Geoffrey Gorer
THE EROTIC MYTH OF AMERICA
How our grandfathers used to snigger and wink among
themselves, or look vaguely disapproving if ladies were present, at
any mention of France or Paris. The adjective "French" appended
to the most innocuous words- postcard, letter, kiss, love-loaded
these neutral terms with meanings which ranged from the suggestive
to the obscene. The word could not be used as a verb or verbal
noun. Even today this aura of naughtiness still clings around the
adjective for the elderly; Mr. Ernest Bevin was able to raise titters
in
the House of Commons by retorting to the serious demand of a
University member for the freer import of French books,
"If
only the
honorable member knew what I was thinking!"
During the nineteenth century, and for the greater part of the
twentieth, untravelled Englishmen and Americans have pictured
Paris in particular, and generally France as a whole as though it
were a sort of erotic Elysium, with all the women as lascivious as
civet cats, ready to commit fornication or adultery at the drop of
a handkerchief, and where all the literature was pornographic, all
the humor sexual, and all art erotic. Even today Americans who
have burlesque shows in many towns still get a thrill from a visit to
the infinitely more sedate Folies-Bergere, or find innuendo in a copy
of
La Vie Parisienne
which they would never discover in
Esquire.
This myth of an erotic Elysium was perpetuated in an endless flood
of pornographic or pseudo-pornographic novels and novelettes with
such titles as
Alone in Paris;
and these seem to have had sufficiently
wide circulation so that during both wars naive English and Amer–
ican soldiers made improper advances to the most respectable and
carefully brought-up French wives and daughters and these resulted
in a considerable worsening of international relations.
This myth seems to have derived, at least in part, from some
aspects of French literature and French plays, such as the various
vaudevilles and Palais Royal farces, which do picture almost non–
stop adultery. Although precise figures are quite impossible to ob-
