The Victorians in love
Anthony Storr
THE BOURGEOIS EXPERIENCE: FROM VICTORIA TO FREUD VOLUME II: THE TENDER PASSION by Peter Gay
OUP, f19.50
This is the second volume of a massive enterprise. Professor Gay has as his object the delineation of middle-class culture from the beginning of the 19th century to the outbreak of the first world war. Since Gay is a convinced Freudian, his first two volumes are largely, though not exclusive- ly, concerned with attitudes towards sex and love. He asks
What, in short, was the bourgeois experience in the university, in the marketplace, in the polling booth, in the museum, in bed? It is Sigmund Freud who has impelled me to ask these questions, and left his mark on my answers.
Gay's first step is to destroy the stereotype of Victorian marriage which is lodged in conventional imagination: the `innocent' wife, dutiful, perpetually preg- nant, but hardly responsive sexually; the middle-class, money-conscious husband, surreptiously resorting to prostitutes, spending most of his leisure at the club, presenting a fiction of respectability. Gay, in his first volume, drew on so wide a range of letters, journals and other records that he not only persuaded one of the falsity of this myth, but left one with the feeling that no generalisations of any kind about bourgeois sexual experience were possible. This second volume is equally rich in content, but better organised and easier to grasp as a whole. Gay's range, the width of his reading, in English, German and French, is formidably extensive. It is not surprising that these volumes have been ten years in the making. Whatever one may finally think of his conclusions, there can be no doubt about the value of what he has recorded as a source-book. Love is more interesting than sex, and the vicissi- tudes of the `tender passion' in both the fiction and the real lives of the Victorians is an enthralling subject.
Gay is particularly good on the novel. Love, he claims, is 'the governing preoc- cupation of 19th-century novelists'. Even the nihilist, Bazarov, in Turgenev's Fathers and Children 'falls victim, much to his astonishment, to love's sting': while Trol- lope, who wrote Miss Mackenzie to prove that a novel can exist without a love interest, confessed himself defeated and has the old maid marry an old man. French novels, though thought dangerous, were acknowledged as being superior in interest to their British counterparts; but Fitzjames Stephen's review of Madame Bovary for the Saturday Review describes the charac- ter of the heroine as 'essentially disgust- ing'. Even so, Stephen was too honest a critic not to realise that some English authors, by writing only what was consi- dered fit for young ladies to read, were in danger of emasculating themselves. In the 1850s, we are certainly a long way from a society which allows the publication of Last Exit to Brooklyn and Histoire d'O, but Gay adroitly makes it clear that Victorian con- flicts over censorship were different from our own in degree, but not in kind. Although by the 1880s 'the islands of reticence were visibly shrinking,' not even the writers uncomfortable with common constraints, including Meredith, Hardy, and Fontane, would provide physical de- tails of love-making or adultery.' It was not until the 19th century had given way to the 20th that more explicit description became possible. Then things appear to have moved rapidly. Gay begins a chapter called Problematic Attachments' with Proust's famous description of Mademoiselle Vin- teuil's lesbian encounter and desecration of her father's photograph. It is surely remarkable that, even in 1913, this deliber- ately shocking episode 'aroused no particu- lar remark'. Perhaps Virginia Woolf was right in supposing that 'In or about Decem- ber, 1910, human character changed.' Gay points out that, even before the turn of the century, attitudes towards homosex- uality were not always so vindictive as the trial of Oscar Wilde might suggest. When Dr. C. J. Vaughan had to resign from the headmastership of Harrow because of an affair with a pupil, he was found appoint- ments in the Church of England and actually offered a bishopric by Palmerston. What Victorian London condemned was Wilde's flamboyance, disregard for propri- ety, and contempt for bourgeois reticence rather than his sexual tastes. Indeed, one might argue that the love which dares not speak its name was rather more acceptable before Freud than after him. Victorian men were able to speak more openly of loving one another than has been at all common until quite recently. Freud's in- sistence that all love is rooted in the body made people more uneasy about homosex- ual feelings rather than less. Could any professedly heterosexual poet today write an equivalent to In Memoriam? Would Gay himself have chosen this translation of his original surname, Frohlich, if he had realised what its modern adjectival use would be?
In a book of this kind, there was bound to be a good deal about prostitution, that perennial Victorian preoccupation. According to Huysmans, the prostitutes of Hamburg were so patriotic that they invari- ably saluted the portrait of their Emperor `before performing the sensual rites'. Syphilis was almost as much a plague as AIDS, though not so immediately lethal. Gay provides us with a vast amount of information, and amply illustrates the fact that Victorian attitudes to sex were far more various and interesting than most people suppose.
In spite of this, it is the figure of Gladstone which lowers over the whole period as its archetypal representative. From the 1840s onward, Gladstone made it his mission to roam the streets, trying to persuade 'fallen women' to rehabilitate themselves by submitting to the disciplines of Houses of Mercy. He was hardly ever successful in doing so, but could not keep away from those who clearly aroused his lust as well as his pity. Gladstone was plagued by a compulsion to read pornogra- phy, recorded his shame in his diary, and duly punished himself for his sins by literal self-flagellation. But even his punishment could not purge his guilt. 'Has it been sufficiently considered, how far pain may become the ground of enjoyment?' he wrote in his diary. The tortuous paths imposed by repression upon Victorian libi- do could hardly be better illustrated.
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