Is There Sex in Victorian Novels?
November 17th, 2007 at 6:42 am (Uncategorized)
Well, sort of. There is not sex in Victorian novels the way there is in Norman Mailer novels, or even in Harlequin teen romances. Victorian novelists, no surprise, tended to observe a social agreement that hot monkey sex is too private to talk about except in porn, and that while an unmarried lady might be induced by a passionate and fleeting lapse of reason to accept a few burning kisses from a lover she hasn’t formally accepted, we all know enough about how that feels to fill in the blanks.
But there are hints. I was reading Anthony Trollope’s minor novel Linda Tressell the other day (been looking for a cheap copy for years!) and ran across the following description of the title character, who is a young orphaned girl in Nuremberg torn between loyalty to a Calvinist aunt who wants her to marry an old, warty, unwashed family friend, and her love for a passionate young man who’s in trouble for political scheming.
Linda Tressel was a tall, light-built, active young woman, in full health, by no means a fine lady, very able and very willing to assist Tetchen [the servant] in the work of the house, or rather to be assisted by Tetchen in doing it, and fit at all points to be the wife of any burgher in Nuremberg. And she was very pretty withal, with eager, speaking eyes,and soft, luxurious tresses, not black, but of so very dark a brown as to be counted black in some lights. It was her aunt’s care to have these tresses confined, so that none of their wayward obstinacy in curling might be seen by the eyes of men; and Linda strived to obey her aunt, but the curls would sometimes be too strong for Linda, and would be seen over her shoulders and behind her back, tempting the eyes of men sorely. Peter Steinmarc [the warty suitor] had seen them many a time, and thought much of them when the offer of Linda’s hand was first made to him. Her face, like that of her aunt, was oval in its form, and its complexion was dark and clear. But perhaps her greatest beauty consisted in the half-soft, half-wild expression of her face, which, while it seemed to declare to the world that she was mild, gentle, and, for the most part, silent, gave a vague, doubtful promise of something that might be be beyond, if only her nature were sufficiently awakened, creating a hope and mysterious longing for something more than might be expected from a girl brought up under the severe thraldom of Madame Charlotte Staubach [stern Calvinist aunt],–creating a hope, or perhaps it might be a fear.
In some ways this paragraph is such a big mashup of cliches one can hardly take notice of it. There is the conflation of hair with sex, and hair control with sexual repression, that has been around probably since the comb was invented, and is still found in almost every romance novel today. (Bitchy girls tend to have their hair and twats under strict financial control; slatterns let it all loose; good girls can’t quite repress their loving natures but try hard, so they have little escaping tendrils.) There’s the mild-mannered girl who doesn’t cause trouble until it becomes necessary to Make a Stand. There’s the “taming a wildcat” bit. We’ve all read this before.
But note also that it’s taken for granted that men look at women, even nice women, and enjoy their beauty in a sexual way. That one of the things men hunt for clues about when selecting a wife, is the potential for resisting repression. “Creating a hope, or perhaps a fear” of something more than you’d expect from a girl brought up under “strict thraldom”–Trollope’s not talking about a nice safe level of sex drive that is easily and safely confined to marital life. It’s interesting that he seems to be talking about sexual passion and resistance to tyranny in the same breath. I can’t help thinking about Trollope’s more famous heroine Lady Glencora Palliser, who is deeply beloved by her husband even as her passionate nature is constantly in conflict with his virtuous but bleakly rule-based view of life. Glencora starts off her marriage by almost running away with her bad-boy former suitor Burgo Fitzgerald. Part of her value and interest as a partner and a character is that she has enough sexual passion that she COULD be out of control, and enough energy as a personality to make trouble.
Because it’s a Victorian novel, Good Girls Don’t. But they should want to, or men won’t either.
There’s a whole other argument here about the so-called public-private split and women’s contribution to public life, but got no time to do the dissertation research so consider my hand lackadaisically waved in that direction.