Frigidity: An Intellectual History

Frigidity An Intellectual History

Peter Cryle Alison Moore

Genders and Sexualities in History Series Editors: John H. Arnold, Joanna Bourke and Sean Brady Palgrave Macmillan’s series, ‘Genders and Sexualities in History’, aims to accommodate and foster new approaches to historical research in the fields of gender and sexuality. The series promotes world-class scholarship that concentrates upon the interconnected themes of genders, sexualities, religions/religiosity, civil society, class formations, politics and war. Historical studies of gender and sexuality have often been treated as disconnected fields, while in recent years historical analyses in these two areas have synthesized, creating new departures in historiography. By linking genders and sexualities with questions of religion, civil society, politics, and the contexts of war and conflict, this series will reflect recent developments in scholarship, moving away from the previously dominant and narrow histories of science, scientific thought and legal processes. The result brings together scholarship from contemporary, modern, early modern, medieval, classical and non-Western history to provide a diachronic forum for scholarship that incorporates new approaches to genders and sexualities in history. Peter Cryle and Alison Moore’s Frigidity: An Intellectual History is the first rigorous analysis of the way that ideas about sexual coldness in women changed over time. Although they explore the topic in British and European contexts from the thirteenth century to the present, particular attention is paid to France in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This was the period in which a vast array of medical, psychological and forensic writing focused upon women’s capacity for sexual pleasure. Paradoxically, concern about female frigidity actually drew attention to the importance of female sexuality. This book is a bold, revisionist history that is based on an original and meticulous exploration of theories of female desire. It is essential reading not only for people interested in sexuality, but in gender history, the history of medicine and psychology, and the wider history of ideas. In common with all volumes in the ‘Genders and Sexualities in History’ series, Frigidity: An Intellectual History presents a multifaceted and meticulously researched scholarly study, and is a sophisticated contribution to our understanding of the past. Titles include Cordelia Beattie and Kirsten A. Fenton (editors) INTERSECTIONS OF GENDER, RELIGION AND ETHNICITY IN THE MIDDLE AGES Matthew Cook QUEER DOMESTICITIES Homosexuality and Home Life in Twentieth-Century London Peter Cryle and Alison Moore FRIGIDITY An Intellectual History

Jennifer Evans LIFE AMONG THE RUINS Cityscape and Sexuality in Cold War Berlin Christopher E. Forth and Elinor Accampo (editors) CONFRONTING MODERNITY IN FIN-DE-SIÈCLE FRANCE Bodies, Minds and Gender Dagmar Herzog (editor) BRUTALITY AND DESIRE War and Sexuality in Europe’s Twentieth Century Jessica Meyer MEN OF WAR Masculinity and the First World War in Britain Jennifer D. Thibodeaux (editor) NEGOTIATING CLERICAL IDENTITIES Priests, Monks and Masculinity in the Middle Ages Hester Vaizey SURVIVING HITLER’S WAR Family Life in Germany 1939–48

Genders and Sexualities in History Series Series Standing Order 978–0–230–55185–5 Hardback 978–0–230–55186–2 Paperback (outside North America only) You can receive future titles in this series as they are published by placing a standing order. Please contact your bookseller or, in case of difficulty, write to us at the address below with your name and address, the title of the series and the ISBN quoted above. Customer Services Department, Macmillan Distribution Ltd, Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS, England

Frigidity An Intellectual History Peter Cryle Professor of French and Director of the Centre for the History of European Discourses, University of Queensland, Australia

Alison Moore Senior Lecturer in Francophone Studies, Cultural Studies Group, University of Technology Sydney, Australia

© Peter Cryle and Alison Moore 2011 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No portion of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, Saffron House, 6-10 Kirby Street, London EC1N 8TS. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The authors have asserted their rights to be identified as the authors of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2011 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Palgrave Macmillan in the UK is an imprint of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan in the US is a division of St Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN 978–0–230–30345–4 hardback This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 20 19 18 17 16 15 14 13 12 11 Printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Antony Rowe, Chippenham and Eastbourne

Contents

Acknowledgements

vi

Introduction: A Long History of a Pseudoscientific Object

1

1 Frigiditas and Impotentia

23

2 Female Impotence in the Nineteenth Century

37

3 Vaginismus

67

4 The Late Nineteenth Century: A Multiplicity of Genres

100

5 The Wedding Night

132

6 Treatment 1: Medicine

161

7 Treatment 2: Psychology

191

8 Relocating Marie Bonaparte’s Clitoris

222

Conclusion

248

Notes

257

Bibliography

292

Index

311

v

Acknowledgements

This book is the product of years of collaboration in the Centre for the History of European Discourses, partly funded by a grant from the Australian Research Council. We owe a great debt to colleagues in the Centre who read drafts, made comments, and provided us with support in seminars and over coffee. Fernanda Alfieri, Chiara Beccalossi, Marina Bollinger and Heather Wolffram were all part of that, and Elizabeth Stephens was a champion of collegial friendship. Robyn Kath and Rebekah Oldfield were excellent research assistants. Our partners, Wendy and Russell, continued to show forbearance and understanding in times of stress. Some of the material in Chapter 1 appeared first in Sexualities, and is reproduced here with the permission of Sage. Material in Chapter 3 appeared first in the Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences (JHMAS), and is reproduced here with the permission of Oxford University Press. Material in Chapter 5 appeared first in the Journal for the History of Sexuality, and is published here with the permission of University of Texas Press. Material in Chapter 8 appeared first in Australian Feminist Studies, and is published with the permission of Taylor and Francis.

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Introduction: A Long History of a Pseudoscientific Object

A problematic theme Producing a history of frigidity is no straightforward matter. There are practical reasons for that, as we shall see: our central theme is multiform, with variations and complications that range across centuries of European thought. But there is an ethical imperative that has to be addressed at the outset. Many scholars would consider that ‘frigidity’ is a flimsy and fanciful notion that has been talked about seriously for far too long. ‘Why continue to discuss it?’ they might ask. Why compound its deleterious absurdity by devoting a whole book to the topic? In crediting the notion of frigidity with the status of a historical object worthy of an intellectual genealogy, do we not imply it has been a coherent medical and psychological concept that deserves to be taken seriously? Are we suggesting, in other words, that ‘frigidity’ must actually refer to some thing? Whatever use value the notion of frigidity may have had for some women as a diagnostic psychological category, it is clear that in the late twentieth century its credibility has been widely challenged by feminist thinkers. By way of example we note the remarks of Luce Irigaray in an interview published in 1977. She deals summarily with ‘frigidity’, invoking and dismissing it in the space of three sentences: Many women believe they are ‘frigid’, and they are often told that this is so. When a woman tells me she is ‘frigid’, I laugh, and tell her I don’t know what it means. She laughs too, which brings about a release, and above all a loss of guilt towards a ‘frigidity’ for which she feels responsible, and which means, first of all, that she has been moulded into models of male sexual ‘techniques’ which do not at all correspond to her sexuality.1 1

2

Frigidity

This is an expeditious way to deal with the theme. It is instant identification accompanied by a refusal of earnest recognition. Laughter signifies here: ‘That silly old thing!’ Irigaray does not need on these occasions to perform an explicit critique of the notion, although she does say elsewhere in another mode that ‘frigidity’ has been produced by ‘the standardization of [ . . . ] sexuality according to masculine parameters’.2 In conversation, talking to women who raise it as a personal concern, she responds with laughter – laughter that functions as a form of therapy. Her interlocutors laugh in response, released from their anxiety by this very attitude, acknowledging as they do so that frigidity is not to be taken seriously. Anxious self-interrogation and psychosexual drama are forestalled. This is a wonderfully efficient way of dealing with the theme, and there is every reason to think that dismissive responses of this kind have contributed to frigidity’s declining prestige as a disorder. It might be said, indeed, that Irigaray is engaged here in discursive therapy. This is how the theme of frigidity can be robbed of its power. It can be undermined by easy familiarity, devalued through the exchange of ironic laughter, and so dealt with in less than 100 words.3 We are impressed by Irigaray’s summary thematic, though we make no attempt to imitate her therapeutic efficiency. We concur with the impulse to bury frigidity as a model for explaining and pathologizing forms of sexual desire or its lack. But our alternative method for dealing with such a disreputable theme is a sustained critical history. Unlike the psychotherapist, we are not primarily concerned to ameliorate the happiness, self-acceptance or sexual fulfilment of anyone. Rather we are concerned with the power of discursive objects in both their present and past formations. We are concerned to understand how such a concept as frigidity emerged and how it changed over time, was transmitted, adapted and deployed in the European cultures that our book traverses. Where Irigaray found a prompt form of critique and a short path to complicity with her interlocutors, we have tackled a history stretching over centuries. Anticipating ethical objections to our work has been a difficult matter. In Anglophone queer studies and feminist circles it may go without saying that a frigid woman is merely a construct within the wider network of a normative imaginary. Frigidity is the product of a masculine misapprehension of female bodies and their differing pleasures. It typically involves a narrow intolerance of forms of jouissance that do not sufficiently conform to the singular narrative of heterosexual coitus in which all sexual acts, aside from penis–vagina penetration, are conceived as peripheral and preparatory. Surely a woman who cannot experience

Introduction: History of Pseudoscientific Object 3

orgasm from penis–vagina penetration simply needs something else or something additional? Surely if nothing causes her to ‘climax’ then her pleasure simply needs to be understood in its own terms? Surely if a woman feels no desire for sex of any kind she should merely do as she pleases? So we are obliged to recognize that, from an ironist’s point of view, our research may be open to criticism for the very care we have taken. By making sexual coldness the object of our history, are we not lending it some credence, letting ourselves be drawn yet again into its discursive games? Worse still, our study might contribute marginally to reviving the declining power of the theme. We are confident, in fact, that our work in no way contributes to the prestige of frigidity, but that is a matter to be determined at the end of the book. We have sought to locate talk about frigidity in specific historical contexts, and to relativize any claims to authority that such talk might make. Many of the texts we examine have positioned themselves as either radically original or eternally wise, but such claims do not stand up when framed by a long history. In the long run, we will show frigidity to be a rather variable object of knowledge without being a particularly inscrutable one. We wonder, indeed, whether it may be a mistake to suppose that frigidity has entirely lost its diagnostic and discursive power, so that all we need to do is to laugh it to scorn. But one thing we can certainly do is lend weight to the summary judgement that provokes Irigaray to laughter. Constructionist accounts of gender and sexuality typically see themselves as dismantling the power of the construct by showing that it is not universal. We aim here for something more precise. Intellectual history can reveal the patchiness, the unevenness, the instability of notions that may in fact be too quickly recognized by modern eyes. On occasions when ‘frigidity’ is still invoked, we will be helping, insofar as academic writing is able, to show it up for what it is: an archaic category that is all the more suspect because it has been in play since medieval times, propped up by centuries of discursive habit, and by the unspecific prestige of earlier usages. We take the view that there can be no universal ethics of speaking about sexual insufficiency or inadequacy. The laughter of Irigaray may liberate some but may anger or humiliate others. Our study has shown us that although frigidity was predominantly discussed by male legal, medical, psychiatric and psychoanalytic scholars throughout its history, it has also attracted remarkable attention and self-identification on the part of certain women. It is a term that some have used, and still use, to describe their own sexual frustration or disappointment. And we do not wish to imply that anyone who experiences their pleasure as lacking,

