CLIO 36:3 2007

JONATHAN LOESBERG
The Afterlife of Victorian Sexuality:
Foucault and Neo-Victorian Historical
Fiction

In her memoir. Moments of Being, Virginia Woolf tells an

anecdote in which Lytton Strachey, one day in 1908, pointed
to a stain on Vanessa Bell's dress and asked, "Semen?" Woolf
tells us she thought, "Can one really say it," and then "we
burst out laughing. With that one word all barriers of
reticence and reserve went down."^ Woolf's story thus
asserts the ability to talk about sex as establishing an end to
the Victorian period. If the death of Victoria ended the reign
and World War I ended the economic and social structure of
the society, the destruction of the 'Tjarriers of reticence and
reserve," in this version at least, began the end of the
Victorian sexual repressiveness that plays such a large role
in our understanding of their culture. It is a fitting
beginning to my discussion of three works of twentieth-
century Victorian fiction because I want to show the vice-like
grip of this story about sexual repression on our historical
narrative about the Victorians, despite its radical
questioning by more recent theories set off by Michel
Foucault's History of Sexuality. Given the ostensibly
postmodern status of two of these works. The French
Lieutenant's Woman and Possession, one might have guessed
at a more skeptical approach to this old story. I will argue,
however, that the turn toward the Victorian period occurs in

1. Virginia Woolf, Moments of Being, 2nd ed. (New York: Harcourt, Brace,
1985), 195.
362 Afterlife of Victorian Sexuality

contemporary historical fiction when the theme of a certain

kind of freedom demands the story of Victorian sexuality as
the image of constraint against which that freedom is
measured. Perhaps more to the point, the lens of Foucault's
theory will show us that the writers of postmodern Victorian
fiction remain "We 'Other Victorians'" (to make a category
out of Foucault's making of a category from Steven Marcus's
famous title), in their attitudes toward sexuality, in their
faith in it as the solution to narrative mystery, and finally,
in their sense that, in speaking about it, we may explain
thingsif nothing else, our hoped for difference from
Victorian reticence.
To displace this story of Victorian sexuality and offer a
context through which to see the novels as offering us a
supportive myth rather than a history, I will start with a
quotation from The History of Sexuality that turns the
psychological inquisition of sexuality into a Disney cartoon:
The aim of this series of studies? To transcribe in history the
fable of The Indiscreet Jewels.
Among its many emblems, our society bears that ofthe talking
genitals. Those genitals, that one catches by surprise and
interrogates, constrained and loquacious, respond tirelessly. One
day, a certain mechanism, magical enough to have rendered itself
invisible, captured those genitals. It made them speak within a
game that mixes pleasure and the involuntary, consent and
inquisition, the truth of the self and of others. We have lived for
many years in the realm of Prince Magogul: prey to an immense
curiosity about our sex, intent on questioning our genitals,
insatiable in our desire to hear what they have to say and to hear
it spoken about, quick to invent all kinds of magical rings that
might force them into indiscretion.^
We are, of course, under no compulsion to accept Foucault's
claim in The History of Sexuality that our constant
theorizing of our sexuality, our attempt to identify its true
nature in order to free ourselves from repression, actually
ensnares us in a project that shares a profound common

2. Michel Foucault, Histoire de la Sexualit, I: La Volont de Savoir (The history

of sexuality I: The will to know) (Paris; Gallimard, 1976), 102. I have translated
from the French rather than using the standard English translation, which, by
rendering sexe as sex, abstaining from translating the title ofthe Diderot story, and
occluding its contentit is the story of a prince who uses a magic ring to make
people's genitals speak the true desires of their, so to speak, bearersmakes
Foucault's statement of theme much less strange and comic than it is in the
original.
Jonathan Loesberg 363

ground witb Victorian repression: to find a trutb about

sexuality. For Foucault, sucb a quest effectively constrains
our freedom in ways analogous to those of repression by
positing a knowledge of our identity that establishes our
limits. But whether or not we agree with Foucault, Denis
Diderot's story of truth-speaking genitals, invoked here,
whether it is our emblem or not, is an emblem, more or less
obscure of these post-Victorian, if not postmodern,
narratives. Each of the works shares a formal feature, a
theme and the articulation of the theme through the emblem
of an interrogated sexuality. And, indeed, both novels
feature, if not talking genitals, genitals that, by bleeding, at
least emit signs that instigate words. The theme, as I said,
is a declaration of some form of freedom. The formal feature,
varying in its particular manifestation, is some form of
binocular narrative, a narrative structure tbat makes us
explicitly aware of seeing tbe Victorian period from a
contemporary standpoint, of seeing tbe Victorians as tbey
ostensibly would not see tbemselves, ratber tban merely
reproducing tbem for our spectacle. And wbat we see tbat
tbey do not see about tbemselves tbat teacbes us our
freedom is some trutb about tbeir sex and ours. Tbe lens of
Foucault's talking genitals may make tbis concern comic
even as bis larger concern witb theories of sexuality as forms
of constraint may make the freedom look simply like a
different register of Victorian limitation. It will, in any case,
allow us to see the diagnosis of Victorian repression as a
fable that holds more recent narrative in its grip because it
allows that narrative to construct a history of our modernity
that gives us an entirely traditional impression of a
movement from Victorian delusion to contemporary
knowledge.
Before proceeding to an analysis of John Fowles and A. S.
Byatt, I want to start with a brief discussion of the first
version of the genre that I know of, Michael Sadleir's 1940
novel, Fanny by Gaslight. Sadleir was an achieved
Victorianist, known especially for his work on Anthony
TroUope. He was also a bibliographer and collector of things
Victorian. Fanny by Gaslight is a romantic melodrama with
what, at the time of the novel's publication, would have been
the unique twist of being set, in large part, in the Victorian
sexual demi-monde of brothels, pleasure gardens, and loose
drinking establishments, with a heroine who, while
364 Afterlife of Victorian Sexuality

pointedly kept clear of prostitution, explicitly does not share

Victorian sexual mores, and chooses to live with her lover
outside of marriage as a way of keeping their relationship
clear of social consequences. The novel takes advantage of
the falling of barriers noted by Woolf, for the most part, via
a sexual touristry of a part of Victorian England we did not
usually see in its own novels, plus the frisson of a Victorian
heroine who, at a key moment, says, "I should be frightened
to be your wife, Harry, but I wantoh, how I wantto be
your love-girl."^ Despite it being in most ways just a
romantic melodrama with a certain literary wit, it
establishes the three elements of post-Victorian narrative
shared by its more self-consciously postmodern successors.
First, Sadleir's novel justifies its sexual touristry with a
critique of Victorian hypocritical respectability that, while it
does not really comprehend the narrative, at least does not
collide with it. In its clearest formulation, a statement by the
novel's male protagonist, this critique of respectability differs
little from anything one might find in a novel by Charles
Dickens or George Eliot. The title character, Fanny, is the
illegitimate daughter of an aristocrat. Clive Seymore, whose
wife, when she learns of the old affair, uses it to blackmail
him into allowing her a divorce, which also ruins his career
in diplomacy. In response to this background, one of
Seymore's diplomatic colleagues, Harry Somerford, who will
fall in love with Fanny, proclaims, "In a confused sort of way,
I was indignant with so-called respectable society, which
made it easy for a spiteful woman like Lady Alicia Seymore
to wreck the career of a fine public servant. . . . Resentful
against respectability, I turned instinctively to women who
neither pretended nor wanted to be respectable, but at least
were honest" (235). This thematic statement could very
probably exist, if not in a novel by Dickens, certainly in one
by Thomas Hardy. But the situation does lead to some of the
novel's humorous twists on Victorian standard plotting.
When Somerford asks Seymore to persuade Fanny to marry
himshe is already living with himSeymore refuses:

3. Michael Sadleir, Fanny by Gaslight (New York: Penguin, 1981), 263.

Hereafter cited parenthetically as Fanny. Michel Faber's recent The Crimson Petal
and ihe White (New York: Harcourt, 2002), with the same considerable historical
knowledge and literary inventiveness, uses the Victorian period for essentially the
same kind of historical sexual touristry.
Jonathan Loesberg 365

"'This situation is becoming more and more bizarre,' he said.

