MySecretLife








Afterword


A short list of our culture’s dominant assumptions about sexuality might go something like this: Powerful social forces in organized social life — religion, the elderly, middle-class life, or something called “Puritanism” or simply “society” in general — conspire to frustrate, condemn, or regulate the free expression of sexuality; sexual expression is therefore a struggle between individual desire and these repressive forces; the truth about humans, for better or worse, lies in what is hidden from social scrutiny, in what is most “intimate” and unspoken, and which can only be understood as the result of a revelation, a confession, a scandal; a person’s sexuality once disclosed reveals the truth of that person. These assumptions might lead a reader of My Secret Life to expect certain things: a titillating entertainment, a juicy scandal, a case history, a rare glimpse into the secrets of a soul, perhaps even a heroic act — a blow in the struggle for self-expression, personal emancipation against the Victorian version of political correctness.
With those expectations, what does one make of a passage like the following?

 
“Hish, you damned howling little bitch,” said Betsy, pushing a pillow right over the girl’s head, but I could hear her cry. I pressed my head on the pillow, the girl’s head was hidden from me.... I had not got up her, was funky about the noise we were making, but in the excitement thought only of my work .. I felt the tightening of her hymen round my prick, as it went through it with a cunt-splitting thrust.... I rose on my knees, and looked at the girl, who lay quite quiet, with her thighs wide open and her hand over her face. — A bloodier mass of spunk I never saw on a cunt. — Her blood had run down on the counterpane, and lay in a red rim all around my prick near to its root. I was delighted beyond measure.
[pp. 295-96]

Molly, it will be recalled, is a fifteen-year-old girl from the country, secured for the narrator’s pleasure by a prostitute named Betsy. A short while earlier, when the girl resisted “Walter‘s” advances, Betsy had threatened to cast her penniless onto the streets. After the rape, Betsy tells the child to wash her vagina. “I would not hear of that,” Walter writes. “I wanted her as she was. I liked to see the bloody smears on her belly and thighs, and know her cunt was full of my semen.... The girl piddled, singing out — ‘ooooho’ in a whisper, as the piddle I suppose touched the torn edges of her virginity” [p. 297].
Here’s Walter seducing another woman, also a virgin:
“Oho! — oho! — ono!” said she bursting into tears, “what a shame to take liberties with a poor girl when she can’t help herself. — oho! — oho! — you must be a bad man.... You mean man, to do such a thing when I was ill.” ...
This had occupied some hours ... but it seemed only as if I had been there some minutes, so deliciously exciting are lascivious acts and words. [p. 177]
 
“I have a confused recollection of thinking myself the next day an ass, for having missed a good opportunity of spermatizing a fresh cunt” [p. 178], he reports after temporary failure; but on the second try, he resorts to the ultimate threat: “ ‘Now don’t be a fool, — damned if I don’t murder you if you are not quiet!’ ‘Oh! oh!’ I had got her somehow on to the bed, she was helpless; with fear, liquor, and cunt-heat, I threw myself on to her.... A mighty straight thrust; and the virginity was gone at that one effort” [pp. 192-93]. “Breathless, fatigued, I got into a violent rage,” he tells us, in the course of struggling with another victim, “and it told as brutality often tells with a woman.”