4

Frigidity

blocked or inhibited is silly, misguided or a dupe of the patriarchy, as Irigaray’s position may imply. The right to greater pleasure is as much a potential feminist demand as the right for one’s desire to be understood on its own terms. Both types of claims can be found throughout twentieth-century texts about frigidity and female sexuality. Indeed, even late-nineteenth-century doctors and sexologists sometimes considered the possibility that the sexual non-fulfilment of women might result from an excessively narrow model of male–female relations. Our study will show how ideas of sexual coldness were able to be given significance at particular points in time, noting the function they had within discursive economies. We will talk about impotentia coeundi, the inability to engage in coitus, as that notion was developed in medieval and early modern discussions of marriage within the Catholic canon law tradition. We will show that such ‘impotence’ differed considerably from the later anaphrodisia, which came to the fore in eighteenth-century medical discourse. And we will show that both differed from vaginismus, which was defined as a gynaecological syndrome in the second half of the nineteenth century. The approximate alignment of these notions does lend them some discursive authority. Without such discursive and conceptual relays, it would not be possible to speak meaningfully of ‘frigidity’ over the centuries. Yet the concept is not the same each time it appears. The various notions gathered around the theme, including the disorders of sexual desire referred to in contemporary discourse, must always be understood in context. So while we will not engage in a specific critique of current usages, we will be offering a genealogy of them that can readily be made to serve the purpose of critique. Our primary contribution to modern critical reflection is to tell the story of how ‘frigidity’ in women ever came to be taken seriously in the first place. Here is a summary account of that story as it will be told in this book. For centuries frigidity and impotence in women tended to be regarded as ancillary disorders of limited consequence. Writing informed by canon law always took frigiditas as a serious matter when it occurred in men because an indisposition to coitus on the part of the husband was a significant impediment to the fulfilment of marriage vows, and a plausible reason for annulment in the courts. By contrast, it was a matter of considerable uncertainty whether frigidity in women was of any great moment at all. The disorder began to gain forensic status when Paolo Zacchia declared in the mid-seventeenth century that there might indeed be circumstances in which a woman’s coldness could serve as grounds for annulment. Female frigidity had

Introduction: History of Pseudoscientific Object 5

thus begun to occupy a minor place alongside the dominant male variety. Throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the ancient notion that women were naturally cooler than men continued to hold a place in medical thinking. Wherever that view persisted, coldness was likely to be considered a temperamental given, so that a woman’s native lack of heat could only be compensated by the infusion of heat from a man. In that sense, female coolness was part of the natural order, and therefore unremarkable. Gendered variations in temperament did not allow it to be thought of as a morbid condition. The pathological states in women that commanded medical attention were most often nymphomania or ‘furor uterinus’, in which certain women displayed excessive heat, thereby reversing the supposedly natural polarities of temperament. Our history gives prominence to the nineteenth century because the discourses we will trace proliferated in that century more than in any other. During the nineteenth century, earlier views were more or less amalgamated with new scientific claims based in physiology. Impotence and sterility figured regularly in medical discussion, and a place was made in this discursive environment for female impotence. That supposed disorder was, so to speak, tucked in alongside the study of impotence in males, which continued to be the dominant topic. But the knowledge base for medical talk about women shifted in the middle of the century: close physiological study of the role of the female genitals in coitus gave support to the view that women were not passive receptacles for sperm, and that they had a quite specific form of natural genital potency. Once female sexual potency was scientifically established as ‘normal’, it became possible to describe the absence of female pleasure in coitus as abnormal, and therefore pathological. Women, said Félix Roubaud in 1855, needed to be treated medically for impotence. Treatment was no straightforward business, however, even in principle. Throughout the nineteenth century, it remained a highly contested matter whether female impotence ought to be understood primarily in physical or in ‘moral’ terms. Asserting the importance of the moral led doctors such as Garnier to the view that frigidity in women required forms of treatment different in kind from those applied to men. Treating frigidity in women now called for an approach that gave full value to natural feminine modesty. Vaginismus, in particular, played an emblematic role in the nineteenth-century recognition of frigidity. It was the female sexual pathology par excellence, linking the moral quality of feminine reluctance to the physical power of the vaginal sphincter muscle. Vaginismus thus constituted an impediment to marriage in a

6

Frigidity

specifically sexual sense not considered by the canonists, and became a proving ground for the emerging profession of gynaecology. Until the very end of the nineteenth century, frigidity or anaphrodisia had been largely confined to the medical and forensic domains, but at the turn of the century, at least in a relatively permissive French milieu, it became a topic for public discourse. Women’s sexual pleasure was regularly declared in this environment to be both natural and fragile, essential and problematic. Middlebrow writing, medical and fictional, declared that (nearly) all women were sexual beings, but expressed grave concern about threats to their actual sexual fulfilment. Women were thought to be exposed even more than men to sexual pathologies of various kinds. Around the newly favoured theme of frigidity, medical texts and novels spoke anxiously of drastic unfulfilment, and just as anxiously of drastic fulfilment. Sexual drama shaping the lives of women characters became one of the staples of the roman de mœurs, or novel of sexual customs. The anxious concerns and dark predictions were never more precisely focused than in talk about the damage that might be wrought on the wedding night. That was when the wife’s sexuality was at stake. Whereas in earlier times the wedding night had largely been the occasion on which marriage was consecrated by the ritual breaking of the hymen, it now became the critical moment at which the husband was called on to induct his bride into sexual adulthood. He had to awaken her to desire and to pleasure for the sake of domestic harmony, and for the sake of her sexual maturation. Yet it was widely agreed by moralists, doctors and novelists that husbands regularly failed to discharge this responsibility. Feminine reticence called for a certain amount of vigour on the husband’s part, but feminine delicacy required an equal measure of gentleness and tact. The virginal bride thus presented an exquisite set of sexual possibilities, but was regularly precipitated into frigidity and vaginismus by the husband’s clumsiness. The long-term story here is one of increasing tendency to remark upon women’s sexual capacity for pleasure, defined as the ability to enjoy coitus. Throughout the nineteenth century, this helped to produce increasing refinement and complication of female sexual ‘problems’. But it was only in the first decade of the twentieth century that frigidity in women was made a book-length topic in its own right. Otto Adler, along with many of his contemporaries, not least of them Havelock Ellis, declared that frigidity was extraordinarily widespread in Western societies. What underlay this new epidemiological concern, making frigidity an urgent question for therapy and potentially for feminist militancy, was the confident knowledge that every woman had a

Introduction: History of Pseudoscientific Object 7

latent capacity for pleasure in coitus. The task for sexual therapy was thus made general and urgent. In the 1920s, psychoanalysts such as Wilhelm Stekel took up the challenge, making frigidity their own by declaring it to be the outward manifestation of an unconscious inner refusal of the female role in heterosexual intercourse. Frigidity was made conceptually more narrow, and in that sense more finely tuned, by the Freudian view that dependence on the clitoral orgasm was itself a form of frigidity insofar as it was an immature form of pleasure, needing to be displaced and replaced by the fully adult vaginal orgasm. That definition of frigidity posed an extraordinarily demanding set of problems for Marie Bonaparte in her attempts to reconcile female sexual pleasure with the requirements of Freudian theory. In her work and that of many of her contemporaries, frigidity became both a sign and a symptom of the movement towards androgyny that modern civilization was seen as producing. Women were no longer womanly enough to experience the correct form of orgasm. Their pretensions to social power made it intolerable for them to hystericize the clitoris and to reject its phallic call to pleasure. Surgery, on the other hand, could provide a way out of this dilemma, and so it was that Marie Bonaparte sought to unite her masculine (clitoral) with her feminine (vaginal) pleasures by relocating her clitoris, thereby avoiding the rupture that Freudian dogma demanded. All of this history, from the thirteenth century to the first half of the twentieth, can be read as the story of how frigidity slowly became a more complex, more demanding, more urgent set of concerns, before receding from view quite suddenly – in Anglophone cultures far more than in France, and in other cultures to varying degrees – during the latter part of the twentieth century. After about 1960, when subjected to feminist critique, frigidity quite quickly appeared as a kind of medical or sexological fiction, not just unsound but professionally redundant to the point of embarrassment. And that is of course the justification for Irigaray’s laughter. Frigidity has now become risible. Or at least, it has no intellectual status, since it can quickly be made laughable by critical irony. In English language texts frigidity appears to have lost most of its power and status in the discursive practice of psychiatrists, having been already dismissed as mostly ‘absurd’ in Charles Rycroft’s 1968 Critical Dictionary of Psychoanalysis.4 The term itself appears to be so thoroughly discredited, so straightforwardly understood as a denial of the reality of feminine pleasure that it does not even rate a mention in one well-known dictionary of feminism and psychoanalysis.5 On the whole, recent psychoanalytic attempts to account for the early psychoanalytic

8

Frigidity

fascination with the idea of frigidity explain it, with no small amount of embarrassment, as an unfortunate and deluded period in the prefeminist development of the discipline, based on a series of blind and ignorant phallocentric models inherited from premodern gender inequalities. The new term FSAD (Female Sexual Arousal Disorder), with its subcategory Hypoactive Sexual Desire Disorder (HSDD), is in contemporary use, as psychiatrists take care to distance themselves from more pathologizing conceptions that were used in the past. That is true even of such relatively recent terms as Inhibited Sexual Desire (ISD).6 David Moore and James Jefferson’s Handbook of Medical Psychiatry tells us that ‘in the past the condition of reduced sexual arousal was referred to as “frigidity”; however, this term is rarely seen in current medical literature’.7 It remains the case, however, that many psychiatrists and sexologists of our time continue to elaborate a complex network of ways in which women can be considered abnormally lacking in desire, pleasure or orgasm.8 Broader cultural representations of frigidity also appear to be on the wane without having entirely disappeared. Journalist Tim Cavanaugh was moved recently to ask whatever became of the Frigid Woman who populated films and novels ‘for decades’ but has been vanishing from popular culture since the ‘sexual revolution’.9 And yet assertions of frigidity as something real continue to appear as shorthand ways of referring to a woman’s non-reciprocation of a man’s desire for sex with her. They still have some currency in everyday talk: in 1991 an American news magazine reported that ‘fragile families, sexual frigidity and limited knowledge or use of birth control are rampant in the U.S.S.R., where women are expected to have both full-time jobs and large families’.10 In France psychologists and doctors and other kinds of therapists continued until very recently to publish works on sexual disorders with the word frigidité in their titles.11 Their therapeutic approaches have tended to emphasize relaxation and treatment for anxiety, lifestyle and fitness improvement rather than the invasive surgical, chemical and dilatory practices of earlier medical approaches, and ample advice is offered about sexual technique for couples, and the need to appreciate women’s slower rate of arousal resulting from a differing endocrinology and sympathetic nervous structure.12 Notably, while such texts use the word frigidity along with impotence, this pair of words serves to designate female and male forms of what is otherwise construed as the same problem – a lack of sexual desire in people. It would be a mistake, then, to ignore the residual presence of terms akin to frigidity, given the unevenness of attitudes to sexuality across

Introduction: History of Pseudoscientific Object 9

cultures. One woman cited in a recent Christian marriage manual said she was haunted for years by the angry words of her husband in an argument in which he called her ‘frigid’.13 Indeed the availability of the term for use as an insult may help to explain both the embarrassment about treating it as a historical object and the fierce attacks directed against it in important feminist texts of the late twentieth century. To make the point provocatively, it might even be argued that the notion is now being kept alive by a curious mixture of derision and rejection. Whatever the reasons, the theme lingers among us. Its very stagnation as a medical and psychological term helps to suggest the eternal quality that is often attributed to it. That is why it still needs to be regularly identified and dismissed, but it is also why its authority needs to be carefully unpicked through genealogical analysis of the kind we undertake in this book. Our assumption, in any case, has been that there is much to be understood in frigidity’s long and rather complicated history, and that the history has some pertinence for the present, even if its value lies in identifying, defining and thereby limiting the discursive effects of such talk. Scholarly writing may have the purpose, not of deploring the indefensible assumptions surrounding and supporting an expression such as this, but of showing how what once appeared to be the gravest of afflictions might at last have lost its capacity to impress and disturb. To indulge a gothic metaphor, frigidity may be less a demon to be slain, than an unburied corpse trailing about the streets of discourse. The critical point in such a history might then be to see frigidity to its grave, to produce a historical monument that will double as a tomb. That is indeed what we have sought to do in this book. We come to bury frigidity, not to praise it.

