Shabby Chic – Choicest Colourways. The Bare Necessaries to Furnish a Cell for Solitude and Repose. Hadrian VII and Des Esseintes Share Know-How.

Drab.

Drab is, actually, a colour. It’s a dull, shabby, light brown. 

A Subfusc Aesthetic. 

And let’s not forget that it is from gris (grey) that we derive grisette, the 19th Century French working woman, traditionally classified by the humble grey fabric she invariably wore.

The grisette pictured below is from Fécamp in the Normandy region of France. Her modest counter-colours are very much in evidence, as you can observe.

Grisette de Fécamp  

Such are the caste colours of subjection . . . yet, perversely, the muted colours of this subfusc aesthetic once appeared conspicuously desirable to its two arch proponents – Joris-Karl Huysmans and Frederick William Rolfe – whose all-consuming hypersensitive preciosity bears the same relation to humility as the masquerades of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette bore to the mock-heroic shepherds and shepherdesses of their pastorale in the rusticised hamlet they made their pleasure-ground at Versailles.

The Unassuming Palette of Pseudo-Monasticism?

So let’s be clear. The romance of transcendental monasticism and ritualism – including a fascination with self-mortification and martyrology of the grossest sort – continues to have a strong appeal for masochistic sensualists; particularly it holds an appeal for certain literary adherents drawn to the theatrics of a penitential Catholicism whose credo often may be likened to the highly selective self-denying practices of a sybaritic hermitage.

Agreed, this is my own rather jaded view of so-called fin-de-siècle Decadents . . . but, please, compare the not unrelated narratives of these two writers, Huysmans and Rolfe (Baron Corvo) – two laundry lists of indulgently fulfilled desires, emblematic of a new genre of ‘narcissistic asceticism’ – separated by exactly twenty years . . . 1884 and 1904 . . . and it’s for you to decide. A husk-mattress, anyone?

Imitations d’Humilité.

    . . . he had hung a disturbing sketch by El Greco in his bedroom. It was a Christ done in strange tints, in a strained design, possessing a wild colour and a disordered energy: a picture executed in the painter’s second manner when he had been tormented by the necessity of avoiding imitation of Titian.

        This sinister painting, with its wax and sickly green tones, bore an affinity to certain ideas Des Esseintes had with regard to furnishing a room.

        According to him, there were but two ways of fitting a bedroom. One could either make it a sense-stimulating alcove, a place for nocturnal delights, or a cell for solitude and repose, a retreat for thought, a sort of oratory.

        . . .  For the second instance,—and now that he wished to put behind him the irritating memories of his past life, this was the only possible expedient—he was compelled to design a room that would be like a monastic cell. But difficulties faced him here, for he refused to accept in its entirety the austere ugliness of those asylums of penitence and prayer.

        By dint of studying the problem in all its phases, he concluded that the end to be attained could thus be stated: to devise a sombre effect by means of cheerful objects, or rather to give a tone of elegance and distinction to the room thus treated, meanwhile preserving its character of ugliness; to reverse the practice of the theatre, whose vile tinsel imitates sumptuous and costly textures; to obtain the contrary effect by use of splendid fabrics; in a word, to have the cell of a Carthusian monk which should possess the appearance of reality without in fact being so.

        Thus he proceeded. To imitate the stone-colour of ochre and clerical yellow, he had his walls covered with saffron silk; to stimulate the chocolate hue of the dadoes common to this type of room, he used pieces of violet wood deepened with amaranth. The effect was bewitching, while recalling to Des Esseintes the repellant rigidity of the model he had followed and yet transformed. The ceiling, in turn, was hung with white, unbleached cloth, in imitation of plaster, but without its discordant brightness. As for the cold pavement of the cell, he was able to copy it, by means of a bit of rug designed in red squares, with whitish spots in the weave to imitate the wear of sandals and the friction of boots.

