THE SEXUAL REVOLUTION IN MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE THE SEXUAL REVOLUTION IN MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE

by

CHARLES I. GLICKSBERG

D

SPRINGER-SCIENCE+BUSINESS MEDIA, B.V. To Bea and Irving Neuman

ISBN 978-94-011-6802-1 ISBN 978-94-011-6800-7 (eBook) DOI 10.1007/978-94-011-6800-7 © 1973 by Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht Originaly published by Martinus Nijhoff, The Hague, Netherlands, 1973 All rights reserved, including the right to translate or to reproduce this book or parts thereof in any form TABLE OF CONTENTS

Introduction VII

PART ONE: THE VICTORIAN ETHOS AND EDWAR- DIAN REPERCUSSIONS 1

Chapter I. The Victorian Sex-Ethic 3

Chapter II. Thomas Hardy and the Sexual Theme 12

Chapter III. H. G. Wells and the New Sexual Morality 33

PART TWO: THE SEXUAL REVOLUTION AND THE MODERN DRAMA 43

Chapter IV. Bernard Shaw and the New Love-Ethic 45

Chapter V. Somerset Maugham on Women and Love 59

Chapter VI. Noel Coward and the Love-Ethic of the Jazz Age 65

PART THREE: EROS IN ENGLAND 71

Chapter VII. Eros and Agape in James Joyce 73

Chapter VIII. D. H. Lawrence and the Religion of Sex 88

Chapter IX. Aldous Huxley: Sex and Salvation 118 VI TABLE OF CONTENTS PART FOUR: THE ENGLISH LITERARY SCENE: FROM THE THIRTIES TO THE PRESENT 141

Chapter X. The New Sex Morality 143 Chapter XI. Sex and Sadism 158 Chaper XII. The Subversion of Sexual Morality 173

PART FIVE: FINALE 181

Chapter XIII. Concluding Remarks 183 INTRODUCTION

The study of its literature is a useful guide to the degree of sexual security existing in a culture.' When a future historian comes to treat of the social taboos of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in a fourteen-volume life-work, his theories of the existence of an enormous secret language of bawdry and an immense oral literature of obscene stories and rhymes known, in various degrees of initiation, to every man and woman in the country, yet never consigned to writing or openly admitted as existing, will be treated as a chimerical notion by the enlightened age in which he writes.' If I were asked to name some characteristics typical of the mid-20th century, I would put first the uncritical worship of money, the spread of nationalism, the tyranny of the orgasm, the homosexual protest and the apotheosis of snobbery. Money, sex, and social climbing motivate society." The English are, on the whole, an inhibited people. They have a basic prudery and gaucheness in sex matters which sets them apart from almost every other nation in Europe .... In England, the realisation that many of the restraints and taboos of Victorian times are unnatural and even psychologically harmful, combined with the decline of organized religion, has led to a considerable laxity in sex matters, particularly since World War II!

1. The Emergence of the New Sex-Ethic As the last third of the twentieth century speeds to a close, it is tempting to take a backward glance over traveled roads and critically examine those ideas and events which were responsible for ushering in what amounts to a sexual revolution in the literature of England. The

1 Alex Comfort, Sexual Behavior in Society. New York: The Viking Press, 1950 p.69. • Robert Graves, Lars Porsena. London: Paul, Trench, Trubner, 1929, p. 55. 3 Cyril Connolly, Previous Convictions. New York and Evanston: Harper & Row, 1963, p. 412. • Alan Simpson, Beckett and Behan and a Theatre in Dublin. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1962, pp. 185-186. VIII INTRODUCTION development of the new sex-ethic in that country was by no means exceptional. More or less the same ideological and historical forces were at work on the European continent and in the United States. The remarkable advances made by science in the study of man, the discoveries of psychoanalysis and the popularization of Freudian ideas, the cata• strophic impact of two world wars, the spectacular manufacture and frightening use of the atomic bomb, the growing militancy and rise to power of the feminist movement, all this worked havoc with traditional folkways and inaugurated sweeping changes in the moral evaluation of sex in England. These radical changes left their imprint on twentieth• century English literature. The Victorian worthies-a Leslie Stephen, an Anthony Trollope, a Thomas Carlyle, a Charles Dickens-would have been aghast had they beheld the monsters of evil the next century would spawn. For them sex was the unmentionable subject. In Victorian days the dirtiest word in the English language never made its appearance on the printed page. The obscene-and anything that referred openly to sex was considered obscene-was severely punished by the courts. Women were regarded as angels of purity, fleshless and sexless, except for those fallen creatures who pandered for a price to man's bestial desires. Venereal disease, never crudely designated by its name, was the worst kept secret of the age. Sexual abnormalities were not discussed in polite society; homosexuality was known as the sin that dare not speak its name. The Victorian Age was exceedingly proud of its virtuous stance. Darwinism might triumph in the scientific arena but the literary spokes• men of the time would not agree to a relaxation of the strict moral principles designed to safeguard the sanctity of marriage and the purity of womanhood. Tennyson, outraged by the immorality of his age, wrote:

Set the maiden fancies wallowing in the troughs of Zolaism,• Forward, forward, ay, and backward, downward too into the abysm!