Questions of method While the primary difference between our approach and that represented here by Irigaray appears to be a matter of critical tactics, there is a second difference that has to do with our fundamental assumptions and the methods to which they give rise. As intellectual historians, we have not taken for granted that frigidity was in fact straightforwardly recognizable, even as a caricatural or fictive disorder. We claim a place for our work alongside like-minded histories that have in recent decades cast new light on terms previously regarded as having natural, unproblematic or universal meanings. The most discussed term has undoubtedly been ‘homosexuality’, although the same quality of attention has been brought to bear on ‘masturbation’, ‘sadomasochism’ and

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Frigidity

on other expressions of the same order. Historical revision has tended to highlight the technical function of these notions, showing how they served in particular circumstances to organize knowledge of the sexual. The primary concern for historians has not, of course, been to refer these terms to an understanding of human physiology, but to observe how power and knowledge have been conjugated in their use, producing a set of effects on language, on social and professional practices, on the mapping and typing of bodies. The place of ‘frigidity’ on this broad revisionary front may seem rather unclear, since the expression has not so far drawn much attention from historians of sexuality. Is that because the affirmative sexual politics of frigidity seem less urgent than those of homosexuality, lesbianism or transgender? Quite often such histories have been produced by historians who identified with those categories in some way – something that does not appear to be the case for frigidity. Partial exceptions in that regard can perhaps be found in the writing of Andrea Dworkin and Sheila Jeffreys, although even there the work of self-identification is ambiguous. Dworkin considers frigidity to be a misogynist invention, albeit less pernicious than the pornographic stereotypes of women as nymphomaniacs, remarking: ‘Perhaps this is a recognition, however perverse, that no one could possibly like or want what men do to women.’14 But remarks of this kind hardly constitute a history in any developed sense. In general, Dworkin and Jeffreys show no sympathy for the history of sexuality, and no positive interest in its concerns. On the other hand, historians committed to working in the field, many of whom see themselves as opponents of Dworkin and Jeffreys, may simply consider that frigidity falls outside their domain, seeing it as a discredited term used to refer to a putative absence of sexuality. Our research, like so much other work in this field, owes a specific debt to the writing of Michel Foucault. We are undertaking a genealogy of frigidity, hoping to show the contingency of frigidity’s emergence, demonstrating that the term came into use in a certain way at a certain time, and there was nothing inevitable about it. We will take every opportunity to point to the untidiness of historical antecedence and the complication of discursive circumstance. As Foucault says, ‘What one finds at the historical beginning of things is not the still preserved identity of their origin, but the discord of other things. The disparate.’15 We will show that what became in the twentieth century one of the most widely discussed forms of female sexual inadequacy built its coherence out of some rather diverse thematic elements. We have, in particular, found a great deal of material from late-nineteenth-century

Introduction: History of Pseudoscientific Object 11

medical sources to confirm Foucault’s claim that sexual discourses of this period had a double function, both inciting and prescribing. In fact, without having been inspired by that observation in the first volume of Foucault’s 1976 Histoire de la sexualité, we might never have been moved in the first instance to consider so closely the concept of frigidity, which, by seeming to refer to the nonsexual, might well fool the unwary into locating it outside the discursive field of sexuality altogether.16 Foucault’s appreciation of the remarkable coexistence of regulation and incitement in nineteenth-century visions of sexuality has thus enabled us to understand a historical object that is paradoxical but, in Foucault’s terms, typically so. Frigidity has often been conceived as a lack, but that has not prevented it from being seen as a pathology, and sometimes as a perversion. It must be said, however, that Foucault’s attentiveness to the multifarious operations by which sexuality came to be ‘put into discourse’ entailed only limited attention to notions specific to female sexuality, and indeed to gender differentiation in general. He contends famously that the nineteenth century produced four basic strategies: ‘the sexualization of the child, the hystericization of women, the specification of perverts, and the regulation of populations’.17 If this model were comprehensively sound, one might have expected the notion of frigidity to be somehow subsumed by the theorization of female hysteria, becoming one symptom or syndrome among other corporeal and psychological effects of that pathology. And if indeed that were so, we might expect to find that frigidity was not visible prior to the nineteenth-century generation of theories about hysteria, and that it was coupled with hysteria in the relevant medical literature of that time. But we have found scant evidence of such a connection. Indeed, the writers who had most to say about the condition of frigidity showed little concern with hysteria, and vice versa. On the other hand, notions of frigidity, sexual coldness, anaphrodisia and vaginismus appear to have enjoyed a history quite their own, which neither emerged out of the hystericization of women, nor contributed materially to it. It has to be said too that the emergence of a concern about sexual perversion, another of Foucault’s key propositions about the nineteenthcentury emergence of ‘sexuality’, does not provide an adequate framework for thinking about frigidity. Indeed, at the time when notions such as homosexuality, sadism, masochism, fetishism and other sexual ‘psychopathologies’ appeared in late-nineteenth-century medical works, frigidity was only occasionally theorized in relation to perversion. Throughout the nineteenth century it had another life altogether

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Frigidity

as the object of medical concern about a dysfunction of feminine bodies and as a question of the mores (mœurs) of the married couple. Frigidity only took on the status of a perversion in twentieth-century psychoanalytic accounts that circulated in the interwar period. In fact, it might be said that frigidity, without occupying a well-defined place in Foucault’s set of strategies, had some sort of function in each of those he identified. As a marriage concern it most certainly appeared as a manner of regulating populations; as a theory of feminine desire and lack it might be said to conform late in its history to the hystericization of women, if we take that term in the sense in which Marie Bonaparte used it to identify the necessary turning away from the clitoris that was required of women in order to transcend the infantile phallic organ of their instinctual pleasure and embrace the mature feminine vagina of reproductive necessity. In that nexus of associations, frigidity was also implicated in the sexualization of childhood according to the Freudian model. And frigidity most certainly did appear as a perversion in various forms of writing in the early twentieth century – as a form of denied desire that masked aberrant fantasies of lesbianism and sadomasochism. From this perspective then, we might wonder how frigidity eluded Foucault as a specific term of inquiry when it so richly exemplified the emergent themes he identified in the formation of sexual subjectivity. In another respect the object of our book corresponds to Foucault’s larger project in the three-part series of the Histoire de la sexualité. One of his general aims there was to produce a genealogy of ‘how individuals were led to exercise upon themselves, and upon others, a hermeneutic of desire’ in which behaviours were a referent but not the sole defining criterion.18 Frigidity might have been used to exemplify that dynamic, in that it referred to a set of ideal responses not manifest in behaviour: it was a failure of desire that demanded interpretation. Analysed within this framework, the various accounts of frigidity across time can be seen to represent a set of hermeneutic guidelines for recognizing, explaining and diagnosing an absent thing. Substance was thus generated from something initially conceived as an absence. Frigidity, then, demonstrated the powerfully generative feature of sexual theorization: it displayed a capacity to flesh out meaning, to create the stuff of discourse, to pose a range of intriguing questions about even the most apparently vacant categories. It might well seem to fellow historians of sexuality that we are offering here the latest in the decades-long series of historical works devoted to the (socio-discursive) construction of N, where N is ‘sexuality’, ‘masculinity’, ‘femininity’, ‘sadomasochism’, ‘lesbianism’ or the like.19

Introduction: History of Pseudoscientific Object 13

To consider a variant that has found even more favour in the eyes of our colleagues, we might be claiming to describe the ‘invention of frigidity’, just as others have described the invention of ‘hysteria’, ‘pornography’, ‘heterosexuality’, ‘hermaphrodites’ and ‘sex’.20 ‘Construction’ and ‘invention’ have functioned since the 1980s as marks of intellectual allegiance. They signal the intention to review discursive formations and sets of cultural practices that might otherwise have been thought historically stable. Ideas, concepts and practices that have often been considered timeless are thus described as having come into existence only quite recently. Such histories demonstrate that these notions do not deserve to be considered natural or universal. So why is this book not entitled, or at least subtitled, ‘The Social Construction of Frigidity’ or ‘The Invention of Frigidity’? The reason is not any lack of sympathy for historical attempts to understand how medicalized terms elaborated new conceptual frameworks for desire, but rather our unease about the ambiguity that often attends constructionist historians’ characterizations of their own work. When ‘construction’ and ‘invention’ are used as slogans for revisionist histories of sexuality, their use can generate a degree of theoretical and rhetorical tension that is not always easily managed. If these words are used to signify ‘constructedness’ or ‘inventedness’, they represent perfectly well the purpose to which we adhere. But if their use is taken to imply that, at each moment in history, a set of agents is likely to be assembling radically unprecedented ways of thinking and talking, this implies a view of history that we cannot accept. It supposes that history advances by continually forgetting the past. Like the most naïve form of modernism, it pays little respect to discursive and social antecedence. Such a thin understanding of history is unlikely to have any great impact on the theory of historical inquiry, but its consequences can be seen at the level of historiographic rhetoric. Scholars with little practical or theoretical interest in long histories appear sometimes to value the notions of construction and invention precisely because they enable a form of presentist critique. If something was invented, they seem to suggest, the agents of that invention are identifiable in principle, and their actions can be called to account. Someone must have been making those things up, producing them for manipulative purposes. ‘Who is responsible?’ is the question implied by these historians, although within the history of sexuality they know the answer in advance. It is a set of ‘historically real protagonists’, to use Londa Schiebinger’s term,21 including all the usual suspects: lawyers, moralists and politicians assuredly, but most particularly doctors, sexologists

