Making a woman: On the construction of female sexuality in Victorian pornography
Master's Thesis in Comparative Literature Department of Arts and Cultural Studies University of Copenhagen
By Maj Fonseca
Supervisor: Anne Fastrup
April 1. 2014 Resumé
Pornografi defineres gerne som eksplicit seksuelt materiale, hvis hovedformål er at ophidse læseren. Pornografiske værker fra den victorianske periode viser sig ganske rigtigt dybt investerede i grafiske beskrivelser af nøgne kroppe og sexakter. Teksterne tilnærmer sig i nogen grad en pornografisk utopi (en ‘pornotopi’), hvor de seksuelle muligheder eksisterer til overflod og hvor alle altid er villige, lystige og generøse med deres kroppe. Her vrimler det med ideale begærsobjekter i form af unge, smukke og uskyldsrene jomfruer. Ved nærmere eftersyn viser der sig dog en besynderlig uhygge mellem fibrene på pornografiens begærskabende bagtæppe. Kvinden i den victorianske pornografiske roman er lige så ofte kilde til begær som til frygt og afsky for manden. Jomfru-figuren står overfor afskyvækkende kvindeskikkelser som nymfomanen, moderen, gammeljomfruen og forførersken, som pornografien af alt magt forsøger at gøre det af med. Spørgsmålet er derfor nærliggende, hvorfor pornografien overhovedet har inkluderet den afskyelige kvinde til at begynde med. Overfor den pornotopiske tendens tilfredsstiller pornografien tillige et begær efter at straffe og fornedre: Voldtægt og fysisk afstraffelse af uvillige kvindelige ofre er den victorianske pornografis seksuelle yndlingstemaer, og det lystfulde maskuline blik er lige så fascineret af jomfruens skønne krop som af smerten og ydmygelsen, som tegner sig på hendes tårevædede ansigt. Den sadistiske vold har en funktion i teksterne, som ikke kan reduceres til at skabe ophidselse. Ambivalens, frygt og afsky kendetegner pornografiens attitude overfor kvindelig seksualitet, i sidste ende også overfor det jomfruelige ideal. Volden kan ses som pornografiens frustrerede forsøg på at håndtere angsten for kvinden: Den udsætter hendes krop for et kontrollerende, undersøgende blik; den forsøger at betvinge og tæmme hende for at forpurre hendes forsøg på overtage mandens magt, og den kan tilmed ses som et forsøg på at ødelægge og dræbe hende. Konklusionen må være, at der er komplicerede, modsatrettede, og nogle gange endda paradoksale indsigter at finde om mandens forhold til kvinden i denne ellers så trivielle litteratur. Table of contents
Introduction...... 2 1. Pornography: historical, theoretical, and methodological reflections...... 4 The Victorian prudes...... 7 Let’s talk about sex...... 9 The curious case of the sadistic pornotopia ...... 11 2. Rape pornography...... 17 The Lustful Turk...... 19 Raped on the Railway...... 26 The Way of a Man with a Maid...... 31 3. Flagellation pornography...... 37 Experimental Lecture...... 39 The Mysteries of Verbena House...... 44 The Memoirs of Dolly Morton...... 48 4. Sadistic violence: the gaze, destruction, castration...... 53 Unveiling the female mystery...... 54 The pleasure of destructing something precious...... 61 The vulnerable penis of pornography...... 65 Conclusion...... 71 Bibliography...... 73 Literary sources...... 73 Secondary sources...... 74
1 Introduction Pornography is the trash genre par excellence, a genre whose main fault is identical with its main function: that is titillates the reader. In contrast to ‘serious’ art that demands detached contemplation, pornography engrosses the reader in involuntary bodily sensations and moves him to action1 - a most illicit way of appreciating cultural products. Pornography is by no means high art; in fact, the genre is generally characterized by a lack of artistic merit. Only in the 1960’s did the serious academic study of pornography take off, but still, to this day, the serious study of trash genres is frowned upon and the intellectual interest in such studies questioned. The history of pornography is still not well-researched, and the practical difficulties arising from the prosecution of pornography throughout history has only made the enquiry harder to accomplish. Even though pornography has become a steadily more popular object of research, there exist very few in-depth literary readings of individual pornographic works. This is problematic since the field likes to jump to conclusions regarding the genre in general while ignoring aspects, which, when subjected to more scrutinous literary inquiry, can draw such conclusions into question. One such problematic conclusion was afforded by Steven Marcus in his 1966 pornographic study, The Other Victorians, where he coins the term ‘pornotopia’ to denominate the tendency towards the carefree sexual wonderland which he sees as a common denominator in pornography in general. In this thesis, I focus on the perception of female sexuality in Victorian pornography, and my findings make me arrive at a less comforting conclusion. Through the literary reading of six Victorian novels of pornography, the fact emerges that the pornotopian descriptions of the young and beautiful women who populate these books as idealized objects of male desire are accompanied by, often not so subtle, descriptions of despicable women - women who are despised, punished, or discarded on account of their sexualities which in various ways deviate from the ideal. I come to the disconcerting conclusion that in the final instance all women are despicable in the eyes of Victorian pornography. The six pornographic novels I present in this thesis were first published in England between 1828 and 1908, a period which encompass the ‘Victorian era’ (1837-1901). These six works are The Lustful Turk (1828), Experimental Lecture (1878), The Mysteries of Verbena House (1882), Raped on the Railway (1894), The Memoirs of Dolly Morton (1899), and The Way of a Man with a Maid (1908). Compared to other literary productions of the Victorian era, these novels are neither famous nor can they boast of literary merit. The first chapter of this thesis titled “Pornography: historical, theoretical, and methodological reflections” will introduce central aspects of the pornographic genre and its history as well as
1 Williams, “Film Bodies: Gender, Genre, and Excess”, p. 4.
2 the theorists which will be used to cast light on the ambivalence towards women in the six pornographic texts. Victorian pornography is characterized by an overabundance of stories of rape and flagellation. Both of these sexual phenomena appear in all six texts, but in The Lustful Turk, Raped on the Railway, and The Way of a Man with a Maid, rape is the primary attraction, and these three texts will therefore be treated as rape-pornography in chapter 2, “Rape pornography”, while Experimental Lecture, The Mysteries of Verbena House, and The Memoirs of Dolly Morton most prominently feature flagellation, and they will therefore be treated as flagellation pornography in chapter 3, “Flagellation pornography”. Next, in chapter 4 “Sadistic violence: the gaze, destruction, castration”, I will seek explanations for the sadistic tendency apparent in these works, and in doing so I make use of three different theories that can cast light on the sadistic violence and the specific way in which it appears in the pornographic works at hand. The first theoretical position focuses on the sadism expressed in the desire to gain knowledge about the female Other, the second sees sadism as the desire to destruct something precious, and the third interprets sadism as originating in the fear of castration. To summarize, what this thesis seeks to demonstrate is that the attitude towards women - displayed in Victorian pornography through sadistic violence and the construction of ‘the despicable woman’ - betrays another tendency at work in the genre than simply pornography's approximation to a pornotopian wonderland. Furthermore, I offer psychological, existential, and ontological interpretations to make sense of this dark side of sexuality.
3 1. Pornography: historical, theoretical, and methodological reflections The etymological origin of the term pornography is the ancient Greek ‘pornographos’ which comprises ‘pornē’ (prostitute) and ‘graphō’ (I write). As such, in its original literal sense, the term refers to writing by or about prostitutes. However, the word appears to have been rarely used in the ancient world as it has only been found in one single source: In the 2nd century writings of Athenaeus, who covers a wide range of subjects in his Deipnosophistai, including the subject of prostitution. From this time on the term was not used until it reappeared in the 19th century, when the writings of Athenaeus were rediscovered. The use of the word pornography now traveled in two directions - either it was used to refer to ‘innocent’ scholarly works on prostitution, or to ‘obscene’ representations in art2. This double meaning of the term is reflected in the the various dictionary entries of the time. For instance, in the French Littré dictionary of 1866, pornography is defined as “(1) a treatise on prostitution, (2) a description of prostitutes in connection with public hygiene” or (3) “obscene painting”.3 The subject of the definition of pornography has not yet been exhausted. Several recent studies on pornography have suggested “that pornography does not demarcate a discernibly unique set of textual features” and that “the shifting and permeable boundaries between the pornographic and the non-pornographic make the presumption of any positivist understanding of genre – the idea that genre categories name essential predicable properties in the texts they categorize – especially hard to sustain”.4 Though I agree that genre definitions are inherently problematic, I choose to ignore this valid contention, mainly for practical reasons, but also because the body of texts with which I am concerned shows clear common denominators, the most prominent of which is their titillatory function. Modern definitions of pornography have emphasized the titillatory aspects of the genre. The great authority on pornographic literature, David Foxon, in his 1965 work Libertine Literature, distinguishes hard-core pornography as books whose principal aim is to “arouse sexual desire and encourage erotic fantasies”.5 According to Foxon, this kind of literature shows a clearly demarcated history starting around the year 1650. Other scholars emphasize the pure titillatory intent in their definitions of pornography. Steven Marcus, in his influential book on Victorian pornography, The Other Victorians (1966), insists that literature
2 Kendrick, The Secret Museum, p. 11. 3 Ibid, p. 17. 4 Frederickson, “Pornography and the Laws of Genre”, 305. Frederickson refers to among others Sharon Marcus who in Between Women (2007) sees an affinity between pornography and the women's magazines of the time, Colette Colligan who in The Traffic in Obscenity (2006) argues that flagellant pornography appropriated the figure of the flogged slave woman seen in abolitionist writings, and Gowan Dawson who in Darwin, Literature and Victorian Respectability (2007) shows that the boundaries between science and pornography was hard to uphold in obscenity legislation. 5 Foxon, Libertine Literature, p. 48.
4 has several purposes while the sole intention of pornography is to titillate6. Marcus' understanding of pornography adheres to the well known distinction between literature, as texts of a certain artistic quality, and pornography, which he considers trash. In a similar vein, the historian, Iain McCalman, states that pornography denotes literary material whose sole purpose is to arouse “as distinct from the obscene literature which possessed some additional and conscious political dimension”7. While erotic content in literature is as old as literature itself, pornography following the above definition as something that arouses and nothing more is a relatively recent invention. Bradford Mudge in The Whore’s Story writes:
“although we have numerous examples from both literature and fine art of sexually explicit material before 1700, the function of that material is not exclusively to arouse the audience, nor was it mass-marketed for commercial gain by authors, printers, and publishers who understood and presupposed its “illegitimate” pleasures. Therefore, that material should not be considered “pornographic” in the modern sense of the word, although certain seemingly pornographic elements may abound. Venus in the Cloister, for example, does include scenes that a contemporary reader would identify as “pornographic,” in so far as they are both sexually explicit and arousing, but those scenes should not be taken to represent the sole purpose of the text.”8
Mudge identifies the point where pornography arises as a recognizable generic category at around 1750. Before this, sexually explicit material was used for its shock effect to criticize religious or political authorities and was often suppressed indiscriminately with books which were considered “bad” for threatening religion, state, or good moral principles by inciting to heresy, political subversion, and philosophical radicalism.9 Iain McCalman identifies the point where pornography loses its political connotations and transforms instead into a commercial enterprise in arousing content somewhat later than Mudge, namely around the 1790’s in France and around the 1830’s in Britain10. In either case, the two critics seem to agree that the pornographic productions of the Victorian era must be viewed as pornography in the modern sense - as commodities exclusively committed to arousing their audience. The new function of pornography resulted in a change in the demographic of the audience. In the 18th century, pornography was widely available to the masses as political propaganda. A famous example is the flood of illegal sensationalist pamphlets depicting the
6 Marcus, The Other Victorians, p. 278. 7 McCalman, “Unrespectable Radicalism”, p. 76. 8 Mudge, The Whore’s Story, p. 27. 9 Hunt, The Invention of Pornography, pp. 10, 16, 18. 10 Ibid, pp. 41-42.
5 French queen, Marie Antoinette, engaging in promiscuous debauchery11 which tarnished her image and added to the resentment that led to the Revolution. In England, pornography was used in the same manner, for instance in the Queen Caroline Affair in the early 1820’s.12 In the beginning of the Victorian period, pornography was consolidated as a pure titillatory genre aimed at men of the middle and upper classes. The exclusivity of Victorian literary pornography is affirmed by the Victorian bibliographer and collector of erotic books, Henry Spencer Ashbee. In his trilogy on pornographic publications, Index Librorum Prohibitorum (1877), Centuria Librorum Absconditorum (1879), and Catena Librorum Tacendorum (1885), Ashbee lists all the pornographic books known to him and offers a short presentation of the plot, an assessment of the literary merits as well as information about the publication of the books. According to Ashbee’s bibliography, pornographic books were typically published in limited editions up to a few hundred copies and offered for sale at high prices. The 1828 edition of The Lustful Turk, for instance, was sold for 2£ 2 shillings, and the 1829 edition was sold at double price - 4 guineas; Experimental Lecture was issued in 75 copies and sold for 4£ 4 shillings in 1878- 79; and The Mysteries of Verbena House was printed in 150 copies and sold for 4 guineas in 1881-188213. These are prices that far exceeded any disposable working-class income: A London laborer’s average wage in the last quarter of the 19th century was about 20 shillings a week.14 Not until the 1890’s did pornography again fall into the hands of the working class with the emergence of pornographic postcards which were cheap to produce, sell, and buy.15 Though pornography during most of the Victorian period was directed towards a select few, the phenomenon was not entirely subterranean. The term entered official language in the mid 19th century (the first entrance into the Oxford English Dictionary was in 185716), and it entered the English consciousness as a problem in need of solving. The Daily Telegraph editorial of June 17th 1857 reported that,
“There are two streets in London [Holywell-street and Wych-street] ... in the immediate vicinity of a teeming thoroughfare [Fleet-street], which from sunrise to midnight are almost impassable to decent men, and wholly so to decent women, from the disgusting nature of the prints and pictures exhibited in the shop windows, and which are, according to the revelations of our sessions courts, only a faint and almost mild reflex of the foul publications on sale within”.17
11 Ibid, p. 306. 12 Ibid, p. 42. 13 Ashbee, Catena Librorum Tacendorum, pp. 134-35, 246, 260. 14 Bowley, Wages in the United Kingdom in the 19th Century, table p. 133. 15 Sigel, Governing Pleasures, p. 122. 16 Kendrick, The Secret Museum, p. 1. 17 The quote is cited in: Roberts, “Morals, Art, and the Law”, p. 614.
6 When modern pornography came into existence it was as the center of attention in a panicked moral debate about censorship.
The Victorian prudes The Victorians established for posterity an image of themselves as the champions of morality, stuffiness, and as repressors of everything sexual. The myth that even piano legs were considered scandalous and consequently covered with pantalettes to protect people of an impressionable mind from being inspired with impure thoughts is still in circulation at the present day, and though there is no evidence to support its claim18 it serves to illustrate how firm our belief in Victorian prudishness continues to be. There are, however, other facts which suggest that the idea of the prudish Victorians has some claim to its rumor. For instance, Steven Marcus refers to the influential Victorian physician, William Acton, as a representative of Victorian official culture. In his 1857 treatise on sexuality, The Functions and Disorders of the Reproductive Organs19, he argues that sex is a problematic practice which, though necessary for procreation, should be carried out with strict moderation. Steven Marcus observes that the underlying reasoning for Acton’s call to caution was the notion that the body is a “productive system with only a limited amount of material at its disposal”.20 Acton perceives semen as a highly enriched fluid which should be “spent”, as ejaculation was widely termed, at most every 7th to 10th day in order to preserve the vitality of the body and avoid consumption, insanity, and ultimately death. Women were in no danger since they were seen as frigid: “A modest woman seldom desires any sexual gratification for herself”21, Acton insists and speculates that females may feel no pleasure from intercourse at all: “In the females of many animals, and especially of those down the scale of existence, we can scarcely believe that any gratification at all attends the act (…) In some animals the act must, we would think, be an unmitigated distress and annoyance to the female”.22 Though Acton’s representational value is uncertain, especially regarding the view of female frigidity23, the call to sexual moderation was not unheard of, and there was almost universal agreement in Victorian England that male masturbation was an evil that should be
18 The myth originated in Captain Frederick Marryat’s satirical 1839 book, A Diary in America. 19 The full title of Acton’s work is The Functions and Disorders of the Reproductive Organs, in Childhood, Youth, Adult Age, and Advanced Life, Considered in their Physiological, Social, and Moral Relations. 20 Marcus, The Other Victorians, p. 22. 21 Ibid, p. 31. 22 Acton, Functions and Disorders p. 133. 23 In The Making of Victorian Sexuality, Michael Mason debunks Acton’s representational value: “As a claim about a woman’s sexual response Acton’s remark [that “the majority of women … are not very much troubled with sexual feeling of any kind”] is, as far as I know, without a parallel in the sexual literature of the day (while it is quite common to find writers mentioning the existence of female frigidity as a matter of some surprise)” (p. 195-196).
7 repressed.24 The Victorians also held that sexuality in children was non-existent, or at least that it ought to be so, until Sigmund Freud began to argue otherwise. According to Acton, normal children entertain no sexual ideas or feelings until their physical development is complete, only outside influences can cause a child’s sexuality to awaken prematurely.25 Parents were therefore advised to keep their children occupied and under strict surveillance. The idea that sexuality lies dormant and suddenly is awakened in the young person at the first given sexual encounter is commonly rehearsed in Victorian pornography: The forceful defloration of the sexually ignorant virgin sets a sexual transformation in motion and she emerges on the other side as a sexual being. Let me return to a point relating to the myth of the scandalous piano legs. It has often been observed that the Victorians saw sexual meaning in the most unlikely things. Ronald Pearsall in the introduction to his monumental fact collection about Victorian sexuality, The Worm in the Bud, writes that “the middle-class Victorians found that the whole subject of sex became forbidden, confused, and diffused into the most unlikely areas. The more repressed could see sex in everything.”26 For instance, women’s shoes were sexual symbols at the time.27 The sexualization of objects that to the present day reader is hardly sexually suggestive is seen in Victorian pornography, too. In Raped on the Railway, the sight of an uncovered woman’s ankle brings the Victorian gentleman into uncontrollable heat28, and in the pornographic novel, The Mysteries of Verbena House, the narrator confesses how easily he is aroused by the sight of women’s undergarments: “it tickles me somewhat when I look from the windows of a railway carriage into suburban back gardens to see the white drawers of women hung to dry on clothes lines, and fluttering in the breeze. My imagination fills the empty galligaskins with cosy bottoms and hirsute quims”.29 The sexual repression of the Victorian age is epitomized in the censorship of “obscene” book publications. While censorship was far from new in the Victorian age, prohibition for exclusively moral concerns was a new development. It was exactly moral concerns that led to the Obscene Publication Act of 1857; a piece of legislation that markedly improved the conditions for seizing and destroying obscene literature as well as prosecuting those responsible30. It is therefore no surprise that the trade in pornographic literature became more secretive than ever: Pornographic publications were often anonymous and bore fraudulent information,31 and the publishers often changed location to derail prosecution.
24 Mason, The Making of Victorian Sexuality, p. 210. 25 Acton, Functions and Disorders, p. 1-2. 26 Pearsall, The Worm in the Bud, p. xi. 27 Ibid, p. 347. 28 Raped on the Railway, pp.11-13. 29 Ibid, p. 31. 30 Roberts, “Morals, Art, and the Law”, p. 619. 31 Marcus, The Other Victorians, p. 39.
8 The idea that pornography not only holds the power to shock decency but to corrupt minds has been shared among censorship advocates for centuries. The 1868 definition of obscenity by Chief Justice Cockburn has had great currency in the prosecution of obscenity, even into the 20th century. The definition states that “the tendency of the matter charged as obscenity is to deprave and corrupt those whose minds are open to corruption and into whose hands a publication of this sort may fall”32. In The Secret Museum, Walter Kendrick convincingly shows that the moral panic surrounding obscene materials was less concerned with the material itself than with the audience. Sexually explicit material from the excavations of Pompeii were carefully kept behind locked doors and only made accessible to men of means who payed the doorkeeper to enter.33 The corruptible minds, those from whom obscene materials were carefully kept, included not only women and children, but men of the lower classes and other ethnicities.34 As has been demonstrated above, the same was true for literary pornography. Kendrick argues that it was only when the danger became apparent that these corruptible minds could get their hands on pornography that the censorship debate became urgent.
