Strange Antics

STRANGE ANTICS

A History of Seduction

Clement Knox

Copyright

William Collins

An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers

1 London Bridge Street

London SE1 9GF

WilliamCollinsBooks.com

This eBook first published in Great Britain by William Collins in 2020

Copyright © Clement Knox 2020

Cover image © Sandro Botticelli (1444-1510) Florentine School. The Birth of Venus, 1482. Oil on canvas, 1.72 x 2.78 m. Florence, The Uffizi Gallery. (Photo by Christophel Fine Art/Universal Images Group via Getty Images)

Clement Knox asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

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Source ISBN: 9780008285678

Ebook Edition © February 2020 ISBN: 9780008285692

Version: 2019-12-13

Dedication

To My Parents

Epigraph

When we behold two males fighting for the possession of the female, or several male birds displaying their gorgeous plumage, and performing strange antics before an assembled body of females, we cannot doubt that, though led by instinct, they know what they are about, and consciously exert their mental and bodily powers.

Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man, Chapter VIII

CONTENTS

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Epigraph

Introduction

1: Rake Culture

2: The Transit of Venus

3: An Unsentimental Education

4: Circling Mary Shelley

5: Of Mann and Men

6: Blood Out

7: Seduction Remains

Afterword

Plate Section

List of Illustrations

Endnotes

Index

Acknowledgements

About the Author

About the Publisher

INTRODUCTION

In 1873, a Georgia court heard the appeal of Myron Wood against his conviction in a seduction case involving Emma Chivers. Wood was a reverend, schoolmaster and Civil War veteran, a pillar of the community in Decatur, the seat of DeKalb County, north-east Georgia. Chivers was fifteen when she first met Wood, who was her teacher at school and her pastor at church. She was the daughter of a destitute widow, so poor that Wood took the family into his own home to help relieve their poverty. But Wood had other motives. His own wife was terminally ill and he seduced Chivers, promising her that he would marry her once his sick spouse died. Chivers trusted him, respected him, and probably somewhat feared him, and she submitted to his advances, the first time she had ever done so. A child was born, whereupon Wood went back on his word and denied all responsibility.

This was the background to Chivers’ initial, successful lawsuit. On appeal Wood adopted a new strategy. He did not deny that the affair had taken place, simply that Chivers was ineligible for protection under the seduction statute as she was a lascivious girl, sluttish, and primed for sin. Wood’s lawyers marshalled an array of witnesses willing to testify to Chivers’ low morals and lustful nature. The sins of the mother were visited upon the daughter. A spinster was found who claimed that Chivers’ mother was rumoured to have consorted with black men and may even have run a brothel in Atlanta. Classmates took to the stand. They revealed that Chivers was not in the habit of concealing her legs as a good Christian girl was expected to do. Some had seen her hug and kiss young men. Others noted her penchant for unfruitful fruit-picking expeditions with local boys. Was it not true, the counsel for the defence asked her, that she was known to go ‘blackberry hunting with young men and [bring] no blackberries back’?

The state supreme court sided with Wood. Emma Chivers, the justices ruled, was not a seducible woman.[1]

What happened in that Georgia courtroom 150 years ago was a waypoint in a social transformation whose consequences we all live with today. Before the Enlightement, the sexual existences of Europeans and North Americans were closely monitored. Sexuality was a public matter, subject to observation and discipline. Sexual freedoms were few and sexual protections were scarce. Today, almost the exact opposite is the case. We are striving towards a juncture where broad sexual freedoms for consenting adults will co-exist with substantive controls on the predatory protections for the vulnerable. How we got from then to now is in a large part the history of seduction. Almost all the reluctant concerns of that history were present in the case of Emma Chivers. To investigate seduction is to think about power, desire, race, class, agency and the law. Less visible but omnipresent – including in the Chivers’ case – is a question of storytelling. The history of seduction is about the sum of stories – in other words, of narrative.

Every aspect of human experience has its history; the problem is identifying how best to measure it. The unit of measurement for the history of seduction is that strange and powerful thing, the seduction narrative. The basic claim of this book is that the seduction narrative is a product of the modern world and serves as a vehicle for the exploration of modern values, modern experiences and modern concerns.

