Keats, Modesty and Masturbation

Rachel Schulkins

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781138272835
• eBook ISBN: 9781317109358
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Examining John Keats's reworking of the romance genre, Rachel Schulkins argues that he is responding to and critiquing the ideals of feminine modesty and asexual femininity advocated in the early nineteenth century. Through close readings of Isabella; or the Pot of Basil, The Eve of St. Agnes, Lamia and 'La Belle Dame sans Merci,' Schulkins offers a re-evaluation of Keats and his poetry designed to demonstrate that Keats's sexual imagery counters conservative morality by encoding taboo desires and the pleasures of masturbation. In so doing, Keats presents a version of female sexuality that undermines the conventional notion of the asexual female. Schulkins engages with feminist criticism that largely views Keats as a misogynist poet who is threatened by the female's overwhelming sexual and creative presence. Such criticism, Schulkins shows, tends towards a problematic identification between poet and protagonist, with the text seen as a direct rendering of authorial ideology. Such an interpretation neither distinguishes between author, protagonist, text, social norms and cultural history nor recognises the socio-sexual and political undertones embedded in Keats's rendering of the female. Ultimately, Schulkins's book reveals how Keats's sexual politics and his refutation of the asexual female model fed the design, plot and vocabulary of his romances.

1 Keats, Modesty and the Politics of Sex

DOI: 10.4324/9781315590998-1

In a letter to John Hamilton Reynolds, Keats remarks that ‘an inward innocence is like a nested dove’ (L 1: 219). He continues the letter by quoting his poem ‘O blush not’. Most critics choose to dismiss this little poem as merely a playful lyric; however, the humorous tone of ‘O blush not’ along with its subject matter encapsulate Keats’s attitude towards and criticism of Regency society and the double standard that defined gender relations. More to our purpose, the poem clearly ridicules the paradox behind the conceptualisation of female modesty, which originated around the mid-eighteenth century. The poem is filled with sexual puns and mockery about women’s supposed innocence, rendered through the medium of blushing, thus alluding to the falsity behind the idea of female modesty and asexuality. Through the poem, we can detect Keats’s rejection of the conservative notion of female virtue, which he deems as a mere false display of modesty. While modesty was generally perceived by eighteenth and nineteenth century writers and intellectuals as rendering inward innocence, Keats presents modesty as a repressive act that simply masks female sexuality in order to portray women as more desirable to men.

Female modesty, in ‘O blush not’, is transmitted via blushing and marks a woman’s purity as well as her explicit sexuality. Christopher Ricks notes that in addition to innocence, blushing, in Keats’s poetry, signifies guilt and embarrassment (4, 23). In Keats’s poem blushing is not a sign of innocence but rather an indication of a conscious and directed sexuality masked under the facade of virtue. Keats associates blushing with sexual experience and with the loss of female chastity:

O blush not so! O blush not so!

Or I shall think you knowing;

And if you smile, the blushing while,

Then maidenheads are going.

By referring to the lady’s deepening blush, Keats seems to accuse the lady of the poem of some impurity of thought or action, though Keats finds it difficult to point out the actual reason behind the lady’s blush:

There’s a blush for won’t, and a blush for shan’t,

And a blush for having done it;

There’s a blush for thought, and a blush for nought,

And a blush for just begun it.

What is being ridiculed in the poem is the notion that blushing is an indication of female innocence. As the second stanza shows, blushing can be a sign of hidden desires, shame and sexual interest. Keats’s poem emphasises the ambiguity of a blush and its attractiveness to the male pursuer. The lady’s blush does not deter her admirer but rather encourages him to pursue her more ardently because of and not in spite of her blushing. It seems as though Keats sees blushing as a sort of a mutual and silent agreement between the lady and her admirer for a sort of a mute foreplay. The lady engages the man’s interest through her blush, and he keeps pursuing her until he discovers the hidden meaning behind it, which again points to the sexual and even erotic gestures Keats attributes to female blushing.

As we move to the third stanza, Keats ridicules what appears to be the lady’s distress under the hands of her suitor:

O sigh not so! O sigh not so!