Let’s talk about sex In The History of Sexuality, the French philosopher, Michel Foucault, denies the popular ‘repressive hypothesis’ that sexuality during the Victorian era was reduced to its procreative function within heterosexual, legitimate, monogamous relationships and that everything else was “driven out, denied, and reduced to silence (…) there was nothing to say about such things, nothing to see, nothing to know”.35 One proponent for such a view is Steven Marcus who in The Other Victorians holds that the free expression of sexuality was repressed by official culture and that pornography provided an outlet for the built-up sexual energies: “The view of human sexuality as it was represented in the subculture of pornography and the view of sexuality held by official culture were reversals, mirror images, negative analogues of one another”, he writes.36 To Foucault, the relationship between power and sex in Victorian times cannot be reduced to silence and repression. Far from repressing sexuality, the Victorian era saw a veritable discursive explosion in which sexuality was ‘dissected’ and laid bare in every last detail in a manner inspired by the Christian practice of confession.37 With great analytical scrutiny, a multiplicity of distinct discourses such as demography, biology, medicine, psychiatry, psychology, ethics, pedagogy and political criticism took sexuality as the object of
32 Pearsall, The Worm in the Bud, p. 384. 33 Kendrick, The Secret Museum, p. 6. 34 Ibid, pp. 6, 15, 35 Foucault, The History of Sexuality, p. 4. 36 Marcus, The Other Victorians, p. 283. 37 Foucault, The History of Sexuality, p. 69.
9 knowledge in order to produce useful, reproductive bodies. Interestingly, these sciences of sexuality were far more interested in describing deviant than ‘normal’ sexualities. Thus, the Victorian era saw the pervert, the hysterical woman, and the sexual child emerge as categories.38 Foucault insists on rejecting the dichotomized understanding of sexuality as something which is either repressed or liberated. Sexuality is always already in the grasp of power; as a discursive category and an object of knowledge, sexuality is shaped and policed by far more discrete mechanisms of power (technique, normalization, and control)39 than the more conspicuous power of suppression (law, censorship, and taboo). In many ways, pornography is distinct from the sober, distanced, useful, scientific discourses about sexuality that were encouraged in the Victorian period, the outcome of which was heteronormative procreative bodies. Both in terms of vocabulary, thematics, and function/intention, it transgresses the ‘legitimate’ way of talking about sex. Pornography seems to be exactly the kind of discourse on sexuality that is repressed by the law. In many ways, the confrontation with the law and the internal need of the genre to transgress sexual taboos and ‘shock decency’ have shaped the pornographic literary expression. Victorian pornography is obsessed with the illegitimate; the law, restricting social conventions, and taboos function in the narrative as titillating obstructions to sexual pleasure. But pornography must also be considered a product of the 19th century incitement to talk about sexuality in order to know it, shape it, define it, and control it. Foucault has little to say about the pornographic discourse specifically, but he does point out that it has inherited the decree of telling every last detail from the Christian practice of confession.40 This, as will become clear, is certainly recognizable in the minute description of bodies and sexual acts in Victorian pornography. There can be no doubt that the account of sex and sexuality that we see in pornography “[stakes] out a "specific field of truth" about sex”41. Its specific focus of attention is an attestation of what the pornographic discourse considers to be of interest and of what truths it deems worthwhile to find. In contrast to the many treatises on sexuality of the 19th century which focus on the man, pornography shows a strong curiosity towards female sexuality.42 And in contrast to the scientific discourses that focus only on the hysterical woman, pornography is interested in many other kinds of deviant female sexuality. As we will have plenty of opportunity to see, the pornographic discourse is highly constructive, normative, and controlling. The pornographic discourse betrays a will to define female
38 Ibid, p. 104-105. 39 Ibid, p. 83. 40 Foucault, The History of Sexuality, p. 21. 41 Kendrick, The Secret Museum, p. 28. 42 William Acton, for instance, in his treatise on sexuality devotes only two short sections to female sexuality.
10 sexuality and femininity, including “natural” female behavior, “authentic” female sexual response, and importantly, to define what constitute desirable and undesirable female bodies.
The curious case of the sadistic pornotopia The Victorian pornographic discourse is a part of a wider international pornographic tradition. Especially French pornography influenced the English trade with translations and sources for inspiration and plagiarism. However, Victorian pornography shows specific English traits, most notably in the sexual acts depicted. Narratives about rape and flagellation are the two most distinguishable trends in the Victorian era43, expressing what can be viewed as a particularly Victorian sentiment. The initiation of virgins into the realm of sexuality in Victorian pornography is almost always an act of force. The Lustful Turk is an interesting instance of this preoccupation with virgin rape as it consists of a succession of no less than six such stories. Flagellation was so common in Victorian England that is was known internationally as ‘The English Vice’44, and this preoccupation naturally spilled into pornography. In general, therefore, it seems that sadistic tendencies characterize Victorian pornography. Though violence seems particularly widespread in Victorian pornographic literature, Steven Marcus argues that the pornography of the time shows strong tendencies towards a utopian state of sexual bliss. From his studies of Victorian pornography, Marcus coined the term pornotopia which denotes a pornographic fantasy world of plenty. Here “all men in it are always and infinitely potent; all women fecundate with lust and flow inexhaustibly with sap or juice or both. Everyone is always ready for anything, and everyone is infinitely generous with his substance… - no one is ever jealous, possessive, or really angry”.45 In this pornotopian idyll, time is an infinite succession of sexual tableaus, space is a suitable place to fuck, and social and historical context is abstracted away. If possible, the pornotopian novel would go on forever, but restricted to the medium of the novel, the narrative unwillingly comes to an end. No pornographic novel is pornotopian through and through. The concept of the pornotopia is seen by Marcus as an ideal type known from sociology; he quotes Max Weber in stating that the pornotopia is a construct “like a utopia which has been arrived at by the analytical accentuation of certain elements of reality”, which “in its conceptual purity (...) cannot be found empirically anywhere in reality”46. The pornotopia is an abstract entity which no work of pornography can wholly become, but to the student of pornography the concept of the pornotopia can be a useful instrument of analysis and comparison.
43 Webb, “Victorian Erotica”, p. 93-94. 44 Ibid, p. 104. 45 Marcus, The Other Victorians, p. 273 46 Ibid, p. 267.
11 Another aspect of the pornotopian novel is that its sole intention is to titillate. Everything that does not add to this goal is stripped away. Though Victorian pornography has strong ties to the novel and the realist tradition and in many respects relies heavily on realism to provoke titillation,47 the characters are always one-dimensional sexualized stock characters, and the sexual acts and the energy with which they engage in them is wholly fantastic. Realism is never an aim in itself and is generally sacrificed to exaggerated sex scenes where the actors show unbelievable stamina and sexual prowess. Aesthetic aspirations, too, are sacrificed and generally considered distractions in a genre whose sole aim is to force the reader to masturbatory action. “Although a pornographic work of fiction is by necessity written”, states Marcus, “it might be more accurate to say that language for pornography is a prison from which it is continually trying to escape. At best, language is a bothersome necessity, for its function in pornography is to set going a series of non-verbal images, of fantasies, and if it could achieve this without the mediation of words it would”.48 Marcus argues that pornography today has found a more suitable medium in the moving picture where it can finally be free of restrictions of written language.49 The inattention to the means of expression along with the lack of psychological complexity, unrealistic scenarios, repetitiveness and lack of narrative structure, have been the main points of criticism that have placed pornography at the very bottom of the artistic hierarchy50. The pornotopian novel has the structure of a catalogue of sexual acts which become increasingly hardcore as the story progresses. The scenes amount to monotonous descriptions of body parts grinding against each other; one could even argue, as does Steven Marcus, that the characters are reduced to their genitals. The narration lingers on the details of the female body, especially the vagina. In contrast, the penis is the only body part of the man that is of interest.51 The penises of Victorian pornography are all described in the same way with unblushingly hyperbolic language as ‘monstrous weapons’, ‘immense machines’, ‘rammers’, ‘pillars’, or sometimes simply as ‘pricks’. The gigantic members possess immense powers of destruction and magical powers over the women who, in the midst of the pain, delight in floods of life-giving sperm that produces multiple orgasms. The vaginas are similarly described in either repetitions of crudely direct nouns (‘cunts’) or clichéed euphemisms (‘Abodes of Love’, ‘Bowers of Bliss’). Like the descriptions of the penises, the minute description of the body of one beautiful virgin is directly interchangeable with the other.
47 In the title or preface of a Victorian pornographic novel, for instance, it will often be insisted that the story about to be told has really transpired. See Marcus, The Other Victorians, p. 203. 48 Marcus,The Other Victorians, p. 279. 49 Ibid, p. 208. 50 See Linda Williams, “Film Bodies: Gender, Genre, and Excess”, p. 10, and Susan Sontag, “The Pornographic Imagination”, p. 39. 51 In the pornotopian novel, the man is the penis, writes Marcus, (The Other Victorians, p. 272).
12 As one of the first works on Victorian pornography, Marcus’ The Other Victorians and especially the concept of the pornotopia as genre characterization has been enormously influential. However, Marcus’ work has also been a popular object of criticism in later years. His weakest point seems to be his strong adherence to Freudian psychoanalysis. To Marcus, all pornographers are starving children: “Inside of every pornographer there is an infant screaming for the breast from which he was torn. Pornography represents an endless and infinitely repeated effort to recapture that breast, and the bliss it offered”52. Psychoanalytical interpretation in the study of pornography can be valuable in drawing out the many layers of meaning in the texts, but to understand pornography solely in terms of wish-fulfillment makes Marcus blind to the wealth of meaning that contradicts this psychoanalytical interpretation, and he ignores the significance of social and historical context. I have already quoted Kathleen Frederickson’s essay, “Victorian Pornography and the Laws of Genre” (2011) in which she provides a review of the studies that object to Marcus’ idea that “pornography strives toward self-containment”53, meaning, it is a product of fantasy distinct from social existence. She argues that pornography in the Victorian period was greatly influenced by other kinds of Victorian intellectual productions and that it is therefore difficult to uphold the view that it is a closed, distinct category.54 To criticize Steven Marcus is therefore nothing new. In this thesis, I make critical use of the concept of the pornotopia. I find it useful, firstly, because it reflects our intuition about the purpose of pornography, and, secondly, because its single-minded insistence on seeing only wishful thinking in pornography highlights pornography's nightmarish qualities so much the stronger. Steven Marcus does not dwell long on the disturbing Victorian fascination with sadistic violence. He states that “In pornotopia conflicts do not exists; and if by chance a conflict does occur it is instantly dispelled by the waving of a magical sexual wand”.55 The excessive male on female violence is possible within the pornotopian idyll, for the violence shows no physical or psychological long term effects on the victim, and has, as we shall see, always happy consequences. In contention with Marcus, I find that the excessive and ever- present violence is deeper and more firmly settled in the pornographic genre of the Victorian period than an occasional random conflict. In fact, I would argue, conflict is an essential part of the specific way in which the present works of Victorian pornography produce titillation. Conquest, domination, degradation, and humiliation of the victim as well as the infliction of physical pain are all important aspects of male desire as portrayed in this selection of Victorian pornography, and scrutinous analysis will show that in every single instance the ‘magical sexual wand’ proves faulty. Marcus’ concept of the pornotopia useful in
52 Marcus, The Other Victorians, p. 274. 53 Frederickson, “Victorian Pornography and the Laws of Genre”, p. 306. 54 Ibid, p. 305. 55 Marcus, The Other Victorians, p. 281.
13 distinguishing these two prevalent and apparently contradictory tendencies - the desire for pleasure and the desire for pain. In the following chapters I will submit the six works of Victorian pornography to literary analysis focusing on their struggling pornotopian and sadistic tendencies in relation to the construction of female sexuality. I will relate both rape and flagellation pornography to the historical context of the phenomenons of rape and flagellation. These contextualizations, however, cannot stand alone in explaining why violence, pain, and humiliation are so important in producing titillation. Some feminist theories have explained the phenomenon simply as the way men hold women down in patriarchal societies. Andrea Dworkin, in Pornography: Men Possessing Women (1981), stands as a strong proponent for the view that male sadistic violence as it is expressed in the male sexual fantasies of pornography is simply a result of the historical fact that men possess power over women. Susan Brownmiller’s famous concept of rape in Against our Will: Men, Women and Rape (1975), according to which rape is “a conscious process of intimidation by which all men keep all women in a state of fear”, can be seen in a similar vein as an expression of man’s power over women. Though there is no doubt that Victorian pornography is deeply invested in patriarchal ideology, the explanation of rape and violence as patriarchal power is too simplistic to explain the many, sometimes contradictory, ways in which sadism is expressed in the texts. I will therefore make use of three different theories (focusing on the demystifying gaze, the pleasure of destruction, and the fear of castration respectively) that each serve to explain certain aspects of the sadistic tendencies we observe in the six works of pornography. First, in a fusion of insights from Foucault, psychoanalysis and various feminist thinkers, I propose an explanation of the domination of women in the pornographic texts seen in the subjection of the female body to an inquiring gaze. The pleasure of looking can be seen as expressive of the desire to eradicate the fear of the female Other by creating knowledge about her mysterious sexuality. The theoretical works on this subject include Michel Foucault’s introduction to his History of Sexuality (1976), Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex (1949), and Rosi Braidotti’s “Body-Images and the Pornography of Representation” (1991). Beauvoir’s existentialist magnum opus, The Second Sex, has gained canonical status in feminist philosophy. It concerns the way in which man in patriarchal societies throughout history has confirmed his status as an active, transcendent being by subjecting woman and constructing her as a passive, immanent Other. The chapter entitled “Myths” shows that ambivalence, suspicion, and fear characterize man’s relationship with woman because casting the woman as radically different has the side effect of veiling her in mystery. Beauvoir’s excurse on the woman myths will show us that the incomprehensible woman is an ideal object of knowledge. Later feminists have focused on man’s desperate attempt to
14 do away with the anxiety by unveiling the female mystery. The scientific discourses on sexuality investigated in the History of Sexuality are to Foucault involved in the operations of power, for powers of technique, control, and normalization are exercised in making something an object of knowledge. Rosi Braidotti in her essay, “Body-Images and the Pornography of Representation”, takes Foucault’s insight and argues that the relentless tendency seen in pornography (and science) to look at and zoom in on the naked female body is an expression of man’s will to gain knowledge about the female mysteries. Giving way to this ‘scopic drive’, moreover, she understands as sadistic in nature. Secondly, I will propose to explain the fascination with defloration, degradation, and excessive punishment of women in the pornographic texts as a fundamentally destructive side to human sexuality. George Bataille in Erotism: Death and Sensuality (1957) argues that human beings have a fundamental need at times to go beyond their productive everyday life and be wasteful and destructive - this he calls erotism. The human sacrifice is the summit of wasteful behavior, but non-procreative sex is another shape that erotism can take. Bataille sees erotism at its logical conclusion in the writings of Marquis de Sade who combined these two kinds of excess in the sacrifice of the female sex partner. However, less extreme measures will do to transcend rational, useful life, as for instance the befoulment of female beauty. I will compare the sadism in the writings of Marquis de Sade to the sadistic tendencies in Victorian pornography, and, though there are important differences, it will be clear that the Victorian texts also display destructive desires to kill the woman and to destroy her worth. Finally, I will make use of the psychoanalytical theory that castration anxiety is at the root of the sadistic perversion. The ever present fear of castration can help to make sense of Victorian pornography’s hypermasculinization of the men, and fetishization of the virgin, and present an alternative way of understanding the excessive sadistic violence against the women. Laura Mulvey’s essay, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” (1975), has been enormously important in feminist film theory. Mulvey argues that the movies work within an implicit gendered division of labor where a masculinized gaze is directed towards the spectacle of a passive, to-be-looked-at female character. However, the sight of the woman is not purely pleasurable since the female otherness signifies the lack of a penis and brings out castration anxiety in the man, a fear that is managed either by investigating and demystifying the woman or by turning her into a fetish object. These two ways of handling the dread of the woman are both encountered in Victorian pornography. According to Sigmund Freud’s essay “Fetishism” (1927), the fetichist perversion is designed to avoid castration anxiety by substituting a thing or body part for the woman as sexual object so that coitus, and thereby the sight of the vagina, is avoided. Using Karen Horney’s early psychoanalytic essay, “The Dread of Women” (1932), I will argue that the virgin vagina in Victorian pornography can paradoxically be understood as a fetishized object. Karen Horney argues that both
15 overvaluation (fetishism) and devaluation of women are measures used by men to control their dread of women, and both these attitudes are reflected in the representation of the virgin in the pornographic texts. Pathological sadism is another way in which castration anxiety is seen in Victorian pornography. In her study of the history of film pornography, Hard Core: Power, Pleasure, and the “Frenzy of the Visible” (1989), Linda Williams gives a definition of the psychoanalytic conception of sadism as originating in a failed reconciliation of the Oedipus complex. The frantic punishment of a female victim is interpreted as the superego of the sadist trying to wipe out the feminine side of his own self to escape the fear of castration. Though this explanation of sadism remains rather speculative, there is abundant evidence in the pornographic texts to suggest that castration anxiety in its various forms, and measures to appease this fear, is at the heart of Victorian pornography. These three readings are not meant to be oppositional. Rather, they are intended to open up the texts by casting light on different aspects of the sadistic tendencies that show themselves in various ways - and often in opposition to the pornotopian tendencies - in these six works of Victorian pornography.
16 2. Rape pornography Stories of rape are numerous in Western literary tradition, and in the Victorian period the phenomenon was widely addressed in sentimental, gothic and pornographic literature as well as in sensationalist journalism. The word ‘rape’ derives from the Latin raptus, which means theft, and which originally denoted “the abduction of a man’s wife or daughter, regardless of whether the sexual act took place, and regardless of her volition”56. However, the modern definition of rape, which was in use in the Victorian era, has volition at its core. It originates in a statute of Elizabeth I of 1575, which states that rape is “the carnal knowledge of a woman forcibly and against her will”57. As we shall see, the question of consent is of the utmost importance to Victorian porn. As for the legal ramifications of extra-marital rape58, the maximum punishment was death in the period between 1285 and 1841, “transportation for life”, meaning that the convict was sent to a penal colony, until 1857, and hereafter “penal servitude for life”.59 From this it appears that the Victorians took rape very seriously, but the fact of the matter is that social status was a determining factor in how rape was perceived by the law. In her essay, “Rape and Justice in Victorian England”, Carolyn A. Conley investigates records from Kent County and establishes that the conviction rate of the rape trials (that is, those which were not immediately dismissed or heard as minor offenses - only 21% of all accused stood trial) was only 40% compared to a conviction rate of 85% for other crimes.60 In The Worm in the Bud, Ronald Pearsall argues that for the poor, rape was a mundane occurrence hardly worse than the brutality of their everyday lives. The general ethos of the poorest “manifested itself in pointless brutality, extreme promiscuity, and their extensions, fortified by cheap and plentiful drink, incest and rape”.61 Rape cases involving working-class women were rarely brought to justice, and when they were, the perpetrator was let go or underwent minor punishments. Though in principle everybody was equal under the law, a person’s perceived “respectability” was decisive to the outcome of rape cases. “The very word “rape” evoked the image of a delicate woman brutally assaulted by a sub-human beast” so “since rape was so heinous a crime that only a monster could commit it, proof that the accused was of at least recognizable human character meant he could not be guilty of rape, even if medical evidence indicated he had been“.62 The rape of a lady was rare, and the outcome of a rape
56 Catty, Writing Rape, Writing Women in Early Modern England, p. 1-2. 57 Conley, “Rape and Justice in Victorian England”, p. 520. 58 Rape within marriage was a conceptual impossibility since “a wife was presumed to have granted lifelong consent to sexual intercourse with her husband”. Bourke, “Sexual Violence, Marital Guidance, and Victorian Bodies: An Aesthesiology”, p. 421. 59 See the entry titled “History” in the Wikipedia entry on “Rape in English Law” http :// en . wikipedia . org / wiki / Rape _ in _ English _ law # History 60 Conley, “Rape and Justice in Victorian England”, p. 520. 61 Pearsall, The Worm in the Bud, p. 320. 62 Conley, “Rape and Justice in Victorian England”, pp. 530, 536.
17 trial with a victim of social status was taken much more seriously than cases of rape of working-class women.63 Similarly, men of social status were seldom convicted of rape at all. Male sexual aggression was perceived as normal, healthy and inevitable, and thus sexual assault was often regarded merely a regrettable instance of loss of self-control. The opinion was common that it was the responsibility of the woman to protect her virtue from these normal male impulses by staying under the supervision of her male guardian (an impossibility for working women), otherwise she was considered fair game64. Like the Victorian court system, rape pornography also shows a well-developed sense of class distinction. It is infatuated with rape of high-class modest women, but raping a working-class woman seems to offer little titillation. Base working-class women are imagined as easy and even willing prey that it would be no challenge to subdue. This is manifested in My Secret Life, the autobiography of the pornographic bibliographer Henry Spencer Ashbee, where the protagonist buys access to the body of one working-class girl after another. Prostitution was widespread among the London working class. The Victorian historian, Henry Mayhew, in his oft cited work, London labour and the London poor (1851-1861), credits police authorities with knowing of 8600 London prostitutes in 1857. Mayhew’s own estimation, however, is that more than 80,000 prostitutes were at work in London alone,65 and this at a time when the London population, according to Meyhew’s calculation, comprised only about two million people. Though the theme of prostitution is not unseen in the Victorian pornographic literature (My Secret Life may be considered one such work), the genre seems to prefer stories of unwilling victims. The value and inaccessibility of a high-class woman along with the dangers in daring to possess her, made the conquest of such a woman very attractive. The protection offered by her social position as well as her own obligation to resist in order to protect her chastity, provided a titillating fantasy. In Victorian England, the loss of virginity or chastity lowered the value of a woman no matter if she had been raped or voluntarily seduced66. As we shall see, Victorian pornography never outright condemns the fallen woman, but it is nevertheless highly ambivalent in regards to female virtue. It ridicules the moral ideas that make the women resist, but it simultaneously views virtue as desirable for the sake of overcoming it. Of all the virtuous and resisting women being raped in Victorian pornography, the virgin is the preferred sexual object to conquer. Several social critics and philanthropists considered the extent to which virgins were raped a serious social evil. In the sensationalist piece of investigative journalism, “The Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon” (1885) W. T. Stead describes what has later been called the defloration mania of Victorian England. According to Stead, large numbers of young working-class virgins were either sold by their
63 Ibid, p. 530. 64 Ibid, p. 353. 65 Mayhew, London labour and the London poor, p. 211-213. 66 Conley, “Rape and Justice in Victorian England”, p. 534.
