The link between exhaustion and sin, established in late antiquity and the Middle Ages by the theologians who wrote on acedia and sloth, was revived four hundred years later in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century discourses on sexuality. The eighteenth century saw a surge in anxieties related to what were taken to be sinful sexual practices, particularly masturbation. The afterlife of the partly humoral, partly theological, and partly moralistic antimasturbation discourse first formulated in that period extended well into the nineteenth century, during which a “science of sex” (
scientia sexualis) emerged, as biological and psychological models replaced the predominantly Christian taxonomies of sexual sin.
1Premodern sexual deviance was essentially seen as a crime “against nature,” with the church delineating the parameters of what was “natural” and thus acceptable and normative, and the state and the community policing its boundaries.
2 In the second half of the nineteenth century, sexual deviance was no longer understood primarily in terms of sinful and immoral behavior but increasingly categorized as either normal or pathological. However, one specific, age-old humoral belief continued to haunt these new “scientific” discourses—the idea of the harmfulness of masturbation. Masturbation, it was assumed, upset the balance of the four humors and drained the individual of precious life energy, leading to permanent exhaustion and potentially even death.
The belief in the harmfulness of masturbation in particular, and excessive sexual activity in general, can be traced back to Greek antiquity and is rooted in the humoral medical system. It was generally assumed that the loss of seminal fluids brought with it a decrease in vital elements and bodily strength. Although physicians were predominantly worried about male sexual excesses, for a long time it was also assumed that females, too, emitted a less visible, ejaculation-like liquid when engaging in sexual activities and were thus also prone to experience the adverse effects of upsetting the humoral bodily economy. Pythagoreans writing in the fifth century
B.C.E., for example, asserted that with each sperm secretion a part of the soul was lost. Aristotle maintained that “the loss of [semen] from the system is just as exhausting as the loss of pure healthy blood.” For most men, Aristotle wrote, “the sequel to sexual intercourse is exhaustion and weakness rather than relief” because “semen has some
dynamis [potency] within itself.”
3 Galen, and most humoral physicians who adopted his theories, also believed in the highly damaging nature of seminal expulsion. Moreover, it was generally assumed that when all vital spirits are concentrated in the genitalia, the rest of the body—in particular, the brain—is left depleted of essential life energy. (A similar argument was also often made about the stomach and the dangers of overeating.) Consequently, if someone indulges in excessive sexual activities over an extended period of time, the depletion of energy in the rest of the body becomes chronic and dangerous.
4The medieval Arab physician Avicenna famously maintained that the loss of one part of semen was as harmful as the loss of forty parts of blood—a quantitative claim that would be much repeated in the medical literature until the advent of sexology in the late nineteenth century.
5 Marsilio Ficino, too, cites Avicenna when he writes in his
Three Books on Life that excessive sexual intercourse is one of the primary causes for exhaustion,
especially if it proceeds even a little beyond one’s strength; for indeed it suddenly drains the spirits, especially the more subtle ones, it weakens the brain, and it ruins the stomach and the heart—no evil can be worse for one’s intelligence. For why did Hippocrates judge sexual intercourse to be like epilepsy, if not because it strikes the mind, which is sacred…. So it was with good reason that the ancients held the Muses and Minerva to be virgins.
6The architects of premodern conceptions of the so-called sexual perversions were ecclesiastical scholars. The most influential of these, Saint Thomas Aquinas, not only wrote on acedia but also drew up the core Christian taxonomy of sexual sins in his
Summa Theologiae. Aquinas defines any sexual act from which procreation cannot follow as “unnatural vice.” He furthermore divides unnatural vice into different species of lechery. All sins of lechery are, first, in conflict with right reason, and, second, in conflict with the “natural pattern of sexuality for the benefit of the species.” The species of lechery are self-abuse (that is, masturbation), bestiality, sodomy (sex with a person of the same sex), and deviations from the natural (genital) form of intercourse such as anal and oral sex. Aquinas then compares the different modalities of lechery and draws up a hierarchy. “The gravity of a sin corresponds rather to an object being abused, than to its proper use being omitted,” he reasons, and thus the lowest rank is held by the solitary sin masturbation, while the greatest sin is that of bestiality as it crosses the species barrier.
7It was only at the beginning of the eighteenth century that Aquinas’s hierarchy of the worst sexual sins was challenged: masturbation, formerly classified as the least harmful of the unnatural vices, suddenly became the most vilified and feared act of sexual deviance. The historian Thomas Laqueur relates the sudden rise of the masturbation pandemic at the dawn of the Enlightenment to the advent of individualism and moral self-government. He identifies the privileging of the imagination, secrecy, and privacy, as well as a valorization of excess, as some of the main reasons why masturbation graduated from a marginal vice to an emblematic disease capturing the core anxieties of the modern subject. Masturbation, he writes, “became ethically central and construed as dangerous precisely when its component parts came to be valued.”
8 Print culture, the novel, and solitary reading practices were not just deemed dangerous because they could stimulate the imagination in undesired ways but also considered to be essential qualities of the cultured individual. Similarly, overindulgence was both feared and celebrated, for the rapidly changing laws of the marketplace depended on a fetishization of consumer goods and on generating an ever-increasing appetite for them.
In 1712, an anonymous pamphlet,
Onania; or, the Heinous Sin of Self-Pollution, and All Its Frightful Consequences, in Both Sexes, Considered, with Spiritual and Physical Advice to Those Who Have Already Injur’d Themselves by This Abominable Practice, written by an English quack, was the first of a number of texts that triggered what was to become known as the masturbation pandemic in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The author declares as the aim of his study the promotion of “Virtue and Christian Purity” and the discouragement of “Vice and Uncleanness,” and in particular “self-pollution.”
9Apart from the fact that masturbation stands in the way of marriage, puts a stop to procreation, and is generally “displeasing to God,” the author of
Onania asserts that it also causes weakness and exhaustion, gonorrhea, nocturnal effusions, seminal emissions, gleets, oozings, infertility, and impotence.
10 Here, we can already observe a shift from a purely religious register to an increasingly medical one. Immoral action is declared to have material, organic consequences; the evocation of frightful medical scenarios, such as the loss of precious life energy, is deployed as a new pedagogical tool. Masturbation is defined as a practice that “perverts” nature because it endangers the survival of the species and thus by implication attacks God’s design. Overall,
Onania contains a curious mixture of Christian, medical, and demographic arguments, culminating in a worldly plea: afflicted readers are urged to buy the “prolifick powder” produced by the author and promising a cure from their ailments.
In 1760, a second influential treatise on masturbation appeared, written by the Swiss physician Samuel-Auguste Tissot (1728–1797). In the preface, Tissot makes explicit the change of strategy already present in
Onania, a shift from moral appeals to the intimidating illustration of the physical consequences of immoral behavior:
My design was to write upon the disorders occasioned by masturbation, or self-pollution, and not upon the crime of masturbation: besides, is not the crime sufficiently proved, when it is demonstrated to be an act of suicide? Those who are acquainted with men, know very well that it is much easier to make them shun vice by the dread of a present ill, than by reasons founded upon principles, the truth of which has not been sufficiently inculcated into them.
11Here, Tissot openly acknowledges that the suggestion of physical ailments as a result of immoral practices is a much more effective tool for convincing human beings to shun evil than are appeals to religious and moral principles. This shift is significant not only because it illustrates a secular focus on the here and now rather than the afterlife, but also because it demonstrates how and why medical arguments were more and more regularly used as pedagogic, ideological, and political tools.
Tissot consequently produces a long list of terrifying symptoms allegedly caused by the practice of masturbation. These include, above all, loss of life energy, weakness, and exhaustion, but also convulsions, sleeplessness, paleness, pimples, consumption, diarrhea, the weakening of intellectual powers, bad digestion, vomiting, anguish, paralysis, spasms, melancholy, catalepsy, epilepsy, imbecility, loss of sensation, disorders of the urinary system, and even death. Tissot still adheres to key principles of humoral theory and argues that the loss of seminal liquor causes dangerous impoverishments in the bodily economy that adversely affect the soul, the nervous system, and the senses. He, too, repeats Avicenna’s formula when he writes that the loss of one ounce of seminal liquor weakens the body more than does the loss of forty ounces of blood.
Assumptions of this kind were to prevail for many years after Tissot. Many theorists of neurasthenia, for example, established a direct link between masturbation and exhaustion.
12 In his early works, even Sigmund Freud argues that masturbation substantially weakens the organism and causes lassitude in the patient. Like his eighteenth- and nineteenth-century colleagues before him, Freud believed that the fragile energy-economy of the human body could be severely damaged by the careless waste of sexual energy (libido) that occurs during the act of masturbation.
13 Sándor Ferenczi, elaborating on Freud’s brief comments on the topic, believed that masturbation puts a specific strain on the sources of neuropsychological energy because “such a willed gratification requires a greater consumption of energy than the almost unconscious act of coitus.”
14 Many of Freud’s successors, however, abandoned this increasingly untenable biophysical argument and suggested that the loss of energy during and after masturbation was less a physical phenomenon than the result of excessive feelings of guilt.
15
While the treatises on masturbation by the anonymous English author and Tissot were grounded primarily in a mélange of Christian dogma and humoral theory, an alternative model with which pathologies could be assessed and explained rose to prominence in the second half of the nineteenth century: the degeneration paradigm. In 1857, in his study Treatise on Physical, Intellectual and Moral Degeneracy in the Human Species and the Causes That Produce These Diseased Varieties, the French physician Bénédict Augustin Morel (1809–1873) introduced the idea of degeneration as a negative, retrogressive cultural development, a form of “perverse evolution,” that results in the gradual weakening of certain groups of individuals and increases from generation to generation. Degeneration, in other words, was considered a form of genetic exhaustion, with dire biopolitical consequences for the strength and vigor of the nation. Morel defines degeneration in the following terms:
The clearest notion we can form of degeneracy is to regard it as a morbid deviation from an original type. This deviation, even if, at the outset, it was ever so slight, contained transmissible elements of such a nature that anyone bearing in him the germs becomes more and more incapable of fulfilling his functions in the world; and mental progress, already checked in his own person, finds itself menaced also in his descendants.
16Harry Oosterhuis argues that Morel “translated the Christian doctrine of man’s regression after original sin into a biological metaphor,” and that degeneration theory “signalled a crisis in the social optimism that had characterized both liberalism and positivist science.”
17 Indeed, it is possible to identify the advent and rapid proliferation of degeneration theory as the point at which the Enlightenment notion of unlimited progress turned sour, when modernity began to be construed as decadence, and when both cultural and medical theorists suddenly feared a general progressive weakening not just of individual groups but of Western civilization as a whole. Although degeneration theory was based on purportedly biological arguments, it essentially pathologized behavior and qualities that were thought of as immoral, criminal, sinful, or otherwise unwelcome.
Cesare Lombroso (1836–1909), an Italian criminal anthropologist most famous for the concept of the “born criminal,” further popularized degeneration theory. Another highly influential text on the matter is the German cultural critic and physician Max Nordau’s Degeneration (1892–1893), an international best seller in which Nordau rejects contemporary art and music as decadent products of degenerate artists and, more significantly, as driving forces of further cultural degeneration and decline. The fear of degeneration—be it physical and mental on the individual level, biopolitical on the demographic level, or sociocultural on the political and philosophical level—attests to a pessimistic, exhausted cultural climate in which the myth of progress itself appears to have run out of steam. It was not until the publication of Freud’s Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality in 1905 that another powerful paradigm—that of arrested psychological development—finally challenged and ultimately replaced the hegemony of degeneration theory in sexological discourse, if not elsewhere.
While earlier writers such as Jean-Jacques Rousseau and doctors such as Tissot perceived civilization as a polluting force contaminating and weakening the body and mind of the individual, later sexologists instead saw the so-called perverts as corruptor figures who weakened the social body. The “degenerates” were construed as dangers to civilization, halting progress by their regression to pre-Christian rituals such as fetishism and even bestiality. They were frequently viewed as retreating atavistically from the intellect to the senses, from reality to the imagination, and from civilization to a primitive state of being.
18 As Vernon A. Rosario observes, what “emerges from the antimasturbatory literature of the nineteenth century is the perception of ‘deviant’ individuals as viruses of the social corps—polluting its national strength and purity.”
19 While in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, moralistic messages that were clearly still grounded in the Christian notion of sin were increasingly presented with medical health warnings in order to scare masturbators into submission by suggesting that they were in danger of squandering for good their nonrenewable life energy, the late nineteenth century gave this argument a decidedly biopolitical twist by suggesting that degenerate individuals were not just endangering themselves but also weakening and indeed exhausting the health of the nation.