        Into this chamber he introduced a small iron bed, the kind used by monks, fashioned of antique, forged and polished iron, the head and foot adorned with thick filigrees of blossoming tulips enlaced with vine branches and leaves. Once this had been part of a balustrade of an old hostel’s superb staircase.

        For his table, he installed an antique praying-desk the inside of which could contain an urn and the outside a prayer book. Against the wall, opposite it, he placed a church pew surmounted by a tall dais with little benches carved out of solid wood. His church tapers were made of real wax, procured from a special house which catered exclusively to houses of worship, for Des Esseintes professed a sincere repugnance to gas, oil and ordinary candles, to all modern forms of illumination, so gaudy and brutal.

À Rebours by Joris-Karl Huysmans (1884) 

Let Us have all of the simplest, without ornament.

They went out into the corridor; and re-entered the apartment by the first antechamber. 

        ‘Cover all the walls and ceilings with brown-packing paper - yes, brown-packing paper - carta straccia,’ the Pope repeated. 

        ‘Stain all the woodwork with a darker shade of brown. The gilding of the cornices can remain as it is. No carpets. These small greenish-blue tiles are clean; and they soothe the eye. Curtains? You may hang very voluminous linen curtains on the doors and windows, greenish-blue linen to match the tiles, and without borders. Furnish all those ante-chambers with rush chairs and oaken tables. Remember that everything is to be plain, without ornament - In this room you may place the usual throne and canopy: and that crucifix from downstairs - (how exquisite the mother-of-pearl figure is!) - and the stools, and twelve large candlesticks - iron or brass - Now this room is to be a workshop. Let Us have a couch and three armchairs, all large and low and well-cushioned, covered with undyed leather. Get some of those large plain wooden tables which are used in kitchens, about three yards long and one and a half wide. Put writing-materials on one of them, there, on the right of the window. Leave the middle of the room empty. Put three small bookcases against that wall and a cupboard here - Make a bedroom of this room. Let the bed be narrow and long, with a husk mattress; and let the back of the head be toward the window. Put one of the large wooden tables here and a dozen rush-chairs -’ (He spoke to the bishop) ‘Do you know that there is no water here at all, except in little jugs?’ (He continued to the Major-domo) ‘Line the walls of this room with greenish-blue tiles, like those on the floor. Put several pegs on both doors. In this corner put a drainpipe covered with a grating; and, six feet above it, let a waterpipe and a tap project rectangularly two feet from the wall. Yes. Six feet from the floor, two feet from the wall; and let there be a constant and copious supply of water - rain water, if possible. Do you understand?’ 

        The Major-domo understood. The Master-of-the-Chamber shivered. 

        ‘And lamps. Get two plain oil-lamps for each room, with copper shades: large lamps, to give a very strong light. Paint over both doors of the bedroom, on the outside of each, Intrantes excommunicantur ipso facto. When We have finished here,’ He addressed the Master-of-the-Chamber again, ‘you will parade your staff; and We will select one person and provide him with a dispensation from that rule as long as he behaves himself well. He will have charge of the bedroom and the sole right to enter it.’ (The Pope passed into the next room: paused, and whispered explicit directions to the Major-domo; and moved on to the farther room.) ‘The clothes-presses from downstairs can be moved into this room. They will serve. And you had better make a door here, so that it can be entered from the corridor.’ (He went on again.) ‘This room is to be the vestry - and this the oratory. Let Us have a plain stone altar and the stations, and the bare necessaries for mass, all of the simplest. Let everything, walls, floor, ceiling, everything, be white - natural white, not painted; and make a door here, also leading into the corridor, a large double door convenient for the faithful who assist at the pontifical mass. The rooms beyond - you will take order about them at a convenient occasion.’ 

        Hadrian and the bishop returned to the pontifical apartments downstairs. 

        ‘Your Holiness will excuse me -’ 

        ‘Yes?’

        ‘- but have You ever contemplated the present situation?’’

        ‘No. Why?’

        ‘Well, Your Holiness seems to have everything cut and dried.’

Hadrian the Seventh by Frederick Rolfe (1904) 

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The Psychopathology of Hedonistic Abasement.

