The French Lieutenant's Woman (38 page)

"These objections
do not, I believe, apply to the third, namely, the introduction of a
sponge or some other substance to guard the mouth of the womb. This
could easily be done by the woman, and would scarcely, it appears to
me, interfere at all in the sexual pleasures, nor have any
prejudicial effect on the health of either party. (Any preventive
means, to be satisfactory, must be used by the woman, as it spoils
the passion and impulsiveness of the venereal act, if the man has to
think of them.)"]

The Victorians chose to
be serious about something we treat rather lightly, and the way they
expressed their seriousness was not to talk openly about sex, just as
part of our way is the very reverse. But these "ways" of
being serious are mere conventions. The fact behind them remains
constant.

I think, too, there is
another common error: of equating a high degree of sexual ignorance
with a low degree of sexual pleasure. I have no doubt that when
Charles's and Sarah's lips touched, very little amatory skill was
shown on either side; but I would not deduce any lack of sexual
excitement from that. In any case, a much more interesting ratio is
between the desire and the ability to fulfill it. Here again we may
believe we come off much better than our great-grandparents. But the
desire is conditioned by the frequency it is evoked: our world spends
a vast amount of its time inviting us to copulate, while our reality
is as busy in frustrating us. We are not so frustrated as the
Victorians? Perhaps. But if you can only enjoy one apple a day,
there's a great deal to be said against living in an orchard of the
wretched things; you might even find apples sweeter if you were
allowed only one a week.

So it seems very far
from sure that the Victorians did not experience a much keener,
because less frequent, sexual pleasure than we do; and that they were
not dimly aware of this, and so chose a convention of suppression,
repression and silence to maintain the keenness of the pleasure. In a
way, by transferring to the public imagination what they left to the
private, we are the more Victorian--in the derogatory sense of the
word--century, since we have, in destroying so much of the mystery,
the difficulty, the aura of the forbidden, destroyed also a great
deal of the pleasure. Of course we cannot measure comparative degrees
of pleasure; but it may be luckier for us than for the Victorians
that we cannot. And in addition their method gave them a bonus of
surplus energy. That secrecy, that gap between the sexes which so
troubled Charles when Sarah tried to diminish it, certainly produced
a greater force, and very often a greater frankness, in every other
field.

All of which appears to
have led us a long way from Mary, though I recall now that she was
very fond of apples. But what she was not was an innocent country
virgin, for the very simple reason that the two adjectives were
incompatible in her century. The causes are not hard to find.

The vast majority of
witnesses and reporters, in every age, belong to the educated class;
and this has produced, throughout history, a kind of minority
distortion of reality. The prudish puritanity we lend to the
Victorians, and rather lazily apply to all classes of Victorian
society, is in fact a middle-class view of the middle-class ethos.
Dickens's working-class characters are all very funny (or very
pathetic) and an incomparable range of grotesques, but for the cold
reality we need to go elsewhere--to Mayhew, the great Commission
Reports and the rest; and nowhere more than in this sexual aspect of
their lives, which Dickens (who lacked a certain authenticity in his
own) and his compeers so totally bowdlerized. The hard--I would
rather call it soft, but no matter-- fact of Victorian rural England
was that what a simpler age called "tasting before you buy"
(premarital intercourse, in our current jargon) was the rule, not the
exception. Listen to this evidence, from a lady still living. She was
born in 1883. Her father was Thomas Hardy's doctor.

The life of the farm
laborer was very different in the Nineteenth Century to what it is
now. For instance, among the Dorset peasants, conception before
marriage was perfectly normal, and the marriage did not take place
until the pregnancy was obvious . . . The reason was the low wages
paid to the workers, and the need to ensure extra hands in the family
to earn.*
[*
An additional economic reason was the diabolical system of paying all
unmarried men--even though they did a man's work in every other
way--half the married man's rate. This splendid method of ensuring
the labor force--at the cost cited below--disappeared only with the
general use of farm machinery. It might be added that Dorset, the
scene of the Tolpuddle Martyrdom, was notoriously the most
disgracefully exploited rural area in England. Here is the Reverend
James Fraser, writing in this same year of 1867: "Modesty must
be an unknown virtue, decency an unimaginable thing, where, in one
small chamber, with the beds lying as thickly as they can be packed,
father, mother, young men, lads, grown and growing girls--two and
sometimes three generations--are herded promiscuously; where every
operation of the toilette and of nature, dressings, undressings,
births, deaths--is performed by each within the sight and hearing of
all--where the whole atmosphere is sensual and human nature is
degraded into something below the level of the swine . . . Cases of
incest are anything but uncommon. We complain of the antenuptial
unchastity of our women, of the loose talk and conduct of the girls
who work in the fields, of the light way in which maidens part with
their honor, and how seldom either a parent's or a brother's blood
boils with shame--here, in cottage herding, is the sufficient account
and history of it all .. ." And behind all this loomed even
grimmer figures, common to every ghetto since time began; scrofula,
cholera, endemic typhoid and tuberculosis.]

I have now come under
the shadow, the very relevant shadow, of the great novelist who
towers over this part of England of which I write. When we remember
that Hardy was the first to try to break the Victorian middle-class
seal over the supposed Pandora's box of sex, not the least
interesting (and certainly the most paradoxical) thing about him is
his fanatical protection of the seal of his own and his immediate
ancestors' sex life. Of course that was, and would still remain, his
inalienable right. But few literary secrets-- this one was not
unearthed until the 1950s--have remained so well kept. It, and the
reality of Victorian rural England I have tried to suggest in this
chapter, answer Edmund Gosse's famous reproof: "What has
Providence done to Mr. Hardy that he should rise up in the arable
land of Wessex and shake his fist at his Creator?" He might as
reasonably have inquired why the Atreids should have shaken their
bronze fists skywards
at Mycenae.

