‘I don’t care if I die in the effort,’ she whispered softly. ‘Never mind how it hurts me, help all you can, Willie dear, this time,’ as she raised herself off him again, and he took hold of her buttocks, to lend his assistance to the grave girl. Clenching her teeth firmly, and shutting her eyes, she gave another desperate plunge upon William’s spear of love, the hymen was broken, and she fairly impaled to the roots of his affair. But it cost her dear, she fell forward in a dead faint, whilst the trickling blood proved the sanguinary nature of Love’s victory.
The stories in The Pearl are wish-fulfilment fantasies, with no relation to reality. They can also be seen as reaction to Victorian prudery. Victorian girls were expected to blush at the least suggestion of indelicacy; so most of the young ladies in The Pearl are an impossible mixture of demure schoolgirl and nymphomaniac.
Her face was crimson to the roots of her hair, as her hand grasped my tool, and her eyes seemed to start with terror at the sudden apparition of Mr John Thomas; so that, taking advantage of her speechless confusion, my own hand, slipping under her clothes, soon had possession of her mount, and, in spite of the nervous contraction of her thighs, the forefinger searched out the virgin clitoris. ‘Oh, oh, oh! Walter don’t! what are you about…’
A moment later she is gasping:
‘Oh, Walter, I’m so afraid; and yet – oh yet, dearest, if I must die I must taste the sweets of love, this forbidden fruit…’ She lay before me in a delightful state of anticipation, her beautiful face all blushes of shame.
And so the conquest is completed. And in story after story, for the next eighteen issues, the same kind of thing happened, varied with floggings and mixed orgies. It seems probable that the magazine expired because the writers could think of nothing new to say.
Spencer Ashbee, the author of the Index of Prohibited Books, is also suspected of having written the enormous sexual autobiography My Secret Life, published in eleven volumes in Amsterdam between 1888 and about 1892. It reveals a mind totally obsessed by sex from a very early age. As a small boy, ‘Walter’ seizes an opportunity to look at his baby sister’s genitals, hides behind lavatories to watch elder sisters urinate, and creeps into the bedroom of female cousins on a hot night to spy on their nakedness. While still a schoolboy he seduces a maidservant, then the cook. He and his cousin Fred hide in a basement to peer up women’s skirts through a grille in the pavement. This enormous work – of over four thousand pages – gives the impression that ‘Walter’ thought about sex for every waking moment of his life. He obviously found it all so delicious and exciting that he settled down to describing it in detail when he was in his early thirties.
It is instructive to compare My Secret Life with the memoirs of Casanova, written a century earlier. Casanova loved sex; but he also loved travel (preferably in his own carriage), mixing in society, eating good food and conversing with intellectuals (such as Voltaire and Rousseau). He loved attractive women because they were essential to his picture of himself as the complete man of the world; but his attitude towards them was as straightforward as that of a hungry man towards a good dinner. By contrast, Walter is apparently interested in very little besides sex, and his attitude towards it is that of a thief. Every woman has a secret, which he longs to steal. They can be fat or thin, tall or short, dark or fair; he still longs to know the exact appearance of their genital organs. As a lover, he has no finesse; his idea of seduction is ‘entreating her to let me see and feel her cunt, using all the persuasion and all the bawdy talk I could.’ ‘I watched my opportunities; my conversation… was one repetition of lustful wants and prayers; I used to pull my prick out, beg her to see and feel it.’ And once he has achieved his objective, he needs to tell himself he has achieved it. ‘I put my hand down and felt around. What rapture to feel my machine buried! nothing but the balls to be touched, and her cunt hair wetted with my sperm, mingling and clinging to mine; in another minute nature urged a crisis, and I spent in a virgin cunt, my prick virgin also. Thus ended my first fuck.’ He enjoys making the girls describe what is happening: ‘What’s that inside you?’ ‘Your prick.’ ‘What am I doing?’ ‘Fucking me.’ We can see that he is trying to make himself more conscious of what is happening; in fact, sex is simply a means to an end: to making himself more conscious. He writes about it because he feels that the experience has not engraved itself deeply enough on his consciousness. His attitude is as far as possible from that of Casanova or the Elizabethans. They accepted sex as a pleasure, but then went on to something else; for Walter sex is the most deliciously intense of all experiences because it is the most forbidden.
It is interesting to note that this feverish interest is not simply a matter of a physical need. From the beginning, his obsession has a distinctly romantic element that relates it to the raptures of Young Werther and Rousseau’s St Preux. He describes reading novels as a schoolboy, ‘thinking of the beauty of the women, reading over and over again the description of their charms, and envying their lovers’ meetings.’ As absurd as it sounds, Walter is a true worshipper of the ‘eternal feminine’. His passion may express itself in the crudest physical forms, but it springs from the imagination. And, like all idealists, he finds it hard to reconcile dream and reality: ‘These feelings got intensified when I thought of my aunt’s backside, and the cunts of my cousins, but when I thought of the heroines, it seemed strange that such beautiful creatures should have any.’ His lifelong craving for women is based on a feeling that there is something untouchable, unpossessable, about them. His quest for ultimate sexual satisfaction is a kind of mystical pilgrimage, like Parsifal’s search for the Holy Grail.
And here we come to the heart of the matter. Walter lacks the self-confidence for knight errantry. He sees himself – with some slight justification – as coarse, boring and stupid. If he possessed the panache of a Don Juan or Casanova, he would devote himself to pursuing the beautiful, slim-waisted girls he sees riding in the park, who are closer to the romantic heroines who fire his imagination. But he lacks the courage, and so is willing to settle for less – far less. In order to satisfy the itch in his loins, he deliberately lowers his aim. This lowering of the aim, this decision to take a short-cut, also constitutes the essence of criminality.
The Pearl makes it clear that Walter’s attitude to sex was not unique; the Victorian male was subject to all kinds of obsessions. He longed for virgins and under-aged girls, for incest and rape, for spanking and flogging. How had this change come about in a mere century? Victorian prudery cannot be wholly to blame, for these trends were apparent a decade before Victoria came to the throne; moreover, the Index of Prohibited Books makes it clear that this was also true of France, which was far less inhibited than England.
The answer begins to emerge if we think of the most basic differences between the Europe of Dr Johnson and Voltaire and the Europe of Tennyson and Flaubert: the factories and railways. Casanova lived in an age of adventure; Walter lived in an age where adventure was fast disappearing. Walter, like Casanova, travelled all over Europe; but wherever he went, he was surrounded by Victorian domesticity, and his travels seem tame by comparison. Casanova hardly strikes us as a fully mature adult; but Walter seems a permanent adolescent. He devotes his life to sex because it is the only thing left to conquer, the only satisfactory outlet for his will.
Zoologists have observed that monkeys in zoos copulate far more than monkeys in the wild; it is the only thing left to do. The same is true of a civilisation that has achieved a high level of security. Chesterton remarked that an adventure is only an inconvenience rightly considered, and that an inconvenience is only an adventure wrongly considered. The aim of civilisation is to do away with inconvenience; in doing so, it also does away with adventure. Adventurous individuals may even turn to crime – like Hornung’s Raffles or Chesterton’s Flambeau – because they find civilised life unbearably dull. Unadventurous individuals, like Walter, may seek ‘adventure’ in seduction and the quest for sexual variety. The element of danger may be absent, but the ‘forbidden’ provides the excitement.