victorian – Page 5 – The History of BDSM

Sexing up Uncle Tom’s Cabin

Sep 272008

I found an extensive archive of essays and images related to Uncle Tom’s Cabin, a key abolitionist text.

One thing that surprised me is that, after reading Robin Wood’s account of the sexualized images used in abolitionist writing, the hundreds of images in the archive, from 1852 to 1930, most of them were not at all sexual. There are many depictions of key scenes in the novel (e.g. Tom rescuing Eva from drowing, Eva and Tom together, Eliza’s dramatic flight across the ice floes) but very little in the way of beatings. I don’t know if this is a preference of those who edit the archive, or a representative sampling of the period.

However, there was a notable exception.

$Uncle Tom\'s Cabin Cruikshank 1852 utilljso02$

George Cruikshank was one of the most famous book illustrators in Victorian England. The twelve “original illustrations” in this turn-of-the-century edition were originally drawn in 1852, for one of the many pirated British editions of Stowe’s novel. At that time they were even more influential than the pictures Billings drew for Jewett’s editions in shaping the way readers around the world “saw” the novel’s characters and events.

As you can see, this scene (which I think is meant to represent the fatal beating of Prue) is the most graphic depiction of punishment in the archive, far more so than any depiction of Tom’s fatal beating at the end of the novel. The woman is young, shapely, lighter in skin color than the man beating her, and positioned just so that one of her breasts is visible. She’s probably supposed to be a mulatto, and could be read as “white”.

I guess this means that the pornographic interpretations of Uncle Tom’s Cabin are in the minority, one of many re-interpretations of the work.

The Oriental and the Gothic in the Antebellum South

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Sep 092008

Gossett, Thomas F. Uncle Tom’s Cabin and American Culture Southern Methodist University Press, 1985

Roberts, Diane. The Myth of Aunt Jemima: Representations of Race and Region Routledge, 1994

Schick, Irvin C. The Erotic Margin: Sexuality and Spatiality in Alteritist Discourse Verso, 1999

First, I want to reiterate my position that consensual Master-slave roleplaying relationships as practiced by Munby and Cullwick and afterwards have only a tenuous connection to the actual institution of Atlantic slavery. It’s more about the fictionalized version of slavery as seen by people who had no direct experience with it.

Second, getting off on a scenario does not necessarily mean the fantasizer agrees with the politics or ideas behind it. In fact, a masochist might get a stronger charge off a scenario if the suffering is not just.

The Rosetta stone of BDSM history

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Jul 272008

Colligan, Colette. “Anti-Abolition Writes Obscenity: The English Vice, Transatlantic Slavery, and England’s Obscene Print Culture” International Exposure: perspectives on modern European pornography, 1800-2000, edited by Lisa Z. Sigel. Rutgers, 2005. Link

While I’ve known for a while that Atlantic slavery was the inspiration for the Master-slave motif of BDSM, exactly how this happened is a bit of a mystery, and I’ve been forced to do a bit of hand-waving when I give presentations. We know that books like Robinson Crusoe and Uncle Tom’s Cabin were inspirations for sexual fantasies, as documented by Krafft-Ebing and Freud. But what happened after that?

Colette Colligan has the answer. The Rosetta stone of BDSM history is two texts: First, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861 in the USA, available in the UK in 1862) written by Harriet Jacobs under the pen name “Linda Brent”, and its sexualized parody The Secret Life of Linda Brent, a Curious History of Slave Life (1882) written by George Lazenby and published in The Cremorne.

Chloe “liked” Olivia: Between Women, by Sharon Marcus

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Mar 272008

Marcus, Sharon Between Women: Friendship, Desire, And Marriage In Victorian England Princeton University Press, 2007 Google Books Amazon

If “the homosexual”, as a legal and psychological identity, was invented in the late Victorian period via events like the publication of Psychopathia Sexualis and the trial of Oscar Wilde, there may have been forms of sexual identity that were un-invented at the same time. Marcus’ book suggests that, instead of looking at Virgina Woolf’s phrase “Chloe liked Olivia” and immediately assuming that the women in question were lesbians, or should have been lesbians if only their society allowed for it, “liked” may have referred to an emotionally passionate yet physically chaste form of female friendship. Far from being in opposition to heterosexuality, female homosociality was a complimentary adjunct to heterosexuality. Female friends were a standard feature of romantic novels; it was the unmarriageable types like Vanity Fair’s Becky Sharp who didn’t like other women.

In further search of Arthur Munby’s erection: Between Women, by Sharon Marcus

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Mar 072008

Marcus, Sharon. Between Women: Friendship, Desire, and Marriage in Victorian England Princeton University Press, 2007.

