This review of a new two volume "Encyclopedia of Erotic Literature" illustrates the point. The reviewer writes:
The thematic subjects have been intelligently chosen. They include articles on syphilis as a literary muse, the rhetoric of seduction, confession and guilt, fairy tales, science fiction, slash fiction, grisettes, somatopia and furniture. The (very interesting) article on furniture concludes as follows: “In the fin-de-siècle, eros crosses over into sickness, and the furniture is caught up in the epidemic: the chaise lounge [sic] itself is sick with desire and pleasure. As the dominant notions of pleasure changed over time, so did the furniture”.Uhuh.
Although the reviewer indicates there are many quality entries, he remains somewhat cynical of the overall effect:
I also finished my reading of these two volumes with the feeling that sex was a lot less fun than I had hitherto supposed. Even thinking about sex has become difficult and it is being made more difficult year by year. For example, the American writer Pat Califia’s work “promotes lust in all its forms and her work contributes to the growing theoretical complexity about sexuality, both in relation to queer studies and the pornography debates”. The Argentinian writer Julio Cortázar’s “works narrate a desire for an impossible plenitude beyond the binary oppositions and hollow conventions which structure mundane bourgeois reality”.Social conservatives like me think people should take sex seriously, in the sense that it shouldn't be viewed merely as a recreational activity. But isn't there also something wrong with taking it too seriously, as do writers who portray it as an irresistible obsessive force, and the academics who then follow in their wake with arcane analysis?
8 comments:
Yeah, yeah. Just remember to stay away from the drawing room table when it's in heat, 'kay? The last thing you want is a lusty drawer ravishing you.
Seriously though, that bit about the furniture doesn't sound too far wrong. A good example that comes to mind is the opening chapter of Wilde's 'Picture of Dorian Gray', where Wilde had to use symbols and atmosphere (ie, furniture like mirrors and sofas) to talk about sexual desire. Because the sort of sexual desire he was talking about in that book was the sort of sexual desire that put you in jail!
Hmmm. I assume the book is free on the net. Care to post here a line or two that shows how a sofa reflects homosexual desire?
Oversexed tables I can take. It's when your furniture goes all communist that it gets annoying.
Gutenberg have it online. Furniture and upholstery are used pretty clearly to reinforce the general image of sensuous pleasures and luxury. The fellow reclining on the divan in this passage is the chap who 'leads' Dorian Gray into corruption:
The studio was filled with the rich odour of roses, and when the light summer wind stirred amidst the trees of the garden, there came through the open door the heavy scent of the lilac, or the more delicate perfume of the pink-flowering thorn.
From the corner of the divan of Persian saddle-bags on which he was lying, smoking, as was his custom, innumerable cigarettes, Lord Henry Wotton could just catch the gleam of the honey-sweet and honey-coloured blossoms of a laburnum, whose tremulous branches seemed hardly able to bear the burden of a beauty so flamelike as theirs; and now and then the fantastic shadows of birds in flight flitted across the long tussore-silk curtains that were stretched in front of the huge window, producing a kind of momentary Japanese effect, and making him think of those pallid, jade-faced painters of Tokyo who, through the medium of an art that is necessarily immobile, seek to convey the sense of swiftness and motion. The sullen murmur of the bees shouldering their way through the long unmown grass, or circling with monotonous insistence round the dusty gilt horns of the straggling woodbine, seemed to make the stillness more oppressive. The dim roar of London was like the bourdon note of a distant organ.
And of course, the whole book is about a picture. Look, maybe it's stretching it to say that this is 'furniture', but it's obvious Wilde wants it to be invested with a kind of sexual force:
Dorian made no answer, but passed listlessly in front of his picture and turned towards it. When he saw it he drew back, and his cheeks flushed for a moment with pleasure. A look of joy came into his eyes, as if he had recognized himself for the first time. He stood there motionless and in wonder, dimly conscious that Hallward was speaking to him, but not catching the meaning of his words. The sense of his own beauty came on him like a revelation. He had never felt it before. Basil Hallward's compliments had seemed to him to be merely the charming exaggeration of friendship. He had listened to them, laughed at them, forgotten them. They had not influenced his nature. Then had come Lord Henry Wotton with his strange panegyric on youth, his terrible warning of its brevity. That had stirred him at the time, and now, as he stood gazing at the shadow of his own loveliness, the full reality of the description flashed across him. Yes, there would be a day when his face would be wrinkled and wizen, his eyes dim and colourless, the grace of his figure broken and deformed. The scarlet would pass away from his lips and the gold steal from his hair. The life that was to make his soul would mar his body. He would become dreadful, hideous, and uncouth.
When you think sex, pathology, and the fin de siècle, you think Captain S.S.Freud, who pathologised eros like noone before him. And what's the psychoanalyst's furnishing of preference? Why, the chaise longue. Nothing like it for eliciting confidences about a person's mother.
What on earth does a "divan of Persian saddle-bags" look like? I get an immediate image of flea infested camel riding equipment.
Tim, I see the point that a general all round gay aesthete like Wilde and his followers were into sensuality generally, including in their idea of room furnishings. Point made and noted; no need to pay academics to write dissertations on it.
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