14

Frigidity

and psychiatrists. This foreknowledge about culpability can lead to the production of what we prefer to call short histories of sexual invention and construction, in which the key purpose becomes not so much to find the actual agent of invention as to understand what reprehensible expediency was at work in the fabrication of a new pseudo-truth. We are broadly persuaded on this point by the argument made in Ian Hacking’s The Social Construction of What? Hacking points first of all to the polarizing value of the term ‘construction’: Social construction has in many contexts been a truly liberating idea, but that which on first hearing has liberated some has made all too many others smug, comfortable, and trendy in ways that have become merely orthodox. If you use it favorably, you deem yourself rather radical. If you trash the phrase, you declare that you are rational, reasonable, and respectable.22 Noting that what he has to say applies equally well to ‘invention’,23 Hacking attempts to account for the purposive use of these terms – what we are calling rhetoric – saying that the narrow definition of their meaning is scarcely possible.24 Taking Hacking’s point that the constructionist position is only interesting if the object of critical attention is usually taken to be ‘natural’, it is clear that nothing more is to be gained by demonstrating at length that frigidity is a construction.25 That is something which is regularly supposed and affirmed in recent feminist, psychoanalytic and psychiatric thought. So our history cannot pretend to denounce a sinister protean opponent. If we had wanted to make a radical impact by showing how frigidity did not deserve to be taken seriously because its emergence was historically contingent, we have missed our chance by at least 40 years. The danger in current historiography is that the terms ‘construction’ and ‘invention’ can effectively reduce the span and the depth of historical inquiry. In this regard, we are aligning ourselves with those historians who have sought to build long histories of sexual ‘pathologies’ and ‘perversions’. Our intention is to show, as others have done for ‘flagellation’, ‘masturbation’ and ‘impotence’, that ‘frigidity’ has a very long history indeed.26 We can gain some insight into this difference by contrasting our work on frigidity with that of Sheila Jeffreys, who owes no allegiance whatsoever to Foucault’s work, but has made her own contribution to the history of twentieth-century sexology. Jeffreys asserts that frigidity is a recent ‘invention’, put together by 1950s sexologists along with male impotence and premature ejaculation. We consider it

Introduction: History of Pseudoscientific Object 15

inaccurate and unhelpful to suppose that talk about ‘frigidity’ was put together deliberately in order to take its place within a well-managed discourse of sexuality. But supposing this to be so has become something of a habit in those feminist accounts that put great emphasis on agency. When understood in those terms, talk of frigidity is attributed to the failure of male doctors to understand the nature of feminine desire, or to the general phallocentrism of heterosexual men who have failed to understand the importance for women of clitoral pleasure and of non-orgasmic forms of jouissance.27 Jeffreys provides a radical expression of that view, and thus helps us to mark a crucial difference with respect to our own approach. A strong assumption about agency allows her to make a polemical and contentious beginning to her book Anticlimax: A Feminist Perspective on the Sexual Revolution. There, she identifies ‘historians of sexuality’ as a group of scholars who have largely cast in their lot with sexual liberationism: Historians of sexuality see the ‘sexual revolution’ of the 1960s as a very positive development for women. They accept the sexological view that the ‘sexual liberation’ offered by that supposed revolution was a necessary component in the liberation of women.28 It would not be hard to provide counterexamples to this claim, the most obvious being Foucault’s own rejection in Histoire de la sexualité of the very notions of sexual liberation or sexual revolution.29 But our interest here is not to debate this question. We are concerned rather to point to the outcomes and side effects of Jeffreys’ use of the notions of construction and invention. Her targets, along with the indulgent historians of sexuality, are well defined: ‘the sexologists and therapists, the pornographers, novelists and sex radicals who took part in the construction of heterosexual desire in the period since the Second World War’.30 What makes these people a group is that they are the concerted enemies of radical feminism as Jeffreys understands it, engaged collectively in the business of constructing heterosexual desire. Sexologists thus appear as historical agents assessing the threat posed by the feminist movement and working to head off its effects: The sexologists played a pivotal role in readjusting the relations between men and women in order to repair the damage to male power caused by the strong feminist movement of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and the social and economic changes which were allowing women better opportunities for selfdetermination.31

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According to Jeffreys’ account, sexologists took on a series of selfassigned tasks in the struggle against women’s sexual autonomy: ‘It was the job of sexologists to inculcate this knowledge into the resistant or inadequate multitude’, as they ‘set themselves diligently to the task of constructing the sexual practice of coitus as “sex” for women and men in the face of women’s determined resistance.’32 And this is where frigidity came in, along with impotence and premature ejaculation. All three, says Jeffreys, were made to order for the purpose of imposing heterosexual coitus as the only model for sex: From such specifications the illnesses that required treatment in sex therapy were created . . . For women the main illnesses were seen as frigidity or failure to become aroused, disinclination to sexual intercourse, dyspareunia or pain during intercourse, vaginismus or muscle spasm which prevented intercourse, and failure to achieve orgasm during intercourse. In the absence of the prescription of sexual intercourse most of these illnesses would simply be inconceivable.33 We have no wish to trivialize Jeffreys’ history of twentieth-century sexology, which brings together valuable documentation and provides a militant antidote to the sometimes facile modernism of sexual liberation talk. Our key point in rejecting her approach is to set aside the kind of history that attaches great value to constructive or inventive agency. There is no doubt in our minds that sexology and other forms of professional knowledge about sex produced notions that proved harmful to women – and indeed to men – sometimes to the point of cruelty, as we shall show. But we see no value for history in imagining sexologists hard at work trying to match every potential move made by the advance of feminism. Our assumption will be, in fact, that their discourse was bigger than they were, that broad habits of talking and thinking carried their whole enterprise. Was their view of sexuality, insofar as it was singular, a ‘constructed’ one, in the sense that it was not a simple reflection of nature? Most certainly. Were they the self-conscious builders of this view? The answer appears to us so uneven and uncertain that we see little point in asking that as a general question. Did they produce ‘sex for the woman’, with its by-product ‘frigidity’ as something ‘constructed from scratch’, as Jeffreys claims? We think not. We are about to show that sexual frigidity had been a topic of discussion for many centuries before 1950s sexology took hold of it, but we are not going to attempt to trump Jeffreys by claiming to discover the moment at which it really was ‘invented’. In Chapter 1, we will discuss

Introduction: History of Pseudoscientific Object 17

the use of the word ‘frigid’ (Latin frigidus) to mean something like ‘sexually inactive’ or ‘sexually incompetent’ in a papal letter by Pope Gregory IX dating from the early thirteenth century.34 This has a definite place in our genealogy, but we do not claim it as a moment of origin. Indeed, we deem it entirely appropriate for modern historians to ask us just what medieval frigiditas might have to do, if anything, with the ‘frigidity’ of 1950s sexology, and, beyond that, with contemporary discourse. Our point is emphatically not that the thirteenth-century signification of the Latin has somehow been secretly preserved in twenty-first-century usage. And we fully accept that the history of sexuality must always be in some sense history for the present, requiring us to engage in the history of frigidity without losing sight of the issues and the unease that have surrounded the term in recent decades. But we want at the same time to take account of, and demonstrate the relevance of, concerns and controversies that have gone on for centuries in Western Europe around the notion of sexual coldness. Seen in this perspective, the history of ‘frigidity’ must be considered a thoroughly strenuous one. There were striking differences of opinion in canon law discussions of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and hard-fought debates in medical texts of the nineteenth, to name but two historical moments at which frigidity has been the subject of definitional argument before the twentieth century began. Our history will follow the term through to its more recent uses, which were themselves often contested. So while the story we have to tell will not be that of a singular invention, it will nonetheless describe a series of reinventions, reclamations and rejections of a related set of terms. Our task will be complicated not just by the vicissitudes of history, but also by the continually shifting nature of the object of our book. We say this to mark a difference with respect to another of the rare pieces of historical writing devoted to our topic, an article by Sylvie Chaperon dating from 2007. Chaperon writes: ‘The study of a broad medical corpus from the nineteenth century, including dictionaries and encyclopaedias, theses, and manuals of conjugal hygiene shows a noteworthy change in the knowledge about frigidity.’35 We agree strongly that striking changes occurred in the course of the nineteenth century, and analysis of them will occupy several chapters in what follows. But we baulk at the expression ‘the knowledge about frigidity’ (le savoir sur la frigidité ) because we do not wish to suppose that the various statements, diagnoses, standard narratives or even definitions can all be taken to be sur la frigidité, as if frigidity were a stable object of reference, and everything said about it a contribution to the knowledge of a singular object. To set about

18

Frigidity

a history in that way is, in our view, to beg the question of whether frigidity is a reliably identifiable phenomenon. This opens up, so to speak, a second front on which our history is opposed to the few existing ones. Jeffreys’ presentist and polemical history appears to us dismissive rather than attentive – in a word, too short – while Chaperon’s longer chronology and broader generic focus appear too certain of the stability of their object. We can and will resist short histories by turning our attention to earlier texts, but we cannot respond to approaches such as Chaperon’s without recognizing a fundamental paradox at the heart of our method. The apparent contradiction is that our book takes frigidity as its theme, while devoting much of its analytical effort to showing the methodological uncertainty – perhaps even the impropriety – of a thematic study in the classic sense. The difficulty can be put simply in the terms of Foucault’s title, Les Mots et les choses. Is it appropriate, we can ask, to consider frigidity as an invariant thing to which different words have referred over time? If it is, we can endeavour to track it through the verbal representations that have made it available to knowledge. But that involves a strong assumption. It supposes that whatever we currently understand as frigidity – let us say a lack of sexual desire or pleasure found especially in women – can be identified across centuries of European thought. The alternative to this approach, put in Foucault’s ironically naïve terms, would be a study led by words. We could take frigidity, frigidité and frigiditas as our talismans, following wherever they might lead. We stand, then, between two stylized alternatives. On the one hand, a realist account that would confidently affirm the identity of its object despite differing conceptual parameters arising within specific sets of intellectual and institutional practices. On the other hand, a thoroughly historicist but rigidly nominalist account that would ignore the intersecting genealogies of concepts appearing under different names. In a recent publication, we contributed to a discussion of this fundamental difficulty, interrogating Thomas Laqueur’s historiographic practice as we did so.36 Our individual contributions rejected from the outset the notion that such objects of knowledge as masturbation, sadism or frigidity might be considered incidental outcomes of the workings of discourse. To put it baldly, we do not believe that things are simply the magical by-products of words. Neither do we believe – and this is where we seem to part company with Laqueur – that things can ever be identified or considered in the absence of words that refer to them. We make the assumption, which is also Foucault’s, that words and things are inextricably related, bound up in such a way that things cannot be conceived

Introduction: History of Pseudoscientific Object 19

of outside or prior to words. This is the burden of the idea of discourse as we understand it. There is, in that sense, nothing exceptional about our philosophical view, but a question does need to be asked about what it entails for the writing of intellectual history. Where and how might historical inquiry begin? The initial focus of our inquiry is indeed on the word ‘frigidity’ and its etymological variants, especially in Latin and French. But we have insisted from the outset on the difficulty of construing the word across time. We will show that ‘frigidity’ cannot be glossed without producing a list of terms that have, at various times and not all at once, served as its referents. We clearly have no grounds, pace Chaperon, for supposing that the word ‘frigidity’ and its etymological equivalents correspond always and everywhere to the same thing. We find in our early texts that the key word frigiditas is closely associated with another, impotentia, which helps to map its significance, but the relation to ‘impotence’ shifts over time, and in any case ‘impotence’ appears equally unstable. That is why it is not helpful to describe referents of the word ‘frigidity’ identified at different times and places as mere variations on a perennial theme. To speak in those terms is in fact to take the outcome of inquiry for granted. We are supposing that there is some succession, some shifting and unstable set of things that holds our study together and justifies its title. But we must concede from the outset that the thematic coherence of our work is not strictly assured in principle. The object of which we speak in Chapter 1 is not necessarily the same as that of which we speak in Chapter 8. Our long history of frigidity is thus a study of the various things that terms such as ‘frigidity’ have meant, and of the drift in meaning from one sense to another. The inertia of language has inevitably haunted constructionist epistemology. As a much-cited study by Diana Fuss has argued, even while such accounts insist on the contingency of the ‘things’ to which key words refer they find themselves obliged to go on using the same words in order to name the construction under discussion.37 This produces another kind of tension that is difficult to manage. How can we assert that the object of historical inquiry is a shifting one while at the same time continuing to refer to ‘it’ in the singular? Niklaus Largier shows how such a tension can be managed by naming the object of a long history according to a more or less neutral practice (‘flagellation’) which, as he then shows, was ascribed different names and vastly different meanings across several cultures and several centuries.38 Things are less simple for us since there is an apparent absence of any neutral object that might form the basis of a long history. ‘Sexual coldness’ cannot be said to fill