I’ve run into yet another snag in the question of, Is BDSM necessarily sexual? And how do we write about people’s sexualities who are very, very different from modern conceptions?

Even the primary sources may not be as reliable as we might think. I’ve always taken for granted that Arthur Munby had little or no interest in vanilla sex, that it was all sublimated into his working-class women fetish. There’s no hint he ever had intercourse in the diaries of him or Hannah Cullwick. However, does that necessarily mean anything?

The question “did the have sex?” is the first one on people’s lips today when confronted with a claim that women in the past were lovers — and it is almost always unanswerable. If firsthand testimony about sex is the standard for defining a relationship as sexual, then most Victorians never had sex. Scholars have yet to determine whether Thomas Carlyle was impotent; when, if ever, John Stuart Mill and Harriet Taylor consummated their relationship; or if Arthur Munby and Hannah Cullwick, whose diaries recorded their experiments with fetishes, cross-dressing, and bootlicking, also had genital intercourse…. one rarely finds even oblique references to sex between husband and wife.

Pg.43

One could add: Did Henry Spencer Ashbee write or compile My Secret Life and just never mention it in his diaries? (I don’t think he did.) And what really happened to T.E. Lawrence in De’era? (Reminds me of a joke in Blackadder, in which a character casually mentions that Oscar Wilde’s homosexuality is actually just a character assassination by a literary rival.) Even in the well-documented cases with primary sources, there’s so much room for uncertainty.

Sharon Marcus’ book about 19th century female relationships argues that “romantic friendship” between women is not just a genteel, Victorian way of saying “lesbian.” Based on her studies of “life writing”, she claims that passionate yet chaste female-female relationships existed as a complementary adjunct to heterosexual marriage. Women were known to and expected to have intense homoerotic relationships, which would develop their feminine qualities. These relationships existed within the “play of the system” of heterosexual marriage, and constituted a separate realm from actual lesbianism as we would define it today.

Marcus provides a lot of examples from diaries and memoirs of intimate encounters between women that apparently never went past first base, if that far. That suggests a remarkable degree of self-restraint. How often did two women slip over that boundary between female friendship and lesbianism? Alternatively, after reading Alan Moore and Melinda Gebbie’s Lost Girls, were Victorian women quietly having orgies in the parlor while their menfolk enjoyed port and cigars in the study?

Who knows? If there was an accepted social realm for intimate relationships between women, that were emotionally intense yet chaste, then there can be erotics that don’t involve genital contact or even arousal. Munby may very well have gone to the grave a technical virgin even after marrying Cullwick, having perhaps never had an erection in all his interactions with working women.

My personal theory is that Munby was aroused by Cullwick and women like her, but he blocked that out on some level, so he could maintain the pretense, to the world and to himself, that there was nothing improper about his “hobby.” Thus, to him, it wasn’t sexual.

That leaves the even more vexing question of how Cullwick experienced her relationship with Munby. We know that she wrote about flirting with and kissing men other than Munby, so she was more sexually expressive than him (or just less reticent about it.) But was what she felt when kneeling and scrubbing floors pleasure?

Sacher-Masoch’s The Black Czarina: “Blood spurted over the ermine.”

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Feb 282008

At long last, I finally found another translated work by Leopold von Sacher-Masoch. “The Black Czarina” was a short story printed in the back of the 1965 Senate edition of Venus in Furs, translated by H.J. Henning. What Fernanda Savage translated as “Confessions of a Supersensual Man”, Henning calls “Confessions of an Ulta-Sentimentalist”, both of which suggest a connection to 18th century ideas of sensibility.

Unfortunately, the book says nothing about where or when “The Black Czarina” was published.

Unsurprisingly, the story reflects Sacher-Masoch’s preoccupation with cruel women (and fur), but it ties in his many other interests in a somewhat ungainly package. It starts off with a picturesque sketch of decaying Galician castles, but that doesn’t last long until: “The great Czar Vladimir is couched at the feet of his slave…. Bearskins are strewn profusely on the ground.”

Vladimir is obsessed with Narda, his slave, who was widowed after the war against Kiev, and delighted in seeing boyards fight to the death over her. The czar, passing by, claims her. However, he grows to love (?) her precisely because of her indomitableness. She says, “Kill me if you like, but you cannot force me. I mock you. You are as impotent as a child.”

To prove his love, Vladimir swaps places with Narda, sovereign and slave, then gives her absolute power for one day, sunrise to sunset.

Unlike Wanda von Dunajew, Narda requires no coaxing to take control on her special day. She wakes to have Vladimir kiss her foot, then dresses in ermine. Her first proclamation: “May my reign be a reign of peace an happiness. As long as it lasts, as far as my sceptre reacher, no man is to bear arms. In token of peace and gentleness, women will form my guard.” She orders treasury gold to be given to the people. She liberates the female slaves from the palace, who serve as her bodyguard.

