How morality became personal in 18th-century England
18世纪英格兰的道德问题私人化进程
Feb 11th 2012 | from the print edition
The Origins of Sex: A History of the First Sexual Revolution.
《性的来历：第一次性革命史 》
By Faramerz Dabhoiwala. Allen Lane; 484 pages; ￡25. To be published in America in May by Oxford University Press USA; $34.95. Buy from Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk
FOR much of the last millennium Europeans lived under sex laws that would have won the approval of the most austere mullah. In England between the 13th and 16th centuries, extramarital sex was policed with such energy that up to 90% of the litigation handled by church courts was about combating fornication, adultery, sodomy and prostitution. The punishments were often savage. When the Reformation got going in the mid-16th century, the zeal for rooting out illicit sex went up another notch.Harsh new national laws were passed, such as a statute in 1534 that made buggery a capital offence. In 1552 a revision of canon law meant that adulterers could face life imprisonment or exile. Sexual transgressors were often whipped, publicly humiliated and even branded.
A hundred years later things quite suddenly began to change. By the mid-18th century sexual mores in England (and in much of Europe, too) had undergone a revolution, writes Faramerz Dabhoiwala, an Oxford historian who has spent much of the last 20 years researching the subject. This rupture was far more dramatic than anything that happened in 1963 when, according to the poet Philip Larkin, “sexual intercourse began”. Less than 100 years after the execution for adultery of Mary Latham, a young woman in Puritan New England, many people were thinking about sex in ways that would make some contemporary readers blush.The wealthy and powerful proudly and openly displayed their mistresses. A public agog for salacious gossip followed the lives of courtesans and high-society prostitutes (such as the oft-painted Kitty Fisher), and pornography was widely available.
The assumption in early modern England that sexual persecution was essential to good social order was not unlike that of the more conservative Islamic republics today. It was partly rooted in religion and the looming threat of hellfire. It was also a product of patriarchal attitudes that saw women as the property of fathers or husbands. Should a woman have sex with a stranger, her family would feel that a crime had been committed against them.
There were practical considerations, too. For affluent families the sudden arrival of a bastard child could wreak havoc with rules of inheritance. The illegitimate children of the poor were resented as burdens on the community, and there was a constant fear of venereal diseases spread by whores. It was everyone’s business to bear down on illicit sex because of its awful consequences. Policing was effective because most people lived in villages or small towns where privacy was unknown.
When and why did things start to change? The latter half of the 17th century saw the start of a backlash against extreme Puritanism, particularly among the upper classes who observed the louche goings on at court, led by the libidinous Charles II. But as Mr Dabhoiwala persuasively argues, the reasons for the first sexual revolution were complex and varied. The migration of people to big cities had made the bonds of traditional morality much harder to enforce, while the explosion of mass-printed media both spread ideas and exploited prurient interest in sexual shenanigans. Exploration also had an influence, as travellers returned with tales of very different sexual cultures.
But the key driver, Mr Dabhoiwala believes, was the spread of religious tolerance and nonconformity, which eroded the church’s authority and let people define morality more personally. Samuel Johnson, a high Tory Anglican, spoke for many in 1750 when he opined that “every man should regulate his actions by his own conscience”. His close friend and amanuensis, James Boswell, chronicled his own frequent encounters with whores and musings on polygamy with little show of guilt. For Boswell and many of his contemporaries, morals were “an uncertain thing”. The upper-middle-class members of the Beggar’s Benison club in Scotland, founded in 1732, apparently thought nothing of arranging meetings where they could drink, sing and fondle naked women. Such evenings were brought to a fitting climax, as it were, when they would communally ejaculate into a ceremonial pewter platter. The book is rich in anecdotes, funny, touching and seedy.
不过Mr Dabhoiwala认为，主要推动力当属宗教包容和非国教主义，它们侵蚀了教会的权威，让人对道德有了更私人的定义。 Samuel Johnson是坚定的保守党党员，虔诚的国教教徒。1750年，他却（译者注：《Containing Rambler》，第一句）道出了很多人的心声：“每个人都该用自己的良心自律”。James Boswell是他的好友，也是他的秘书。此人常与妓女鬼混，乐享齐人之福，还把丑事一一记录下来，似乎丝毫不觉内疚，与许多时人一样把道德当做“不确定之物”。1732年，苏格兰成立了“乞丐的祝福”俱乐部，会员多为社会中上层人物。很明显，他们并不把自己安排的“会议”——狂歌滥饮，逗弄裸女——当成一回事。如果一起朝礼仪锡盘（河蟹……这帮人果然让现代人翻译不能），就可以说这种夜晚的气氛达到了恰如其分的高潮。这本书满是奇闻轶事，有趣而令人印象深刻，但实在是太“有料”了，有些下流。
Yet it would be wrong to view late-18th-century attitudes towards sex as a prototype of our own. Sexual liberation was largely confined to the ranks of well-to-do chaps. It was generally assumed that while it was “natural” for men to pursue sexual opportunity, women were instinctively more virtuous (in complete contrast with the prior belief that women were the more uncontrollably lustful sex). Thus women were seen as vulnerable to male seduction, particularly by unscrupulous rakes who plotted with bawds to ensnare the innocent. William Hogarth’s 1732 engravings of “The Harlot’s Progress” were wildly popular, as were Samuel Richardson’s moralising novels, “Pamela” and “Clarissa”. The number of prostitutes in London grew exponentially, but they came to be regarded less as wicked sirens and more as victims of men’s carnal appetites who deserved not punishment but pity—and, when possible, salvation and reform by charitable institutions.
如果就此把18世纪的性观念认作当下英国人性观念的原型，那可就错了。当时，性开放仅仅属于比较富足的人群。而且人们还认为男人追求风流自然而然，女人却天生贞洁贤淑（与先前的意见相反。此前认为女人更加水性杨花），因此女人容易被男人变坏，尤其当无德浪子与老鸨合谋诱骗清纯少女时，更容易得手。 William Hogarth1732年的版画作品《一个妓女的历程》（The Harlot’s Progress）② 广受欢迎，Samuel Richardson的教化小说《帕梅拉》（Pamela）与《克拉丽莎》（Clarissa）③也不遑多让。伦敦的妓女数量呈指数增长，不过她们不再是邪恶的塞壬海妖④，而是男人肉欲的受害者，应该得到怜悯而不应受到惩罚——如有可能，还应该被慈善机构拯救和感化。
“The Origins of Sex” is a splendidly informative and entertaining book, but Mr Dabhoiwala leaves us with quite a few frustratingly loose ends. He has little to say, for example, about contraception, which was central to the sexual revolution of the 1960s. Sheaths of various kinds became popular in the 18th century, but libertines such as Casanova saw them more as protection against disease than as a form of birth control. What women thought about contraception is left blank. And by restricting himself to the period running roughly between 1600 and 1800, the author is able to bypass the late-Victorian return to sexual discipline, which lingered well into the last century. The difference, he would say, is that even the most prudish Victorians saw sexuality largely as a private matter, which the state should neither judge nor attempt to regulate. If only young Iranians were so lucky.
