Victorian steampunk animatronic bed

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Jun 132010
 

From My Delineated Life, a remarkable animatronic bed.

This rosewood bed, encrusted with silver and the figures made of bronze, was created for Nawab Muhammad Bahawal Khan Abbasi V of Bahawalpur in 1883. The four figures at the corners represent women of France, Spain, Italy and Greece. With clever mechanisms, the statues were able to wink and wave fans and fly whisks. No flys on this Khan.

What’s interesting is that this artifact represents a kind of reverse Orientalism, an “Oriental” man’s fantasy of different varieties of European women.

The Markham project on female discipline

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Mar 292010
 

The Voice in the Corner spanking blog had a post on “the Markham Project.” “Miss Markham” seems to have been a retroactive creation, a shared name used in various femsub spanking writings by various hands over a considerable period of time. Some go as far back as the Englishwoman’s Domestic Magazine of the 1870s.

The Markham Project was apparently instigated by a professional governess and educationalist, Miss Elisabeth Markham between the 1880s and the early part of the 20th century.

Her aims were to encourage best practice in the training of governesses and the education of young women. She apparently advocated corporal punishment of young women over the age of 16 and unmarried ladies “up to a late age.” Her philosophy was to show that women were not frail creatures and that spanking, caning, birching and other “robust forms of punishment” were essential for discipline and the well-being of “females of all social conditions wishing to better themselves.”

I think a lot of spanking/flagellation erotica of the period imitated the debates over corporal punishment in school and domestic settings, both as protective imitation and as tongue-in-cheek parody. I very much doubt their ever were these flagellation-obsessed schools you read about.

Mario Praz’ “The Romantic Agony”

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Mar 182010
 

Praz, Mario. The Romantic Agony Meridian, 1956. First published 1933. Google Books

I think people tend to use the terms Romantic and Gothic interchangeably. I tend to use the Gothic as the underside of the Romantic, the cynicism to the humanism. BDSM comes from the Gothic, the parody/critique of the Romantic. This requires delving into the history of the Romantic, which like Praz’ book, is big, sprawling, disorderly and largely written in French and Italian.

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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.

The Erotic Orient in one image

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Jul 102009
 

From Gloria Brame, who is practically doing my job for me.

Date and origin unknown, sadly. Note the Orientalist artifacts: Persian rugs, anklets, turban, arm bracelets, the servant-mistress relationship indicated by their positions, the direct sightlines. I’m curious where the black woman came from and how she ended up in a photographer’s studio somewhere in Europe.

You could see it as a take on Manet’s Olympia, though in this case the black woman’s sexuality is not completely erased.

Nuns are the original fetish object: Catholicism, Sexual Deviance, and Victorian Gothic Culture by Patrick R. O’Malley

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Feb 102009
 

O’Malley, Patrick R. Catholicism, Sexual Deviance, and Victorian Gothic Culture Cambridge University Press, 2006 Link

He had a special passion, also, for ecclesiastical vestments, as indeed he had for everything connected with the service of the Church. In the long cedar chests that lined the west gallery of his house, he had stored away many rare and beautiful specimens of what is really the raiment of the Bride of Christ, who must wear purple and jewels and fine linen that she may hide the pallid macerated body that is worn by the suffering that she seeks for and wounded by self-inflicted pain.

Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

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England’s finest pornographers: The Traffic in Obscenity from Byron to Beardsley, by Colette Colligan

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Nov 122008
 

Colligan, Colette. The Traffic in Obscenity from Byron to Beardsley Palgrave Macmillan, 2006 Link

Alan Moore wrote, in The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, Vol. 1, “The British Empire has always encountered difficulty in distinguishing between its heroes and its monsters.” That applies to more than just fictional characters. Why else would two of England’s heroes also be known as notorious pornographers?

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Hiram Powers’ The Greek Slave: Virtue in Distress

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Oct 172008
 

Hiram Powers' The Greek Slave

One of the most popular works of sculpture of the 19th century was Hiram Powers’ The Greek Slave, circa 1843.

To forestall any shock and dismay over the statue’s nudity, Powers helpfully included a pamphlet explaining how his work was to be interpreted, a short narrative sketch of virtue-in-distress.

Powers astutely explained, in the pamphlet that accompained his statue on its American tour in 1847, that his slave’s nudity was not her fault: she had been divested of her clothes by the lustful and impious Turks who put her on the auction block; thus her unwilling nakedness signified the purest form of the Ideal, the triumph of Christian virtue over sin. This sales pitch, aimed point-blank at Puritan sensibilities, worked so well that American Clergymen urged their congregations to go and see The Greek Slave.”

The humor magazine Punch has always been in touch with the British middle class psyche, and and it made a perhaps unwittingly clever satire of the sculpture when it ran a cartoon entitled, The Virginian Slave. Remember, the original statue and its replicas and miniatures were created when slavery was in full bloom in the American South, and people who demonstrated their sensitivity by clucking over The Greek Slave’s virtue-in-distress couldn’t care too much about the actual slaves across the Atlantic.

The Virginian Slave

Now, was this an example of “unconscious pornography”, that the Victorian American and British viewers needed a pious gloss to gaze upon a naked woman in chains without guilt? Or did they really look it in a different way than us cynical moderns? Or can the image be viewed in multiple ways?

I’m a little influenced by Harold Bloom’s idea of strong and weak misreading, or misprision. It could be that BDSM pornography is a misreading of earlier genres like the novel of sensibility and the Gothic.

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