Marriage Really Was The Answer To Everything

Eight posts ago, I started a series on 1890s male sexuality, and expected to wind up characterizing the 1890s gentleman and his sexy self as Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, but the novel itself can be read as a critique of societal expectations of male sexuality.

The strange sense of man's double being which must at times come in upon and overwhelm the mind of every thinking creature gives us the Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde and its posing and eliding of the issue of man, sliding as it does between male and human, between a sexual-instinctual problematic of masculinity and an undifferentiating psychological recognition of the beyond of consciousness, of ego and id. The story starts from the exclusion of the woman which is the condition of a questioning of the man and also its limitation, the specifics of difference are pulled back into general themes. The title, in fact, is misleading or, to put it another way, is itself one of the precautions and a symptom of the problem of representation: nothing about the story is really strange other than that it should be thought strange, the strange case of male sexuality is precisely unstrange by being made into this strange case which comes out of, works with the assumptions of, the given system of representation. Male sexuality is neither the foregone conclusion of animal passion nor the horror of an unspeakable darkness but once it is envisaged within this system that is all that can be said, all that is allowed.

I love-love-love this passage in Stephen Heath's "Psychopathia sexualis: Stevenson's Strange Case." I love the essay for what it is, and love this passage for how it speaks to this series of posts. For over a month now, I've been talking about male sexuality as if there is some difference between male sexuality and human sexuality, and I've been trying to limit the discussion of female sexuality. Picturing sexuality as animal passion, is it wrong to assume that there was any difference in sexuality 120 years ago? Surely, as animals we can't have changed that much.

Eugen Sandow

I began this series by discussing 1890s male body image. The ideal male form was characterized as much by ability as it was by form. Form, they had discovered, could be sculpted, and doctors were already refusing to treat obese patients.

In my discussion on sexual orientation, I showed you how they were inventing the modern concept of homosexuality. Men having sex with other men wasn't new, but the act of letting the action define who one was was new. Identities carry power. As a heterosexist society, 1890s London mobilized to limit the power of homosexual identities by outlawing it, and redefining it as a form of mental illness.  In spite of the homophobia that this gave rise to, I think that homosexual men in the 1890s were better off than the men who had no labels because they must have felt less alone.

Which brings me to my post on masturbation: everybody did it, but Victorians worked very hard to make each other feel bad about it. The rumors about what masturbation could do to your health were almost as bad as the remedies for masturbators. It was during this post that I felt the most like I would end up with a Jekyll and Hyde conclusion because it seemed that people feared sex so much that the most reasonable personal solution was to keep it a secret.

Thankfully, that's not generally what they were doing. Homosexuality wasn't the only new identity an 1890s guy could wear. People were trying out aestheticism, being a Bohemian, they were even switching religions, and inventing new religions. In many ways, the 1890s were like the 1960s, but people dressed better. It seems that they were even beginning to understand that the identity of 'man' or 'woman' is one that we create for ourselves, but the full realization of that notion still seems a long way off.

There were both male and female prostitutes, just like there have always been, but the motivation of male prostitutes was perceived differently from the motivation of female prostitutes, much the same way the idea of being a male porn star today is quite different from the idea of being a female porn star. My discussion on prostitution made it clearer to me that the main difference between 1890s male sexuality and 1890s female sexuality was the concept of agency.

Men were perceived as having these out-of-control sex drives, whereas women weren't supposed to have a sex drive at all. What little sex education existed in the 1890s existed exclusively for young men. On the other hand, all responsibility for the transmission of STDs fell on the heads of female prostitutes.

In many ways the increase in religious and spiritual feeling at the end of the 19th century can be linked to the Darwinian Revolution and the need some people felt to differentiate themselves from animals. Sex was viewed as a baser instinct, an act they had in common with every other mammal on the planet. Morality was used to condemn anything they didn't like, and science was frequently used to back those notions up. Disease could then be read as a moral failing, linked to the degeneration (rather than upward evolution) of mankind.

I couldn't talk about 1890s male sexuality without talking about women. Women were cast into a separate sphere, dressed up as a morally-outstanding potential wife/mother, taught to refuse all sexual advances, and portrayed as the antidote to all male sexual problems.