This fear of the dreadful consequences that would follow if the moral barriers were removed and instinct allowed to reign unchecked, was, as we shall see in a later chapter, characteristic of the temper of Victorian literature. It was not always so. During the Renaissance, man first developed pride in the beauty of the body, which came into its own while the soul was assigned a correspondingly subordinate position. Literature then took up the fascinating theme of Eros, though the problems the poets and playwrights faced were not unlike the one modern writers wrestled INTRODUCTION IX with: how to reconcile passion with convention, the fierce urgency of sexual desire with the negative injunctions of the moral law. The men of the Renaissance added a new fillip to the erotic theme: though the course of true love never did run smooth, they knew that the majesty of passion is not to be thrust aside. The double standard of morality prevailed. The man could do very much as he pleased before marriage and even after marriage, though in the latter case he might have to put up with the wrath of his wife. The Renaissance exalted the primacy and power of the lordly male. "The obligatory proof of manliness was no longer heroic deeds, as in the age of the knights and the minnesingers, but sexual virility." 5 Since Nature dictated that man should be promis• cuous, it was absurd to run counter to this decree. In the eighteenth century a number of zealous reformers preached the doctrine of a return to nature. The sex instinct was looked upon as "natural," not to be vilified or repressed. Women had as much right to the enjoyment of sex as men. Morality, however, was still largely an expression of class morality. What was binding upon the lower orders did not apply to the upper classes. What the twentieth century brought about was a greater understanding of the existence of sexual aberrations. Abnormality was not a vice restricted to the Marquis de Sade or Swinburne or Oscar Wilde or Gide or Marcel Proust or Genet; homosexuality, sadism, nymphomania and satyriasis were rampant at all levels of society, from the highest to the lowest. This preoccupation with aspects of sexual behavior that varied from the norm was to be expected in a Freudian age excessively interested in all matters relating to sex. It is in the twentieth century, too, that the new woman emerged, insisting on her right to complete sexual fulfillment and demanding socioeconomic equality with the male of the species. 6 The modern age made possible a more realistic and enlightened attitude toward sex, though that attitude was carried at times to dangerous extremes. On the whole, writers were prone to adopt one of a number of possible responses to the sexual question. Ready to hand was the Christian theology of sex, with its picture of man as the victim of original sin but open to grace and redemption through an act of genuine repentance.

, Richard Lewinsohn, A History of Sexual Customs. Translated by Alexander Mayce. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1956, p. 161. • See the chapter on "Women and Sex Morals" in Vera Brittain, Lady into Woman. New York: The Macmillan Company, 1953, pp. 147-160. x INTRODUCTION This, in general, is the position taken by Graham Greene and Franc;ois Mauriac. Then there is the strictly moral interpretation, which argues that sex caters to the beast in man and is justified only for the purpose of procreation, a point of view promulgated by Tolstoy in his later years and one that is close to the Christian conception of Eros. At the other extreme is the naturalistic outlook, as formulated by Zola, which takes as its fighting premise the assumption that whatever is natural is right. Man is an integral part of Nature and must therefore be accorded the freedom to release his God-given instincts. This liberating value-judgment was reinforced by the teaching of Freud and his disciples, who rescued the maligned sex instinct from the grip of ignorance and superstition. Then there is the Marxist dialectic which placed the economic motif in a position of paramount importance. As the brilliant young English critic, Christopher Caudwell, wrote in keeping with his Marxist faith: "Bour• geois civilisation has reduced social relations to the cash nexus. They have become emptied of affection. To a psychologist, the whole world seems suffering from a starvation of love, and this need appears in a compensatory and pathological form as neurosis, hate, perversion, and unrest." 7 Despite the bourgeois cult of love, sexual behavior functions as a conditioned response to the social mechanism. The capacity to love is lost. Tenderness is ousted from social consciousness. Literary Marxists reject Freudianism as a bourgeois psychology that commits the gross fallacy of studying the individual in isolation from society. Only dialectical materialism is able to determine what is life• giving and life-negating. Even sex must be interpreted dialectically as a manifestation of the class conflict. In short, the implications of sex extend far beyond the restricted domain of the personal. Freud was right, however, in fighting to preserve the newly fledged science of psycho• analysis. "The denial of sex was part of the denial of life's wholeness inevitable in a class-riven society; and so Freud's discovery of the centrality of sex was a revolutionary scientific act." 8 But it was not truly revolutionary in that, unlike Marxism, it universalized the sex instinct and made everything in life subject to its influence. Where Freud stressed the overriding force of sex, the Marxist stressed the crucial importance of food and economic factors.

