226
STEVEN MARCUS
Whichever way it is regarded, life is terrible and tragic- dark, complex
beyond fathoming, incoherent, certain of suffering, unavoidably to
be endured. Yet beneath all the fantasies (and being expressed through
them), beneath all the ignorance there is an emotion that sets the
tone of this book and all it represents. This emotion is fear-fear of
sex in general and particular: of impotence and of potency; of
impulse and of its loss ; of indulgence and even of the remedies
prescribed to curb it. These fears it may be said are universal and
exist in all societies or cultures; and all societies and cultures have
devised means of dealing with them. In the Victorian world, however,
what seems to have happened is that these fears have been raised
into consciousness along with certain of their contradictions; and
it
is the sense of irreparable contradiction that speaks out most strongly
from Acton's pages.
Thus, although spermatorrhea is a universal danger, it is no more
dangerous than its opposite, ungratified sexual excitement. To Acton,
the "excitement of the sexual feelings when not followed by the
result which it should produce,
is ...
an unmitigated evil." This evil
produces exactly the same dreadful consequences for health as un–
inhibited sexual indulgence. Young men are likely to become impotent
as a result of prolonged sexual excitement which
is
for one reason
or another not gratified, and older men, particularly those who are
married to younger women, will pay the penalty of excited abstinence
"by becoming martyrs to paralysis, softening of the brain, and driveling
idiotcy." Whichever way one turns, then, things are terrible. Sex
is
thought of as a universal and virtually incurable scourge.
It
cannot
ultimately be controlled, and serves as a kind of metaphor for death,
as cancer does today. Some fifty years after Acton, Freud was to
discover that all thought was capable of being sexualized, and that
even the most abstruse intellectual interests have a sexual origin and
are endowed with a charge of unconscious sexual energy. In the age
before Freud, in the writings of such a figure as Acton, it is physio–
logical sex which is universal and universally protean; yet
this
very
physiology illustrates the point of Freud's idea.
What of woman in this world of torment and fear?
As
I
mentioned before, women are discussed in only two places in Acton's
