Victorian Lust and Love

...Sickbed attendance was a necessary skill, and corpses were laid out in the parlor...

...Nor was the naked body a mystery, since parks and public buildings were ornamented with realistic statues and paintings...

...A number of recent books have tried to explain why (most notably Nina Auerbach's Woman and the Demon...

...One of Gay's most amusing discussions features Hiram Powers' sculpture of "The Greek Slave"—a girl dessed only in chains...

...One nationally syndicated radio commentary took pains to evoke for listeners the voluptuous nude statues and paintings...

...The sordid trial humiliated Mabel, and David as well...

...She was grateful for her union with David Todd, his persistent philandering notwithstanding...

...When the young couple first moved to Amherst, they entered an ingrown world of complex family relationships, such as that of the Dickinsons—the town's "leading family," by virtue of the public-spirited dedication of Austin, following in his father's footsteps...

...As he portrays her, Mabel was always lucky...

...Sue got her revenge after Austin died in 1895...

...Yet readers of The Mill on the Floss or Middlemarch probably are already aware of how ardent 19th-century females could be...

...To sell us on his thesis, the author has to demonstrate that we have in fact believed that in the last century nice women were mostly frigid, and their men suffered from degradation of the erotic principle...

...Future volumes will cover such subjects as love, aggression, and "the travail of liberal culture...

...In this instance there was a happy ending, but Ruskin's tragedy was far from unique...

...Gay's study turns out to be written very much in the spirit of the great Victorian popularizers...

...Gay confirms that Mabel's frank sexuality was common for her era...

...He keeps complaining that "The historian's habit of taking Flaubert's or Marx's anti-bourgeois outbursts as though they were sober reports from the front has done little to clarify" the exact nature of middle-class life...

...It also graphically described an advertisement of the period for some bizarre devices said to inhibit "self-abuse"—a sensual education, indeed...

...Sex was play for the Todds...

...The Reverend Orville Dewey gushed that she was " clothed all over with sentiment, sheltered and protected by it from every eye...

...They felt that as two superior beings they ought to be united for eternity (although significantly, Austin never really attempted to break away from his family...

...Why did the theme not attract 18th-century writers to a similar extent...

...Yet many women did not learn about them and continued to resort to abortion to limit their families—especially in America...

...It is actually the first part of an ambitious study, The Bourgeois Experience: Victoria to Freud...

...But those who have been titillated by the reviews may find the book a disappointment...

...Wisely letting her material speak for itself, Longsworth has managed to recreate the flavor of 19th-century middle-class life in New England...

...She was beginning to be snubbed (pace Gay), though discreetly, so as not to offend Austin...

...She began to experience her happiest moments away from Amherst," Longsworth says—accompanying David on his astronomy expeditions, giving lectures, working on the publication of Emily's poems...

...l. n Austin and Mabel (Farrar Straus Giroux, 449 pp., $24.95), Polly Longsworth has reproduced a generous selection of the letters that passed between Mabel Loomis Todd and Austin Dickinson...

...as an explanation of 19th-century artistic preoccupations it falls flat...

...Writers suffered more, because censors rarely discriminated between the highest and basest motives...

...Her eldest son, Ned, a sickly college boy, became infatuated with the brilliant Mrs...

...He concludes his opening installment on a fittingly optimistic note: "Theage, after all, called for largely untried responses to establish, or readjust, the relative shares of freedom and obligation and to regulate anew the relations between man's fundamental, often clashing drives...

...The strain of a double life eventually killed Austin...

...any performance would more than satisfy them...

...The world has changed less since Jesus Christ than in the last 30 years," CharlesPeguy, the French Catholic poet, declared...

...Even the popular culture has long been deluged by accounts of passionate Victorian marriages...

...Mabel became her friend through little notes, but never laid eyes on her until the poet was in her coffin...

...Living as they did in an age of rationalization, it is not surprising that they justified the relationship...

...to dramatize, and, I trust, to complicate and correct those tenacious misconceptions that have dogged our reading of Victorian culture as a devious and insincere world in which middle-class husbands slaked their lust by keeping mistresses, frequenting prostitutes, or molesting children, while their wives, timid, dutiful, obedient, were sexually anesthetic and poured all their capacity for love into their housework and their child-rearing...

...In addition, "I have chosen to begin this inquiry with bourgeois sexuality...

...Charles Goodyear vulcanized rubber in 1839...

...You are my world, and my Christ," he wrote Mabel after they had known each other for five years...

...Austin's sisters, both eccentric, lived nearby in the old family Homestead...

...But men and women admired her extraordinary personal magnetism...