This is not to say that seduction never existed in fact or fiction before the onset of modernity. The moons of Jupiter are named for four of Zeus’s most celebrated seductions. The nymph Io he enshrouded in darkness and turned into a snow-white heifer to conceal her from his jealous wife. Callisto, the ‘Arcadian virgin [who] suddenly caught his fancy and fired his heart with a deep-felt passion’, he approached in the guise of her mistress, the goddess Diana, before taking her in his arms and revealing his true identity. To win the Phoenician princess Europa, he ‘discarded his mighty sceptre and clothed himself in the form of a bull’. Once he had lured her to sit on his back, he swam out to sea, taking her all the way to Crete where they eventually had three children together. To secure the Trojan youth Ganymede, he took the form of an enormous eagle, swooping down from the skies and carrying him away to Mount Olympus. All these stories are recorded in the Metamorphoses, written by the Roman poet Ovid, who is also famous for authoring the first-ever seduction manual, the Ars Amatoria, in the second century BC.

Ovid’s frank treatment of seduction scandalised the emperor Augustus and he was sent into exile on the Black Sea. Whatever tribulations he experienced in his own lifetime, however, Ovid’s legacy endured. In the pre-modern world he was the paradigmatic writer on seduction, name-checked by Chaucer and Shakespeare and avidly read by every educated young man. Indeed, Ovid’s influence was so great that it became an inspiration for perhaps the first proto-feminist analysis of seduction. Writing in the early fifteenth century, Christine de Pizan mocked the clerks who lived by Ovid’s sexual commandments while lamenting that the sexual culture his writings had helped forge made life impossible for women. For a beautiful woman to keep herself chaste, de Pizan wrote, is ‘like being in the midst of flames without getting burnt’ on account of her having ‘to fend off the attentions of young men and courtiers who are eager to have affairs’.[2]

Classical writers aside, the other major influence on how pre-moderns thought about seduction was Christianity. In the Christian tradition, the problem of seduction had begun not with Ovid but with Eve in the Garden of Eden. From the earliest days of the Christian faith, theologians had identified the first woman, Eve, and consequently all women, with lust. St Augustine had claimed that mankind’s original sin was the lustfulness uncovered in Eve after she ate the apple at the serpent’s urging. Augustine believed that the ‘legacy of Eve’ was the ‘sorrow she brought into the world’ through her discovery of her sexuality. As a result of this mythology, early Christian culture was astonishingly misogynistic. St Jerome was so aghast at the carnality he associated with women that he counselled chastity for men wherever possible. Indeed, he identified men with sexual restraint (with ‘the virtue of continence’), whereas women were marked with the ‘command to increase and multiply’ associated with the expulsion from Eden and with ‘the nakedness and the fig-leaves which speak of sexual passion’. The writer and apologist Tertullian described women as ‘each an Eve … You are the devil’s gateway: you are the unsealer of that forbidden tree: you are the first deserter of divine law.’ For the eleventh-century Benedictine monk St Peter Damian, women were ‘bitches, sows, screech-owls, night owls, she-wolves, blood suckers … harlots, prostitutes, with your lascivious kisses, you wallowing places for fat pigs, couches for unclean spirits, demi-goddesses, sirens, witches’.[3]

The consequence of theological misogyny was a literary tradition in which the dominant seduction narrative was that of a woman seducing a man. In ‘The Wife of Bath’s Tale’ in Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales, this trope was mocked by the female narrator who describes how men, drunk on Ovid, Jerome, Tertullian and all the rest, have come to believe that women are intrinsically licentious and that they ‘cannot keep the vow of marriage’. When at the end of fourteenth-century romance Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Gawain discovers that the witch Morgan Le Fay has been toying with him throughout the tale, he gives vent to his frustrations concerning male powerlessness in the face of female manipulation:

But it’s no wonder a fool should lose his senses and be brought to his downfall through the wiles of women. For Adam in this world was misled by one, and Solomon by several, and Samson after him – Delilah was his ruin – and David afterwards, was blinded by Bathsheba and suffered much misery. Since all of these were deluded, it would be a fine thing to love them well without trusting, if a man could do it.[4]

Many of these concerns spilled over into the popular fear about witches. ‘All witchcraft comes from carnal lust,’ intoned the Malleus Maleficarum, the classic treatise on the subject, ‘which in women is insatiable.’[5]

In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries these attitudes began to soften. The continental tradition of courtliness popularised by writers like Baldassare Castiglione and Philip Sidney encouraged socialising among the sexes – at least at an elite level – and emphasised that courtship could be an aesthetic pleasure and not a moral hazard. This attitude is certainly in evidence in Shakespeare’s comedies, where the game of love is played out in an endless carnival of disguise, gender confusion and enchantment. In figures like Richard III, who seeks to seduce the widow Lady Anne, gloating that he will triumph though he has ‘nothing to back my suit at all, But the plain devil and dissembling looks’, Shakespeare also looks forward to more modern conceptions of the seduction narrative where men are predators and women are prey.

