Lure of the List: Doomed Excavations of the Ur-Text and Other Futilities (Palimpsestic Texts Part 1)

I studied the poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins for GCE A Level Eng Lit, and I still refer to his On the Origin of Beauty: A Platonic Dialogue (1865) as a theory of aesthetics worthy of application to most decorative arts, even to the descriptive passages in my fictions. 

Mind you, you would have to look very hard indeed between the lines to detect their masked presence.

However, it’s my own Theory of Palimpsestic Texts I wish to put to the test on this occasion. 

My theory proposes that, despite the most rigorous scholarship, the critic can never be sure that an ur-text is not waiting to be excavated that prefigures the literary effusion under review, whose uniqueness had seemed at first reading so promisingly sui generis.

Yes. So often when the Enchanted Reader peels away the palimpsests, the Disenchanted Reader finds older writings still legible beneath. 

Take, for instance, the love English poets have for shopping lists...

The Lure of the List.

Consider the poem, In the Valley of the Elwy, by Manley Hopkins (whom Kingsley Amis bibulously considered a neurasthenic whose spirituality was crippled by an ‘obsessive affectation of singularity’, and who should have drowned in the wreck of the Deutschland) ...

Lovely the woods, waters, meadows, combes, vales,
All the air things wear that build this world of Wales. 

Is it unfair to recall here the cadences of Tennyson, from Ulysses (1842) some thirty years earlier...

Much have I seen and known; cities of men 

And manners, climates, councils, governments,

But do these cadences derive from a work even earlier in the century of their youth?

Look at Wordsworth’s Composed upon Westminster Bridge of 1802 to see the lure of the list assert itself ...

Ships, towers, domes, theatres, and temples lie

Open unto the fields, and to the sky;

(... although, as has been pointed out, you could also see Croydon from that point of vantage).

... Nor, I belatedly add, should we ignore the potency of this effect when observed in Milton’s Paradise Lost ...

Thrones, Dominations, Princedoms, Vertues, Powers . . .
. . . Princes, Potentates, Warriors, 

 

or

 

Rocks, caves, lakes, fens, bogs, dens, and shades of death . . .

 

or. yet again, 
Alice Through the Looking-Glass

 

To talk of many things: 

Of shoes — and ships — and sealing-wax —. 

Of cabbages — and kings —.

compare with Richard II

 

Let’s talk of graves, of worms, and epitaphs; . . .

 

Liverpudlian Precursor.

There must be a passion akin to a cataloguer’s or indexer’s or, in the case of John Lennon, aged thirteen, a nascent lyricist’s, to see a tabulated itemisation metamorphose into art; see Lennon’s Met Office Weather Report in Eskimonisian from the witty schoolboy magazine he edited, The Daily Howl (C1953) ...

Weather Report. Tomorrow will be muggy, followed by tuggy and weggy. The rest follows. ‘Ǫoglé hînķle wýrtle fóò.’ You may have noticed that it is written in Eskimonisian, especially for our Eskimonisian readers.  

Yet, that power of rhythmic memorization, which drove the precocious John Lennon to his garbled rendering of ‘Dogger, Humber, Wight, Rockall, Faeroes’ is also found in a frequently cited work by a fellow Liverpudlian (by culture not birth), the poet Carol Ann Duffy.

Her Prayer, 40 years later than Lennon’s, concludes with the moral relativist’s lines: 

Darkness outside. Inside, the radio's prayer — 

Rockall. Malin. Dogger. Finisterre.

Carol Ann Duffy                                     John Lennon

 

The Sisyphean Task of the Ur-Textualist.

So, in this special case of the Shipping Report, where does the ur-textualist begin an excavation? 

Maybe this comparison only goes to prove that the lyric voice of an idiot savant (a possessed tongue, in general, I mean, though the voices of John Lennon, Dylan Thomas and Arthur Rimbaud spring to mind) is likely to defeat the ur-textualist in search of the buried remains of a causality that could predate what is claimed to be a first occurrence.

Take a look at another poet, Philip Larkin, to test the Palimpsestic Effect. 

See, for instance, the end of the penultimate stanza of his magnificent Whitsun Weddings (1958) ...

I thought of London spread out in the sun,
Its postal districts packed like squares of wheat:

Then refer to the opening lines of W. H. Auden’s As I walked out one evening (1937) ...

