The secret vice

Masturbation in Victorian fiction and medical culture

Diane Mason

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN:
  9780719077142
• eBook ISBN:
  9781847797087
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: British History
• Index: History

The secret vice: Masturbation in Victorian fiction and medical culture provides a unique consideration of writings on self-abuse in the long nineteenth century. The book examines the discourse on masturbation in medical works by English, Continental and American practitioners and demonstrates the influence and impact of these writings, not only on Victorian pornography but also in the creation of fictional characters by canonical authors such as Bram Stoker, J. S. Le Fanu, Charles Dickens and Oscar Wilde.

The book also features the first detailed and balanced study of the largely overlooked literature on masturbation as it pertains to women in clinical and popular medical works aimed at the female reader. Mason concludes with a consideration of the way the distinctly Victorian discourse on masturbation has persisted into the late-twentieth and twenty-first centuries with particular reference to Willy Russell's tragic-comic novel, The Wrong Boy (2000) and to the construction of 'Victorian Dad', a character featured in the adult comic, Viz.

1 ‘It is more than blackguardly, it is deadly’
Masturbation in the male

In Dean Farrar’s 1858 children’s novel, Eric, or Little by Little, the eponymous schoolboy Eric approaches Russell, ‘an honourable, pure-hearted’ boy, for advice as to what to do about Ball, a fellow pupil who is proving to be a particularly vicious influence to others in his dormitory.¹ Russell reminds Eric of the headmaster’s sermon ‘on Kibroth-Hattaavah’ (analysed later in this chapter) and alerts him to the dangers of indulging in the ‘evil’ that Ball is communicating to his fellows: ‘It is more than blackguardly, it is deadly … my father said it was the most fatal curse which could ever become rife in a public school.’² Although, in Eric, the exact nature of ‘It’ is never explicitly identified, given the evidence of the headmaster’s sermon, there are ample grounds to suggest that the ‘evil’ which Dr Rowlands (Eric’s headmaster) railed against was masturbation. The practice of ‘secret sin’ was notably condemned in the later work of J.A. Conwell as ‘the greatest curse of blossoming manhood’.³ Indeed, in his 1897 article, ‘Immorality Among Schoolboys’, M.C. Hime advocates that pupils should be forewarned about the ‘unnatural’ practice of ‘secret, unmentionable sin’ in order to enable them to recognise and avoid it.⁴ Nineteenth-century dictionary definitions of ‘secret’ include not merely that which is ‘unknown’ but also implicate ‘something studiously concealed’.⁵ Such definitions disclose a paradox, and one not solely contained in Hime’s words but occurring in the wider discourse on masturbation itself. Masturbation is an ‘unnatural’ practice that appears to be undertaken seemingly naturally; that is without initiation. It is an ‘unmentionable sin’ that has to be mentioned in order to identify it. Masturbation is also frequently referred to as the ‘solitary vice’, a term which, again, seems to be somewhat misleading. As early as the publication of Onania (1715), the prospect was raised that youth ‘have learn’d to Pollute themfelves [sic]’ by following ‘the Example of their Intimates’.⁶ That anonymous author’s opinion was still being enthusiastically endorsed in works produced by practitioners over a century later. Writing in 1870, American physician Nicholas Francis Cooke asserts:

Onanism, though called the solitary vice, is essentially gregarious in its origin. It is, indeed, by unrestrained intercourse with each other that boys are taught and encouraged to pursue this destructive practice.⁷

Although mixing with others was by no means thought to be the only cause of self-pollution in the Victorian period, the notion that young people, here notably ‘boys’, freely pooled their knowledge and experience of the vice with their fellows further highlights this contradictory tension within a discourse which is ostensibly about solitary or secret sin. Far from taking pains to ‘studiously conceal’ the fact that they indulged in onanism, it would seem that existing masturbators were more than willing to initiate and foster the habit in others.

Furthermore, this essentially private or ‘solitary’ sexual practice was said to be highly visible, and attended by signifiers of disease displayed in the public arena. Cooke warns that masturbation, ‘if persevered in, must reveal itself’.⁸ Indeed, he claims that he is able to ‘select the onanists of a school by a walk among the pupils’.⁹ The disorder was manifested in a range of physical symptoms which were widely broadcast in clinical and popular medical writing, through periodical advertising and publications by quack practitioners and, more spectacularly, as waxwork exhibits in anatomical museums.¹⁰ Masturbation can, therefore, more correctly be perceived as a ‘secret’ vice that is, in effect, no secret at all.

