Literary Sex and Sexuality

Sex and Sexuality

Many classic works of literature have been banned because of their treatment of sex or sexuality. School boards, parents, and governments have tried to stop children and adults from reading such works as Aristophanes’ Lysistrata, Daniel Defoe’s Moll Flanders, Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita, Maya Angelou’s I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, J. D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye, D. H. Lawrence’s Women in Love, and a long list of others, because these books were felt to deal with issues involving sex in ways that were deemed inappropriate or obscene. Objections range from a “too frank” discussion of rape, as in I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings; to depictions of promiscuity thought to be too suggestive, as in Moll Flanders; to descriptions of consensual sexual intercourse labeled too “explicit,” as in Women in Love. Sex, both the physical act and the broad range of feelings involved in sexual desire, is an important part of human life. It is, of course, the way in which we procreate and thus the method by which our species survives, but outside of procreation, sex and sexual desire are vital components of what it means to be human. All healthy human beings have sexual impulses and sexual desires. Our sexual histories, fantasies, and relationships (or the lack thereof) are a part of our identities.

Literature, as a mirror on the human condition, therefore must address the subject of sex and sexuality, but there are great variations on how and to what extent. The human need to procreate is one obvious reason why sex is so important to human beings, but it is by no means the only reason, or even the primary one. Sexual desire—even merely feeling it, not necessarily acting upon it—has been seen as inspiring as well as impure, as a generator of creativity but also as an initiator of debilitating guilt, as the source of life’s greatest pleasures, and as the cause of life’s greatest pain. From the beginnings of Western civilization, discussing and writing about sex has been controversial. In Desire: A History of European Sexuality, Ann Clark explains that Western thought regarding sex has traditionally been divided into two competing threads: one that sees sexual desire as “polluting and dangerous,” and one that sees it as “creative, transcendent, and transformative” (1). Some ancient Greeks worried that reason and sexual desire were incompatible, but in general the Greeks did “not see sex itself as shameful or honorable” and believed that “aggressive sexual energy could be a force for fertility, culture, and spirituality” (15). They even used “the language of erotic love to describe the ascent from earthly love to spiritual love” (1). In fact, sex for the ancient Greeks only became a “problem” when it transgressed the boundaries of the social order, as when a man had sex with another man’s wife (i.e., his property) or if a man of the upper class took a submissive role in sex with a man of the lower classes. The early church, however, had a largely negative attitude toward sex and sexual desire, seeing celibacy as a better, more pure way of life. In Jewish life, sexual desire was not seen as inherently evil, and sex within marriage was a definite good.

However, early Christians, such as the apostle Paul in the first century, saw sex, even sex within marriage, as a dangerous corruption that would lead believers away from God (39). Saint Augustine, for example, writing in the fourth century, greatly admired celibates and felt much guilt about his early pagan life. This attitude, that sex is polluting, corrupting, and dirty, is present even today. In literature, we see this attitude in many works. In William Shakespeare’s King Lear, for instance, men who pursue their sexual desires are clearly painted as fools, doomed to eventual ruin. In Thomas Hardy’s Jude the Obscure, Sue Bridehead sees the act of sex as the road to disaster, avoids it whenever she can, and blames her sexual relationship with Jude for their tragic end. Other works of literature hold the opposite view, however, treating sex as a positive force, even sometimes as a useful metaphor for things such as ambition, transcendence, and crossing difficult boundaries. In Lysistrata, for example, the women know that they can use sex as a weapon for peace. Thus, sex is seen as wholly positive. The men want sex because it delivers pleasure, and the women know that its power is so great that it can end the wars they so despise. Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream shows the reader that while a surrender to lust can be destructive, as when Oberon tricks Titania into sleeping with Bottom, sexual union within marriage brings about great things: fertility, spirituality, and creativity. Similarly, the relationship between Rupert and Ursula in D. H. Lawrence’s Women in Love is portrayed as an ideal sexual relationship, transcendent and mystical, that unites the two lovers while still leaving them as individual beings. Women in Love is only one of the many Lawrence novels that treat sex and sexuality so frankly. The Rainbow, Lady Chatterley’s Lover, and Sons and Lovers all contain plots that emphasize the important role of sex and sexuality in the lives of human beings. Lawrence was heavily influenced by the psychosexual development theories of the Austrian psychologist Sigmund Freud.