The interior decorator manqué, His Holiness, claims he has not contemplated the ‘present situation’!? My eye! 
        Good artists borrow, great artists steal. This is almost certainly the case in Rolfe’s theft (from Huysmans) of the Psychopathology of Hedonistic Abasement to colour the idée fixe of his novel‘s eponymous hero, an undisguised self portrait.

The fetishisation of monastic self-denial, we might imagine, also displaces for both authors the anxieties of a co-existing obsession by substituting the psychical pain of libidinous neuroses with a convenient sublimation. 

I will not mention the present day pontifical inclination to shun residence in the apostolic apartments in favour of modest quarters in a sort hostel for visiting clergy, some distance from the papal palace, on the other side of the Vatican city state. 

Product Placement . . . the Keys of Saint Peter are British-Made.

However, Shabby Chic apart, I will note here that, according to Hadrian the Seventh, the Keys of Saint Peter, the symbol of papal authority, are manufactured to the highest specification by London's oldest and most prestigious lock manufacturer.

        ‘A master key, Holiness, I have just got one too.’ The bishop shewed his own ring.
        ‘‘Capital! Where do you get those things made?’
        ‘At a place in Band Street [sic] —Brahma [sic] I think the name is.’  
        ‘Tell your Brahma people to fit all the doors upstairs with locks which have separate keys, . .  and also to send a man who is capable of making an episcopal ring for Us which shall contain a master key to all those locks.‘
        ‘Very well, Holy Father.’

Note: After 103 years in Piccadilly and Bond Street, Bramah Locksmiths have moved to 7 Goodge Place, Fitzrovia, London, W1T 4SF. 
The present Managing Director is a member of the Bramah family.
http://www.bramah.co.uk/Chronological%20History.pdf

Sham Pain.

For The Pallette of Pain, an account of painter Francis Bacon’s use of ‘violence as an activity’, the ‘sham pain’ he proposed for his friends and rendered on canvases, regarded by the cognoscenti as transgressive art – yet expressive of a consummate passive-aggressive masochist with a bent for self-abasement – see also :
https://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.com/2014/05/i-am-serial-killer-diarist-unremarked.html

•

Catherine Eisner believes passionately in plot-driven suspense fiction, a devotion to literary craft that draws on studies in psychoanalytical criminology and psychoactive pharmacology to explore the dark side of motivation, and ignite plot twists with unexpected outcomes. Within these disciplines Eisner’s fictions seek to explore variant literary forms derived from psychotherapy and criminology to trace the traumas of characters in extremis. Compulsive recurring sub-themes in her narratives examine sibling rivalry, rivalrous cousinhood, pathological imposture, financial chicanery, and the effects of non-familial male pheromones on pubescence, 

see Eisner’s Sister Morphine (2008)
http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2011/09/sister-morphine.html

and Listen Close to Me (2011)

http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2011/09/published-this-autumn-listen-close-to.html 

and A Bad Case (2014)

http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2015/07/a-bad-case-and-other-adventures-of.html

Joan Smith and the Faint Aroma of Performing Seals

I’ve just heard that Joan Smith is augmenting her brilliant early broadside, Misogynies (Faber 1996) with her new The Public Woman (Westbourne Press), a compelling examination of male hostility towards women.
http://www.amazon.co.uk/The-Public-Woman-Joan-Smith/dp/1908906049 

The news of her latest work reminds me of my citing of her earlier title in a little essay of mine in 2004 (Ambit Spring Issue 176), Faint Aroma of Performing Seals.
 

There was a piquant flavour to my piece, and this is how I began ...

‘When love congeals it soon reveals the faint aroma of performing seals,’ wrote Lorenz Hart, which raises the fascinating question as to whether there exists a distinct fishiness, released by pheromonally-induced alterations, permeating the ups and downs of the love-life of the female hominid.

A question of questionable taste, you may say, but reassuringly I am in the distinguished company of Joan Smith in raising it.