These precursors are interesting but they feel intellectually distant. The cause of that distance – and the reason that this book begins at the start of the eighteenth century and not before – is the Enlightenment. The seduction narrative was born out of a series of intellectual developments and value shifts that took place in this period.

In short, the seduction narrative was a byproduct of the rise of liberalism. The growing belief – that by 1800 had solidified into a consensus across much of Europe and North America – that individuals had the basic right to chose their husband or wife was one consequence of the widespread acceptance of liberal attitudes.

It was also the decisive development in the history of seduction because it raised a raft of issues. If marriage was now a private choice then individuals, especially women, had to be trusted to make their own decisions. But could they be trusted to make the right ones? What if they were deceived? If they were misled, were they owed any special sympathies or even particular legal protections? Conversely, if men were judged to have behaved in a deceptive or exploitative manner, how were they to be dealt with? Should they be punished? Should they be reformed? Or, as the hackneyed saying goes, is all fair in love and war? As we shall see, these questions occupied the attention of some of the most celebrated minds of the past. They still concern us now.

Underpinning all these debates is a more fundamental question. Are we rational decision-makers or flighty, manipulable creatures, subject to our passions? Whether reason or passion exerts greater sway on human decision-making was one of the foundational debates of the Enlightenment. And – in numerous variants – it is with us to this day.[6] The argument of this book is that this debate finds expression in the seduction narrative. Key to its expression is the fact that seduction narratives come in two forms. Each takes a different side of this debate. Each tells a complementary story about the modern world. In the classic seduction narrative – what me might call the ‘Villainous’ kind – the seducer uses guile, deception and mental games to overcome their target’s resistance. It implies a psychological vulnerability on the part of seduced – a fact reflected in etymology of the word: se + ducere, to lead away. Seduction assumes one person is manipulating another, leading them away from their true preferences. This was the basis for the crucial legal distinction between rape and seduction. Whereas rape was coercive, seduction admitted consent while assuming that consent had somehow been degraded by the techniques of the seducer. As one New York court put it in 1896: ‘to constitute seduction, the defendant must use insinuating arts to overcome the opposition of the seduced and must by wiles, without force, debauch her.’[7] In common law the classic example of seduction was a woman who agreed to sex after accepting a disingenuous marriage proposal. This, in the eyes of society and the law, was a species of fraud as consent had been obtained by a lie. Early nineteenth-century feminists campaigning for increased legal protections for women and girls understood the threat of seduction as being pervasive. In a pamphlet from 1910, one wrote that seduction – the ‘ultimate inferno’ – was brought about by the assault on the rational mind ‘by the toils of unreasoning and prejudiced ignorance.’[8] Nowadays the language used to describe such scenarios tends to focus on structures of power and patterns of grooming and assault.

The common feature is that the seduction narrative dramatises powerlessness. This is why, from Clarissa (1748) to Cruel Intentions (1999), the victims of seducers are portrayed as naive, unworldly women. This is not to say that there have been no seduction narratives that feature women seducing men – as we shall see, this has been a recurring counter-current from the eighteenth century to the twenty-first – simply that they rely on the premise that men are the powerless playthings of predatory, powerful women, a contention that has lacked credibility for almost all recorded history. This speaks to the political, feminist dimension of these seduction narratives. They tell a story about women’s place in society. They allegorise their oppression.

If the villainous seduction narrative dwells on psychological vulnerability, the other kind of seduction narrative focuses on the power of reason. Enlightenment philosophers believed that individuals were endowed with reason and could use it to make decisions in their own best interests. In one of the foundational manifestos of the Enlightenment, the Declaration of Independence, the founding fathers of the United States declared that among the ‘unalienable Rights’ of free men were ‘Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness’. The other kind of seduction narrative – the one which portrays the seducer as a hero, not a villain – is intensely interested in that pursuit.

Throughout this book we shall meet writers and intellectuals who believed that the rational pursuit of sexual pleasure was an endeavour characteristic to the enlightened individual. In England, one of the earliest champions of this position was the writer and dramatist Henry Fielding who considered men’s and women’s desires natural ‘and productive not only of corporeal delight, but of the most rational felicity’. In continental Europe, philosophers like Voltaire and Casanova argued much the same. Nor was it just men who trumpeted the virtues of sexual freedom. The pursuit of what she called ‘rational desires’ was central to the intellectual project of Mary Wollstonecraft. Among the Romantics, ‘free love’ was embraced in theory and practice by women such as Mary Shelley and Claire Clairmont as much as it was by men like Percy Shelley and Lord Byron. In the latter half of the twentieth century, this view of human sexuality became basically unchallenged. From James Bond to Brigitte Bardot, seducers were celebrated in the culture as symbols of sexual freedom, free agents who had unburdened themselves of the irrational prejudices of custom, religion and taboo. In the twenty-first century the rise of algorithmic online dating represents the triumph of seduction as a logical exercise.