...Mabel, meanwhile, was beginning to find that "Pain has become a constant state...

...Any doomed love affair may make engrossing, if sometimes unedifying reading...

...His mother, thinking the flirtation might lessen his shyness, encouraged it...

...Although Nathaniel and Sophia Hawthorne apparently shared as sensual a marriage as the Todds, the widow destroyed all passages referring to it after her husband's death...

...After his death, the "War Between the Houses" erupted—a battle over Emily's papers and Austin's last wishes that ended in public humiliation for the Todds and further embitterment for the Dickinson clan...

...George Eliot's judgments receive respectful attention, while Carlyle and Ruskin are primarily treated as cases of psychopathiasexualis...

...They kept track of their inventive love-making in her diary, where Mabel noted that "his presence is absolutely essential to my physical health...

...Though her style was naturally melodramatic (neither of them achieved the devastating spareness of Emily's prose), it was probably true...

...Because David was so often away on scientific expeditions, Austin would be sent to escort Mabel to evening parties at the Dickinsons' They discovered that they were both moved by crickets chirping, and shortly thereafter, each recorded the single word "Rubicon" in their diaries...

...Journals, letters and confidences to doctors make it plain that many women took conjugal delights for granted —and felt cheated if they missed out...

...They considered themselves "twomature, richly furnished souls," as Austin put it...

...It is not always easy to be sure what audience Gay has in mind...

...Longsworth has delved even deeper into the story, revealing that it was considerably unhappier than Gay's cheery summary would lead one to believe...

...There were few qualms about flaunting propriety...

...And Thackerayjoked that "Wewho lived before the railways are antediluvians—we must pass away...

...But there was...

...Mabel recorded complacently, "David is large enough to see that if he does not answer to me at every point and another does, it's not his fault, nor mine, nor the other's...

...She was the archetypal "It" girl...

...Thus, the rest of the world first learned the facts in 1974, from Richard B. Sewall's The Life of Emily Dickinson...

...Conventionalism is not for those strong enough to be laws unto themselves," Austin declared sententiouslyFor several years, Mabel managed to maintain some sort of equilibrium between her "Husband/Lover/David" and her newfound "Master andKing...

...Her marriage to David Todd, an astronomer at Amherst, was sexually intense...

...The letters fantasizing about the deaths of their inconvenient spouses make unpleasant reading...

...Their reassurances were equally misplaced: They tried to buck up timorous males by maintaining that nice girls had very little interest in sex...

...by 1850, he had patented several moderately reliable prophylactics...

...Emily had not been seen by anyone except her own relatives for years...

...Longsworth provides probing, albeit sympathetic, portraits of her four main characters...

...Nevertheless, this did not prevent Mabel, at 25, from falling in love with Amherst's leading citizen, Emily's 53-year-old brother, Austin Dickinson...

...She played piano, sang, painted, and lectured with more charm than genius...

...This may clarify a facet of the Oedipus complex...

...Mabel's parents had a close to celibate marriage that Education of the Senses denies, and this book insists, was a Victorian norm...

...It inspired an almost religious rapture among the churchly...

...The pictures Gay includes have been a focus of attention, too...

...The truth was, Sue frightened all three Dickinsons, who welcomed Mabel as a catalyst...

...Despite its serious faults, however, Education of the Senses has substantial virtues...

...Her pregnancy was a mistake she took care not to repeat...

...In general, the 19th century was an age of anxiety, its society in flux...

...David willingly shared his wife, staying late at the observatory to allow the lovers privacy...

...Her brother's rapture and frustration seem to have found their way into her verse—poems that lovers in pain still read to try and make sense of their feelings...

...He tends to quote novelists as the supreme authorities...

...A sensual lyric poem by Algernon Swinburne, a sober manual on contraception by Robert Dale Owen, and a pornographic story by Anonymous were all the same, all certain to corrupt and deprave the innocent...

...But there is more to Austin and Mabel than True Romance...

...Amherst was a repressed community, much of its life carried on behind closed doors...

...It was the first salvo in the War Between the Houses, which was carried into the second generation by the daughters, long after their formidable mothers were gone...

...reason to hope that savagery might be tamed by civilizing Eros,' sensuous force,' as George Eliot put it,' controlled by spiritual passion,' lust mastered by love...

...WhenEffie Gray annulled her unconsummated marriage to John Ruskin, and married the painter John Everett Millais, she had to comfort his nervous tears on their wedding journey...

...25.00)—a study of the 19th-century " bourgeoisie's sensual life, the shape that its libidinous drives assumed under the pressure of its moral imperatives...

