Sexual Politics

The outmoded tenets of male supremacy gave way to “two opposing camps, rational and chivalrous, each of them claiming to have at heart the best interests of both sexes” (88). These two camps can be explored by contrasting John Stuart Mill’s Subjection of Women and John Ruskin’s “Of Queen’s Gardens.” Keen to clarify that he is “no crude chauvinist, Ruskin asserts that he is steering a middle course,” arguing against the “‘left’ of feminism […] with the courtly platitude that women are loved and honored, have nothing to complain of and are even royalty, so long as they stay at home” (91). Instead of choosing sides on the topic of superiority between the sexes, Ruskin suggests that the sexes are incomparable and complementary. It is their inherent difference, he says, that allows them to satisfy and complete one another.

Mill renounces arguments of inherent difference, countering that “what is commonly regarded as feminine character is but the predictable outcome of a highly artificial system of cultivation” (95), and that “all her education, formal and informal, is dedicated to perpetuating [her oppression]” (96). While Ruskin suggests that women should remain within the domestic sphere, “Mill is eager to train women in every branch of arts and science, to open professional learning to them, that the world’s available talent might be doubled” (96). Indeed, in Mill’s understanding, “the home is the center of a system he defines as ‘domestic slavery’” (99). He proposes that “the complete emancipation of women” (107) would not only benefit women themselves but men, society as a whole, and humanity in the broadest sense.

Around the same period, Friedrich Engels’s The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State provided “the most comprehensive account of patriarchal history and economy—and the most radical” (108) due to Engels’s attack on family organizations. A longstanding quarrel in anthropology centers on the question of whether patriarchal social organization is “the primeval, original, hence the ‘natural’ form of society, biologically based in the physical strength of the male, and the ‘debilitating’ effects of pregnancy in the female” (108-09). As a liberal, Mill takes this position, viewing “the subjection of women to be an eternal feature of human life which ‘progress’ and moral suasion might alleviate” (110). However, as a revolutionary, Engels regards “institutions as man-made and hence capable of radical, sudden, even violent alteration”, and finds “the origins of property in the subjection and ownership of women upon which patriarchal was founded” (110). That is to say, Engels views patriarchy as a self-sustaining system dependent on other forms of oppression.

Engels’s approach still fails to offer a solid explanation of how, when, and why patriarchy became established. He suggests that this occurs largely through “the establishment of the male’s exclusive sexual possession over women” (112) paving the way for the reduction of women to chattel or property. This assumption reinforces patriarchy as socially viable and desirable. Moreover, his suggestion that women found sexuality tiresome and therefore submitted to subjugation is highly problematic. This proposal relies on the assumption that “sexual intercourse is in fact (for women) a political act of submission” (116) and highlights how “the vast and inherent potential of female sexuality had come, by Engels’s time, to be nearly totally obscured through cultural restraints” (119).

Nonetheless, Engels still makes a great “contribution to the sexual revolution […] in his analysis of patriarchal marriage and family” (120). He presents the family as “a financial unit […] committed to the idea of property in persons and in goods,” with the authority of its head maintained through “the economic dependence of its members” (124). He even proposes radical solutions, advocating for sexual relationships based on “individual sex love” and suggesting that “only with the end of male economic dominion and the entrance of women into the economic world on perfectly equal and independent terms will sexual love cease to be barter in some manner based on financial coercion” (125). Arguably even more radical is his proposal that the collectivizing of property and the means of production will mean that childhood care and education will become a public matter. “[…] every female,” then, “[…] simply by virtue of her anatomy, is obliged, even forced, to be the sole or primary caretaker of childhood […] prevented from being a free human being” (126). Engels therefore presents the dissolution of the family as central to the true liberation of all women.

Literary responses to the sexual revolution broadly fit three groups: the realistic/revolutionary, which includes radicals like Engels and moderates like Charles Dickens, the sentimental and chivalrous school, exemplified by Ruskin, and the school of fantasy. While the former groups have “a definite stand to take for or against the sexual revolution,” the fantastic is more ambivalent, even “confused in its response” (129). Despite this, it makes a valuable contribution to the revolution by “releas[ing] more sexual energy and express[ing] more tenuous and deeply buried sexual attitudes” (129) than the other schools. The fantastic can be explored through a number of less-frequently analyzed works.

