Victorian Honeymoons: Sexual Reorientations and the "Sights" of Europe

This paper, which ends with a discussion of some heterosexual couples' experiences while honeymooning in the Swiss Alps, begins with the observation of a self-identified homosexual man who, it seems, made a deliberate choice to avoid Switzerland as the site of his wedding journey with his wife. Looking back on his honeymoon in his Memoir, John Addington Symonds stepped back from the narrative of his complex sexual identifications to make a more general point about Victorian erotic culture:

Truly we civilized people of the nineteenth century are more backward than the African savages in all that concerns this most important fact of human life. We allow young men and women to contract permanent relations involving sex, designed for procreation, without instructing them in the elementary science of sexual physiology. We do all that lies in us to keep them chaste, to develop and refine their sense of shame, while we leave them to imagine what they like about the nuptial connection. Then we fling them naked into bed together, modest, alike ignorant, mutually embarrassed by the awkward situation, trusting that they will blunder on the truth by instinct. We forget that this is a dangerous test of their affection and their self- respect; all the more dangerous in proportion as they are highly cultivated, refined and sensitive. (157-58)

I begin with Symonds, not because he is a "typical" Victorian honeymooner, whatever that might mean, but precisely because his self-situation with respect to normative modes of Victorian sexuality can help us both to defamiliarize those norms and to feel anew its familiar pressures. Symonds, who throughout his life saw himself as primarily attracted to men, and who in his later years was to make male homosexual relations the topic of his research and autobiographical writing, might seem an odd--even a perverse--choice for initiating a discussion of the Victorian honeymoon. What his experience and his own analysis of it allow us to see, however, is the cultural work performed by the ideal Victorian honeymoon, by the ideal of the honeymoon: its heterosexualizing imperative, its work of what I will be calling "reorientation," even for couples who approximated its canonical sentiments more closely than Symonds was willing and, in his terms, able to do.

The work of reorientation is laid bare by the language of instruction and acculturation that characterizes the passage from Symonds. Such language is particularly remarkable because of Symonds's own conflicting uses of the word "natural" with respect to his sexuality. Symonds, for instance, was at once able to make fun of his "innocence" in thinking that his decision to marry would take care of "the necessity of growing into a natural man" (135) and to refer unironically to the "superior naturalness and coolness" of his first heterosexual passion. His strong, if intermittent, sense that men and women could and should be educated into conventional sexuality foregrounds the honeymoon as the privileged scene of instruction.

The Symondses' honeymoon is also instructive with respect to another important trope of reorientation: the rich and pervasive lexicon of place. Again, Symonds's experiences gesture obliquely, if topically, to a powerful norm. A lifelong lover of the Alps who associated the mountain scenery with his first heterosexual romance with a Swiss girl named Rosa as well as with his later engagement to Catherine North, a man who was to be instrumental in popularizing the Alps as a winter resort for British invalids, Symonds went against the habits of his class and his own habits of place to take his honeymoon in Brighton. His daughter Margaret, writing from their eventual home in the Alpine resort of Davos Platz, remarks the oddness of this choice: "[T]hey did not go to the Alps which both of them loved so dearly; they did not even go to Italy--they went for some quite unimaginable reason to Brighton" (86). In Margaret Symonds's bowdlerized account of her father's life, many reasons...