Cortesia de
wikipedia
We Other Victorians
«For a long time, the
story goes, we supported a Victorian regime, and we continue to be dominated by
it even today. Thus the image of the imperial prude is emblazoned on our restrained,
mute, and hypocritical sexuality. At the beginning of the seventeenth century a
certain frankness was still common, it would seem. Sexual practices had little
need of secrecy; words were said without undue reticence, and things were done
without too much concealment; one had a tolerant familiarity with the illicit.
Codes regulating the coarse, the obscene, and the indecent were quite lax
compared to those of the nineteenth century. It was a time of direct gestures,
shameless discourse, and open transgressions, when anatomies were shown and
intermingled at will, and knowing children hung about amid the laughter of
adults: it was a period when bodies made
a display of themselves. But twilight soon fell upon this bright day,
followed by the monotonous nights of the Victorian bourgeoisie. Sexuality was
carefully confined; it moved into the home. The conjugal family took custody of
it and absorbed it into the serious function of reproduction. On the subject of
sex, silence became the rule. The legitimate and procreative couple laid down
the law. The couple imposed itself as model, enforced the norm, safeguarded the
truth, and reserved the right to speak while retaining the principle of
secrecy. A single locus of sexuality was acknowledged in social space as well
as at the heart of every household, but it was a utilitarian and fertile one:
the parents bedroom. The rest had only to remain vague; proper demeanor avoided
contact with other bodies, and verbal decency sanitized one’s speech. And sterile
behavior carried the taint of abnormality; if it insisted on making itself too
visible, it would be designated accordingly and would have to pay the penalty.
Nothing
that was not ordered in terms of generation or transfigured by it could expect
sanction or protection. Nor did it merit a hearing. It would be driven out,
denied, and reduced to silence. Not only did it not exist, it had no right to
exist and would be made to disappear upon its least manifestation, whether in
acts or in words. Everyone knew, for example, that children had no sex, which
was why they were forbidden to talk about it, why one closed one's eyes and stopped
one's ears whenever they came to show evidence to the contrary, and why a
general and studied silence was imposed. These are the characteristic features
attributed to repression, which serve to distinguish it from the prohibitions maintained
by penal law: repression operated as a sentence to disappear, but also as an
injunction to silence, an affirmation of nonexistence, and, by implication, an
admission that there was nothing to say about such things, nothing to see, and
nothing to know. Such was the hypocrisy of our bourgeois societies with its
halting logic. It was forced to make a few concessions, however. If it was
truly necessary to make room for illegitimate sexualities, it was reasoned, let
them take their infernal mischief elsewhere: to a place where they could be
reintegrated, if not in the circuits of production, at least in those of
profit. The brothel and the mental hospital would be those places of tolerance:
the prostitute, the client, and the pimp, together with the psychiatrist and his
hysteric, those other Victorians, as
Steven Marcus would say, seem to have surreptitiously transferred the pleasures
that are unspoken into the order of things that are counted. Words and
gestures, quietly authorized, could be exchanged there at the going rate. Only
in those places would untrammeled sex have a right to (safely insularized)
forms of reality, and only to clandestine, circumscribed, and coded types of
discourse. Everywhere else, modern puritanism imposed its triple edict
of taboo, nonexistence, and silence». In Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality,
volume I, An Introduction, translated from the French by Robert Hurley, Pantheon
Books, New York, Editions Gallimard, Paris, 1976, ISBN 0-394-41775-5.
Cortesia de Pantheon/JDACT