Past, Present, and Pornography

Early on in The Other Victorians: A Study of Sexuality and Pornography in Mid-Nineteenth Century England (1966), Steven Marcus lays down a marker of methodological principle with the declaration that he will not “play the easy game of ‘showing up the past,’” a statement that raises the question of what relationship between present and past he is suggesting instead (12–13). One possibility arrives via a book that Marcus influenced, and that has in many respects come to overshadow his own: Michel Foucault’s first volume of The History of Sexuality (1976). From its opening sentence invoking how “the story goes” (or has gone up to now) (3), Foucault’s introductory chapter “We ‘Other Victorians’” details what he terms “the speaker’s benefit” that typically accrues when we “show up” the past: if we can continue to view the past as repressive, deluded, or hypocritical, we can pat ourselves on the back for being bold, truthful, and liberated—the other of those Victorians (6). Marcus figured pornography as a contemporary “other” to the Victorian mainstream and, in interesting ways, to the canonical Victorian novel; we might want to ask, though, what Foucault meant by positioning us as those “other Victorians.” Do our ways of thinking and talking about sex align with Victorian pornography, running against or alongside more dominant images of the period? Or are “we” simply more “Victorian” than we like to allow—in which case, do we show up the present, or compliment the past for being a lot more modern than we usually admit?

I pose these questions not only to get at the complicated relationship in Marcus between past (or pasts: the Victorian one and its contemporary other) and present (or presents: that of the early 1960s and today), but also to think through the relationship between his text and Foucault’s. When I wrote The Victorians in the Rearview Mirror (2007), I placed what now seems to me an undue emphasis on the notion of otherness, suggesting that figuring pornography as a Victorian subcultural underground shared with other recovery projects a desire to isolate some progressive element in the past that might have gone largely unnoticed at the time. In that reading, far from “showing up the past,” Marcus was seeking to compliment it by rescuing a nugget of proto-modernity from what E. P. Thompson famously called “the enormous condescension of posterity” (12). Re-reading The Other Victorians now, I’m more struck by how its vision of the past as emergent modernity is offset by a counteracting view of pornography’s otherness as signaled instead—or at the same time—by its regressiveness. Victorian pornography’s forward-looking capacity is best exemplified by Marcus’s reading of My Secret Life (1888), a text he views as evolving a conception of sexuality that is “an end in itself and not merely a means to something” (189); elsewhere, he refers to this as a “significant anticipation of what is generally thought of as the modern, liberal, and liberated conception of sexual morality” (151). In between those two assertions, however, this idea of anticipation gets radically qualified, as My Secret Life is said to represent “the last prepsychological epoch of modern culture” in part because its author is so reluctant to reflect upon his own sexuality. Along the same lines, the work’s “revolutionary” quality (such a loaded term in the 1960s) is called into question because its vision of sexual self-liberation does not extend consistently to its social attitudes (166).

It is not only My Secret Life that emerges from The Other Victorians as Janus-faced—“emergent” and “residual” at the same time, to use Raymond Williams’s terms (121–27). The prodigious output of the pornographer James Campbell Reddie is described in one memorable sentence as “an interesting combination of stale eighteenth-century euphemisms and some kind of mid-Victorian anticipation of Mickey Spillaine,” a formulation that nicely suggests Marcus’s present as an echo of an even older past that brackets the Victorian (239). It is easy to see what he means by this, given the presence throughout Victorian pornography of...