If Eugen Sandow was the perfect man, the perfect woman knew nothing about sex and was a virgin until the horrible night that she got married. Her life's ambition was to become a mother. The perfect woman had no aspirations outside of keeping a perfect house to raise her perfect children in. She would refuse sex to her husband whenever he asked for it, and would refuse to take her clothes off when they did it.

If you were a man and were less than perfect in any way, common sense of the day suggested you find that woman and marry her straight away because she would cure your masturbating, she would reduce your sex drive, and she would shape you into the kind of man who could carry a family of six on his shoulders.

Basically, women were needed to balance out the baser instincts of male sexuality and to harness his ambitious nature, while directing him along the right path in life. That path steered clear away from pornography, masturbation, and dirty pictures, and on toward a bland diet, lots of exercise, and kids to ignore. The kids were her responsibility.

We know, of course, from the biographies of nearly every writer ever mentioned in this blog that, even if this was the ideal, it was almost never the reality, and more married couples lived apart in England and Wales than in any other part of Europe. Like Jekyll and Hyde, there were probably some men who lived double lives, just as there are today, but for the most part, people couldn't help being whoever they were, even if society was working really hard to make them feel bad about it.

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Rent Boys & Degenerate Men

From Tom Kalin's "Swoon" (1992).

Victorian sexuality can be approached from so many directions, including (but not limited to) body image, sexual orientation, masturbation, prostitution, sex education, disease, religion, marriage, and pornography. All of these aspects overlap and influence each other, creating tremendous diversity in attitudes toward sex at any given point in history. Each of these factors provide the context in which sexual identities are created. This post is the fourth in a series of posts that seek to explore that context from the 1890s with an emphasis on male sexuality.

Prostitution

Our attitudes toward women and prostitution haven't changed much since 1899, but attitudes toward men and prostitution changed dramatically between 1890 and 1899. As I explained in my post on sexual orientation, the decade began without the labels of hetero, or homosexual, society was very heterosexist.

Male prostitution existed in 1890. Homosexual prostitution, both male and female, was a common part of city life. The city had molly houses (places for men to dress in drag and meet other men), and there was an all-male brothel on Cleveland Street in 1889. Male prostitutes serviced male clients.

Without sexual orientation labels, people normalized male homosexual acts by over-sexualizing men. The idea was, and sadly sometimes still is, that men needed to have sex, masturbation was forbidden, and if he couldn't find a woman, sex with another man would do, especially a young man because they could sometimes look a little like women.

Richard Freiherr von Krafft-Ebing
with his wife, Marie Luise.

In Psychopathia Sexualis (1886; 1894 translated), Richard von Kraft-Ebing only reinforced the idea that, while abstinence in women was to be expected, abstinence in men was "sufficient to overcome re-pugnance for the unnatural act," by 'unnatural' he meant 'homosexual.'

So, it was believed that:

• Men needed to have sex.
• If they masturbated, they might go insane, or develop epilepsy.
• If they couldn't find a woman to have sex with, a man would do.
• Two men having sex was still unnatural, whatever that means.

The heterosexist society of London in the 1890s heteronormalized the male on male sex acts taking place in the streets until they were blue in the balls, but the fact was that there were more female prostitutes per capita in London in 1890, than there are today. 

Indeed, many of those who campaigned against female prostitution, both in the eighteenth century and the early twentieth, sought only to regulate the trade rather than to eliminate it, fearing that if men did not have easy access to women, they would turn to each other. - Kerwin Kaye

It might have actually been easier for these men to hire a female prostitute. None of these men were paying men to have sex with them because they couldn't find a woman who would do it; these men were paying men to have sex with them because homosexual sex was exactly the kind of sex they wanted to have.

Cleveland Street Scandal in the London Illustrated News (1889).

The Criminal Law Amendment Act of 1885, which sent Oscar Wilde to prison for two years, was a source of ongoing torment for many men, who slept with "rent boys," or male prostitutes. When the Cleveland Street brothel was discovered by police, it was rumoured that one of its clients was second in line to the throne, reinforcing a popular idea that the men who hired male prostitutes were generally rather affluent. This led to some especially seedy characters, taking up the profession of male prostitution, in order to be able to blackmail their clients after the fact. 

