Please welcome author Y.S. Lee to GreenBeanTeenQueen! This post is part of a Traveling Teens tour. Check out the entire tour schedule! Y.S. Lee is the author of The Agency trilogy. The first book in the series, A Spy in the House, is out this month!Hello! Over the next 2 weeks, I’m making 8 guest posts as part of the T2T blog tour. As an ex-professor and writer of historical fiction, my theme is Things You (Probably) Didn’t Know About the Victorians. Today’s topic is Sexy Victorians!
So, the Victorians and Sex. They were all terribly repressed and it was unladylike for a woman to enjoy (or even move during!) sex with her husband, right? Um, not quite. Let’s take a quick look at a couple of myths:
Myth 1: “Lie back and think of England”. There is absolutely no evidence that Queen Victoria (or any other woman of the 1800s) ever advised anyone to “lie back and think of England” during sex. In fact, Queen Victoria thought her husband, Prince Albert, was gorgeous and confided to a friend that “Greek statues are nothing compared to Albert in his bath”. That’s sexy! Truth is, although QV is often remembered as a stout widow with a long face, during her married life she was the lively type, the sort of person who enjoyed parties and balls. It was only when Albert died (unexpectedly, at a young age) that she become the tragic widow.
Myth 2: The Victorians were so repressed they couldn’t look at the legs on their furniture - they covered their piano legs in frilly pantalettes! This is a funny one, because the only recorded instance of this happening is in a book written by an Englishman (Captain Frederick Marryat, if you’re curious). And you know where he describes the prissy piano-legs? Why, in America! It’s his idea of a joke about Stateside uptightness. Isn’t irony sweet?
I’m not, however, claiming that the Victorians were totally free and easy in their outlook. For example, there was still a lot of hypocrisy (as there is today). When the novelist George Eliot (real name: Mary Ann Evans) fell in love with George Henry Lewes, they couldn’t get married because Lewes was separated from his wife and unable to get a divorce. So Eliot and Lewes chose to live together, and Eliot paid the price: she was excluded from polite society. It’s an interesting double standard: Lewes was not criticized for living with a woman who was not his wife, while Eliot was ostracized for living with a man who was her husband in all but the legal sense. And that’s just one example.
What I am saying, overall, is that a lot of casual stereotypes about the Victorians are not true, and that the facts are a lot more subtle and complicated than stereotypes allow. Let me now turn this around: what stereotypes have you heard about the Victorians? I’ll try to answer any questions you have (to the best of my knowledge!).
Be sure to follow the tour to Steph Su's blog tomorrow. You can pre-order A Spy in the House. And check out Y.S. Lee's blog for a great giveaway!
lol, I mean, I read this already before I sent it to you, but I had to read it again, because it cracks me up every time. Ying (and the Victorians) are SO cool. :)
ReplyDeleteI know-this post rocks! Those Victorians were sexy!:)
ReplyDeleteLOL this post put Victorians in a whole new light! Hmm I can't think of any myths about Victorians and sex (I think someone said they had some ridiculous ideas about birth control/corsets/other ways to prevent pregnancies but I can't remember what exactly and I may be mixing up things).
ReplyDeleteAnyway this is going to be an entertaining and informative tour and I'll be following along :)
Fun post! I had never heard about the piano legs thing before, haha.
ReplyDeleteI'm so glad you enjoyed it! (And Steph, I'm afraid I'm not cool but it's nice to know I can fake it sometimes...)
ReplyDelete@MissAttitude, birth control is a fascinating topic in the C19 because it's so unreliable and everything's discussed in a discreet, almost coded way. But you're right - it had nothing to do with corsets!
So interesting the old myths we believe and accept as fact! LOL! Thanks for teaching me a thing or two about Victorians.
ReplyDeleteSo glad you enjoyed the post, Tammy. :)
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