'It is most unusual for a suitor to ask a parent's help in
regularizing his daughter's union. Maybe it is even more
unusual for the parent to say that he sees his daughter's
point of view. I should be proud to think of you two as man
and wife; but I can sympathize with [FJanny's non-
conformity andwell, I have some reason for not regarding
marriage as the element in a love-affair which is made in
Heaven"' (283). Seymore recognizes the distortion Sadleir
has created out of the standard scene of a suitor asking the
father's permission to marry the daughter. And the novel's
sexual nonconformity, aligned with Fanny's, manages to
justify what in TroUope would certainly be an unthinkable
response. Thus the novel's concern with illicit affairs and the
sexual demi-monde has at least the justification of giving the
banal theme of resistance to hypocritical respectability a new
twist on a traditional Victorian scene.
Second, the theme of breaking away from respectability is
given its claim to modernity by a very deliberately binocular
narrative. Historical novels in the nineteenth century were,
with some exceptions, always more or less noticeably
narrated by a contemporaneous narrative voice that
addressed its audience in terms of the historical difference
between the age depicted and the one the narrator and the
audience shared. But that narrative stance in the nineteenth
century was always more the unassumed norm than a
situation that needed attention called to it. Fanny by
Gaslight, however, explicitly frames its Victorian story with
an account, told in the third-person, of how a publisher-
writer. Warbeck, came to know the elderly Fanny in the
1930s, elicited her story, and himself wrote it down in a way
he thought most likely to gain it an audience. Thus we know
that the body of the book is written, in fact, by the character
Warbeck with his own ends in the twentieth century. And we
know the narrative arrangement of the story is fictive even
within this frame fiction because a large part of the
narrative is told by Harry Somerford, who is long dead by
the time Fanny tells her story to the narrator. Sadleir's
introductory one-paragraph note to the novel makes the
situation explicit:
Differences in style between the various sections are deliberate.
The first section and the last, which tell a tale of our own days,
are written as the author wished to write them. Parts One and
366 Afterlife of Victorian Sexuality

Three of Fanny's story are told by her in the first person but
written by Warbeck in the nineteen-thirties; they are therefore
modern as to narrative but "period" as to conversation. Part Two
of Fanny's story, told in the first person by Harry Somerford, is
more nearly period through-out, because it purports to read as a
contemporary account of events which took place during the
eighteen-seventies. (unpaginated, introductory note, emphasis in
original)
By thinking about the narrative situation described here
carefully, one could start to make a case for the book as
having a modernist narrative complexity: the Fanny section
is also told in thefirst-person,but presented as a first-person
narrative explicitly modernized by Warbeck to show its own
artifice. In contrast, although he also writes it. Warbeck
presents the Somerford section as actually written by
Somerford. In fact, one should not make too much of this
complexity of the two different presentations of different
first-person narratives. For the most part, as with his sexual
touristry, Sadleir seems simply to want to exhibit his comfort
in Victorian modes of linguistic presentation, both
conversation and narrative.
Still, the novel explicitly connects its antagonism to
Victorian respectability and its narrative structure with an
openness about sexuality that creates the model for the more
deliberately postmodern fictions of Fowles and Byatt. One
sees the connection in a common judgment Fanny and
Warbeck make that seals their alliance to tell her story.
During his stay in the obscure French town that Fanny has
retired to. Warbeck sees in a church a stained glass window
depicting the Garden of Eden: "the composition
demonstrated in words of one syllable the desire of man for
woman, and was of a kind unusual in a sacred (or indeed any
public) edifice" (18). Later, when Fanny is deciding whether
she thinks Warbeck will be prepared to hear the story of her
life, she suddenly asks:
". . . Let me ask you thiswhat in a year's time will you
remember most clearly ofthat church there?"
"The Adam and Eve window" he replied.
She fiashed him a look, mock scandalized. "Oh, Mr Warbeck!"
she said, and her little face creased dangerously.
After a few moments she chuckled.
"I will tell you my story . . ." (25)
Warbeck and Fanny enter a compact around their common
sense that the depiction of sexual desire is pleasing rather
Jonathan Loesberg 367

than scandalous, thus around their common refusal of

Victorian prudery. One should note that Fanny's question
seems irrelevant to their preceding discussion of their
mutual antagonism to hypocrisy, and yet it acts as a test,
which Warbeck clearly passes. The acceptance of sexual
desire thus signals a larger agreement in their attitude
toward Victorian society that will guarantee the perspective
from which the story will be told. In its obviousness, Fanny
by Gaslight sets out clearly the way in which a post-
Victorian fiction that means to be more than a costume
drama lays out its theme of what we should be that
Victorians are not (or in Possession, what they were that we
have lost, a version of the same story) through a binocular
narrative that embodies that theme in terms of our distance
from Victorian sexuality.
The appearance of a self-reflexive concern with the status
of narration in Fanny by Gaslight, hardly either a modernist
or postmodernist masterpiece, raises the vexed question of
what constitutes the postmodernism of The French
Lieutenant's Woman and Possession, a question that has
plagued both novels. Generally, citing Linda Hutcheon's
definition of "historiographie metafiction," as defined by the
mixing of fictive and historical events and personages and by
intrusive narration, both of which raise the question of the
difference between fiction and reality, critics then point to
what I have referred to as the binocular narrative of the
novels, their use of self-reflexive narration and their playing
with the boundaries of history and fiction.* The obvious
problem with this definition is that it really does not
distinguish Fowles and Byatt from their nineteenth-century
forebears. Critics, for instance, sometimes refer to Fowles's
narrator fixing the date of Ernestina's death as the day
Hitler invaded Poland as having the postmodern effect of
unsettling our sense of the boundary between fiction and

4. Linda Hutcheon, A Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction (New

York: Routledge, 1988), 5, is cited in Mahmoud Salami, John Fowles's Fiction and
the Poetics of Postmodernism (London: Associated UP, 1992), 108-09; and Jane
Campbell, A. S. Byatt and the Heliotropic Imagination (Waterloo, Ontario: Wilfred
Laurier UP, 2004), 111; Jackie Buxton, "What's Love Got to Do with It," in Essays
on the Fiction of A. S. Byatt, ed. Alexa Alfer and Michael J. Noble (Westport, CT:
Greenwood P, 2001), 93; and Kate Flint, "Plotting the Victorians: Narrative, Post-
Modernism, and Contemporary Fiction," in Writing and Victorianism, ed. J. B.
Bullen (London: Longman, 1997), 288.
368 Afterlife of Victorian Sexuality