7 Christopher Caudwell, Studies in a Dying Culture. London: John Lane, The Bodley Head, 1938, p. 148. B Jack Lindsay, The Anatomy of Spirit. London: Macmillan and Company, 1937, p. 89. INTRODUCTION XI The last attitude worthy of mention in this context is that of the humanist, who sets forth a code of ethics stripped of superstition, prejudice, and irrationality. What the writer of this persuasion believes in is a rational system of sexual morality, while recognizing the deplorable fact that few people in the present age are able to abide by it. The individual is free to make his own decisions and take upon himself the responsibility for violating the social conventions of his time. This attitude bears some resemblance to sexuality as interpreted in the work of Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir.9 It does not follow, of course, that modern English writers necessarily conformed in their work to any of the attitudes we have briefly outlined. Imaginative literature is not concerned in the main with ideas and ideology; it portrays the dilemmas of the human condition as they are experienced in the flesh of individualized characters. The sex-ethic as it functions in the novels of D. H. Lawrence, Aldous Huxley, Somerset Maugham, Graham Greene, Angus Wilson, and Iris Murdoch is not to be summed up in a single abstract formula. Yet deep-cutting differences

• Simone de Beauvoir has dealt fully with this aspect of existentialism in her book, The Second Sex, which analyses the myth of woman as treated by five writers: Montherlant, Claudel, D. H. Lawrence, Breton, and Stendhal. The sexual myths, she maintains, are completely dominated by the male hierarchy of values. Woman is pictured as being sex incarnate, the source of all carnal temptation, the embodied evil of sensuality, but she is also mysterious, unknowable, taking on such contra• dictory roles as virgin and harlot, saint and prostitute. Simone de Beauvoir shows that man repeatedly tries to rebel against the tyranny of woman, who represents the inexorable decree of Nature. In her own life Simone de Beauvoir sought to remain faithful to her libertarian principles. Both she and Sartre believed in freedom; the bondage of marriage was not for them. They "took the unmarried state for granted." (Simone de Beauvoir, The Prime of Life. Translated by Peter Green, Cleveland and New York: The World Publishing Company, 1962, p. 66.) In her autobiography, Force of Circumstance, she declares: "There are many couples who conclude more or less the same pact as Sartre and myself: to maintain throughout all deviations from the main path a 'certain fidelity.' " (Simone de Beauvoir, Force of Circumstance. Translated by Richard Howard. New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1965, p. 124.) She is aware that the woman in such a "free love arrangement" runs more of a calculated risk, since man is the more variable, the more promiscuous creature. "If the two allies allow themselves only passing sexual liaisons, then there is no difficulty, but it also means that the freedom they allow themselves is not worthy of the name. Sartre and I have been more ambitious; it has been our wish to experience 'contingent loves'; but there is one question we have deliberately avoided: How would the third person feel about our arrangement? It often happened that the third person accommodated himself to it without difficulty; our union left plenty of room for loving friendships and fleeting affairs." (Ibid., pp. 124-125.) XII INTRODUCTION do make themselves felt: the Christian conception of sex as sinful to be found in the writings of men like C. S. Lewis and Graham Greene stands in sharp opposition to the joyous acceptance of sex by a D. H. Lawrence. But the elemental instinct of sex, whether approved or fiercely opposed on religious or moralistic grounds, is not to be denied. However much it has been subjected to repression or sublimation, it has functioned more or less successfully through all the vicissitudes of recorded history. The mating instinct, under whatever legal or moral auspices it operates, is not to be held in check. In fact, not much has changed in the character of this biological urge. What does change, slowly but perceptibly, is the attitude men take toward sex. Each genera• tion draws up its own sexual philosophy, its own conception as to what is natural, normal, sane, and desirable, and these values find expression, hostile or supportive, in the literature of the time. It is, as a rule, the heretics, the proponents of the new dispensation-men like H. G. Wells, Bernard Shaw, and James Joyce-whose work, by the scandal it creates or the public controversy it provokes, calls attention to itself. Not that literature as a whole aims to be subversive; usually it reflects the sexual mores of the age. For reasons that are both practical and prudential, the writer tends to supply the demands of popular taste; he avoids the forbidden theme or treats it circumspectly because he or his publisher fears to incur the penalties of censorship. We know that George