ACTON'S WISDOM
227
book.
1I
They appear in a section devoted to "Marriage," and at
first sight seem to offer an escape from the nightmare of sexuality.
"It is a delusion under which many a previously incontinent man
suffers," writes Acton, "to suppose that in newly married life he will
be required to treat his wife as he used to treat his mistresses. It is
not so in the case of any modest English woman. He need not fear
that his wife will require the excitement, or in any respect imitate
the ways of a courtezan."
This
passage contains a cluster of inter–
esting assumptions. It assumes, in the first place, and as a matter of
public knowledge, that large numbers of Victorian middle-class men
will have had mistresses-who were courtesans. It further assumes
that the Victorian wife will not have sexual desires, and as a
corollary adds that courtesans or mistresses are in themselves extremely
sexual; both of these assumptions seem at least open to question.
(It may be useful to note that modern "marriage manuals" reverse
the formulation offered by Acton.) The operative word in the passage
is of course "fear" ; it further underscores the fantasy-conception of
sexuality in Acton's work. But it also indicates to what extent this
conception is both analogous to and the counterpart by opposition of
the fantasies of pornography. In pornography, all women-including
wives-are excited and behave like courtesans all the time. Since
women are not like this, there is a natural temptation to conjecture
that the persistence of the pornographic fantasy is somehow connected
with this fact.
It
is indeed connected, but it cannot be accounted for
by such a single, simple functional explanation.
But marriage alone is not enough of a safeguard- for either man
or woman. Pregnancy and child-bearing seem to be the only reliable
means of stifling sexual desire.
If
the married female conceives every second year, during
the nine months that follow conception she experiences no
5. This represents a change from the older and pre-medical science writings
about sex. In
Aristotle's Master Piece,
the mostly widely-circulated work
of sexual and proto-medical folklore in the English 17th and 18th centuries,
the emphasis falls in the other direction, and considerably more space i.
given to the dispensing of information about female sexual functions than
is
liven to describing those functions in the male.
See also Otho T. Beall, Jr.,
"Aristotle's Master Piece
in America:
A
Land–
mark in the Folklore of Medicine,"
William and Mary Quarterly,
3rd Ser.,
XX
(1963), 207-222.