If you haven’t read her landmark collection Misogynies then really it’s time you did – and in particular – her marvellous essay, Patum Peperium (‘Gentleman’s Relish’), especially in the context of the continuing debate surrounding the ordination of women priests.

What, then, is the connection between ‘performing seals’, an ‘anchovy paste’ and ‘pheromones’?

First, Joan Smith on the subject:  ‘An Anglican curate, interviewed in the Independent, “said that you might as well ordain a pot of anchovy paste as a woman.” ’
 
Smith then goes on to develop her powerfully persuasive theory of a misogynistic conspiracy, fomented by a male hominidal cabal, revealed by the curate’s aforesaid put-down remark.

‘The sexual imagery is irresistible: the paste is made of fish, a smell strongly and pejoratively associated with the female genitals; it is famously spicy and strong, for use only in small quantities ... our clever curate has boiled down thousands of years of hostility to women into one telling phrase.'

From Tertullian to St Augustine to St Jerome the misogynic theologians are castigated by Smith in her essay but, in the process, her rather fascinating topic of the fishy aphrodisiac qualities of ‘Gentleman’s Relish’ is abandoned.

With my reader’s indulgence, I wrote, it was a topic I was quite eager to return to.

Neglected in her essay, I regretted, was a passage from Huysmans’ Against Nature (À Rebours) which chimes very well with her original theme. From Chapter Nine we learn that the ‘carnal nature’ of the dissolute, epicene dilettante Des Esseintes has ‘lain dormant for months’ and his thoughts return to ‘a box full of purple bonbons’. (Shades of Lolita and ‘Papa's Purple Pills’* or ‘purpills’ of Humbert Humbert.)

‘These bonbons ... known by the ridiculous name of Pearls of the Pyrenees, consisted of a drop of schoenanthus scent or female essence crystallized in pieces of sugar; they stimulated the papillæ of the mouth, evoking memories of water opalescent with rare vinegars and lingering kisses fragrant with perfume.’

Here we can catch the wave of that arch-sensualist’s Proustian stream of consciousness.
 
Pearls evoke oysters, of course, and ever since Aphrodite, the Greek goddess of love, arose from the foam on an oyster shell, fresh oysters have been regarded as an aphrodisiac.      

Oysters are famous for their aphrodisiac qualities due to their high mineral salt and glycogen content, an essential element in muscle contraction (ingredients of little consequence for Des Esseintes, however, whose ‘impotency had been established beyond doubt’). 

And what of Des Esseintes’ ‘schoenanthus’ scent? That hint of lemongrass (schoenanthus) would have compounded his blend of stimulants. After all, for the most intimate tête-à-tête oysters are best served on a bed of crushed ice on a silver platter with two lemons cut in quarters.

So far, our literary aphrodisiac recipe to pep up the sex life of jaded homidæ is looking promising ...

And so on, for two-and-half pages of pretty conclusive aphrodisiacal formulæ ... ‘Cosmeticians please note.’

Yes, I was quite pleased with my little essay, and I am today very grateful in acknowledging Joan Smith as its inciter. Thank you. And may I wish every success for The Public Woman, a necessary continuing polemic, and a sequel long overdue.

Postscriptum.

I just had the thought today that maybe the feminist slogan, ‘A woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle’, has, after all, an unintended anchovy-like aphrodisiacal sublimation embedded in it.

*Another thought (16-07-13): has the Annotated Lolita (I don’t have a copy) observed that Papa’s sinister purple pill refers to a papaveraceous sedative ... in other words, an opiate?

