Tag: Female Sexual Repression

Sex and The ‘Penny Dreadful’

The control of sex and sexuality was a fascination of the 19th century. In a reaction to the thought to be morally bankrupt licentiousness of the regency period, Victorian sexual values were characterized by repression, control and purity. Fitting as a common theme of the era was man’s victory over nature. It was a time when the medical establishment was obsessed with classifying and categorizing and “disorders” such as homosexuality and hysteria were invented

Penny Dreadful is a dark gothic horror television show; its main appeal is its excellent cast, which includes Eva Green, Timothy Dalton, and Josh Hartnett, and the fact that it features popular horror characters that are now in the public domain, including both doctor and creature Frankenstein, Dorian Gray, Mina Harker,  and Van Helsing. The London it portrays is dark and brooding and slides with ease between the unfettered opulence of the rich to degradation of the poor. The show manages to capture the atmospheric blend of strife and ambition that seems to characterize the period of industrialization.

The control of sex and sexuality was a fascination of the 19th century. In a reaction to the thought-to-be morally bankrupt licentiousness of the regency period, Victorian sexual values were characterized by repression, control and purity. Fitting as a common theme of the era was man’s victory over nature. It was a time when the medical establishment was obsessed with classifying and categorizing and “disorders” such as homosexuality and hysteria were invented. The latter led to the invention of the vibrator as women were treated for the condition by being stimulated to orgasm by doctors. Ironically, masturbation in men (women were not really thought to be capable) was heavily pathologised and blamed for a vast array of ills. However the obsession with strict sexual morality and the regulation of sexual impulses meant society was obsessed with talking about and policing it, hence the prevalence of sexuality as a theme in both medicine and art during the period. Parallel to the puritanical public standards existed a large private world of sex work and pornography.

The character of Brona Croft, played by Billie Piper, a northern Irish sex worker plagued with consumption, represents the particular paradox of the sex worker in the 19th century. Her life is difficult, she is poor, and there is the ever-present threat of violence which is made apparent on the show by the reports of sex workers being torn apart by what might be the re-emergence of Jack the Ripper. However, Brona also on a certain level exists outside of the highly patriarchal social structures of the day. She makes her own money, she decides how to spend it and chooses her own relationships, freedoms most other women do not have. Brona is a fully realized character in a way that sex workers normally are not on television. We learn that she came to the trade because she was replaced by a machine in her factory job, but she prefers it anyway because the money is better and she doesn’t have to spend her days cooped up inside never seeing the sun. She speaks eloquently about the grim poverty of her childhood and her escape from an abusive relationship. Her sex work is not viewed as a barrier to her having meaningful romantic relationships. Her profession is an aspect of her but it is not who she is. I can’t believe just how refreshing it is to have a sex worker on television that is fully human in her own right and not just a plot device to be thrown away at the writers whims. Brona certainly does not fit into the “happy hooker” trope. There are many issues that she has to contend with that the show addresses; some are due to her work and some are not. What matters though is that Brona’s life is not tragic simply because she is a sex worker, nor is it perfect because she is. For example, she is dying of consumption, but this is portrayed to be more a symptom of her poverty rather than a punishment for her work.

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Vanessa Ives (played by Eva Green), on the other hand, is a Victorian lady of leisure. She lives with Sir Malcolm Murray, a famed explorer of the African continent, and their relationship is not explained until mid-season but seems vaguely paternal. What we do know is that Vanessa is in the possession of some super natural abilities and is helping Sir Malcolm to locate his daughter who is currently under the power of a vampire. Vanessa’s sexuality is constantly and consistently pathologised. She ruminates on whether viewing a sexual act for the first time awoken a wickedness inside of her. Her very first sexual experience ended up breaking up two families who had been very close and triggering her first episode, of what is referred to by two different doctors over the course of the season, a “psycho-sexual” illness. The treatments that she is subjected for this illness amount very literally to torture and Vanessa’s mother ends up dying of shock when witnessing a display of her daughter’s sexuality. For Vanessa, her sexuality is not the source of her freedom from restrictive patriarchal norms of the day; it is a curse that she must control with utmost care otherwise the consequences could be devastating. Vanessa’s sexuality is dangerous–not just to her but to the people around her.