For it sounds of Eve’s sweet pippin;

By those loosen’d hips, you have tasted the pips

And fought in an amorous nipping.

Keats dismisses the lady’s sigh as a form of anxiety and rather sees it as an erotic moan of a consummated desire. The association of the lady’s sigh with ‘Eve’s sweet pippin’ alludes to Eve’s transgression, and her surrender to taste the forbidden fruit to pacify her ‘sweet’ ardour. Keats’s references to Eve, the lady’s loosened hips, and her amorous battle remove the innocent factor from the lady’s sigh and blush. Keats relates the lady’s sighs more with sexual pleasure than discomfort, thus uncovering the sexual and erotic gestures masked under the display of modesty. The lady’s sigh indicates that she is familiar with the impact her innocent gestures have on the opposite sex, which renders her through the eyes of Keats as nothing more than a teasing coquette who wants to arouse male desire and not to shy away from it. As the poem advances towards its last two stanzas, Keats explicitly asks the lady for sexual favours:

Will you play once more, at nice-cut-core,

For it only will last our youth out;

And we have the prime of the kissing time,

We have not one sweet tooth out.

There’s a sigh for yes, and a sigh for no,

And a sigh for I can’t bear it!

O what can be done? Shall we stay or run?

O cut the sweet apple and share it!

Keats beseeches the lady for a sexual engagement before they both will lose the prime of their youth. He borrows the phrase ‘nice-cut-core’ from the cultivation of fruits. Its meaning relates to the removal of the core to help give the root a proper fit. The sexual undertone in the phrase cannot be misleading. It appears that what Keats asks of the lady is to remove the barrier, either her display of innocence or her virginity, for both to consummate their physical desires.

Under the light and childish rhythm of the poem, Keats delivers his social criticism against the double standard applied to women and sexuality. Even though Keats depicts the lady as passive, whose sighs and blushing indicate apparent innocence, he sees her as a sexual creature who portrays her sexuality through the superficiality of virtue. In the poem, blushing and sighs embody false feminine modesty because they point exactly at its opposite. They come to arouse sexual desire in men and express women’s readiness for men’s courting, all under the disguise of female virtue and passivity. The lady in Keats’s poem embodies the feminine image promoted in conduct books during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries: of an apparently passive and asexual female who simultaneously arouses male admiration and desire while repressing her own under a mask of false innocence. The poem clearly denounces the theatrical display of innocence that women were encouraged to adopt in order to be deemed socially respectable and marriageable.

What is being criticised in the poem is arguably the division between the private and the public realms. While the lady in ‘O blush not’ is privately aware of her desire, she is forced to repress her feelings in the public realm to maintain the moral codes of late eighteenth- and early nineteenth- century English society. ‘O blush not’ emphasises the impossible separation between the public and the private as modesty itself is rendered as a social act that attracts attention and even implies female sexual awareness, rather than sexual indifference. In the poem, blushing is a sign of sensation and embarrassment of that sensation. It is a sign of sexual consciousness as well as a sign of social and moral matter. The lady’s blush emerges from her wish, and yet her incapability, to master her feelings and desires, which only deepens her blush. Accordingly, blushing is a social demand that requires women to hide their sexuality behind a veil of innocence and is also an indication of their failure to do so: It is a direct sign of conscious sexuality that cannot be mastered.

