A Very Queer Family Indeed: Sex, Religion, and the Bensons in Victorian Britain by Simon Goldhill

Author:Simon Goldhill [Goldhill, Simon]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
ISBN: 9780226393780
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Published: 2016-08-10T16:00:00+00:00

His use of the word “simply” conceals a very complex legal and social set of problems, however (let alone his opportunistic homophobia). What acts will count with women? How will they be proved or witnessed? The Lord Chancellor, however, insisted that knowledge of such practices was lacking not just among the country’s legislators but among its women: “The overwhelming majority of the women of this country have never heard of this thing at all. . . . I would be bold enough to say that of every thousand women, taken as a whole, 999 have never heard a whisper of these practices.” The Lords were worried that the burden of proof, without the physical signs of penetration or emission, would prove impossible, and that blackmail would be the most obvious result of such poor legal drafting. The Lords duly voted the amendment and bill down, and sent it back to the Commons.

Yet this first attempt to legislate on female sexual activity with females also revealed how the language and conceptualization of such activity were changing. Wild informed the House that he had consulted medical experts as to how he should address Parliament. He was advised that he should go to Krafft-Ebing or Havelock Ellis for a full panoply of behavior and the technical language to describe it, but for clarity’s sake, he was encouraged “simply to refer to the Lesbian love practices between women, which are common knowledge.” The MP, ventriloquizing the medical expert, asserts that “Lesbian love practices” are “common knowledge” (despite the assertions of general ignorance by Macquisten and the Lord Chancellor). The term “Lesbian” is here entering the realm of legislation as the technical term (though the addition of “between women” suggests its reference was not as familiar as “common knowledge” would suggest), and, equally importantly, it enters with the imprimatur of the expert knowledge of the sciences of sexual behavior.

Wild cites Krafft-Ebing and Havelock Ellis together as authorities, although they took diametrically opposed lines on the issue of homosexuality. For Havelock Ellis, in terms that Arthur Benson significantly recalls, “The study of the abnormal is perfectly distinct from the study of the morbid”; that is, he argues, it is necessary to distinguish absolutely between that which does not conform to the norms of heterosexual desire and its institutions, and that which is sinful, corrupt, or degenerate. Those who desire their own sex may be a small percentage of the population and thus not normal, but they need not be thought for this reason to be diseased. The terms “abnormal” and “morbid” make up the matrix through which the boundaries of “sexual inversion” are formulated. So Edward Carpenter, whose books were far more easily available and far more influential with a broad public than either Krafft-Ebing or Havelock Ellis, writes:

Formerly it was assumed as a matter of course, that the type [sexual inversion] was merely a result of disease and degeneration; but now with the examination of the actual facts, it appears that, on the contrary[,] many are fine, healthy specimens of their sex .

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