 

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Having the two characters on the same show makes for a really interesting dynamic. It seems to capture the sheer obsession Victorian society had with the policing of sexuality and channelling it into the proper avenues while at the same time there existed many women who manage to carve out lives outside the structures of society despite the extreme social disapproval. Overall, the show manages to capture the two sides of the society quite nicely and explores both characters in a way that does justice to their humanity.

 

Gaayathri Nair is currently living and writing in Auckland, New Zealand. You can find more of her work at her blog A Human Story and tweet her @A_Gaayathri

The Sin of Sexuality: Desire in ‘Philomena’

Sex is everywhere and nowhere in ‘Philomena.’ Sex is the reason that the titular heroine is sent to Roscrea as a young woman, to have her illegitimate baby behind closed doors. Sex is also the reason that Philomena’s son, Anthony, is adopted out to an American family even though his mother is still living.

'Philomena' movie poster
Philomena movie poster

 

This guest post by Caitlin Keefe Moran appears as part of our theme week on Representations of Female Sexual Desire.

Philomena, directed by Stephen Frears, tells a recognizable story: a mother searches for the child she gave up for adoption in her youth. What complicates this recognizable story is that this isn’t the story at all: Philomena’s child was given up against her will by the Sisters of the Sacred Heart at Roscrea Abbey in Ireland, who held her in bondage as a laundry girl until she repaid the debt caused by her sin of sexual indiscretion. Sex is everywhere and nowhere in Philomena. Sex is the reason that the titular heroine is sent to Roscrea as a young woman, to have her illegitimate baby behind closed doors. Sex is also the reason that Philomena’s son, Anthony, is adopted out to an American family even though his mother is still living; the very fact that she gave birth to him at all, unmarried as she was, means she is unfit to be his mother. But we never see any sex—we get the faintest whisper of a flirtation at a county fair, a couple of innocent giggles, a dropped caramel apple, before the camera pans away. The next time we see Philomena, she is pregnant, standing before a firing squad of nuns, answering questions about her virtue.

Judi Dench as Philomena Lee, looking through the gates at Roscrea Abbey
Judi Dench as Philomena Lee, looking through the gates at Roscrea Abbey

 

The bulk of the film follows Philomena (Dame Judi Dench) as she tries to find her son after over four decades of separation with the help of journalist Martin Sixsmith (Steve Coogan, who was nominated for an Oscar for co-writing the screenplay). After being stonewalled by the nuns currently living at Roscrea, Philomena and Martin end up in Washington DC, following a tip from an Irish bartender that most of the Roscrea children were sent to America. I won’t spoil the surprise of what she ends up finding but I will say that we get to hear Judi Dench say the word “clitoris,” which in my opinion justifies just about every endeavor.

Catholic ideology hangs over the film like an incense-scented altar cloth. All discussions of sex, or sin, or pleasure, are tied to each other and connected in a messy tangle. When the nuns interrogate a pregnant Philomena, they don’t focus on what she did; they interrogate her agency and her gratification. “Did you enjoy your sin?” they ask. “Did you take your knickers down?” Sexual pleasure, in other words, makes an already execrable sin that much worse. Philomena herself buys into this logic; after she and Martin travel to Roscrea together for the first time, she speaks frankly about her first sexual experience. “And after I had the sex,” she tells Martin, “I thought anything that feels so lovely must be wrong.” To which Martin, a lapsed Catholic and former altar boy, replies, “Fucking Catholics.”

Philomena and Martin on the way to America—and answers.
Philomena and Martin on the way to America—and answers.

