BOOKS

Desire shall not fail, actually

Raymond Carr

THE MAKING OF VICTORIAN SEXUAL ATTITUDES by Michael Mason OUP, £17.99, pp. 256 his book enraged me. It deals with a fascinating topic — the ideological under- pinnings of Victorian attitudes to sex — yet it will not attract the attention it deserves. Michael Mason is immensely learned but he does not wear his learning lightly. He would take no pride, as Gibbon did, in that his books would be found on the tables of women of fashion; rather they will end up beside the computers on the desks of his academic colleagues. The divorce between this inwardly directed professionalism and the more generalised intellectual discourse of our time has become acute.

This is a pity because this book's central argument is challenging, its detail absorbing. When most of us think of Victorian prudery about sex — Mason's anti-sensualism — we put it down to the `lip-service puritanism of the bourgeoisie', or to the pervasive influence of the evangelical movement. But these religious roots, Mason claims, do not explain anti- sensualism's enduring vitality. This must be sought in the strange convergence between the theological anti-sensualism of protes- tantism — riddled as we shall see with ambiguities — and the anti-sensualism of secularists in the progressive radical tradi- tion of the 19th century.

The latter was rooted in the environmen- talism — men are creatures of their cultur- al context and therefore can be moulded anew by changes in it — and the optimistic rationalism of the 18th-century Enlighten- ment. As men became more rational, so they would master their animal drives. More enlightenment entailed less sex. Desire, Rousseau held, was not a physical need until stoked up by bad literature, a view shared by Christian evangelicals in their incessant warnings of the evil influ- ence of theatre-going and novel-reading on the young mind. James Stuart Mill, the Victorian heir of the philosophes of the Enlightenment, attacked conventional mar- riage and campaigned for divorce. But his distinctly cool relationship with Harriet Taylor seemed to be a proof of his asser- tion that the 'sexual propensity' was becoming 'completely under the control of reason'.

Catholic apologists had always asserted, in Pascal's words, that protestantism would engender 'a thousand bizarre sects'. This would seem amply borne out by the beliefs and practices of protestant sects catalogued by Mason. There is Henry Price's Agape- mone, a bisexual religious community whose members professed to practise celibacy. An obsession with chastity may lead to an erotic dwelling on the delights of the flesh in order to make their conquest more of a triumph for God's elect. To the solid burghers of neighbouring Taunton the Agapemone appeared not so much a monastery as a libertarian harem.

Particularly interesting .is Mason's discussion of Swedenborgism. SwedenbOrg was a distinguished scientist; troubled by erotic dreams and his intellectual pride, he suffered conversion to a sort of scientific mysticism, which he expounded in 30 Latin works. His influence extended far beyond the sect founded after his death in 1772.

`Oh Nigel, you make everything sound so wonderful!' There are traces of his ideas in Coleridge, Balzac, Baudelaire and W. B. Yeats. His exposition of the erotic pleasures to be enjoyed in the after-life, where we preserve our genders intact, clearly influenced Charles Kingsley, for whom the 'thrilling writhings' of this life were but a dim shadow of the perfect union in heaven, where 'we lie naked in each other's arms, clasped together, toying with each other's limbs'. As Mason points out, in Wuthering Heights a transgressive and uuconsumated union on this earth may be consumated in heaven.

There are, as Mason repeatedly reminds us, peculiar ambiguities in some of the extremer forms of protestant sectarianism. I was brought up by my mother as a primitive methodist, the proletarian brand of methodism. It was a jolly concern, even a liberating experience, perhaps even with a whiff of antinomian licence to sin (see Romans 3, viii). Joining the C of E, it was Anglicanism that I found coldly formal and puritanical. It may be that the sect's fanati- cal temperance, its condemnation of drink as the evil, implied sexual abstinence as well. Oddly enough, I discovered that my mother wrote vaguely erotic verse. Never- theless, her temperance remained absolute. After her conversion to Anglicanism, she spat out the communion wine on her hand- kerchief. Was she yet another example of Swedenborgian erotic matrimonialism?

