I got to thinking the other day about how many of my favorite writers lived sexless lives. It amazes me that they wrote such interesting works while missing out on a huge slice of life. The celibates include:
Emily Dickinson
Jane Austen
Henry David Thoreau
Lewis Carroll
Elizabeth Goudge
Henry James (though he may possibly have had a brief gay fling in late middle age.)
Maybe P.G. Wodehouse (some biographers, not all, think P.G.W. never consummated his marriage and that his life was as chaste as Bertie Wooster’s.)
Can you think of any other examples of perennially virginal writers?
Only the women writers could ever have properly been virgins, and then only until their age of majority. Everyone on the list should really be called celibate.
Proper according to (a) the original meaning of the word virgin as a sexually immature female and (b) my own convictions, which are that virgin tends to infantilize adults and emasculate males.
It wasn’t even all that older than the usage for a woman, with a first cite of only 20 years earlier (there was an older version that meant not just chaste, but pious, and only referred to early Christian times).
You should have known me in college. Some days, about the only thing keeping me from climbing a tower armed to the teeth was that I was 100% gutless and hated firearms.
Doug, your inability to get laid is not the topic of this thread. I’m interested in how Henry James and Jane Austen managed to craft exquisite depictions of human relations despite never having indulged in sexual dalliance.
I’ll focus on Austen because I don’t know anything about James.
I don’t see anything in Austen’s books that would require a sexual relationship to learn. She’s obviously a good observer. She has parents. She has friends. She has a sister. She could easily have been in love once or a hundred times.
So, it doesn’t surprise me. I think any person who talks with enough people would be able to piece together anything they haven’t experienced personally. After all, most authors are only one sex, so they have to piece together the other sex from observation.
No, celibate means deliberatly abstaining from sexual relations. It doesn’t mean never having sexual relations. I can sleep around for the next twenty years, and then join a monastery and become celibate. There is no term in the English language for a man who has never had any sex at all, except virgin. Which, as has been pointed out, has been used in that sense for over seven hundred years.
Which is a function of how society views men who have never had sex, not the word “virgin” itself. Using a different word isn’t going to change that. If people started to use “celibate” in the way you want it used, then “celibate” would have those exact same connotations.
Hans Christian Andersen was probably a virgin. He was abused by his schoolmaster in his youth but his private journals tell of his refusal to have sexual relations and his release through masturbation. His biographers note several homosexual infatuations but no relationships.
I’ve often wondered about the adulterers in Mansfield Park. Jane gives such a good depiction of them and how their affair develops and plays out. How much did Jane know about the actual mechanics of sexual intercourse? Would she have known what constituted an adulterous act?