...Yet even by the standards of Victorian rhetoric, they were phenomenally self-righteous...

...If there is a Heaven for me, you are that—God pity such love...

...Their only daughter, starved by the lack of physical affection at home, craved to be "the center" of every group...

...This is, of course, a stock theme of Romanticism...

...Austin's pent-up feelings overflowed...

...Most have concentrated on descriptions of orgasm from the diary of Mabel Loomis Todd, and statistics on female sexuality from the "Mosher survey" (a Victorian Hite Report...

...This last project was one more way of cementing her relations with the Dickinsons, and besting Sue—who had once been the poet's dearest friend...

...Time seemed to speed up as life became removed from seasonal patterns...

...By 1887 she called Austin "my true husband," wore his wedding ring, and tried to have a child by him...

...One must wonder, though, whether Gay isn't shooting fish in a barrel...

...Todd...

...Mothers nursed infants in public (a sight we are only beginning to accustom ourselves to...

...His wife, Sue, was a fascinating, intelligent woman whose "magnetism concealed vindictiveness," as those around her learned to their cost...

...No less diverse fathers than William Ewart Gladstone and Richard Wagner took time out from their schedules in the masculine world to assist with the deliveries, without any coaching from Lamaze...

...True, they were required to be cloaked with allegorical significance...

...For all the posturing, there is no denying the strength of their bond...

...She browbeat Vinnie into reneging on some land Austin had wanted to deed to the Todds...

...Perhaps the cardinal achievement of Education of the Senses is capturing the mood of a century as it tried to woo stability and progress simultaneously...

...The sensational topics of sex and hypocrisy have certainly aroused the critics...

...Apparently most of Amherst was aware of the Todd/Dickinson affair, yet with characteristic Victorian discretion almost never mentioned it in letters...

...One of the book's most haunting pictures is of Mabel and Austin trysting in the old Dickinson Homestead, while the unseen Emily lurks behind the wall...

...No love story approaches it," Mabel unhesitatingly boasted, and Longsworth's detailed account almost justifies the hyperbole...

...In most respects, Mabel reflected her middle-class upbringing...

...He stresses that he decided to start with Education of the Senses because, as a Freudian, he believes that the libido is central to understanding motivation...

...Here is Gay's reasoning: "The fear of women...

...and Amherst was surprisingly tolerant, taking pains not to invite Austin's wife to college functions...

...It was acceptable to represent Eve, or Helen, or the Spirit of Electricity as a nude, but to depict the artist's model as herself was obscene...

...Between censorship and the disinclination to discuss personal matters, information about things like birth control was hard to come by...

...For instance, he examines the "castrating sisterhood" of destructive femmes fatales in 19th-century literature and art...

...I am conscious every moment that my life is a tragedy," Mabel confessed when emotions were at their highest pitch...

...At the same time, his own approach is so doctrinaire that only those who share his Freudian perceptions will be inclined to agree with his conclusions...

...is born of man's early dependence on his mother, and his longing, frustrated love for her, his defenseless lassitude after intercourse, and the frightening aspect and portentous implications of the female genitals: For the boy who is likely to see a woman as a castrated male, the absence of her penis reads like a threat to his own...

...Freud wrote Civilization and its Discontents to prove that the elimination of such elemental worries as finding food and shelter only leads to more diffuse panic...

...Gay also points out that men frequently entered wedlock as fearful and inexperienced as their brides...

...Lives and writings of the great were routinely bowdlerized by their relatives, not simply of embarrassing material but of every reference to family life...

...Gay tells us that one of his chief objectives is to show the staggering range of bourgeois culture, and in this he succeeds admirably...

...Babies were born at home...

...In many ways, Victorians were earthier than we are...

...Doctors terrified many men by thundering against the "perilous waste of energy" expended in semen...

...Privacy was a Victorian obsession...

...Vinnie kept cats and wore the fashions of her girlhood...

...Gay guesses that her adoration of Austin was a transference of her extreme attachment to her father, and observes that few women resolve their compulsions so successfully...

...Gay is anxious to disabuse us of the notion that he has tried to whet our appetites by appealing to prurience...

...They wrote each other almost daily from 1882 to 1895, regardless of whether they were separated by oceans or merely by the lawn that divided their homes...

...Ironically, too, Sue inadvertently engendered the affair...

...He begins with the case of Mabel Loomis Todd, long famous as the woman who brought Emily Dickinson's poetry to public attention...

...He was, Gay argues, bourgeois to the core himself, otherwise he could not have spoken so eloquently for the middle-class psyche...