Freud’s theories on how we develop as sexual beings are so important to the way in which we think about sex and the brain that they cannot be ignored. He argues that all adult neurosis is borne from childhood sexuality. According to his theories, we have instinctive sexual appetites, even as infants, and these appetites mature in a series of changes, with the object of our affection being the primary change. Freud believed that getting “stuck” in one phase was the source of psychological problems in adults. He even used a work of literature, Sophocles’ Oedipus the King, to name the complex in which an adult remains fixated on his mother as the object of affection. Freud’s theories on psychosexual development received an enormous amount of attention throughout most of the 20th century. However, other scientists have criticized his theories for being focused on sex to the exclusion of other elements that influence our personalities, and feminists have pointed out that his theories focus heavily on male sexuality. Nevertheless, his attention to sexual desire as an important part of our personalities was an invaluable step in terms of transforming the ways in which we talk about sex and sexuality.

The French theorist Michel Foucault points out this importance in his own influential work The History of Sexuality (1976–84). Foucault’s argument counteracts the generally accepted narrative that in Western society, talk of sex is repressed. Instead, he claims that since the 19th century, discourse about sex has exploded, in venues such as the doctor’s office and the church confessional. As in those two examples, however, this discourse has been controlled by those in power, keeping those not in power marginalized. Part of this control involves labeling certain sex acts, or even sexual urges, pathological. Foucault’s own identity as an open homosexual to his friends, but not open to the rest of the world, may have influenced his thinking here. In fact, briefly surveying the treatment of homosexuality in literature, one might be left with the mistaken impression that there were no open homosexuals well into the 20th century. Homosexual themes and story lines abound in this history, but they are almost always coded and indirect. One of the most famous examples is in Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s In Memoriam, A. H. H, an elegiac poem written after the death of his dear friend Arthur Hallam. Tennyson speaks of his loss in intense terms, some of which have become famous for speaking of heterosexual love: “↜’Tis better to have loved and lost, than never to have loved at all” (Canto 27, 15–16). That the object of his love and his loss was another man was not considered scandalous, precisely because Tennyson was indirect here, rather than explicit. In fact, describing close, intense friendships between same-sex pairs is one of the most common ways in which homosexuality has historically been expressed in literature. Writers as diverse as Edmund Spenser, Lord Byron, Sarah Orne Jewett, and Virginia Woolf have written of these devoted friendships in a way that allows the spirit of same-sex love to be expressed without explicitly naming the relationship as a sexual one. In addition, literary critics have long found homoerotic undertones in works that involve “male bonding,” even when that was not necessarily the author’s intention. The American critic Leslie Fiedler noted these undertones between Huck and Jim in Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn in his famous essay “Come Back A’gin to the Raft, Huck Honey” (1948). Fiedler and others have pointed out similar relationships between Ishmail and Queequeg in Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick, the vampire hunting crew in Bram Stoker’s Dracula, and Finny and Gene in John Knowles’s A Separate Peace. Openly homosexual characters in literature were rare until the late 20th century.

Society’s prohibition against same-sex relationships, as well as the probable desire of some homosexual authors to keep their sexuality hidden, limited the direct display of any sexual orientation that was not heterosexual in all forms of art. In fact, when the lesbian author Radclyffe Hall published the lesbian novel The Well of Loneliness in 1928, she was put on trial for obscenity. When homosexuality did make an open appearance in literature before this point, it was usually mocked, as in many English plays of the 18th century, or clearly considered a failing, as in Tennessee Williams’s Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. The end of the 20th century saw a somewhat more open attitude, with texts like James Baldwin’s Go Tell It on the Mountain and Jeannette Winterson’s Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit treating homosexuality as one important facet of a character’s identity.

While sex and sexuality are clearly vital to human existence, their treatment in print has often been oblique, requiring the reader to read between the lines and tease out meanings from indirect references and suggestive metaphors. Obviously necessary for the continuation of the species, sex is also of paramount importance in terms of identity and can have a profound effect on our health and our emotions. Literature, therefore, has always addressed the issue and will continue to do so (perhaps more openly) as we move into the 21st century.

See also Chopin, Kate: Awakening, The; Cisneros, Sandra: Woman Hollering Creek and Other Stories; Dreiser, Theodore: Sister Carrie; Erdrich, Louise: Love Medicine; Hesse, Herman: Steppenwolf; Jacobs, Harriet: Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Written by Herself; James, Henry: Turn of the Screw, The; Marshall, Paule: Brown Girl, Brownstones; Shakespeare, William: Taming of the Shrew, The; Silko, Leslie Marmon: Almanac of the Dead; Smith, Jean: Tree Grows in Brooklyn, A; Toomer, Jean: Cane; Walker, Alice: Color Purple, The.