As I walked out one evening,

Walking down Bristol Street,

The crowds upon the pavement

Were fields of harvest wheat.

And compare Larkin’s ultimate line – Sent out of sight – with Sassoon’s on; on; and out of sight (Everyone Sang).

Who, then, are the precursors?

Are they, I wonder, my old friends Mr and Mrs Anon? See
http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2011/09/commoners-rights-to-heroic-quatrain.html 
http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2011/10/mr-and-mrs-anon.html

Here are some of the most beautiful words in the English language (Thomas Nashe’s In Time of Pestilence, 1593) ...

Brightness falls from the air,
Queens have died young and fair,
Dust hath closed Helen’s eye.
I am sick, I must die:
Lord, have mercy on us. 

And yet.

And yet, the oldest hand-book of English Proverbs, one that harks back to paraemiographia and Adagia collected before Thomas Nashe lived, records an English saw from the lips of the ‘inglorious’ ignoramuses (as Kingsley Amis would have it), citing this old saying ...

Fair fall truth and daylight.

The ‘Here is Where’ Formula.

However, I will sign off this posting with the reluctant acknowledgement that Kingsley Amis in his own poems could nail with savagery the egregiously unoriginal in poetry, satirizing the earnestness of those poets unblessed by a lyric tongue. 

Here, in Here Is Where (from A Case of Samples, 1956),  he damns the insipidness of certain versifiers (just open the pages of the New Yorker from any issue in the last four decades and you’ll find any number of such formulaic constructions).

                                 Here, where the ragged water
                                 Is twilled and spun over
                                 Pebbles backed like beetles,
                                 Bright as beer-bottles,
                                 Bits of it like snow beaten,
                                 Or milk boiling in saucepan ...

                                 Going well so far, eh?

Ah. 

When things start writing themselves you should know that it’s truly time to stop.

Afterthought.

In the end, though (vis-à-vis originality), I think certain writers in English of an acquired sensibility must recognise, as Amis points out, that they are very often merely hangers on in a proscriptive system of artistry that constrains them to travel clustered in the same orbit, hung in perfect equipoise between the gravitational pull of mundanities and the limitless attractions of the cosmos, because they have all attained exactly the same critical mass.

 

Liverpudlian post-post-scriptum.

(30-09-13) I have just viewed for the first time the opening of Liverpudlian Terence Davies’s Distant Voices, Still Lives (1988), a movie about working class life in 1940s Liverpool, which begins with a radio Shipping Forecast voiceover ... a rather too familiar device for conveying emotional weather that seems to bear out my foregoing remarks

Found! The Last Faithful Husband in France.

A recent fiction of mine (Darkly, More is Seen, Spring Issue of Ambit 212) considers infidelity in lovers as an unstoppable force of nature, the opinion held by my passive-aggressive narrator who fails to revise her cynical view of French mores due to a tendency to glare at Gallic seduction rites through Anglo-Saxon-tinted spectacles.

As she confesses:

I could not dismiss our parting in the light, practical manner with which the French seem to deal with natural catastrophes of the heart. In France, I’m aware, no woman is expected to remain physically faithful for three years, let alone a decade.

Darkly, More is Seen.

 I am reminded of a truisme français, formulated over three centuries ago:  

The struggle we undergo to remain faithful to one we love is little better than infidelity.

François de la Rochefoucauld

But it was neither of these two attitudes that prompted this brief posting.

No. What set me off on these musings was a recent screening of that truly gripping thriller, L’Homme Qui Voulait Savoir (The Vanishing, 1988, Dir. George Sluizer), starring the beguiling Johanna ter Steege. 

Here are fervent protestations of fidelity from its sinister French antagonist, Raymond Lemorne (played by a Bernard-Pierre Donnadieu), addressing his wife:

‘I am the last Frenchman who can be proud of having known only one woman in his life.’

 An admirable sentiment.

Except it’s a sentiment professed by a homicidal French sociopath.

●

Postscript 06.06.16

In response to this post, a correspondent has complained, ‘It’s all very well to condemn the customary dalliances of the French, but what is your true opinion of the English attitude to the institution of marriage?’

In answer, I drew her attention to the English film, The Thirty Nine Steps (1935), wherein the hero, masquerading as an adulterous lover leaving his mistress’s flat at dawn, enlists the aid of a milkman to evade pursuing enquiry agents.

                English Adulterer: You married?