history. But the most cursory reading of Sir Walter Scott,

William Makepeace Thackeray's Henry Esmond (1852),
George Eliot's Romola (1863), and Leo Tolstoy's War and
Peace (1869) will show that it is almost constitutive of the
nineteenth-century historical novel to have fictional
characters play roles in historical events and interact with
famous historical personages. Moreover, these novels were,
as I said, frequently narrated by a contemporaneous
narrator, looking backward (Henry Esmond's re-creation of
an eigbteentb-century narrator was a commented upon
exception).
As for narrative intrusion itself, Walter Allen pointed out
wben The French Lieutenant's Woman first appeared tbat
critics wbo insisted on tbe experimental quality of tbose
intrusions seem never to bave read a nineteentb-century
novel.^ And one attempt to refute Allen by noting tbe
different ends of omniscience in Fowles and his forebears
only makes matters worse: "The Victorians believed that the
created world was perfectly ordered; that it was continuously
watched over by an all-knowing Providence; that not even a
sparrow fell without God's acquiescence and knowledge. The
godlike narrator of Victorian fiction was built on similar
premises." It is hard to square this statement with a
Victorian intellectual history cognizant of the beliefs even of
Victorian theists, much less aware of Charles Darwin,
Matthew Arnold, Eliot, John Stuart Mill, and Hardy (the list
could go on and on). And, even if we distinguish between
Victorian narrators and Victorian writers, Victorian
omniscient narrators hardly manifested any more certainty
about a moral order to the world than their authors would
have. Fowles, of course, does discuss Victorian unbelief (his
protagonist, Charles Smithson, is an agnostic). But he too
(though never Byatt) falls prey to this retrospective
flattening of Victorian intellectual history at times. For
instance, he portentously explains how Darwin did away
with the Linnaean view that the taxonomic categorizations
of life forms corresponded to a natural reality and then

5. Walter Allen, "The Achievement of John Fowles," Encounter 35 (1970): 66.

6. Susan Onega, Form and Meaning in the Novels of John Fowles (Ann Arbor:
UMI Research P, 1989), 79.
Jonathan Loesberg 369

denies that Darwin realized this,^ a claim that one would

think could hardly survive even a first reading of The Origin
of Species, where Darwin explicitly states that, while
systems of classification taken as artificial conveniences are
useful, they should not be considered natural orders.^
Still, even if there is a basis to the pedantic complaints by
Victorianists like me about the ways the novels and their
critics assume their modernity with reductive statements
about Victorians, this historical correction leaves
unexplained the manifest difference between the historical
attitudes and the narrative omniscience of these novels and
of those of their Victorian forebears, the general readerly
sense that the handling of narrative in these books is
pointedly mid- to la te twentieth century and not nineteenth
century in mode. One may offer three linked explanations,
and they will also lead us to the insistently recurring theory
of Victorian repressed sexuality in these novels as
importantly and essentially different, a theory that started,
as we have seen, with the twentieth century and has so far
outlasted it in its fiction. First is what one might call, after
the Jorge Luis Borges story, the Pierre Menard effect. One
will remember that Menard attempted to live such a life as
to enable him, from the twentieth century, to rewrite Don
Quixote. The narrator of the story quotes the same passage
from the Cervantes novel twice. Attributing it to Cervantes,
he writes off its seventeenth-century meditation on history
as merely "rhetorical praise," but attributing it to Menard,
in the twentieth century, he finds it new and "s: aggering."^
In the same way, although intrusive narration drawing
historical conclusions based on the fiction it presents was not
novel among Victorian writers, nor was the use of it naive,
certainly when The French Lieutenant's Woman appeared,
when Henry James's reaction to nineteenth-century
narration still constrained the workings of third-person
omniscient narrative, it would have seemed, against that
more recent background, a startling departure. Second, the

7. John Fowles, The French Lieutenant's Woman (New York: Signet, 1970), 45.
Hereafter cited parenthetically.
8. See the opening of chapter 14, on classification, in Charles Darwin, The
Origin of Species and The Descent of Man (New York: Modern Library, 1936).
9. Jorge Luis Borges, Collected Fictions, trans. Andrew Hurley (New York:
Viking, 1998), 94.
370 Afterlife of Victorian Sexuality

content of the intrusions in both novels, Fowles's insistent

and footnoted use of contemporaneous Victorian studies and
Byatt's references to the various literary critical currents
surrounding her contemporary critics as well as her tour de
force re-creations of Victorian poetry, fiction, letters, and
memoirs, make the fact of the intrusions look less Victorian
because, while Victorian narrators interpreted their own
fictions quite explicitly, they did not so consciously insist on
a scholarly or fictively created artifice to their distance, but
simply assumed it. This consciousness of artifice, finally,
leads to a sense that there is an element of pastiche or
parody to the twentieth-century novels. While they do not
seem to parody themselves in any self-consuming way
(Fowles may offer two endings, but be does not parody bis
existential tbemes; Byatt seems to want to write a romance,
not really to undercut ber romance endings), tbe self-
reflexiveness created by tbe relative novelty of tbe tecbnique
and our awareness of tbe anacbronism of its use and tbe
fictive awareness of its own artifice do create tbe aura of a
consideration of fictiveness witbin its own fiction tbat does
verify tbe critical consensus tbat tbese novels are
postmodern bistoriograpby ratber tban just bistorical fiction.
And yet, in eacb case, as we will see, tbis reflexiveness
does not manage to acbieve by itself tbe form of freedom tbe
autbor wants from it. And it is questionable wbetber it
provides any real departure from a Victorian stake in
ultimate explanation. In Fowles's case, the reflexiveness
does not really buttress tbe problematic version of existential
freedom tbat demands, paradoxically, our assent to our own
essential nature. In Byatt's case, its seeming self-awareness
of tbe traditional, even clicbd, quality of its affirmations
does not, by itself, fund a new ratification of tbose
affirmations. Tbis insufficiency returns us to tbe importance
of eacb fiction's use of tbe tbeory of repression. Altbougb
tbey will seem to contrast in tbeir attitude toward Victorian
sexualityFowles in seeing it as bypocritical and crippling;
Byatt in seeing it as tbe outward manifestation of a greater
openness to autbentic passiontbe essential structure of
their contrast between Victorian and contemporaneous
sexuality remains tbe same. It means to give a basis to tbe
more ephemeral nature of tbe contrast between the Victorian
and contemporary element in their binocular narratives and
Jonathan Loesberg 371
thus a grounding to the various versions of freedom they use
their version of Victorianism to espouse.
The French Lieutenant's Woman brings these meshed
structures and themes to a philosophic high point. Working
out the connection between the novel's postmodern
techniques and its theme of existential freedom will show us
in what ways it is a product of its time, the 1960s, and also
how the theme of Our difference from Victorian sexuality has
a more general grip on twentieth-century consciousness.
Fowles's novel has as an explicit, not to say didactically
insisted on, theme, the endorsement of an existential
freedom.^" It means to highlight that theme by contexting it
in a Victorian period that it depicts as embodying the most
stubborn resistance to that freedom, most particularly in its
sexual repressiveness, which denies the true identity that,
in Sartrean form, we can only be free by accepting. And it
establishes that theme through a particularly inventive
version of the binocular narrative. Rather than explicitly
establishing a present period, the novel uses an ostensibly
Victorian-style omniscient narrator whose omniscience
expresses itself in a relentless, post-Freudian, twentieth-
century analysis of Victorian mores. If the theme and the
definition of Victorian sexuality seem to come most directly
from the period of the 1960s, this suitability gives the
narrator the advantage of being able to use contemporaneous
Victorian critical research to buttress his attitudes. In his
footnotes and interjections, the narrator might well have
cited, for instance, Marcus's famous work on Victorian
pornography, The Other Victorians.^^

