The French Lieutenant's Woman - John Fowles (38 page)

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.
 
 

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)

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 clientèle.
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.

It is a gray evening turning
into night. Already the two gaslamps on the pavement opposite have been
pulled to brightness by the lamplighter's long pole and illumine the raw
brick of the warehouse walls. There are several lights on in the rooms
of the hotel; brighter on the ground floor, softer above, since as in so
many Victorian houses the gaspipes had been considered too expensive to
be allowed upstairs, and there oil lamps are still in use. Through one
ground-floor window, by the main door, Mrs. Endicott herself can be seen
at a table by a small coal fire, poring over her Bible--that is, her accounts
ledger; and if we traverse diagonally up from that window to another in
the endmost house to the right, a darkened top-floor window, whose murrey
curtains are still not drawn, we can just see a good example of a twelve-and-sixer--though
here I mean the room, not the guest.