As I argued in one of my very
first blog posts, Victorian novels are obsessed with sex – the legalities that
surround it in marriage, its results when unsanctioned by law, the power
dynamics of attraction, the results of its absence and repression. Yet writers
in the nineteenth century faced significant constraints when approaching this
topic. Its very exploration is reliant on a level of awareness from readers
about what can, and cannot, be said, and so, in novels of the period, writing
about sex is often just as much about not
writing about sex.
Enter contemporary writers taking
Victorian England for their setting. They’re faced with a conundrum.
Neo-Victorianism is an opportunity to dial up the sexual content of a period
novel, to say what couldn’t be said before, and to expose the dark underbelly
of what can seem from a distance a puritanical society. Yet by making sex
explicit, modern writers in a Victorian mode risk destroying the suggestive elisions
that some readers find most appealing about the period’s writing, and the text
coming across as too modern – destroying our faith in the verisimilitude of the
worlds they create.
Robert Edric has one solution.
His The London Satyr (2011) is all about
sex and its trade. The mysterious Marlow runs a pornography racket in 1890s
London, with the narrator, Charles Webster, illicitly supplying him with
costumes from the Lyceum – the theatre where he works – for use in his explicit
photographs. It’s not the kind of novel that could in any way be conceived of
as having been written at the time.
Yet, despite this frank summary,
Edric doesn’t get to the sexual content immediately. The novel opens with, and
continues to be obsessed by, an examination of what it means to be followed, to
be paranoid, to be aware that you are doing wrong. Webster, like Marlow’s other
associates, doesn’t have moral
concerns about what he is doing – even when a 12-year-old prostitute is
murdered. What he is obsessed by is the fear of discovery and punishment in a
society that, as a whole, disapproves of what many of its inhabitants are
doing. Here’s a representative paragraph in the early pages:
‘But there was no one. There had never been anyone. I had been acting
out these small subterfuges and dramas for almost three years. And each time I
remarked on this to Marlow, he dismissed my concerns and complaints with the
amused remark that I knew nothing of what was happening in the world around me;
that I was blind and deaf, ignorant of the wider scheme of things, oblivious to
those putative, secretive followers, all those others who sought only to expose
and undermine and destroy him. And every time he told me this, of course –
every exaggerated word and dramatic flourish – what he did not say, what he did
not need to say, was that if he was
destroyed and punished, then the same thing, in its lesser way, would surely
befall me too.’
There’s a lot going on here.
Webster’s series of ‘subterfuges and dramas’ could almost refer to how sex is
spoken about in Victorian writing more widely and how it plays out in the lives
of people in societies that condemn or control it. Even more importantly the
idea of ignorance when it comes to the ‘wider scheme of things’ is one of the
book’s central themes. Many characters have, and barter with, partial knowledge, especially when it
comes to Marlow’s shady dealings. But rather than accepting this ignorance and
paranoia as a universal truth, Webster is preoccupied with the idea that
somebody must know everything – Marlow himself, his associate Bliss, or the
London Vigilance Committee and its leader, hot on the heals of the
pornographers.
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| Diagram of a panopticon |
In this way, Webster can be seen
as suffering from the kind of self-repression and discipline described by
Michel Foucault in his 1975 Discipline
and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Foucault uses the image of the
panopticon – a prison designed by Jeremny Bentham in the late eighteenth
century, where no one prisoner can ever be sure if he is the one being watched.
Foucault writes:
‘Traditionally, power was what was seen, what was shown, and what was
manifested...Disciplinary power, on the other hand, is exercised through its
invisibility; at the same time it imposes on those whom it subjects a principle
of compulsory visibility. In discipline, it is the subjects who have to be
seen. Their visibility assures the hold of the power that is exercised over
them. It is this fact of being constantly seen, of being able always to be
seen, that maintains the disciplined individual in his subjection.’
This model has been taken by many
critics since to explain the self-policing of nineteenth-century society,
especially when it came to sexual behaviour – and its close relation to much of
Webster’s narrative is clear. By giving his central character this kind of
internal struggle, Edric does something very clever – he manages to suggest the
milieu of Victorian society, even when writing about a topic that would have
been impossible to write about in a novel at the time.
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| Robert Edric (1956-) |
Another key strategy Edric
employs in the novel is to make Webster’s own responses to the sex and sexual
moments he witnesses highly ambiguous. The narrator goes through the whole
novel without appearing to have any sex himself at all, even while moving in
these circles. He certainly doesn’t appear to be having any sex with his wife –
although, in typical Victorian novel style this isn’t discussed directly but
suggested by their lack of closeness and separate bedrooms. And he wakes up
following an orgy like this:
‘I nudged the girl with my foot. She moaned incoherently but made no
attempt to rouse herself. I struggled to remember what – if anything – had
happened between us, but little came. All our clothing – what little she still
wore – remained intact.’
There’s a strange tension here.
This night – watching a pornographic stage show before falling asleep beside a
topless girl in a room full of other copulating people – is a major social
transgression, but, at the same time, for Webster, it is also something of a
non-event. Even in a room filled with every sexual temptation, the narrator
doesn’t find satisfaction or resolution, allowing him to remain the frustrated
nineteenth-century hero. Even when the novel reaches its most explicit and we,
and Webster, get to witness one of the infamous photo shoots, his reactions
remain very difficult to read:
‘I glanced at the boy, his organ now in the woman’s mouth, her hands
clasping his buttocks, her lips formed in a perfect circle against the dark
skin and stiffening flesh. The boy had moved his hands to his hips. He was
grinning – arrogant almost – his eyes wide and watching the top of the woman’s
head. They were perfectly still, though their motions, the gentle rocking and
swaying, drawing and pulling, were easy to imagine, and I watched them for a
moment before realising how closely Marlow was now watching me. ‘Go closer,’ he
suggested to me. I shook my head at the offer.’
For Webster, revealing anything
of his own sexual desires to Marlow is an impossibility and a sign of weakness,
despite the trade they both participate in. The man or woman who inspires
desire – either personally, or in a directorial capacity – is always the one
with the power in the novel. This is most clearly seen in the scenes with
Marlow, and also the scenes between Webster and his cunning and sexually
provocative maid Isobel – where Edric reverses the usual sexual power dynamics
between male employer and female servant.
In The London Satyr, sex can be written about more directly than in a
nineteenth-century novel, but the sex that the novel is obsessed with is far
from ‘modern’ and never straightforward.
Which novel should be next in my
Neo-Victorian Voices series? Let me know – here, on Facebook or by
tweeting @SVictorianist!
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