In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the Gothic emerged as a significant literary and artistic movement through which the Western imagination figured its concerns about exhaustion, decrepitude, decay, and ruination. The Gothic is also teeming with references to the entire spectrum of what Freud would later identify as polymorphous perversions. One need only think of Matthew Lewis’s novel
The Monk (1796), for example, which includes graphic scenes of rape and incest. And within the Gothic supernatural bestiary, no creature combines the themes of exhaustion and sexuality as effectively as the vampire. Literary representations of vampires frequently serve as vehicles to voice anxieties about racial others and about sexual deviance in its various manifestations: in works such as Ludwig Tieck’s
Wake Not the Dead (1823),
20 Théophile Gautier’s
The Dead in Love (1836), and, of course, Bram Stoker’s
Dracula (1897), the vampiric protagonists are aligned with necrophilia, homosexuality, polygamy, fetishism, obsession, gynophobia, and oral sex. Moreover, often of aristocratic descent, vampires such as John Polidori’s Lord Ruthven, protagonist of the story “The Vampyre” (1819), and Stoker’s Count Dracula are recurrently associated with capitalist exploitation, as they quite literally suck their victims dry, parasitically draining their life energy and ruthlessly depleting their resources for their own precarious survival. Karl Marx was keenly aware of the metaphoric power of vampires when he wrote in
Capital: “Capital is dead labor, which, vampire-like, lives only by sucking living labor, and lives the more, the more labor it sucks.”
21As attitudes toward otherness and sexuality changed in the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, so did the status of the bloodsucking creatures of the night. While most nineteenth-century vampire texts cast the undead as seductive but ultimately monstrous threats to the social order that are generally destroyed in the end by the forces of good, twentieth-century, and especially postwar, representations of vampires focus instead on the loneliness of the social outcast, on the attractions of narcissism, and on attitudes toward minorities, or else they glamorize the otherness of the vampire. Teenagers, in particular, are prone to identify with the pale, brooding, and misunderstood outsiders, whose difference is now frequently recast not just as acceptable but as superior: Ann Rice’s Vampire Chronicles, Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight saga, and Kevin Williamson and Julie Plec’s television series The Vampire Diaries are clear cases in point.
In nineteenth-century vampire texts, the supernatural frequently functions as a guise to discuss then-taboo sexual practices.
22 John Sheridan Le Fanu’s
Carmilla (1872) is a highly representative example of this tendency: allegorically deploying the figure of a female vampire, it is a cautionary tale against the assumed physical and moral dangers of lesbian love. Motherless Laura, a classic Gothic victim, lives with her aging father in an isolated castle in Styria, where she falls under the spell of the beautiful and mysterious houseguest Carmilla. Blatantly abusing the father’s hospitality, and capitalizing on Laura’s loneliness and naivety, Carmilla talks the talk of lovers and woos her victim with romantic phrases and gestures, while feeding on peasant girls in the vicinity and gradually depleting Laura of her own life force. Psychologically and physically seductive, Carmilla is a highly skilled deceiver, and it takes the father a long time, as well as outside help, before he understands why his beloved daughter is literally wasting away at such alarming speed.
The literary critic Richard Dyer argues that the frequent association of homosexuality with vampires is due, first, to the fact that the public face of homosexuality and decadent sexuality in general was frequently associated with aristocrats such as the Marquis de Sade, Lord Byron, and Oscar Wilde. Vampires, too, are traditionally of aristocratic origin. Second, a Freudian reading of monsters in general suggests that they represent the threatening forms that repressed sexual desires can take. Third, the importance of sucking and biting, and the fact that most acts of vampirism take place in private spaces such as bedrooms and at night, speak for themselves. Fourth, and most important, both vampirism and homosexuality are also aligned with secrecy, mystery, and clandestine identities, which are decodable only by the initiated. “[T]he vocabulary of queer spotting,” Dyer writes, “has been the languid, worn, sad, refined paleness of vampire image.” He suggests that this is owing once again to the idea of the decadence of the aristocracy, who do not work and who live their lives indoors or in the shade.
23A much more plausible origin for the association of languor, paleness, apathy, and exhaustion with homosexuality and vampirism, however, is the link between masturbation and other nonprocreative sexual practices and the waste of precious life energy discussed earlier. As a direct result of the humoral doctrines that dominated medical practice for centuries, the belief in the damaging physical consequences of excessive sexual activities in general, as well as of sexual activities seen as perverse, was still widely accepted in the nineteenth century. It was based on the idea that nonrenewable life energy was wasted in such acts, while it also served as a medically supported moral tool to vilify and pathologize them. Weakness, paleness, and languor were thus frequently interpreted as signs for sexually improper activities.