18 poor parents or deceived into “meeting men” for money. Stead describes how they cry and scream as they were forcefully strapped down and raped by rich gentlemen, who has paid between £5 and £20 for a maidenhead.67 Though Stead’s method of investigating the industry in girls’ maidenheads has been criticized for its unreliability, there seems to be little doubt that Victorian men were extraordinarily attracted to the idea of taking a maidenhead. In his commentary to the autobiography of Henry Spencer Ashbee, My Secret Life, Steven Marcus writes that “Like many Englishmen of his time the author on occasion experiences a peculiarly intense desire to deflower a young virgin, the younger the better”.68 The consummation of one such episode is described in the following terms:
“With pride and power I clasped her, feeling sure she was virgin. There she lay in all her beauty, submitting to my will, I enjoying my sense of power, wriggling gently for a minute, till my prick demanded its right of entry. I pushed, a sharp "oh!" a harder push, a louder cry, the obstacle was tight and hard indeed, I had never had such difficulty before; my lust grew fierce, her cry of pain gave me inexpressable pleasure, and saying I would not hurt, yet wishing to hurt her and glorying in it, I thrust with all the violence my buttocks could give, till my prick seemed to bleed, and pained me. "Oh ! mon Dieu! ne faites pas ca, get away, you shan't". she cried, "oh! o-o-oh !"69
The Victorian infatuation with defloration comes across in pornography where virgins are the undisputed preferred objects of desire. Sadistic gloating in dominating and hurting a resisting victim is the key element in the attraction of rape, and this aspect is naturally intensified in scenes of virgin rape, especially of young girls, where the disproportion in size between the unrealistically huge male members and the delicate young female bodies wreaks further havoc.
The Lustful Turk The Lustful Turk is a pornographic epistolary novel by an anonymous author which was first published in 1828 by J. B. Brookes70. It features six more or less indistinguishable stories of virgin rape. Though the novel is pre-Victorian it was very popular throughout the Victorian period, being reprinted in 1829 by Brookes and republished in the 1860s and again in 1893 by the infamous pornographic publisher, William Dugdale.
67 W. T. Stead, “The Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon”, Part II: “Procuration in the West-End”. 68 Marcus, The Other Victorians, p. 156. 69 Ashbee, My Secret Life, Vol. II, chapter 2. 70 Ashbee, Catena Librorum Tacendorum, pp. 134-135.
19 The main protagonist is the virtuous English middle class virgin, Emily Barlow, who platonically loves her sweetheart Henry, the brother of her best friend Sylvia Carey, to whom the letters comprising the story are mainly addressed. Emily is kidnapped during a voyage at sea and presented to Ali, the Dey of Algiers, as a sex slave. She meets the rest of the harem and hears their tales about the circumstances of their abductions and rapes by the Dey. Eventually the Dey also succeeds in kidnapping and raping Sylvia as an act of revenge for the indignation she expresses about Emily’s new way of life in the harem. The story abruptly ends when the Dey is violently castrated by a new girl he is about to rape, and so with no further use of the girls of his harem he sets them all free.
Upon her arrival to the harem, the Dey immediately attempts to deflower Emily, and he is aided in the deed by the slumbering sexual ‘nature’ of the heroine which is aroused by the Dey’s passionate embraces:
“Nature, too powerful nature, had become aroused and assisted his lascivious proceedings, conveying his kisses, brutal as they were, to the inmost recesses of my heart (…) an unknown fire rushed through every part of me, hurried on - by a strange pleasure. All my loud cries dwindled into gentle sighs, and in spite of my inward rage and grief, I could not resist” (10).
The physical fight between the man and the woman is paralleled by an inward struggle between the modesty and shame laid down on her by society and the involuntary feelings announcing her sexual awakening. The six virgin rape scenes are described in much the same way; as brutal acts of violence with no consideration for the victim:
“I quickly felt him forcing his way into me, with a fury that caused me to scream with anguish. My petitions, supplications and tears were of no use. I was on the altar, and, butcher-like, he was determined to complete the sacrifice; indeed, my cries seemed only to excite him to the finishing of my ruin, and sucking my lips and breasts with fury, he unrelentingly rooted up all obstacles my virginity offered, tearing and cutting me to pieces, until the complete junction of our bodies announced that the whole of his terrible shaft was buried within me. I could bear the dreadful torment no longer: uttering a piercing cry I sank insensible in the arms of my cruel ravisher” (16-17).
There is no pretense that the woman enjoys the intercourse, rather, her suffering is important to the gratification of the man - Emily faints no less than three times from pain during her
20 defloration, and three times during the next rape scene as well. Nevertheless, all the rape stories of the book (except one) comes to the same conclusion: The young innocent girls eventually transform into happy submissive sex addicts after the initial painful removal of their maidenheads which is accompanied by the nullification of the force of social conventions that dictates a girl to be virtuous and modest, and the eradication of their feelings of pride and bashfulness. Ali explains the philosophy in the following manner: “Rid them of their virginity, enjoy them properly, and it is wonderful to observe the rapidity with which the seed of pleasure will thrive and yield a rich harvest to the happy cultivator” (96). The loss of maidenhead is a necessary rite, a sacrifice a girl must make, or be forced to make, to become a woman able to take part in the delights of sex. By a sudden act of violence - a battle imagined as the storming of a fortress - the girls must be set free from that which restricts the expression of their sexual nature. No attempt is made to rationalize why the initiation of the virgin into the realm of sexuality needs to be so traumatically painful or why their suffering so excites the rapists. Though Ali has access to anesthetics, he seldom chooses to lessen the pain of his victims. It is clear that the titillation is effected by the detailed description of the struggle, pain, and tears of the victims that make it possible for the reader to gloat in the suffering the girls. The sadist element is best expressed in the rape of Eliza. Eliza is Emily’s maid who was also kidnapped and presented to the Dey, but who the Dey chose to send to the Bey of Tunis. The Bey has Eliza strapped down, flogged until her blood flows, and finally he brutally rapes her. The Bey professes that “There is nothing on earth so much enhances the joy with me as to know the object that affords me the pleasure detests me, but cannot help from satisfying my desires - her tears and looks of anguish are sources of unutterable joy to me!” (61). Eliza is the only virgin who remains indignant, so much so that she attempts to assassinate the Bey. To accomplice this, she makes use of female deception: “In the midst of my joys she clasped me in her arms, returning my kisses as ardently as they were given, and appearing to receive as much ecstatic pleasure as she herself gave. But it was all deceit, to lull me to my destruction” (64). As we will see repeatedly throughout this thesis, the rapists of Victorian pornography invariably see himself as the victor in the moment that the women experience sexual pleasure in spite of themselves. The visual evidence of the woman’s orgasm is a sign that she has been transformed, or rather, that she has been tamed, and that there is no longer reason to fear the indignation that was her initial reaction to the violence. The Lustful Turk is an interesting instance because it openly acknowledges the anxiety arising from women’s ability to fraudulently give the impression of experiencing sexual pleasure. In all cases other than that of Eliza, the pain and torment is forgotten and forgiven when the girls, now free of any pretension to virtue and with their sexual organs prepared, experience a new world of excessive bliss:
21 “Being entirely relieved of pain, I swam in the sea of thrilling delight and enjoyment only known to the young maids just released from the pangs of expiring virginity. With these all my pains and fears vanished, together with the remains of my virgin bashfulness, the only thing that could throw any obstacle in the way of this luxurious novelty which so ravishingly filled my soul with ecstasy and astonishment” (22).
Resigned to their status as sex slaves, the girls are not only content but feel blessed with their lot. Now begins a time of apprenticeship, where the man educates the ignorant women in the techniques of sex (for the most part) increasing their pleasure. The sexual pleasure is an epiphany that wholly converts them and makes them think they have found the true meaning of their existence, and this turns them against their former beliefs in proper female behavior:
“I could not help smiling at my ignorance when I considered the ridiculous airs I had assumed (...) about my chastity. The Dey, indeed, had soon discovered my folly, and like a man of sense, took the proper method to subdue me. (...) he put to the rout all my pure modest virgin scruples, rapturously teaching me the nature of love's sacred mysteries, and the great end for which we poor weak females are created” (35).
In retrospect, the rape victims become rape apologists. The Dey’s sexual assertiveness is celebrated while the girls’ former gentlemanly lovers are ridiculed. One woman professes that “it would now be impossible for me to return to him with anything like satisfaction to myself, so firmly has the Dey fixed himself in my affections” (36). The main actor in this transformation of the girls is the penis, the all-powerful, magical creator of whores. In pornography, the penis is a divine object of worship, its sperm is the giver of vitality, and ejaculation into the womb of a woman almost surely will make her climax. The penis of the Dey is euphemistically described as “this wonderful instrument of nature - this terror of virgins, but delight of women” (22). In every Victorian novel, the penis is always of enormous proportions, always erect, hard as iron, and ready to ravish a maid again and again. It is a weapon that “rends, wounds, tears, and is capable of killing the object it attacks”, writes Steven Marcus.71 This is especially obvious in the defloration scenes in The Lustful Turk, which are variously describes as sacrifice, butchering, and murder: "stay your cruel thrusts, you murder me!" (98), cries Sylvia. But the power of the penis does not stop at its destructive qualities, it is equally a “magical instrument of infinite powers”, writes
71 Marcus, The Other Victorians, p. 212.
22 Marcus.72 In destroying the virgin, it creates a whore, a woman who is always ready to receive the penis. It has an almost mystical power over women: “Without knowing what it was, every throb created in me a tremor unaccountable” (11) writes Emily while she is still in her virgin state. The virgin feels the attraction of the penis in a mixture of horror and delight as if she anticipates the awakening of her sexuality by means of this instrument. When she has become intimate with the penis, the mere sight of it makes her throw herself on her back and spread her thighs ready to be rammed (87). It is this immense overestimation of the powers of the penis that is Marcus’ main reason for maintaining that pornography is made for men by men.73 Another way in which the male point of view and the catering to male desire become apparent in the novel is the struggle between what is imagined as male sexual desire in opposition to female sexual desire. The male fantasy at work in the novel is that of conquest. In the oriental harem, virgins are plentiful, and the man can forever repeat the ritual of molding a proud, virtuous and stunningly beautiful girl into a submissive sexual object. In his embrace, she is happy with her fate, but the discrepancy arises when he tires of her and lets his attention wander toward the next beautiful virgin. The desire of the women is imagined to be the dream of exclusivity known from romance, a dream that is suggested in this novel but ultimately disappointed. The heroine Emily, we are told, is especially beautiful, and, on her introduction into the Dey’s harem, she becomes his preferred sex toy. Female rivalry is introduced: “Her transports went like daggers to my heart” (40) and “I hated her in my heart for robbing me of that which was dear to me” (86) are the sentiments of Emily when other courtesans assume her position as favorite. Unlike Richardson's Pamela, Emily does not succeed in changing the Dey from his libertine ways, she is not able to install in him a purer kind of love and secure his eternal devotion - for this is porn, not romance. It has often been observed that love is subject to the problem of time - erotic love is powerful and wonderful but it will always come to an end before long.74 Sexual desire is even more vulnerable to the passing of time. Steven Marcus points out that pornography is repetitive to the point of becoming formulaic and ritualistic75: “The impulse or compulsion to repeat, to repeat endlessly, is one of pornography’s most striking qualities”, he writes.76 The ideal pornotopian narrative would go on forever, for there is no end to sexual desire. But
72 Ibid. 73 Ibid, p. 213. 74 Erotic love is often defined as a lack in western tradition. To obtain the object of desire, in this perspective, implies the end of desire. Accordingly, Denis de Rougemont‘s in Love in the Western World (1939) observes that great love stories, such as Romeo and Juliet, always insert obstructions to the happy consumption of the lovers’ love in order to keep the love alive. As far back as classical philosophy, erotic love has been seen as fleeting. In Symposium, Socrates describes Eros as a homeless person who is always on his way somewhere else. 75 Marcus, The Other Victorians, p. 213. 76 Ibid, p. 279.
23 though the pornotopian novel strives for eternal repetition of sexual pleasure, this never involves the same sexual partner for long. This is also the case in The Lustful Turk, where male desire represented as a succession of conquests of different women triumphs over what is perceived as female sentimentality. Every novel must necessarily come to a close, and pornography only closes reluctantly. The Lustful Turk clearly exhibits the desire to go on and on; after six interchangeable stories about the defloration of six more or less interchangeable virgins, the story ends abruptly with the violent castration of the Dey:
“The Dey had received a Greek girl from one of his captains. She passively submitted to his embraces, and uttered no complaint until he commenced the attack upon her second maidenhead; then did she seem inspired with the strength of a Hercules. She suddenly seized a knife, which she had concealed under a cushion, grasped his pinnacle of strength, and in less than a thought drew the knife across it and severed it from his body, she then plunged it into her own heart and expired immediately” (110).
As such, desire comes to an abrupt end. With no further use for his courtesans they are all set free. The repetition of the sexual scenarios themselves suggested no conclusion but projected the continuation of the story endlessly into the future. In terms of narrative logic, the removal of the penis therefore seems like a crude fabrication included to disrupt the suggested course of events. The ending also brings the insistence on male sexual all-powerfulness into doubt. The ending contradicts what has been preached in the novel to this point, that male aggressive sexuality must subdue the woman to his desire, and that she is better off that way. First, the male protagonist is castrated. The Dey’s penis, his divine destructive and creative power, is literally chopped off. Next, in an act which evokes the whole Freudian arsenal of tools of symbolic interpretation, the Dey preserves his penis and testicles in a jar and presents them to Emily and Sylvia as a farewell gift. Now, from having been sexual objects subjugated to the Dey’s total power, the two women become dangerous sexual predators. Sylvia, we are told, “afterwards married a baronet, who lost his charge before he effected his entrance, so well did she play the prude” (111). The novel lets her succeed in duping men with female artifice. Emily forgets everything about Henry, her former gentle and devoted lover who was on the verge of death from the sorrow of losing her. Her sexual education has taught her to demand the same godlike sexual prowess from prospective husbands as the Dey exhibited:
24 “I will never marry until I am assured that the chosen one possesses sufficient charm and weight not only to erase the Dey's impression from my heart, but also from a more sensitive part. I have a young willing maid who possesses wiles enough to catch any man, and sufficient experience to answer my purpose; out of ten suitors, seven have passed through her ordeal and been found wanting. My hopes at present are centred on an Irish earl, who I have a presentiment will be found worthy of acceptance” (110).
A pornotopian happy ending is supposed to demonstrate the beneficial effects of male sexual domination on the lives of women. In this case, the women have obviously prospered. Their sexual education has taught them to know what they want and how to get it. However, it is curious that this conclusion contradicts the otherwise pervading celebration of assertive masculinity that does not let itself be duped by female pretenses to modesty and pride. Thus, the novel comes full circle. The difference is that the women no longer only make presumptions to pride and power but actually gain the power to deny men the access to their bodies. ‘Gentlemen’ are ridiculed by the novel and represented as doomed in the face of the unbridled sexuality of these femmes fatales. With the gift from the Dey, they are now the owners of the phallus, the symbol of power and in the context of pornography specifically power in the shape of masculine sexual agency and aggression. They know the game too well to submit to anyone but the most masculine of men: Inevitably, seven out of ten must fall short. The final conclusion to be drawn from the attitude to female sexuality in this novel must be that all kinds of men are in danger from all kinds of women. Even the most aggressive man in the novel, the Bey of Tunis, was all but killed by female pretenses. More fatal still (according to the sexualized worldview of pornography) is the loss of the penis suffered by the Dey at the hand of a deceitful virgin with a hidden knife and a hidden resentment. The immense sexual prowess of these men could not, after all its remonstrances to the contrary, thoroughly subdue the virgin. The anxiety is directed towards the impenetrable mind of the female: Even in her apparent raptures of pleasure she could be faking. More disturbing still, even the women who feel pleasure in spite of themselves, have secrets. The Dey, already before his castration, suspects that his orgasming slaves are still not truly content: “even in the height of our ecstasies, a cloud seems to hang on her beauteous countenance, clearly indicating that it is nature, not love, that creates her transport” (4). His power comes to a stop: It may be able to force pleasure in the resisting woman, but it cannot force love. It shall be one of the main points in this thesis that the desire to disrobe, gaze at and interpret visual evidence on the surface of the woman’s body is an expression of the desire of the man to ease the anxiety that arises from the woman’s Otherness. In The Lustful Turk, the anxiety arises from the suspicion that even when she
25 seems to have resigned to the embraces of the man, he still does not know her and still does not have total power over her. Secretly, she could be brooding on a revolt. Female sexuality, experienced or inexperienced, is dangerous, something that is ready to take away the power of man.
Raped on the Railway The Victorian pornographic novel, Raped On The Railway, bears the subtitle, A True Story Of A Lady Who Was First Ravished And Then Chastised On The Scotch Express. The author is anonymous, but it was published by the well known Victorian publisher of pornographic books, Charles Carrington in 1894. It concerns the beautiful and elegant soldier’s wife Mrs. Sinclair, who finds herself alone in a train compartment with a stranger, Robert Brandon, who becomes attracted to her and rapes her. The act is discovered by the brother-in-law of Mrs. Sinclair, who perceives her decision to keep the rape a secret to avoid scandal as evidence that she consented. He revenges the cuckolding of his brother by having her severely flogged. The brother-in-law is aroused by the whipping, and he therefore later attempts but fails to rape Mrs. Sinclair in her home. In a subplot, Brandon catches his wife, Maud, on the verge of committing adultery. He punishes her with flagellation which reawakens her desire for him to the point where she desires him more than he desires her. She is diagnosed as a nymphomaniac and soon dies in child labor. Freed from commitment, Brandon enlists in the British army in Africa where he befriends Mr. Sinclair, who soon dies in battle. The novel ends with the rejoining of the two protagonists, Brandon and Mrs. Sinclair, and it is hinted that they will live happily together in a sexually fulfilling relationship.
In this novel, rape is explicitly and, it seems, sincerely endorsed: “To get a strong- bodied wench, in the prime of health, down on her back, and triumph over her virtue, in spite of all her struggles, is to my mind the height of delightful existence, the sum of all human ambition”, the narrator, ‘a doctor and a man of the world’, states. He uses his qualifications as a man of science and experience to maintain what has been insisted in (almost) every single rape narrative in Victorian pornography, that rape not only benefits the man, but the victim of the rape alike: “To her, the friction, contact and embraces of man, flesh to flesh close-locked and intertwined, is as much a necessity as eating and drinking, and sleeping and breathing. Many women cannot be made to appreciate the philosophy until they have been violently taken against their will, and made to taste of the fruit for which they afterwards entertain such a passionate liking” (7). The moral is that there is always happy consequences to rape, both for the man and the woman.
26 The rape of Mrs. Sinclair is framed by the narrator as a game little different from the game of seduction, in which the woman is supposed to resist even in spite of herself and the man has won once he gains possession over the woman’s body. To attempt the seduction with every resource available is a matter of masculine pride. ““I should be a great fool to go on acting like a timid school-boy. I am certain that the lady would not fail to laugh at me to- morrow morning”” (12), Brandon muses before continuing his siege. The opinions, the perspective, and the gaze of the novel belong to the male. The narrator, following literary convention, claims to be a disinterested neutral observer of an action that has really taken place (7). His claim to being an invisible witness is already contradicted by the fact that he has access to the mental states of the characters, but more importantly he takes unequal part in the battle between the sexes by prioritizing the point of view of Brandon. This comes about in the objectification and eroticization of Mrs. Sinclair. “There was at the extreme end in the far corner, with her back to the engine, a lady, wrapped up in furs and travelling wraps, and whose face was completely hidden behind a thick veil” (9). This initial description of Mrs. Sinclair shows that she has no interest in others, on the contrary she sits by herself, minds her own business, and tries to fall asleep. Nevertheless, every last thing about her is seen as an expression of her participation in the game. Brandon is obsessed with uncovering the mystery that is Mrs. Sinclair, wanting to expose her face and body and to know her carnally as well. The eroticization of Mrs. Sinclair is evidently a projection of male desire: She has bright eyes with “long eyelashes which served to intensify the sudden glances which were shot from behind them”, her clothes show off “her figure to perfection”, her hat is coquettish, her lips “not only eminently kissable, but would return a kiss with interest”, and her tone of voice is seductive77. The point of view is further evidenced in the focus on the woman’s body, the possession of which is partly attained by uncovering it: “He brought to view two small but beautifully round breasts, just showing their little pink nipples above the corset which confined them … He saw before his entranced eyes, now gleaming with lust, a forest of golden brown curly hair which extended, in a triangular shape from the line where the thighs join the body, all over the lower part of the belly. At the apex of this triangle, there peered through a thicker and curlier tuft of hair the pouting red lips of a pretty and very tempting looking abode of love” (30).