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this role any better than ‘frigidity’ or ‘anaphrodisia’. None of these terms can be considered neutral. And we know that the problem of naming is not simply solved by the generalized use of quotation marks around our key terms. That is sometimes no more than a falsely comforting constructionist habit. Ian Hacking makes a useful distinction about scientific objects: they are not all, he says, without natural foundation to the same degree. A constructionist history of the invention of quarks must contend with scientific evidence for the existence of a verifiable object.39 Similarly, diseases such as syphilis, AIDS or consumption are discursive constructions that nonetheless refer to lethal conditions that exist whether they are named or not. By contrast, ‘frigidity’ cannot and never could be proven to exist independently of its construction and nomination. Even when doctors and psychiatrists felt sure that there was a real object to which terms like ‘frigidity’ referred, they continued to describe it in terms of absence or deficiency. The presence of frigidity was often identified through the very absence of lesions, or of any physical evidence. The disorder was repeatedly theorized, contested and redefined through quotation and reference. Every church canonist, doctor, psychiatrist and psychoanalyst knew frigidity (or anaphrodisia or vaginismus or sexual coldness) to exist because it was part of academic or professional talk. Paraphrasing or referring to known examples was a standard means of disseminating knowledge. And so was disagreeing with a particular example or offering a somewhat new account. This characteristic of ‘frigidity’ as a mobile topic functioning with diffuse forms of authority and derivative reference is responsible for the methodological approach of our book. That is why frigidity is, par excellence, an object of inquiry for intellectual history. Across our historical account, the minimal recurring element in all formulations of female sexual coldness, frigidity, anaphrodisia or vaginismus is the non-receptivity of a person to a particular desire or sexual expectation of another. In this sense, the term ‘sexual coldness’ can serve as a working term of reference for the full scope of our history, though in fact the notion of a simple lack of heat does not deserve to be considered universal, and was rejected out of hand in some earlytwentieth-century accounts. Non-receptivity to the desire of another can result from a great variety of causes, or can occur indeed without any particular cause. As a result, it often seems to us, there lies at the heart of our topic something like the absence of a reality. Our genealogy is, as much as anything, a study in shifting ways of construing quite particular absences, however they might be named. When the construction of

Introduction: History of Pseudoscientific Object 21

quarks or AIDS is bracketed out or otherwise undone, there is still some thing that can be proven to exist. But without the discursive elaboration of frigidity, anaphrodisia, vaginismus or coldness, there may be no thing to find, and nothing to say. A further question might arise about the scope of our inquiry. We have focused largely on France, whereas Germany, Britain or Italy might have served almost as well. As it happens, our base of erudition is strongest in French history, but we have endeavoured throughout to show the circulation of discourses across national borders. Chapter 1 is primarily concerned with the canon law writings of a Spaniard and an Italian. Chapter 2 points to the decisive impact of a German physiologist on French medical thought. Chapter 3 turns on the pioneering work of an American gynaecologist and the problematic reception of his work in France, and Chapter 7 is almost entirely devoted to Central European psychotherapists who led the way in that field. In that sense, France serves as a topical place for our work without marking the boundary of its ambition. This is not so much a history of frigidity in France as a history of frigidity in which France serves as the locus of change. Readers familiar with the history of scientific and sexual concepts will be unsurprised by this. Many scholars who have gone before us have taken a loose national focus as a useful pivot for examining widely circulating ideas about degeneration, hygiene and colonial racialism, to name just a few.40 Other historians, whom we are happy to acknowledge as models, have focused on a particular cultural emergence while referring more broadly to other historical occurrences and inviting further studies of those contexts they refer to but do not elaborate upon. It is our hope that this will not be the first and only history of ‘frigidity’ and similar notions, since our decision to touch lightly upon the late-twentiethcentury use of these terms and much of their history in the Anglophone world leaves room for further work. The very mobility of our national focus stems in part from the kind of historical work in which we have engaged. If our gaze were aimed at the social experience of a medical condition, we would almost certainly have dwelt on narrower local circumstances. But the nature of frigidity as a discursive elaboration calls for a different methodology, tracing the lines of genealogical influence across canonist, literary, medical, psychiatric and psychoanalytic texts. Such lines are not strictly national since, at least until the mid-twentieth century, intellectuals, doctors, and other writers often read widely across different languages and national traditions. Local institutional and social practices informed the production of such texts, and indeed we have something to say about the uniquely

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French medical conventions that may help to explain the remarkable flowering of talk about la frigidité in the early years of the twentieth century. But we make no apology for moving across national borders and continents in order to show how the discursive elaboration we trace was, at different times, constituted internationally. To summarize, we have refused to presume that there was an unchanging set of physical and psychological phenomena underlying the various afflictions, disabilities and deviancies that have been described over time as forms of sexual coldness. For that very reason, we have been unwilling to impose on the past an understanding of gender politics based on present circumstances. So while we have found an increasing refinement and complexification of female sexual coldness over time, we are not prepared to read that history in teleological terms as the process whereby patriarchal repression as we know it took shape over time. Rather, we have been concerned to show how, at various points, a ‘moral’ interest in the health and welfare of women led to increasingly detailed knowledge of female desire and pleasure – always within the framework of heterosexual coitus. The knowledge developed was both enabling and constraining, both supportive and invasive. ‘Frigidity’ actually made women’s sexuality important where it had not always been so. But the recognition it gave was achieved at enormous cost. Talk about frigidity, anaphrodisia, vaginismus and the like put women’s desire and pleasure into a space of anxious fragility, a domain of knowledge surrounded by diagnostic scrutiny and coercive therapeutic attention.

1 Frigiditas and Impotentia

As our Introduction makes clear, the bulk of this history will be devoted to the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. That was when, over a period of about 100 years, the notion of frigidity took on the thematic shape and discursive functions we recognize so easily today. The role of this first chapter is to enable our study by examining briefly some medieval and early modern discussions of ‘frigidity’ and the related matter of ‘impotence’. Summary analysis of the period before 1800 will allow us to approach our primary corpus with an awareness of historical elements that were still in play in the nineteenth century, although they may since have disappeared from view. By giving an account of these now rather obscure antecedents, we are answering the requirements of a long-term genealogy. Our examination will bring to light an intellectual tradition around an idea of frigidity that established authoritative interpretations and kept them available over five or six centuries, at least within an erudite milieu. That is why this first chapter corresponds to such a long historical period, extending from the mid-thirteenth century to the late eighteenth. Its function is to cover a great chronological span in an economical fashion. Attention to earlier ways of thinking about frigidity requires us to move outside the generic domains most frequented by historians of modern sexuality. From Chapter 2 onwards, we will refer to those familiar genres: to medical and psychiatric texts, to advice manuals and indeed to fiction. But in this chapter we will discuss only one kind of text: writings in canon law. Not wishing to suppose that this genre is familiar to Anglophone historians of the modern world, we will first take the liberty of making some quite general introductory comments. ‘Canon’ in this context signifies a rule of conduct, and canon law presents norms of conduct for members of the Catholic Church.1 It does 23

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not address matters of belief, but serves to order the structures, rules and procedures of the church.2 In that broad sense, there is a similarity between the prescriptions of canon law and the more familiar genre of the secular conduct manual. Because of their focus on behaviours, eminent canonists had reasons to build knowledge about what we now call the sexual. In some instances, they provided a guide to confessors that spelled out in fine detail the canons of behaviour in the marriage bed; in others, they applied medical knowledge to ecclesial requirements in matters of intimate contact; and quite generally they provided expert opinions on a range of finely differentiated cases in which the rules of conduct were interpreted and applied. Foucault comments broadly on the importance of such texts and the technologies they deploy. Catholic confession, he suggests, involved a set of techniques that functioned in their own way like an ars erotica: Contained in Christian confession, and especially in the direction and examination of conscience, in the search for spiritual union and the love of God, were a whole series of techniques that have something in common with an art of the erotic: the master’s guidance along the path of initiation, the intensification of experiences, and the enhancement of effects by the discourse that accompanies them.3 In the practice of confession as it emerged in medieval Christianity, Foucault finds a characteristic technology for the production of truth as avowal.4 Not just some general exhortation to admit to bodily weakness, but a well-organized set of penitential practices for bringing to light the most specific sins. This he refers to as ‘the traditional technology of the flesh’, with its ‘techniques for analysing concupiscence and putting it into discourse’.5 Historians of the early modern period have analysed such knowledge practices in detail, although their work has not often been articulated with Foucauldian histories of sexuality. French historian Pierre Darmon is something of an exception, since he locates his study of canon law writing on impotence within the broad periodization outlined by Foucault. There was indeed, says Darmon, a discursive explosion of talk about sexuality at the end of the sixteenth century, and it happened when ‘the Church took over [investit] the discourse about sex’.6 But this does not seem to us the most helpful way to put it, since Darmon appears to suppose that there was already in existence a ‘discourse about sex’ waiting to be taken over by the church. Our hypothesis, more closely aligned with Foucault’s approach, is rather that a certain form of knowledge took shape in canon law, producing an object of attention

Frigiditas and Impotentia

25

and stricture that moderns might now call sex, although it is more narrowly and properly described as conjugal relations governed by the Catholic sacrament. The frame for this knowledge, as Foucault points out, is a refined understanding of ‘the flesh’. Catholic technologies of the flesh have in fact been the object of a substantial body of scholarly work, much of it in Italian. A recent paper by Fernanda Alfieri points to the range of historical research under way in Italy, including studies of the institutions governing the sacrament of marriage and the examination of records describing transgressive behaviour that either led to the tribunal or found itself consigned by the Inquisition to the space of the unspeakable.7 Our focus here will simply be on prescriptions surrounding the sacrament of marriage. The first point to be made about ‘frigidity’ in canon law texts is that it was always considered alongside impotence, as part of the same legal and medical problematic. Impotence figured prominently because it was seen as a potential hindrance to marriage. It was, to put it in the technical terms of this discourse, a diriment impediment, that is, an obstacle justifying annulment.8 Divorce was forbidden in principle, so it was a matter for canonists of determining in what circumstances annulment might properly be allowed. And since the sacramental purpose of marriage included copulation for the sake of ‘generation’, any enduring inability to fulfil that purpose called for legal attention.9 There were in fact several kinds of reason for annulment, although it was necessary in practice to limit the list as far as possible. Matters of consanguinity were usually the first grounds to be listed, but impotence took a prominent place.10 A preceptive letter (decretalis) by Pope Gregory IX, De frigidis et maleficiatis, et impotentia coeundi (Regarding the frigid and the spellbound, and impotence to engage in coitus), appeared in the first half of the thirteenth century. Gregory IX identified the two principal causes of impotence as frigiditas and maleficium, and was quoted as an authority in subsequent centuries.11 Darmon considers that his letter was probably slow to take effect, but our focus here is not so much on the application of the law as on its conceptual basis, on the work done by the definition of terms, and on their long-standing authority.12 Gregory IX’s text became in fact the locus classicus in which frigidity and impotence stood in close relation, one to the other. The question of maleficium is a fascinating one, but it leads away from the genealogy of frigidity that we are pursuing here. Reference to spells that had the effect of taking away men’s potency persisted well into the eighteenth century, finding an echo in sophisticated French libertine novels of the mid-eighteenth century through the notion of enchantement. In libertine fiction, a man who could not penetrate a woman was