Moore, despite his pioneering efforts as an avowed disciple of Zola, compromised with the prudish taste of his Victorian audience. Regardless of what individual writers do or say, the process of change in response to new conditions goes on inexorably, so that what is con• sidered shocking and reprehensible in one age is regarded as perfectly legitimate and even desirable in another. If we examine the sexual attitudes voiced in English literature from the Victorian Age to the present day, we get a striking confirmation of the relativity of moral values. What pronounced shifts take place in the spectrum of public taste! What astonishing reversals of judgment in the legal and moral code! The Victorians, the epitome of gentility in matters relating to sexual behavior, looked upon homosexuality as an abnormal and revolting vice. The notorious trial of Oscar Wilde is a case in point. Indeed, the entire subject of sex was taboo. To write about it openly was the mark of a coarse and depraved mind. But the sex instinct, in literature as in life, cannot be repressed with impunity. Eros, offended, exacts its revenge. Though sex the world over is a subject of absorbing interest, the manner in which it is portrayed INTRODUCTION XIII in literature affords some indication of the degree of repression a given society exercises. Seduction, the loss of innocence, promiscuity, illicit love: these have constituted the staple of much English fiction and drama since Elizabethan times. There is always the conflict between the Old Adam and the moral self, between the dictates of the law and the irre• pressible call of instinct. Importunate in its demand for immediate gratification, cunning in its subversion of the faculty of reason, instinct pays little heed to the moral covenant. The fact is that in England as well as the United States sex has today become an obsession. After the end of the First World War, profound changes took place in the moral life of the English people. The younger generation con• demned those who still adhered to the old ideals of repression as hypo• crites. The cry was raised: "Down with Victorianism!" The motor car helped to relax the morals of students. According to Elspeth Huxley, in Love among the Daughters: "It was not religion or morality that kept most of us relatively chaste, but lack of facilities." 111 The Freudian injunction that it was dangerous and decidedly harmful to frustrate the sexual instinct was accepted by the intellectuals as the latest scientific gospel. Adolescents defied the attempts by parents to control their behavior. Gradually, by the time of the Second World War, according to one observer, "licence became accepted among adolescents of all classes to a point at which it began to lose its revolutionary appeal; and suddenly the permissive atmosphere became, to youth's surprise, yaw• ningly tedious."ll What was once hailed as a grand victory in the fight for sexual liberation proved disappointing in the end. There was no need now for the young to participate in the sexual revolution. The battle had been won, the cause had triumphed, and now-what? Sex ceased to possess the importance the previous generations had attached to it, and the young turned to other forms of rebellion. The new permissive sex ethic that the younger generation took for granted had to be fought for in good earnest. A more enlightened climate of opinion was not generated without a protracted struggle. Men like Havelock Ellis and Bertrand Russell approached the sexual problem from a rational point of view, though recognizing the irrational forces which govern the sexual instinct. The first chapter of Marriage and Morals, by

'OElspeth Huxley, Love among the Daughters. New York: William Morrow & Co., Inc., 1968, p. 77. 11 Alan McGlashan, "Sex on These Islands," in Arthur Koestler (ed.), Suicide of a Nation? New York: The Macmillan Company, 1964, p. 206. XIV INTRODUCTION Bertrand Russell, tries to answer the question "Why a Sexual Ethic Is Necessary." Russell rejects both the Freudian and Marxist interpretation of sexuality, the first arguing that sex is of supreme importance and the other holding up the economic factor as primary. He makes it clear that with but few exceptions sexual ethics and sexual institutions were not guided by rational considerations. What form of sexual behavior is best for people-that is indeed an extremely difficult problem to solve, for too many variables enter into the equation. He states the reason why the monogamic patriarchal family has predominated over the polygamic. "The primary motive of sexual ethics since pre-Christian times has been to secure that degree of female virtue without which the patriarchal family becomes impossible, since paternity is uncertain." 12 Russell sounds a call for desirable change in sexual morals. Ignorance and superstition in matters relating to sex must be overcome. They were not easily over• come. Mrs. Grundy held the fort and would not yield an inch of ground. Writers had to fight strenuously for the right of freedom of expression in this hotly contested area.

