Peter Tupper

The letters of Sacher-Masoch and Emilie Mataja

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Sep 052009
 

I’ve managed to locate another translated scrap of the writings of Leopold von Sacher-Masoch. The Blast Books edition of Venus in Furs, translated from the German by Uwe Moeller and Laura Lindgren, includes a set of letters between Sacher-Masoch and a young Viennese wannabe writer named Emilie Mataja. Their correspondence lasted from late 1874 and 1875, when Sacher-Masoch was still married to Aurora Rumelin. A side issue is their various attempts to send letters anonymously to each other, without being intercepted by his wife and her father.

Mataja idolized Sacher-Masoch to a degree that would be embarrassing for a 13-year-old girl, let alone a 19-year-old young woman. “I worship you as a god, I idolize you through your works. Many a time I’ve revived my tired soul with your fiery words; I’ve shaken my feeble senses from their sleep with the feverish potion that streams from your work.”

He played the, “you are a special, talented person, far above the common horde,” card with her, and did give her advice on her writing career, both as a writer and on the publishing industry. (Whether this wagood advice is another matter.) However, this is when Sacher-Masoch started to sound a little crazy, or at least obsessive. His letters inevitably turned to persuading her to wear furs, going into great details on how to get an ermine jacket, and getting her to whip and dominate him. He sketches out plans for both of them to move to Italy and have an open marriage. He even referred to his wife as “Wanda von Dunajew” in one letter. He has sudden shifts of mood and mixed messages. On July 28, 1875, he called her, “My Charming Mistress!” By October 31, 1875, it was back to “Dear Miss Mataja”. By December 22, 1875, he went into great detail about how his own wife is now his ideal cruel woman, as if to say that he was the victor in their abortive affair and he didn’t need her anymore.

Mataja, much like Aurora Rumelin, was really after literary validation and connections from Sacher-Masoch, and was evasive about actually doing anything kinky with him.

Had they lived closer together, or Sacher-Masoch been a better seducer, this might have ended in tragedy, but instead it ended in comedy. They met for the first time a few years later in Vienna. He begged her to whip him, and in furs, of course. She said she would, so long as it was just the one time. Naturally, this wasn’t satisfactory for him. “I let the matter drop because I was beginning to tire of the joke (for me it was only a joke.” Then he inquired if she was still a virgin and passive-aggressively suggested that she was a lesbian.

“My impression was that he was highly peculiar, but I must say that apart from his sexual eccentricities, he was an affable, simple, and likeable man; and that there was something particularly moving about his tender adoration of his children.”

I don’t know why, but I have an urge to to salvage Sacher-Masoch’s personal and literary reputation, which grows in proportion to the evidence that he was something of a jackass. Then again, literary history is full of people who were acknowledged as geniuses but had sketchy personal lives.

The Mystery of “The Mysteries of Verbena House”

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Aug 212009
 

The Grumpy Old Bookman explores the possibility that the classic of Victorian flagellant literature, The Mysteries of Verbena House, was at least in part written by George Augustus Sala, and that the name of the flagellation school in based on a real world flagellation brothel in London’s St. John’s Wood, patronized by Algernon Swinburne.

Sala was certainly known to perhaps the most famous poet of the late nineteenth century, Algernon Swinburne, and Swinburne is said to have admired him greatly. And Swinburne was yet another Victorian who, as a result of his experience at Eton, was totally obsessed by flagellation. Though in his case his interest was masochist rather than sadistic; his sole sexual interest was in being the slave of a beautiful, violent woman.

We know for certain that, in the late 1860s, Swinburne was a regular visitor to a flagellant brothel in St John’s Wood. Here he was able to act out his fantasies. According to Edmund Gosse, writing in 1919, ten years after Swinburne’s death, the brothel was staffed by ‘two golden-haired and rouge-cheeked ladies’; there was also an older woman, who welcomed the guests and took the money.

During the course of a discussion about whether to include such sordid details in an official biography, Gosse wrote to various interested parties and asked them what should be included and what left out. And it is in the course of this correspondence that the poet A.E. Housman is said to have ‘let slip’ that the name of the brothel was Verbena Lodge. The correspondence between Gosse and the others is stored in the British Museum, and one scholar says that few people have been privileged to see it.

I’d really like to see Verbena House, which must have lapsed into public domain long ago, but I can’t find a copy, so far.

The above quote comes from part three of his exploration of Victorian pornography. Parts one and two are also worth checking out.

Swinburne’s indulgences

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Aug 202009
 

Thomas, Donald. The Victorian Underworld John Murray, 1998. Link Pg. 103 mainly

BDSM seems to have existed as an elite subset of prostitution. Specialty brothels escaped attention. Flagellation was mentioned in Sir John Davies’ Epigrams from 1599, which I haven’t located. Ashbee listed the principal whipping brothels in 1877, located in the better residential neighborhoods.

Swinburne patronized one at 7 Circus Road, St. John’s Wood. “two golden-haired and rouge-cheeked ladies received, in luxuriously furnished rooms, gentlemen whom they consented to chastise for large sums of money.”

Other houses had women whipped by male clients or in front of paying audiences.

In one court case, a 15 year old girl claimed she was beaten, by men known as “Sealskin” or “the Count,” while tied to a step-ladder.

In My Secret Life, Walter describes meeting a girl who describes being flogged by a woman “for a lady’s delecation.” No man present, and the lady was masked.

Jack McGeorge, RIP

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Aug 192009
 

Sadly, Jack McGeorge passed away on Tuesday, August 18th.

