| What are we faced with in the nineteenth century? An age
where woman was sacred; and where you could buy a thirteen-year-old girl for
a few pounds - a few shillings, if you wanted her for only an hour or two.
Where more churches were built than in the whole previous history if the
country; and where one in sixty houses in London was a brothel (the modern
ratio would be nearer one in six thousand). Where the sanctity of marriage
(and chastity before marriage) was proclaimed from every pulpit, in every
newspaper editorial and public utterance; and where never - or hardly ever -
have so many great figures, from the future king down, led scandalous
private lives. Where the penal system was progressively humanized; and
flagellation so rife that a Frenchman set out quite seriously to prove that
the Marquis de Sade must have had English ancestry. Where the female body
had never been so hidden from view; and where every sculptor was judged by
his ability to carve naked women. Where there is not a single novel, play or
poem of literary distinction that ever goes beyond the sensuality of a kiss,
where Dr Bowdler ... was widely considered a public benefactor; and where
the output of pornography has never been exceeded. Where the excretory
functions were never referred to; and where the sanitation remained - the
flushing toilet came late in the age and remained a luxury well up to 1900 -
so primitive that there can have been few houses, and few streets, where one
was not constantly reminded of them. Where it was universally maintained
that women do not have orgasms; and yet every prostitute was taught to
simulate them. Where there was an enormous progress and liberation in every
other field of human activity; and nothing but tyranny in the most personal
and fundamental.
John Fowles, French Lieutenant's Woman |
