Abstract
In this chapter, we will see how, during the period 1880–1930, a set of propositions about frigidity came to be elaborated and disseminated. In a range of contexts that we are about to describe, it came to be affirmed that many women who seemed cold and unfeeling at the outset might be awakened to pleasure by intercourse with a virile male. In other cases, it was affirmed that cold demeanour in a woman was the result of a perverse denial of her natural dependence on men. Women blocked by the shape of their bodies from the full satisfaction of procreative pleasure might still offer the prospect of a form of sexual excitement despite being constrained by enforced chastity. And others might long for ‘normal’ sexual pleasure while only experiencing desire, occasionally and exceptionally, as the utter loss of self-control. In short, sexual coldness was not so much the mere absence of pleasure that had for so long been given the name ‘female impotence’. Anaphrodisia came to be spoken of primarily as a terrible malfunction of desire, as frigidity became for the first time an object of common knowledge and a commonplace generalization. In this chapter, we will consider where and how this set of routine propositions emerged. In order to do so, we must look in some hitherto unexplored places.
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Notes
Peter Cryle, ‘Les Choses et les Mots: Missing Words and Blurry Things in the History of Sexuality’, Sexualities 12 (2009): 439–52;
Alison Moore, ‘The Invention of Sadism? The Limits of Neologisms in the History of Sexuality’, Sexualities 12 (2009): 489–505.
Ivan Crozier, ‘Book Review: Solitary Sex: A Cultural History of Masturbation’, History of Psychiatry 15 (2004): 505–8.
Niklaus Largier, In Praise of the Whip: A Cultural History of Arousal (New York: Zone Books, 2007), 19.
Paul Veyne, Foucault. Sa pensée, sa personne (Paris: Albin Michel, 2008), 19.
Rae Beth Gordon, ‘Le Caf’conc’ et l’hystérie’, Romantisme, 64 (1989): 53, 63.
Angus McLaren, The Trials of Masculinity: Policing Sexual Boundaries, 1870– 1930 (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1997), 149.
George Weisz, ‘Reform and Conflict in French Medical Education, 1870– 1914’, in The Organization of Science and Technology in France1808–1914, ed. Robert Fox and George Weisz (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), 63.
Dr Paul Labarthe, Dictionnaire populaire de médecine usuelle d’hygiène publique et privée (Paris: Marpon & Flammarion, 1885), II, 405. Adolphe Trébuchet was a doctor and administrator. The text alluded to here is his Jurisprudence de la médecine, de la chirurgie et de la pharmacie en France, comprenant la médecine légale, la police médicale, la responsabilité des médecins, chirurgiens, pharmaciens, etc., l’exposé et la discussion des lois, ordonnances, règlemens et instructions concernant l’art de guérir. Appuyé des jugemens des cours et des tribunaux (Paris: Baillière, 1834).
Sylvie Chaperon, Les Origines de la sexologie (1850–1890) (Paris: Audibert, 2007), 64.
See Ambroise Tardieu, Etude médico-légale sur les attentats aux mœurs, ed. Georges Vigarello (1859; repr. Grenoble, 1995); Ambroise Tardieu, Manuel de pathologie et de clinique médicales, 3rd edn (Paris: Germer Baillière, 1865);
Dr L[éon] Thoinot, Attentats aux mœurs et perversions du sens génital. Leçons professées à la Faculté de Médecine (Paris: Doin, 1898);
Dr [Henri] Legrand du Saulle, De l’épilepsie. Le mariage est-il sans danger pour les épileptiques et pour leur descendance? (Paris: Masson, 1861);
Dr [Henri] Legrand du Saulle, Les Hystériques. Etat physique et état mental. Actes insolites, délictueux et criminels (Paris: Baillière 1883);
Jean-Martin Charcot, Leçons du mardi à la Salpêtrière (Paris: Aux bureaux du progrès médical, 1889);
Valentin Magnan, Des anomalies, des aberrations et des perversions sexuelles (Paris: Delahaye and Lecrosnier, 1885);
and Charles Féré, L’Instinct sexuel. Evolution et dissolution (Paris: Alcan, 1899).
The most important studies of texts of this kind can be found in Jan Goldstein, Console and Classify: The French Psychiatric Profession in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987)
and Janet Beizer, Ventriloquized Bodies: Narratives of Hysteria in 19th Century France (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1994).
Edmond Langlebert, Syphilis et mariage. Nouvelle étude sur les conditions d’aptitude au mariage des sujets syphilitiques (Paris: Adrien Delahaye et E. Lecrosnier, 1880), 3.
Edmond Langlebert, La Syphilis dans ses rapports avec le mariage (Paris: Delahaye, 1873).
Dr Emile Laurent, Sadisme et masochisme (Paris: Vigot Frères, 1903) [Les Perversions sexuelles. Physiologie — Pathologie — Thérapeutique XI], 163–9.
Dr Emile Laurent, L’Amour morbide. Etude de psychologie pathologique (Paris: Société d’Editions Scientifiques, 1891), 94.
Dr Emile Laurent and Paul Nagour, L’Occultisme et l’amour (Paris: Vigot Frères, 1902) [Les Perversions sexuelles. Physiologie — Pathologie — Thérapeutique X], 3.
T[hésée] Pouillet, De la blennorrhagie chez l’homme. Essai critique sur ses divers modes de traitement, XVIII, N. 271 (Thèse de Médecine, Paris, 1875).