The Emergence of the ‘Proper Lady’ and its Paradox

What Keats’s ‘O blush not’ illustrates are the social obligations imposed on women in the early nineteenth century to maintain an image of female purity. By the mid-eighteenth century, a new kind of woman emerged – the passionless domestic female. Throughout this period and more so towards the turn of the century, countless female conduct books, ladies’ magazines and instruction manuals posited a feminine ideal that rested on the notion of the religious, pious, moral and asexual woman. The desirability of the ‘domestic woman’ depended on her education in domestic practices, moral value and certain qualities of mind (Armstrong 4). Women were expected to be religious and virtuous, and female rectitude was understood in terms of Christian morality. Female virtue was defined almost exclusively in sexual terms: It was structured around notions of modesty, restraint, passivity, obedience, delicacy and most importantly chastity. Such views are expressed in Lord Halifax’s The Lady’s New-Years Gift; or Advice to a Daughter (1688), which ran through twenty four editions and was supplanted by equally popular works such as Dr John Gregory’s A Father’s Legacy to His Daughters (1774) and Hester Chapone’s Letters on the Improvement of the Mind (1773). The popularity of these works was such that they were still in high demand in the early years of the nineteenth century. Other works such as Timothy Rogers’s The Character of a Good Woman, both in a Single and Married State (1697) and Thomas Seward’s ‘The Female Right to Literature’ (1748) emphasised the passive virtue that defined female nature and was considered essential to the perseverance of that nature (Armstrong 66). Writing conduct books for women became a cultural trend through which female and male writers alike, such as Hannah More, Hester Chapone, Maria Edgeworth, Dr Fordyce and Dr Gregory established their literary careers.

The numerous amounts of books and manuals written to benefit the female reader, to help cultivate her disposition, are not surprising considering that the eighteenth century not only invented but culturally embraced the notion of the passionless female. The notion regarding the passionless female was a new conception of femininity that contradicted the established opinions regarding sex and gender before 1700s. One of the explanations for this redefinition of femininity can be attributed to the medical re-conceptualisation of the body, which Thomas Laqueur identifies as the changeover from the one-sex to the two-sex body theory in the early part of the eighteenth century. Before 1700 the female body, though inferior, was perceived as essentially the same as the male body, and both sexes were believed to derive pleasure from sex through the form of ejaculation. After 1700, however, the two-sex body theory argued that female and male bodies were essentially different rather than identical as was believed before. This demarcation between the sexes was followed by a change in beliefs about female sexual pleasure. Whereas before it was believed that an orgasm was necessary for the female to conceive, the new two-sex body theory urged scientists to retract and contradict this assumption. Thus, the implication of the two-sex body theory was that woman was conceived as essentially different from man with regards to her sexual nature. It was assumed that women derived no sexual pleasure from coupling and that the majority of women exhibited little or no sexual desire (Laqueur, Making Sex 3–6).

Though there was no medical proof to support the assumptions regarding the divergent sexual tempers of the sexes, the ideology of the asexual female, so powerfully present in the fiction of the late eighteenth century, was culturally adopted (Laqueur, Making Sex 9). Despite the fact that there was nothing to support the idea of female asexuality, the dominant opinion during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries was that women do not have sexual drives, and the minority that did exhibit any sexual symptoms were categorised as morally, mentally and physically diseased. Those who failed to follow the rules of respectability were publically scorned, castigated and stripped of their ‘good’ name and achievements as the examples of Mary Wollstonecraft and Mary Hays demonstrate. Mary Hays’s impropriety in her personal life and her forthright depiction of female passion in Emma Courtney made her a target of social ridicule. The series ‘Feminist Controversy in England, 1788–1810’, reveal the extent to which Dr Gregory’s text in 1774 represents main stream thought in English society at the time and the extent to which female writers who advocated the expression of female sexual desire, such as Wollstonecraft and Hays, were the minority. The change in the conception of femininity is further evident in the narratives published towards the end of the eighteenth century, where the passionate heroine is discarded in favour of the heroine of the domestic novel. This genre, the domestic novel, along with the conduct books and manuals circulating around this time presented and advocated the argument that modesty precluded not only the expressions but also the feelings of desire.¹

1 For further discussion concerning the invention of the passionless female in literature consult Armstrong’s Desire and Domestic Fiction: A Political History of the Novel.

