I also believe in victorian times a “treatment” for “hysteria” was removal of the ovaries!
I can and will! Austen’s work is not quite as prim and proper as many Janeites would have you believe.
Mansfield Park is also, to my knowledge, the only Austen novel with a joke about anal sex.
“Certainly, my home at my uncle’s brought me acquainted with a circle of admirals. Of Rears, and Vices, I saw enough. Now, do not be suspecting me of a pun, I entreat.”
I don’t know how many Victorian ladies would have understood that one, or admitted to it if they did.
“I can and will! Austen’s work is not quite as prim and proper as many Janeites would have you believe.”
Indeed not. The word I used was “refined.” But the kind of morality that Austen was advocating looked forward to the virtues that Victorians, by and large, tended to value. Regency decadence was not among them. (The idea that Austen’s fiction anticipated aspects of Victorian culture isn’t at all original to me, btw. It’s something that literary critics have beeng saying for decades.)
Don’t get me wrong though: my point all along has been that one can get a false impression (which is not to say that Lissa herself has that false impression) from focusing on etiquette and conduct manuals alone that the Victorians were wholly prudish, asexual, repressed, and uptight. What I’ve been suggesting is that to get a better understanding of what Victorian sexuality was like you need to read between the lines of Victorian fiction–as you have done with Mansfield Park. So when I say that Austen was a proto-Victorian I don’t mean she was a proto-prude or primmer-than-thou. I mean that she was urging a certain kind of conduct upon her contemporaries that the Victorians came to idealize.
While Austen’s heroes and heroines tend to be level-headed, tactful, considerate of others, self-controlled, and dutiful, they are not boring, prudish, humorless, and asexual. Mr. Knightley needs to learn to dance after all! Yes, Austen could be wickedly funny. But so could George Eliot, Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Jane Carlyle (wife of Thomas) and, for that matter, Florence Nightingale (whose feminist treatise “Cassandra” is sometimes laugh-out-loud funny).
“I don’t know how many Victorian ladies would have understood that one, or admitted to it if they did.”
Well, possibly more than you think, if your impression is that Victorian women were completely hung up on propriety at the expense humor and passion. Although the Victorians (esp. middle-class Victorians) were indeed shocked by the idea of pre-marital sex for women, and although their views of “femininity” were more constraining and normalizing than ours tend to be, there is, in other words, a lot of sexiness in Victorian novels–including (perhaps especially) those written by women, and thought highly appropriate for respectable female readers. The same is true of Austen. That is all I meant to say by way of defending my inclusion of Austen as a relevant (indeed modular) figure for Victorian culture.
“Mansfield Park is also, to my knowledge, the only Austen novel with a joke about anal sex.”
Depends how much Eve Sedgwick you read 
Hope this thread isn’t languishing. Having major renovations done on my house, going to work, together with my hectic nap schedule, have kept me from posting but I look forward to reading you bright people’s posts. Re-reading The French Lieutenant’s Woman in spurts – such an engaging novel. Wonder what y’all think of Fowles’ portrait of Victorian society? (And no, I won’t call it The Freedom Lieutenant’s Woman!)
Lissa, since my name was mentioned, I wanted you to know I read this thread.
From one of the Little House books by Laura Ingalls Wilder (paraphrased, from memory)
Ma is chiding Laura for not wearing her corset to bed(!) like her sister Mary does and like she did as a teen. “When your Pa and I first married, he could put his hands around my waist and his fingers met.” Laura: “Well, he can’t do that now and he seems to like you all right.” 
Someone once told me (sorry, no cite) that there was a lot of what we might consider lesbian sexuality in Victorian times although it was not considered “sex.” Women wrote rather passionate love notes to each other and engaged in things like hugging, cuddling in bed, tickling, kissing, etc. Does anyone else have any research or info on this allegation?
I’m not sure why you’re posing this as a question about VIctorian women. Plenty of women do that sort of thing today, and for many of them it’s still not considered “sex” or even remotely sexual. I don’t think I know any women who wouldn’t hug their close female friends. Cuddling, tickling, and kissing are more rare, but still not particularly unusual among playful, outgoing young women. If such behavior can be considered just friendly physical contact today, I doubt heterosexual Victorian women would have thought much differently.