I cite these passages because it’s crucial to see My Secret Life clearly from the outset for what it is. Page after page contains closely detailed accounts (possibly elaborated in the writing) of victims’ pleas, tears, and struggles, and the author’s pleasure in their terror, helplessness, pain, even their blood. The writing is obviously skillful: characters come vividly to life in the rapid sequence of dialogue and description, and phrases like “lay in a red rim” and “the torn edges of her virginity” work well as metaphors. But this is neither “naughty” nor “titillating” nor “scandalous” nor brave; it’s the record of a serial rapist, a man who today would face decades behind bars for criminal acts. Yet the same writer is also capable of a statement like this:
That which women had I do not regret, they have been the greatest joy of my life, and are so to every true man, from infancy to old age. Copulation is the highest pleasure, both to the body and mind, and it is worth all other human pleasures put together. A woman sleeping or waking is a paradise to a man, if he be happy with her, and he cannot spend his money on anything better. [pp. 155-56]
What would it mean for a child rapist to insist that a woman “is a paradise to a man”? Does he mean a woman in herself or “that which she has” for sale? In literature we are used to such dramatic contradictions, but usually we know where we stand as readers — Nabokov’s Lolita comes to mind, in this as in so many other ways when reading My Secret Life. Walter is a far more disturbing figure than Humbert Humbert because he seems unaware either of his brutality or his contradictions — a fact that comes out most clearly in his casual remarks. Here’s his reaction when a woman he’s raped complains he’s hurt her: “What a sham ... a woman always is, — a Grenadier has fucked her twice, yet she says my prick hurts her” [p. 206]. “I soon tired of her,” he writes of another servant woman: “She was a good-natured, foolish, stupid, trusting creature, and my wonder is that she had lived twenty-one years in the country, without having had a prick up her. As a lovely-cunted fuckstress she left nothing to be desired. She had her fears about consequences, for her courses stopped, but she somehow managed to set that to rights, and at last went to her situation” [p. 211]. Pregnancy and childbearing are a woman’s concerns, easily dismissible: “Mrs O*b***e was not up to the mark, and began to talk the sort of bosh that women do, who are funky of consequences” [p. 219]. Regretting having missed the chance of deflowering a working-class girl, he writes that he “first met the little stupid, who might have had the pleasure of a fuck, and profit as well. — As it is, I dare say some dirty young boy will open her cunt, and give her a black eye if she upbraids him if her belly swells” [p. 370]. The “little stupid” does not understand that being deflowered by a gentleman is a gift.
Why continue? Because it’s only as we confront Walter’s criminality and his moral imbecility — his banality, to use Hannah Arendt’s term — that the book’s painful value emerges. Most disturbingly — and most important — Walter is not a pervert and he’s not unique. At first he frames his experiences in terms of secrecy and cunning: As a boy, he peeps at women’s genitals; he makes furtive trysts with elaborate precautions; he listens to the sounds of defecation inside the walls of a privy; he peeps through holes in the walls of bordellos; he spends a lifetime of successful eluding. But abnormality has meaning only in the context of a social norm, and as he makes clear, Walter’s attitudes — and to some extent his practices — were common among men of his social class. For example, he has elders who model for him and his friends what “normal” sexual relations look like. One of these mentors, a Major, instructs the young soldiers this way:
“If she is not twenty-five she’ll be randy directly her belly is filled, — then go at her. If she’s thirty, give her half-an-hour. If she’s thirty-five let her digest an hour, she won’t feel the warmth of the dinner in her cunt till then.... But don’t flurry your young un, — talk a little quiet smut whilst feeding, just to make her laugh and think of baudy things, then when she has left table, go at her. But it’s well ... to leave a woman alone in a room for a few minutes after she has dined, perhaps then she will let slip a fart or two, perhaps she’ll piss, — she’ll be all the better for the wind and water being out.” [p. 179]
The Major’s absurd linkage of the stomach and the genitals produces the illusion of quasimedical expertise while reducing women to pure (inaccurate) anatomy, as if they were a species of horseflesh to be properly “fed” and rested according to their ages. Walter doesn’t appear to take entirely seriously this crude parody of a boy’s guide to dating, though one feature of the Major’s advice he applies literally: “[S]how any one of them your prick as soon as you can, it’s a great persuader.” Far more important than the explicit advice is the overriding implication: The women in question are social inferiors, not “ladies.” But even before this lesson, Walter has been a precocious student of the social and gender power a young gentleman can exercise over servant women and girls. The women risk destitution, abandonment by fiancés, unwanted pregnancies, loss of jobs; the young gentleman can threaten them with loss of income or of exposure. When one struggling servant girl threatens to tell her “young man,” Walter replies plausibly, “if you tell him he’ll think it’s your fault.”