Hardy’s Jude the Obscure presents Jude as “a complete human being composed of both sense and spirit, mind and body” while setting him in a classic triangle with “two women who are incomplete beings” (130). Arabella stands “at one pole, utter carnality” (130), while Sue is “pure spirit.” Hardy is clearly “disgusted by Arabella, appalled, if intrigued, by her crude and terrible vitality” and “champions Sue through a series of uningratiating maneuvers,” while remaining “slightly nervous about her” (130). Although Hardy is “too astute, or far too timid, to permit himself to be identified with the notorious feminists,” he nevertheless presents a highly “sensitive, perceptive account of Sue’s capitulation” (131) to restrictive social mores. The portrait is still flawed, however, particularly by Hardy’s failure to show her motivations or help the reader comprehend her behavior. More significantly, the treatment of both Sue and Arabella reinforce the notion that female sexuality is evil, revealing Hardy to be, in terms of the sexual revolution, a troubling figure.

Meredith’s “gay and civilized urbanity in The Egotist” is far removed from “the air of grim futility” (134) found in Jude the Obscure. However, like Hardy’s novel, it too attacks patriarchal marriage conventions. Beyond this, its “painstaking investigation of the egotist of its title” (134), Sir Willoughby Patterne, makes it an example of masculine vanity. It pursues this analysis to such a degree that the novel “might have been based upon Mill’s observations on the vicious effects that the superior status awarded to men must necessarily have upon their characters” (134). Meredith’s portrayal of Clara Middleton is also remarkable in its unflinching reflection of how the constraints placed on women limit their understanding and self-awareness to such a degree that Clara “cannot at first comprehend what it is in her rich and handsome husband that she finds so utterly repellent” (136). This portrayal reflects the fact that Meredith is “an avowed feminist who sees in woman an oppressed class dominated through male self-interest, prevented from developing as human beings by a system which prostitutes them in and out of marriage and deliberately miseducates them” (136). Only its conclusion disappoints, when Meredith portrays Clara’s marriage to Vernon Whitford as a happy circumstance when it really functions as a sort of dying. Clara, who has spent the novel “in the process of becoming” is revealed to have “not succeeded in becoming anyone but Mrs. Vernon Whitford, which is to say, no one at all” (139).

Charlotte Brontë’s portrayal of Lucy Snowe, the heroine of Villette, clearly demonstrates “what effect her life in a male-supremacist society has upon the psyche of a woman” (140). Lucy serves as “a pair of eyes watching society; weighing, ridiculing, judging” (140): judging that includes both men and women. Shaped by her life in patriarchal society, she is “bitter and she is honest; a neurotic revolutionary full of conflict, backsliding, anger, terrible self-doubt, and an unconquerable determination to win through” (140). Indeed, the novel reads like a heated debate between Ruskin and Mill as Lucy alternates between “hankering after the sugared hopes of chivalric rescue, and the strenuous realism of Mill’s analysis” (145). It is this that makes Lucy such an accurate and revealing portrait, for she “would not be creditable if she were not continuously about to surrender to convention; if she were not by turns silly as well as sensible” (146).

Oscar Wilde portrays the eponymous character in Salomé as “a blinding manifestation of sexuality itself, more an idea than a personality” (152). She represents “an imperious sexual will” and “irresistible force” (152). However, despite her “exhibitionism and imperious clitoral command, Salomé is not exclusively or even fundamentally female; she is Oscar Wilde” (153). This complicates an already complex issue. By seemingly approving of Salomé’s role as “a fatal woman who castrates the male […] Wilde would appear to be reacting to the sexual revolution with the enthusiasm of overkill” (155). After all, “feminists merely wanted equality and the vote—need one respond with a heroine who goes about cutting off heads?” (155). Despite the “revolutionary energy of Wilde’s assertion of homosexuality” elsewhere, “in his writing itself, [it is] diverted into reactionary fantasy which still parades the fatal woman of misogynous myth, the feminine evil” (155).