Abstract
Magnificent though the Victorian novelists were, they almost all (an exception, of course, is the later Hardy) failed miserably in one respect: nowhere in “respectable” Victorian literature (and most of the pornography was based on the brothel—or eighteenth-century accounts) does one see a man and a woman described together in bed. We do not know how they made love, what they said to each other in their most intimate moments, what they felt then.1
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References
John Fowles, “Notes on an Unfinished Novel,” in Afterwords. Edited by Thomas McCormack. New York and London: Harper & Row, 1969, p. 166.
Iris Murdoch, A Fairly Honourable Defeat. New York: The Viking Press, 1970, pp. 56–57.
Christopher Booker, The Neophiliacs. Boston: Gambit Incorporated, 1970, p. 72.
“In Melanesia, there is no taboo on sex in general; there is no putting of any veils on natural functions, certainly not in the case of a child.” (Bronislaw Malinowski, Sex and Repression in Savage Society. London: Kegan Paul & Company, 1927, pp. 54-55.) The children run about naked; at the age of three or four they become aware of sexuality. No repressions of any kind as regards nakedness or the excretory functions are forced upon them by their elders.
Herbert Marshall McLuhan, The Mechanical Bride. New York: The Vanguard Press, 1951, p. 99.
In his chapter on “Sadism and the Criminal Mentality” in The Origins of the Sexual Impulse, Colin Wilson denies that sadism is a manifestation of the death-wish. It springs from the roots of a nihilistic affliction, the disintegration of the body of values that sustains a man with a vital sense of purpose. The instincts have lost their primacy and the intellect is at a loss what to do. In this impasse, modern man turns to pleasure as the only generator and guarantor of life. “Sexual perversions are an attempt to stimulate the jaded pleasure nerve.” (Colin Wilson, The Origins of the Sexual Impulse. New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1963, p. 181.) Psychopathic crime in modern life “is often the ‘crime of boredom’, the crime that appears to have no particular motive, but to spring out of ‘too much freedom’ and total lack of a sense of purpose.” (Ibid., p. 195.)
Modern British Dramatists. Edited by John Russell Brown. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1968, p. 3.
Brigid Brophy, Flesh. Cleveland and New York: The World Publishing Company, 1962, p. 61.
Noel Perrin, Dr. Bowdler’s Legacy. New York: Atheneum, 1969, p. 86.
Joseph H. McMahon, The Imagination of Jean Genet. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, p. 254.
“Where a full normal outlet is available, nobody derives more than anticipatory enjoyment from mere sexiness in literature—civilised cultures produce little pornography, and use it as a condiment: barbarian cultures tend to produce much, and rely on it as a diet. The less satisfactory the sexual life of a culture, the greater the proportion of its literature which is a form of literary self-abuse, and the more abnormal the tone of the contained matter.” Alex Comfort, Barbarism and Sexual Freedom. London: Freedom Press, 1948, pp. 26-27.
Peter Fryer, Secrets of the British Museum. New York: Citadel Press, 1966, p. 97.
“Universally we find a radical discord between biological impulse and the demands of society, morality and religion.” Karl Jaspers, General Psycho pathology. Translated by J. Hoenig and Marian W. Hamilton. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1963, p. 627.
“Once we have recognized that the moral and social law emanates not from God but from society, which invents its various gods as mouthpieces for the law, we have simply substituted society for God and undertaken God’s dilemma ourselves.” Brigid Brophy, Black Ship to Hell. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1962, p. 21.
All sublimation, he holds, “Represents a dying to the body.” Norman O. Brown, Life Against Death. Middletown, Connecticut: Wesleyan University Press, 1951, p. 295.
Ian D. Suttie, The Origins of Love and Hate. New York: Julian Press, 1952, p. 36.
“There is no doubt at all that we must recognize in modesty, desire and love in general a metaphysical significance, which means that they are incomprehensible if man is treated as a machine governed by natural laws, or even as ‘a bundle of instincts’, and that they are relevant to him as a consciousness and as a freedom.” M. Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception. Translated by Colin Smith. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1962, p. 166.
Ludwig Binswanger, Being-in-the-World. Translated by Jacob Needleman. New York and London: Basic Books, 1963, p. 160.
After 1914, women in England grew remarkably in sophistication; they were no longer left in ignorance of the essential facts of life. They could speak freely of pregnancy and prostitution, without having to resort to squeamish circumlocutions. “Amongst our friends we discussed sodomy and lesbianism with as little hesitation as we compared the merits of different contraceptives.…” Vera Brittain, Testament of Youth. New York: The Macmillan Company, 1934, p. 578.
Alex Comfort says that he has “more confidence in sex than in art not to make us self-preoccupied. Mystical and near-mystical satisfactions, to which the ‘creative imagination’ is prone, have a drawback which frankly erotic enjoyment has not, that they tend to damp down our belligerency in defence of our own, and other people’s, social rights, while adult satisfactions, and the social relationships they generate, have a way of heightening it.” Alex Comfort, Darwin and the Naked Lady. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1961, p. 156.
Dorothea Krook, Three Traditions of Moral Thought. Cambridge: The University Press, 1959, p. 160.
“The Freudian attempt to explain the psychological elements in material terms was at first welcomed by those who intellectually were convinced that materialism was true and emotionally convinced that with sex uninhibited they would be happy. After fifty years of thinking and experiment neither conviction has stood up to examination.” Gerald Heard, Morals Since 1900. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1950, p. 104.
In England as well as the United States, homosexuals were for a long time made to suffer the irrational hostility of the public and persecution by the legal authorities. Much of the antagonism was caused by the combined pressure of ignorance and fear. When the Kinsey Reports and the Wolfenden Report were published, the clouds of ignorance were largely lifted; the hitherto “shameful” and tabooed subject could at last be discussed freely. The homosexual of our time is no longer intimidated by the semantic variations, pejorative in character, played on the meaning of what is “natural”; he will not agree that his sexual disposition runs counter to “the laws of nature.” Nor does he feel the need to conceal his identity. In his autobiography, J. R. Ackerley declares: “I thought, wrote, and spoke the love of man for man and, among my friends, even among some intelligent normal ones, made no bones about my activities.” (J. R. Ackerley, My Father & Myself. New York: Coward-McCann, 1969, p. 144.) The brilliant novel, Radcliffe, by David Storey, contains an eloquent justification of homosexuality. The protagonist insists “that there is a love that exists between men which is neither obscene nor degrading, but is as powerful and as profound, and as fruitful, as that love which bears children.… Politics, art, religion: these things are the products of men’s loving.” (David Storey, Radcliffe. New York: Coward-McCann, 1964, p. 371.
The complete satisfaction of all instinctual needs is not only not a basis for happiness, it does not even guarantee sanity.” Erich Fromm, The Art of Loving. New York and Evanston: Harper & Row, 1956, p. 92.
John Fowles, The Magus. Boston and Toronto: Little, Brown and Company, 1965, p. 11.
Ibid., p. 13.
Ibid., p. 17.
Ibid., p. 141.
Ibid., p. 223.
Ibid., p. 262.
John Fowles, The Aristos. New York: New American Library, 1970, p. 169.
Ibid., p. 175.
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© 1973 Martinus Nijhoff, The Hague, Netherlands
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Glicksberg, C.I. (1973). Concluding Remarks. In: The Sexual Revolution in Modern English Literature. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-011-9548-5_13
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