                Cockney Milkman: Yes. But don’t rub it in. 

Footnote 28.07.20

I note the death of Parisienne Olivia de Havilland who wrote Every Frenchman Has One. I'm determined to read it.

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

 

Mr Twiddle: Agent Provocateur.

I see I drew a moral in my last post.

Here’s another moral drawn; again by Mrs Stock-Engländer, the wife of that arch-Englishman, my father.

My mother, when reading us bedtime stories, was alert to question Enid Blyton’s world view: ‘Into my books I pack ethical and moral teaching,’ Miss Blyton claimed.  A claim dismissed by Mother’s strictest censures.

Even now I recall my mother’s observations, over fifty years ago, when reading a tale of Mr Twiddle (a petit-bourgeois Pickwickian creation of Blyton’s). The moral of one particular bedtime read was: ‘Trust makes way for treachery,’ for kindly Mr Twiddle tested his housemaid’s honesty by calculating to ‘mislay’ coins on the stairs.  The housemaid was tempted and dismissed for theft. I clearly remember my mother’s condemnation of this entrapment as the act of an agent provocateur. 

That was the moral my mother drew, and the moral I pondered on, aged seven.

Postscript . . . Tests of Honesty in a Building Society.

Curiously, I have just stumbled across the following account of a young trainee secretary in a well-known British building society (Life’s Too Short: True Stories About Life at Work, 2010), who reluctantly attended college to . . . 

. . . learn shorthand and touch-typing. This prepared me for my first job  in the Halifax Building Society. Life in a branch of a building society was a gentle introduction to the working world . . . There was one colleague who left one and two pence pieces around the staff room to test our honesty.

We are all vermin now.

So the British prime minister pronounces, ‘We are all Thatcherites now.’

Here, surely, is a species of Doublespeak parroted by the chatterati that is as brassnecked as any utterance by those who presume to misappropriate this familiar one-size-fits-all, catch-all-catchphrase for their own ends.

Consider the case of British novelist Zadie Smith, who writes of 21st century alienation in England as akin to Kafka’s existential crisis of the Jew: ‘What is Englishness? … We’re all insects, all Ungeziefer, now.’ *

So we are all verminous bugs now, are we?’

I truly regret coupling the names of Margaret Thatcher and Franz Kafka in the same breath (mind you, their surnames are powerfully trochaic), yet I must protest the heavy-handed usage of a remark that originated with a British Liberal Chancellor of the Exchequer in 1888, if I am not mistaken … ‘We are all Socialists now.’

How ironic, then, that three masters of German letters should be a ghostly triumvirate summoned up – by association – at the promptings of an angst-ridden professional soul-barer to challenge the naïve platitudes of her earnest schoolgirl thesis.

Did not Goethe towards the end of his life say that a person should be, ‘ein gemäßigter Liberaler, wie es alle vernünftigen Leute.’ (Quoted as: ‘Any sensible person is a moderate liberal’) 

And did not Thomas Mann echo his words and say, with good reason, ‘Jeder vernünftige Mensch ist ein gemäßigter Sozialist.’ (‘Any sensible person is a moderate socialist.’)  

Kafka knew the works of Goethe inside out and venerated his writings so I believe it is distinctly flawed thinking for Zadie Smith to invoke Kafka’s name to support her disloyal and extremist notion of chronic sociopathy in Great Britain, the cradle of Liberalism (Locke, Mill, Cobden, Wollstonecraft, Stopes, et al).

As we know, Margaret Thatcher famously said, ‘There is no such thing as society.’ And now it appears the darling of thinking women’s reading groups agrees with her.

I asked my mother, when she was nearing the end of her life and infirm, how she placed herself as a participant in English society. She looked up from her knitting and said, ‘You know very well the pattern I follow, dear. The tenth balaclava this is I am knitting for the lifeboatmen. [She was a supporter of the RNLI.] Am I not part of your national life? [Then, with a dig at me for my not-so-frequent visits.] I am of society. Yes. Even if your mother is never seen by it.’

As Mother was only too aware, my paternal aunt had lambasted my father in a fierce letter (from Berlin, November 17, 1929) accusing him of becoming a stereotypical arch-Englishman (Stock-Engländer) ... of having ‘gone native’, so to speak ... so the question of national identity had clearly exercised the sister of my father, who in his own characteristically quiet yet dogged way had resolved his own existential crisis, at least then... it was a different problem after WW2.