 

Religion and sexuality were, and remain, uncomfortably coupled, not only in Ireland but in Catholic countries everywhere. In the climax of the movie, when Martin and Philomena confront Sister Hildegarde, the nun who purposely withheld information about Philomena from her son when he was dying from AIDS and searching from her, Sister Hildegarde lays it out for them: “I have kept my vow of chastity my entire life. Self-denial and mortification of the flesh. That’s what brings us closer to God. Those girls had no one to blame but themselves and their carnal incontinence.” (To which Martin, lapsed Catholic and former altar boy, replies, “I think if Jesus were here right now he’d tip you out of that fucking wheelchair.” Go Martin!) In Sister Hildegarde’s world, sexual purity is the only thing women possess that makes them valuable, worthy of both earthly and divine love. Once that purity has been lost—and especially if the losing of it was enjoyable—then women also lose the right to be treated like human beings. When Philomena was in labor, Sister Hildegarde was the attending nurse who refused to call a doctor or administer pain medication when it became clear that the baby was breach. “Her pain is her penance,” she says to another nun as she stood over a screaming Philomena. An exercise in sexuality may start out pleasurably, but it can only end in pain. Martin, too, learns this when he discovers old graves in the back of the abbey, all anonymous, for the women who hadn’t survived labor at Roscrea. Mother and child, in childbirth.

Philomena Lee was one of thousands of girls between the mid-18th century and the late 20th century who worked in the Magdalene laundries (named for Mary Magdalene, who in early Christian tradition was suspected of being a prostitute). Sometimes they came, like Philomena, pregnant and unwed. Others came from state-run hospitals and psychiatric wards, or were simply plucked from the street and delivered up to the nuns. Once in the control of the nuns, the women and girls worked for no pay doing backbreaking labor until they expunged their sins. But for women like Philomena, this was impossible. Her sexuality was her sin. Many of the Roscrea girls came from backgrounds rife with sexual abuse and violence. In 2013, the Sydney Morning Herald published interviews with women who had survived the laundries; one of them, named Mary Currington, described her three-decade marriage after incarceration in the laundries thusly: “I’m afraid I was a failure in the bedroom department. It was all tied up with the abuse as a child. I tried to be a good wife, but every time it felt like rape… It was a humiliating, degrading, shaming life and it doesn’t leave you.”

Young Philomena with Anthony, before he was taken away
Young Philomena with Anthony, before he was taken away

 

The last of the Magdalene laundries closed down in 1996 (let that sink in for a moment). In 2011, after sustained efforts from survivors’ groups and the United Nations Committee against Torture, the Irish government officially recognized its role in the operation of the laundries and apologized. The religious orders that had run the laundries, however, refused to pay restitution to the surviving victims (justifying the note I scrawled in the margins of my notebook while watching the movie: “Damn, nuns are cold”). These were absolutely not the sins of the father being visited upon the son; the Church was still benefitting from the laundries only 15 years before the government’s formal apology, so they should have been held accountable. But the rhetoric of sexual indiscretion allowed them to escape culpability for their abuses. These were damaged women, irredeemable women. The fallen. If they had committed any other crime, any other sacrilege, then perhaps they would be worthy of an apology. But not these women. Not Philomena. After all, she took her knickers down.

In the end, Philomena finds it within herself to forgive the nuns of Roscrea for what did to her; Martin, ever the cranky atheist, can’t. As a viewer, I tended to side with Martin on questions of faith and forgiveness. If I were Philomena, the world could have pried my bitterness out of my cold, dead hands as I was lowered into the ground. But even more important than Philomena’s forgiveness of a wretched old nun is that throughout the movie she maintains an open heart and a loving soul in the face of incredible loss. She lives not as a woman afraid but as a woman mourning what was lost, who nevertheless keeps going. She maintains a love of the world, of things and of people, of cheesy romance novels that she continuously narrates to Martin and free booze on airplanes. She marries and has more children, who are good to her. In spite of a world that would have gladly consigned her to the anonymous headstones in the abbey’s graveyard, she lives.

Caitlin Keefe Moran is an editor in New York City. Her work has appeared on The Toast, in The Iowa Review, and other outlets. She lives in Queens and feels passionately about donuts and splitting infinitives as a form of protest.