Sacher-Masoch wasn’t exactly racially progressive, to wit:

“Where is the negress?” enquired Narda.

“In the dungeon.”

“Tigris? And why?”

“She killed her gaoler.”

Narda gave a sign and Tigris was brought to her. She was a superb woman who seemed carved out of ebony. A woman disquieting by the nocturnal splendour of her body of bacchante, by the cruel laugh of her feline face and the bloodthirsty sparkle of her voluptuous eyes.

“You killed a man?” said Narda in a severe tone.

The negress nodded.

“And why?”

“For the pleasure of it,” replied Tigris, grinding her teeth.

“For one day I have the power of life and death,” said the Czarina. “What shall I do with you?”

“Let me die. I cannot live here if I may not kill anybody. My heart thirsts for blood, as yours for kisses.”

“Good. Your thirst will be quenched,” said the Czarina with a shudder. “No man is allowed to bear arms in my domain. I pardon you Tigris. You will be my executioner.”

The negress let fly a savage yelp, the cry of a wild beast.

Narda is also described in animalistic terms.

The czarina and her female guards go on a morning bear hunt, and Narda calmly dispatches a bear. Then things take a turn for the odd. Narda comes across Iegor, the pragmatic and independent-minded peasant man, who is unimpressed by her.

“I hate all those who wear purple and fine linen, and harness men to their carts like beasts. We lived free…. We had no wars, and if anyone disturbed the peace of the commune, the people judged him.”

This is the kind of resourceful, independent peasant man Sacher-Masoch valorized in other writings, at least according to James Cleugh’s biography. Narda wins his loyalty until the end of the day.

When holding court, Narda hears the complaints of the people against the boyard nobles. In this case, loyalty to the czar is seen as a belief in justice and personal autonomy, compared to the corrupt and brutal boyards. Narda orders a boyard executed and quartered, with a portion given to each of four accusers. The others begged for mercy, but they are slaughtered by women archers. The dying men gaze adoringly at their executioners.

When Narda puts Iegor in charge of the army on the frontier, the czar says, “You have done what no sovereign dared to, broken the power of an arrogant nobility. For this, we thank you. But do not interfere with the rights of the Crown.” Narda pays no heed.

She holds an extravagant party at the end of the day. The boyards (presumably the ones who weren’t slaughtered) toast her. While there’s still an hour before sundown, she whips Vladimir.

Vladimir tries to cut this off, but Narda turns a temporary play into a coup. Vladimir and the boyards fall to their knees and surrender. Narda has Tigris execute Vladimir. “Blood spurted over the ermine.” It ends with a decapitation scene straight out of Salome and Judith and other stories of women destroying men, as described as Dijkstra’s Idols of Perversity. Narda becomes Galicia’s benevolent dictator.

While Wanda is an agent (unwitting?) of Severin’s personal transformation (however incomplete and tentative), Narda is an agent of Galicia’s social transformation. She liberates the peasantry from the corrupt and vicious nobility and puts women, slaves and peasants in positions of authority, a classic “world upside down” scenario. Initially, this social upheaval is a liminoid ritual, a temporary period bounded by sunrise and sunset, but Narda takes the opportunity to make the ritual liminal, and permanent. Slave becomes sovereign, and sovereign becomes a corpse. Perhaps this suggests that the play of power in sexual desire, in which women have advantage, according to Sacher-Masoch, could result in real social revolution. We know that Sacher-Masoch grew up in a region wracked with recent peasant uprisings and massacres. For him, that was a very real possibility for the future, and he had a very ambivalent view of it. Perhaps his fascination with personal and social violence was a response to his wish for revolution, combined with his realization that, as an aristocrat and an intellectual, he’d probably be one of the first up against the wall. (Lord Byron had a similar conflict.)

Not a good story, as the dialogue is stilted and the characters are stereotypes, but at least I can speak with a little more authority on the works of Leopold von Sacher-Masoch.

Bram Dijkstra’s Idols of Perversity

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Feb 092008

Dijkstra, Bram. Idols of Perversity: Fantasies of Feminine Evil in Fin-De-Siecle Culture Oxford University Press, 1986.

Dijkstra’s book is an overview of art from the mid-nineteenth century to the early twentieth, exploring the recurring themes of artists largely forgotten today. Back then, paintings were an art form viewed by the general public in salons and exhibitions, and having great controversy for their content. In the author’s analysis, there were recurring themes of gender, class and race tangled together in art.