MLS, this is rough sketch b/c this isn’t directly my area, but I think it’s mainly correct. There was a lot less fear of being thought to be gay or lesbian in this period because the idea of having a same-sex orientation was just not thought about in a consistent way: there was no codified vocabulary for it. Most important, there was no serious medical discourse about it until the end of the Victorian period (c. 1880s IIRC) and it wasn’t until medicine marked homosexuality (often called “inversion” at this time) as such that a parallel movement arose to repress it, legally and socially. That doesn’t mean that “sodomites” didn’t actually exist, and wouldn’t be persecuted for their acts: but it does mean that they were just thought unnatural and sinful. But there was no acknowledgment of a homosexual personality type or culture to go along with it (things that we might want to reject as stereotypes today, but which were necessary to putting homosexuality on the map as a thing to be diagnosed, policed, and feared).
Because most people didn’t think about it or fear it there was no reason to worry about perception. Hence, men also expressed a lot of affection for each other during this period; they walked arm in arm at universities, for example. Oscar Wilde’s libel trials in the 1890s, which resulted in his being jailed, brought a lot of this to the fore.
The term lesbian, I’m fairly sure, originated with Swinburne who wrote a poem called “Anactoria,” the name of Sappho’s lover. Again, I haven’t got time to check this for you; but I think I’m right.
There are a lot of good books on this subject, both for a specialist and general audience.
We discussed this in the thread that spawned this one. I’m just gonna cut & paste my first response:
In the museum in which I work we have a large collection of letters written during the Victorian period. It was not at all uncommon for girls to use phrases like, “I can’t wait to feel your arms around me again,” and “I love you, darling!” to their close friends. Some letters even have the girls stating their longing for their friend’s kisses, and talk of the “thrill” of holding their friends’ hands. Nothing about this was deemed improper in any way.
Remember **MLS, ** that sharing a bed was very common during the time. It was more usual for an overnight female guest to sleep with a female in the family than to, say, sleep on the couch. Men didn’t shrink from sharing beds, either. (In the thread linked in my OP, I have a lenghty piece on bed-sharing, if you want to read it.)
People were much more demonstrative, and in writing, people were very passionate and affectionate. However, there was nothing sexual about it.
For example, consider the Empress Alexandra writing to Rasputin and telling him she wished to fall asleep on his shoulder. She did not mean this LITERALLY, but figuratively-that she wanted to give her burdens over to him, for him to take care of. She felt calm around him because of what he could do for the Heir.
However, very few people knew of Alexei’s hemophilia, and those who read the letters assumed that Rasputin was her lover, when nothing could be further from the truth.
Well, “romantic” letters between two people of opposite sex were generally less socially acceptable. For example, a huband would think nothing of finding one of his wife’s “passionate” letters to a female friend, whereas the same letter to a male might be upsetting. Between two women it wasn’t even a consideration that something sexual might be going on, but between a man and a woman, eyebrows might be raised.
Empress Alexandra’s letter was harmless in her eyes because she saw Rasputin as a spiritual advisor. IIRC, she either discounted or ignored stories of his sexual excesses, but others did not, making the letter, in their minds, suspect.
Etiquette-wise, a married woman had no legitimate reason in writing socially to a male, especially using romantic language. The only acceptable communication between a married woman and a man would be for business reasons.
All true, Lissa, but again: class and nationality figure here as well. The upper classes could and did get away with a lot more–meaning that upper-class women, so long as they were discreet, could depart a bit from the strict notions of propriety to which middle-class women were held. And on the Continent things were a bit looser among all classes.
Queen Victoria is an interesting exception here. She chose to adopt middle-class morality as her own (and by all accounts had a very happy marriage with Albert). She was also the first monarch to be really embraced by the British public: before that the monarchy was not as important to the mass of people.
Guin: “People were much more demonstrative, and in writing, people were very passionate and affectionate. However, there was nothing sexual about it.”
I know what you’re saying, and I don’t necessarily disagree–but consider this as well.
The Victorians just didn’t talk about sex as obsessively as we do. In fact they hardly talked about it at all. It would never occur to them, therefore, to draw lines as we do, between affectionate but not sexual, or passionate but not sexual. There was close friendship, which was open and demonstrative, and there was sex which was private and not discussed.
So let’s take the case of two close men or two close women who were, by today’s standards, more openly affectionate in their language and gestures. I wouldn’t say that those friends were actually homosexual (though in some instances they may well have been); but I also wouldn’t say that in the absence of sex that there was nothing that we would call sexual about their intimacy. It’s just that they wouldn’t think of it that way.
It really is a very different mindset: a culture in which the thing that we call “sexuality” didn’t exist as such.
Take, for example, Goblin Market, a well-known poem by Chistina Rossetti. Nowadays the sexual imagery in this poem seems so obvious that you’d think no one would miss it. Yet the Victorians thought of it as a good poem to read to children to contrast the behavior between a too-curious sister and her virtuous counterpart. In the climax of the poem, in order to save the curious sister’s life, the virtuous sister beseeches the former to suck forbidden fruit juices from her body:
"She cried “Laura,” up the garden,
“Did you miss me ?