The practice was so common that most of the writers in my blog, who used male prostitutes at one time, or another, were at some point also victims of blackmail. Consequently, the clients were labelled as degenerate hedonists, who deserved to be blackmailed; while the male prostitutes themselves were to be viewed with suspicion.

Until the invention of homosexuality, neither of the actors in male on male prostitution were viewed as homosexuals, only as degenerate men with excessive sexual tastes that corrupted younger men into an 'easy' way of making money.

Gender played a strong role in the perception of prostitutes. More agency was read into the characters of male prostitutes. They were seen as more responsible for their own fates, and their own destinies. A male prostitute could leave it behind him, when he got too old to continue working, or simply didn't wish to carry on with it anymore. The main difference between the perception of male prostitutes versus the perception of female prostitutes was how much agency men and women had.

No one seemed to be organizing to reform male prostitutes the way that they were organizing to reform female prostitutes, often called "fallen women," out of the separate spheres ideology. Separate spheres ideology maintained that while men needed sex, women shouldn't even want it a little bit. The idea that a Victorian woman might have had sex with many men was devastating to the angel of the household mythology. Even if a female prostitute was reformed, or somehow 'saved' from her 'vile' circumstances, she would never be admitted into polite society, as was the case with Lady Meux.

Lady Meux.

Still, Victorians were mighty reformers, and a man with a questionable past could always be redeemed by marriage to a morally outstanding woman. I will write more on marriage later.

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Dens of Debauchery

Without kids to take trick-or-treating, we've been talking about going out for Halloween, but no one wants to spend too much money, which got me thinking of what writers in London in the 1890s feared most: poverty and debauchery.

"There were opium dens where one could buy oblivion, dens of horror where the memory of old sins could be destroyed by the madness of sins that were new." - Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891).

East End Den etching (1870)

Addictions were killing writers, like Wilkie Collins, at the end of the Victorian era. Decadence was paired with degeneration in the imagination, and the adventurous upper classes secretly enjoyed 'slumming.'

"It was rumoured that he had been seen brawling with foreign sailors in a low den in the distant parts of Whitechapel, and that he consorted with thieves and coiners and knew the mysteries of their trade. His extraordinary absences became notorious, and, when he used to reappear again in society, men would whisper to each other in corners, or pass him with a sneer, or look at him with cold searching eyes, as though they were determined to discover his secret." - Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891).

William Ewart Gladstone was the only PM to physically walk the streets, trying to rescue fallen women, and make London a safer place (however duplicitous Gladstone's interest in prostitutes may have been). Like most Victorian Londoners, he was probably both fascinated and terrified by the path that poverty and vice could lead one down.

"Have you seen that awful den of hellish infamy—with the very moonlight alive with grisly shapes, and every speck of dust that whirls in the wind a devouring monster in embryo?" - Bram Stoker, Dracula (1897).

Stories, like Dracula, make it clear that no one was really safe from the horrors of vice.

"...it is only recently that I have come to the den where I live now. But that is the humour of Absinthe! — It leads one down in the social scale so gently, step by step, — so insidiously, — so carefully — that one can- not see the end. And even for me, the end is not yet." - Marie Corelli, Wormwood: A Drama of Paris (1890).

Poverty in Victorian London was the 1890s writer's greatest fear. The specter of poverty lived in a den, some dark, smoky place, filled with opium and thieves. Dens of thieves turned boys, like Oliver Twist, into "fogle-hunters." Loose women would be killed by the Ripper.

While socially-conscious middle-class Londoners worked tirelessly to improve the lives of the poor, the media often portrayed the oppressed classes as monsters.

Workers in a textile factory.

Phantom stalking Whitechapel, as an embodiment of neglect.

Consequently, it may be argued that the thing Victorian Londoners feared the most was other Victorian Londoners.

Throughout October 2014, I will be sharing the halloween-themed stories of 1890s London. Check back often!

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Miss Behaviour

The narrator in my book was a real woman, not a famous woman, not a talented woman, not an especially pretty woman, though it is said that she had nice lips and looked like a lily. She came from a respectable home, but didn't always do respectable things. I don't think she was a prostitute of any kind, but I think she may have met a few. I know there were many other women like her in the 1890s, but it is so difficult to find information about them because of the overwhelming urge for these women to appear "respectable."

I know that not all Victorian women were obsessed with being respectable. Oscar Wilde's mother disliked the term “respectable” and wouldn’t have anyone respectable in her house. She went by the name Speranza and liked shocking people. Still, many people respected her.

I'm not denying that many Victorians were obsessed with respectability. Bram Stoker, who was a close personal friend of Speranza, lived out his life in a sexless marriage and there's no evidence of him ever hiring a prostitute (though he might have actually been gay - don't believe me? Google his relationship with Walt Whitman...).

What I am saying is that for these Victorians, obsessed with respectability, maybe their obsession with it was part of the trap. Being a middle-class women probably meant that there was a lot of pressure on a woman to follow her family's wishes and avoid saying and doing dozens of things every day, but it didn't mean they all avoided those things all of the time. These Victorian women paid for their transgrassions, socially, see Degeneration, Decadence & Drink, but I don't think we can sum up a culture so easily.

"In order to merit protection a woman had to be obedient, submissive, and incapable of defending herself. Chivalry was reserved for those women who both needed and deserved protection -- a relatively select group. The right to protection was based on the assumption that women were weaker, softer, and generally very different from the strong men who protected them. Therefore protection was often reserved for middle class women. While it was possible for a working class woman to be respectable, some of the more delicate aspects of the feminine ideal were clearly beyond her." - Caroline Conley

We know from court records that most sexual assaults against women happened in the home. Most of these were by someone that was known to the victim. We also know that this kind of vulnerability did not fit with the Victorian ideal of respectability and didn't make those women any more worthy of the chivalrous protection of her male relatives. In many cases that went unreported, there are documents that indicate many women were even forced to mary their attackers.

Yet, as Conley asserts, it was possible for a working class woman to be respectable. Indeed, there was likely a working-class version of respectability, that may fit into some of the gray areas I wish to explore. Now, just because the rest of this blog post is about prostitution doesn't mean that I think that there wasn't a huge gray area between angel of the household and prostitute. My narrator wasn't either. She was just a woman, but the rest of this post is about prostitutes.

Website after website, journal after journal talks about how poor and working class women were forced into prostitution. When they talk about middle-class women breaking the mold, they overwhelming put it in a positive light and talk about women getting educations. But there were middle-class women who were not the least bit "respectable" and who made a living sleeping with men or having a boyfriend, someone we might call a Sugar Daddy today. These women were middle-class prostitutes who settled down into respectable middle-class lives - often with men who basically used to be their Johns.

As Mike J. Higgins says about male sexuality at this time, "Different contexts brought out different types of sexual behaviour." Unless we are talking about male homosexuality, we are also discussing women's sexuality when we talk about men's sexuality and I think that Higgins' observation is incredibly astute, especially when we consider the different spheres women were expected to operate within.

The ideology of the angel of the household restricted the way that many middle-class women performed their identities. It also changed the way that men interacted with them. In a letter to the Times (4 November 1847), "Joseph" writes:

I doubt if it ever occurred to any man to attempt the seduction of a woman whom he really believed to be modest and virtuous.

For a man to call an unmarried middle-class woman (angel of the household) by her first name, implied that he wanted to marry her! Meanwhile, many poor and working-class girls were called by their first names all the time. A poorer woman named Kathryn might have been called Kate, but "Kate" was also a slang term for prostitute!

Through my research, I'm growing to believe that poor and working-class women "turned tricks" because it was expected or assumed. The context, in which poorer women lived, was one, in which men behaved differently toward them than they would the "purer" angel of the household. I've also grown to believe that the more middle-class a prostitute was the greater her physical mobility throughout social spaces.

Physical mobility through social spaces: I think that a poor or working-class prostitute could be seen in a working class pub without anyone falling off their bar stool. I think that a better-dressed middle-class prostitute might have been escorted into Henry Irving's Beefsteak Room.

Please, if you disagree with any of these thoughts, let me know. The quality of my story depends on it!

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