This is not the place to
penetrate far into the shadows beside Egdon Heath. What is definitely
known is that in 1867 Hardy, then twenty-seven years old, returned to
Dorset from his architectural studies in London and fell profoundly
in love with his sixteen-year-old cousin Tryphena. They became
engaged. Five years later, and incomprehensibly, the engagement was
broken. Though not absolutely proven, it now seems clear that the
engagement was broken by the revelation to Hardy of a very sinister
skeleton in the family cupboard: Tryphena was not his cousin, but his
illegitimate half-sister's illegitimate daughter. Countless poems of
Hardy's hint at it: "At the wicket gate," "She did not
turn," "Her immortality"* and many others; and that
there were several recent illegitimacies on the maternal side in his
family is proven. Hardy himself was born "five months from the
altar." The pious have sometimes maintained that he broke his
engagement for class reasons--he was too much the rising young master
to put up with a simple Dorset girl. It is true he did marry above
himself in 1874--to the disastrously insensitive Lavinia Gifford. But
Tryphena was an exceptional young woman; she became the headmistress
of a Plymouth school at the age of twenty, having passed out fifth
from her teachers' training college in London. It is difficult not to
accept that some terrible family secret was what really forced them
to separate. It was a fortunate secret, of course, in one way, since
never was an English genius so devoted and indebted to one muse and
one muse only. It gives us all his greatest love elegies. It gave us
Sue Bridehead and Tess, who are pure Tryphena in spirit; and Jude the
Obscure is even tacitly dedicated to her in Hardy's own preface--"The
scheme was laid down in 1890 ... some of the circumstances being
suggested by the death of a woman ..." Tryphena, by then married
to another man, had died in that year.
[*
Not the greatest, but one of the most revealing poems, in this
context, that Hardy ever wrote. Its first version may be dated to
1897. Gosse's key question was asked in the course of a review of
Jude the Obscure in January 1896.]

This tension,
then--between lust and renunciation, undying recollection and undying
repression, lyrical surrender and tragic duty, between the sordid
facts and their noble use-- energizes and explains one of the age's
greatest writers; and beyond him, structures the whole age itself. It
is this I have digressed to remind you of.

So let us descend to our
own sheep. You will guess now why Sam and Mary were on their way to
the barn; and as it was not the first time they had gone there, you
will perhaps understand better Mary's tears ... and why she knew a
little more about sin than one might have suspected at first sight of
her nineteen-year-old face; or would have suspected, had one passed
through Dorchester later that same year, from the face of a better
educated though three years younger girl in the real world; who
stands, inscrutable for eternity
now,
beside the pale young architect newly returned from his dreary five
years in the capital and about to become ("Till the flame had
eaten her breasts, and mouth and hair") the perfect emblem of
his age's greatest mystery.
 

36

But on her
forehead sits a fire:
She
sets her forward countenance
And
leaps into the future chance,
Submitting
all things to desire.
--
Tennyson,
In Memoriam (1850)

Exeter, a hundred years
ago, was a great deal farther from the capital than it is today; and
it therefore still provided for itself some of the wicked amenities
all Britain now flocks to London to enjoy. It would be an
exaggeration to say that the city had a red light quarter in 1867;
for all that it had a distinctly louche area, rather away from the
center of the town and the carbolic presence of the Cathedral. It
occupied a part of the city that slopes down towards the river, once,
in the days (already well past in 1867) when it was a considerable
port, the heart of Exeter life. It consisted of a warren of streets
still with many Tudor houses, badly lit, malodorous, teeming. There
were brothels there, and dance halls and gin places; but rather more
frequent were variously undone girls and women--unmarried mothers,
mistresses, a whole population in retreat from the claustrophobic
villages and small towns of Devon. It was notoriously a place to
hide, in short; crammed with cheap lodging houses and inns like that
one described by Sarah in Weymouth, safe sanctuaries from the stern
moral tide that swept elsewhere through the life of the country.
Exeter was, in all this, no exception--all the larger provincial
towns of the time had to find room for this unfortunate army of
female wounded in the battle for universal masculine purity.

In a street on the
fringe of this area there stood a row of Georgian terrace houses. No
doubt they had when built enjoyed a pleasant prospect down towards
the river. But warehouses had gone up and blocked that view; the
houses had most visibly lost self-confidence in their natural
elegance. Their woodwork lacked paint, their roofs tiles, the door
panels were split. One or two were still private residences; but a
central block of five, made shabbily uniform by a blasphemous
application of dull brown paint to the original brick, declared
themselves in a long wooden sign over the central doorway of the five
to be a hotel--Endicott's Family Hotel, to be precise. It was owned,
and administered (as the wooden sign also informed passers-by) by
Mrs. Martha Endicott, whose chief characteristic may be said to have
been a sublime lack of curiosity about her clientele. She was a
thoroughly Devon woman; that is, she did not see intending guests,
but only the money their stay would represent. She classified those
who stood in her little office off the hall accordingly:
ten-shillinger, twelve-shillinger, fifteener, and so on ... the
prices referring to the charge per week. Those accustomed to being
fifteen shillings down every time they touch a bell in a modern hotel
must not think that her hotel was cheap; the normal rent for a
cottage in those days was a shilling a week, two at most. Very nice
little houses in Exeter could have been rented for six or seven
shillings; and ten shillings a week for the cheapest room made
Endicott's Family, though without any obvious justification beyond
the rapacity of the proprietress, on the choice side.