The obsession of the male gaze with the female body comes across particularly strongly in the sections narrated by a neutral observer, but also, surprisingly, in the few sections which are supposedly focalized through Mrs. Sinclair herself: “She took off her shoes and stood in all the naked beauty of her glorious womanhood” (42).
77 The portrait of Mrs. Sinclair is found on p. 11.
27 The sexual pleasure associated with looking at others was already described by Sigmund Freud as scopophilia, a phenomenon first seen in the natural inquisitive activity of children centered on seeing other people’s genitals and bodily functions.78 Feminist scholars have later argued that the desire to look is largely an activity employed by men on the bodies of women. As such, Laura Mulvey reads a patriarchal episteme of looking at women into the basic structure of the cinematic tradition, while the feminist philosopher, Andrea Braidotti, centers her critique of the privilege given to the visual regime on the dominance and violence involved in the activity of looking.79 In a later chapter, I will return to these theories of the gaze in an attempt to make sense of the male desire to let the gaze linger and slowly glide over the female body. In Raped on the Railway we see a silencing of the female perspective and the reduction of the woman through the male gaze to an eroticized body, an object to demystify, possess, and in the last instance to commit violence upon. But though Mrs. Sinclair is merely considered an object, the question of whether or not she liked it is of utmost importance. The narrator insists that women “have been unable in the majority of cases even when taken by force, to avoid sharing the fierce joy of the orgasm thereby produced” (29), and, against all the evidence to the contrary, the narrator insists that she experienced “pleasure in the ravishment even against her own will” (38). This is a surprising proclamation since the reader has witnessed Brandon’s unreliable interpretation of Mrs. Sinclair, and since she was evidently an unwilling victim of rape. She fought, screamed, bit, and cried all the way through the rape, and she was badly hurt from the violent acts committed against her. Furthermore, she never gave any indication of pleasure, and indeed, she could hardly have experienced an orgasm from the one full thrust that Brandon managed to present her with before he ejaculated from over-excitement. However, when the point of view is finally handed over to Mrs. Sinclair she is painted as woman “of an ardent and amorous temperament” (32) sexually frustrated by her husband’s low libido and inadequate size. She would therefore have enjoyed Brandon's “huge member” (30) under other circumstances. Even though she is incapacitated from the beating, she herself comments ““I believe that cruel beating only made you more excited,” she went on, addressing her bower of bliss, “and that you would be glad if that big artist were to come in again now”” (42). Though this novel manages it very poorly, it is clear that it attempts to reconcile the use of force and violence with a paradoxical and abrupt insistence on the pleasure of the victim which goes contrary to everything which has previously been apparent in the text. And indeed, the sexual fantasy that relies equally on violent force, resistance, pleasure, and loving attachment is itself fundamentally contradictory. The pornographic text tries to resolve the problem posed by sadistic desire
78 Freud, Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, pp. 191-192. 79 Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” (1975); and Braidotti, “Body-Images and the Pornography of Representation” (1991).
28 with a magic sexual wand. Steven Marcus insists that conflicts do not exist in the world of the pornotopia, and if they arise they are “instantly dispelled by the waving of the magic sexual wand”.80 Thus, psychological realism is dispensed with in pornography, and, indeed, Mrs. Sinclair has only fleeting physical bruises and no lingering psychological consequences but horniness from her experiences. Psychological trauma as a result of rape is not sexy. The novel explicitly recognizes that rape is a serious crime in the eyes of the law, it describes the brutality of the assault, and it acknowledges the existence of sexual double standards for men and women as there are serious social consequences of both rape and seduction for a woman. However, in accordance with the pornotopian intent, the novel simultaneously diminishes the seriousness of rape in every possible way and instead paints it as an amorous game. Brandon reportedly feels regret once his passion is satisfied, most of all because he fears the possible outcome of a rape trial, but the seriousness of his regret is countered by the apology:
It was not my fault; but you looked so beautiful as you lay in my arms that I could not resist the temptation. It was very wrong of me I own, but I was carried away by my love. It was your fault too, you know,” he continued. “What man could be alone with the prettiest and most lovable woman in the world and not burn to possess her? It was not possible that I should not love you”” (31)
In insisting that Mrs. Sinclair's irresistibility makes her responsible for her own violation, Brandon rehearses the well-known patriarchal idea that the woman is responsible for the desire she produces in the man. Mrs. Sinclair, in accordance with the findings of Carolyn Conley regarding the Victorian attitude towards the question of responsibility in rape cases, recognizes her fault regretting that she allowed Brandon to even speak to her. Following the male logic of the novel, Mrs. Sinclair is an artful temptress displaying her passionate nature in everything she is and does. With reference to The Mysteries of Verbena House in which it is stated that “the bigger the whore — professional or otherwise — the nicer will be the drawers she wears, while the prude, or the cantankerous old maid will either wear the most hideous breeches imaginable, or none at all” (39), even her silk drawers are seen as an outward sign of her promiscuity. Mrs. Sinclair forgives him, it is professed that she rather enjoyed the rape, and the crime is finally completely revoked in the eyes of the novel with the ending which hints that Mrs. Sinclair will live happily ever after in a sexually fulfilling relationship with Brandon. Mrs. Sinclair is the undisputed idealized object of desire of Raped on the Railway, and she remains so without falling in estimation throughout the novel. Brandon often thinks
80 Marcus, The Other Victorians, p. 281.
29 of her with longing when he is confronted with the vices of his wife. Maud Brandon is the despicable woman of the novel. She is a classic Shakespearean shrew in need of taming. She is beautiful, but unfaithful, ambitious, and frigid, but these deplorable features are exorcised from her with a vigorous spanking that (magically) rekindles her love for her husband. After Brandon’s display of masculine attributes, Maud becomes enamored to the point that her sexual appetite surpasses that of her husband. This the novel disapproves of. Maud is diagnosed as a nymphomaniac, a most wretched illness in the eyes of the novel: “Such cases, unfortunately, are not very rare, and there is nothing more sad, more heart- rending than to see woman a prey to the most hideous of maladies, carried away irresistibly, contrary to her will, fall lower in rank than a brute, and assist powerless at her own degradation” (50). Her hypersexuality makes her unendurable: “however amorous a man may be, he seldom likes to find that in his wife, though he may in his mistress” (49) the narrator comments. In the eyes of the novel, nymphomania is a pathology, a sickness unto death, and this is visible in Maud’s appearance: “She was untidily — almost shabbily — dressed (…) but it was in her face that he discerned the greatest change. Her eyes were sunken, and glittered with a strange brilliancy, and her face was preternaturally pale, with a red patch over each cheek-bone” (49). Only a short time elapses before Maud opportunely dies in childbirth, and Brandon is free to pursue Mrs. Sinclair. Paradoxically, while celebrating female promiscuity, as seen in the many cases where the female is freed from her sexually suppressing sense of propriety, the promiscuous woman is simultaneously a source of serious discomfiture in Victorian pornography. As objects of desire, Mrs. Sinclair is superior to Maud because of her coy, feminine modesty. In contrast to Maud, Mrs. Sinclair never becomes too sexually forthcoming. The nymphomaniac disrupts the preconceived division of women as passive, vainly resisting, and (importantly) initially frigid objects of desire and men as actors, holders of the gaze, and possessors of sexual libido. The idea of forcing a woman who feels pleasure in spite of herself is essential to titillation, but with the nymphomaniac this fantasy becomes void. It could be argued that this is true for all sexually liberated women in pornography, and indeed they very are difficult to distinguish from the nymphomaniac. However, the nymphomaniac is further despicable because she, like the women of The Lustful Turk who symbolically and literally castrated the man, poses a threat of castration by bringing into doubt man's sexual prowess: To the nymphomaniac, the male libido will always fall short. When compared to the trajectory of the sexual transformation of the women in The Lustful Turk and of Maud, it becomes clear that Mrs. Sinclair can be seen as continually desirable because her sexual transformation has not yet reached its conclusion. The effects of Mrs. Sinclair’s sexual reawakening and the end of desire that follows is hidden behind the veil of the happy ending. In marriage, the continuation of force and resistance is not a viable option.
30 The Way of a Man with a Maid The Way of a Man with a Maid is a pornographic novel featuring no less than five instances of rape. The author of the story is anonymous, and little is known about the publication though circumstances suggest that it was first published in Liverpool by H. W. Pickle & Co in 1908.81 The first of the two volumes features a detailed story of the vengeance rape of the beautiful, modest virgin, Alice, who has slighted the protagonist, Jack, by unfeelingly rejecting his marriage proposal. In the course of eleven chapters, it is described how Jack retaliates by capturing Alice in his soundproof torture chamber where he patiently subjects her to a wide range of humiliations including groping, undressing, tickling, whipping, and forcing her to orgasms through cunnilingus and anal rape. Finally, he reaches the peak of his revenge by taking her maidenhead. Each new attack constitutes a new peak in the distress of the victim, who pleads, laments, and resists throughout all of his endeavors. During her subjugation, Alice experiences the awakening of her sexual nature and she finally becomes Jack’s willing lover. Together they carry out the disciplinary correction of Alice’s disrespectful maid, Fanny, who is subjected to similar sexual assaults, and the result is that Fanny becomes a docile servant and willing lover of the two sexual aggressors. The next victim is Alice’s friend, Connie, who is the object of Alice’s unrequited sexual desires. Jack, Alice, and Fanny carry out a scheme to convert Connie to lesbianism, and she becomes a willing member of the small hedonistic society. The last victims of the story are Lady Betty and her daughter Molly who Jack and his sexual partners despise. They undergo the same kind of sexual subjugation and are furthermore forced to engage in incestuous relations in front of the gloating party before they are finally sent away.
The result of the rape, as in the other rape stories discussed, is that Alice feels pleasure in spite of herself, orgasming again and again, and her sexual nature is awakened for good. I will not go into details since the description of her rape and sexual awakening is very much in the vein of the previous stories. Having regained her freedom, some days pass before Alice forgives Jack for his brutal treatment of her and becomes his regular sex partner, and thus the violence is excused. As we have already seen in the two preceding novels the Shakespearean “taming of the screw” narrative is common in rape porn. On finding herself restricted in Jack’s contraption, Alice is at first indignant at the treatment she is subjected to. “Alice stamped her little foot in her rage: “How dare you speak to me in this way?” she demanded furiously” (I:II). In the course of the story, however, Alice is tamed and freed of her haughty pretensions. As seen in the other rape stories, unwillingness is a prerequisite for enjoyment. Jack’s pleasure is less dependent on satisfying his immediate physical desire than maintaining a position of power over an unwilling victim. He demands promises of compliance from her, but in reality
81 Scheiner, The Essential Guide to Erotic Literature, Part One: Before 1920, pp. 326-9.
31 he prefers her resistance: “I should practically be flogging a dead horse” (I:X), he complains after having succeeded in taming her and contemplates how to make her continue to object to his treatment of her. Since the novel caters to a sadistic sentiment centered on the opposition of the victim, little time passes before the lovers are looking for a new woman to torture and humiliate.
On top of the conventional rape narratives, some new ideas are presented that can add to our understanding of the Victorian attitude towards female sexuality. The sexual transformation occurring in the three women upon their sexual awakening is interestingly imagined as masculinization. They prefer Jack, the ‘fortunate individual’ they can thank for awakening their sexuality, to anyone else, and they continually seek him out for sexual gratification. However, among themselves, they engage in lesbian sex. The bisexual tendency is especially prevalent in Alice. In the following scene, Alice’s maid, Fanny, is tied down and forced to be the instrument of satisfying Alice’s sexual desires:
“A hurricane of sexual rage seemed to seize Alice! Her bottom wildly oscillated and gyrated with confused jerks, thrusts, and shoves as she frenziedly pressed her cunt against Fanny's with a rapid jogging motion: suddenly Alice seemed to stiffen and become almost rigid, her arms gripped Fanny more tightly than ever, her head fell forward on Fanny's shoulder as an indescribable spasm thrilled through her, followed by convulsive vibrations and tremors!” (II:III).
Victorian pornography invariably imagines lesbian sex as tribadism; an imitation of the heterosexual missionary position. Many other aspects of female sexuality are likewise conceived as male analogues such as the ease with which women archive orgasms, and the representation of these orgasms as always accompanied by ejaculations. This betrays both a lack of knowledge about female anatomy and a decided male-centrism involved in the ‘utopianization’ of the sexual encounters. The male experience is always the default in Victorian pornography. The transformation of Alice into an active, sexual agent is informed by the masculine perspective. A central aspect of the traditional notion of gender difference, a notion often seen in the writings of Freud and everywhere present in Victorian pornography as well, is that initiative and the sadistic sentiment are features of masculinity whereas femininity is equated with a passive and masochistic attitude. Alice in her lesbianism takes what Freud would call a ‘masculine attitude’ towards her own sex; she becomes a predator taking pleasure in seducing, subjecting, and humiliating other women: “into her eyes came the Sadique glint” (II:V), Jack notices when they contemplate the subjugation of yet another woman.
32 Though the novel is fascinated with the spectacle of lesbianism and the urges of the sexually liberated, Sadian woman, the power of the man over the woman is maintained. In the middle of these lesbian orgies, Jack remains the central character. As the narrator and the holder of the gaze, the point of view is his, but he is furthermore placed in the center of the action as the orchestrator of one lesbian tableau after another to the gratification of the implied male reader as well as his own voyeuristic desire. As a benevolent despot, he proposes the schemes and minutely directs the actions of his three devoted female pupils who idolize him: “"Jack, you're a genius!" ejaculated Alice admiringly” (II:V). Most importantly, the penis remains the preferred instrument of pleasure. When Fanny is first raped by Alice and then by Jack, the question is raised which ‘fuck’ she liked best. Fanny’s orgasms are indiscriminately described with hyperboles such as “the most exquisite bliss” (II:III) and “quivering ecstatically under heavenly sensations” (II:III) in both the lesbian and heterosexual scenes, but upon being questioned by Alice she admits that she prefers the penis: “she never felt anything so delicious as her sensations when in your arms, after you had got into her!” (II:IV), Alice discloses to Jack. The victory of heterosexual coitus over lesbian sex is well-known theme in the pornographic tradition. In Cleland’s classic Fanny Hill, the heroine, upon witnessing coitus for the first time, decides that she wants “more solid food”: “[I] promis'd tacitly to myself that I would not be put off much longer with this foolery from woman to woman”82. A similar sentiment is seen in The Way of a Man with a Maid where Jack has no reason for jealousy since the lesbian desire never threatens to undermine the importance of the man. The lesbian tableaus are indisputably secondary: They function as titillating spectacles for Jack who becomes aroused and is brought into the action to bring the scene to its climax with his rampant, weapon-like penis. In Victorian pornography, lesbianism is a sideshow spectacle introduced for the visual gratification of men which, before anything else, must never threaten the perception of the penis as the organ of primary importance.
The Way of a Man with A Maid, more than any of the two former novels, indulges the desire to look. Jack lingers over the description of Alice’s body as he slowly undresses it to a steady stream of cries and lamentations from the victim. In order to grasp the taboo-breaking and humiliating potential in disrobing a woman against her will, it is important to understand that nakedness was highly disturbing to the Victorians. In Raped on the Railway, the narrator comments that Brandon “Like most English husbands (...) had never seen his wife naked”83. In the Victorian era, it was common for married couples to sleep side by side and even to have intercourse wearing their chemises: “complete undressing for copulation appears to
82 Cleland, Fanny Hill, p. 24. 83 Raped on the Railway, p. 20.
33 have been the ultimate in naughtiness”84. Part of the torture of Alice consists in forcing her to witness her own forced undressing and the handling of her naked body in a mirror. Jack is the ultimate voyeur having furnished his torture chamber with peeping holes and minutely surveying the spectacle of the female body at every step in the undressing: “I pushed the armchair in front of her, and then settled myself down to a systematic and critical inspection of Alice's naked self!” (I:III). His narration is strewn with observations about the visual evidence of the emotions of his victims. He is especially attentive to their sexual experiences which is evident in their faces as blushes, on their bodies as quivering, in the appearance of their vaginas as emissions: “Bending over her, I closely inspected her cunt to ascertain whether she had or had not spent under the terrific tickling she had just received! I could find no traces whatever, but to make sure, I gently drew the lips apart and peered into the sweet coral cleft, but again saw no traces” (II:VII). The modest women turn their innocent eyes away from the indecent spectacle in deep blushes, the liberated women unreservedly indulge in visual pleasure. Alice yields to her newfound masculinized desire to look: “"I must! ... I must look at it!" she says as she “gently drew the lips apart and peered curiously into the shell-pink cavity of Connie's cunt, and after a prolonged inspection, she shifted her finger rather higher, again parted the lips and with rapt attention gazed at Connie's clitoris which was now beginning to show signs of sexual excitement” (II:VII).
The three favorites, Alice, Fanny, and Connie, as is evident from the descriptions above, are all equipped with delicious vaginas and beautiful bodies. The last scene of subjugation, however, features a despicable woman with “the biggest cunt I ever came across!" (II:VIII). Lady Betty is unlikable; she is “silly, affected, insincere, and unscrupulous”, and she offends Jack by persisting in attempting to make him marry her daughter. This is offered as the reason that Jack wants to humiliate and punish them both. Lady Betty is described as “a tall, robust, buxom woman of under forty, after the type of Ruben's fleshy females, but somewhat over-developed, and owed a good deal to her corseter” (II:VIII), and Molly, we are told, is a younger edition of her mother. Despite the dubious praise, Jack insists that Lady Betty is attractive, and he persists in this assertion even after the discovery of her, to say the least, deviant vagina:
“But what attracted all our eyes (even her daughter's) was the hair which grew over her cunt. I do not think I ever saw such an enormous tract. A dinner plate would not have covered it! It seemed to spring from somewhere between Lady Betty's legs; it clustered so thickly over the cunt itself that her crack was quite invisible. It extended all over her groin and abdomen and
84 Pearsall, The Worm in the Bud, 345.
34 reached her navel, closely curling and silky and fully two inches deep all over her Mount Venus! A simply wonderful sight!” (II:VIII).
Though the context is the praise of a woman who is “enough to provoke any man into concupiscence”, the description of this massive, disorienting labyrinth suggests disconcertion above all. Lady Betty’s vagina is of the dangerous kind that threatens to absorb the lover into its gaping deep like the earth or the sea. All preceding sex scenes were only celebratory in tone, but the present scene featuring Lady Betty and her daughter takes a grotesque turn, the humiliation becomes serious, and the disgust and distress they feel become believable. Tied down in a soixante- neuf position, Jack exhibits Lady Betty’s vagina to her daughter saying ”"Look, Molly, this is the first thing you came through!"” (II:XI) evoking the full force of the incestuous taboo they have been forced to transgress. In the other three cases, the victims felt humiliation but also newly awakened desire; in the incestuous scene, the victims experience true repugnance: “She yelled in agony, then slowly and with horrible repugnance, nerved herself to touch her mother's greasy and sticky cunt with her lips, nearly choking as her tongue slowly transferred the remains of my spend from her mother's gaping slit into her own mouth and down her throat!” (II:XI). In contrast, the sexual residue visible on the women in the former scenes are not ‘greasy’ or ‘sticky’, but euphemistically described as “tiny drops of love-dew” (II:III) and variations thereof, while Jack’s ejaculation is either a boiling balm, essence, tribute or love-juice. Furthermore the three favorites are never confronted with the remains of their own or Jack’s ejaculations but always allowed to clean themselves afterwards. With Lady Betty and her daughter it is different. Sex is no longer beautiful and delicious, but dirty, demeaning and excessively violent. "Suck me clean, Lady Betty!" I sternly repeated as I sent cut after cut on her wriggling plunging backside till she could no longer endure the pain, and half-hysterically raised her head and opened her mouth. Instantly I ceased the flagellation and popped my humid prick between her unwilling lips, which closed softly but reluctantly on it as a look of intense repulsion passed over her agonized face!” (II:XI). Lady Betty and her daughter are not included in the happy group of lovers afterwards, but are set free after their obnoxiousness is thoroughly punished. What sets the mother and daughter apart from the other three, one must ask? The women are all similar in so far as all need behavioral correction, and all of them are attractive - or so the novel insists. Why then does the novel depart from its pornotopian tendency and refuse to include mother and daughter into the secret sexual society of happy sexual actors like the rest of the women? The possibility of usurpation suggested in the masculinization of the sexualities of the three favorites is wholly held in check by the undisputed power of Jack, and their active and sadistic tendencies therefore never become disturbing but remains arousing in the eyes
35 of the novel. However, the motherhood of Lady Betty is problematic. I would suggest that the novel contradicts its true attitude when it celebrates Lady Betty’s attractions, for in reality it finds her status as mother, and the foreshadowing of motherhood represented in Molly, who is a virgin mirror image of Lady Betty, most disturbing. According to Simone de Beauvoir, motherhood has been the most frightening of all the female mysteries throughout the history of patriarchal society. In the chapter, “Unveiling the female mystery”, I will come back to this point. For now, let it suffice to mention that in Victorian pornography, the idea of pregnancy as a consequence of sex is eagerly repressed; either it is never mentioned, quickly glanced over, or represented as a problem easily dealt with: In The Lustful Turk, Emily spontaneously aborts her child when she hears that the Dey has been castrated, and in Raped on the Railway, Maud, the despicable nymphomaniac who the novel wants discharged, dies in childbirth. In the world view of Victorian pornography, the mother is yet another sexual deviant who must be punished and cast out.