Authentic voices.

However, this absurd breast-beating of Zadie Smith – moreover, a public agonizing in peacetime England – raises other questions, which I have persisted in pursuing with a most distinguished literary editor of one of London’s quality daily newspapers.

I had referred ‘... to certain solipsistic postwar poets who, in my own view, exhibit a maudlin notionality of identification with Holocaust victims that devalues the scale of human suffering.’ 

These remarks were prompted by Zadie Smith’s reference to Sylvia Plath, in her Kafka essay, in which she writes, ‘For there is a sense in which Kafka’s Jewish Question (“What have I in common with Jews?”) has become everybody’s question, Jewish alienation the template for all our doubts. Sylvia Plath hinted at this: “I think I may well be a Jew.” ’  

Well, the crazy conclusion to all these musings is that – though I had NOT specifically mentioned Sylvia Plath – the distinguished literary editor guessed whereof I spoke.

He wrote: ‘Wherever you stand on “maudlin identification”, it’s a very old argument, and I’m not sure it’s worth reviving. And I’m afraid her poems are always going to be a bit more interesting than Karen Gershon’s, aren’t they?’ **

Really?

MORAL : Germans have a word for a denigrating self-loather: a Nestbeschmutzer (a besmircher of one’s own nest). Zadie Smith’s self-styled alienation is hard to swallow, in my view, when she is gifted with the greatest boon ever conferred to unify a nation: the pure reason of the English language as a medium of connexion rather than of estrangement. Alienation? She did not have the misfortune to be cursed with the split personality of futurist L v. K, who was born in 1902 in Elsass/Alsace. Up to the age of 16 his studies were in German until the political overthrow of 1918 and his teachers changed to French, an agonizing relinquishment of the language he loved. See my The Eleven Surviving Works of L v. K at the South Bank Poetry Library for a tragedy of true alienation ...

http://www.poetrymagazines.org.uk/magazine/record.asp?id=9440 

Divided loyalty?*** I suggest Zadie Smith examines the example of Anglophile Adam von Trott zu Solz before she makes that claim.  

Better to be a Stock-Engländer than an Ungeziefer. 

 

*   See http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/3558156/Zadie-Smith-on-Kafka.html

** For the poems of Karen Gershon, a Kindertransport refugee, see

http://jwa.org/encyclopedia/article/gershon-karen

*** Oh, and maybe, too, Zadie Smith should listen to actor Richard Burton – a Welsh speaker – conjugating the verb ‘to be’ . . . ‘I will teach you the greatest poem in the English language, the present tense of the verb “to be”: I am, thou art, she is, he is, we are, you are, they are . . . ’ 

Immured mustard field. Found.

Last night, reading for the first time that classic of prison literature, Die Zelle, by a distant kinsman of mine, Horst Bienek, I stumbled upon a specimen of poésie trouvée no less poignant than any love poem composed by Neruda, yet this was a prose fragment (my line-breaks as original punctuation, page 54), and all the more powerful in its intensity for being written out of four years of confinement in a Siberian forced labour camp ... a vibrant memory for the prisoner that persists to shimmer in the dark.

The Field of Mustard

We lie down in a field of mustard,

the yellow blossoms sway before our eyes,

we look at each other,

we do not say anything,

I bend over her,

once I push my tongue between her teeth,

she draws back,

I write my wishes on her face with my breath,

she answers me with her breath,

for a long time we talk with one another

in a language no one speaks ;

next evening I wait for her,

she does not come.

Horst Bienek (1930-1990). Distinguished award-winning German novelist and poet. He was a student of Bertolt Brecht at the Berliner Ensemble. In 1951, he was arrested on political grounds by the NKVD and sentenced by a Soviet military tribunal to twenty-five years of forced labour in the notorious Vorkuta, a gulag. He was released due to an amnesty in 1955. His first novel, Die Zelle (The Cell, 1968, filmed under his own direction in 1972), focuses on a prisoner who, in the isolation of his cell, fights for mental and physical survival in the face of sickness, torture, and an uncertain fate. A first person narrative, it uses stream of consciousness to agonizing effect. The truly excellent English translation is by Ursula Mahlendorf.

For more found poems see: 

http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2011/09/poesie-trouvee-unsought-text.html

and
http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2012/05/way-of-seeing-ronald-searle.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