Come and kiss me.
Never mind my bruises,
Hug me, kiss me, suck my juices
Squeezed from goblin fruits for you,
Goblin pulp and goblin dew.
Eat me, drink me, love me;
Laura, make much of me:
For your sake I have braved the glen
And had to do with goblin merchant men.”
Now there are a lot of different ways to read this poem: among them there is a Christian reading, and there is a homoerotic reading. As far as I’m concerned they’re all interesting.
But my point is this: obviously the Victorians didn’t see this poem as sexual or they’d not have read it to their children. But does that mean that what we would see as the obvious eroticism was completely lost on them? I suspect not. Rather, I suspect, there experience of eros was different than ours.
Lissa, I have read letters written by married women to close male friends of the family–and not with any hint of an illicit relationship, just to share news, opinions, etc. Granted, most of these were intellectual women who, to some degree, lived atypical lives. And typical middle-class wives probably would have been more likely to let their husbands do the writing for them. But again, a lot of that is really to do with class consciousness less than restrictions on sex per se.
I do think there may have been stricter adherence to some of these codes in the States than in Britain: that is the impression you get here and there in Harriet Martineau’s Society in America, written in the 1830s. She felt that American women weren’t given enough meaningful things to do in comparison to their British counterparts (and she had plenty of things to say about how narrow British women’s lives were). So if you’re focusing your researches mainly on American mores there may well be notable differences.
That I am. I’m not necessarily all that familiar with British manners.
Speaking of poetry, some scholars I have read have speculated that Emily Dickinson’s poem “I Held a Jewel” is actually about matrubation.
They also see myriad sexual nuances in “Wild Nights” (but who wouldn’t?)
Also rampant are the allegations that Dickinson had a lesbian relationship with her sister-in-law Susan, but as we’ve already discussed, love writings can be misinterpereted.
This post satisfies me as the most likely reason for differences in the behavior of men towards men, today versus yesteryear – which was my original question in the other thread. Thanks, Mandelstam.
Lissa: “Speaking of poetry, some scholars I have read have speculated that Emily Dickinson’s poem “I Held a Jewel” is actually about matrubation.”
Well, that reading seems plausible though, if you actually think about it, questionable (the gem being missing in the end??).
When it comes to literary criticism, I have a fairly open mind, but it’s the words “actually about” that get tricky: i.e., when the critic in question thinks that s/he’s come up with the one true reading.
TGWATY, glad to be of service.
I tend to agree. It sometimes seems that critics refuse to let a poem just be a poem. Things tend to be analyzed to death in the search for the “true meaning.”
I think it’s the perception of the Victorian era as asexual that makes people try to insert sexual nuances into innocent phrases. It may be that they feel that the author’s intention was to address sexual issues in a hidden way to be deciphered by those “in the know.” It’s been my opinion that often in the search for “hidden” subtelties, that the true meaning is often lost. In other words, sometimes a gem is just a gem.
In my opinion, the gem in Dickinson’s poem may be a happy thought, a feeling of love, or any number of things. It may be the line about “honest fingers” which has inspired the debate.
Victoria, told about lesbians, is supposed to have asked, “But what do they do?”
One assumes she & Albert never indulged in foreplay.
Oh, no, no, no!
Victoria and Albert had a * passionate * sex life if the relatively tame entries in her diary are any indication.
“I NEVER NEVER spent such a night!” she wrote on the morning after her wedding. “My DEAR DEAR Albert sat beside me and kissed me again and again!”
Victoria was wildly in love with her husband. The only thing about their marriage she disliked was bearing children. She had quite a bit of distate for children, saying that babies had a hideous “froglike action” to their movements. She warned her daughters to try to avoid having children for as long as possible. (Though how she expected them to do this is unclear given her apparent ignorance of birth control. She must have meant for them to abstain from sex.)
No one could ever compare to Albert in Victoria’s mind, and she apparently thought that no couple had ever loved so passionately and deeply. When he died, her advisors seriously thought she was going to lose her mind out of grief.
At one point, after their last child, Princess Beatrice, was born, she was told by her doctor that it would probably be best if she had no more kids.
The Queen is said to have replied, “But doctor, must I have no more fun in bed?”
Yeah, they had a VERY hot and heavy sex life.
Oh lord, yes, Lissa and Guinastasia, I knew that. Was attempting to be mildly amusing while at the same time pointing out the innocence (bordering on stupidity) of Victoria et al about sexual possibilities. Does silencing speech about sex (or any other important subject) stifle the imagination as well? (This is a serious question.)