36 3. Flagellation pornography Victorian pornography abounds with flagellation. The theme was already popular in eighteenth-century England, where flagellation appears in both medical treatises as well as in titillating texts such as Fanny Hill (1749). It was, however, not until the 19th century that flagellation pornography developed into a separate genre with its own conventions: Most Victorian flagellation pornography focuses on the shape of the buttocks of the victim and how it reddens and bleeds while the victim fights, cries, and screams for mercy. It also shows great fascination with the instruments of punishment, and the reaction of the audience which in most cases amounts to gloating and arousal.85 Flagellation was so widespread a phenomenon in Victorian England that it became known abroad as “The English Vice”.86 In the sex industry, flagellation was a common request of men for whom spanking worked as an aphrodisiac. The best known example of prostitution centered on flagellation is the case of Mrs. Theresa Berkley who ran an exclusive West End brothel in London, where she made use of her famous ‘Berkley horse’ for tying up and whipping her customers.87 Within Victorian pornography, flagellation was a popular subject, too. As we have already seen, scenes of flagellation have been present in each of the three novels studied here as rape porn. One of the dominating theories as to why flagellation was so popular in Victorian pornography, more so than ever before or after, attributes the eroticization of flagellation (including the public spectacle, the humiliation, and the pain that often accompanied it) to the fact that corporal punishment was a common experience for generations of schoolboys.88 Corporal punishment was frequently used in the army and in prison, but what affected most Victorians was the use of the rod in the English middle-class home and in public schools: "At the public schools the flogging of boys was an everyday practice which, along with other hallowed traditions, was felt to be essential to the development of the boy's character”89, writes Ian Gibson in his comprehensive study of what he terms the Victorian “flagellomania”. In the public schools, the disciplinary beatings were not only frequent, they were also public spectacles that offered voyeuristic pleasure to the audience90. Another but more disputed theory explains the phenomenon as an expression of repressed homosexual desire. A firm advocate of this psychoanalytic theory is Steven Marcus, who points to the fact that male homosexual sex was one of the most tabooed sexual activities in Victorian England, so much so that very little homosexual pornography
85 Coligan, “Anti-Abolition Writes Obscenity”, p. 69. 86 Pearsall, The Worm in the Bud, p. 336. 87 Ibid, p. 335. 88 “Flagellation became, for generations of schoolboys, a form of sexual pleasure” writes Pearsall, The Worm in the Bud, p. 328. 89 Ian Gibson, The English Vice, 1978, p. 70. Cited in Raymond L. Gard, The End of the Rod, p. xxiii. 90 Pearsall, The Worm in the Bud, p. 331.
37 was produced in this period. The abundant literature on flagellation can be seen as a distorted outlet for forbidden homoeroticism. Marcus refers to Sigmund Freud’s essay, “‘A Child is Being Beaten’” (1919), in which Freud investigates the origins of the masochistic and sadistic perversions. Freud argues that the beating fantasies are not a result of school discipline: They originate in his patients much earlier than the age where boys would start to attend public school, and indeed, that his patients only seldom suffered from the trauma of disciplinary beatings at all.91 Freud observes that the beating fantasies of his adult male patients were always masochistic. Masochism, according to Freud, is a result of a regression to the anal-sadistic stage where the sadism, instead of being directed towards an external object, turns against the ego itself92. The person having the fantasy is himself the object of chastisement, but instead of being traumatic the fantasy is accompanied with a high degree of pleasure and sexual stimulation. Further, Freud argues, the male beating fantasy is also homosexual: The fantasy has as its content a scene where a boy, who is identified with the person having the fantasy, is being beaten by his mother or a substitute for his mother. But this is merely an intricate guilt-derived distortion of a prior fantasy where the boy is beaten by his father, which in turn derives from the original fantasy of the boy being loved by his father93. This sexual fantasy originates in the Oedipus complex where the boy has taken the father as his object of incestuous love instead of the mother. “The boy evades his homosexuality by repressing and remodeling his unconscious phantasy”, writes Freud94. According to Steven Marcus, the homosexual and masochistic beating fantasy laid out by Freud is always to be found in Victorian flagellation pornography. He argues that the victim of the flogging, even if a girl, can always be interpreted as a boy, and the executioner, even if a woman, has so many male characteristics that she can be interpreted as male. “The fantasy is a homosexual one: a little boy is being beaten - that is, loved - by another man. And we must conclude, I believe, that the entire immense literature of flagellation produced during the Victorian period, along with the fantasies it embodied and the practices it depicted, represents a kind of last-ditch compromise with the defense against homosexuality”95. Without having read all Victorian narratives of flagellation, I am confident in contending that this categorical interpretation of all flagellation pornography in terms of one single narrative of repressed homosexual desire is too reductive and very ill-founded. It is true that some flagellation pornography has strong homoerotic undercurrents and can be seen as the displacement of a homosexual fantasy. For instance, gender identities are fluid
91 Freud, “‘A Child is being Beaten’”, pp. 179-180. 92 Ibid, p. 194. 93 Ibid, p. 198. 94 Ibid, p. 199. 95 Marcus, The Other Victorians, p. 260.
38 in the pornographic novel, Frank & I (1902), in which the homeless boy, “Frank”, is taken in by a rich, young bachelor. During a disciplinary punishment it is revealed that Frank is really a girl, and they eventually become lovers. Another example that would fit Marcus’ interpretation is the Victorian pornography novel Gynecocracy (1893) where the male protagonist is continually humiliated and flagellated by authoritative governance and forced to wear girls’ clothes. However, most other works on flagellation clearly display heterosexual desire and unmuddled, conventional gender identities. As we shall see, this is the case in for instance Experimental Lecture and The Memoirs of Dolly Morton. In this thesis, I have restricted my selection of flagellation literature to include only works of pornography that have female sexuality at their center of attention. These works neither show homoerotic tendencies, nor can they be characterized as masochistic, but rather as sadistic. There are a few token scenes of flagellation with willing victims to whom flogging serves as an aphrodisiac or is professed to give pleasurable sensations, but the sexual energy is invested in the fantasy of male power over a distinctly female body in scenes where modest women are tortured, entirely subdued, and where all-powerful men are gloating in their suffering and humiliation. As Gilles Deleuze asserts, “a genuine sadist could never tolerate a masochistic victim”.96 This was unequivocally true in the rape narratives studied in the previous chapter, where it was clear that willing victims have no attraction and where male sexuality is depicted as conquest, domination, and sadistic desire. There is, certainly, abundant Victorian pornographic literature where, to use the expression of Steven Marcus, “everyone is always ready for anything”97; where the pornotopian element is far more pronounced in that the sexual spectacle consists in (semi-)consensual sexual frolicking where the pain felt by the woman is not sought for its own sake. However, I have yet to come across a Victorian work of pornography that approaches Marcus’ pornotopia in being entirely free of violence and force.98 The pattern holds true for the works on flagellation of female victims in the following chapter; here the sexual fantasies are greatly concerned with dissent and pain.
Experimental Lecture Experimental Lecture is a pornographic novel published in 1878 under the pseudonym “Colonel Spanker”. Like Raped on the Railway and The Memoirs of Dolly Morton, it was published by Charles Carrington, who was the most prominent publisher of pornography in the late 19th century. The novel concerns a modest virgin of seventeen named Julia Ponsonby, who is abducted, stripped, fondled, humiliated, tortured, and 96 Deleuze, “Coldness and Cruelty”, p. 40. 97 Marcus, The Other Victorians, p. 273. 98 Even in the highly pornotopic novel, The Romance of Lust (1873-76), where the young male protagonist is indulging in sexual adventures with a wide range of willing women, sex sometimes produces pain in the female.
39 ultimately raped for the viewing pleasure of the ‘Society of Aristocratic Flagellants’. The novel has disturbed every scholar of Victorian pornography with its radical sadism. Henry Spencer Ashbee, in his bibliography, comments that “This book, which we can fairly assert is the most coldly cruel and unblushingly indecent of any we have ever read, stands entirely alone in the English language. It seems to be the wild dream, or rather nightmare, of some vicious, used-up, old rake, who, positively worn out, and his hide tanned and whipped to insensibility by diurnal flogging, has gone mad on the subject of beastly flagellation”.99 Similar reactions have been common in the 20th century with Ronald Pearsall calling Experimental Lecture “ultrasadistic”,100 and Peter Webb finding it “one of the most disturbing” books on flagellation.101 While physical cruelty is certainly prevalent, it is as much the emotions of distress displayed by the victim as she is subjected to a succession of indignities and tortures that constitute the titillatory spectacle. This focus on emotional degradation is suggested by the full title, which reads, On the exciting and voluptuous pleasures to be derived from crushing and humiliating the spirit of a beautiful and modest lady; as delivered by him in the assembly-room of the Society of Aristocratic Flagellants, Mayfair. The Society prefers “a pretty young lady with real blue blood in her veins, who had been brought up with every care and tenderness, and thoroughly imbued with every modest sensibility”102 to a willing and vulgar working-class prostitute. For only she, they theorize, is sufficiently proud and sensitive to exhibit the desired amount of indignation, horror, and disgust at being compelled to submit to all kinds of humiliations. Like other Victorian works of pornography, the body of the sexual object is minutely described in the usual terms: She possesses a beautiful plump bottom, heaving ivory globes, a luxurious growth of hair on her “grotto of love”, pouting coral lips etc. Apart from the fixation on her bottom, which is spanked to a pulp in the course of the story, it is Julia’s ever-blushing shame-filled face bearing witness to her distress that is the focus of attention. “Oh! Heavens! What an accumulation of fearful shame and pain!” She goes on sobbing while the tears roll continually down her crimson face” (467). The descriptions of her agony and shame are similar all the way to the end, only the violence that produces the reactions are increased in intensity. Ashbee rightly compares Experimental Lecture to the works of Marquis de Sade, for sadism is prevalent. This can be illustrated by one of the most gruesome scenes in the book: “Julia shrieks in agony, but not in time to avert two or three more cuts like the last, one of which makes her clitoris spurt with blood which was collected in the cellular tissue of that 99 Ashbee, Catena Librorum Tacendorum, p. 250-251. 100 Pearsall, The Worm in the Bud, p. 336. 101 Webb, “Victorian Erotica”, p. 104. 102 Experimental Lecture, location 29. The edition of Experimental Lecture here used is an ebook published by the Birchgrove Press which features no page numbers. I will refer to the text so that, for instance, location 29 is indicated in the following manner: (29).
40 excitable part, she shrieks out in excruciating agony: “Oh! Oh!! Oh!!! Kill me in mercy; let me die now! Ah-r-r-re!”” (1032). However, unlike many of de Sade’s writings, the Lecture does not end in murder, but in an unconvincing happy ending that reverses all wrongs. The last page of the book describes how the torture of Julia reaches its climax with forced defloration. I have chosen to cite the passage in length because it includes the abrupt happy ending, and it neatly exemplifies Julia’s emotional response and resistance as well as the way in which the audience gloats over her distress.
“The steed plunges on his impetuous course with a most painful thrust. Julia winces, and the sudden shock thoroughly awakens her to the outrage that is being attempted. She struggles to throw him off, but the ladies hold her down, encouraging his lordship to thrust home and make a woman of her, which he does with such effect as to split through the hymen and crash through every virgin obstacle to his progress; his victim gives a most piercing shriek and almost faints, but Miss Debrette putting her hand underneath applies some of the salt to her wounded clitoris and just inside the lips of her cunny so the poor girl almost springs with agony to the intense delight of her lover and his friends. He keeps himself well in hand and restrains his own ardor, whilst enjoying all the emotions of the horrified and agonized girl beneath him. The Colonel chaffs and jeers the victim on her lascivious motions, adding to the intensity of her profound disgust and humiliation. Julia screams, sighs, and tries in vain to screen her face from their sight; but her hands are pulled back that they may gloat over the picture of her misery. Miss Debrette seizes a birch and lays on his lordship's posteriors till she makes him start on the race of love with renewed fury. Julia's feelings too are no longer to be restrained, her bursting heat and the soothing effect of his motions carry her away in spite of herself; she swims in a heaven of delight, her screams and cries change to hysterical sobs of delirious joy, and she spends in ecstasy in response to the drenching shower of love which he shoots for the third time into her still insatiate womb. Every one is entranced with the delightful sight, till at last the Colonel announces that the curtain must fall upon this blissful conclusion to his lecture. Julia was really married to Lord Flashington as soon as possible, and became one of the most energetic members of the Society of Aristocratic Flagellants. FINIS” (1169).
The “disgrace and shame” (509) sticking to Julia from the ordeals she has been through are reversed according to the conventional manner in which the rape of a virgin has
41 traditionally been made right - by marriage. Already the law of the Old Testament prescribed marriage as the way for a man to reverse the wrong he has done a woman by raping her.103 Traditionally, not excluding Victorian times, rape has been a conceptual impossibility within marriage, and so, for a woman to enter into marriage with her rapist implies retroactive consent. To borrow the words of Frances Ferguson in her essay “Rape and the Rise of the Novel” (1987), “rape simply ceases to exist because it has been, by definition, absorbed into marriage”.104 This, too, is the case in Experimental Lecture, but here the pain, suffering, and humiliation experienced by the victim is additionally excused and reversed, first, by her deus ex machina-like orgasm and, second, by Julia’s conversion to the philosophy of flagellation. Pornography has a strong need to show that the female characters, who according to Ronald Pearsall are “brainless toys ever capable of being brought to heat by the brandishing of the penis”, are “up to any trick”.105 This need is postponed in novels where the titillation is mainly sadistic in nature. Accordingly, willingness and complicity have to be abruptly inserted in order to keep the novel from becoming a full blown horror story. After all, the novel insists, it wasn’t so bad. Like in Raped on the Railway, the happy ending of Experimental Lecture is an unconvincing attempt to reverse the excessive sadism displayed in the novel. Additionally, the novel attempts to lessen the brutality of the violence against the female victim by constructing both men and women as sexual aggressors. Where men are the sole administers of pain to mainly female victims in Marquis de Sade’s 120 Days of sodom, six women are eager spectators to the torture of Julia compared to only four men (218). This is a significant difference because it points to the fact that the novel is concerned with consolidating the culturally preconceived notion that women are naturally gentle and empathetic with the insistence that they can become abettors to sexual crimes and even active sexual aggressors. The men have no problem at any time witnessing the distress of the victim - their capability of enjoying this kind of entertainment is never questioned. The Colonel, however, have been forced to “educate the lady members” (30) to develop in them the sadistic sentiments that are so natural to the men, and he has succeeded to such a degree that the ladies “seem to evince even greater anxiety than the gentlemen” (61) to have Julia as their victim. In other words, female sexuality is masculinized. Julia at one point reaches out to the women, begging for their intervention: “Have you no pity, ladies? Are your hearts as cruel as these gentlemen’s? Look at these cuts and bruises Ah! Ah! Oh! Oh! What pleasure can you find in this torture?” (447). One woman protests against the severity of
103 “If a man find a damsel that is a virgin, which is not betrothed, and lay hold on her, and lie with her, and they be found; Then the man that lay with her shall give unto the damsel's father fifty shekels of silver, and she shall be his wife; because he hath humbled her, he may not put her away all his days” (Deuteronomy 22:28-29). King James Version. 104 Ferguson, “Rape and the Rise of the Novel”, p. 92. 105 Pearsall, The Worm in the Bud, p. 367-368.
42 torture but it is without effect, and the women invest themselves in the lecture until the end where they hold Julia down to be raped and delight in the spectacle of her agony. As already emphasized, sexual violence commonly serves as sexual education to women in porn. In this novel, the “lecture” not only teaches Julia about the sexual pleasure of intercourse, but also about the pleasure of administering pain. In another scheme to further ‘mortify Julia’s modesty’, the Colonel forces her to flog Miss Debrette, the lady flagellant who is the most enthusiastic about the torture of Julia. Miss Debrette is as much an unblushing masochist as she has shown herself to be a sadist. She “was so fond of flagellation she delighted in being whipped and excited by the rod till the skin was literally trashed of her bottom” (584). To her own embarrassment, Julia feels pleasure in the revenge: “Julia, blushing and crimson at what she is doing, yet seems to experience a thrilling sense of warmth and pleasure as each cut descends on the victims flesh (…) ”Ah! I can’t express myself…. but every strike gives me quite a strange pleasure…. I…. I…. I’ll kill you if you don’t apologise!” (569). Julia has now, initially in spite of herself, become a sexual aggressor. Women, the novel seems to insist, can learn to adopt sexual attitudes that have traditionally been reserved for men: They can learn to take pleasure in being both the happy receivers and administers of pain, in taking both the position of the sexually submissive and the dominant. While this is undoubtedly true in the lives of many women, in the context of Victorian pornography the juxtaposition of the demand that women are ever submissive to men in all things sexual while being simultaneously sexual aggressors becomes paradoxical. This was already clear in The Lustful Turk, where the virgins were molded into docile sex puppets and celebrated as such but ultimately turned into suspect sexual predators. In Experimental Lecture, Miss Debrette is the female pervert whose role it is to illustrate the point that women can be as vile as men. This role, however, sets her apart from the rest of the female company. Like the other women, the identity of Miss Debrette is hidden behind a costume, a mask, and a code name; but unlike the rest of the female spectators, Miss Debrette is often mentioned by name and has characteristics that set her apart from the rest of the group of ladies. However, this distinction does not serve her as a compliment as far as it sets her up as a contrast to the idealized heroine. Julia is a perfect object of desire: She is a fair-haired and white-skinned plump English virgin whose modesty and dissent make her the perfect victim. It is the expressed preference of the novel that the victim is modest and unwilling, and this favoritism is shown in the obsessive sexualization of Julia’s body and unwillingness. This is the more pronounced when contrasted with the novel’s indifference towards the ‘charms’ of the masochistic pervert. The exposure of Miss Debrette’s body is not described in detail, sexualized, or gloated over: “the victim being a very dark lady her exposed rump formed quite a contrast to that of Miss Ponsonby, she was of Spanish extraction and had a slightly olive tint as complexion of her skin" (542). Far from focusing on
43 the shape of her body, it is the racial otherness of Miss Debrette that attracts attention. Her exoticized body sets her masochistic hypersexual disposition apart as something deviant and perverted. It is with mixed feelings that pornographic novels allow women to become dominating figures. In Experimental Lecture, Julia is depicted as a proud woman who must learn submissiveness: She is an object of desire who must learn to adopt the attitude of an object. “Allow me to make her properly obedient” (405), says the Colonel to Julia’s future husband. He terms the flogging as a lecture in proper female manners: “Now, you hot tempered young lady, let me remind you that such pretty little feet were never made to kick with, only brutal men are allowed to do such vulgar things. Fie! Fie! Miss Ponsonby, where are your good manners?” (388). On the other hand, Julia is to enter into the society of flagellants where men and women are, at least in principle, equal. Like the other females of the society, she reaches this distinction only after having undergone an education. Julia is transformed from an innocent virgin to a sexual aggressor and dominatrix through the rite of defloration, submission, sexual awakening, and, if the pattern holds true from the previous pornographic stories, she will go through a stage of borderline nymphomania before being finally ostracized as a pervert. Her future is already preempted in the figure of Miss Debrette who serves not only as a curious interlude, but must be seen as an unpleasant apprehension of what Julia will become, or at least how she will come to be perceived when she is no longer a modest victim but “one of the most energetic members of the Society of Aristocratic Flagellants” (1200). In the world of Victorian pornography, it seems, the journey of female sexual development is doomed to end in despicability.