In addition to being a retired US Marine, McGeorge was in the Scene before there was a Scene, in the late 1960s. One of his first meetings with other kinky people was through a Mensa group. Since then, he’s been teaching and organizing for longer than some people have been alive.

He gained an unwelcome degree of notoriety in late 2002, when some unprincipled flack in the Washington Post wrote a front page story asking whether a person in the BDSM culture should be allowed on the UN weapons inspection mission in Iraq. This is a very interesting case because I believe it is one of the first cases of a person under pressure in a high status position because of their kinky sexuality, and it has many parallels to the ideas that gays can’t hold critical positions.

A year or two ago, McGeorge was nice enough to take me up on my open offer to interview him by phone. I now have three cassette tapes of his life in kink. I found McGeorge to be a thoughtful, generous, brave and principled guy. He has been out about being kinky his entire life, even while working in high security government and corporate positions.

I have yet to do anything with those interview tapes, even transcribe them. As a condition of speaking with me, I agreed that I would not use these interviews for an article published in the mainstream media. As the mainstream media raked him over the coals with snide articles like “A taste of the whip for Saddam”, this is understandable.

Now that he’s no longer with us, I’m hesitant to think about doing anything with them as I can’t ask him if he’s okay with it. I think that I should transcribe them and send the files and tapes to the Leather Archives and Museum.

Adam Warren’s Empowered and damsel-in-distress comics

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Jul 192009
 


EMPOWERED 5 duct tapery japery by *AdamWarren on deviantART

Comics artist and writer Adam Warren on “Empowered“, his “sexy, superhero comedy” (except when it isn’t). Empowered is a chronically unlucky rookie superheroine who loses all her powers whenever her skin-tight, black suit is ripped even slightly. Because of the “unwritten rules” nearly all superheroes and villains subscribe to, she won’t be killed or seriously hurt, but she does end up tied up, or strapped down, or gagged, or chloroformed, or glued to something, etc. Often a little spanking too.

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Empowered and damsel-in-distress bondage comics

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Jul 192009
 


EMPOWERED 5 duct tapery japery by *AdamWarren on deviantART

Comics artist and writer Adam Warren on “Empowered“, his “sexy, superhero comedy”, (except when it isn’t). Empowered is a chronically unlucky rookie superheroine who loses all her powers whenever her skin-tight, black suit is ripped even slightly. Because of the “unwritten rules” nearly all superheroes and villains subscribe to, she won’t be killed or seriously hurt, but she does end up tied up, or strapped down, or gagged, or chloroformed, or glued to something, etc. Often a little spanking too.
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Whip-stripping in 1944 proto-music video

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Jul 162009
 

From Boing Boing Video (fast forward to the 2:00 mark):

This film was a 1944 “Soundie”, kind of the prototype of the music video, played on a film projector jukebox in dance halls.

Nerdcore pioneers DEVO more-or-less recreated this clip for the video for “Whip It“. Here, the whip-stripped woman doesn’t object.

That’s what I miss about the 1980s. You could be a complete dweeb and still get a record deal.

Doing (right by) Wonder Woman (right)

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Jul 122009
 

One of my two favorite comics writers, Grant Morrison on the idea of making DC Comics’ Wonder Woman as big a deal as she ought to be. From io9.com:

So, Wonder Woman is a character where you imagine this very strange mélange of girl power, bondage, and a slightly disturbed sexuality. There is this bondage element; these extremely weird dark elements of Wonder Woman haven’t been adequately dealt with. Wonder Woman remains a really bizarre, untouchable character. She should represent women in the same way Superman represents men.

…

To make it work, to give [Wonder Woman] a sexuality that isn’t exploitive, because that’s too easy; but also to give her a [narrative] power.

William Moulton Marston, the character’s creator, was an odd combination of utopian feminist idealism and fetishistic sexuality. It’s important to remember that the character was never purely anything. From the beginning Wonder Woman was (always, already) schizoid, multi-valent: one part patriotic symbol, one part feminist ideal, one part lesbian icon, one part dominatrix, one part sex toy, and probably a few other parts beyond that. It’s hard to make a character with so many diverse elements work, though when it does it can be very satisfying. (Xena: Warrior Princess had a similar mosaic of progressive messages, comedy, kung fu, sword and sorcery, cheesecake/beefcake and lesbian subtext.)

From a writer’s perspective, there’s an additional problem in introducing the character to a larger audience. The other well-known superheroes start out as people in a world that resembles our own. Superman was a mid-western farm kid, Batman was a East Coast old money scion, Spider-man was a working-class nerd. When writing the character, you can start with a person who has grown up in an environment the viewer can relate to, and then add the fantastic elements. Wonder Woman, however, comes from a fantastic island of Amazon women, and in some versions of her origin she was made out of clay and given life. She doesn’t come to our world until she is an adult.

I think it could be done. “Hellboy” for example, features a hero who can’t pass for human, and his challenge is to retain his loyalty to humanity. The story introduces him to the view through the eyes of a more relatable human character.

Trueblood, stereotypes and the American Orient

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Jul 102009
 

If the Old West is America’s mythic past, then the South is its xenotopia, its Orient. Uncle Tom’s Cabin, as discussed previously, partakes in both the Oriental and the Gothic. The HBO series Trueblood focuses on the small Louisiana town of Bon Temps in a world in which vampires have “come out of the coffin.” Likewise, it takes part of the Orientalism and the Gothicism stereotypically associated with the South, using the South as a blank screen for fantasies of, among other things, deviant sexuality.

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