2. The Fight for Freedom of Expression In the nineteenth century the fight for freedom of expression had to be waged against great odds. Public opinion and the law were both aligned on the side of the formidable Mrs. Grundy. The cult of prudery prevailed. Prudery springs from many causes, both individual and social, and gives rise to consequences that are often absurd. Fundamentally it is motivated by the mixed emotions of secret envy and unconscious fear and hatred.13 Though some purity-mongers may be hypocritical in rushing to the defence of threatened public morality, most prudes, it must be acknowledged, are sincere in their convictions; they are sustained in their campaign against sin by a fanatical sense of righteousness, but, like the notorious Anthony Comstock in the United States, they are not aware of the real motives that drive them to root out all references to sex in literature. They are fearful of sex, which they consider to be the domain

10 Bertrand Russell, Marriage and Morals. New York: Liveright, 1929, pp. 8-9. 13 Peter Fryer declares that it is motivated by "fear and hatred of pleasure, primarily of sexual pleasure; and Mrs. Grundy is a prude who carries this fear and hatred to the stage of more or less organized interference with other people's pleasures." Peter Fryer, Mrs. Grundy. New York: London House & Maxwell, 1964, p.18. INTRODUCTION xv of the demonic, the source of original sin, the primal evil. It is this distorted and irrational body of values that accounts for their mono• mania. "To a healthy person sex is a very important part, but only a part, of life; so long as he is sexually satisfied his sexual needs are only from time to time in the forefront of his consciousness." 14 The trouble with prudery is that it must go the whole hog. The professional prude refuses to allow any relaxation of moral standards. Not only descriptions of sexual behavior, if permitted at all, but modes of speech as well must conform to his stringent ideal of what is proper. In fact, he angrily proscribes any expression, regardless of the context in which it appears, directly or indirectly connected with sex. He is on the constant lookout for the diabolical manifestations of the obscene. He and his kind never face the difficult problem of how obscenity is to be defined. What is obscene to one man is the authentic voice of the creative spirit to another man. Obviously the obscene must gratify a deep• seated, universal need in man, for there is no age that has been completely free of this alleged "vice" of obscenity. Who at some time or other does not resort to it? The scientific study of the physiology and psychology of sex threw a new light on the meaning and function of obscenity. It was shown that the attempt to eliminate sex from literature and art is bound to prove ineffectual, for then it thrives underground. And why must every• thing relating to the sexual instinct be considered obscene? As Havelock Ellis who, together with Freud, was in large part responsible for the success of the sexual enlightenment in England, says: "When everything is obscene it becomes impossible to say what obscenity is. Hence the endless definitions of obscenity, and their absurdity." 15 Mrs. Grundy, the aroused voice of Puritanism, is not troubled by the semantics of definition. She knows what obscenity is without having to consult the dictionary; she can detect its foul smell a mile away. Obscenity is that which tends to arouse sexual desire, and she is prepared to go to court to prosecute the literary purveyors of the obscene. Victorian literature felt the full impact of this obsession. But the laws against obscenity, like those directed against pornography, could offer no genuine solution of the problem. The laws were effective, however, in producing a literature in Victorian times that was straitlaced. As the middle class in England rose to a position of power, they energetically enforced those

14 Ibid., p. 18. 15 Havelock Ellis, On Life and Sex. New York: Garden City Publishing Company, 1937, II, 104. XVI INTRODUCTION moralistic values which were hostile to all forms of unregulated pleasure. The prosecution of pornography as a crime gained momentum. When Queen Victoria ascended the throne, literature came under the chastening influence of a predominantly prudish society. The judges of the land labored to define obscenity. Lord Chief Justice Cockburn applied this arbitrary test: "whether the tendency of the matter charged as obscenity is to deprave and corrupt those whose minds are open to such immoral influences .... " 16 In 1888, Vizetelly was prosecuted for publishing a translation of Zola's La Terre. The opening of the twentieth century marked the beginning of a welcome change. Liberal ideas on the subject of sex were at last being heard. Leaders like H. G. Wells and Bernard Shaw appeared who advocated various social reforms, but their views on the place of sex in literature were comparatively mild, though then considered sufficiently dangerous to call forth sharp controversy. Neither Shaw's plays, however iconoclastic in tone, nor Wells's fiction seriously violated the proprieties. It was D. H. Lawrence who declared open warfare on Mrs. Grundy. Published in 1915, The Rainbow was assailed viciously in the press; over a thousand copies of the novel were destroyed by order of the court. When the police raided his exhibition of paintings, Lawrence wrote Pornography and Obscenity, which excoriated the hypocritical policy of the land. The cause Lawrence represented was eventually vindicated, though not, alas, in his lifetime. The Obscene Publishing Act of 1959 established a new legal definition: the test is now based not on the putative effect of a single offensive passage torn out of context but on the book as a whole. The entire conception of obscenity was swathed in ambiguity. Similarly the subject of pornography was discussed in an atmosphere charged with moralistic bias so that works of genuine literary merit were condemned as pornographic because they dealt frankly with the theme of sex.17