The book in question is Dr H. Fournier, L’Onanisme: causes, dangers et inconvénients pour les individus, la famille et la société, remèdes, 2nd edn (Paris: Baillière, 1876) [Petite Bibliothèque médicale].
Dr [Thésée Pouillet], Psychopathie sexuelle I. De l’onanisme chez la femme, 7th edn (Paris: Vigot Frères, 1897) [Bibliothèque des perversions sexuelles, 5], 19–20.
It is interesting to note that this attempt at disqualification was not entirely successful. In a book first published in Germany in 1892 by the leading German therapist Albert von Schrenck-Notzing, Fournier was quoted as an authority on onanism. See Dr A. von Schrenck-Notzing, Therapeutic Suggestion in Psychopathia Sexualis (Pathological Manifestations of the Sexual Sense), with Especial Reference to Contrary Sexual Instinct (Philadelphia: Davis and London: Rebman, 1895), 35.
There is some discussion of Caufeynon/Fauconney in McLaren, The Trials of Masculinity, 147ff., and in Brigitte Lhomond, preface to Histoire de la femme, by Dr Caufeynon (Paris, Côté-femmes, 1989), 7–15.
Dr Désormeaux, Bibliothèque sexuelle du Dr Désormeaux, 13 vols (Paris, 1905–1907); Dr Caufeynon, Bibliothèque populaire des connaissances médicales, 20 vols (Paris, n.d.);
Dr Riolan, Nouvelle collection exclusive d’hygiène et de médecine, 12 vols (Paris, 1909).
J.-P. Dartigues, De l’amour expérimental ou des causes d’adultère chez la femme au XIXe siècle. Etude d’hygiène et d’économie sociale résultant de l’ignorance, du libertinage et des fraudes dans l’accomplissement des devoirs conjugaux (Versailles: Litzellmann, 1887), vii.
Dr Caufeynon, Orgasme. Sens génital jadis et aujourd’hui. Physiologie comparée de l’amour sexuel dans l’homme et la bête. Sensibilité physique et morale sous le rapport des sexes. Volupté à travers les âges. Ses formes naturelles et ses artifices (Paris: Offenstadt, 1903).
F[rançois]-E[mmanuel] Fodéré, Traité de médecine légale et d’hygiène publique ou de police de santé. Adapté aux codes de l’Empire Français, et aux connaissances actuelles. A l’usage des gens de l’Art, de ceux du Barreau, des Jurés et des Administrateurs de la santé publique, civils, militaires et de marine (Paris: Mame, 1813) I, x.
Dr Riolan, Impuissance, frigidité, stérilité, vol. 8, Nouvelle collection exclusive d’hygiène et de médecine (Paris: Pierre 1909), 52.
Dr Eynon, Manuel de l’amour conjugal (Paris: Pierre, 1909), 128.
Dr Désormeaux, L’Impuissance et la stérilité, vol. 7, Bibliothèque sexuelle du Dr Désormeaux (Paris: Chaubard, 1905–07), 47.
[Jean-Baptiste] Fonssagrives, Dictionnaire encyclopédique des sciences médicales, (Masson: P. Asselin, then Asselin & Houzeau, 1868–89), IV, article ‘Anaphrodisie, Anaphrodisiaques’.
Dr Jaf, L’Amoursecret (Paris: Offenstadt 1903), 97–8.
Dr Désormeaux, L’Amour conjugal, vol. 11, Bibliothèque sexuelle du Dr Désormeaux (Paris: Chaubard, 1905–07), 25.
Victorien Du Saussay, Femme, amour, mensonges (Paris, Méricant, 1905), 36–7.
Adolphe Belot, La Femme de glace (Paris, 1878), 199–200. For a fuller discussion of this story,
see Peter Cryle, The Telling of the Act: Sexuality as Narrative in Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century France (Newark: Delaware University Press, 2002), 84–7.
Marcel Prévost, ‘Un Voluptueux’, in Marcel Prévost, Femmes (Paris: Lemerre, 1907), 1–192.
Théodore Joran, Le Mensonge du féminisme. Opinions de Léon H… (Paris: Jouve, 1905), 7.
See Andrea Dworkin, Intercourse (London: Secker and Warburg 1987), 107. As we noted in the Introduction, Dworkin honours the so-called frigid women of history and literature. She sees them as having chosen the last form of defence against male aggression.
See, for example, Dr Robert Teutsch, Le Féminisme (Paris: Société française d’éditions littéraires et techniques, 1934),
and Wilhelm Stekel, Frigidity in Woman in Relation to her Love Life, trans. James S. Van Teslaar, vol. 1 (New York: Boni and Liveright, 1926).
Richard Lesclide, La Femme impossible (Paris: Dentu, 1883), 45.
Jean-Louis Dubut de Laforest, Mademoiselle de T***. Mœurs contemporaines (Paris, [1883?]). In later editions, the title is given as Mademoiselle Tantale. References here are to the collection of Dubut’s works, Pathologie sociale (Paris, 1897). The preface is found on pages 4–6.
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© 2011 Peter Cryle and Alison Moore
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Cryle, P., Moore, A. (2011). The Late Nineteenth Century: A Multiplicity of Genres. In: Frigidity. Genders and Sexualities in History. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230337039_5
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