●

Catherine Eisner believes passionately in plot-driven suspense fiction, a devotion to literary craft that draws on studies in psychoanalytical criminology and psychoactive pharmacology to explore the dark side of motivation, and ignite plot twists with unexpected outcomes. Within these disciplines Eisner’s fictions seek to explore variant literary forms derived from psychotherapy and criminology to trace the traumas of characters in extremis. Compulsive recurring sub-themes in her narratives examine sibling rivalry, rivalrous cousinhood, pathological imposture, financial chicanery, and the effects of non-familial male pheromones on pubescence, 
see Eisner’s Sister Morphine (2008)

http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2011/09/sister-morphine.html

and Listen Close to Me (2011)

http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2011/09/published-this-autumn-listen-close-to.html  

and A Bad Case (2015)

http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2015/07/a-bad-case-and-other-adventures-of.html

 

Sex Lessons from Literature Unhindered by 20/20 Hindsight.

Sometime late in 2007 there was a call for learned papers on the aesthetics and putative authorship (thought to be Oscar Wilde) of Teleny, or, The Reverse of the Medal, the notorious, salacious, homoerotic novel, first published in London in 1893.

I made my response clear. ‘It might be instructive for me to write a short essay quoting contemporary women in an attempt to interpret their likely contemporary response to the subject matter of Teleny. I would be objective in my writing in every respect, and NOT exhibit 20/20 feminist hindsight.’ In the event, this proposal met with a deafening silence and I moved on to other concerns.

It was only today that I revisited my notes for filing and realized that I had fleetingly touched upon this theme in an essay of mine, a year earlier, in Strange Attractor literary journal (2006), Contra-Genesis: Unusual Cases of Extra-uterine Gestation and Post Mortem Extra-genital Conception. 
http://strangeattractor.co.uk/shoppe/journal-three/ 

These torturously imagined permutations for achieving extracorporeal or adventitious conception recall that notorious novel of homosexuality, Teleny, written in 1893 and attributed to Oscar Wilde, in which the hero, Teleny, impregnates a young countess while visualising the face of his male lover, and nine months afterwards the ‘fine boy’ which issues from the act resembles the lover ... a treacherous male fantasy of the grossest sort, in the opinion of most women readers I should imagine. 

I remember well the thrust of my intended remarks for the 2007 Teleny Symposium because my notes tell me my sources were cited from feminists (male and female) who were of age in 1893. My intuition was simply to attempt a composite contemporaneous view of female sexual desire from glimpses and glints and glimmers sometimes disclosed by psychoanalytical fiction writers of the time. I use the word ‘fiction’ advisedly in the case of the Austrian child psychoanalyst Hermine Hug von Hugenstein, who was 22 years old when Teleny was published.

See also, Hermine Hug von Hugenstein, the Murder of a Doctrinaire Freudian:
https://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.com/2016/06/the-murder-of-doctrinaire-freudian-by.html

Hermine Hug von Hugenstein

Hermine’s Diary of a Halfgrown Girl (believed by many to be a work of fiction rather than an authentic document edited by her) charts the puberty of the diarist from ages eleven to fourteen-and-a-half in a record unmatched, according to Freud in his Introduction, by any chronicle formerly written since it enables ‘... us to see so clearly into the soul of a young girl ... during the years of puberal development.’

Sexual Heat.

Under one of my note-headings, Sexual Heat, I quote the following from the young diarist, Rita, in her her twelfth year. She is observing her teacher on whom she has a crush:

When he strokes his beard I become quite hot and cold with ecstasy. And the way he lifts up his coattails as he sits down. It’s lovely, I do want to kiss him. Hella and I take turns to put our penholder on his desk so that he can hallow it with his hand as he writes. Afterwards in the arithmetic lesson when I write with it, I keep looking at Hella and she looks back at me and we both know what the other is thinking of.  

The symbolism of dip-pen and pen-holder and the excitement stimulated by these objects need not be dwelt on here, other than to observe that the secret sexual life of adolescent girls in the late 19th century, as expressed by contemporaneous women, must be sought in such almost imperceptible textual glimmers.

Similarly, for mydriatic response to stimulus (pupil dilation) as an index to sexual arousal, see Rita’s diary entry for the same year, observing a schoolboy admirer:

When he says that his eyes grow dark, quite black, although his eyes are really grey and they get very large. Especially in the evening when we say goodbye, it frightens me. I'm always dreaming of him. 

