a thoroughly Devon woman; that is, she did not see intending guests, but only the money their stay would represent. She classified those who stood in her little office off the hall accordingly: ten-shillinger, twelve-shillinger, fifteener, and so on… the prices referring to the charge per week. Those accustomed to being fifteen shillings down every time they touch a bell in a modern hotel must not think that her hotel was cheap; the normal rent for a cottage in those days was a shilling a week, two at most. Very nice little houses in Exeter could have been rented for six or seven shillings; and ten shillings a week for the cheapest room made Endicott’s Family, though without any obvious justification beyond the rapacity of the proprietress, on the choice side.
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