Apart from a detailed treatment of the Victorian obsession with the rescuing of fallen women that seems today such an odd concern of Gladstone, there is a thoughtful examination of the connection between working-class radicalism and anti- sensualism. Respectability would accompa- ny the social and political advance of the working classes, a sign of identity that would cut them off from the moral laxity and luxury of their social superiors and oppressors. Forced, for lack of an alterna- tive, to meet in pubs, radicals struggled against the temptation of beer. Chartists allowed dancing, provided that it was not accompanied by 'suggestive hugging'. Of course political radicalism could lead to doctrines of sexual liberation, as it did with the anarchists. In the 1830s some Owenite socialists favoured unrestricted sexual intercourse on the grounds that during it the sexes 'polish and improve each other'. They castigated the horrors of conventional marriage as the root cause of prostitution. But the Owenite sexual revolution fizzled out, not least because to Owenite women such views gave a charter to male lust. Their attitudes bear a curious similarity to those of later feminists who regarded birth

control — often opposed by working-class radicals — as encouraging the sexual exploitation of women. Enthusiasts for male continence, feminists downgraded the sexual drives of their own sex, echoing the clarion call of Mary Wollstonecraft, 'Mod- esty, the sacred offspring of sensibility and reason' — the old slogan of the Enlighten- ment.

This was not the view of George Drysdale whose Elements of Social Science, published in the 1850s, is the most startling of the many works analysed in this book. Drysdale was unique in arguing that sexual activity would increase with civilisation. Drysdale had two passionate convictions. He was a neo-Malthusian, an advocate of birth control, not only because over- population threatened demographic disaster, but because repeated childbirth condemned working-class women to a living hell. But he was equally passionate in his insistence that abstinence was inhuman, and, as a doctor, regarded it as responsible for the diseases described in some 150 pages. Hence his Law of Exercise of the sexual organs; like other organs they must be exercised at least twice a week if we are to remain in health.

Mason ends his book with an extraordi- nary outburst on paedophilia as an 'evil' to be cured by chemical castration. It is not enough to condemn it on grounds that it hurts the child. It is that present ideas which equate the right to sexual pleasure as on a par with, say, the right to free speech, are misguided. We must 'take a leaf from the 19th-century anti-sensualist book' if the legal restraint on sex between adults and children is to survive the liberationist offensive.

To assert a right to enjoy unlimited sexu- al satisfaction, may, in the end, turn the whole process into a repetitive sport, to be measured by points scored for the length and intensity of Kingsley's 'thrilling writhings', Long ago, that forgotten figure, Professor Joad maintained that D. H. Lawrence's insistence on the legitimacy of fulfilment logically entailed that we must shout louder each time if the momentum of fulfilment is to be maintained. I once met a man who professed to prefer writhing in bed with his companion on a fine autumn day to getting up to enjoy a morning's cub-hunting. Morals apart, sure- ly the wrong aesthetic choice.

Bedtime for a Bradford family Anyone who understandably fancies themselves a little weary of Don McCullin's unsparing images of human brutality and suffering, and also perhaps of his own look of sullen toughness tinged with shame, should go back to the pictures themselves to rediscover what a wonderful photographer he is. The power of his most upsetting images depends on close-up, remorseless in execution, though never in spirit. But he is also a master of space, distance and landscape. One feels that he would have astounded and earned the deep respect of his Victorian forebear, Roger Fenton. Sleeping with Ghosts, which covers his entire career, could have easily been extended with many more master works, but it would then have cost more than its modest price, while it quite sufficiently conveys the essence of his life's work with a stunning and silencing eloquence. There are also several previously unpublished images, all entirely worthy of inclusion.

(Sleeping with Ghosts, introduced by Mark Haworth-Booth, with text by Don McCullin, Jonathan Cape, £25, pp. 208).

Bruce Bernard