The mid-nineteenth century, circa 1850, saw woman as the “household nun”, the passive vessel where the warrior-merchant man kept his soul for safekeeping. Artists painted sappy sentimental images of mothers and children, nymphs with broken backs languishing in the woods, etc. Around 1870, when the first generation raised under these ideals had matured (and when decadents like Rachile and Sacher-Masoch and Bram Stoker and Flaubert wrote), they took their disappointment in their mothers and wives failing to live up to that ideal as inspiration to portray women as monsters: bestial, materialistic, lustful, full of low cunning, primitive, a snare to trap man on his path to spiritual apotheosis and transcendance of the material. Dualistic thinking combined with garbled Darwin and Schopenhauer.

The cultural leaders of the years around 1900 much preferred the depiction of a simple world of dualistic absolutes, of easily identifiable abject household nuns and monstrous devil-women juxtaposed with godlike imperial males and pitiful effeminate victims. (Pg.393)

It’s not surprising to me that the author explores themes that eventually became staples of BDSM imagery: Orientalist slave women, domineering men, an early examples of forniphilia, the amazon, the temptress, the woman-as-animal, the vampire. Dijkstra goes a little overboard, apparently suggesting that even innocuous images are informed by sexism and racism, or that any juxtaposition of woman and animal in the same painting was understood to be an allusion to full on bestiality. Masochist paintings and novels prompt him to go into a convoluted theory in purple prose about masochists as “executioner’s assistants”.

It’s not that Dijkstra is wrong, it’s that he’s a modernist: his texts have one meaning. If one allows for irony or humor or subversion or fantasy when creating or viewing images, many different stories emerge. The story of Judith and Holofernes can be an instance of female heroism, instead of just a woman consuming the spiritual essence of man to fill her own moral and intellectual vacuum. Dijkstra’s final example is the biblical tale of Salome, which in Oscar Wilde’s version is the conflict of the spiritual/speaking and hearing/man versus the material/seeing and being seen/woman, but remember that in Aubrey Beardsley’s illustrations of the play, Wilde himself is caricatured as Salome’s manipulative mother, Herodias.

Dijkstra has one theme only: man’s sublimated hatred towards woman, which ultimately limits his analysis. He leaves out how people find solutions in fantasy to problems, how symbols that can be monstrous to one viewer or one time can be heroic to another viewer or another time. His book covers the period which I consider the very early roots of the BDSM subculture, circa 1870, the publication date of Venus in Furs and also soon after the first spate of fetishist letters in Englishwoman’s Domestic Magazine.

I’ve already identified the connection between BDSM imagery and late 19th century Orientalism in books and paintings. I’m currently reading Bram Dijkstra’s Idols of Perversity, about depictions of the feminine in late 19th century art. This introduced me to the softcore, Orientalist work of Ernest Normand.

Normand’s work hits the high points of this genre: slave women of various races on nude display before the sale, Orientalist kitsch artifacts such as fans and a sphinx, that kind of thing. Such paintings were displayed in major exhibitions and smaller reproductions were, I think, widely available.

I found the image above on a page about an art show in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada, called Orientalism & Ephemera.

Orientalism & Ephemera thus explores the attraction and presence of the East within our everyday experience. For many artists, this awareness presents a way to counter the violence of today’s conflicts. Much of our contemporary cultural exchange is in response to the repeated and boundless violence of the politics of empire-building projects, which attempt to colonize the spatial, disempower the colonized, and destroy cultures. In Orientalism, Said addressed the Orient, not as a threatening other but as “an integral part of European material civilization and culture” (Said 1978). By focusing on ephemeral artifacts, souvenirs, pamphlets, postcards, catalogues, travel and commercial items, documents and photographs, the exhibition I have organized reflects a certain closeness and offers an alternative space from which to consider the innumerable manifestations of orientalism within our everyday culture.

The list given above should include “pornography”. The example of emphemera provided, an undated advertisement for a book, is a classic example of the “anthro-porn” genre, of National Geographic nudes and mondo films. (I could write a book on the overlap of documentary and pornography alone.)

Obviously, the art in the above ad is much cruder than Normand’s technically skilled painting. The woman to the left seems an afterthought, as if to deflect the implications of male-on-male torture, and the way the man on the right is holding the right conveys the sexual implications with the subtlety of a sledgehammer. The documentary context puts the reader in the position of the civilized man (presumably) observing the “weird rites” and congratulating ourselves on how advanced we are.

Normand’s high art of Bondage and the low art of “The book of Torture” are both based on Orientalism, the use of what is today the Middle East as an arena for fantasies that unacceptable. The Orientalist view looks outward from the civilized world of industrial, Christian Europe to the rest of the world, but also back in time, to an imagined primordial fantasy where men were men and women were chattel, where social Darwinism had free reign. It was a rejection of liberal society in fantasy.

Such imagery is still published in the 20th century. Witness: