All this is important to the understanding of the criminal mentality, particularly the serial killer. At the time I am writing these words, a religious cult in Waco, Texas, is under siege by the FBI. A psychologist who has been studying cult members comments that such people are not necessarily unintelligent and easily influenced—that such cults often target highly intelligent people, but concentrate on them when they are in a state of emotional vulnerability, perhaps after the break-up of a love affair, the loss of a job, the failure to pass an exam. Then the potential convert is in a state of low self-esteem, and looks around for something that will give him a sense of exercising his power to choose, his ability to act—because action brings relief.
In the Postscript to my history of forensic detection Written in Blood, I cite the parallel example of Arthur Koestler, who, after he had lost all his money in a poker game, got drunk at a party, spent the night with a girl he disliked, and discovered that his car radiator had frozen and burst, experienced an intense urge to ‘do something desperate’ that resulted in the decision to join the Communist Party. In a man with a tendency to physical violence it could just as easily have led to murder.
The case of serial killer Ted Bundy reveals the same pattern. In his early twenties Bundy fell in love with a girl from a wealthy family and they became engaged. He decided to study Chinese because he reasoned that America would enter diplomatic relations with China and need interpreters. But he found the work too hard and dropped out of the course. The girl broke the engagement, which had the effect of totally undermining his self-esteem. Yet it was not this event that caused him to become a serial killer, even though he subsequently developed into a Peeping Tom. He became a law student and worked for the Office of Justice Planning, then became an election worker for the candidate for State governor. His self-confidence increased. Five years after being thrown over, he met his former fiancée, persuaded her to marry him, and spent a weekend with her. Then he dumped her as she had dumped him. And it was this act of calculated revenge that turned him from a Peeping Tom into a sex murderer. It gave him the courage—and the contempt for women—to turn his fantasies into reality.
The same psychological mechanism explains the rise in the crime rate during times of economic recession. It is not simply that people steal for money. It is because the psychological trauma of being without a job leads to the feeling of ‘anger with fate’, and the desire to express it by abandoning former inhibitions and ‘hitting out’. Graham Greene’s favourite quote from Gauguin was: ‘Life being what it is, one dreams of revenge.’ After one of the Moors murders, Ian Brady—who proclaimed himself an atheist—shook his fist at the sky and shouted: ‘Take that, you bastard!’ The serial killer Carl Panzram even believed that by killing innocent people—usually children—he was gaining a kind of ‘compensatory’ revenge on people who had made him suffer.
This element of violent irrationality has always been a basic element in human nature. Shakespeare catches it in Julius Caesar when a man being attacked by a mob protests that he is Cinna the poet, not Cinna the conspirator, and his attackers shout: ‘Tear him for his bad verses.’ But until the nineteenth century, it was rare for this kind of resentment to find expression in sex crime. Crime was largely the result of social deprivation, so the criminal was interested in money and property, not in sex. In overcrowded slums, brothers and sisters often slept in the same bed, and were introduced to incest from an early age. In The Complete Jack the Ripper, Donald Rumbelow quotes a friend of Lord Salisbury who was indignantly separating two children having sex on a slum pavement when the boy cried: ‘Why do you take hold of me? There are a dozen of them at it down there.’ Drunken women would offer their bodies for a few pence, and mothers sell their daughters’ virginity for five shillings. Sex was so freely available that there would have been no point in killing for it, or even risking the gallows for rape.
Casanova, who died in 1798, embodies the straightforward physical approach to sex. He is fascinated by the magic of women, and by his own ability to persuade them to yield. His first love affair was with two teenage sisters, who allowed him to spend the night in their room so that he could meet a girl with whom he was in love. When the girl failed to show up, they allowed the young abbé—Casanova was in holy orders—to sleep between them. He instantly broke his promise not to lay a finger on them, and seduced first one, then the other. But he tells this story—like that of his innumerable later conquests—in a language of delicate euphemism: ‘Her natural instincts soon working in concert with my own, I reach the goal; and my efforts, crowned with the most complete success, leave me not the shadow of doubt that I have gathered those first fruits to which our prejudice makes us attach so great an importance.’ He is enough of an eighteenth century rationalist to recognize that there is a certain absurdity in attaching so much importance to taking a girl’s virginity. And after he has described a dozen or so similar affairs, we begin to recognize that Casanova’s conquests are not the result of an overpowering sexual impulse, but of a desire to think well of himself, to aggrandize his ego. He attaches far more importance to other kinds of conquest—for example, impressing contemporary intellectuals like Voltaire and Rousseau, or holding a dinner table enthralled with his conversation.
In the second half of the eighteenth century, a curious change began to come about. It was at this time that pornography suddenly came into existence: that is, sexual description whose basis was the forbiddenness of the sexual act. Earlier works like Aretino’s Dialogues (1536) and the anonymous School of Venus (1655) may seem to contradict that assertion; but they can also be seen as works in the great humanist tradition, arguing against puritanical morality. In The School of Venus, Fanchon tells her friend Suzanne: ‘Since Robinet fucked me, and I know what is what, I find all my mother’s warnings to be but bugbears and good for nothing but frightening children. For my part, I believe we were created for fucking, and when we begin to fuck we begin to live.’ Donald Thomas comments: ‘Compared with the neurotic and sadistic pornography which has made up so much of the erotic literature of the last two centuries, The School of Venus seems almost radiant with innocence.’
The same argument applies to the anticlerical erotica of the eighteenth century, with titles like Venus in the Cloister and The Monastery Gate, or the Story of Dom Bugger, it was all about priests seducing their penitents or monks impregnating nuns. (In fact, Venus in the Cloister was based on a famous scandal in which a Jesuit named Fr Girard seduced one of his penitents.) This type of healthy indecency can trace its ancestry to Boccaccio and Rabelais—the latter writes: ‘Even the shadow of a monastery is fruitful.’
The change to genuine eroticism is marked by John Cleland’s Memoirs of a Lady of Pleasure—usually known as Fanny Hill (1747)—which describes how a young servant girl is introduced into a brothel, then into a life of endless sexual adventure. But Fanny Hill was preceded by a far more important novel: Samuel Richardson’s Pamela (1740), the story of a servant girl who resists all her master’s attempts at seduction until he capitulates and marries her. Richardson, a printer-turned-author, firmly believed that he was writing a highly moral tale about a virtuous girl. But the public who lingered over scenes in which her master flings her on a bed and throws her skirts over her head were more interested in how soon she would lose her virginity.
Pamela was the first novel in our modern sense of the word: a kind of soap opera about ordinary people rather than strange, distant lands populated by dusky princes and lovelorn shepherds. Within five years, Europe had become a ‘nation of readers’, and every small town had its lending library. It was then that Cleland introduced a new twist with Fanny Hill, in which there was no attempt to pretend that the author’s intention was to preach virtue and abstinence.
And yet even Fanny Hill is, in a sense, non-pornographic. The sex is Rabelaisian and down-to-earth; when Fanny peers through a crack in the closet-door at the brothel madame about to have sex with her lover, she sees ‘her fat brawny thighs hung down; and the whole greasy landscape…fairly open to my view: a wide open-mouthed gap, overshaded with a grizzly bush seemed held out like a beggar’s wallet…’ The description could hardly be less erotic.
I have suggested elsewhere that the invention of the novel must be regarded as one of the important steps in mankind’s development. The theatre had provided the public with entertainment since the days of the ancient Greeks, but the novel was an invitation to sit alone and use the imagination to conjure up other people’s lives. And even though Cleland was sentenced to the pillory, and then persuaded to write no more pornography by the grant of a government pension (which suggests that ministers recognized the danger of free sexual fantasy), others quickly took his place and created a pornography industry.
By far the most important of these figures was the Marquis de Sade, born in the same year that Pamela was published. Thrown into jail for atheism, then for kidnapping and whipping a beggar woman, Sade was antiauthoritarian to the point of paranoia. His early fantasies about incest and about the seduction and rape of children can only be understood in the light of his hatred of the Christian church. He was obsessed by ‘the forbidden’—it is typical that he seduced and ran away with his wife’s younger sister, a canoness (or apprentice nun). Finally, sentenced to prison for a third time for various misdemeanours—including sodomizing prostitutes and almost killing two of them with an aphrodisiac—he poured his sexual frustrations into the works for which he is famous (or infamous), novels like Philosophy in the Boudoir and Justine. The first is about the debauching of a virgin by an incestuous brother and sister, the second about the endless misfortunes of a pure and virtuous girl. Both might be regarded as blasphemous parodies of Richardson’s Pamela. His unfinished 120 Days of Sodom is an attempt at a novel that catalogues every possible sexual perversion.
Freed briefly by the French Revolution, Sade was soon back in prison for writing novels of unparalleled violence and indecency; Juliette ends with a scene in which a mother allows her little daughter to be violated and burnt alive while she herself is simultaneously penetrated, vaginally and anally, by two of her lover’s henchmen.
In fact, the novels of Sade are even less pornographic than Fanny Hill. There is no lingering sensuality, no gloating over sexual fantasy; Sade is more concerned with shouting blasphemies at the top of his voice. He is a man who hates the system so much that his one concern is to defy it. When he describes sexual orgies, it is not to titillate the lecherous, but to upset the guardians of morality.
To understand Sade—and the great majority of serial killers—we only have to recognize that he was an extremely imperious man who loved having his own way. As a born aristocrat, he expected to give orders and have them promptly obeyed. So to be at the mercy of gaolers threw him into a state of sheer outrage. His privileges were always being suspended for losing his temper. In the chronology of his life we read: ‘October 10, 1787: Sade berates the prison governor and his aide who come to announce to him suspension of his exercise period.’ Thirteen days later it was restored, but in June of the following year we read: ‘Sade’s exercise period again having been suspended “for impertinence”, and he having been informed in writing, the prisoner nonetheless attempts to descend at his regular hour to the yard, and…it was only when the officer pointed his gun at him that he retreated, swearing loudly.’ Sade was simply incapable of getting used to the idea that he was not an eastern sultan. He never learned to adjust. Frustration of his wishes threw him into a frenzy of rage. And because it was impossible to express that rage by flogging the prison governor and his minions, Sade channelled it into his books. We might say that what fate was trying to teach him was self-discipline; but his imperious temperament made it impossible. And, being highly intelligent, he rationalized his refusal to attempt self-discipline in the only possible way: that is, into a philosophical system in which everybody is permitted unlimited violence towards everybody else…We shall observe the same syndrome in many of the serial killers of the late twentieth century.
Sade died in the Charenton asylum in December 1814. But his influence was already pervasive. Lord Byron had recently invented a new kind of hero, the world-weary sinner who is also the defiant rebel, and had lived up to his sinister reputation by seducing and impregnating his half-sister, then sodomizing his wife. By the time of Byron’s death in exile in 1824, Sade’s works already enjoyed a wide underground circulation in England (a country that always seems to have been peculiarly obsessed by sexual morality and immorality), and a new pornography industry was flourishing. And the essence of this new pornography was an obsession with forbiddenness. It is full of scenes in which schoolteachers seduce their pupils and butlers seduce the little daughter of the household. In The Power of Hypnotism, a youth who has learned hypnosis in Germany uses it to seduce his sister, after which the two of them use it to have sex with their mother and father. Later in the book, the vicar and his two little nieces are hypnotized into joining in an orgy. Nothing could be more unlike the boisterous couplings in Boccaccio or Rabelais, or even in Fanny Hill. And Casanova would simply have scratched his head, and wondered why any normal person should want to have sex with his own family members when the world is full of desirable girls. This is sex raised to an unhealthy intensity by the use of a kind of morbid imagination.
Let us try to understand just what has happened.
Sex depends fundamentally upon a certain sexual energy which accumulates in the genitals, like water accumulating in a cistern. Without this energy, neither male nor female can experience sexual excitement. This energy is released by friction—preferably with the genitals of someone of the opposite sex. But when the cistern is full to the top, almost any friction can cause it to brim over—for example, accidentally pressing against a tabletop.
But no matter how full the cistern, it would be difficult to achieve full release without some sense of purpose or direction, which serves as a channel. In animals, this channelling is caused by the smell of the female in season. Human sex has ceased to be seasonal, and the channelling is achieved by a certain sense of ‘forbiddenness’. The pleasure of sexuality lies in the male’s feeling that the body of any attractive female is ‘forbidden territory’ until she can be persuaded to give her consent. And no matter how gentle and considerate the male, this desire to enter ‘forbidden territory’ must be recognized as a form of aggression.
In primitive societies, the forbiddenness is complicated by a social taboo. The male has to approach the parents of the girl he wants to marry and obtain their consent—perhaps even pay them for her. And now, in a sense, she is no longer ‘forbidden’. Yet here human imagination comes to the rescue. He continues to want her, even when she is his wife, because it is easy to remember when she was ‘forbidden’.
We must recognize another important point that is true of all desire. It can be intensified by wanting something badly. You enjoy your dinner more when you are hungry. But you also enjoy it more when you have been looking forward to it. Romantic love is essentially a kind of imaginative build-up, a ‘looking forward’ to possessing the object of desire. This is a simple but all-important observation: that we can enjoy something twice as much simply by ‘taking thought’ about it, building up a certain anticipation. Conversely, it is easy to cease to enjoy something by being too casual about it, by taking it for granted.
So ‘romantic love’—as expressed by the troubadours, and by Dante and Petrarch and Shakespeare—was an interesting step forward in human history. Human beings were learning to intensify animal sexuality with the use of imagination. But this must be immediately qualified by saying that it was true only for a small number of people. For the ‘average man’, sex remained as simple and crude as the coupling of two dogs.
With the rise of the novel, more and more inveterate daydreamers learned to use the imagination and to ‘cultivate their sensibilities’—that is, to ‘conjure up’ other realities, other times and places.
Inevitably—human nature being what it is—an increasing number of these began to use imagination for sexual purposes—that is, for masturbation. There is a very narrow dividing line between a teenage girl imagining being carried off by Byron’s Corsair, and allowing herself to daydream of being ravished by him. And if we look closely at Heathcliff in Wuthering Heights, it is easy to see that Emily Brontë daydreamed of a male who was even more brutal and earthy than Byron’s swashbuckling heroes. It may seem unnecessarily crude to ask: Did Emily Brontë masturbate as she thought about Heathcliff? But the question is more important than it looks. It makes us aware that imagination was pushing human beings towards the dividing line between the ‘permitted’ and the ‘forbidden’. And—since forbiddenness is another name for criminality—towards the criminal.
In Victorian pornography, this criminal element has become all-important. Now it is a question of seeking out the forbidden for its own sake. Sexual excitement ceases to be associated with naked lovers in bed; instead, the quintessential situation is someone peering through a keyhole or a crack in the lavatory door at something he is ‘not supposed to be looking at’. The penis is regarded as a kind of burglar whose task is to get into forbidden places.
What is happening is that this power of the imagination—to increase a pleasure by anticipating it—is being used to create a new kind of sex, what we might call ‘superheated sex’.
Normal ‘animal’ sex can only reach a certain intensity, no matter how much a man wants a woman and vice versa. When they are in bed, close physical contact soon turns into the ‘flow experience’, in which there is a mutual release of energy. No matter how much they try to control the flow, it soon leads to sexual fulfilment. What the Marquis de Sade discovered was that the initial desire can be made far more intense, far more feverish, by taking advantage of the fact that male sexuality is based on aggression. Moreover, imagination can be used to drag out the whole process to far more than its normal length. ‘Animal’ intercourse might last from a minute to a quarter of an hour or so. But ‘superheated sex’ can be kept on the boil for twice or three times that period.
Now in fact, Sade’s idea of sex was always far more aggressive than that of the normal male. Even as a young man, he wanted to beat prostitutes and be beaten. He once tried to explain his idea of sex by saying that any kind of blow—even chopping wood with an axe—gives a feeling of satisfaction. Most males are likely to consider this a little peculiar—to feel that Sade is extending sex beyond the idea of the normal sexual impulse. But anyone who reads Sade’s works in chronological order can understand how this came about. Sade’s first major work is the novel Justine, completed in the Bastille in 1787, when he was 47. He had been in prison for eight years. The basic argument of Justine is that crime leads to prosperity, while virtue leads to misfortune. Justine is a sweet, timid, modest girl of remarkable beauty; her elder sister Juliette, equally beautiful, is depraved from an early age. Their parents die while they are still in a convent, leaving them destitute, and they are thrown out into the world. The wicked Juliette prospers, while Justine is humiliated, beaten and raped with appalling regularity. Sade obviously felt that he had been badly treated by the world—which on the whole was true—and the novel was intended partly as a Swiftian satire on human selfishness. Sade takes an entirely cynical view of kings, judges and priests; he claims that all indulge their vices to the full, while urging restraint on the rest of society. But, according to Sade, God does not exist, there is no ‘moral law’, and man was sent into the world solely to enjoy himself. So he is trying to awaken his fellow men to ‘the truth’ about society, and to overthrow those in authority. Unfortunately, his logic is totally distorted by his hatred of authority and religion, so that he simply refuses to imagine what would happen if everybody set out to satisfy their desires to the full.
In fact, Sade was already writing a novel in which he asks the question: what would happen if a group of human beings was rich and powerful enough to satisfy their desires to the full? The 120 Days of Sodom is a vast catalogue of the ‘forbidden’, in which four libertines, who include a bishop and a Lord Chief Justice, spend four months indulging every form of perversion, from the rape of children and virgins to ritual murder. Towards the end, even Sade gets tired of the horrors, and the final scenes are only sketched in outline. He left this work behind in the Bastille when he was released, and it was only found by accident many years later.
So Sade, who has been violently restrained—and rather badly treated—by authority now used his imagination to devise situations that amounted to a continuous scream of defiance. In fact, as an individual, Sade was far from ‘sadistic’. He was a genuinely affectionate father, and when he had a chance to sentence his hated mother-in-law to death—as a member of a revolutionary tribunal—he allowed her to go free. But he was crazed with hatred of authority, and his work may be seen as a kind of continuous sex crime of the imagination. A serial killer like Carl Panzram is a kind of Sade who put his daydreams into practise.
Oddly enough, Sade’s work is seldom pornographic, in the sense of being sexually stimulating. He never gloats over the lascivious preliminaries and the physical details of sex; when one of his characters commits incest, he merely ‘ravishes’ his daughter, then teaches her ‘all the mysteries of love’. Sade is more interested in expressing his sense of grievance by pouring out indecencies; basically, he is like a schoolboy sticking out his tongue at the headmaster.
What is obvious to the modern reader of Sade is that he is a man who is trying to create a sexual illusion, a kind of daydream. If he shows signs of waking up, he redoubles the ‘wickedness’ to try and stimulate his imagination. When Sade actually seduced his sister-in-law, the apprentice nun, he must have found out that, after the initial thrill, it soon ceased to feel wicked. But Sade’s characters never get tired of ‘the forbidden’. After Juliette has seduced her clergyman father, she then looks on as he is murdered by her lover. But, as we can see from the 120 Days, Sade’s imagination was unable to sustain the sexual daydream; he kept on inflating the sexual illusion until it burst like a bubble.
Victorian pornography never went this far. It was only concerned with creating an atmosphere of feverish sensuality, with great emphasis on the preliminaries. One well-known piece of Victorian pornography, the anonymous Raped on the Railway (1894), clearly reveals the difference between sex in the eighteenth and in the nineteenth centuries. It begins with a prelude on Euston station (to increase our anticipation of what is to come), then a chapter in which a painter named Brandon tries to persuade a veiled lady with whom he is sharing the compartment to ‘let me contemplate those heavenly features I so burn to portray’. When he tries to lift her veil, she produces a revolver; but before she can fire it, the train brakes suddenly and flings her into his arms.
There follows a long digression in which the author tells the reader about the painter’s earlier life and love affairs; finally he returns us to, the carriage, in which the lady—introduced as Mrs Sinclair—is now lying in a ‘swoon’. The painter unbuttons her dress ‘exposing to view two small but beautifully round breasts just showing their little pink nipples above the corset which confined them’. After kissing these, he ‘carefully turned back her skirt, and the fine linen petticoats underneath it exposing to view a pair of well-shaped legs encased in black silk stockings, and encircled by very natty-looking garters with red bows’. ‘Pulling apart her thighs as gently as though he were touching a sleeping child’, he opens the slit of her drawers. ‘The charms he sought were, however, hidden from his eyes by a chemise of the finest cambric. Carefully lifting this he saw before his entranced eyes, now gleaming with lust, a forest of golden brown curly hair which extended, in a triangular shape from the line where the thighs join the body, all over the belly. At the apex of this triangle, there peered through a thicker and curlier tuft of hair the pouting red lips of a pretty and very tempting-looking abode of love.’
All this is quite unlike Cleland or Sade. The writer is trying to create in the reader, moment by moment, the actual sensations of a man in the grip of sexual excitement. It is also clear that the writer finds her underwear very nearly as exciting as her body. This is a refinement of sexual desire that Casanova would have found incomprehensible.
As he is about to enter, the lady wakes up. The painter wrestles with her until she is exhausted, then succeeds in penetrating her. She struggles violently until he thrusts into her and ‘poured into her vagina the warm flood which she would have been so glad to receive and mingle with her own love fountain, if the tool which was shooting the warm jets into her had come as a friend and not as an enemy’.
After the rape is over, he begs her forgiveness, offering to let her shoot him; she finally agrees to say nothing about the rape if he will promise not to speak to her for the rest of the journey.
But a guard at the next station deduces from her ‘tottering walk’ and the disarray of her clothes what has happened, and when a man in the next compartment makes a joke about needing a woman, tells him that the lady next door looks as if she has had a ‘rare good poking’. As Mrs Sinclair emerges from the toilet, one of the men, described as ‘a giant’, recognizes her as his sister-in-law. With three companions he gets into her carriage. While they doze, the rapist and his victim are both overpowered and tied up. Then the lady is laid face-downward on the seat, and the men begin ‘very carefully and slowly to draw back the panting woman’s dress’. ‘They then served a stout travelling flannel petticoat in the same way, and also a rose-coloured silk petticoat that she wore next to her drawers.’ At this point, the writer pauses to observe that ‘the latter article of feminine toilette calls for special remark. There is a great psychological significance in the quality of women’s drawers.’ And the next part of the undressing is delayed for a page while he discourses on underwear. Finally, the drawers are removed, and for the next six pages or so, the lady’s bottom, ‘the most wonderful riches that it has ever been the lot of man to gaze upon’, is birched until it glows bright red.
Even when she arrives home, Mrs Sinclair’s ordeal is not finished. Her brother-in-law—a member of the Society for National Purity—calls on her and makes a determined attempt to rape her; she finally disables him by bending his penis, which causes him such agony that a doctor has to administer morphine.
It is impossible not to recognize the resemblance between Raped on the Railway and Sade. The fact that the brother-in-law is a member of the Society of National Purity suggests that all such people are hypocrites—in fact, that they are rapists at heart—while the description of the woman’s struggles as her brother-in-law tries to rape her (‘her underclothing was in a frightful state, the pink silk petticoat…being torn in several places, and her clean white drawers nearly wrenched from the strings that attached them to her waist’) is reminiscent of Justine’s tribulations.
Yet the difference between Justine and Raped on the Railway is also enormous. Justine is simply ‘violated’, and the details are left to the imagination. Mrs Sinclair’s breasts, her buttocks, her genitals, her petticoat, her underskirt and her drawers are all described with obsessive precision. Compared to Cleland or Sade, the author of Raped on the Railway is in a kind of fever; we can almost hear his heavy breathing as he describes her underwear. All this is the result of a century and a half of novel-reading.
The main difference between the two books lies in the happy ending of Raped on the Railway. In the last chapter, the lady’s husband is conveniently killed off in the Boer war; Brandon calls on her, and they end in one another’s arms. Yet as the book closes in an atmosphere of reconciliation and morality, we become aware of the paradox involved in the author’s attitude to sex. Brandon and Mrs Sinclair will now become husband and wife. But will Brandon’s eyes continue to ‘gleam with lust’ every time his wife takes off her clothes? Obviously not; they will become an ordinary married couple, for whom sex is a pleasure that lasts ten minutes or so, and then is followed by sleep. All this dwelling on rounded breasts, white thighs (and the ‘abode of love’ between them), pink silk petticoats and fine linen drawers, is a kind of embroidery, a deliberately intensified illusion, that has nothing to do with the simple fact of sexual intercourse as described by Cleland. It has been added by the Victorian imagination, and is the outcome of a century of romanticism, of regarding women as untouchable goddesses or compassionate angels.
In fact, this feverish romanticism had already begun to manifest in another form. In 1886, a book called Psychopathia Sexualis caused such a scandal that the British Medico-Psychological Association debated whether to cancel the author’s membership. The author was a German ‘alienist’ (as psychiatrists were then called), Richard von Krafft-Ebing. And the book begins with an utterly typical case describing how a middle-aged man showed ‘increasing perversion of his moral sense’, so that he constantly accosted women in the street and asked them to marry him or allow coitus. Placed in an asylum, ‘the sexual excitement increased to a veritable satyriasis, which increased until he died.’ ‘He masturbated continuously, even before others, took delight only in obscene ideas, and thought the men around him were women, and pestered them with obscene proposals.’ And this portrait of a man totally obsessed with sex is followed by a gallery of sadists, masochists (Krafft-Ebing invented both words), voyeurs, fetishists, transvestites, vampires and necrophiles.
Among the cases of necrophily is one that throws a great deal of light on the development of ‘the sexual illusion’.
Sergeant Bertrand, a man of delicate physical, constitution and of peculiar character; from childhood silent and inclined to solitude.
The details of the health of his family are not satisfactorily known; but the occurrence of mental diseases in his ancestry is ascertained. It is said that while he was a child he was affected with destructive impulses, which he himself could not explain. He would break whatever was at hand. In early childhood, without teaching, he learned to masturbate. At nine he began to feel inclinations towards persons of the opposite sex. At thirteen the impulse to sexual intercourse became powerfully awakened in him. He now masturbated excessively. When he did this, his fancy always created a room filled with women. He would imagine that he carried out the sexual act with them and then killed them. Immediately thereafter he would think of them as corpses, and of how he defiled them. Occasionally in such situations the thought of carrying out a similar act with male corpses would come up, but it was always attended with a feeling of disgust.
In time he felt the impulse to carry out such acts with actual corpses. For want of human bodies, he obtained those of animals. He would cut open the abdomen, tear out the entrails, and masturbate during the act. He declares that in this way he experienced inexpressible pleasure. In 1846 these bodies no longer satisfied him. He now killed dogs, and proceeded with them as before. Toward the end of 1846 he first felt the desire to make use of human bodies.
At first he had a horror of it. In 1847, being by accident in a graveyard, he ran across the grave of a newly buried corpse. Then this impulse, with headache and palpitation of the heart, became so powerful that, although there were people nearby, and he was in danger of detection, he dug up the body. In the absence of a convenient instrument for cutting it up, he satisfied himself by hacking it with a shovel.
In 1847 and 1848, during two weeks, as reported, the impulse, accompanied by violent headache, to commit brutalities on corpses actuated him. Amidst the greatest dangers and difficulties he satisfied this impulse some fifteen times. He dug up the bodies with his hands, in nowise sensible in his excitement to the injuries he thus inflicted on himself. When he had obtained the body, he cut it up with a sword or pocket-knife, tore out the entrails, and then masturbated. The sex of the bodies is said to have been a matter of indifference to him, though it was ascertained that this modern vampire had dug up more female than male corpses.
During these acts he declares himself to have been in an indescribable state of sexual excitement. After having cut them up, he reinterred the bodies.
In July, 1848, he accidentally came across the body of a girl of sixteen. Then, for the first time, he experienced a desire to carry out coitus on a cadaver.
‘I covered it with kisses and pressed it wildly to my heart. All that one could enjoy with a living woman is nothing in comparison with the pleasure I experienced. After I had enjoyed it for about a quarter of an hour, I cut the body up, as usual, and tore out the entrails. Then I buried the cadaver again.’ Only after this, as B. declares, had he felt the impulse to use the bodies sexually before cutting them up, and thereafter he had done it in three instances. The actual motive for exhuming the bodies, however, was then, as before, to cut them up; and the enjoyment in so doing was greater than in using the bodies sexually. The latter act had always been nothing more than an episode of the principal one, and had never quieted his desires; for which reason he had later on always mutilated the body.
The medico-legal examiners gave an opinion of ‘monomania’. Court-martial sentence to one year’s imprisonment.
An account of the case quoted by the sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld includes some important details:
He denied that he had ever bitten the corpses, as one of the experts asserts.
An interesting feature of the case is that, in addition to and in spite of his necrophile activities, B. entertained relations with girls wherever he was stationed, and completely ‘satisfied’ them. Several girls wanted to marry him. When the impulse manifested itself, which happened at intervals of about a fortnight, the attack being heralded by a headache, he pursued his necrosadism pleasures. And nothing could deter him. Even shots fired at him by sentries, traps laid for him, the most inclement weather, such obstacles as a pond which he had to swim in the middle of winter, the need to lie motionless in wet clothes in icy cold weather—none of these things deterred him. Finally, he was so severely wounded by a trap shot while climbing over the cemetery wall that he could not escape arrest, thereby providing an explanation of the many desecrations of the cemetery that had become known. Under the influence of the surgeon Marchal de Calvi, under whose treatment he was, B. freely admitted everything stating that he was not sure that he would not do such things again. He also declared that the important thing for him was the act of destruction, not the sexual act.
His attitude to women is rather interesting. He said:—
‘I have always loved women to distraction. I have never allowed anyone to offend a woman in my presence. Everywhere I had young and charming mistresses, whom I have been able to satisfy completely and who were devoted to me. This is proved by the fact that some of them, although they came from well-to-do, distinguished families, wanted to follow me. I have never touched a married woman; I always disliked obscene talk. If such talk was started in my presence, I endeavoured to turn the conversation to a different subject. I had a strictly religious education and have always loved and defended religion, though I am not a fanatic.
‘I have always loved destruction. In my childhood my parents would not give me any toys because I smashed everything. In later years I could not keep anything, even a penknife, longer than a fortnight; by then it was smashed up. It sometimes happens that I buy myself a pipe in the morning, and smash it up in the evening or next morning. In the army I once returned to barracks drunk and smashed everything that I could lay hands on.’
This case is interesting because it allows us such a clear insight into the reason for the rise of sex crime. There had, of course, been sadistic disembowellers before the nineteenth century, like Vlad the Impaler (the original ‘Dracula’) and the French Marshal Gilles de Rais (who killed children). But these had been members of an upper class who had the leisure to become bored, and to devote themselves to strange pleasures and fantasies. Bertrand was the son of a peasant. The origin of his sadism lay in ‘hypersexuality’—sexual desire of almost painful intensity. Fantasies of raping a roomful of women were followed by fantasies of killing them all—a daydream of ultimate power and aggression. (We note that Bertrand is a ‘man of delicate physical constitution’, and inclined to daydream, so these power fantasies are compensatory.) Since he has no contact with human corpses at this period, he is forced to make do with animal corpses; and since these are unsatisfactory for sexual purposes, his aggression finds expression in disembowelling. From then on, he is ‘imprinted’ with an association of sex and disembowelling. At 24, Bertrand began to kill and disembowel dogs while he masturbated. So when he came across an open grave with a corpse (a female) the desire to enact his fantasies was overwhelming; he described in his confession the ‘insane frenzy’ with which he began to beat the corpse with a spade.
The progression, then, is simple: intense sexual desire that finds outlet in daydreams, then in fantasies of rape followed by murder, then in disembowelling animal corpses, then sadistic acts on living dogs, then necrophily on female corpses. (In spite of Krafft-Ebing’s assertion, Bertrand said that he felt only disgust when he disinterred a male corpse.) And the medium which causes this progression from fantasy to necrophily is aggression. Yet Bertrand continues to feel a powerful inhibition about attacking living women. And so, as far as we can judge, did most of the males suffering from ‘hypersexuality’.
In the second half of the nineteenth century, this inhibition finally broke down. Krafft-Ebing also describes one of the first recorded sex crimes in our modern sense of the word:
Alton, a clerk in England, goes out of town for a walk. He lures a child into a thicket, and returns after a time to his office, where he makes this entry in his notebook: ‘Killed today a young girl; it was fine and hot.’ The child was missed, searched for, and found cut into pieces. Many parts, among them the genitals, could not be found. A. did not show the slightest trace of emotion, and gave no explanation of the motive of circumstances of the horrible deed. He was a psychopathic individual, and occasionally subject to fits of depression and taedium vitae. His father had had an attack of acute mania. A near relative suffered from mania with homicidal impulses. A. was executed.
Krafft-Ebing has it slightly wrong; the clerk was called Frederick Baker, and the town was Alton, Hampshire. It happened in July 1867, and the victim was an 8-year-old girl named Fanny Adams, whom Baker accosted and lured away from her playmates with a promise of sweets, then murdered in a hop garden.
Here, as in the case of Sergeant Bertrand, we can see that the sheer intensity of sexual fantasy leads to dreams of violence and murder. When he finally puts these dreams into action, it is not enough to commit rape: he also has to mutilate the victim and scatter the parts of her body over such a wide area that the phrase ‘sweet Fanny Adams’ has become a slang term meaning ‘nothing’.
Five years later, in 1872, one of the first Jack the Ripper-type killers, Vincent Verzeni, was arrested. The case is again described by Krafft-Ebing:
Vincenz Verzeni, born in 1849; since 11th January, 1872, in prison; is accused (1) of an attempt to strangle his nurse Marianne, four years ago, while she lay sick in bed; (2) of a similar attempt on a married woman, Arsuffi, aged twenty-seven; (3) of an attempt to strangle a married woman, Gala, by grasping her throat while kneeling on her abdomen; (4) on suspicion of the following murders:—
In December a fourteen-year-old girl, Johanna Motta, set out for a neighbouring village between seven and eight o’clock in the morning. As she did not return, her master set out to find her, and discovered her body near the village, lying by a path in the fields. The corpse was frightfully mutilated with numerous wounds. The intestines and genitals had been torn from the open body, and were found nearby. The nakedness of the body and erosions on the thighs made it seem probable that there had been an attempt at rape; the mouth, filled with earth, pointed to suffocation. In the neighbourhood of the body, under a pile of straw, were found a portion of flesh torn from the right calf, and pieces of, clothing. The perpetrator of the deed remained undiscovered.
On 28th August, 1871, a married woman, Frigeni, aged twenty-eight, set out into the fields early in the morning. As she did not return by eight o’clock, her husband started out to fetch her. He found her a corpse, lying naked in the field, with the mark of a thong around her neck, with which she had been strangled, and with numerous wounds. The abdomen had been slit open, and the intestines were hanging out.
On 29th August, at noon, as Maria Previtali, aged nineteen, went through a field, she was followed by her cousin, Verzeni. He dragged her into a field of grain, threw her to the ground, and began to choke her. As he let go of her for a moment to ascertain whether any one was near, the girl got up and, by her supplicating entreaty, induced Verzeni to let her go, after he had pressed her hands together for some time.
Verzeni was brought before a court. He is twenty-two years old. His cranium is of more than average size, but asymmetrical. The right frontal bone is narrower and lower than the left, the right frontal prominence being less developed, and the right ear smaller than the left (by 1 centimetre in length and 3 centimetres in breadth); both ears are defective in the inferior half of the helix; the right temporal artery is somewhat atheromatous. Bull-necked; enormous development of the zygomœ and inferior maxilla; penis greatly developed, frœnum wanting; slight divergent alternating strabismus (insufficiency of the internal rectus muscle, and myopia). Lombroso concludes, from these signs of degeneration, that there is a congenital arrest of development of the right frontal lobe. As seemed probable, Verzeni has a bad ancestry—two uncles are cretins; a third, microcephalic, beardless, one testicle wanting, the other atrophic. The father shows traces of pellagrous degeneration, and had an attack of hypochondria pellagrosa. A cousin suffered from cerebral hyperœmia; another is a confirmed thief.
Verzeni’s family is bigoted and low-minded. He himself has ordinary intelligence; knows how to defend himself well; seeks to prove an alibi and cast suspicion on others. There is nothing in his past that points to mental disease, but his character is peculiar. He is silent and inclined to be solitary. In prison he is cynical. He masturbates, and makes every effort to gain sight of women.
Verzeni finally confessed his deeds and their motive. The commission of them gave him an indescribably pleasant (lustful) feeling, which was accompanied by erection and ejaculation. As soon as he has grasped his victim by the neck, sexual sensations were experienced. It was entirely the same to him, with reference to these sensations, whether the women were old, young, ugly, or beautiful. Usually, simply choking them had satisfied him, and he then had allowed his victims to live; in the two cases mentioned, the sexual satisfaction was delayed, and he had continued to choke them until they died. The gratification experienced in this garrotting was greater than in masturbation. The abrasions of the skin on Motta’s thighs were produced by his teeth, whilst sucking her blood in most intense lustful pleasure. He had torn out a piece of flesh from her calf and taken it with him to roast at home; but on the way he hid it under the straw-stack, for fear his mother would suspect him. He also carried pieces of the clothing and intestines some distance, because it gave him great pleasure to smell and touch them. The strength which he possessed in these moments of intense lustful pleasure was enormous. He had never been a fool; while committing his deeds he saw nothing around him (apparently as a result of intense sexual excitement, annihilation of perception—instinctive action).
After such acts he was always very happy, enjoying a feeling of great satisfaction. He had never had pangs of conscience. It had never occurred to him to touch the genitals of the martyred women or to violate his victims. It had satisfied him to throttle them and suck their blood. These statements of this modern vampire seem to rest on truth. Normal sexual impulses seem to have remained foreign to him. Two sweethearts that he had, he was satisfied to look at; it was very strange to him that he had no inclination to strangle them or press their hands; but he had not had the same pleasure with them as with his victims. There was no trace of moral sense, remorse and the like.
Verzeni said himself that it would be a good thing if he were to be kept in prison, because with freedom he could not resist his impulses. Verzeni was sentenced to imprisonment for life (Lombroso, ‘Verzeni e Agnoletti,’ Rome, 1873). The confessions which Verzeni made after his sentence are interesting:—
‘I had an unspeakable delight in strangling women, experiencing during the act erections and real sexual pleasure. It was even a pleasure only to small female clothing. The feeling of pleasure while strangling them was much greater than that which I experienced while masturbating. I took great delight in drinking Motta’s blood. It also gave me the greatest pleasure to pull the hair-pins out of the hair of my victims.
‘I took the clothing and intestines because of the pleasure it gave me to smell and touch them. At last my mother came to suspect me, because she noticed spots of semen on my shirt after each murder or attempt at one. I am not crazy, but in the moment of strangling my victims I saw nothing else. After the commission of the deeds I was satisfied and felt well. It never occurred to me to touch or look at the genitals or such things. It satisfied me to seize the women by the neck and suck their blood. To this very day I am ignorant of how a woman is formed. During the strangling and after it, I pressed myself on the entire body without thinking of one part more than another.’
Verzeni arrived at his perverse acts quite independently, after having noticed, when he was twelve years old, that he experienced a peculiar feeling of pleasure while wringing the necks of chickens. After this he often killed great numbers of them and then said that a weasel had been in the hen-coop.
It is interesting to note that Verzeni found the intestines and the female clothing equally exciting. And this suddenly enables us to understand the emphasis on underwear in Raped on the Railway. Mrs Sinclair is at first remote, untouchable, even her face hidden behind a veil. So the artist Brandon sees her as a sexual object, not as a fellow human being—moreover, as a sexual object whose ‘forbiddenness’ merits aggression. The silk underskirt and the drawers are symbols of her forbiddenness. And the difference between the erotic fantasy of Fanny Hill and the pornographic fantasy of Raped on the Railway is essentially a difference of aggression. Cleland is interested only in the straightforward pleasures of the ‘two backed beast’, of the mutual satisfaction men and women can obtain from of their genitals. Fanny Hill is a straightforward transference of the pleasures of the bed into fiction, a kind of substitute for an hour in bed with a member of the opposite sex. Raped on the Railway is intended as more than a substitute; it is intended to give a higher degree of pleasure by taking its (male) reader on an excursion into the forbidden, in which aggression is expressed first in rape, then in spanking.
The irony of the situation is that it is the development of the human imagination that has led to all this ‘superheated sex’ with its flavour of criminality. Imagination means that human beings are no longer contented with the narrowness and boredom of their everyday lives; they dream of far horizons and a richer and more satisfying kind of experience. But this enriched imagination is also placed at the service of their sexual fantasy and their will-to-power. The result is a product like Raped on the Railway, which takes at least three hours to read, and is therefore far more extended than a normal sexual experience.
Imagination, of course, is not the whole explanation. The social changes brought about by the Industrial Revolution, which packed hundreds of thousands of human beings into a thoroughly artificial environment in the cities, also played their part. Even more important was the frustration induced by Victorian prudery, in which children were brought up to regard any reference to intimate parts of the body as shameful. Even the word ‘legs’ was unmentionable, and table legs were often covered up with a long tablecloth, or even a kind of stocking, in case they brought a blush to the cheeks of young ladies.
Because we are the heirs of Victorian prudery, we find all this fairly natural, even if rather absurd. But to grasp the real point, imagine what would happen if our society regarded food as shameful and unmentionable, so that only married couples ate together, while single people ate alone, and did their best to give the impression that they had no need of nourishment. A food pornography would develop in which men in a fever of desire would peer through cracks in doors at women eating their dinner, and in which a description of a cherry tart surmounted by a twisted blob of whipped cream would arouse all the illicit thrills of a girl removing her clothes. The sense of wickedness would soon be transferred to food packaging, and fetishists would furtively search through dustbins for empty boxes with erotic pictures of cheesecake and beefburgers. A few dedicated perverts would accumulate drawers full of empty jamjars, opened cans of baked beans, and greaseproof paper in which sausages had been wrapped, while food pedophiles would be attracted only to unripe fruit and baby carrots.
It sounds laughable only because our attitude to food is strictly realistic, like the primitive attitude to sex. We agree that food is one of the great pleasures of life, we sympathize with gourmets who seek out the best restaurants, but we waste no time in daydreaming about ten-course meals. Because food is openly available, and there are no taboos about eating in public, we have not subjected it to the hothouse treatment of the imagination. Yet, biologically speaking, there is a close parallel between our need for food and our need for sex. Both are essential for survival, both can give great pleasure, both can be associated with a will to power (only the rich can afford the finest food). If we make an effort to grasp the underlying reality of sex as we grasp the underlying reality of food, we see that it is based on the man’s and woman’s mutual need to find a partner, and that the essence of such a relation is that it is based on a sense of difference: that obvious yet all-important recognition that men are different from women. The male’s sexual pleasure springs from a sense of overcoming this difference. And in a world in which sexual desire was still as ‘normal’ as our need for food, sexual satisfaction would lead to a simple, monogamous relation, with little or no interest in other partners, and certainly no interest in the kind of abstract sexuality—the sexual illusion—that is satisfied by erotic daydreams.
To grasp this is to grasp what has happened to sex since the late eighteen century. Imagination has turned it into a kind of gigantic shadow of itself, like the Spectre of the Brocken, and the straightforward bawdiness of Aretino and The School of Venus has been transformed into something far more steamy, criminal and neurotic.
In the first half of the nineteenth century, sex crime became increasingly common, particularly in urban areas—Henry Mayhew even produced a map in the mid-1840s showing where ‘carnal’ attacks were most common—and the prevalence of sadistic crime slowly increased, although to judge by the cases mentioned by Krafft-Ebing and Hirschfeld it seldom resulted in murder. (The rape of children was not uncommon, because children were more ‘forbidden’ than adult women.) Even as early as 1790, women in London were terrified by a man who became known as ‘the Monster’, who slashed at their clothes with a sharp knife, which sometimes caused painful cuts. One girl, Anne Porter, was slashed in the buttocks, and on undressing, found a wound nine inches long and four inches deep. Six months later, she recognized her attacker in the street, and her male companion followed the man home and made a kind of citizen’s arrest. The ‘monster’ proved to be a slightly built man named Renwick Williams, a maker of artificial flowers; although he insisted on his innocence he was sentenced to six years in prison.
Forty years later, in 1829, a man known as ‘the Ripper of Bozen’ stabbed girls in the lower abdomen, and when caught, admitted that ‘he was suffering from a sexual urge amounting to a frenzy’, and that he was obsessed by the urge for days on end until he gave way to it, experiencing orgasm as he slashed the girls.
The following case from Krafft-Ebing is again typical:
C. L., aged forty-two, engineer, married, father of two children; from a neuropathic family; father irascible, a drinker; mother hysterical, subject to eclamptic attacks. The patient remembers that in childhood he took particular pleasure in witnessing the slaughtering of domestic animals, especially swine. He thus experienced lustful pleasure and ejaculation. Later he visited slaughter-houses, in order to delight in the sight of flowing blood and the death throes of the animals. When he could find opportunity, he killed the animals himself, which always afforded him a vicarious feeling of sexual pleasure.
At the time of full maturity he first attained to a knowledge of his abnormality. The patient was not exactly opposed in inclination to women, but close contact with them seemed to him repugnant. On the advice of a physician, at twenty-five he married a woman who pleased him, in the hope of freeing himself of his abnormal condition. Although he was very partial to his wife, it was only seldom, and after great trouble and exertion of his imagination, that he could perform coitus with her; nevertheless, he begat two children. In 1866 he was in the war in Bohemia. His letters written at that time to his wife, were composed in an exalted, enthusiastic tone. He was missed after the battle of Königgrätz.
Krafft-Ebing tries to explain such cases by remarking that ‘cruelty is natural to primitive man’. But here he seems to be missing the point. What has happened in this case—as in that of Sergeant Bertrand, Vincent Verzeni and Jack the Ripper—is that ‘superheated sex’, which is based on ‘forbiddenness’, has become associated with cruelty. The notion that blood and disembowellment can be sexually stimulating will strike most people as incomprehensible; yet all the evidence seems to show that when a person of high sexual drive is subjected continually to the sight and smell of blood, the result is often the development of a sadistic obsession.
One of the most typical of these early cases is described by State Attorney Wulffen and quoted by Hirschfeld:
Eusebius Pieydagnelle was tried in 1871 for four murders. In the speech he addressed to the jury…he begged them to sentence him to death. He said he would have killed himself but for the fact that he believed in a Beyond, and did not want to add a further sin to his score.
Pieydagnelle told the jury that he came from highly respect-able parents and had had an excellent education. Unfortunately, opposite their house in Vinuville there was a butcher’s shop kept by a M. Cristobal. ‘The smell of fresh blood, the appetizing meat, the bloody lumps—all this fascinated me and I began to envy the butcher’s assistant, because he could work at the block, with rolled-up sleeves and bloody hands.’ Then, in spite of his parents’ opposition, he persuaded them to apprentice him to Cristobal. Here he drank blood in secret and wounded the cattle. He derived the greatest excitement when he was permitted to kill an animal himself. ‘But the sweetest sensation is when you feel the animal trembling under your knife. The animal’s departing life creeps along the blade right up to your hand. The mighty blow that felled the bullocks sounded like sweet music in my ears.’ Unfortunately for him, his father took him away from the butcher, and apprenticed him to a notary. But it was too late. He was seized with a terrible depression, a deep melancholia, and since he could no longer kill animals, he began to kill people. Six times he committed murder under the compulsion of the same urge. He tried to isolate himself from the world and lived in a cave in a wood. But it was all in vain; his impulse was stronger than he. His last victim was his first employer, M. Cristobal. The murderer then gave himself up. His first victim was a girl of 15, and he describes his sensation when he killed her as follows: ‘As I looked at the lovely creature my first thought was that I should like to kiss her. I bent down…But I paused—a stolen kiss is no use. But I could not bring myself to wake her up. I looked at her lovely neck—and at that moment the gleam of the kitchen knife that lay beside the girl struck my eyes. Something drew me irresistibly towards the knife.’
Two years after the publication of Psychopathia Sexualis, the Jack the Ripper murders created a sensation that reverberated around the world. For the first time, the general public became aware that something strange and frightening was happening. In an introduction to Donald Rumbelow’s Complete Jack the Ripper, I tried to explain just why the murders produced such an impact. The Victorians were basically sentimental; they cried at the death of Little Nell and rejoiced at the conversion of Scrooge in A Christmas Carol. They gasped with horror in the theatre as William Corder shot Maria Marten in the Red Barn, or the Colleen Bawn was murdered by her spoilt playboy husband. (Both plays were based on real cases.) Victorian society might be divided by class barriers, but where sentiment was concerned, it was one big happy family. The Ripper murders, with their nightmarish mutilations, simply went beyond normal comprehension. It was as if the killer wanted to shock the whole community, to fling the murders in its face like a hysterical insult. The crimes seemed to exude the smell of pure evil.
Now, as we have seen, the Ripper murders were a long way from being the first sex crimes; such crimes had been going on intermittently throughout the nineteenth century. But earlier crimes—like those of Vincent Verzeni—were hardly known outside the countries in which they occurred. Reuter had opened a news office in London in 1851; but it was not until Edison invented the ‘quadruplex’ telegraph in 1874—in which four messages could be sent along the same wire—that the age of mass communication suddenly began. Jack the Ripper, with his gruesome pseudonym, was the first mass murderer to receive worldwide publicity.
In fact, the Ripper murders merely created a general awareness of something that had been ‘in the air’ since Sade. They seemed to crystallize the spirit of the 120 Days of Sodom. And in the year following the murders, Tolstoy was to give expression to a troubled awareness of this change in a short novel called The Kreutzer Sonata, about a man named Pozdnichev, who had stabbed his wife in a fit of insane jealousy. Pozdnichev argues passionately that civilization has been poisoned by sexual desire. Simple peasants, he declares, eat and drink a great deal, but they use up the energy in hard physical labour. The leisured classes canalize their excess energies into sex and romance. He tells how, as a teenager, he indulged in masturbation, and finally began making use of prostitutes. This, he argues, is unnatural, a sign of our frenzied and morbid sexuality.
He goes on to describe how his wife and a musician began to take an obvious romantic interest in one another as they played Beethoven’s Kreutzer Sonata, and how he became increasingly possessed by jealousy until he caught the two of them alone together, and stabbed his wife. When he begged her forgiveness as she lay on her deathbed, she merely looked at him with ‘cold animal hatred’, and told him that forgiveness was all rubbish. In fact, Tolstoy is arguing that the intimate relations between man and woman are ‘all rubbish’, based on illusion. When a lady who is listening suggests that real love is based on spiritual affinity and identity of ideals, Pozdnichev asks sarcastically: ‘Do they go to bed together because of identity of ideals?’
The Kreutzer Sonata caused passionate controversy, and even today, few commentators can write about it without taking sides—usually to argue that Pozdnichev is an insane egoist. The truth is that Tolstoy was the one man of genius of his time who saw clearly what had happened to the human sexual urge in the past century: that it had been amplified by the imagination until it had achieved an unhealthy strength. His argument might be paraphrased: ‘normal’ sexual desire is as straightforward and natural as a fruit punch but human beings have deliberately added raw alcohol to make it more interesting. The result is an erotic cocktail that creates a kind of insanity. Tolstoy must have regarded the Ripper murders as a typical example of this insanity. And in blaming Beethoven, he is not entirely wide of the mark. Beethoven signals the beginning of a new kind of romantic music, a music based on a consciousness of the ego. Tolstoy has simply failed to identify the source of this development as Samuel Richardson and the novelists who followed. How could he recognize it when he himself was perpetuating the ‘egoism’ in his own novels? Yet the basic theme of his own Anna Karenina is the sexual illusion, and how it leads to tragedy.
There is another respect in which Tolstoy is guilty of muddled thinking. In appealing to the Russian peasant as the ‘normal’ human being, who keeps sex in its proper place, Tolstoy is implying that highly civilized sexuality—the sexual preoccupation displayed by the leisured classes—is somehow abnormal—that it has crossed the line that divides normality from abnormality or perversion. But this fails to recognize that it is totally impossible to draw a clear dividing line between normality and perversion. Perversion depends on a sense of ‘forbiddenness’, a desire to violate taboos, and all sex depends on this sense of forbiddenness. The contact of two bodies has to bring a shock of ‘difference’, and without this shock, sex would become either mechanical or simply impossible. In animals, the smell of the female on heat triggers ‘forbiddenness’. In human beings, this function has been handed over to our minds. All sex is based on ‘forbiddenness’.
All this raises an interesting question. Tolstoy blames the problem on the leisured-class, and there is a sense in which he is obviously correct: earlier ‘monsters’ like Caligula, Gilles de Rais, Ivan the Terrible, Vlad the Impaler, Countess Bathory,1 all belonged to the upper classes. So why were the majority of sex killers working-class? Why is it still true that nearly all serial killers are working-class? Conversely, if it was the working classes who were packed like sardines into unhealthy basements during the Industrial Revolution, creating a sexual free-for-all, then why were the leisured classes also infected with the virus?
In The Misfits I have suggested that the answer could lie in Rupert Sheldrake’s ‘hypothesis of formative causation’. Sheldrake points out that heredity cannot be explained entirely in chemical terms: DNA and so on. Something else is needed, and embryologists have concluded that the ‘something else’ is a factor called ‘morphogenetic fields’. The wing of a bird or the tentacle of an octopus is shaped by a kind of electrical ‘mould’—just like the moulds into which we pour jellies—which is why many creatures can re-grow a limb that has been cut off. These ‘moulds’ seem to be magnetic fields, which shape the living molecules just as a magnet can ‘shape’ iron filings into a pattern. Sheldrake suggests that these ‘fields’ can be used to explain some rather odd observations made by biologists.
For example, in 1920 the psychologist William McDougal performed an experiment at Harvard to see if baby rats could inherit abilities developed by their parents (the ‘inheritance of acquired characteristics’ that Darwinists regard as such a fearful heresy). He put white rats into a tank of water from which they could escape up one of two gangplanks. One gangplank had an electric current running through it, and the first generation of rats soon learned to choose the other one. Then McDougal tried the same experiment on their children, and then on their children, and so on. And he found that each generation learned more quickly than its parents—he had proved that the inheritance of acquired characteristics does occur.
Now when a scientist performs an experiment on a group of animals, he always keeps an exactly similar group who are not subjected to experiments; these are called the ‘control group’—the purpose being to have a ready standard of comparison. When a colleague of McDougal’s—W. E. Agar of Melbourne—repeated his experiment, he also decided to test the control group at the end of several generations. To his baffled astonishment, these also showed the same ability to learn more quickly. And that was impossible, for they had merely been sitting passively in cages. It looked as if the control rats had learned by some kind of telepathy.
Not telepathy, says Sheldrake, but by ‘morphic resonance’. The control group of rats ‘picked up’ the morphogenetic field of the trained rats in the same way that an iron bar can pick up the electrical field of a coil of wire and turn into a magnet. Simple induction.
Incredibly, this seems to work not only with living creatures but with crystals. New chemicals, when synthesized for the first time, are often extremely difficult to crystallize. But as soon as one of them has been crystallized in any laboratory in the world, it becomes easier to crystallize in all the others. At first, it was suspected that scientists travelling from one laboratory to another might be carrying fragments of crystals in their clothes or beards—or even that tiny quantities are carried in the atmosphere. Both explanations seem highly unlikely. The likeliest, Sheldrake suggests, is a process of ‘induction’ through morphogenetic fields.
A series of experiments has been performed to test the Sheldrake hypothesis and has produced positive results. At Yale, Professor Gary Schwartz found that people who do not know Hebrew were able to distinguish between real words in Hebrew and false words—because Jews all over the world already know the genuine words. Alan Pickering of Hatfield Polytechnic obtained the same result using Persian script. In another experiment, English-speaking people were asked to memorize two rhymes in a foreign language—one a well-known nursery rhyme, one a newly composed rhyme. The result—as the hypothesis of formative causation predicts—is that they learned the nursery rhyme more easily than the newly composed rhyme.
If Sheldrake is correct, then it becomes altogether easier to understand what has been happening since the time of Richardson. The obvious objection to the ‘imagination’ theory suggested in this book is that the majority of the inhabitants of Europe were illiterate, even in the nineteenth century, so that even the spread of circulating libraries could hardly explain the enormous influence of romanticism and of the ‘sexual revolution’. Could a mere change in literary fashion explain why, by the time Krafft-Ebing came to write Psychopathia Sexualis, the capital cities of Europe seemed to have an astonishingly high level of sexual perversion? Is it not more likely, for example, that the explanation lies in the increasing stresses of industrial society? (One answer to that objection is that cases of sex crime in the nineteenth century occurred in rural areas as frequently as in cities.) The hypothesis of morphic resonance suggests an altogether more satisfying explanation. If Sheldrake is correct, we would expect the ‘imaginative revolution’ to spread to every class of society, so that it would affect illiterate working men like Bichel and Pieydagnelle and Verzeni as much as aristocrats like Sade and Byron and Swinburne.
Fortunately—as we shall see in the next chapter—sex crime made a fairly slow start. But by the middle of the 1920s, it was apparent that a new type of human predator was at large, and that in some strange and frightening way, the human race had emerged into a new stage of lost innocence.
1 For a fuller account of these see ‘A Gallery of Monsters’ in my Second Mammoth Book of True Crime (Robinson, London, 1990).