The Major’s advice signals that boys will be boys: So far from being denied them, sex is what Walter’s friends in the barracks and the clubs do in their spare time. That’s not to deny that Walter received a double message (his mother’s upbraiding, the disapproval of wealthy relatives), which explains the strict need for secrecy. His sadism may be to an extent a personal trait, but it’s more important to recognize its social context. The close connection between absolute, irresponsible power and acts of individual brutality is familiar to students of human society. The history of rape under the American slaveholding system is a well-known example, and although the escapades of Victorian rakes hardly compare to a catastrophe of that scale, My Secret Life starkly illustrates how dangerous life was for Victorian women of the lower orders, how vulnerable they were, and how legally defenseless. It also shows that any simplified notion of Victorianism as a uniform regime of sexual repression profoundly misconceives the nature of sexuality in modern society.
This last point has been made in a different way by the great French historian Michel Foucault. In the first volume of his History of Sexuality, Foucault challenged his readers to consider “the case of a society which has been loudly castigating itself for its hypocrisy for more than a century, [and] which speaks verbosely of its own silence.” For the age of supposed sexual repression is also the age when sex became what Foucault calls a discourse, an organized set of texts that form a coherent, approved body. It was the Victorians, after all, who produced the first medical studies of sexual behavior, who named and classified the “perversions,” and who defined sexual behavior in terms of personality types rather than specific acts. In Foucault’s account, the author of My Secret Life becomes not “a courageous fugitive from a ‘Victorianism’ that would have compelled him to silence” but as “the most direct and in a way most naive representative” of a social injunction to speak about sex. Those ways of speaking about sex have a history we often mistake as universal and natural. In its modern form, Foucault claims, sexuality has come to stand for a number of disparate activities previously kept separate that we have come mistakenly to view as “natural.” As Jonathan Culler summarizes in his Literary Theory: A Very Short Guide: “The notion of ‘sex’ made it possible to group together, in an artificial unity, anatomical elements, biological functions, conducts, sensations, pleasures; and it enabled one to make use of this fictitious unity as a causal principle, an omnipresent meaning, a secret to be discovered everywhere.”

My Secret Life does precisely this. By focusing on his illicit sexual adventures, Walter brings together a range of elements under a single head, which he isolates and identifies as his “secret” life, and which he finally attempts to universalize as a guide to sexual experience in general. Seen this way, Walter’s relations with servants and children can be seen not simply as physiological but also as social, emotional, and interpersonal events. Something similar becomes clear in his relations with prostitutes, the other category of women that is prominent in the memoir.
Before he rapes the girl Molly, Walter proposes the following “game” to Betsy:
I took some shillings from my pocket, and sitting down on the floor with my back to the fire, — “Open your legs wide Betsy,” said I, “as you sit on the sofa, and I’ll throw shillings at your cunt. Every time I hit between its lips, the shilling is yours — if I miss, I’m to have three throws more with it and then it’s yours.” — Betsy screamed with laughter, brought up both heels to the level of her buttocks on the sofa, and spread out her thighs, shewing a wide split, that a half crown could have gone into. I pitched the shillings at her cunt — one or two hit it, and she made Molly pick them up. — The girl stood looking at me — then at Betsy, and repeating, “Well, you are dirty,” astonishment in her eyes, manner, and voice, but she picked up the shillings fast enough. [p. 292]
This scene is different from the rapes: There’s no physical compulsion and no pain, just a game everyone seems to be enjoying. (We must always remember that we’re getting the story as Walter reports, and no doubt partly re-creates it.) But nearly all the encounters in the book are with social inferiors, of whom some resist and have to be seduced, and others minister to his pleasures through the power of his purse. In the grotesque game of throwing coins into vaginas, Walter literalizes the economic relationship, combining sex, money, masculinity, and power into the same operation. As Steven Marcus pointed out years ago in The Other Victorians, sex in My Secret Life circulates like money (“spend” is of course colloquial for “have an orgasm”), and Walter is the source of both kinds of spending: He ejaculates sperm; he tosses coins.