10. Fowles has stated that his aim was "to show an existentialist awareness
before it was chronologically possible," qtd. in Barry N. Olshen, John Fowles (New
York: Frederick Ungar, 1978), 72. Most readings of the novel at least note the
theme. Explicit working out of it occurs, for instance, in Katherine Tarbox, The Art
of John Fowles (Athens: U of Georgia P, 1988), 59-86, and in John V. Hagopian,
"Bad Faith in The French Lieutenant's Woman," Contemporary Literature 23
(Spring 1982): 191-201.
11. Marcus's study. The Other Victorians: A Study of Sexuality and Pornography
in Mid-Nineteenth-Century England (New York: Basic Books, 1966), has been
immensely influential, but it has never been universally praised, perhaps because
of a patronizing attitude toward its subjects and an assurance of its own state of
knowledge that has not worn well. And Fowles's narrator certainly shares this
assurance of his own greater knowledge.
372 Afterlife of Victorian Sexuality

Almost all criticism of the novel begins with and

documents Fowles's concern with existential freedom.
Simply to establish the concern here, I will cite one of the
more famous moments in the novel, the one in which,
through Sarah Woodruff, the novel declares its theme, a
declaration that has the added value of opening itself to
Foucault's criticism of existentialism that aligns with his
criticism of the repressive theory of Victorian sexuality and,
thus, explicates the connection between the two concerns.
Sarah, in a scene as incompletely motivated as is Fanny's
question to Warbeck about his favorite feature of the local
church, tells her "story" to the novel's protagonist, Charles
Smithson. And, as in that earlier novel, the lack of narrative
motivation signals thematic declaration. Having earlier
explained that her peculiar background destines her to
remain childless and unmarried, an outcast in Victorian
society, Sarah then explains her decision to become the
mistress of the French lieutenant by depicting it as an
authentic embrace of her situation:
I did it so that I should never be the same again. I did it so that
people should point at me, should say, there walks the French
Lieutenant's Whore . . . . If I had left that man and returned to
Mrs. Talbot's, and resumed my former existence, I know that by
now I should be truly dead . . . and by my own hand. What kept
me alive was my shame, my knowing that I am truly not like
other women. I shall never have children, a husband, and those
innocent happinesses they have. And they will never understand
the reason for my crime . . . . Sometimes I almost pity them. I
think I have a freedom they cannot understand. (142, emphasis
in original)
And a couple of pages later, she explains her concealing the
fact that she has already broken with the French lieutenant
by saying that that allowed her, "To be what I must be. An
outcast" (145).
Foucault's critique of Jean-Paul Sartre's concept of
authenticity helps to locate the existential nature of the
freedom Sarah seeks and its oddly constraining nature:
"From a theoretical point of view, I think that Sartre sets
aside the idea of self as something we are given, but because
of the notion of moral authenticity, he falls back on the idea
that one must be oneself and truly oneself. In my opinion,
the only practical and acceptable consequence of what Sartre
has said is to tie his theoretical discovery to creative practice
Jonathan Loesberg 373

and not to moral authenticity."^^ According to the criterion of

authenticity, we only act freely when, in full consciousness,
we accept our being and choose to act according to its
dictates. Prior to our conscious acceptance, we act according
to our being as a matter of constraint. Choosing to resist our
being is less freedom than reaction. Thus Sarah, in accepting
her outcast nature as a matter of constraint, because she
must "be what I must be," nevertheless experiences a
freedom she thinks belongs to no one else around her.'^^
Foucault's complaint about Sartre, that after setting aside
the notion of the self, he oddly reestablishes it with the
concept of an authenticity that entails acting in accord with
that self, also captures why both Sarah and, ultimately,
Charles must find their freedom through choices they
experience as painful rather than liberating, through an
acceptance of their separation from their society. If Sarah
carries Fowles's message of freedom, the figure who must
discover its value and its pain is Charles, an aristocrat who,
in the course of the novel, will have his expectations of a title
stripped away from him, will break a respectable and
enriching engagement that promises an emotionally and
economically comfortable life, and will, by a settlement over
the broken engagement, be disenabled from any further
marriage in Victorian society, all connected with an explicit
discovery of anti-Victorian freedom releasing him from the
expectations of his society (285-86).
The intrusive narrator reinforces the ambiguities of the
novel's theme in a particularly self-contradictory way when
he both recognizes the characters as fictive and insists that
he lets his characters act freely:

12. Michel Foucault, Dits et Ecrits (Sayings and writings) (Paris: Gallimard,
2001), 2:1211, my translation.
13. There is also an aura ahout existential freedom that it is tied to solitariness.
Thus Sarah's freedom is tied to accepting her outcastness. And thus most critics
believe, contra Fowles's own insistence, that the second ending, in which Charles
and Sarah separate so that Charles, like Sarah, has become free also in his social
separation, is the true ending. See, for instance, Onega, Form and Meaning in the
Novels of John Fowles, 89-90. Note also Peter Conradi's comment, "For Fowles as
for Sartre existential truth is always in inverse proportion to social integration," in
"The French Lieutenant's Woman: Novel, Screenplay, Film," Critical Quarterly 24
(Spring 1982): 44-45.
374 Afterlife of Victorian Sexuality

In other words, to be free myself, I must give [Charles], and

Tina, and Sarah, even the abominable Mrs. Poulteney, their
freedom as well. There is only one good definition of God: the
freedom that allows other freedoms to exist. And I must conform
to that definition.
The novelist is still a god, since he creates (and not even the
most aleatory avant-garde modern novel has managed to
extirpate its author completely): what has changed is that we are
no longer the gods ofthe Victorian image, with freedom our first
principle, rather than authority. (82)
Fowles prefaces this statement by his insistence that his
characters have started to take on their own life and thus
move according to their own lights and not his intentions. In
order to capture the aesthetic intelligence of this passage, we
must first note its various absurdities. It is, first, not true
that authors coming to see their characters as human
enough to seem to be independent of their author's
intentions for them is a peculiarly postmodern technique.
Nineteenth-century realist authors frequently commented on
how their characters became so real that they moved beyond
authorial control.^* They rarely made such claims within
their fiction, however, because, in order to maintain the
illusion that their characters made their own decisions, they
did not tend to admit that their novels were fiction. The
Victorian omniscient narrator, not having created the novel's
world (in contrast to the author), literally could not control
the actions of its characters. Indeed, J. Hillis Miller defines
the form of Victorian fiction partially in terms of its artifice
of a narrator who knows the subjectivities of characters
whom he or she, nevertheless, did not create and does not
control. ^^
Second, the Victorian artifice of a narrator who sees
omnisciently a world nevertheless independent of himself
recognizes an inescapable ontological reality, which is that
fictively created characters cannot act freely. Dickens and
Eliot do not refer to their characters as their own creations