Le Fanu’s
Carmilla abounds in references to the female vampire’s languor: Laura repeatedly notices “something of languor and exhaustion” in her friend’s pretty countenance; she observes that Carmilla’s movements are “languid—
very languid,” and that she has “languid and burning eyes.” When the two of them go for even the shortest of walks, Carmilla seems “almost immediately exhausted” and has to return to the castle. When a doctor is summoned to investigate Carmilla’s mysterious chronic exhaustion, she tries to deflect his and Laura’s concern: “There is nothing ever wrong with me, but a little weakness. People say I am languid; I am incapable of exertion; I can scarcely walk as far as a child of three years old; and every now and then the little strength I have falters and I become as you have seen me. But after all I am very easily set up again; in a moment I am perfectly myself. See how I have recovered.”
24Of course, as the reader soon discovers, Carmilla’s method of restoring her energy is far from wholesome, and thus it is no surprise that Laura, too, should soon suffer from weakness and exhaustion:
For some nights I slept profoundly; but still every morning I felt the same lassitude, and a languor weighed upon me all day. I felt myself a changed girl. A strange melancholy was stealing over me, a melancholy that I would not have interrupted. Dim thoughts of death began to open, and an idea that I was slowly sinking took gentle, and, somehow, not unwelcome, possession of me. If it was sad, the tone of mind which this induced was also sweet. Whatever it might be, my soul acquiesced in it.
Carmilla is clearly excited by the fact that her victim is slowly fading away and succumbing to morbid longings as a result of her indecent nocturnal undertakings, her “strange paroxysms of languid adoration” becoming ever more frequent. She attends to Laura “with increasing ardour the more [her] strength and spirit waned,” which suggests that she not only thrives while Laura withers away but also derives some sadistic-necrophiliac sexual pleasure from the parasitical energy transfer.
25Le Fanu’s equation of vampirism with lesbianism is far from subtle: he likens it to a highly infectious epidemic, thus suggesting the dangers of moral and sexual corruption. Moreover, Carmilla frequently talks of love, and Laura is not entirely unaware of (or immune to) the nonplatonic nature of her houseguest’s attention, which she experiences as simultaneously fascinating and repulsive. Vampires traditionally have to be invited in—they seduce rather than use violence—which renders their victims at least partly responsible for what happens to them. Moreover, the vampiric act itself and the sensations it triggers are clearly related to orgasmic sexual activities in Le Fanu’s novella. Laura reports that
certain vague and strange visited me in my sleep. The prevailing one was of that pleasant, peculiar cold thrill which we feel in bathing, when we move against the current of a river. This was soon accompanied by dreams…they left an awful impression, and a sense of exhaustion, as if I had passed through a long period of great mental exertion and danger…. Sometimes there came a sensation as if a hand was drawn softly along my cheek and neck. Sometimes it was as if warm lips kissed me, and longer and more lovingly as they reached my throat, but there the caress fixed itself. My heart beat faster, my breathing rose and fell rapidly and full drawn; a sobbing, that rose into a sense of strangulation, supervened, and turned into a dreadful convulsion, in which my senses left me and I became unconscious.
26These nocturnal happenings soon leave their mark on Laura’s appearance: “I had grown pale, my eyes were dilated and darkened underneath, and the languor which I had long felt began to display itself in my countenance.”
27 Increasingly alarmed by these changes, Laura’s father calls in a doctor and, by coincidence, also hears the story of another man who recently lost his beloved niece to Carmilla the vampire. With the aid of someone initiated into the mysteries of the bloodsucking predators and adept at vampire slaying, the men eventually decapitate Carmilla and thus vanquish for good the threat that subversive lesbian activities pose to the patriarchal order. As in the case of the early sexological literature on the dangers of masturbation, then, Le Fanu effectively deploys exhaustion imagery to suggest grave physical and moral damage in his cautionary tale against the highly contagious menace of lesbianism.
In most Western cultures, the link that was thought to exist between sexuality and exhaustion is now largely a thing of the past, since both humoral theories and overly moralistic and judgmental attitudes toward sexual difference no longer dominate the cultural imagination. Similarly, our ongoing fascination with vampires does not revolve around taboo forms of sexual desire that are represented as both fascinating and monstrous, as was the case in the nineteenth century, but is based a celebration of difference that is recast as a positive and highly desirable form of exceptionality (and one that, unsurprisingly, appeals particularly to teenagers). Yet what remains culturally relevant even today is the basic assumption that underpins the link between exhaustion and sexuality—the belief that exhaustion may be caused by specific behavior and actions, which are, to a certain extend at least, deliberate choices and thus fall into the remit of the moral responsibility of the individual.