Love Among the Prudes |
BY the time that Charles Dickens was inviting his 'dearest Pig' to breakfast (and even to make his breakfast for him), and Benjamin Disraeli was trying to write immortal literature under the inspiration of the words 'Mary Anne' written in large letters in front of him, and William Ewart Gladstone had nerved himself to make a proposal of marriage in the Colosseum at Rome by moonlight, the age of leisure was in full disintegration. In a harsh new England every man was expected to work for his bread. The grossness of the Court, the insolence of the Shelleys and Byrons, had outraged the middle classes. They looked, and not in vain, to the new Queen to set an example of propriety. One day in 1839 the Queen sent for Prince Albert and sat with him hand in hand on a sofa in a small blue sitting-room. There, exercising her queenly prerogative, she proposed to him. As Prince Albert told his grandmother: '[she] declared to me in a genuine outburst of love and affection that I had gained her whole heart and would make her intensely happy if I would make her the sacrifice of sharing her life with her....' The Queen's 'joyous openness of manner' enchanted the sober Prince, who felt convinced that heaven had not delivered him into evil hands. Soon afterwards he sent her 'a complete account of my ancestors and their connection with the Reformation and the Protestant movement'. With this admirable royal example, conditions were ripe for the nineteenth-century version of Puritanism; a Puritanism distinguished, this time, not by leering attacks on female frailty, but by an idealization of woman, now the virtuous idol of a domestic shrine. Sexual instincts became something no nice girl would admit to possessing; her job was to make man ashamed of his. In other words, prudery was back-in unprecedented strength. Mrs Grundy (who was first heard of in 1798 as an off-stage character in a forgotten play) now came into the social forefront. The curious excesses of prudery are too well known to need elaboration: the draping of table legs for decency's sake, the ban on suggestive phrases like 'the naked eye', the euphemism of 'unmentionables' for trousers, the reluctance of old maids to go to bed in rooms containing men's portraits, even the segregation on bookshelves of works by male and female authors. There are those who hold that Victorian prudery was only a different form of sex appeal, in which the minimum of exposure was made to create the maximum of excitement.Once the idea was well established, says C. Willett Cunnington, prudery 'served as a kind of regulator by which a constant, safe emotional pressure .could be maintained; its practical value in the general improvement of behaviour has not received the credit it deserves. ...' But if prudery was regulator, whose was the hand that controlled it? Are we to believe that man deliberately whetted his desires by moving a notch or two in the direction of 'Hot'? Or was the lever operated by the dainty hand of a young woman in a crinoline, a young woman who knew that by swathing herself to her extremities she was firing the passions of men-even as the Regency belle had done by sauntering about in her seven-ounce dress? If this is so, the Victorian miss was a dissimulating sensualist of no mean order. It seems at least possible that prudery was just prudery; that is, excessive modesty inspired by a genuine moral revulsion against licence. |