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Sex and the Refuge for Destitute Truth
Our object of study being in all his relations, physical, moral, psychical, and social, it is impossible to treat the subject adequately without offending in general the mauvaise honte, the false delicacy, and the ingrained prejudices of the age.
Without some such refuge for Destitute Truth as the rooms of the Anthropological Society, we should find it equally difficult to relate and to publish facts.
Sir Richard F. Burton, “Notes on Certain Matters Connected with the Dahoman”
T
he strange career of Sir Richard Burton, to which we shall devote some attention, must surely caution us about any easy generaliza-tions concerning Victorian society. Sexuality and gender were top-ics of debate and contestation throughout the period. However, it would be unwise to deny that those debates reveal the power exercised by “Mrs.Grundy” as well as the good queen herself.
In a recent volume Michael Mason has reminded us that the deprecatory use of the term Victorian originates in the writings of H. G. Wells, Lytton Strachey, and (to a degree) Edmund Gosse and that the consequent stereo-type has inevitably diminished our understanding of a period that produced many rebels and critics (:–). Furthermore, he has stressed that, con-trary to received popular belief, some of the more progressive forces of the era were on Mrs. Grundy’s side, including some secularists who otherwise opposed Victorian religiosity.
In some measure the work of Mayhew and Hemyng that we considered in the last chapter illustrates the cogency of Mason’s argument. It is obviously
“Victorian” in its morality. Nonetheless, the discussion of prostitution is not devoid of sympathy, nor is it totally lacking in prurience. It is a work of journalism and is commonly said to be a founding work of social science.
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Normal Page PgEnds: TEX [52],(2) It is an exemplary illustration of Michel Foucault’s most compelling
argu-ment: rather than simply repressing sexual discourse, as the bourgeois so-ciety that succeeded the greatth-century revolutions is supposed to have done, various agencies ofth-century society required that a great deal of sexual information be made public. Public disclosure was required not only in order to bring the sexual behavior of women, children, patients, church members, and private citizens under the control of agents of authority (hus-bands, doctors, teachers, courts, etc.) but also to aid in the legitimation of that authority by providing, as a major justification of the hierarchy upon which it was based, evidence of a dangerous sexual depravity among the lower ranks (Foucault). Granted, there was reticence about sex in some quarters, but it coexisted with noisy (Foucault would argue compulsory) discourse in others. There were indeed newlywed brides who were ignorant of basic physiology, while in both Britain and the United States there were a number of publications about the dangers of masturbation and how to pre-vent it (see Barker-Benfield:–). However, the tracts that warned against unsanctioned forms of sexuality by their very nature required some discussion of the topic.
In this chapter we discuss a variety of anthropological writings that ap-peared between the years and . It is our contention that these writings do not fail to reflect the social debates and issues of the time. These included the controversial Contagious Diseases Acts passed between
and, which empowered authorities in port towns to inspect prostitutes for venereal disease and to confine noncompliant women in lock hospitals.1 This body of legislation did not address the responsibilities of the prosti-tutes’ clients and was seen by Victorian feminist critics such as Josephine Butler as a reinforcement of the double standard. Coventry Patmore’s fa-mous paean to the “angel in the house,” the sequestered, pampered, but disempowered middle-class antithesis of the “madwoman in the attic” and the “woman of the streets,” was written in thes. In the late s a sex scandal led to the fall of Sir Charles Dilke, a prominent British politician.
Charles Bradlaugh and Annie Besant faced prosecution in for pub-lishing Charles Knowlton’s pamphlet, The Fruits of Philosophy, which advocated barrier methods of contraception – condom, sponge, pessary, and so forth.
Despite such legal interference, contraceptive knowledge began to spread to all classes. In thes a furor erupted over the white slave trade. Scandal also ensued from a police raid on a homosexual bordello in Cleveland Street that was frequented by a number of aristocrats, including, so rumor had
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the Criminal Law Amendment Act in , which endeavored to tighten controls over prostitution and which also contained new provisions, less draconian and, for that reason, perhaps more enforceable, against homosex-uality between consenting adults. It was this legislation that was to be used against Oscar Wilde. A leading participant in the debate over the white slave trade was W. T. Stead, the influential and self-publicizing editor of the Pall Mall Gazette. Stead obtained the services of an adolescent girl by paying off her mother, shipped her to France, and published a pamphlet, The Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon, to show how easy it was to export British virgins to sinister foreign places. Stead was supported by some feminists and Evan-gelical Christians and opposed both by those who disliked the brashness and frankness of his journalism and by many who quite simply opposed kidnapping, even if carried out in the service of higher moral interests. He was prosecuted and briefly imprisoned. Subsequently, Stead condemned the abuse of human rights by King Leopold in the Congo Free State and campaigned for several other causes, including marine safety. He drowned when the Titanic went down.
As the controversy over Stead raged on, Captain Burton’s privately pub-lished and unexpurgated translation of the Arabian Nights’ Entertainments (The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night) came into print. (Ten vol-umes containing the, tales appeared between and , and six additional volumes of Supplemental Nights were published between
and.) Perhaps because of the price of the volumes and the expecta-tion of restricted circulaexpecta-tion, only, copies were printed. Although the volumes contained vivid accounts of imaginary sexual encounters of all possible kinds, and the long section IV:D in the “Terminal Essay” in volume
consisted of a protracted survey of the nature and distribution of male homosexual practices, Burton was never prosecuted, though he and his wife feared he might be. These fears are evidenced in a series of newspaper clip-pings about such prosecutions that Burton pasted in his own copies of the Arabian Nights, which are now shelved in the Huntington Library. In fact, he was to receive his knighthood in, the year following the publication of the first volumes of the Arabian Nights. Burton’s fears were not without justification. Through the efforts of the National Vigilance Association and its supporters, including W. T. Stead, Henry Vizetelly was successfully pros-ecuted in for publishing a translation of Émile Zola’s La Terre, which was deemed to be an “obscene libel.”
Underlying all these events was a fundamental question concerning the
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in the Contagious Diseases Acts was that the monogamous Christian family was the preferable social form. Middle-class women were to be protected from a wicked world and their “baser instincts,” and their future husbands were not to contract “the great scourge.” However, as Mason () ob-serves, the Victorian idea of marriage did not exclude sexual pleasure within that union. Bachelors, moreover, unlike unmarried females, could not be expected to be chaste, although the influential physician William Acton advocated the avoidance of such premarital fantasies as might lead to sex.
Prostitution was an unavoidable fact. The law could not prevent it, but its promulgators did hope to curb the threat to the health and welfare of British soldiers and sailors by controlling the bodies of the prostitutes.
The opposition to the Contagious Diseases Acts, which became the social purity movement, involved an alliance between Evangelical Christians, pro-gressives, and feminists. (Butler and Stead fit all these descriptions.) This coalition argued that male liberties restricted women’s safety and bodily integrity (see Walkowitz; Kent ). Such critics considered Victorian sexual and marital institutions to be hypocritical at best. One might say that in a sense they considered them inadequately “Victorian,” but their agenda challenged some of the emerging forms of control rather than sim-ply demanding the suppression of impolite discourse. Butler was particu-larly scandalized by compulsory examinations of alleged prostitutes with a new gynecological instrument, the speculum, a procedure she characterized as an especially brutal variety of rape (Walkowitz:). She repeatedly encouraged middle-class women to join forces with their working-class sis-ters to resist such abuses.
If one set of radicals criticized Victorian sexuality because it hypocriti-cally oppressed women, another influential group criticized it because it un-realistically restricted the sexual activity of men and imposed limits on the discussion of sexuality. Burton clearly belongs to this group; indeed, he was its most articulate spokesman. In other words, there were radical “men’s”
and radical “women’s stories” and they frequently contradicted one another.
The picture is, in fact, a fairly complicated one. Opposition to Evangelical Christianity sometimes united male sexual libertarians with defenders of slavery and racial inferiority. There were feminist sexual libertarians such as Eleanor Marx, Karl Marx’s daughter, who translated Zola, as well as the indefatigable Besant. There were alliances between ostensibly heterosexual advocates of sexual freedom such as Burton and closeted homosexuals such as J. A. Symonds.
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to where, with whom, at what time, and through what medium one could conduct any one of them: “Where and when it was not possible to talk about such things became more strictly defined; in which circumstances, among which speakers, and within which social relationships” (Foucault:).