These rival traditions in the seduction narrative – reason versus passion; the seducer as hero versus the seducer as villain – coexist. They are, in fact, deeply intertwined. In the period of three centuries covered by this book, both kinds of narrative exist in every time and in every place that is studied. Indeed, the foundational conflict between reason and passion that is at the heart of this history is often found within seduction narratives themselves. For example, in the eighteenth-century novel The Man of Feeling, the seduced and betrayed Emily Atkins contrasts her passionate abandon with her seducer’s cold, calculating nature:

It was gratitude, it was pride, it was love! Love which had made too fatal a progress in my heart, before any declaration on his part should have warranted a return: but I interpreted every look of attention, every expression of compliment, to the passion I imagined him inspired with, and imputed to his sensibility that silence which was the effect of art and design.

This dynamic tension between reason and passion also accounts for another recurrent theme in this book: the use of hypnosis as a metaphor for seduction. As we shall see in the chapters on Mary Shelley and Bram Stoker, hypnotism was a potent symbol of seduction, as it was a transitional psychological state that bridged the worlds of reason and passion. Seduction is bewildering, exciting and dangerous because it occupies this grey zone of agency.

It is for precisely the same reason that seduction has repeatedly been the subject of legal interest. As we shall see in the later chapters of this book, the legal principles that brought Emma Chivers to the courtroom in the 1870s were born of passionate public debates about the limits of rational sexual decision-making and consequently with the limits of consent.

Such tension creates paradoxes – contradictions that will surface again and again in this narrative. Those who believe that individuals are prone to violent passions and vulnerable to manipulation tend to argue for the creation of laws and rules that will try to rationally regulate sexual desire. As we shall see, the successful campaigns on both sides of the Atlantic in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to bring about a body of law to regulate seduction mobilised these ‘villainous’ seduction narratives in order to achieve their goals. Out of the chaos of the passionate mind was born the need for a set of logical legal codes. Yet these supposedly rational laws were quickly revealed to be capricious themselves. As the example of Emma Chivers showed, far from being impartial, seduction laws were used to police arbitrary boundaries of class, race and gender.

Conversely, the ‘Heroic’ seduction narrative uses the claim of rationality to advance a culture of sensual revelry. From the hedonism of Enlightenment London, Paris and Venice, to the free love doctrines of the Romantics, to the ‘sexual revolution’ of the 1960s and 1970s, sexual rationalism has been used to justify a culture of pleasure, permissiveness and emotional authenticity. Yet time and again, the promise of sexual freedom in theory has run up against the problem of sexual freedom in practice. The dream of emotional authenticity underpinned by a model of rational decision-making has all too often led to a reality of sexual exploitation motivated by an unfeeling transactionalism that conceals itself within a masque of sexual liberation. At the height of the sexual revolution, Germaine Greer observed as much when she wrote in The Female Eunuch that ‘sex for many has become a sorry business, a mechanical release involving neither discovery nor triumph, stressing human isolation more dishearteningly than ever before’.[9]

These paradoxes, these brawling contradictions, are the engine of this book. But what follows is not an attempt to endlessly restate the arguments made above. These are intended to function only as the poles, pegs and guy ropes that give structure to the marquee of the book. Crowded under the canopy are a dozen or so major figures, and a selection of minor figures, through whose lives and relationships and writings the history of seduction will be explored.

1

RAKE CULTURE

He could not fidget – as a man well might, standing in the dock of the Old Bailey charged with a capital offence – because his thumbs were bound together with twine. This seemed to be the end of the road for Colonel Francis Charteris. After a long and infamous career as Britain’s most notorious rake, Charteris, now in his late sixties, stood accused of the rape of his former maidservant Anne Bond. Standing before a judge and jury in February 1730 he had little hope of obtaining an acquittal. He was one of London’s most renowned sexual predators, so detested for his lechery and his abusive methods that his house in Hanover Square had been attacked on more than one occasion by angry mobs. He had only managed to have annulled a previous conviction for rape through generous bribery (what was then known as a ‘Golden Nol. Pros.’). His trial took place amid a blizzard of Grub Street pamphlets that chronicled his misdeeds, real and fictional, and denounced him as ‘the Rape-Master-General of Great Britain’. In taverns, coffee-houses and salons throughout the capital the most scandalous rumours were spread about him, including allegations that he had raped his own grandmother.[1]