14. For instance, Dickens said about Fagin while he was writing Oliver Twist
(1838), that he "is such an out and outer, that I don't know what to make of him,"
in Edgar Johnson, Charles Dickens: His Triumph and Tragedy (New York: Simon
and Schuster, 1952), 1:222, a statement that asserts the same ignorance of who his
character is that Fowles proclaims about Sarah, probably with less irony.
15. J. Hillis Miller, The Form of Victorian Fiction (Notre Dame: U of Notre Dame
P, 1968), 11, 64-65.
Jonathan Loesberg 375

because, as sucb creations, tbose cbaracters can never be

free but can only be created, fictive cbaracters, no matter
how much the author protests to the contrary. When
Thackeray's narrator in Vanity Fair (1848), in an early
exception to Miller's definition, refers to bis characters as his
own creations, he also famously recognizes that, as such,
they are puppets. Thus, at the moment that Fowles's
narrator ostentatiously grants his characters their freedom,
he immediately makes his reader aware that they have none.
And so this intrusion can oddly coexist with others in which
the narrator pointedly exercises his control over Charles in
particular or asserts two endings to the novel because he
cannot decide which he prefers and decides their order by a
fictive coin toss. The postmodern novelist does not extirpate
the author but magnifies him in making fictiveness part of
the fictive world of the novel. So Fowles's narrator appears
in the novel, creates two different ends for his characters
(neither of which, he insists, is more likely than the other),
and shows us his magic manipulation of time.
Finally, while it may be an ethical principle that, in order
to be free ourselves, we must grant other human beings their
freedom, it is hard to see how that ethical requirement
extends to fictive characters. The famous Kantian demand
that we must treat human beings as tbeir own ends and not
as mere instruments of our ends, to wbicb Fowles's claim
owes a clear debt, does not obviously apply to cbaracters in
fiction. And yet the very absurdity of Fowles's claim, taken
witb any seriousness, precisely justifies tbe use of Victorian
cbaracters to outline a pbilosophically anachronistic picture
of existential freedom. Just as we know why fictive
characters cannot be free, even as we can imagine tbeir
autbor emancipating tbem, we can experience more strongly
tbe learning of freedom by cbaracters most unsuited to be
able to know it because of tbe very strengtb of tbe
constraints tbat bold tbem. Even tbe contradiction between
tbe postmodern tecbnique tbat insists on tbe fictiveness of
tbe cbaracters and tbe use of tbat tecbnique to assert tbeir
nonfictive freedom manifests tbe same contradiction in tbe
concept of an existential freedom tbat begins in accepting a
constraining authenticity and outcast state.
The resolution to this contradiction comes with Fowles's
enlistment of the repressive theory of Victorian sexuality
botb to capture Cbarles and to create a patb for bis freedom.
376 Afterlife of Victorian Sexuality

And, although Fowles gives his critique of the constraint of

Victorian society and its moral inauthenticity a
comprehensiveness that captures many of the intellectual
features of the age in terms that Victorian literary critics
contemporary with him might have used, his most relentless
figure for constraint is Victorian repressed sexuality. The
crux of the plot, after all, is that Charles will be forced into
freedom by an attraction to Sarah that he can neither fully
understand nor fully resist. He cannot fully understand it
because, even though she teaches him to see his engagement
and future life as "a fixed voyage to a known place," and thus
"a deprivation" (107), he finds "incomprehensible" her
explanation of her own actions, of marrying shame, as she
puts it (143). He cannot resist the attraction because, since
he will not admit its sexual element, according to the logic of
the return of the repressed, he must be under its thrall in a
more powerful way. Thus the narrator describes the
pleasures of voyeurism Charles experiences in hearing
Sarah's confession and then comments on the effect of the
fact that Charles cannot recognize this aspect of his
experience: "Such a sudden shift of sexual key is impossible
today. A man and a woman are no sooner in any but the
most casual contact than they consider the possibility of a
physical relationship. We consider such frankness about the
real drives of human behavior healthy, but in Charles's time
private minds did not admit the desires banned by the public
mind; and when the consciousness was sprung on by these
lurking tigers it was ludicrously unprepared" (143). And, at
its end, the novel embodies Sarah's freedom from her society
in her living in Dante Gabriel Rossetti's home, depicted as a
sanctuary from Victorian sexual hypocrisy, frequented by
Algernon Swinburne and thus sexually free, visited by John
Ruskin who discusses art with Rossetti and thus an
aesthetic space, as if the two are intrinsically connected.
When Charles, after having made love to Sarah, wakes up
with blood on his nightshirt and realizes, melodramatically,
that he "had forced a virgin" (277), we can see both how the
ostensible Victorian fear of sex and our sense of the freedom
an acceptance of its hold on our identity gives seem almost
to have been the subject of Foucault's parody of talking
genitals (and we will see this image recur, to different ends
but with the same Foucaultian effect, in Possession). By
testifying to Sarah's virginity, the genital bleeding seems
Jonathan Loesberg 377

also to testify to an earlier lie and immediately leads to a

conversation that will ultimately end in Charles's ostensible
throwing off of the chains of his age. Charles wonders why
Sarah would lie to him about her virginity and immediately
assumes a situation of sexual blackmail. This guess seems to
be confirmed when he realizes that she has feigned the limp
that allowed easier physical contact upon their meeting. At
this point, Sarah makes this interpretation of her action
impossible by stating her love for Charles and her
determination that this meeting be their last. One should
recognize that this dialogue can only occur in the light of her
virginity. Without it, because of her Victorian fallenness, the
act of sex cannot threaten blackmail and so, oddly, can only
have been an expression of desire. With it, both Sarah's
motivations and the nature of her desire for Charleswhich
are often the same thing in the novelcome into question, a
question whose answer in the next chapter will be Charles's
acceptance both of his desire for her and of his freedom from
Victorian constraint. Thus the fact of repression causing
sudden, uncomprehended sexual activity sets off a colloquy
about sexual identity and its implications, in which one of
the participants is Foucault's talking "jewels," the result of
which is the suitably contradictory freedom discussed above,
manifest in the impossibly contradictory assertion of an
unfictive freedom for characters so obviously being
manipulated toward fictive ends.^^ Foucault's claim that our
belief in the truth of sex ties us to Victorian ideas about the
truth of identity also gains credence here, given that the role
of narrative climax, so to speak, is fully nineteenth century.
And, finally, the binocular narrative connects all themes
of freedom and the recognizing of one's sexual identity
together, this time not only in its commentary from the
present period on Victorian sexuality, but in its commentary
on its own fictive procedure. Much of the narrative explicitly
comments on the Victorian setting in a way, as we have seen,
at once reminiscent of the omniscient, philosophically
allusive narrators of Eliot and Hardy, but also from the
perspective of an informed, contemporary, cultural critic.
Much of the above reading is only possible via the

16. In this context, it is perhaps pertinent to note Conradi's comment that Fowles
depicts "two Victorians making love . . . as though it were the primal scene itself
(41).
378 Afterlife of Victorian Sexuality

commentary of that narrator who not only tells us what

Charles thinks, but also compares his thoughts to twentieth-
century attitudes to indicate their evasions and repressions.
And certainly, the generalizations about Victorian sexuality
are insistent. Thus, describing a moment in which Charles's
fiance, Ernestina (surely a loaded nameto Fowles at least,
it is important that she be Ernestina), shrinks from a
momentary sexual thought, the narrator again turns to
Alfred Lord Tennyson, in a footnote no less, to generalize the
situation: "surely the oddest of all the odd arguments in that
celebrated anthology of after-life anxiety is stated in this
poem (xxxv). To claim that love can only be Satyr-shaped if
there is no immortality of the soul is clearly a panic flight
from Freud" (29-30). Since Fowles expressed some
antagonism to Freudian psychology in his prior novel. The
Magus (1965), Sigmund Freud seems to stand here merely
for sexual self-awareness. In any case, the narrator
establishes the sexual constraint of his characters and the
freer analysis of our own age. It may not be irrelevant that
he also indicates our remaining homophobia when he claims
that lesbianism among the Victorians was limited only to
"the most brutish of the urban poor" or "the most
emancipated of the aristocracy" (130). Foucault's argument
against both authenticity and contemporary notions of open
sexuality is that the one as much as the other created
identities to trap us rather than to liberate us. And one
symptom of that entrapment was the creation of the
homosexual as an identity in the nineteenth century. ^^
Fowles may be post-Freudian in his willingness to talk
explicitly about sexuality, but he is Victorian in his sense of
the mystery and inescapability of identity.
Before moving on to a discussion of what Possession does
with sex and the Victorians, we need to hesitate briefly over
the film version of The French Lieutenant's Woman because
the shifts it makes from the novel to accommodate the effects
of its narrator form part of the transition between the two
novels. In the place of the novel's intrusively contemporary
narrator, who calls attention to our difference from the
subjects of the novel, the film offers dual plots, a
contemporary love story juxtaposed against the novel's story

17. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality: Volume 1 an Introduction, trans.

Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage, 1980), 42-43.
Jonathan Loesberg 379

of Sarah and Charles. This revision allows contemporary

comment on the plot ofthe novel in two ways, each of which
elides the necessity for voice-over narration. First, because
the two plots parallel two different love stories, the
contemporary love story may implicitly comment on the
Victorian one. And, second, the characters themselves, who
are, in the contemporary plot, actors playing the roles ofthe
Victorians in a film being made of the novel, may comment
on the motivations of the characters they are playing. The
revision also allows the film to capture the novel's two
endings by giving one to each plot. These are probably the
formal reasons for the invention of this added story, but the
effect of this change is to make the historical fiction not a
comment from the present on the past (a constitutive
element of nineteenth-century historical fiction), but the
spectacle of a contrast present before us. It thus makes the
theme of our difference from the past not a matter of
narrative voice but of plot spectacle. And whether as a
matter of conscious inuence or not. Possession uses this
mode of juxtaposed plot as its version of binocular narrative.
So Possession, following the film version of The French
Lieutenant's Woman, replaces Fowles's intrusive,
contemporaneous author's voice with a contemporary and a
Victorian narrative. The presentation of the Victorian plot
involves more complexity than one might imagine. A film
can present a period drama with the illusion that it depicts
the spectacle ofthe past without intermediary. In the case of
The French Lieutenant's Woman, when the film cuts from the
drama ofthe actors to the drama ofthe novel, even when the
cuts start by reminding us that the scene is acted, the effect
is simply to move from presentation of one drama to
presentation of the other. To eliminate the intermediary of
narrative voice, Byatt first presents the Victorian part of her
plot in terms of contemporaneous letters, diaries, and
poemsand one ofthe most impressive achievements ofthe
novel is its ventriloquism of Victorian writing, both prose
and poetry. Because all of the documents are carefully
contexted in terms of their current discovery by late-
twentieth-century literary scholars, though, while they
present the past without narrative intermediary, they have
the effect of making the reader share the scholarly act of
learning the past through the interpretation of its
documents. And this sense has the odd effect of making the
380 Afterlife of Victorian Sexuality

very few pages tbat narrate tbe past directly seem as if tbey
are giving us a direct access to tbat wbicb cannot any longer
be known by tbe modern cbaracters and is available to tbe
reader only magically.
To an extent. Possession also follows tbe film of The
French Lieutenant's Woman in its interest in contrasting
Victorian and contemporary love dramas. And it makes
clearer tbat film's suggestion tbat tbe Victorian repression
of sex led to deeper passion. In Byatt's novel, tbe Victorian
couple give tbemselves over to a love tbat can only be
transient and tbat in every way tbreatens tbe rest of tbeir
livesand at least determines, if not ruins, tbe subsequent
life of tbe woman. In contrast, tbe modern lovers are beld
apart only by tbeir professional status and tbeir own
uncertainties about commitment. As in tbe past novels, tbis
contrast also operates in tandem witb a contrast between tbe
Victorian social constraints on sex and the lack of those
constraints in the contemporary plot, making more ironic the
lack of connection that threatens the modern characters.
Although Possession can seem far more nostalgic for than
critical of Victorian sexuality, then, the terms of its contrast
are the same, and this is all the more noticeable because tbe
novel makes postmodern literary, psycbological, and feminist
tbeory a matter of direct concern by making its
contemporary cbaracters literary scbolars wbo, we are
supposed to tbink, are saturated in tbat tbeory.
Altbougb tbe novel constantly presents its twentietb-
century cbaracters as tbinking in terms of postmodern
tbeory, its every step works to force tbem to abandon tbat
tbeory or simply stop attending to it. Roland, for instance,
considers a feminist analysis of one of tbe fictive Cbristabel
LaMotte's works, an analysis tbat parodically reads a poem's
landscape as a metapborized woman's body: "Roland laid
aside Leonora Stern witb a small sigb. He bad a vision of tbe
land tbey were to explore, covered witb sucking buman
orifices and knotted buman body-bair. He did not like tbis
vision, and yet, a cbild of bis time, found it compelling,
somebow guaranteed to be significant, as a geological survey
of oolite would not be. Sexuality was like tbick smoked glass:
everytbing took on tbe same blurred vision tbrougb it. He
Jonathan Loesberg 381

could not imagine a pool with stones and water."^^ Although

we immediately see his companion, Maud Bailey, reading a
biography of the other poet, Randolph Ash, with equal
dissatisfaction, every aspect of the book confirms biography
as the real adventure. If Roland is persuaded by Leonora
Stern's vision, he nevertheless, with Maud, sets about
showing how the landscape of a LaMotte poem comes from
a Yorkshire expedition she took with Ash. And the book
depicts the poets' affair as one that will unalterably change
the interpretation of each poet's work. Indeed, while we are
told that Maud and Roland at least are knowledgeably
postmodern about sex and the disparate self, they are an odd
set of postmodernists who not only go off on research of the
most old-fashioned, biographical sort but are sure that their
findings will change readings that one would think have
nothing to do with biographical information.
And, of course, the unlearning of postmodern theory will
extend to and allow their unlearning of the emotional
hesitation that obstructs their relationship for the body of
the narrative. At the end, first Maud Bailey, a feminist and
a literary theorist, will turn to the editing of the texts that
have taught her not only the relationship between LaMotte
and Ash but her own lineage, texts which, however, she feels
are a demonic possession: "I feel they have taken me over"
(548). But then, in direct contradiction to her own feminism,
which has warded off being possessed emotionally in order
to guard a solitude, she will, in a concluding sex scene,
finally submit to the mutual possession that she and Roland
have seen in the past: "Roland finally, to use an outdated
phrase, entered and took possession of all her white coolness
that grew warm against him, so that there seemed to be no
boundaries, and he heard, towards dawn, from a long way
off, her clear voice, crying out, uninhibited, unashamed, in
pleasure and triumph" (550-51).
Given that, unlike both Sadleir and Fowles, Byatt sees her
modernity as wanting precisely where her Victorians are
passionate, one might think that her take on Victorian
sexuality would not follow the general twentieth-century
view of repression. And her impersonations of Victorian
writing show considerably more interest and appreciation for