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said to be under a spell cast either by the woman herself or by some malevolent third party, as in Angola, by La Morlière, or Tanzaï et Néardné, by Crébillon. But the notion of maleficium functions as an alternative to frigidity, and seems never to apply to women. It plays no discernable role in the genealogy of female frigidity as we now understand it. The definition and elaboration of frigidity in canon law takes on its most complete form in the work of two influential figures, a Spanish Jesuit and an Italian doctor, who maintained allegiance to Gregory IX’s declarations on impotence while refining and elaborating them. Thomas Sanchez was the Spanish author of De sancto matrimonii sacramento disputationum (Disputations about the holy sacrament of matrimony), the complete edition of which appeared in 1605, while Paolo Zacchia held the office of Protomedico of Rome, and published his Quaestiones medicolegales in its definitive form in 1661. In this chapter, we will explore their definitions of frigiditas, and the understandings of impotence that constrained the meaning of that term. For Sanchez and for his fellow canonists, impotence was a decidedly broader notion than it is in modern usage, subsuming any lasting indisposition or debility, including sterility, which prevented reproductive copulation. Within this broad category, it was possible to distinguish two main types of impotence according to the functions involved in the fulfilment of marriage. Sanchez identified impotence that impeded copulation on the one hand, and the kind that blocked generation on the other: ‘impotence for copulation is one thing: quite another is impotence for generation alone, which is called sterility’.13 Zacchia made the same general distinction, analysing impotence as impotentia coeundi, the incapacity to engage in coitus, and impotentia generandi, or the inability to ‘generate’.14 The distinction between impotentia coeundi, copulative impotence, and impotentia generandi, reproductive impotence, became standard, and continued to influence conceptual work for centuries to follow. A form of it was still in play in some nineteenth-century medical texts, as we shall see in Chapter 2. In Sanchez’s earlier account of the significance of impotence for the sacrament of marriage, a number of points emerged.15 The first – and this remained an invariant of canon law discourse – was that frigidity occurred most significantly in men. And while Gregory IX’s maleficium could be an occasional, supernatural cause of impotentia coeundi, the most frequent natural cause was frigiditas: the husband lacked the natural heat required to produce an erection and/or ejaculate sperm. Whether or not frigidity occurred naturally in women seemed for Sanchez to be a matter of some uncertainty. He asked explicitly

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‘whether frigidity is found in woman’,16 but the difficulty of answering the question directly was inherent in his founding assumptions. That was because he was committed to a striking asymmetry of gender in his account of impotentia coeundi: ‘the same thing can occur from inherent natural causes, whether it be frigidity in the man or narrowness in the woman’.17 The impediment might have had the same general name in both sexes, but its causes were understood quite differently. In women, the primary, perhaps the only cause of impotentia coeundi was arctitudo, obstruction or excessive narrowness of the vaginal passage, rather than any quality of coldness. Accordingly, said Sanchez, ‘frigidity rendering a spouse impotent occurs only in the man’.18 ‘The male is the agent in generation’, while ‘foemina vero solum patiatur’, the woman in truth plays only a passive role.19 So if no actual physical obstacle happened to be present, the woman would always be able to play her part in copulation. It was not that she was required to be ‘passive’ in some modern psychological sense. Rather, her role was physically passive in such a way that her emotions or temperament did not call for the attention of canon law. The focus was on the man’s capacity to implant the seed and the woman’s capacity to be the vessel, the one in whom it was planted. She played her role by receiving the seed properly into the uterus. Because canonists were generally committed to maintaining wherever possible the sacred state of marriage, they were open to remedies that might put an end to impotentia and thus offer the opportunity of avoiding annulment. So while Sanchez’s discussion of impotentia coeundi in women was limited by its definitional scope, some remedies for it were briefly considered in his work. These were ways of overcoming narrowness, either by medication that produced dilatation or by incision.20 But the key thing for our genealogy is that impotentia coeundi in women, by contrast with men, was not seen to arise from anything that could be called frigidity. Where women were concerned, said Sanchez, ‘frigiditas passioni non obstat’, coldness of passion was not an impediment.21 He did not assert that frigidity could not be found in women, merely that it was of no consequence for the annulment of marriage. It did not constitute a true (diriment) impediment, and it was ‘impossible to prove’.22 The symptom of male frigidity was in some sense visible when erection failed to occur, but that was not so where females were concerned. The forensic equivalent in their case was measurable narrowness. Thus impotentia in women was not prima facie the lack of any passion or heat: it was a blockage of some sort, constituting a sensible impediment to coitus, and therefore to generation.23

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It is noteworthy – and perhaps a little surprising for any who might hold to the idea that Christian thought was always and everywhere puritanical – that canonists like Sanchez did not seek to deny the fleshliness of marriage. They were in fact committed to the idea that the sacrament could only be consummated in the flesh, and saw the role of the church as providing detailed guidance as to how this was to be done. But while that purpose was widely agreed, there was some uncertainty about the exact place of matrimonial coitus. Was it merely a ‘path’ to the fulfilment of marriage, as Sanchez affirmed at one point?24 Or was it not, as many considered, the actual realization of the sacrament? It was regularly affirmed by Sanchez and by his colleagues that marriage in its fullness required not just the potential for generation, but the making of unam carnem, one flesh.25 As a consequence, interpreting the requirement to make one flesh became itself a matter of close legal and confessional attention. The sacrament required the execution of copula perfecta,26 but how exactly was that to be defined? Sanchez’s own view, in opposition to some others he quoted,27 was that the holy purpose of marriage could not be properly fulfilled by mere penetration. There had to be, on the part of the man, a capacity to emit semen into the woman’s vas, her duct or vessel.28 In response to those who asserted that a marriage was valid even when seed was not emitted into the woman’s vessel,29 he conceded that one flesh had been made only when part of the seed was placed there. But the key point for a genealogy of modern frigidity is that Sanchez and his colleagues began to recognize a ‘secondary’ purpose of holy marriage in addition to the ‘primary’ purpose of generation: ‘to satisfy [. . .] desires [concupiscentiae]’.30 This was not a fully separate or sufficient purpose, but in Sanchez’s view copula perfecta was deemed to satisfy desires while at the same time being ‘suited by its very nature to the generation of offspring’.31 This view of copula perfecta came later to be contested and largely displaced within the tradition of canon law. Joseph Bajada’s history describes how Zacchia’s later Quaestiones medico-legales (1661) became ‘the classical text of undiscussed authority for the next two centuries’.32 There were, says Bajada, two main reasons for this shift in the locus of authority: the death of Sanchez, and a papal brief by Sixtus V entitled Cum frequenter, in which copula perfecta was redefined.33 Zacchia himself further revised the definition: Cum frequenter of 1587 said that it [perfect coupling] should include erection, intromission, and ejaculation of verum semen [true seed]. But Zacchia took the view, now widely upheld in the Church, that

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there was no need, in the perfect copula, for the ejaculation of semen in testiculis elaboratum [seed produced in the testicles]. That would be essential to potentia generandi [potency to generate], but not to potentia coeundi [potency to copulate]. The requirements of the latter could be fully met without the ejaculation of verum semen, and the proper aim of marriage realized as copula satiativa libidinis [copulation that satisfied desire].34 Zacchia’s revision thus allowed for copulation to be considered as an end in itself, without taking into account the full set of material circumstances required for generation. This gave standing within canon law not just to coitus as the act of procreation, nor even to copulation itself as sacred union of the flesh, but to the very desire that was fulfilled in the coupling of husband and wife. That the satisfaction of desire should itself be a sacramental purpose of marriage did not, for Zacchia, create ambiguity about what constituted potentia coeundi in men. The penis had to be erect; it had to be placed in the woman’s vessel; and seed had to be ejaculated. The failure of any one of these necessary conditions allowed for the definition of different ‘classes of frigidity’.35 So frigidity functioned almost as a synonym for impotentia coeundi, as long as the emphasis stayed on men: ‘Those who can properly be called frigid [frigidi, masculine plural] are those who because of listlessness of the genital parts or lack of native heat are impotent to engage in coitus.’36 But while continuing to take the male as his defining reference, Zacchia did allow that frigidity might exist in women. In doing so, he opened up new possibilities for medical and legal thought about the wife’s capacity for the enjoyment of conjugal relations. Sanchez, as we have already seen, was prepared to allow that frigidity might exist in women, but denied that it had any significant consequences. Zacchia’s approach was different. He opened up the question by talking about women’s production of seed. For Sanchez, the woman’s role was simply to be the passive receiver of the man’s seed: ‘patiens est, et semen recipit’.37 Zacchia, on the other hand, argued that conception occurred ‘not only from the seed of the husband, but from the seed of the wife joined with it’.38 It is easy enough to misread this statement as an inspired anticipation of later accounts of reproductive biology, but Zacchia was not talking about the union of sperm and ovum. He was talking about the wife’s full participation in copulation. Against Aristotle and others, he asserted that women did produce seed during coitus, finding proof of that in the fact that the woman was ‘debilitatem’ afterwards,

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just as the man was.39 The woman joined with the man as they brought non-being into being in the likeness of themselves. Only by producing seed could she truly participate in generation.40 Zacchia was fully aware of the contrary argument that women could, after all, ‘conceive without pleasure’. His adversaries, whom he quoted, pointed out that if women in such circumstances had not been experiencing pleasure, they must not have been emitting seed, and yet generation had still occurred.41 Against them, Zacchia asserted that ‘all women emit seed when they experience pleasure, even outside coitus’.42 It was natural, he said, for women to produce seed and experience pleasure when conceiving, and exceptions to that rule were rare.43 It followed for Zacchia that the wife’s production of seed was a necessary part of copula perfecta. The satisfaction of fleshly desire was not just the husband’s business. Canon law as Zacchia understood it required the husband to ensure that the wife ‘also experience pleasure from coitus’.44 Bajada, in his history, points out what was at stake in Zacchia’s formal recognition of the wife’s pleasure: This is where he parts company from Sanchez, who only thought it necessary for the husband to achieve ejaculation. That view supposes that the only true aim of marriage is generation, whereas Zacchia takes the true aims of marriage to include the sharing of pleasure. Indeed, for Zacchia, the husband who does not make room for his wife’s pleasure is likely to fail doubly since her pleasure is necessary to produce the seed which will be needed for generation.45 Once it was established by Zacchia that women naturally emitted their own seed in coitus, and that this emission was a proper component of copula perfecta as well as a strong adjunct to generation, frigidity in women could be more clearly and consequentially defined. Women had their own productivity and their own potency: their role was not simply to act as a vessel. Zacchia quoted another doctor, Girolamo Mercuriale, in order to disagree with him on this point. In 1587, Mercuriale had published a study of illnesses in women in which he declared that ‘in women there is no sickness [morbum] which takes the form of a lack of desire for coitus’.46 Against this, Zacchia began by appealing to clinical experience, which showed that women did in fact experience such a sickness.47 He then went on to situate this observed lack of desire in relation to his theory of female seed. ‘Women, like men’, he said, ‘can be frigid by nature, not only by feeling no venereal irritation [arousal], but also by not producing any seed within themselves whose stimulus

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would move them to coitus.’48 Some women could be described as ‘deficient in seed’, and could thus be considered frigid by nature as much as any man.49 According to Zacchia, women of this kind would naturally fail to engage properly in coitus, not ‘mixing their seed with that of the man’.50 It was therefore a mistake to affirm, as many canonists did, that ‘frigidity rendering a spouse impotent occurs solely in men’.51 This last sentence was in fact a virtual quote from Sanchez, with whom Zacchia explicitly took issue in the same paragraph. Female frigiditas, said Zacchia, was quite distinct from undue narrowness of the vagina, the only condition in women admitted by Sanchez as an impediment to marriage. And in any case, Zacchia observed, material obstruction of that kind was extremely rare.52 Deficiency of seed was decidedly more frequent and more significant in its effects.53 That is how Zacchia came to affirm what we might call the substantial nature of female frigidity. It was located in the inner workings of women: As for frigidity, learned colleagues do not admit its existence in women, and I do not dissent if that is tantamount to saying there is no impediment in women to playing a passive role. But true frigidity does occur in women, not only by poison as I have already shown, but by an entirely cold [frigidam] temperament, because of which they do not produce seed within themselves, and because of which no venereal stimulus contributes to arousal. As a consequence, they are unsuited to any kind of generation, just as frigid men are. Thus whenever it is a question of determining a woman’s potential for generation, if anyone should declare her to be frigid, and if proof of that be offered, the case fully deserves to be heard by the court.54 This was, we submit, an important moment in the long-term genealogy of modern frigidity. In Zacchia’s work the notion of female impotence, understood as the incapacity to engage in coitus, came to make room for something other than genital narrowness. Impotentia coeundi, even in women, could be caused by a native inability to generate the seed that would ensure the fullness of copulation. And this lack of copulative seed was not equivalent to sterility: to confuse the one with the other was in Zacchia’s view a serious error.55 Asserting the possibility (and the clinical observability) of female frigidity required of Zacchia that he move beyond Sanchez’s declaration that female frigidity was ‘impossible to prove’. Accordingly, Zacchia claimed to be able to read outward signs of inner frigidity on the bodies

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of women. In a textbook example of what Thomas Laqueur has taught us to call the ‘one-sex model’,56 he transposed to women the symptoms found in men: the most noteworthy of these [signs] are the ones that attest to frigidity in men, namely a general lack of hair in the usual places, flaccid genitals, no stimulation to coitus or affairs of Venus, and other things of the same kind which may be present along with others proper to women as I have indicated here.57 It would be a mistake, he cautioned elsewhere, to conclude that frigidity was present unless the person being examined had reached full maturity. Annulment ought not to be granted until there had been time for these signs to appear, whether in the husband or in the wife.58 Like Sanchez, and for the same forensic reasons, Zacchia was always concerned to determine whether in a given instance impotence was curable.59 Curable incapacities or defects provided no solid grounds for annulment. But frigidity understood as a constitutional given appeared to offer little hope of a cure. The striking thing from a genealogical point of view is that the set of more or less intractable symptoms listed by Zacchia – not just unresponsiveness to stimulation, but also the lack of body hair and flaccidity of the genitals – continued to serve for centuries as the marks of a predisposition to frigidity in women. Zacchia’s great achievement, for better and for worse, was to establish the approximate equivalence of male and female frigidity, transferring to women the medical symptoms and the legal consequentiality of an illness which had hitherto been the preserve of men. When impotentia coeundi in women was conceived of as genital obstruction, it was quite literally an incapacity: a failure to serve as a proper vessel. But when frigidity was identified as a likely source of the problem, it became possible to entertain a notion of female potentia, a power to desire and to act that was identified in principle by its very absence. Zacchia was drawn into this view by his insistence that women produced seed in intercourse, and his logic was straightforward: only those who were capable in principle of being potent could be declared impotent. In Chapter 2, we will see that there emerged in the nineteenth century a rather different understanding of how the female genitals behaved in coitus, but the logic identifying deficiency or pathology was much the same: female impotence could only appear where there was an expectation of female potency.

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Our history has reached a long way back in order to find the point at which frigidity in women first came to be conceived as legally and medically problematic in Western Europe, and we have now shown that such problematization reached a quite elaborate form in the seventeenthcentury writings of Zacchia. Now, having identified and defined this thematic, we are about to move quite quickly to a study of the nineteenth century. That ellipsis in our history is more than a matter of historiographical economy. We have come to the conclusion that, from about 1660 to 1780, there were no new influential reformulations of frigidity as a problem. Had we concentrated further on the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, we could have pursued in more detail a tradition in medical and moral thought that owed allegiance to ancient theories of temperament. A dominant view within that tradition was that a natural difference in bodily humour caused women to be naturally cool while men were naturally warm. To the extent that that was so, ‘frigidity’ did not present as a problem requiring medical, legal or ecclesial intervention. There, coldness, or at least coolness, in women was a quite unremarkable thing. From time to time, as we will show briefly in Chapters 2, 4 and 7, this notion of natural bodily temperament interfered or intersected with that of frigidity, but the two were in general terms conceptually discrete. The primary concern of this book is to understand how, where and when gendered frigidity came to be constituted as a disorder. It was considered as such in the writings of canonists like Zacchia, and again in the nineteenth century, as we shall shortly see. Yet even if it is accepted that these were the two decisive phases in the history of frigidity prior to the twentieth century, it remains to be seen whether, taken together, they constitute a genealogy in the proper sense of the word. Reference to Zacchia and his colleagues is, it must be said, no longer found in modern sexological and psychiatric discourse. So how does our analysis of sixteenth and seventeenth-century canonist writings prepare our analysis of nineteenth-century medical texts, advice manuals and fiction? Our geneaogical point is that key terms coined by the canonists remained in play until the early twentieth century. Zacchia’s conceptual work, in particular, continued to serve as a point of reference in places where one might not have expected to find it. The canon law view of frigidity remained in play, for example, in some of the high places of eighteenth-century Enlightenment philosophy. The article on impotence in Voltaire’s Dictionnaire philosophique still accorded an honourable mention to Gregory IX: ‘we have in the Decretales the famous heading de frigidis et maleficiatis, which is

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remarkably interesting, but does not explain everything’.60 What the Pope notably failed to explain to Voltaire’s satisfaction was the place of sorcery. The philosophe was astonished to note the position taken by learned doctors of canon law, who declared that a spellbound husband could not in conscience apply to other charms or magicians to destroy the spell. The husband was required to resort to exorcism. This moved Voltaire to make the wry comment that ‘it would have been better to establish in the first place whether a sorcerer can give a man virility or take it away’.61 But Enlightenment irony did not shut down the canonists’ gendered articulation of impotence and frigidity. As we have already indicated, Crébillon and other contemporaries of Voltaire felt free to populate their libertine stories with genies and fairies who typically meddled in matters of potency. Further evidence that canonist thought maintained an influence in eighteenth-century secular places can be found in Diderot and d’Alembert’s great French Encyclopédie, whose entry on ‘Frigidité’ began by recognizing the term as having a jurisprudential function, thereby locating it squarely in the canon law tradition: This defect which produces in the man an impediment justifying the annulment of marriage is a lack of strength and a weakness of temperament that is not brought on by either old age or passing illness. It is the condition of an impotent man who never has the sensations necessary to carry out his conjugal duty.62 Consequently, the entry went on, ‘He who is cold cannot enter into marriage. If he does so the marriage is void, and can be dissolved.’ That same logic still led to the exclusion of women from consideration: ‘We are speaking here only of men, for frigidity in women is not a cause of impotence or an impediment to marriage.’ After a discussion of the different causes of frigidity in men – congenital ones, accidental ones and maleficium – the article concludes with a set of three references: Gregory IX, Sanchez and Zacchia.63 Whatever the force of Voltaire’s irony about maleficium, canon law discourse of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries continued to hold a place in what was perhaps the greatest work of the Enlightenment. Some other historians have drawn attention to the fact that Zacchia in particular continued to be cited as an authority long after his work was published. Bajada points out that his magnum opus continued

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to serve within canon law deliberations as ‘the classical text of undiscussed authority for the next two centuries’.64 According to Peter J. Jugis, that authority was particularly great when matters such as those that we have been discussing in this chapter came into view: ‘Zacchia’s expertise was so renowned, especially in regard to the medical aspects of impotence and nonconsummation, that his work became a standard reference for canonists even into the twentieth century.’65 Alain Corbin, discussing the ‘benevolence’ displayed by some nineteenthcentury Catholic thinkers towards certain defined forms of pleasure, attributes their openness to the influence of Zacchia.66 But most importantly, Zacchia’s work continued to have authority outside the specific domain of the church. Chiara Beccalossi points out in her analysis of late-nineteenth-century sexology in Italy that Zacchia remained, at the time, ‘the traditional medicolegal expert on whose authority forensic medicine was based’ whenever pederasty was under discussion.67 George Rousseau makes a more general point with some eloquence, noting the habitual and half-informed reference to Zacchia’s name that continued to be found in early European sexology: Mid-nineteenth-century readers of the new sexology – the emerging science just being invigorated in Europe – would have continued to stumble upon the name Paolo Zacchia (1584–1659) in primary texts, footnotes, and learned apparatuses. Zacchia was usually glossed as the most eminent authority on forensic science of the Renaissance but without explanation why. It appeared to those readers curious about the new science of sex as if he had accomplished for the Renaissance what DNA testing has done in our generation. Yet rarely was Zacchia biographically or bibliographically discussed.68 When our history mentions Zacchia, we want our readers to know why, although Zacchia’s biography matters less from a genealogical point of view than the legal–medical knowledge he developed. At any rate, the history we pursue in the following chapters will support Rousseau’s claim that ‘this was a seminal work within the sweep of forensic science, throughout the realms where medicine and the law intersect’.69 Canon law established a coherent problematic around the concept of frigiditas. It made copulation a matter of sacramental importance. It marked a difference between men and women that was grounded in church law and subject to forensic examination. It produced the

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category of ‘narrowness’ as a way of understanding women’s incapacity for intercourse. It made male potency and impotence the centre of attention, but eventually came to ask whether female impotence might be spoken of in much the same terms. None of these questions can be said to hold the limelight in our time, but our next chapter will show that they continued variously to play a role in nineteenth-century medical discourse.