,. Alec Craig, Suppressed Books: A History of the Conception of Literary Obscenity. Cleveland and New York: The World Publishing Company, 1963, p. 44. 17 Alec Craig presents this definition of pornography: "A definition of porno• graphy in the sense of reprehensible sexual writing that all right-minded people are supposed to want suppressed by law has become almost classic. The phrase, used by Judge Woolsey in his celebrated Ulysses judgment, is 'dirt for dirt's sake,' and it appears to be a very satisfactory description in the eyes of most writers and speakers on the subject of pornography. But if we ask ourselves what is this dirt for whose sake it is blameworthy to write, what is the answer? Do we mean 'sex for sex's INTRODUCTION XVII The organized attempt to censor and thus control the reading taste of the English public failed to achieve its objective. A more sophisticated younger generation came on the scene who refused to be bound by the standards of their elders. What one decade brands as "dirt" is hailed as original art by the next decade. The proof is that many novels once stigmatized as immoral are later enshrined as classics. As the reading public grew steadily larger, the old moral system of literary judgment was abandoned. Obscenity cannot be suppressed. The writer must be left free to abide by his own sense of values. The laws that in his time are regarded as absolute and sacrosanct may well prove to be the ephemeral voice of convention. There is little justification for the regula• tion of literary standards by law. "Even if a book presents unpopular or unconventional views about sexual morality it should be tolerated, provided its manner of presentation is not pornographic." 18 Actually as Herbert Read argues, the problem of pornography cannot be solved by means of censorship or suppression. The minds of men, both those who create pornography and those who consume it, must be transformed. Prohibition and censorship, as Read points out, are "brutal

sake'? If so, why not?-unless we believe that sex is dirt." (Ibid., p. 211.) Geoffrey Gorer, the anthropologist, analyzes the relationship between obscenity and porno• graphy. Some aspects of sexuality are looked upon as obscene, though the way in which obscenity is defined in different societies varies. (See his account of the Lepchas of Sikkim, India, in Himalayan Village, and their forthright, unemotional attitude toward sex. "They openly equate sexual activity with eating, saying that the one is as natural and as necessary as the other. .. " Geoffrey Gorer, Himalayan Vii/age. London: Michael Joseph, 1938, p. 332.) Thus the connection between obscenity and pornography is hard to pin down; a literary work may be porno• graphic in content without directly employing obscene words. Pornography, Gorer holds, "is defined by its subject matter and its attitude thereto. The subject matter is sexual activity of any overt kind, which is depicted as inherently desirable and exciting ... " (C. H. Rolph (ed.), Does Pornography Matter? London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1961, pp. 29-30.) In The Other Victorians, Steven Marcus discusses some pornographic classics that were immensely popular during the Victorian era. He shows what is characteristic of the genre: it is written by "men and for men ... " (Steven Marcus, The Other Victorians. New York: Basic Books, Inc., 1966, p. 213.) It identifies the female organ with the person, so that "the woman ceases to be a woman and is transformed into an object." (Ibid., p. 213.) The concluding chapter is called "Pornotopia." Marcus speaks of pornotopia as "literally a world of grace abounding to the chief of sinners. All men in it are always and infinitely potent; all women fecundate with lust. ... " (Ibid., p. 273.) 18 Norman St.John-Stevas, Obscenity and the Law. London: Secker and Warburg, 1956, p. 202. XVIII INTRODUCTION methods which succeed only in aggravating the disease." 19 They aggravate the disease because they fail to consider its etiology and the social conditions that facilitate its growth. If the middle class takes the lead in the campaign to halt the sale of pornography, it is they, paradoxically, who are the most avid consumers of pornographic literature. Morse Peckham reports that the market for true pornography, the purveying of pornography unredeemed by style, of pornography for its own sake, is primarily the well-to-do middle class. The respectable citizen buys the vast majority of pornographic publications. The high prices for such books are and always have been the proof; only the economically self-disciplined can afford them!O