18. A. S. Byatt, Possession: A Romance (New York: Vintage, 1991), 267-68.

Hereafter cited parenthetically.
382 Afterlife of Victorian Sexuality

the intellectual and aesthetic energy of the literature than

either Sadleir (who simply ignored that aspect of the Victorian
period) or Fowles (who occasionally gestured toward it, but
only grudgingly) exhibit. Still, though her evaluations oppose
those of Fowles, her depictions of a contrast between Victorian
constraint and modern openness remain the same. We see
precisely the power of the passion in Possession in terms of the
constraints it must overcome. Thus, for instance, in one of the
few Victorian scenes narrated by the third-person narrator,
rather than seen through diary or memoir, we see Ash and
LaMotte determining what their relationship will be on the
trip in language that is powerful exactly for how careful and
formal it is:
"We are travelling together," [Ash] said. "We decidedyou
decidedto come. What I do not know is whether you would
wishwhether you should chooseto lodge and manage yourself
separately from me after this pointor whetheror whether
you would wish to travel as my wife. It is a large step . . . ."
"I want to be with you," she said. "I took a vast step. If it is
taken, it is taken. I am quite happy to be called your wife,
wherever you choose, for this time. That is what I had understood
Iwehad decided." (299-300)
It is striking how many times Ash and LaMotte have to
declare intentions explicitly precisely because decorum
assumes that no act, by itself, entails presumption of
physical intimacy, and then the intentions must be declared
through decorous language that makes the act of choice all
that much more striking.
I will return to Byatt's seeming revaluation of Victorian
sexuality and its connection with Fowles and, finally,
Foucault in a moment, but first I want to raise the larger
issue of Byatt's connection with postmodernism since her
conscious awareness of postmodernism, both as a literary
technique and as a literary theoretical movement, would
seem to preclude any easy reading of an adherence to older
views of Victorian sexuality as in any way a formal necessity
rather than a conscious choice. Although the critics argue
over whether the work is postmodern or in conscious
antagonism to postmodernism, the features at issue are
generally clear and not in dispute.^ On the one hand, the

19. The strongest argument in favor of the novel as postmodern in technique and
theme is in Catherine Belsey, "Postmodern Love: Questioning the Metaphysics of
Jonathan Loesberg 383

novel, in its plot concerning literary critics who interpret

past texts to find the truth of their present, thus
foregrounding the reader's own experience, clearly plays
with postmodern refiexive techniques. Further, regardless of
the novel's outcome, the contemporary characters show an
awareness of contemporary literary theory and, with regard
to the issue of desire, of Jacques Lacan in particular,
although he is not named, as well as of French feminism and
deconstruction. And Byatt has testified to the intensity and
pleasure with which she has read theory.^" Finally, though
the novel parodies, in Leonora Stern, a certain style of
feminism, it can certainly be argued tbat it shows a
sympathy with the desires of its women characters, centrally
Christabel LaMotte and Maud Bailey, not to be constrained
by male constructions.^^
On the other hand, in addition to what seems to be the
significance of the dual plots in their affirmation of a
commitment to passion that forces the contemporary
characters to put their theoretically induced hesitancy about
relationship aside, we have a number of affirmations within
and outside the novel of an antipathy to both postmodern
fiction and theory in favor of older values. First, one may
observe that Byatt has noted her awareness of Fowles and
her dislike of what she takes to be the artificiality and
"paperiness" of The French Lieutenant's Woman?"^ This
response is buttressed not merely by the frequently noted
realism of the novel but even by the connected ethos in its
near explicit statement of a George Eliot affirmation of the

Desire," New Literary History 25 (Summer 1994); 683-705. Probably the strongest
argument against is Louise Yellin, "Cultural Cartography: A. S. Byatt's Possession
and the Politics of Victorian Studies," Victorian Newsletter 81 (Spring 1992): 38-41.
In between, one may find positions that in different ways deal with the conflicting
features I will discuss: see Buxton, "What's Love Got to Do with It"; Campbell, A. S.
Byatt and the Heliotropic Imagination; Flint, "Plotting the Victorians"; Kelly A.
Marsh, "The Neo-Sensation Novel," PQ 74 (1995): 99-125; and Dana Shiller, "The
Redemptive Past in the Neo-Victorian Novel," Studies in the Novel 29 (1997): 538-
60.
20. See Christine Franken, A. S. Byatt: Art. Authorship, Creativity (New York:
Palgrave, 2001), 92.
21. The most extensive feminist reading of the novel is in Campbell, A. S. Byatt
and the Heliotropic Imagination, 107-46.
22. See Campbell, A. S. Byatt and the Heliotropic Imagination, 138; and Flint,
"Plotting the Victorians," 299.
384 Afterlife of Victorian Sexuality

quotidian in introducing a "Postscript" that critics frequently

take as a postmodern irony: "There are things that happen
and leave no discernable trace, are not spoken of or written
of, though it would be very wrong to say that subsequent
events go on indifferently, all the same, as though such
things had never been" (552). This seems almost an allusion
to the conclusion in Middlemarch (1871-72) about the value
of Dorothea's life: "the growing good of the world is partly
dependent on unhistoric acts" (896).^^ And finally, even at
the level of the kind of literary reading it affirms, the novel
is notably old-fashioned. First, as we have seen, all the
critics in the novel (even Leonora Stern!) implicitly or
explicitly affirm that the readings of Ash's and LaMotte's
poetical texts will have to be revised in the light of their
having had a relationship: can one really imagine a critic
who has argued for the sexual element of landscape
description giving that up for a connection to Yorkshire
because of a proof that the poet had been to Yorkshire? But,
moreover, the actual readings of poetry in the novel seem
relentlessly biographical. Most noticeably, Maud, in one of
the few moments of a creative interpretation that the novel
does not satirize, reads a poem about LaMotte's dolls, which
Maud, up to that time, had taken symbolically, as one could
hardly not do, as revealing to her where to find the hidden
correspondence between her and Ash. This reading goes
beyond an assent to biographical relevance to a reading of
poetry as coded biographical information, a way of finding
out events in a poet's life. Poetry can work like that, but
most readers of poetry, much less post-New Critical
academic readers, do not think that way. Such readings
attest to a positively ancient faith that, in addition to being
read and interpreted, texts can be decoded for arcane
revelations.

23. Shiller, "The Redemptive Past in the Neo-Victorian Novel," 540-42, discusses
parallels between Possession and Middlemarch and also notices this echo. My only
complaint with her reading is her definition of Middlemarch as a historical novel.
Eliot at least would not have thought it so. The typicality with which Victorian
novels are set twenty to thirty years prior to their compositionfor instance. Vanity
Fair (1848), most Dickens novels, and Middlemarchtestifies to a more expansive
notion of presentness among Victorians, which may distinguish them from our
constant sense of having been just separated by a crisis from all history as much as
does their more reticent reference to sex.
Jonathan Loesberg 385

The obvious solution to the conflict between Byatt's beliefs

and her techniques is to take the novel as a postmodern,
ironically aware, affirmation of traditional sentiments and
beliefs as in Umberto Eco's remark that, while we can no
longer say "I love you madly" straight, we can communicate
the same message ironically by saying, "As Barbara
Cartland would put it, I love you madly."^* The problem with
asserting this solution too easily, though, is determining how
easily we can extend the situation in Eco. His example
presumes that the meaning behind "I love you madly"
remains real and constant and that the irony recognizes only
the clich and consequent drift in the sentence that conveys
that meaning. An irony about the reality of the meaning
would obviously change it in important waysat least for
the person to whom the sentence is addressed. But if we take
the ostensibly traditional realist sensibilities o Possession to
be unchanged by Byatt's appropriation of postmodern
awareness to communicate them knowingly, that would turn
those techniques into a pointedly inauthentic ornament.
Catherine Belsey, for instance, has argued that the novel is
thoroughly Lacanian in its figuration of desire.^^ But if the
novel were also Victorian in its evaluation of desire, the
figurations from Lacan hardly become meaningful as an
evaluation of its awareness. The solution to this problem
again comes with the novel's interest not merely in Victorian
love but in Victorian sexuality and the necessity ofthat topic
to the novel's sense of how we may move through our
theoretical hesitancies to an openness to passion and
possession.
And so we return to Byatt's seeming revaluation of the
interpretation of Victorian sexuality that Fowles shares with
Marcus. For Byatt, as we have seen, far from a dangerous
entrapment, Victorian sexual reserve entailed that
relationships, when they occurred, demanded greater and
more rewarding emotional commitment. The fear of being
possessed carries with it a dream, shared by Roland and
Maud, of "an empty clean bed in an empty clean room"
(290), a dream that they both recognize represents a kind of