The author of The Polite Lady, for example, clearly rejects the indulgence of female appetite as any desire is perceived as the ‘enemy of this virtue of chastity’. For desire ‘not only inflames the blood, and raises the passions; but, at the same time, darkens and clouds the mind, and renders it less capable to resist and regulate the inferior appetites. It debases and corrupts the heart; it gives us too strong a relish for the pleasures of sense, and too great a disgust for those of a rational nature’ (Polite Lady 191–2). Thomas Gisborne, as well, warns that female desire can lead to ‘unsteadiness of mind; to fondness of novelty; to habit of frivolousness; and trifling employment … to sudden excesses; [to] unmerited attachments’ (33–4). Instead of this image of female profligacy, Gisborne promotes the image of the proper lady whose desires and nature are guided and controlled by her master. For Gisborne, as with other writers at the time, the concept of female modesty and asexuality forbade direct self-expression, the wilful acknowledgment of the self and its desires. Modesty was believed to advocate suppression and repression, incorporating within notions of obedience and subordination to patriarchal and social expectations. It embraced conformity, convention and self-sacrifice over desire, rebelliousness and self-expression.

A proper woman was a modest one, but the concept of modesty was such that it was designed to stimulate and quell male desire. We have seen how Keats’s ‘O blush not’ divulges and ridicules the paradox imbedded within the concept of female modesty, that though sexuality should be concealed, the idea behind its concealment is an actual confirmation of its existence. Mary Poovey brings this point further across in her study The Proper Lady and the Woman Writer, arguing that women’s sexuality was not dismissed as nonexistent, but rather transmuted into its opposite. She maintains that even though modesty is perceived as a woman’s interiority that comes to hide her sexuality, its public display attracts the opposite sex as it is also ‘a woman’s most effective lure’. As Poovey writes, ‘modesty is provocation; it whets the lover’s appetite; it suspends both partners momentarily in the delicious foreplay of anticipation’ (22). The anonymous writer of The Ladies Library, first published in 1714, epitomises this contradictory perception of modesty and its social function. Initially, the author presents modesty as a protecting tool against men’s sexual pursuits, ‘for tis certain a modest Countenance gives a Check to Lust .… Such an Authority there is in Virtue, that where ’tis eminent, ’tis apt to controul all loose Appetites, and he must not only be lustful but sacrilegious who attempts to violate such a Sanctuary’ (Ladies Library 1: 128). However, as her argument progresses the author seems to change her tone and instead of promoting the idea of purity of mind and heart, she advises her female readers to clothe themselves in ‘virgin modesty’ if only to ‘render themselves agreeable’. Women, she argues are ‘never so comely and fine, as when they are clothed in Virgin Modesty; never so amiable as when they are adorn’d with the Beauties of Innocence and Virtue’ (Ladies Library 1: 129).

Thus though modesty was presented as part of female character and interiority, it was adopted, popularised and promoted as having a social value. Though the 1811 fashion guide The Mirror of the Graces was primarily designed to instruct Englishwomen in the latest fashions and beauty treatments, the author is quick to remind her readers that external grace is invariably linked with the ‘internal beauty of the virgin soul’ (Mirror of the Graces 18). The author makes the point that no fashion should strip a woman of her grace, but rather should be perceived as a sign of female delicacy, ‘as a pledge of honour’ (The Mirror of the Graces 78). It is interesting to note that modesty and purity are presented here as female accessories, a fashionable garnish to female beauty.² The idea of modesty as a social mask becomes even more apparent when the writer comments that the rendering of the mind’s purity via the ‘fairness of the body’ will help women attract the attention of the opposite sex (The Mirror of the Graces 17). In her conclusion to the work, the author reiterates to her readers that ‘if Beauty be woman’s weapon, it must be feathered by the Graces, pointed by the eye of Discretion, and sh...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Editions and Abbreviations
• Introduction: Keats and the ‘Masturbating Girl’
• 1 Keats, Modesty and the Politics of Sex
• 2 Female Onanism in Keats’s Romances
• 3 The Economy of Romance in Keats’s Isabella
• 4 Phantoms of Sexual Repression in The Eve of St Agnes
• 5 Figures of Romance and Anti-Romance in ‘La Belle Dame sans Merci’
• 6 The Humanisation of the Serpent Lamia
• Afterthought
• Bibliography
• Index