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
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| Hermine Hug von Hugenstein |
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.
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