The English working class are not interested in pornography for its own sake, even if they could afford that expensive commodity. Contrary to popular expectation, they are not sexually more licentious than the middle or upper classes; they talk about sex more freely, "and sexual experience in the working-classes is probably more easily and earlier acquired than in other social groups." 21 Despite all this, they are remarkably shy about some aspects of sex: "about discussing it 'sensibly', about being seen naked, or even about undressing for the act of sex ... " 22 As Allan Sillitoe reveals in his fiction dealing with the life of the working class, the young pick up their sexual knowledge in the group of peers to which they belong and at work. They soon leave off masturbation and are initiated into heterosexual experience. Those who at the age of eighteen have not passed through that experience are not looked upon as men. 23 Hoggart's conclusions are borne out by such a clear-eyed observer of the English working class as George Orwell. Writing in 1944 on "The English People," he declares: "It is universally agreed that the

19 C. H. Rolph (ed.), Does Pornography Matter?, p. 17.

20 Morse Peckham, Beyond the Tragic Vision. New York: George Braziller, 1962, p. 317.

21 Richard Hoggart, The Uses of Literacy. London: Chatto and Windus, 1957, p.83.

22 Ibid., p. 83. 28 "They have little sense of guilt or sin in connection with their sex-life; they make much of sex, but not because underneath they feel lost and anonymous in the great urban mass.... They are not indulging in the bravado of immorality about which much was heard in the behaviour of some groups during the 'twenties.' Yet they do feel vaguely that 'scientific discovery' has made it all the more legitimate as well as, with cheap contraceptives, easier." (Ibid., p. 84.) INTRODUCTION XIX working classes are far more moral than the upper classes, but the idea that sexuality is wicked in itself has no popular basis." 24 But the views of the English working classes played no part in the battle that writers had to wage against the "censor-morons." That battle for freedom of expression in England was finally won. Lady Chatterley's Lover was cleared of the charges brought against it by the censors. One French critic maintained that the publication of this novel constituted "the Sexual Revolution's Declaration of RightS."25 The realities of sex had to be faced; no prohibitive morality could for long hold back the natural interest of men and women in the honest treatment of sexual love in literature. The newly won freedom of expression was not an unmixed blessing. The new permissive sex ethic argued that there is no such thing as biological guilt; all guilt is an expression not of nature but of a repressive culture. A new liberalized morality emerged that was suited to the condition of alienated man in industrialized society. In the increasing impersonality of modern urban life no one was interested in the sexual morality or immorality of his neighbour. Though the norm officially prescribed is that of marital fidelity, the wife who remains virtuous is put on the defensive. Adultery is no longer a sin, not even a problem; the chief difficulty is how to arrange matters so as to escape detection. To have an affair is to be enlightened, liberated, in the swing of things. As Morton M. Hunt points out: "As a theme, indeed, ordinary adultery has come to seem rather tame; a generation that has grown accustomed to everything from the clinical minutiae of Lady Chatterley's Lover to the outright perversion of Lolita is not likely to be startled by simple infidelity ... " 26 None of the legal or social restrictions in force has ever prevented a woman from betraying her husband sexually. Today when the traditional barriers have been removed and women are free to work and play and travel unescorted, the opportunities for extramarital affairs are more abundant and detection more difficult. The old puritanic taboos have been lifted. Prudery has gone out of fashion. The twentieth century has

"' George Orwell, As I Please, 1943-1945, in The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell. Edited by Sonia Orwell and Ian Angus. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, Inc., 1968, III, II. .. Rene Guyon, Sexual Freedom. Translated by Eden and Cedar Paul. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1950, p. 125. 26 Morton M. Hunt, Her Infinite Variety. New York and Evanston: Harper & Row, 1962, p. 118. xx INTRODUCTION virtually brought to an end the war of the sexes. 27 Women are speaking out freely on the controversial issue of sex and love and marriage and the double standard. The spreading knowledge and improved practice of birth control helped to emancipate the modern woman from her oppressive fear of unwanted pregnancy. It was possible now to separate sexual activity from the ends of procreation.28 Women stressed the fact that the biological function of sex, for the female as well as the male, is not summed up in reproduction. Nor is it true, as commonly alleged, chiefly by men, that women are naturally monogamous. She is capable of satisfying a number of men. In writing about the Profumo affair, Brigid Brophy makes the point that chastity is no longer held to be an indispensable commodity in the marriage market. It has been de• valued; "chastity is no longer a virtue but has become a neutral." 29 Now that perfectly safe contraceptive devices are available and the danger of giving birth to illegitimate children does not exist, promiscuous sexual intercourse has ceased to be immoral.