The Mysteries of Verbena House The Mysteries of Verbena House, as is usual in Victorian pornography, bears an alternative title indicated with an “or”: Miss Bellasis Birched for Thieving. The novel, thus, makes it no secret that this is a book on flagellation, and to be more precise, it is a book on female on female flagellation. Henry Spencer Ashbee’s index tells us that the novel was published privately in London in two parts in 1881 and 1882 under the pseudonym 'Etonensis', but that each part was written by different authors, whom Ashbee does not mention. The action takes place in a school for the daughters of well-to-do gentlemen and aristocrats. When a scandalous instance of thievery takes place in her school, the headmistress, Miss Sinclair, finds herself forced to take hard measures with the culprit. The event becomes a disciplinary as well as sexual revelation to the otherwise gentle and asexual woman. Flogging proves a beneficial method of correction with the additional effect
44 of sexually arousing the headmistress. Finally, the handsome Rev. Arthur Calvedon is introduced to satisfy the awakened desires of Miss Sinclair. In contrast to Experimental Lecture, The Mysteries of Verbena House focuses more on the executioner than on the victim. Of course, there is the compulsory descriptions of the victim’s buttocks; the “perfect posterior” that “[swells] out grandly, properly, and gradually from a sloping small of the back that would have satisfied a Grecian sculptor” (103) but turns into “a hideous mass of raw, gory flesh” (109). Miss Sinclair is the evident center of attention. She is described as a “fine, tall, shapely “maid-matron” (...) of about two-and-thirty” (10) who is “richly and voluptuously developed” (including “massive thighs” and a “fat cunt”, as well as an “immense bottom” (121, 125)). She has hazel eyes full of light, “lips of colour”, “‘dove- coloured’ brown hair”, “very small, white, plump, and yet firm-looking hands” (10), and a heaving bosom (95, 103). The generous attribution of adjectives such as “voluptuous”, “handsome”, and “luxurious” testifies to the fact that, despite her mature age, she is still perceived as desirable. There is little in her physical appearance to suggest the masculine properties that Marcus points to when he categorically interprets pornographic chastisers as men. It is revealed that Miss Sinclair has a past; that, in the words of the male narrator, she “had been heartily fucked when young, but had always hidden her irregularities under a cloak of outward respectability” (112). Again we see the idea reiterated that women are perpetually dishonest and hide their real thoughts, feelings, and, in fact, their whole beings from view. Miss Sinclair’s nature has been dormant for many years but reawakens during the chastisement of Miss Bellasis: “She enjoyed in anticipation the coming punishment, she thirsted for it, she wanted it; she must flog, she must cut up a bottom! She was doomed to excoriate bums, to weal posteriors for the remaining term of her life (...) The demon of the rod had got Miss Sinclair” (102, 110). The end of the novel concludes that the transformation of Miss Sinclair is complete and irrevocable, for not one of the fifty pupils avoids “correction” before the year is over. It is significant that the flagellation depicted in the plot is framed as disciplinary correction or education. In every instance the flogging has the most marvelous effect on the delinquent pupils. The girls never appear to enjoy being disciplined, on the contrary they scream and cry as their buttocks turn into a mass of blood-streaming weals. Rather, like Julia from Experimental Lecture, they benefit from the correction by becoming better, more submissive, women: “soon Verbena House became one of the best schools in Brighton, turning out the most obedient accomplished ladies possible, and transforming dirty, slovenly, lazy, dunces into stately maidens, who excited the admirations of all beholders as they filed down the Marine Parade, two by two, with smiling faces, albeit aching bottoms” (144). In the end, everyone is happy; Miss Sinclair, her lover, the girls’ parents, their “beholders”, and not
45 least the girls’ future husbands - Verbena House educates “bright-eyed obedient, sensible housewives” (144). I previously elaborated on the consistency with which Victorian pornography construes sadistic violence as a practice with ultimately happy consequences for all the parties involved in order to bring about titillation. Julia, in Experimental Lecture, was innocent of any crimes, but in the eyes of the novel her pride and insubordination to her fate was deeply felt as unladylike behavior that needed correction. In this novel, too, the greatest fault of these rich middle and upper class girls seems to be their haughtiness and obstinacy. ““I will not,”” cries Miss Bellasis, and stamps her foot (95), but after the correction her response has taken another tone: ““Oh! Miss Sinclair”, she said, in a humble tone, proving how her proud spirit had been crushed, (...) “I will be such a good girl in the future”” (127).
The role played by men in Victorian pornography consists, firstly, in that of voyeur, focalizer, or narrator. Secondarily, they act as sexual educators to the ignorant women, and thirdly they provide the magical penis. The Rev. Calvedon takes on all three of the roles in this novel, but his inclusion seems outright arbitrary to the narrative. In contrast to the other pornographic novels contemplated, the heroine in this novel does not need education. Her sexual reawakening and transformation into a lady flagellant is already set in motion when the Reverend is introduced to provide his input on corporal punishment. The novel, further, is on the verge of suggesting that Miss Sinclair is capable of producing her own orgasm: Not only is she turned on by whipping plump schoolgirls, she is very close to orgasming alone from this experience: “Miss Sinclair had very nearly spent, but she was not wholly pleased yet”. In fact, the possibility of self-fulfillment is more than suggested in the response of the French teacher to the flogging: “The sight of the bruised buttocks had simply caused a violent erection of a horny clitoris, followed by a copious emission” (106). However, in the case of Miss Sinclair, the Reverend is introduced to ease her excited state much like the role of Jack in The Way of a Man with a Maid. In other words, The Mysteries of Verbena House also insists that the penis is of primary importance. This anxiety about the primacy of the penis and the aversion towards the idea of women’s sexual self-fulfillment are further evidenced in the novel’s attitude towards female masturbation. One of the schoolgirls, Miss Hatherton, is found in possession of Cleland’s Fanny Hill, which she uses for the purpose of “self-abuse”. The description of her vagina makes it clear that female masturbation is a most vile thing in the eyes of the novel:
“Miss Sinclair (...) could easily see the Archdeacon’s daughter was a martyr of self-abuse. (...) The lips of her quim were slightly apart, a pouting clitoris could be easily seen, and all was too red and chafed for a young boarding-school Miss. (...) the big lips had been often played with and
46 distended by far the disciple of Onan, and very little of the hymen was apparently left. The red, staring orifice was far from being pretty to look at, and it is possible that a feeling of disgust on the part of Miss Sinclair caused her to ply the brush very freely” (139, 142)
Too much masturbation, this novel reasons, transforms a supposedly otherwise delicious little pink slit into a gaping monster with long lips and a darkened color showing off the interior of the vagina. These are quite curious consequences to propose considering that the genre otherwise never allows negative consequences to arise from sex. Pregnancies and venereal diseases are either ignored in pornography or seen as a problem to be easily solved. Along with the forced inclusion of men into the plot without support from the logic of the narrative as a whole, this leads me to suspect that the novel entertains strong uneasiness towards the notion of autonomous female sexuality. Another curious aspect, which we have already seen in many of the selected works, is the ambivalence toward female sexuality once awakened. The description of Miss Sinclair is very favorable before her sexual reawakening: Having pinned down Miss Sinclair on her back and exposed her body, the Reverend (in a strange fusion with the expressly male narrator) observes that “there was none of those signs of chafing that is often discernable on the inner sides of mature ladies’ thighs, but all was white and well tended. And there went up a sweet scent of under-linen that had been in lavender, mingled with that nameless faint marine perfume we all enjoy” (116). On the following day, however, the description of Miss Sinclair is less favorable: She has now become most unlady-like, on the verge of the grotesque, and is even compared to an animal. She is described as “reveling in the feeling of knowing that her fat cunt was “gluey,” sticky, perspiring, and strong smelling” (124). She inspects her vagina and finds it “caked with white flakes”, and as the grand finale, she finds her chamber pot and “rattle[s] out a stream like an old horse, enough to knock the bottom out of the pot” (125). Though the sight of a woman urinating was a popular sexual service at the time, the old-horse imagery deflates the idea that the urination of Miss Sinclair is meant to be a charming sight. The notion that women are defiled by sex is a common trope in Western society. Here, Miss Sinclair’s defilement is physical and concrete and not moralistic in tone, but it shares much with the absurd and vulgarized portrayals of the over-sexualized Miss Debrette, the nymphomaniac Maud Brandon, and the motherly Lady Betty. Scenes like these testify to pornography’s ill-hidden disgust with the sexuality of mature women, which translates into an ambivalence toward female sexuality in general.
47 The Memoirs of Dolly Morton The Memoirs of Dolly Morton plays out its flagellation narrative in the context of slavery in the Antebellum South. However, it is not an American but a Victorian pornographic novel written by a 'Hugues Rebell' and published in London in 1899 by the infamous British publisher of pornography, Charles Carrington. The story is about the eighteen-year-old orphan, Dolly Morton, who travels with her companion, the thirty year old Quaker spinster, Miss Ruth Dean, from New York City to Virginia with the intention of helping fugitive slaves flee to the North. Here she meets the rich plantation owner and libertine, Randolph. After having known each other for some time, Randolph tries but fails to rape Dolly. He vows to make her submit to him somehow and seeks to accomplish this by betraying Miss Dean and Dolly’s abolitionist activities to the white slave owners. The two women are punished for their offenses with whippings and by being made to ‘ride the rail’. They are saved from the last mentioned torture by Randolph on the condition that Dolly becomes his mistress, and Dolly moves in with him on his slaveholding estate. Here she gives up her maidenhead and is forced to gratify all his sexual desires until he eventually grows tired of her, after which Dolly becomes a high-end prostitute. During her time on the plantation, Dolly witnesses the violence against, sexual objectification of, and dehumanization of the female slaves.
Unlike the majority of the previous pornographic novels analyzed, this novel professes to be told from a female point of view, and, by comparison, this is fairly convincingly executed. In the frame narrative, Dolly tells her story to the male narrator. The male point of view is evident from the way it focuses on Dolly’s many sexual attractions and on the sexual encounters the narrator has with her. In contrast, Dolly’s own story is an unusual pornographic narrative since a long time passes before the first graphical sex scene is introduced. Another unconventional element worth mentioning is the fact that the whippings in this story only arouse the male executioners, never the female victim. In other regards, the narrative falls back into the usual pornographic tropes such as detailed focus on the sexualized female body, a focus which is hardly believable in a narrative of a heterosexual woman who professes that “a woman is not excited by seeing the nakedness of other women” (112). Another inconsistency pervading the novel is the male-centric idea that women invariably must orgasm upon receiving the manly discharge. What is more interesting, and what makes the female point of view more believable, is the fact that Dolly continuously resists the sexual domination of Randolph in important ways. Where every other woman screamed, cried, and fought with all her limited feminine might, Dolly lies flat on her back and lets Randolph torture her virgin body again and again. On the threat of whipping and lynching she is de facto a sexual slave forced to submit to her defloration without physically resisting his violence and forced without reproach she must satisfy Randolph’s immense sexual appetite however and whenever he wants. Nevertheless,
48 she remains emotionally free. In contrast to all the other girls who are raped, discover sexual bliss, and become emotionally attached to their rapists, Dolly is never broken in by the violence but continues to detest Randolph. She does find pleasure in the sexual encounters (“I squirmed and twisted myself about, wriggling my bottom in voluptuous ecstasy until all was over” (135)), but she never becomes a sex enthusiast (“I heartily wished that there was not such a thing as a male organ in the world” (187)), and she has nothing but contempt for him treating her like a ‘plaything’: “If only he would treat me more as a woman and less as a subject for the gratification of his passions, I might get to like him a little”, she thinks to herself (133), but she keeps her dissatisfaction secret and plays the part of a docile sexual object because, she rationalizes, that will serve her better than futilely defying him. In all the other pornographic novels, resistance was always futile; it served primarily to enhance the viewing pleasure of the sadistic male narrator/rapist/reader. Secondly, it positioned the woman as modest and therefore worth raping. In this novel, Randolph’s first rape attempt is successfully defeated by the sheer force of Dolly’s resisting body, and Randolph therefore has to resort to threats, torture, and terror to have his way. The Memoirs of Dolly Morton focuses more on whippings than on sexual intercourse, the last of which are more often than not speedily mentioned rather than graphically elaborated. I will not go into great detail about the flagellatory content of this novel since it would largely amount to a repetition of previous points; suffice it to say that the flagellations are drawn out in great detail both in regard to the appearance of the female victims, their humiliation, resistance, pain, and suffering, the physical effects of the different methods of corporal punishment, and the excitatory effect the beating of women has on men. However, one specific scene of flagellation will be able to shed light on an issue not yet fully elaborated, namely the issue of the ambivalent view of Victorian pornography on women who are not ‘conventional sexual objects’, that is, women who are not young, plump virgins. The twenty-eight pages of chapters 4, 5, and 6 go into great detail on how the bodies of Dolly and Miss Dean are exposed to the fifteen excited male members of the lynch mob, how they are groped, severely whipped and lastly made to sit astride on a spiked fence as punishment for their abolitionist enterprises. Finally, Randolph interrupts the torture of the two women after extracting from Dolly a promise that she will submit to him. However, to make him free Miss Dean in addition to herself takes Dolly a great amount of begging. The primary reason for Randolph’s indifference to the sufferings of Miss Dean is her lack of sexual attraction:
“Randolph laughed scornfully. "I have not the least intention of offering the terms to you, Miss Dean," he said. "As far as I am concerned, you may sit on the rail till the two hours are over. The view I had of your naked charms did not tempt me in the slightest. You have no figure. You are quite straight up
49 and down. Your bottom is too narrow, your thighs are too small and your legs are too thin. I like a woman to have a broad bottom, plump thighs and good legs, such as Dorothy has." (63)
In contrast to the despicable women of the previously mentioned novels, like Lady Betty, Maud Brandon, and Miss Debrette, towards whom the novels showed an ambiguous mingle of disgust and desire, Miss Dean has no sexual attractions whatsoever. Miss Dean is initially described as a pretty but prudish looking woman with “no colour in her cheeks” (20), but upon disrobing her an unexpected and, to the aesthetic sensibility as well as the whole sexual ethos of Victorian pornography, abhorrent sight is exposed:
“Miss Dean's "spot" was somewhat remarkable. I had never seen it before, and I could not help looking at it with astonishment. It was covered with a thick forest of glossy, darkbrown hair which extended some distance up her belly and descended between her thighs in curly locks nearly two inches long. The fissure was completely hidden and not a trace of the lips could be seen. One man, after a prolonged stare, exclaimed: "By Gosh! I've never seen such a fleece between a woman's legs in my life! Darn me if she wouldn't have to be sheared before a man could get into her." The men roared with laughter at the remark, while Miss Dean groaned and writhed in the bitterness of her shame.” (58)
The spinsterhood of Miss Dean was already visible in her pale complexion, but the exposure of the untrodden path to her well hidden, impenetrable vagina is a slap in the face to the expectant male gaze. “"Je-ru-sa-lem! What a little bottom she's got. It ain't no bigger than a man's. By gosh, boys! Perhaps she is a man!"”, one of them jokes (48). But the reality of the discomfiture that this comment expresses is more deeply rooted: A woman who cannot be defined as a sexual object to be possessed by a man, who like Miss Dean is not only unpossessed but even unpossessable in her undesirability, seems to be on the verge of crossing the epistemic border of what is even a conceptual possibility in Victorian pornography. In Victorian England, being an old maid meant to have failed at one’s purpose as a woman by not marrying and having children.106 The Victorian stereotype of the spinster seen in the literature of the time paints her as a ridiculously pitiable figure who has withered away and is now miserable and full of bitterness.107 Simone de Beauvoir analyses the repulsion
106 Hickok, “The Spinster in Victoria's England”, p. 120. 107 Ibid, p. 123-130.
50 inspired by spinsters in terms of the threatening idea of female independence: “The curse is in their very flesh, this flesh that is the object for no subject, that no desire has made desirable, that has bloomed and wilted without finding a place in the world of men; turned away from her destination, the old maid becomes an eccentric object, as troubling as the incommunicable thinking of a madman”.108 Indeed, the ridiculousness of Miss Dean’s spinsterhood is underlaid with fear of her mysterious non-existence as a sexual object for men. Miss Dean is punished more severely than the plump, blooming Dolly who the punishers take great care not to spoil with scars. Where Dolly is administered twelve cuts without a drop of blood being drawn, Miss Dean is whipped no less than forty times on her exposed buttocks until they are waled, striped, and bloodstained. “I don't think the marks of the whipping will ever be quite rubbed off her skin", remarks the executioner (50). One gets the vivid sensation that Miss Dean is (at least partly) punished for being a despicable, unpossessable spinster. The black slave women are another kind of alien bodies that are scarred and cast as despicable. Though both Dolly and the black women are objectified as ‘mannequins’ (84) and ‘playthings’ (90) and perceived as property, their non-identity is always in the forefront of the consciousness of the narrative: Dolly’s ivory whiteness is praised throughout the book (50, 78, 85, 176 etc.); she becomes the mistress of the slave household; Randolph has had them all sexually, but only Dolly shares his bed; the black women are ‘unvirtuous’ (“her ideas, like those of most slave women, were very loose on the subject of feminine virtue” (79)); only the black slaves are whipped; the black women are equated with animals (“I have no more regard for my slaves than for my dogs and horses" (103)) etc. The black slave women serve to accentuate Dolly’s superiority as a sexual object, and their dehumanized status makes it possible for the pornographic novel to play out extremely degrading sexual scenarios which would have been to horrible if Dolly had been the victim. Especially one scene highlights the difference in the sexualization of the black women and Dolly. Inspired by the scene in Rabelais’ La vie de Gargantua et de Pantagruel, Randolph decides that his most beautiful slave women shall serve naked at a dinner party for his male friends. Fully dressed, Dolly is filled by shame by the spectacle of the humiliated slave women serving at table while being lashed with a whip every time they make a mistake. After dinner, the black women serve as entertainment as they are forced to act as horses racing against each other while whip lashes are administered to the slowest. “The men grew excited. They laughed, cheered and betted on the girls as they raced up and down the corridor, their long hair flowing loosely behind them, their marvellous breasts undulating, their bottoms swaying” (111). Hereafter the women are forced to mount each other as jockeys on race horses, and this further exposes the sexualized sites of their
108 Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, p. 174.
51 vulnerable, bouncing bodies. As the grand finale, the women are given over to the now vigorously excited male guests to enjoy in private while Randolph extinguishes his lust with the still fully dressed Dolly. The horse race is an instance of the novel exploiting the degradation of slavery for sexual titillation. Dehumanization, racialization, colonization, and alienation are used to excuse the posing of women as literal animals for the sexual gratification of the reader, for it cannot bring itself to subject its white, English heroine to this level of degradation.
52 4. Sadistic violence: the gaze, destruction, castration.
“Everything in the world is about sex except sex. Sex is about power. - Oscar Wilde
Victorian pornography is not a pornotopia. Marcus ignores the pronounced sadism in the Victorian pornographic texts when he focuses on the pornographic tendency to imagine a happy sexual wonderland. Even though the violence is supposedly canceled by the (unconvincing) deus ex machina happy endings where the women find their proper place and experience sexual awakening, one has to ask why the violence exists to begin with, and why this deeply felt need to discipline, subordinate, and cause pain in the woman almost takes the shape of revenge. Why is pleasure not only intensified but seemingly dependent on the resistance, pain, terror, and humiliation of the victim? Secondly, since pornography does in fact possess the power to construct an ideal sexual fantasy, why, then, do all the Victorian works of pornography include the despicable woman when it could instead focus exclusively on its preferred object of desire - the virgin? Or, to frame the question differently, why is the woman, once the man has succeeded in turning the virgin into a whore, ultimately despicable in the eyes of Victorian pornography - a genre which, if we are to believe Marcus, is characterized by its celebration of the free exchange of abundant sexual pleasures? To account for these two problems, one must turn away from the idea that the sexual desire expressed in pornography is simply concerned with abundant utopian sexual bliss. On the contrary, sex in Victorian pornography is influenced by deeper existential and psychological issues.
The feminist theories of Andrea Dworkin and Susan Brownmiller make it possible to understand violence against women not as a question of achieving pornotopian bliss, but as an expression of male power over women. In her account of the history of rape in Against Our Will, Susan Brownmiller writes that “rape became not only a male prerogative, but man's basic weapon of force against woman, the principal agent of his will and her fear. His forcible entry into her body, despite her physical protestations and struggle, became the vehicle of his victorious conquest over her being, the ultimate test of his superior strength, the triumph of his manhood”109 Rape, to Brownmiller, is man’s instrument of power over woman. In a similar vein, Andrea Dworkin, in Pornography: Men possessing Women, writes that the major theme in pornography is male power: “the degradation of women exists in order to postulate, exercise, and celebrate male power. Male power, in degrading women, is
109 Brownmiller, Against Our Will, p. 5.
53 first concerned with itself, its perpetuation, expansion, intensification, and elevation”.110 While the assertion of male power over women is certainly evident in the six pornographic texts, the anxiety, ambiguity, dissatisfaction, and exaggeration that are so evident in these texts suggest that there is more to the story. In the following three sections I elaborate on the question of male on female violence as well as on the figure of the despicable woman, first by giving an account of patriarchal power as the desire to see, know, and control female sexuality; secondly, by contemplating the desire to transform and destruct seen in the texts; and, finally, by using the psychoanalytic concept of the castration complex as an interpretive framework to understand some of the curious aspects of the pornographic imagination.