Some topics could be discussed in mixed company in the drawing room and addressed to a mixed audience in the form of fiction. Other topics could be addressed in serious monographs, and the “naughty bits” could be rendered in Latin, of which the masses could be presumed to be ignorant.
The exclusively male world of the men’s club and the usually exclusive world of the learned society constituted another kind of forum. And there was also the world of pornography, which, as we shall see, was not always fully distinct from all the other genres of expression.
The anthropological discussion of sexuality in mid-Victorian society fol-lowed precisely such a set of rules. Because the discourse often excluded women (in some cases intentionally) it privileged the discussion of male rather than female sexual concerns. Indeed, the conversations themselves sometimes served as a validation of manhood. At this critical period when the roots of institutional anthropology were planted and an influential body of evolutionary theory was published, the nascent discipline was involved in not one but several discourses on sexuality. The discussions concerning primitive promiscuity, matriliny or matriarchy, and marriage by capture in which John F. McLennan, Lewis Henry Morgan, Sir John Lubbock, and Johann Jakob Bachofen were involved are marked by a degree of reticence, indeed prudery, over sexual matters. There is an absence of explicit reference to genital sexuality; much is left to the imagination. The works of these authors were intended for a general but largely male scholarly readership.
In the Anthropological Society of London (), whose founders left the Ethnological Society in because the latter wished to admit women, members preferred that, “in the consideration of the subject, a spade is called a spade, and not a rake or hoe” (Sellon–:). When the men of this learned society were not discussing the virtues of the proslavery po-sition in the United States or the connection of race and language, they had time on their hands to discuss the significance of phallic worship. (The
is discussed in Lyons:–; Stocking ; Burrow ; and below.) In all such discussions the “Other” or the “primitive” is conscripted in the service of pressing contemporary concerns, whether or not that con-scription is expressly acknowledged. As one of us has remarked concern-ing both the Victorian anthropologists and some of their successors: “One
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truly instinctive sexual response, whether desired or deplored, is relatively absent from the bedrooms of modern Europe. One must seek (or avoid) it elsewhere. Science may be employed both to find it and to keep it at a safe distance” (Lyons:).
In The Other Victorians Steven Marcus makes some interesting remarks about nonfictional Victorian pornography: “By the mid-Victorian period the pornographic scene had established itself in very much the same modes, categories, and varieties as exist today. Alongside of works which fumbled toward a scientific account of sexuality were grouped volumes describing the ‘rites’ and ‘practices’ of certain curious sexual and religious cults, vol-umes which purported to be anthropology of some kind, volvol-umes of folklore, and a whole range of sex and marriage manuals of differing inflammatory intensity but uniformly equal ineptitude and disingenuousness” (:, emphasis added).
The had been established to discuss what purported to be“anthropol-ogy of some kind.” It was most certainly interested in curious rites and prac-tices of a religious and sexual nature. Most accounts of this rather diverse body (e.g., Burrow) have stressed its hard-line stance on racial issues.
Its founder, Dr. James Hunt, was a polygenist, a supporter of the defeated American South, and a defender of Governor Edward John Eyre of Jamaica, who suppressed a rebellion with much brutality. Not all members of the so-ciety endorsed Hunt’s political and scientific credos, but a majority probably did. Hunt firmly believed that physical type and culture were indissociable and that anthropological science should be grounded in comparative racial anatomy (see Lyons).
Burton shared Hunt’s racial prejudices and his dislike of Christian phi-lanthropists. He had another axe to grind against Mrs. Grundy and the Evangelists of Exeter Hall. He wanted to be able to discuss sex with other men in the absence of women. He was on leave from the diplomatic ser-vice long enough to aid Hunt in establishing the, which he served as vice president, but successive diplomatic postings in Fernando Póo, Brazil, and Damascus prevented him from playing an active role. Dismayed by the dissolution of the society after Hunt’s death at the end of thes (it merged with the Ethnological Society to form the Anthropological Insti-tute), Burton was briefly active in the new London Anthropological Society
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destitute truth, no place to discuss topics such as phallic worship, which occupied that uncertain boundary between some Victorian anthropology and pornography.