And as to dreams, the celebrated diary of Mariya Konstantinovna Bashkirtseva, Russian feminist writer, painter and sculptor (she died from tuberculosis in her twenty-fourth year in 1884, in Paris), reveals the turmoil of her early adolescence (1873):

I had a horrible dream last night ... I saw the sun growing bigger and covering nearly half the heavens, but it emitted neither light nor heat ... then half of it was covered by a cloud. We all cried out, ‘The sun is standing still!’ ... Then the sun began to turn round like two wheels one within the other ... the bright sun was covered at intervals by a cloud as round as itself ... What is the meaning of this dream?

The Burden of Secret Knowledge.

The vividness of her recall, as a young late 19th Century woman recording her disturbed psychical state, suggests to me a mind and emotions responsive to profound impressions yet whose stimuli remain almost wholly uncomprehended. As Freud writes, in the Introduction to Rita’s diary, ‘Above all, we are shown how the mystery of the sexual life first presses itself vaguely on the attention, and then takes entire possession of the growing intelligence, so that the child suffers under the load of secret knowledge ...’

The child, then, of this period, shoulders a burden of secret knowledge that is all the more burdensome for being beyond her complete understanding. 

Proto-feminist novelist George Gissing rams home this point in his novel Denzil Quarrier, published in 1892, the year before Teleny. Here is another glinting facet from the past, as headstrong twenty-three-year-old Serena, a young woman of independent means, seated on a piano-stool, defies her mother, who with purple face insists her daughter should refrain from reading a French novel. As to French novel-writing, in her family’s view, ‘One and all are drenched in impurity!’ The bosom of Serena’s mother heaves ‘like a troubled sea.’ Serena protests:

‘You had rather have me play than read that book? That shows how little you understand of either. This is an immoral piece of music! If you knew what it meant you would scream in horror. It is immoral, and I am going to practise it day after day.’

We might guess the musical piece, like the novel Serena is reading, was composed by a Frenchman. As a character of Gissing’s remarks in Denzil Quarrier, ‘[I read] No English [novels], unless I am in need of an emetic.’ That Teleny has fin de siècle Paris as its setting, and reeks of the Aesthetic Movement in highest Decadent style and swooning mood, recalls a cultivar from the same hothouse, Salomé, written in French by Wilde two years earlier. As for the piano composition, was it by César Franck or one of his franckistes one wonders, since they wrote immersed in the Romantic Catholicism that claimed their contemporary, Joris-Karl Huysmans, whose novel, À Rebours, was the ‘poisonous French novel’ that corrupted Wilde’s Dorian Gray, published in 1890, three years before Teleny.

A Short-Lived Joy.

That brilliant satire on the Decadence, Autobiography of a Boy by G. S. Street, published appropriately in the year following Teleny, 1894, is very clear as to the responses by young women to the posturings of male aesthetes. Each chapter pillories most aspects of Pateresque aestheticism ...  Medievalism, Utopiaism, Grecophilia, Romantic Catholicism, etc.

This passage from Street I suspect reflects contemporary women’s general view of the Decadent Manner and is in its effect, because of this, more Wodehousian than Wildean ...

One or two ambitions he [the aspiring Aesthete] did, however, confide to his intimates.  He desired to be regarded as a man to whom no chaste woman should be allowed to speak, an aim he would mention wistfully, in a manner inexpressibly touching, for he never achieved it.  I did indeed persuade a friend of his and mine to cut him in the park one crowded afternoon; but his joy, which was as unrestrained as his proud nature permitted, was short-lived, for she was cruelly forgetful, and asked him to dinner the next day.

It was these tiny details, gleaned from reading so many of the books listed by William Gaunt in the bibliography for his Aesthetic Adventure (read when I was sixteen), that I intended to assemble into a simulacrum of a young Englishwoman’s psyche as it might have responded to subconsciously perceived sexual stimuli at the end of the 19th Century.
 