Unveiling the female mystery
Of all these myths, none is more anchored in masculine hearts than the feminine “mystery” - Simone de Beauvoir111
We may approach an answer to why Victorian pornography abounds with male on female violence, if we return to Foucault’s insight that knowledge is power. In pornography, we recognize what Foucault identified as the determination “to cause [sexuality] to speak through explicit articulation and endlessly accumulated detail”.112 Pornography as an instance of the incitement to talk about sex to produce knowledge about it exercises powers of domination and control. However, it seems quite apparent that the object of knowledge which is dominated and controlled in Victorian pornography is less sexuality in general than female sexuality in particular. The will to know the truth about female sexuality permeates Victorian pornography as a frantic desire to look up under the petticoats of women. This is especially pronounced in Raped on the Railway, where Mrs. Sinclair emanates mystery that must be uncovered113. Brandon muses excitedly on the beauties that he vividly imagines must be hidden underneath her elegant dress. The same infatuation with penetrating the hidden female mysteries is central in the flagellation novel, The Mysteries of Verbena House, where the title alone promises a rare insight into the sexual secrets of the lives of boarding school girls.
110 Dworkin, Pornography, p. 24. 111 Beauvoir, The Second Sex, p. 268. 112 Foucault, The History of Sexuality, p. 18. 113 The same can be said about the pornographic novel, Frank & I (1902), where the mystery of “Frank’s” peculiar feminine behavior and physique is explained when it is discovered that “Frank” is in reality a girl.
54 Feminist scholars agree that the idea of the mysterious womankind is a construction of patriarchal society. In The Second Sex, Simone de Beauvoir discusses patriarchy’s construction of the woman as the ultimate mystery - the radical Other. She makes use of the German philosopher, Friedrich Hegel’s idea that the self comes to know itself in the confrontation with another self-consciousness. Beauvoir goes further and argues that the woman has historically been given the status of this otherness; she has been made a screen of projection in man’s quest for selfhood. Following Hegel’s slave-dialectic, this is connected to the fundamental human tendency to attempt to pose oneself as subject and constitute the other as object.114 Throughout history, argues Beauvoir, man has succeeded in confirming himself as subject at the expense of the woman, and he has justified her subordination as eternal and natural by imposing his definitions on her: The woman has been resigned to object status, immanence, and passivity while man has defined himself in opposition to her as a transcendent and active subject. In Beauvoir's view, casting the woman as the Other is a prerequisite for colonizing her, but the price of the othering is confusion and fear. In the various myths created by man about the woman, Beauvoir sees the juxtaposition of desire and fear. He desires “Venus freshly emerging from the waters”,115 he wants to take her in his arms, penetrate her, and possess her. The conquered woman in her youth and beauty is imagined as all the riches of nature: “She is all the fauna, all the earthly flora: gazelle, doe, lilies and roses, downy peaches, fragrant raspberries; she is precious stones, mother-of-pearl, agate, pearls, silk, the blue of the sky, the freshness of springs, air, flame, earth and water”.116 In the sexual embrace with the young woman, man takes possession not only of the woman herself, but of everything she represents, of nature and life itself. However, when man is unsure of his possession of the woman, her powers of attraction becomes disconcerting: she then becomes a temptress, Circe, a mermaid, a femme fatale. When she has been domesticated, when she is no longer a dangerous prey to be conquered but a good wife, her enchanting magic disappears.117 The very use man makes of the young and beautiful woman destroys her attractions: “weighed down by childbirth, she loses her sexual attraction”,118 and so the woman comes instead to remind the man of age and death. In the pornographic texts, we have witnessed the repression of the fact that pregnancy and maternity are the natural consequences of sexual activity. In addition to the examples already mentioned where pregnancies are taken care of by killing off the pregnant woman or making her spontaneously abort the fetus, Victorian pornography most often
114 Beauvoir, The Other Sex, p. 7. 115 Ibid, p. 171. 116 Ibid, pp. 174-175. 117 Ibid, p. 204-205. 118 Ibid, p. 178.
55 seeks to avoid the disconcerting thought of motherhood altogether. The sign of the woman’s fertility, the menstruation blood, is never mentioned, the risk of pregnancy as an effect of coitus is often ignored, or it may be imagined to be easily prevented by way of pseudo- scientific contraceptive techniques. The figure of the mother, as exemplified by the treatment of Lady Betty in The Way of a Man with a Maid, awakens disgust in Victorian pornography. According to Beauvoir, it is in the figure of the mother that the woman is at her most dangerous. Beauvoir sees in man’s attitude towards women a wish to separate the idea of the mother from the idea of the lover in the woman he possesses. Hence the universal law against incest, and hence the idea that the woman is impure when her reproductive role is most pronounced: when she menstruates, is pregnant, or lactates. The mother represents “the mysterious alchemies of life”,119 she is the muddy earth that engulfs the bones of its children, a chaotic darkness that threatens to swallow him up.120 The female principle is related to uncontrollable mystical powers: Her menstrual cycle is connected to the cosmic powers that make the planets turn, and the menstrual blood is imagined to sour the cream and spoil the meat.121 In Christianity, man has tamed the fear of the feminine principle represented by the mother by glorifying her. In the Virgin Mary, the woman humbles herself as a faithful servant, and her motherhood remains distinct from the idea of sexuality.122 Virginity is another source of both fear and fascination to the man, insists Beauvoir.123 She mentions numerous societies where rites of initiation are demanded to protect the man from the feminine power of the virgin. The fear of the virgin is rather surprising when we consider how she is celebrated in Victorian pornography, and I will endeavor to make sense of this contradiction in the third section of this chapter on psychoanalytic theory. Beauvoir also mentions the spinster who is fear-provoking because she has grown old without fulfilling the female destiny of being possessed by a man. Historically, because she has not entered into alliance with a man, she is imagined to have entered into alliance with the devil. The spinster is uncanny and suspect, like an old attic full of cobwebs.124
The man loves the woman “because she is his, he fears her because she remains other”.125 He wants to possess her, to domesticate her cosmic forces and magic feminine powers. However, since man defines woman as everything that he is not, and she therefore continues to escape him as the ungraspable, perturbing enigma of the Other. That the other always remains the other can almost be considered a psychological truism, but the woman, Beauvoir argues, has been constructed as the Other in a deeper sense. Mythification offers
119 Ibid, p. 171. 120 Ibid, p. 166. 121 Ibid, pp. 168-169. 122 Ibid, p. 188-189. 123 Ibid, p. 172-174. 124 Ibid, p. 174. 125 Ibid, p. 187.
56 “eternity at bargain prices (…) a handy, pocket-sized absolute”, writes Beauvoir.126 The mythification of the woman is a process where one aspect attributed to her is enlarged and seen as essential and eternal. “In concrete reality, woman manifest themselves in many different ways; but each of the myths built around woman tries to summarize her as a whole; each is supposed to be unique; the consequence of this is a multiplicity of incompatible myths, and men are perplexed before the strange inconsistencies of the idea of Femininity”.127 The woman herself cannot help contradicting the one-dimensional definition given her, but another level of confusion arises when the essential and absolute ‘truths’ of several myths collide. She is both the Holy Mother and the cruel stepmother, the loving wife and the Praying Mantis, Life and Death, Good and Evil. From the experience of perplexity that the contradicting myths inspire, man constructs yet another myth, the myth of woman as the absolute Mystery, a mystery that necessarily cannot be unraveled.128 The woman is defined as simply ungraspable. Foucault has taught us that knowledge and power are intimately related. “The agency of domination does not reside in the one who speaks”, writes he, “but in the one who listens and says nothing”.129 Woman doesn’t understand man either, “but there is no ‘masculine mystery”,130 writes Beauvoir. As the possessor of power, man has nothing to confess; he is not, like the woman, the ultimate object of knowledge. Beauvoir has shown us that patriarchal power lies not only in physical dominance, but also in the dominance of definitions which casts the woman as a mysterious fear- provoking Other. Beauvoir seems to be of the opinion that the construction of the mysterious woman is a sign of man’s laziness; he gives up and casts her as a Mystery and thereby he escapes the perplexing contradictions of the mythification.131 The pornographic literature, however, shows that man is vigorously active in attempting to unveil the female mystery. In the following, I will argue that pornography is invested in the patriarchal construction of the mysterious woman, and that rather than being lazy, the persistent gaze is an attempt to obtain knowledge in order to master the fear created by her mysterious being. The feminist philosopher, Rosi Braidotti, in her essay, “Body-Images and the Pornography of Representation”, observes that the mother’s body has traditionally been the privileged object of scientific knowledge. She speculates that the reason for this curiosity is that the woman’s body is the site of one of the most fundamental mysteries - the origin of life and one’s own origin.132 Linda Williams in Hard Core argues that it is the secrets of the
126 Ibid, p. 272. 127 Ibid, p. 266-267. 128 Ibid, p. 268-271. 129 Foucault, The Will to Knowledge, p. 62. 130 Beauvoir, The Other Sex, p. 271 131 Ibid, p. 272. 132 Braidotti, p. 145.
57 women’s sexual pleasure that pornography seeks knowledge about.133 I don’t think it necessary to decide on a single fundamental question that is at the heart of the pornographic inquiry into the feminine mystery. It is, however, certain that pornography is greatly concerned with looking at the woman, and that the goal of the inquiry is, at least partly, to ease the fear of the mysterious female Other. Braidotti argues that pornographic representation is an expression of the ‘scopic drive’ known from psychoanalytic theory. Scopophilia was first described by Sigmund Freud in his Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (1905) as a sexual impulse which involves taking other people as sexual objects. Upon discovering their own sexual organs, children naturally become interested in other people’s genitals. Such children turn into voyeurs of the excretion activities of their people as it is usually in such situations that they find opportunity to satisfy their curiosity. In later life, scopophilia can manifest itself as a voyeuristic compulsion.134 Braidotti argues that scopophilia is not an innocent, passive activity, but that the taking of another person as an object to be looked at and inquired into is an act connected to the will to control and dominate the object of knowledge as exemplified in “the practice of opening something up to see how it functions.135 She points out that according to Foucault, scientific discourse privileges visibility in generating knowledge about the human body, and Braidotti is deeply skeptical of this scientific ideology of visibility. She dismissively observes that modern science behaves as if “the light of reason could extend into the deepest murkiest depths of the human organism, as if truth consisted simply in making something visible”.136 Visual representation, she argues, leaves the intangible truth about things and human experiences unexplained. Victorian pornography is obsessed with the task of uncovering the female mystery, and this it attempts within a distinctly scopic episteme. Like the curious child, pornography is enticed by that which is hidden. The narrator of The Mysteries of Verbena House is fascinated with the naked female bodies hidden underneath women’s clothing, and he is especially focused on the visible signs of female sexuality that must be revealed when the clothes are removed: “As I walk behind girls in the street, watching their swaying tournure, I often wonder if, beneath all that silk, and lace, and sarsnet - beneath the several strata of crinoline, flannel and linen petticoats, drawers and chemise, there are any such things as bottoms freshly scored by rod, or whip, or cane”.137 Long detailed descriptions are given of the exposed, sexualized female body. The idea that the marks of female sexuality are visible on the woman’s naked body is found everywhere in the pornographic texts, and especially in
133 Williams, Hard Core, pp. 30-33. 134 Freud, Three Essays on The Theory of Sexuality, p. 192. 135 Braidotti, “Body-Images and the Pornography of Representation”, p. 144. 136 Ibid, pp. 144-145. Braidotti refers to Foucault’s Historie de la folie and Naissance de la Clinique. 137 The Mysteries of Verbena House, p. 37.
58 the portrayal of vaginas. The vagina of the female masturbator, Miss Hatherton, shows signs of her ‘self-abuse’, the impenetrable vagina of Miss Dean testifies to her unpossessability, Lady Betty’s ‘big long cunt’ is evidence of her motherhood, and Eliza’s virginity is apparent from the looks of her pubic growth: “The cygnet down instantly disclosed that she was a maid, for where the bodies have been properly joined in the fierce encounter, the hair (particularly of the female) loses that sleek downy appearance, and by the constant friction the smooth hair becomes rubbed into delightful little curls”.138 A positivist pseudo-scientific ideology of sexual cause and visible effect is at work to create ‘knowledge’ about the otherwise unknowable female sexualities.
It is clear that power, both epistemological and physical, is involved in the unveiling of the woman, for the men of Victorian pornography are never anonymous peepers but active sexual aggressors holding the woman down to look at her. However, Rosi Braidotti argues that seeking knowledge about someone else is not only an act of domination, as Foucault would have it, but in itself an act of sadism. The gaze of modern science as well as the gaze of pornography dissects the body: The gaze produced by the scopic drive essentially sees the body as an assembly of detachable and exchangeable pieces. In pornotopian pornography, specifically, identical penises and vaginas act as autonomous body parts grinding against each other.139 To destroy something to see how it works is to Braidotti “the expression of curiosity linked to the most archaic sadistic impulses”.140 While I agree that the dissecting gaze of pornography seems sadistic, I would argue that the pornographic knowledge-seeking penetration into the female mysteries is sadistic in even more obvious ways: The will to knowledge of Victorian pornography makes use of excessive physical violence to extract the sexual truth from the woman. This is necessary, it finds, because the woman is perceived as fundamentally deceitful and secretive. The essential female property of deception is a cause for great anxiety to the imagination of pornography. To Eliza’s rapist, the Bey of Tunis, female deception becomes almost fatal: Convinced that her expressions of ecstasy are real he thinks her wholly subdued, but as soon as she has won the trust of the Bey, Eliza takes her revenge and stabs him. The novel explicitly raises the problem that is implied throughout the whole body of texts, that there will always be uncertainty as to the woman’s true sexual feelings. Invariably the female pretense to modesty is a concern in Victorian pornography. Mrs Sinclair hides her real sensual feelings behind the appearance of coquettish modesty, and Miss Sinclair hypocritically conceals her past behind a “cloak of outward respectability” etc..141 In Victorian 138 The Lustful Turk, p. 59. 139 To illustrate, one scene in chapter I of May’s Account of Her Introduction to the Art of Love goes as follows: “With the other he direct his prick, now larger than ever, into her cunt. It seems to quiver with delight, as the organ of bliss penetrated its soft folds”. 140 Braidotti, “Body-Images and the Pornography of Representation”, p. 145. 141 The Mysteries of Verbena House, p. 112.
59 pornography, as we have seen, one way of easing the fear of female deception is to subject the body of the woman to careful scrutiny. Violence is another favored solution to the problem of the female mystery and the risk of female deception. In one of the philosophical passages of Marquis de Sade’s Justine, the perverted monk Clément explains the usefulness of violence: "there is no more lively sensation than that of pain; its impressions are certain and dependable, they never deceive as may those of the pleasure women perpetually feign and almost never experience".142 Excessive violence, urges Clément, paints the woman’s true feelings on her face. In most Victorian accounts of female orgasm, the spasmodic convulsions and ecstatic outcries that man fears are fake are accompanied by a ‘copious discharge’ that ‘bedews’ the penis. Female ejaculation is offered as tangible proof of the reality of the woman’s pleasure. Another measure of avoiding the risk of female deception is violence. Victorian pornography subscribes to the Sadian view that under torture the truth comes out. In Experimental Lecture, a confession of Julia’s sexual past is wrought from her under torture. In other novels, the women willingly tells of their sexual thoughts and feelings after their sexual transformation is completed - completed through violence. More significantly, the woman’s tortured body is itself an authentic testament of her true feelings - her scarlet humiliated cheeks, her streaming hot tears, her cries and screams, her convulsing welted and bloody limbs testify to her suffering. In short, Victorian pornography shows a desperate wish not to be betrayed by female pretenses.
The investment of the pornotopian novel in uncovering the mystery of female sexual otherness goes through various acts of concrete violence accompanied with intense gazing: Stripping naked the woman, inspecting her naked body, contemplating her suffering face, making her speak up under torture, opening up her body during rape, and turning it inside out with flagellation. At last the violence stops, but only when he has won her total submission. At this point an inner transformation takes place in the woman that makes her appreciate the existence as a sexual object fully possessed by the man. At this point she is totally subdued, her pretenses have been forced out of her, and she has become emotionally transparent. However, Beauvoir insists that the female mystery cannot be unveiled because it is merely a Fata Morgana created by gender-inequality itself. In similar terms, Braidotti refuses pornography’s scopic paradigm of knowledge and its frantic, repeated attempts to unveil the female mystery by making female sexuality visible. Pornography itself seems to be aware of the futility of its scopic quest. As seen in some of the pornographic examples, even in the pornographic fantasy world the wish of fully possessing, that is, of knowing and owning a wholly subdued woman, is distorted by a nagging fear that, after all, she may still be pretending - and plotting her revenge.
142 Marquis de Sade, Justine, p. 606.
60 The pleasure of destructing something precious
“thenceforth he made it his regular custom, every time that he took a virgin to his bed, to kill her at the expiration of the night” - Thousand and One Nights143
The former chapter shows that the scopic Will to Knowledge runs through the narratives of Victorian pornography as a desire to force the woman to give up her secrets. In this chapter I argue that the sadistic desire to violate the woman may rest on other reasons besides scopic curiosity: It may also be seen as a desire to destruct something precious. Human sexuality has long been observed to contain a perceptible sadistic side. According to Sigmund Freud, the desire to inflict pain on the sexual object is the most common of all perversions. The root of this perversion is seen in normal male sexuality which contains an aggressive element expressing itself as a desire to subjugate the sexual object. In the sadistic pervert, this aggressive element has become independent and exaggerated.144 Against Freud who holds sadism to be a perversion, the French philosopher, George Bataille, sees the desire to destruct as a normal expression of adult sexuality. In his writings, the heterogeneous side of human existence, all that which is discouraged by civil society such as the desire to waste and destruct, has found articulation. In Erotism: Death and Sensuality (1957) Bataille is concerned with the violence embedded in human sexuality. In Bataille’s system of thought, man is a discontinuous being who comes into existence alone and dies alone, and in-between he lives a solipsistic life apart from other human consciousnesses, a life delimited by society’s demand that he be a hardworking individual who accumulates possessions.145 In this social world centered on upholding life, waste (including sexual excess) is banned and tabooed, and of all things wasteful, death is seen as the most wasteful thing imaginable. Man seeks in eroticism a way to transgress this rational, useful, discontinuous, individual existence, where people are distinct from one another. He wants to dissolve the self and become part of the great continuity of existence. Erotic sexual activity, that is, un-procreative sexual excess, is a way of approaching death just short of dying. The sexual partners step outside themselves, they breach the limits of their enclosed selves and fuse together in what the French call ‘le petit mort’. The disintegration of the self is fundamentally violent; it is an act of self-destruction.146 The specific case of the transgressive, excessively wasteful sex that culminates in the murder of the sexual partner, as is often seen in the writings of de Sade, contains a revelation of continuity similar to the one derived from the religious human sacrifice where “the victim dies 143 The Thousand and One Nights, the 1859 edition by John Murry, p. 10. 144 Freud, Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, pp. 157-160. 145 Bataille, Death and Sensuality, pp. 15, 40-41. 146 Ibid, pp. 16-19.
61 and the spectators share in what his death reveals”.147 In the fusion with the dying sexual partner, the sacrificer experiences the continuity of death himself. To Bataille, the murder of the sex partner is eroticism at its logical conclusion.148 Bataille serves an important function in making us attentive to the destructive side of human sexuality even if we don’t accept his ontological system. Susan Sontag learns from Bataille that “tamed as it may be, sexuality remains one of the demonic forces in human consciousness - pushing us at intervals close to taboo and dangerous desires, which range from the impulse to commit sudden arbitrary violence upon another person to the voluptuous yearnings for the extinction of one’s consciousness, for death itself”.149 Bataille’s theory suggests that "what pornography is really about, ultimately, isn't sex but death".150 In the history of pornography, the connection between sex and violence until death is most clearly apparent in the works of Marquis de Sade. The very last story outlined in The 120 Days of Sodom concerns a nobleman who every fortnight receives fifteen virgins, who he beats and tortures while he deflowers them anally as well as vaginally with his monstrously sized penis. When this is completed he throws them into his torture chamber where he has them fixed into elaborate machines which kill them each in a different way: One is descended into boiling oil, one is torn apart, one is devoured by reptiles and so forth. While contemplating this spectacle he ejaculates, and the few girls who may have survived the torture receives the death stroke.151 Unlike the works of de Sade, no woman is ever brutally sacrificed as the climatic end of a sexual encounter in Victorian pornography. In the pornotopic story, the woman is reborn from the ashes of violence like a phoenix. She goes through brutal rapes and flagellation, but both her body and soul are miraculously healed, and she comes out on the other side a better, more obedient, woman. In Sadian pornography there is no rebirth - on the contrary, sex ends in sacrifice. It could easily be argued that the Sadian narrative is not pornography.152 Following the definition of pornography accepted in this thesis (at least as a point of departure) that pornography is sexually explicit materials intended to titillate, the works of de Sade are problematic: It is uncertain whether they can be said to intend or, indeed, affect arousal of the reader, and, from the frequent use of drawn out philosophical discourses in-between sexual tableaus, it is certainly clear that titillation of the reader is by no means its sole intention. It would therefore be unfair to conflate these two very different kinds of sexually explicit material. However, as has already been hinted above, there are important ways in which Victorian pornography comes close to the Sadian narrative, and though it never actually kills
147 Ibid, p. 22. 148 Ibid, p. 18. 149 Sontag, “The Pornographic Imagination”, p. 57. 150 Ibid, p. 60. 151 Marquis de Sade, 120 Days of Sodom, pp. 379-382. 152 Linda Williams argues that ‘snuff’, a category of pornography which fits the works of de Sade perfectly, cannot really be seen as pornography but must be considered horror (Hard Core, p. 190).