As inheritors of Freud’s century, we’re used to seeing surface objects as symbols and sex as the “deeper” or hidden truth. But if with Foucault we reversed the relationship and asked what the sexual acts “cover,” we could say that in the game with the shillings, Walter practices class relations, focusing them intimately and even brutally through the symbolism of sex while at the same time partly disavowing their existence. We also remember that for years Walter had no financial independence but was in fact reliant on his mother’s purse strings — a fact grotesquely reversed by the game of the shillings, where he throws the money into the woman’s body.
The more we think of Walter’s ordinary life, the more it seems that the “omnipresent meaning” of his life, the “secret to be discovered everywhere” lies more in the public world he conceals from us than in the “secret” world of the ten massive volumes. In this regard, the most telling incident is not Walter’s loathing of his wife (he wouldn’t be the first person driven to multiple affairs because of an unhappy marriage) but this single sentence: “I pass over many incidents of a couple of years or more, during which I was well off, had a mistress whom I had seduced, as it is stupidly called, and had children; but it brought me no happiness, and I fled from the connection” [p. 212]. We might speculate that just as no man is a hero to his valet, no man can be a Don Juan to his wife; but what kind of man erases both his children and his children’s mother at the moment when they cease to give him “pleasure”? Instead of a conventional lifestyle covering the secret of his sexuality, we might speculate that Walter’s sexuality covered, or rather substituted for, an impoverished emotional life — the void at the core of it, the lack that drove him to thoughts of suicide.
Was he capable of love? I believe the question is interesting because his spirited defense of the pleasure of the senses puts pressure not only on “Victorian” ideas of bodily pleasure but on the poverty of our own vocabulary for describing the affections. Lust and love are almost synonymous, he says at several points near the end of the manuscript. Although the “almost” leaves open a world of ambiguity, it’s clear that Walter means by this not that love is only lust but that lust carried to its highest point — a joint exercise of body, mind, and imagination — fulfills all that is meant by love. “The couples blest with imagination, they who by various excitements of which a mere animal is not capable, bring fucking to intellectual heights, make it a dream of the senses, make lust and love in its sensual elevation ethereal, a poetic delirium — they are not the beasts” [p. 468]. Walter expresses affection for many of his partners, particularly the prostitutes, though in a childlike way — as the rosy penumbra radiating from the pleasure they give him. It is what women can give him, what he can take or pay for, that he likes and admires, as one likes a fine wine or a prize horse — the thing he usually symbolizes as the genitals. (Oddly, Walter never fetishizes the hips, thighs, or breasts — the features that can be shown in today’s ads, magazines, and television — as his modern American counterparts would.) “A virginity taken by a street boy of sixteen, is a pearl cast to swine,” he says at one point, then follows with the closest statement to a confession he ever gives us: “I am sure of this even from my own experience, for I cared nothing whatever about the virginities I took early in my life. It was cunt alone I cared about, and any cunt for my pleasure was good enough” [p. 280]. But then: “in later years, giving pleasure to the woman is almost as great a pleasure to me, as my physical delight in her” [p. 467].
This discovery of mutuality brings about something like a utopian moment near the end of Walter’s career. In his reverie, he reconfigures the spiritualized death scene of sentimental fiction in terms of postcoital bliss — the only such scene I know in Victorian literature:
And as she spent, I noticed for the first time on her face, an expression so exquisite, so soft in its voluptuous delight, that angelic is the only term I can apply to it. It was so serene, so complete in its felicity, and her frame became so tranquil, that I could almost fancy her soul was departing to the mansions of the blest, happy in its escape from the world of troubles amidst the sublime delights of fucking. [p. 473]
Our hopeful struggle today is to realize sexual bliss as part of fully reciprocal, nondominant human intimacy. Throughout his life Walter substituted genital sexuality for an artificial unity of bodily pleasures, class relationships, emotional intensity, and the assertion of will. Now, at the end of his book, mutual pleasure stands in for the equality of persons — and for once, he is able to look on the transfigured face of his beloved. He glimpses it ffittingly, in a bordello, leaving his shillings behind him as he goes.
— PAUL SAWYER