Acknowledging the prevalence of this discourse, it is fruitful to explore some further aspects of the masturbatory hypothesis as it pertains to men in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century clinical and popular medical advice works. As to the intended market for these popular anti-masturbation texts, I am using Lesley A. Hall’s model of the ‘normal male’ – ‘a man who would define himself as heterosexual, [who] wants to marry and lead a conventional conjugal life, and [who] has no “deviations of object” in his sex-life’.¹¹

In her 1991 book, Hidden Anxieties: Male Sexuality 1900–1950, Lesley A. Hall’s assertion that ‘“Normality” [in the male] does not exclude sexual anxiety’, and her subsequent study of these male anxieties, acknowledge the existence of a now-eclipsed consensus about the ‘monolithic’ or ‘unproblematic’ nature of masculinity.¹² Although Hall’s research into male sexual anxieties is based largely on the copious correspondence received by Marie Stopes from male readers following the publication of Married Love in 1918, masculine concerns about sexuality and perceived sexual problems are by no means the exclusive preserve of twentieth-century ‘agony aunts’.¹³ Similar worries are reflected in the published replies to the (presumably, male) correspondents writing to The Boys’ Own Paper in the late nineteenth century.¹⁴ A selection of these replies appearing in the periodical in August 1891 discloses enquiries about ‘EVIL HABITS’, ‘NERVOUSNESS’,¹⁵ ‘WEAKNESS’¹⁶ and the most effective way to use ‘BROMIDE OF POTASSIUM’; a drug often utilised to subdue the sexual impulse.¹⁷ Not surprisingly, perhaps, the most emphatically condemnatory reply is meted out to ‘EVIL HABITS (A Christian Irishman)’ who is told, in no uncertain terms: ‘How can you call yourself a Christian! We cannot help you if you cannot help yourself. Only it means ruin.’¹⁸ Masturbation was thought to have a catastrophic effect on the moral as well as physical health of those who indulged in the vice in nineteenth-century medical discourse. In his influential 1857 treatise, The Functions and Disorders of the Reproductive Organs, British physician William Acton contends that ‘the [youthful] victim [of onanism] drifts into irremediable ruin, tied and bound in the chain of … sin’.¹⁹ Acton’s language here – specifically his allusion to ‘sin’ – is more Biblical than scientific or clinical. Clinical writings on the subject, in common with those of the popular press, provide a significant locus for the intersection of religious and medical discourses in the nineteenth century.

Returning, though, to the other Boys’ Own Paper correspondents, given the tone of the respondents and the tenor of their responses, it is entirely possible that all of the letters quoted contained queries about the perceived problems of self-abuse or other seminal weakness. ‘NERVOUSNESS (Shargar)’ is told to ‘have more faith in fresh air’ and ‘exercise with the dumbbells’ and is instructed to ‘read good and interesting books’,²⁰ while ‘BROMIDE OF POTASSIUM (Pill Box)’ is advised to ‘Go and skylark in the open air, read good books, keep out of mischief, and abjure evil habits’.²¹ The guidance offered by the journal’s respondents accords with the directions of popular medical/sexual advice works aimed at the young male reader. In What a Young Boy Ought to Know (1897), Sylvanus Stall counsels his (presumably worried) readers to ‘Take plenty of exercise in the open air’ and to ‘Avoid all stories and trashy books and papers, but read plenty of good ones’ in order that ‘purity and strength may be measurably regained by those who have learned the vicious habit which is so prevalent among boys’.²² Conclusive proof as to The Boys’ Own Paper correspondents’ concerns is impossible without access to the original letters (which are never quoted).²³ Taking into account the comparison given above though, the replies cited are clearly open to interpretation as a manifestation of the letter writers’ unease about problems of a sexual nature. On this evidence, it would appear that the youthful ‘normal male’ in the Victorian period was just as subject to anxieties about his sexuality and, indeed, sexual performance as Hall’s early to mid twentieth-century sample. Moreover, if one examines the literature on self-abuse aimed at men produced during the nineteenth to early twentieth centuries, the period preceding that covered by Hall, it is equally apparent that what is written exploits many of these ‘normal’ masculine fears.

Hall challenges the essentialist view that perceives males as predominantly ‘forceful, aggressive, [and] promiscuous’ and argues that men, too, ‘worry about sexual difficulties within relationships’.²⁴ From the outset, the male wishing to live in a traditional conjugal manner prototypically needs to attract a member of the opposite sex. Pertinently, popular medical and sexual advice publications emphasised the devastating effects that indulgence in ‘solitary vice’ could wreak on one’s visible personal appearance as well as upon the state of the customarily concealed genitalia. In his ‘inspiring, character-building book for young men’, Manhood’s Morning (1903), Joseph Alfred Conwell explicitly states that by indulging in onanism ‘young men lose personal magnetism and attractiveness’.²⁵ The extent of this loss of attractiveness is graphically described in the earlier writing of R.V. Pierce. In his summation of the results of prolonged and excessive ‘abuse of the sexual organs’, Pierce asserts that:

the face becomes blotched and animal-like in its expression. The victim is careless of his personal appearance, not scrupulously neat, and not unfrequently a rank odor exhales from the body.²⁶

The i...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgement
• Introduction
• 1 ‘It is more than blackguardly, it is deadly’: masturbation in the male
• 2 ‘A beauty treatment that leaves us glowing’?: female masturbation and its consequences
• 3 ‘The languor which I had long felt began to display itself in my countenance’: vampires, lesbians and masturbators
• 4 ‘That mighty love which maddens one to crime’: masturbation and same-sex desire in Teleny
• 5 ‘His behaviour betrays the actual state of things’: onanism and obsessive behaviour in Our Mutual Friend
• 6 ‘Sin is a thing that writes itself across a man’s face’: conflicting signifiers of vice in The Picture of Dorian Grayand The Mystery of Edwin Drood
• Afterword
• Bibliography
• Index