24. I take both the reference to Eco and the significance for Possession drawn
from it from Buxton, "What's Love Got to Do with It," 89, 102-03.
25. Belsey, "Postmodern Love," 696.
386 Afterlife of Victorian Sexuality
exhaustion. In fact, this claim to greater Victorian openness
to passion not only has all the same features as Fowles's and
Marcus's theory^Victorian reticence if not repression
contrasted with contemporary garrulousness if not
opennessFowles could even be said to have shared it up to
a point. In a chapter that begins with a discussion of
Victorian hypocrisy about sexuality, Fowles goes on to insist
that Victorians' repression and hypocrisy did not entail less
intensity of experience or less passion. He starts by saying
that it was a period "where it was universally maintained
that women do not have orgasms; and yet every prostitute
was taught to simulate one" (212). But he goes on to insist
that the Victorians were "as highly sexed" as we are and that
"there is another common error: of equating a high degree of
sexual ignorance with a low degree of sexual pleasure. I have
no doubt that when Charles's and Sarah's lips touched, very
little amatory skill was shown on either side; but I would not
deduce any lack of sexual excitement from that" (213).
Indeed, Fowles's interest in repression and Byatt's in passion
are linked. For Fowles, Victorian sexuality could not be a
figure for a construction that enforces inauthenticity unless
that construction exerted extreme power. In the same way,
for Byatt, Victorian sexuality could not figure the ability to
give oneself away if it did not also figure the risks and
dangers of such passion that made it valuable. The constant
truth that allows recapturing in ironic rephrasing in
Possession is the truth constant to sex, desire, and passion
that Ash and LaMotte figure and that Roland and Maud
must rediscover.
The insistence on this essence has some odd consequences
in both books. First there is a clearly unconscious re-creation
of Victorian gender complementarity that Fowles explicitly
disputes and that Byatt surely does not mean to endorse.
And yet Sarah is the most mysterious and rebellious figure
in The French Lieutenant's Woman, just as LaMotte is the
most mysterious and heroic figure in Possession. The reason
for their greater mysteriousness and power is not really that
the novels tell us less about the subjectivity of these
characters, I think. Certainly we hear a lot from LaMotte.
Rather, we presume that the desire ofthe men does not need
explanation but that the desire ofthe women, confronting as
it does the force of so much social obstruction, must have
some extraordinary explanation so, in Sarah's case, we have
Jonathan Loesberg 387
only conflicting bistories and, in LaMotte's, texts tbat seem
less tban fully relevatory.^^ Women in botb novels enact tbe
most courageous choices precisely because their authors
assume their desire does not go without saying. While
neither Fowles nor Byatt think of women as without sexual
desire, as we sometimes construe the Victorians as thinking,
both authors emplot their novels as if women's sexual
choices differ from those of men in kind, and not merely as
a matter of social context and expectation.
And this brings us to two more consequences and a return
to Foucault. The first is another instance of signifying
genitals, and although the signifier is the same in Possession
as in The French Lieutenant's Woman, the signified is
somewhat different. Ash awakens with the telltale stains
that seem always to mean only virginity in the first instance
but then to carry different implications: "In the morning,
washing, he found traces of blood on his thighs. He had
thought, the ultimate things, she did not know, and here was
ancient proof. He stood, sponge in hand, and puzzled over
her. Such delicate skills, such informed desire, and yet a
virgin. There were possibilities, of which the most obvious
was to him slightly repugnant, and then, when he thought
about it with determination, interesting too" (509, emphasis
in original). Some critics have asserted that the novel is
silent or ambiguous about LaMotte's relationship with
Blanche Glover.^^ But even assuming their living
arrangement and Glover's jealousy over Ash are not enough
to establish a romantic friendship, without regard to sexual
contact, this passage, marking LaMotte's physical intactness
combined with her sexual experience, draws the conclusion
fairly clearly that LaMotte's and Glover's relationship was
sexual even in Ash's mind. And while LaMotte's virginity
does not lead to the central dialogue that Sarah's does, it
communicates to the reader the significance of what LaMotte
has chosen, to her at least. It also owes some of its force to a
not entirely residual homophobia, of which we saw traces in
Fowles. The passage has the distinct traces of the

26. So Belsey claims that "what is silent, despite Christabel's textual prolixity,
is the desire of women" (695). But this is only true if we assume that Ash's desire
needs no deeper explanation than its existence.
27. See for instance Buxton, "What's Love Got to Do with It," 101-02; and
Campbell, A. S. Byatt and the Heliotropic Imagination, 121.
388 Afterlife of Victorian Sexuality

pornographic narrative in which earlier female lesbian

dalliance, presented for male pleasure, is construed as
preparatory to the more serious heterosexual experience that
follows.
One cannot say, in either novel, that the fact of either
Sarah's or LaMotte's virginity was necessary to their
respective plots. And I expect that neither Fowles nor Byatt
intended homophobia in the passages I quote in support of
my claim of its presence. One can say, I think, that in novels
that mean to find a truth about human beings in their
sexuality, the discovery of virginity at a key narrative
moment has the force of finding out something important
about the beings ofthe female characters and, of course, the
strangeness of this codification of the physical as the
psychological is precisely what Foucault meant to suggest
was a strange idea in his comedy ofthe talking genitals. The
almost casual homophobia follows, as he suggests, according
to the logic by which sexual preference becomes internal
state. The interest in its appearance has nothing to do with
diagnosing the authors of those novels (unlike Roland and
Maud, I am not on a chase for biographical truth) and
everything to do with marking how important the repressive
theory of Victorian sexuality to which it is attached has to do
with the sense of modernity and postmodernity in those
novels.
The lens of Foucault brings into focus one last aspect of
my argument. One might imagine that my skepticism at the
narrative of sexual liberation entailed either a claim that the
Victorians were no less open to sexual passion than we are
or that we are really as repressed as they. Certainly the
former claim is part of Byatt's theme. But each of these
ostensibly corrective readings of mid-twentieth-century
accounts of sexual liberation still depends on the prior
contrast between Victorian reticence and modern openness.
Foucault's critique stipulates that contrast and argues a
common ground between the Victorians and we other
Victorians in a belief that sexual activity structures
psychological identity. This is the belief in Sadleir's desire to
be free of all that, Fowles's sense that understanding
sexuality allows a comprehension of authenticity, and
Byatt's desire, through postmodern, ironic awareness, to
recapture the values of traditional romanceand perhaps
traditional literary criticism.
Jonathan Loesberg 389
Foucault's theory that twentieth-century sexual
psychology and nineteenth-century sexual repression are
versions of the same would have done Byatt no good since it
does not authorize the nostalgia o Possession. Foucault does
show, though, that positive or negative evaluations of
contrast do not change the terms of the contrast. And
contrast is the essence of a historical novel using the past to
comment on our present. Thus Byatt quotes Nathaniel
Hawthorne in an epigraph: "The point of view in which this
tale comes under Romantic definition lies in the attempt to
connect a bygone time with the very present that is flitting
away from us." Victorians are for us, among other things, but
importantly, their sexuality, and so historical novels about
our sexuality will choose that period as one of difference and
the difference can only be one, the meaning of the fact that
we do talk about what they did not. We can see the grip this
theory has on us in its persistence. It appears prior to its
first complete critical utterance in the 1960s, lasts through
that utterance, and survives beyond it in a determined
restatement in an explicitly postmodern context.
American University
Washington, DC