At the time of the 2007 Teleny Symposium, my researches for my appreciation of a feminocentric view of Teleny had delved further back into the theme of an Englishwoman’s quest for, and response to, sexual knowledge in the latter part of the 19th Century ... particularly the period 1870s to the 1890s.  The sexual repression that I researched is very evident in this quotation, for example, which describes how an ‘undergraduette’ is thwarted when she enquires at her University bookshop for a copy of Tennyson’s Idylls of a King:

The bookseller had pursed his lips in refusal when I requested the Idylls:  ‘We never have had any poetical effusions on our shelves, and we don’t think we shall begin now.’  My innocent enquiry had been treated as though it were a cause of offence to the severest censors of the University’s morals and manners.

Before I conclude this very modest conspectus on An Englishwoman’s Perceptions of Homoerotica in the Late Nineteenth Century, I would like to note that this literary genre’s suppression was, according to my sources, apparently due directly to an Englishwoman’s interdict. It should be remembered that, at the beginning of the nineteenth century, the well-known prostitute and great propagator of pornography ‘Mary Wilson’ — whom a contemporary called ‘the reviver of erotic literature in the present century’ — strictly forbade the description of homosexual love in any of the erotic fiction and poetry she published.

Were I a Man.

In The Voluptuarian Cabinet Mary Wilson wrote:

It is much to be regretted, that some of the very best French works should be deformed by passages descriptive of Socratic love but it is still more to be lamented that such ideas should ever be transferred into our language. I speak not merely the feelings of a woman upon the subject, for were I a man, I should consider it highly criminal to propagate doctrines, the adoption of which is attended with such horrible consequences. Let us have all kinds of orthodox [copulation] but not heterodox fashions.

Personally, I see a stark contrast between the homoerotic wish-fulfilment evidenced in Teleny and the dreams and fantasies that I believe absorbed the minds of cultivated late 19th century Englishwomen. The glimpses and glints and glimmers I’ve identified by way of illustrating the female psyche of those times all seem to configure a composite mind for this sorority appreciative of realism in their amours in contrast to the perfumed phantasmagoria firing the blood of the aesthetic brotherhood. 

The Separate Room, the Inviolable Retreat.

Two final glimpses of this feminine realism can be observed in the writings of novelist Ethelind Colburn Mayne (aged 28 years in 1893, and the first translator of Freud into English) and the pioneer of Birth Control, Marie Stopes, herself entering puberty in 1893, when Teleny was first published.

In Married Love Marie Stopes writes: 

Now it may enchant a man once — perhaps even twice — or at long intervals – to watch his goddess screw her hair into a tight and unbecoming knot and soap her ears. But it is is inherently too unlovely a proceeding to retain indefinite enchantment ... A married woman’s body and soul should be essentially her own, and that can only be so if she has an inviolable retreat.

In a key feminist text, Colburn Mayne, in her short story The Separate Room, makes clear the reasons for the underlying discontent of her tragic heroine, Marion (an autobiographical fiction that connects us directly to the world of the Yellow Book and its aesthetes, since she was a member of its editorial team). Marion, who’s forced by circumstance to share a bedroom with her mother, confronts her on the same vexed question of Stopes’s ‘inviolable retreat’.

‘Shall I tell you what I was crying about? It was about never being alone. I’m going to ask the doctor to order me a separate bedroom. The extra-quarter’s salary will pay for it. It will do me more good than any other change.’

I think, on reflection, that had I truly written a paper for the Teleny Symposium I would have reminded the aesthetes that the educated Englishwoman in the late nineteenth century was essentially a domestic creature, societised to cultural norms, for whom there was little space allotted, either for intellectual or political freedom or, moreover, for nourishing sleep, and that febrile sexual reveries of the kind productive of Teleny would have been denied her ... unless — improbable outcome — they were written under duress by a bluestocking at the mercy of a Bluebeard as though she were some sort of latterday Scheherazade.

  

See also, the Hypatian Erotica Awards – High Victorian Nominees Announced!
http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2013/08/hypatian-erotica-awards-high-victorian.html