3. The Old Adam in Literature Decried, depreciated, defamed, warred against, the erotic impulse in literature cannot be legislated out of existence. When the inhibiting external pressure is too great, it hits upon elaborately disguised modes of dealing with the deathless energy of the sexual instinct. Eros among the Greeks was worshiped as one of the oldest gods, but the native puritanic tradition forbade such a pagan cult of love from establishing itself in England. The epiphany of the God of Love must first be spiritualized; it must be sublimated, made to conform to the ascetic ideal. Such a restrictive conception of the nature of love induced Victorian writers to deal with the forbidden subject of sex by means of veiled allusions and circumlocutions. But the experience of sexual love, however discreetly it is interpreted in the literature of a given age, remains a universal and archetypal motif. The novel and the drama project the figures of men and women against a specific social background, revealing their characteristic behavior, their striving, their interrelationships, the various forms, deviant or conventional, their acts of love assume, the

27 Brigid Brophy, Don't Never Forget. London: Jonathan Cape, 1966, p. 24. .. "Only when sex ceased to be considered a sin could woman be regarded as a human being and not as either a 'temptress' or as the incorporation of a necessary evil." Viola Klein, The Feminine Character. London: Routledge, 1946, p. 96 . .. Brigid Brophy, Don't Never Forget, p. 54. INTRODUCTION XXI complex underlying motives that prompt their quest for sexual fulfillment; they articulate in their responses, their gestures, their words of approval or condemnation, what their society considers moral and immoral. But the need for love remains an obsessive and enduring concern in the lives of people, and the literature of every age, whatever symbolic disguise the face of love happens to put on, reflects this concern. The pursuit of sex may not be the acknowledged theme of a novel and yet operate as a dominating force in the background. Clarissa Barlowe, if judged by its leading scenes, might well be called a licentiously moral work of fiction. Despite the obvious fact that Samuel Richardson makes virtue triumph, the reader is given an enticing view of the face of evil. 30 To take a more recent and more extreme example from another culture that illustrates the shaping influence of society on the character of sexual morality: immediately after the October Revolution in Russia, family ties, the heritage of the former bourgeois regime, were enthu• siastically done away with. Some Russian writers preached the doctrine of "free love." In Alexandra Kollontay's novel, Red Love, the heroine at the end gives up the man she has been living with. Symbol of the economically emancipated, self-sufficient woman, she says: "I don't need a man. That's all they can do-be fathers!" 31 Love is an illusion. Sex is, like hunger or thirst, a physical need to be satisfied without indulging in romantic nonsense. But the Soviet Union's urgent need for increased industrialization made the family, the larger the better, a useful productive unit, and the liberal divorce laws were sharply curtailed. During the period of the Stalin dictatorship, child-bearing was extolled as a sacred, patriotic duty.32 The love life of man and woman was of secondary

,0 Clarissa, according to one critic, is "a kind of love goddess, a Venus .... She is the love goddess of the Puritan middle class of the English eighteenth century, of the bourgeois family, and of mercantile society." Dorothy Van Ghent, The English Novel. New York: Rinehart & Company, Inc., 1955, p. 50. 31 Alexandra KoIIontay, Red Love. New York: Seven Arts Publishing Company, 1927, p. 285. 3' The assumption that revolutionary politics goes hand in hand with the break• down of sexual conventions and controls is not in accordance with the historical facts. A social order may be ruled by a given class, the aristocrats, the bourgeoisie, the proletariat, but this affords no clue to the kind of sexual behavior it will permit. Nor does the sexual revolution, if it is successful, inevitably give rise to the social revolution. Indeed, the political revolution, once it has gained power, establishes the reign of puritanism. "The belief that a narrow sexual morality is an essential bulwark of the capitalist system is no longer tenable." E. J. Hobsbawn, "Revolution Is XXII INTRODUCTION importance compared to the necessities of economic and technological development. 33 Influenced by the work of such pioneers as Havelock Ellis and Sigmund Freud, modern English literature has inaugurated a revolution in the field of sexuality. The movement in the direction of greater free• dom of sex expression is evident in the fiction of Thomas Hardy, who is fascinated by the irrational compulsion present in sexual love, but he was prevented from speaking out and gave up the writing of fiction. The naturalistic writers of the twentieth century, unlike their Victorian predecessors, pictured man as a creature of instinct. Many of them utilized the discoveries of biology and psychoanalysis in portraying the character of man in his search for sexual fulfillment.

Puritan," in The New Eroticism. Edited by Philip Noble. New York: Random House, 1970, p. 38. 33 See George Gibian, Interval of Freedom: Soviet Literature during the Thaw. Minneapolis: The University of Minnesota Press, 1960.