62 the woman it perceptibly shows aspirations to do so. First of all, the defloration scenes imitate murder. Though the passage depicting the defloration of Emily in the The Lustful Turk has already been quoted, I present it here again as an instance of an alarmingly brutal virgin rape:
I was on the altar, and, butcher-like, he was determined to complete the sacrifice; indeed, my cries seemed only to excite him to the finishing of my ruin, and sucking my lips and breasts with fury, he unrelentingly rooted up all obstacles my virginity offered, tearing and cutting me to pieces, until the complete junction of our bodies announced that the whole of his terrible shaft was buried within me. I could bear the dreadful torment no longer: uttering a piercing cry I sank insensible in the arms of my cruel ravisher”.153
Describing deflorations as murder and sacrifice is a conventional representation in Victorian pornography,154 but it is not just the metaphoric labels used to describe the action that makes the imitation of murder apparent: The violence is so brutal that the virgin writhes around in agony in a way that resembles death cramps before she finally loses consciousness. The pervading violence of Victorian pornography heavily suggests the death of the women though death is never realized. As such, the Sadian endings seem like the logical conclusion to this desire for violence whereas the Victorian deus ex machina happy ending - in stopping just short of death and magically erasing the traces of the violence - disrupts the implied culmination of the violent tale. Secondly, Victorian pornography approaches the death of the woman in the sexual transformation that takes place in her following her initiation. The sexual encounter destroys the value of the object of desire and turns her into a despicable woman. In order to remain titillating, Victorian pornography avoids the murder of the virgin, which, as it has been shown, is the implied conclusion to the sexual fantasy of defloration. Bataille’s text is intricate to say the least, but one can draw the idea from it that where murder - the ultimate sacrifice - of the object of desire is impossible, the transgression of reasonable, productive life can still be achieved by destroying that which makes the object of desire desirable,155 and this, Bataille argues, is beauty. “Beauty has a cardinal importance, for ugliness cannot be spoiled, and to despoil is the essence of eroticism”.156 In religious sacrifice, the victim is chosen for its perfection so that the waste may be as great as
153 The Lustful Turk, pp. 16-17. 154 Marcus, The Other Victorians, p. 198. 155 Bataille writes: “If transgression is impossible, then profanation takes its place. Degradation, which turns eroticism into something foul and horrible, is better than the neutrality of reasonable and non- destructive sexual behaviour” (Death and Sensuality, p. 140). 156 Bataille, Death and Sensuality, p. 145.
63 possible. In sexual eroticism, too, beauty is desired to be wasted. In Bataille’s framework, the sexual act itself is ugly, and to subject the woman to sex is therefore to desecrate her beauty: “The face and its beauty must be profaned, first by uncovering the woman's secret parts, and then by putting the male organ into them. No one doubts the ugliness of the sexual act”.157 Female beauty is sacrificed by the man during sex, and therefore, “for a man, there is nothing more depressing than an ugly woman”.158 In the case of Victorian pornography, the idea that beauty is destroyed by sex may not be immediately apparent. As a point of departure, sex is always a good thing in the pornotopian narratives and the sight it offers is always flattering to the man and the woman alike. Even the long term physical consequences of the sadistic violence are magically wiped away. In many pornotopian narratives, the women often surpass themselves in beauty throughout the story. In The Autobiography of a Flea, for instance, the beautiful Bella is continuously described as more beautiful than ever before each sexual encounter. However, even in this pornotopian text, sex ultimately takes something away from her. If we are to believe the prophecies of the narrator, she is headed towards destruction: “No doubt the constant and vigorous sensual excitement [she] endured, tended very soon to break up those beautiful young charms”.159 Bella, it is predicted, will soon lose her beauty and turn into a despicable woman. Given Marcus’ account of pornography as a reversed mirror image of official morality that celebrates sexual exchange and female promiscuity, it is surprising that Victorian pornography is so deeply invested in the idea that sex takes something away from the woman. The truth is that Victorian pornography is highly ambiguous about female promiscuity. In patriarchal societies, properties like chastity and innocence are highly valued in women and, as perfectly symbolized by the idea of deflowering a virgin, these properties are irrevocably lost when she has had sex. He has conquered, she is ruined. In Victorian pornography, this sense of loss is often deeply felt and mourned by the women. In The Lustful Turk, for instance, Eliza takes revenge: “Receive that for the many times you have forced my poor body to submit to your loathsome pollutions”, she utters as she stabs the Bey.160 Typically, the pornotopian element soon takes effect: She has nothing more to lose so she might as well indulge in sexual hedonism. But the dismissive attitude towards the initiated woman in Victorian pornography makes it clear that modesty, purity, and innocence are desirable qualities in a woman only in order that the man may destroy them. The virgins (and modest women) turned whores may initially offer a state of pornotopian bliss, but their shelf lives are short, and after they are used up they are discharged. Emily and Sylvia from
157 Ibid. 158 Ibid. 159 The Autobiography of a Flea, chapter XII. 160 The Lustful Turk, p. 64.
64 The Lustful Turk are simply sent home, Dolly Morton is left by Randolph, and Maud Brandon from Raped on the Railway is literally killed off. Destruction ending in death may be what Victorian pornography ultimately desires. Though the desire to kill the woman is not as expressly articulated as it is in the works of de Sade, it is nevertheless heavily suggested. If the virgin is not literally killed like the sultan’s wives in One Thousand and One Nights, her death is simulated in murder-like defloration. And though sex does not literally kill the woman, she is symbolically killed inasmuch as her sexual value is spoiled and, thus, she ceases to exists in the only true way a woman can exist in Victorian pornography - as an object of desire. Again, de Sade goes all the way when he lets another of his interchangeable sadistic male characters say, “the time has come for her to pay for my loss of interest by the loss of her existence”.161 Victorian pornography, too, seems acutely aware that sexual desire has an end, at least as far as the desire for the individual woman goes, and when desire ends she must be discharged.
The vulnerable penis of pornography
“Hatred of women originates in … castration anxiety” - Boehm162
In this chapter I will make use of the psychoanalytical theory concerning castration anxiety to make sense of some curious aspects of the representation of male and female sexuality in Victorian pornography. These are the glorified vagina, the overvalued penis, and the pronounced violence against women’s bodies.
That the vagina has historically been a source of disgust in men barely needs arguing. Beauvoir observes that disgust with the vagina has always been widespread in patriarchal countries. She cites a contemporary French author for writing that “At present I tend to regard the feminine organ as something unclean or as a wound, not less attractive on that account, but dangerous in itself, like everything bloody, mucous, infected”.163 Bataille, similarly argues that the female (as well as the male) sex organ is ugly, and he too, refers to authoritative sources in the Western tradition to strengthen his point.164 Sigmund Freud sees the male dread of the vagina as a psychological condition that applies universally to all men, and he explains the phenomenon with the theory of castration anxiety. According to Freud, the discovery of sexual difference is a traumatic experience for
161 Marquis de Sade, Justine, p. 555. 162 Felix Boehm, “The Femininity-Complex in Men”. 163 The quote is from Michel Leiris’ L’Âge d’homme. Cited in Beauvoir, The Second Sex, p. 168. 164 Bataille, Death and Sensuality, p. 145.
65 the boy. He perceives the female organ as a lack of a penis rationalizing that it has been at some point cut off. The discovery of women’s menstrual residues strengthens his convictions that the female organ is a bleeding wound. This in turn makes him aware of the possibility that he too may lose his member, that it may be cut off. The trauma is never erased: “Probably no male human being is spared the fright of castration at the sight of a female genital” writes Freud and continues to argue that the impression is so strong that it can turn men homosexual or fetishist.165 In the psychoanalytic conception of sexual development, the castration complex is closely associated with the Oedipus complex. The Oedipus complex was first introduced by Freud in his “Interpretation of Dreams” (1900) as a theory with universal validity to the psychological development of children. Freud refers to the legend of Oedipus as represented in Sophocles’ drama, where Oedipus is compelled by destiny to kill his father and marry his mother. To Freud, this myth expresses the primeval wishful fantasy of all men: “It is the fate of all of us, perhaps, to direct our first sexual impulse towards our mother and our first hatred and our first murderous wish against our father”166 In the phallic stage of psychosexual development, every boy goes through a phase in which he desires his mother and feels jealous hostility towards the father. A successful resolution to the Oedipus complex is achieved when the threat of castration becomes real to the boy, who has at this age (3-6 years) discovered the female genitals. He perceives the vagina as a lacking penis, and he imagines that it must at some time have been cut off. The boy fears that the father, who is superior to him in strength and size, will punish his transgression with castration, and so his narcissistic love for his penis makes him repress the incestuous desire. Instead he identifies with the father and internalizes the authority of the father in what now becomes the super- ego, the severity of which will protect the ego for a return to incestuous feelings.167 Taking the father as role model implies dis-identifying with the mother, whose genitalia are continually a constant reminder of the threat of castration. In the influential essay, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” from 1975, Laura Mulvey makes use of this psychoanalytical realization to account for the role of the woman in the moving pictures of patriarchal society. To Mulvey, the representation of the female form in films “speaks castration and nothing else”.168 The female, who has traditionally been assigned the role of exhibitionistic object, is not just pleasurable to look at. Her body signifies sexual difference: As Freud himself has stated, her discernible lack of a penis inevitably evokes castration anxiety in the man. Now, man's unconscious has two possibilities of making the sight of the woman bearable:
165 Freud, “Fetishism”, p. 154. 166 Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, p. 262. 167 Freud, “The Dissolution of The Oedipus Complex”, pp. 174-177. 168 Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema”, p. 833
66 “Preoccupation with the re-enactment of the original trauma (investigating the woman, demystifying her mystery), counterbalanced by the devaluation, punishment or saving of the guilty object (…); or else complete disavowal of castration by the substitution of a fetish object or turning the represented figure itself into a fetish so that it becomes reassuring rather than dangerous (hence over-valuation, the cult of the female star)”.169
We have already sufficiently exhausted the demystifying enterprise of pornography, and in the light of psychoanalytic theory we may add the desire to ease castration anxiety to the list of possible reasons for the man to look at the woman. The second option of overcoming castration anxiety by way of fetishism opens new possibilities of understanding the ever present virgin/whore dichotomy in Victorian pornography. Early psychoanalysts already drew attention to the function of fetishization in relation to the fear of women. Karen Horney, for instance, points to the overabundant myths about dangerous women in literature. “Men have never tired of fashioning expressions for this experience: the violent force by which the man feels himself drawn to the woman, and, side by side with his longing, the dread lest through her he might die and be undone”.170 Like Mulvey, Karen Horney considers the overvaluation of women as essentially having the same function as devaluation; both are attitudes calculated to erase man’s dread of women. The glorifying attitude signifies ”'There is no need for me to dread a being so wonderful, so beautiful, nay, so saintly'” and the disparaging attitude implies: “'It would be too ridiculous to dread a creature who, if you take her all round, is such a poor thing'”.171 In Victorian pornography, the devaluing attitude is most prominent. The women initially hold the conceited notion that they possess power over men: Insisting on their rights with reference to social conventions and the law, they make use of indignation, coquetry, and assumption of virtue to partake in the game of power and withhold from men what men always want in pornography: free access to the female body. In the face of real, unbounded, aggressive, masculine, physical, sexual power their presumption to phallic power is soon crushed, their spirit humiliated, and the novel makes all assurances that the woman is transformed and thus thoroughly defeated. There is no reason to fear castration from such an innocent, weak, orgasming creature. Though the virgins are considered beautiful, they are by no means treated as fetish objects in themselves. Unlike the movie star they are not worshipped but degraded and subdued. Only indirectly are women fetishized in Victorian pornography. The Freudian concept of fetishism is normally taken to be the case of a thing (like a shoe) or a part of the sexual
169 Ibid, p. 840. 170 Horney, “The Dread of Women”, p. 349. 171 Ibid, p. 351.
67 object (like a foot) “inappropriate for sexual purposes” that takes precedence over the sexual object such that the normal sexual aim (coitus) is relinquished.172 The fetish, writes Freud, is a substitution for the mother’s lost penis: It is a disavowal of the fact that the mother lacks a penis, a way to escape the female genitals in order to avoid the confrontation with the threat of castration.173 As such, it is clear that pornography has no interest in this kind of fetishism which denies the existence of the female genitals; on the contrary, the vagina is the undisputed protagonist of the pornographic narrative. Paradoxically, the virgin vagina becomes a fetishized, divine object. The virgin - innocent, inexperienced, and often barely a woman - poses no threat to the man, and the virgin vagina in pornotopian pornography is anything but frightening. It is by all measures idealized; delicious and alluring without the uncanny connotations of secretly possessing the power to undo the man: “his ardent gaze fell upon the centre spot of attraction—on the small pink slit which lay half hidden at the foot of the swelling mount of Venus, hardly yet shaded by the softest down”.174 The religious metaphors so often employed in describing the appearance of the virgin vagina accentuates the divine quality it is imagined to possess. In a psychoanalytical and anthropological perspective, pornography’s lack of fear of virginity is highly conspicuous. Both Freud and Beauvoir describe the taboo of virginity around the world, and the rites involved in deflowering a virgin to protect the man.175 Beauvoir mentions primitive societies, where the virgin is ritualistically deflowered with an object before the wedding night, where the virgin is offered to strangers traveling through, where a serpent is imagined to live in the virgin’s vagina, where virginal blood is imagined to be able to ruin the man’s vitality, where other rites are used to protect the man from the immense powers of the virgin etc.. In Victorian pornography, men prefer virgins and savor the satisfactory feeling of deflowering them themselves. However, here too, the deflorations of virgins are highly ritualistic in both form and function. The defloration of the virgin serves to cleanse her of her deplorable qualities, and only after the brutal act of force that transforms her internally as well as externally can the man relax and enjoy her without fear. However, the anxiety seems to linger in the pornographic narrative in the shape of the despicable woman. The women in The Lustful Turk serve as the best example. The Dey is never confident that his slaves are sufficiently tamed, and he is right in his conjecture since the women literally and symbolically succeed in castrating the men. They offer an interesting counterexample to the fetishized/devalued virgins which accentuates the castration anxiety underlying the idealized pornotopian narrative, where the fear-provoking qualities of the vagina is conspicuously stripped away in the same manner as the overvalued female movie star in Mulvey's example.
172 Freud, Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, p. 153. 173 Freud, “Fetishism”, pp. 152-153. 174 The Autobiography of a Flea, chapter 1. 175 See Beauvoir, The Second Sex, pp. 172-174.
68 While the virgin vagina is fetishized, the virgin herself is chastised, and the sadism involved in the desire to punish the woman can be seen as yet another expression of castration anxiety. In Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, Freud acknowledges the existence of an aggressive trait in the normal sexual impulse which is connected with the need, at times, to conquer the sexual object in other ways than courtship. This normal aggression is characterized simply as an “active and violent attitude towards the sexual object” whereas the sadistic perversion is seen in “cases in which satisfaction is entirely conditional on the humiliation and maltreatment of the object”.176 According to this distinction, the sadism at work in the pornographic texts is of the pathological kind. Within the psychoanalytic tradition, there is some disagreement as to what constitutes the origin of the sadistic perversion. One theory is particularly interesting because it connects sadism with the fear of castration. This idea seems very applicable to pornographic literature where castration anxiety seems so pronounced. Linda Williams concisely lays out this view on sadism:
“The perversion has its genesis in the trauma of a male child's oedipal relation to his father. In identifying with the power of the father and the phallus, the child rejects the mother in himself, expels his ego, and overinvests in the superego. The unconstrained superego runs wild and seeks external victims - victims who represent the rejected ego. This punishment of the female aspect of the self then yields sadistic fantasies of the obsessive and violent punishment of women who substitute for that rejected part.”177
In this view, the investment of Victorian pornography in sadistic punishment of women is a defense mechanism set in motion by the fear of female difference and the castration anxiety it causes. The desperate dis-identification with the female sex, moreover, is strongly enunciated in these sadistic tales by the polarized portrayals of men and women in terms of masculine and feminine characteristics. The female (virgin) victims are weak, swooning and barely grown up and embody the prescribed roles as passive objects of desire. In contrast, the men are strong, aggressive, much older, wiser, and experienced in all areas of life. The strongest evidence of over-masculinization is of course the huge penises these men are invariably equipped with in the stories. Making free use of the Freudian notion of castration anxiety, the over-dimensional penises can be seen as the desperate attempt of a pornographic male unconscious to compensate for a feeling of masculine inadequacy. It
176 Freud, Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, p. 158. 177 Williams, Hard Core, p. 210-211.
69 could be argued that the assertion of all-powerful domination over and excessively brutal punishment of women can likewise be viewed as a defense against the fear evoked by the nightmarish idea that women could rob man of the phallus by making claim to power.
70 Conclusion The woman of Victorian pornography starts out as the ideal object of desire: a high- class innocent virgin with plump flesh and coral lips who has no idea of the latent sexual nature inside her. She is a forbidden fruit protected by the law, social conventions, and her own innocence and moral integrity, and it is exactly her inaccessibility that constitutes her attraction. Virginity is a highly valued, fetishized commodity that the man can only take into possession through an act of transgression where he makes use of his masculine sexual prowess. A virgin who does not resist or cry out in pain is suspect. The forceful introduction of the virgin into the sexual realm changes her forever; in the eyes of Victorian morality, she is now a fallen woman, polluted by the act committed against her, robbed of her value and respectability. In the eyes of Victorian pornography, she is also considered damaged goods. Here, the value of the deflowered virgin is gone, for a virgin can only be deflowered once. Instead, she transforms into a hypersexual whore who constantly craves the penis, and is thus, in every way, ruined for the sadistic male sexuality of Victorian pornography: She has no hymen to cause her pain during coitus, she has no pretensions to chastity to make her resist, and her innocence is lost with the first taste of sexual pleasure. In short, she is no longer any fun, and male desire soon turns towards a new victim. Victorian pornography, in no subtle way, betrays its despisal of women. In all the Victorian works of pornography contemplated in this thesis, a disconcerting image of what the virgin will all too soon become roams the periphery of the narrative: The Predator, the sexually experienced woman, is a shrewd, masculinized, and active sexual agent who threatens to usurp the power of man; the Nymphomaniac, a woman with overabundant sexual desire of her own, exposes male sexual prowess as insufficient; the Masochist in taking pleasure in violence makes the pleasure of the male sadist impossible; and the Mother threatens to swallow up the man into her immense gaping vagina. In addition, there is the Spinster, unpossessed and unpossessable in her ugliness, who disrupts the definition of women as objects of desire to be possessed by men, and like the female Masturbator and the Lesbian, she suggests the horrifying idea that women can be sexually (or a-sexually) self-sufficient. Even the weak and innocent Virgin herself has secret castrating properties. In short, Victorian pornography abounds with dangerous, despicable women. Pornography is held to be an expression of pure male sexual desire, a pornotopian construction that includes only what titillates. However, certain dystopian properties find equal expression in the narratives. The many nightmarish female sexualities strewn about in the otherwise pornotopian novels function not only to set off the desirability of the virgin figures, they betray a certain schizophrenia suggesting a twofold intention or function of Victorian pornography. One is to titillate, another is to come to terms with man’s dread of women. Whether the sadistic aggressor attempts to know, destroy, or exorcize the woman
71 from himself, all three can be interpreted as ways of dealing with the fear of woman, a fear originating in either a constructed conceptual or natural bodily difference. However, the many ways in which sadism appears in pornography suggests that the motivations are many- sided, sometimes contradictory, sometimes complimentary, and they promise to resist any interpretation that tries to postulate fundamental working principles. There is, after all, no reason to close the texts prematurely.
72 Bibliography
All links were accessible on March 11, 2014.
Front page illustration: Gustave Courbet, L'Origine du Monde, 1866.
Literary sources
Fanny Hill or Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure by John Cleland (1748). Kindle ebook (ISBN: B004K6LX7Y).
The 120 Days of Sodom by Marquis de Sade (1785). Wilder Publications: USA, 2008. Kindle ebook.
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