Burton’s own contributions to this rather curious discourse included a presentation to the Anthropological Society of London concerning clay figures of the phallic deity Legba in Dahomey (Burton –, b):
“Among all barbarians whose primal want is progeny, we observe a greater or less development of the Phallic worship.”2A quarter of a century later he contributed verse translations of Latin poems and verse inscriptions to Pri-apeia. The volume was completed in the year of Burton’s death () and bore only the name of Leonard Smithers, who did prose translations. Burton was an unnamed coeditor and cotranslator. Isabel Burton, his widow, had made attempts to stop publication of the volume.
Burton always claimed that his work was addressed to scholars. It is im-possible to know the precise motives of those who bought literature that hovered around this uncertain boundary. Some small publishers and book-stores still cater to both tastes. In the bookseller John Camden Hotten ofb Piccadilly reprinted one of the earliest works on phallic worship, Richard Payne Knight’s A Discourse on the Worship of Priapus (), to-gether with a recent work by a Thomas Wright of the British Archaeological Society, On the Worship of the Generative Powers in the Middle Ages (Marcus
:–). Hotten also published Aphrodisiacs and Anti-Aphrodisiacs by John Davenport, whom Marcus describes as a “semi-learned pornographic hack” (:), and a collection of seven works allegedly assembled by the historian Henry Buckle (Library Illustrative of Social Progress) dealing with the topic of flagellation. If we peruse the pages of Ancient Symbol Worship:
The Influence of the Phallic Idea in the Religions of Antiquity by Hodder Westropp and Charles Staniland Wake, which reproduced two papers de-livered before the, we find a reference to Davenport (concerning phallic worship) in the introduction by the editor, Alexander Wilder (:), a reference to the well-known Payne Knight by Wake (:), and a reference to the seven works on flagellation by Wilder (:). It should be noted that neither Westropp nor Wake refers to Davenport or the Buckle collection, though the editor does. We may presume, however, that both authors knew for what readership their work was intended, even if they did not themselves form part of it, and that the readership may have been more extensive than Hunt’s motley crowd of “anthropologists.”
Phallic objects were appropriate weapons for bashing church-inspired
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the new German biblical criticism was challenging literal interpretations of the Bible. The challenge mounted by the was surely much less subtle.
Capt. Edward Sellon, like Burton, was an Indian army veteran. His two papers, “On the Phallic Worship of India” and “Sacti Puja, the Worship of the Female Powers,” aroused much discussion. Sellon’s first paper dealt with the worship of the lingam (combined “linga” and “yoni”) by various Hindu sects in India. “It has been the practice of missionaries to burke the question of linga puja, from a mistaken and false delicacy,” remarked the author (Sellon–:). The paper contains, inter alia, an interesting description of the idea of Sacti (generative force), an account of young maidens rubbing themselves on the linga at village temples in order to promote their own fertility, along with a description of Yonijas, Hindu sects who chose to worship the yoni rather than the linga and lingam (see also Sellon–:). Lastly, we find an amazing assertion that Old Testament Judaism, along with all other religions of the ancient world, was based on the phallic cult: “The ark of the covenant, held so sacred by the Jews, contained nothing more nor less than a Phallus, the ark being the type of the Angha
Capt. Edward Sellon, like Burton, was an Indian army veteran. His two papers, “On the Phallic Worship of India” and “Sacti Puja, the Worship of the Female Powers,” aroused much discussion. Sellon’s first paper dealt with the worship of the lingam (combined “linga” and “yoni”) by various Hindu sects in India. “It has been the practice of missionaries to burke the question of linga puja, from a mistaken and false delicacy,” remarked the author (Sellon–:). The paper contains, inter alia, an interesting description of the idea of Sacti (generative force), an account of young maidens rubbing themselves on the linga at village temples in order to promote their own fertility, along with a description of Yonijas, Hindu sects who chose to worship the yoni rather than the linga and lingam (see also Sellon–:). Lastly, we find an amazing assertion that Old Testament Judaism, along with all other religions of the ancient world, was based on the phallic cult: “The ark of the covenant, held so sacred by the Jews, contained nothing more nor less than a Phallus, the ark being the type of the Angha