2 Female Impotence in the Nineteenth Century

Defining and redefining From the late eighteenth century onwards, the general understanding of such key terms as ‘impotence’ and ‘frigidity’ began to change. By the first decade of the twentieth century, frigidity was regarded as an exclusively female – not to say feminine – disorder. The rest of this chapter will seek to map that general shift while pointing to the continuing resonance of some early modern notions. It should be noted firstly that much of the talk that went on in the nineteenth century was explicitly about the definition of terms. What lay at the heart of most discussions – and sometimes turned them into heated debates – was disagreement about the place of women. The predominant trend over the nineteenth century, interspersed with moments of reaction, was to allow women a more central position in the discursive field of impotence and frigidity. To think of that trend as progress or liberation would be foolhardy. It was undoubtedly a type of closer attention, and indeed of greater recognition, but the very closeness of attention served to refine the workings of a form of knowledge that came to make pathology and perversion out of the absence of female sexual desire or pleasure. We have seen so far one major thematic element that contributed to the genealogy of frigidity: a gendered notion of impotentia coeundi in canon law. Towards the end of the eighteenth century there emerged a second element that would play a progressively more important role in the century to follow: what medical discourse came to speak of as the ‘moral’ dimension of medicine. Whereas frigidity had largely been understood before that time as a purely physical phenomenon – especially in women – it could now be understood also in ‘moral’ terms. In practice, frigidity was to become a topos in which the moral and the 37

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physical were considered in tandem – and this deserves to be considered a new problematization. The merely physical account of obstacles to intercourse in women came to appear deficient to nineteenth-century medicine, and showing this to be so became a characteristic move of progressive medical talk. Medical knowledge thus moved to revise materialist assumptions by including the moral within its domain. It should be clear that insofar as the physical and the moral were understood as a necessarily conjoined pair, the word ‘moral’ was not being used here in its modern sense. The function of the term becomes clearer when we observe that it tended to be replaced and displaced towards the end of the century by such terms as ‘psychical’ and ‘mental’. This allowed an equivalent conceptual arrangement to continue, as the physical now had to be complemented by the psychological. By correcting or adjusting any narrowly physical view, medicine thus tended to claim the moral/psychological as part of its domain, insisting that one could not be properly known without the other. This double claim to territory and the insistence that the two not be separated may well have been the decisive moves that eventually allowed psychosexuality to be established as a field of knowledge towards the end of the nineteenth century. A preoccupation with the place of the moral seems to have emerged alongside a concern with the medical study of women. In 1775, there appeared a work by Pierre Roussel, Système physique et moral de la femme, which continued to be read in the nineteenth century, and was in fact reprinted several times between 1800 and 1810. Roussel was a graduate of the Faculty of Medicine at Montpellier who moved to Paris and was connected to philosophical circles through Théophile de Bordeu.1 As it happens, his book had nothing radical to say about frigidity. In fact, it made no mention of the word. It did, however, criticize the habitual focus of medical attention. Doctors, in Roussel’s view, had made the mistake of leaving le moral to philosophy and devoting all their attention to le physique.2 And they were guilty of a further omission that he was seeking to rectify. This second corrective purpose was not articulated with the first by any strict logic, but simply appeared alongside it, as it would often do in the course of the nineteenth century. Not only should the moral and the physical be brought closer together, but it was also time for medicine to pay closer attention to women: While on the one hand philosophes have closely observed the moral, doctors on the other have developed the physical, at least as far as that is possible. It would however have been desirable for doctors

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to dwell a little on the general constitution of woman, rather than considering her as if she were the same as man.3 We can read this as a principled objection to the one-sex model described by Thomas Laqueur, and a sign that the model was beginning to lose its hold. Woman, Roussel was saying, should not be understood according to norms established for the medical description of man.4 His first concern was to ‘absolve doctors of the imputation of materialism’ by self-consciously including the moral within the range of medical observation;5 however, the preferred locus of the moral–physical knowledge he advocated was the space of womanhood. By a happy appeal to one of the eighteenth century’s favoured emblems, he was able to characterize his work as that of a medical and philosophical Pygmalion.6 The statue waiting to be brought to life by medicine properly conceived was that of woman, and its beautiful shape would be ‘animated’ by a proper description of woman’s moral qualities. Roussel did not attempt to reclaim frigidity for women, nor even to reclaim women for frigidity. He simply moved to include the question of women’s pleasure within the ambit of medicine. Something of this remained in medical writing throughout the following century, as some writers, at least, attempted to accommodate women within an understanding of impotence and frigidity while attending to the ‘moral’ dimension of medicine. As we saw in Chapter 1, impotence, frigidity and sterility had long been established as a constellation of themes, so that examining relations between them, including critical matters of redefinition, will allow us to pursue our genealogy through the nineteenth century. The first author we will consider in this regard is François-Emmanuel Fodéré, who held the founding chair of legal medicine at the University of Strasbourg. Fodéré’s Traité de médecine légale et d’hygiène publique ou de police de santé (Treatise on legal medicine and public hygiene or the policing of health) was published in 1813, although an earlier version had appeared in 1795.7 His concern, as the title of his book indicates, was with forensic medicine, especially as it stood in relation to the Napoleonic penal code. He was well aware of the historical antecedents to his role of medico-legal specialist, and expressed particular satisfaction at the lapse of the congrès, or judicial examination of husbands claiming to be impotent, that had occurred in the middle of the seventeenth century.8 Like Zacchia, Fodéré had a professional stake in ensuring that the considered opinions of doctors about impotence, rather than assessments made by judges, would serve as the basis for legal decisions. His claim on the area was in fact another step in

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the enclosure of these questions within the field of medical expertise. Fodéré was unsure, however, about the status of impotence under the Napoleonic code. Ought it still to be considered a ‘major, decisive’ basis for annulment? The code appeared not to address the question directly, but seemed to allow that impotence might serve as grounds for requesting an annulment.9 In the face of this uncertainty, Fodéré’s main contribution to medical understanding had to do, as with almost all of his nineteenth-century successors, with matters of nosological definition. Using much the same logic as Sanchez, and no doubt for the same forensic reasons, he sought to arrive at definitions that depended as little as possible on hypotheses about interiority. Here, the recognition of impotence was emphatically not about the ‘moral’, but about what the doctor could see and feel: ‘we will only speak here of external causes that are accessible to sight or touch, setting aside internal causes as still too problematic, since they do not provide sufficient data to allow us to pronounce on such delicate matters’.10 In conceptual terms, this resulted in both a gain and a loss. Difficulty and indelicacy could be avoided, and legal closure achieved, by refusing any effective distinction between impotence and sterility, and attending only to the equivalence of their outcomes: ‘impotence and sterility are synonyms in our terms’, said Fodéré.11 But in saying this he had given up a strong distinction that had been made and held to by Zacchia. As it happened, Fodéré was unwittingly providing later writers with a target, for this statement and others like it would serve throughout the nineteenth century as an emblem of ‘traditional’ error. Many of those to follow would speak as if all who had gone before had, like Fodéré, been unable or unwilling to distinguish between the inability to engage in coitus and the inability to reproduce. Fodéré did say, at the risk of contradicting himself, that a woman could be impotent without being sterile. This contradiction may be resolved if we suppose that his earlier general statements were focused on men, and that the one we are about to quote was meant to modulate those generalizations in order to account for women. Having stated earlier that impotence and sterility were effectively the same, he now declared: Woman can be impotent, that is, unable to conceive, without being sterile, and can be sterile without being impotent. Some women can become fertile if the disorder that constitutes the impotence is destroyed, while some others, endowed with all the conditions that facilitate copulation, remain invincibly sterile.12

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What made these women sterile? Was it the inability to copulate, or the inability to conceive? Fodéré did not distinguish clearly, seeming to allow only for some sort of vice de conformation (congenital disorder) which could be an initial cause of impotence in females. If such a disorder could be cured, he was saying, the apparent sterility that accompanied it might also disappear. In that sense, sterility was always ‘apparent’: it was a measurable outcome whose internal causes could not be properly discerned by medicine. That is why, despite the secular focus, Fodéré’s logic did not differ in any significant regard from that of Sanchez, who had found no effective difference, where women were concerned, between the inability to copulate and the inability to conceive. And when Fodéré spoke, as he did soon after, about the possibility of curing impotence in females, he again followed Sanchez’s line without acknowledging the similarity, saying that there were two classes of female impotence: ‘the former are incurable, and the others curable, although it is hard to establish an exact demarcation between the two classes’.13 It should be clear that the work of definition and distinction was in no way secondary here: it was bound up with the (re)conception of impotence and its highly gendered manifestations. Some of the most interesting definitional work in the nineteenth century went on, as it happened, in medical encyclopaedias and dictionaries. A Dictionnaire des sciences médicales published over the period 1812–22, for example, contained an 18-page entry on frigidity, which first appeared in 1816. The article was not signed, but was regularly attributed by subsequent authors to Julien-Joseph Virey. Virey was an influential encyclopaedist, if not actually a scientist of great personal understanding.14 He was one of a group of doctors who produced this encyclopaedia, and his authorship of the article entitled ‘Frigidité’ would appear to be confirmed by the close resemblance between the content of this article and that of a later book on the topic signed by him, which we will discuss shortly. If, as we suppose, definition functions partly by exclusion, one of the most noteworthy things about Virey’s article is the fact that it located some aspects of the early modern thematics in other topical places. Whatever ‘frigidity’ was taken to be here, it seemed not to be genital malformation, since the reader who wished to learn about that was referred to such articles as ‘Castration’, ‘Eunuch’, ‘Sexual Organs’ and ‘Uterus’. Furthermore, while maléficiés continued to be used here about men as a synonym for ‘impotent’,15 Virey disavowed the tradition on which that usage was based, and dismissed the notion of maléfice as archaic.16 The article did, however, maintain a focus on men even as it allowed for

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the possibility of frigidity in women: ‘Frigidity is the condition found in individuals of either sex, but primarily in men who prove to be impotent and incapable of generation, and even of coitus.’17 Note that impotence for coitus was mentioned here as an extreme case of the same condition. By this account, sterility was the main consideration, and the primary category. Understood thus, frigidity in men typically resulted in sterility, and sometimes even in the inability to copulate. In keeping with the broad exclusion of anatomy from the topic of frigidity, there appeared here a more detailed focus on questions of temperament. From the outset, ‘frigidité’ was put together with ‘froideur’ (coldness), ‘not because they have absolutely the same meaning, but because they refer to qualities of temperament and character that are strongly analogous’.18 This kind of medicine, as distinct from Sanchez’s and Fodéré’s forensic anatomy, made it possible to think of the physical and the moral as equivalent and concomitant in their effects: ‘The particular emphasis here is on the inertia that a rather weak and naturally delicate constitution, or one that is artificially deteriorated and enervated, either physically or morally, can manifest in its genital functions.’19 There was discord between a discourse of temperament that spoke of women as generally colder than men and a discourse of marital duty – of copulation and generation – that saw coldness in men as the more significant, more urgent disorder. Virey considered that there were probably more frigid women than men, but he explained in the classic manner why male frigidity mattered more: ‘the effect is not equal in society and marriage, for the woman can always receive, unless her sexual organs are misshapen’.20 He then went on to quote casuists who, like Sanchez, argued that frigidity in the wife was not reason enough to annul a marriage. Virey had other entrées than Sanchez’s into the question of frigidity, notably the notion of temperament. He even had a way of setting aside matters of genital shape. But he too was focused on conjugal duty, and appeared to be concerned with frigidity – in women and in men – only insofar as it resulted in sterility. Virey’s article also provided a list of the visible symptoms of frigidity in women. This was not quite Zacchia’s list of transposed masculine qualities, which notably included flaccidity of the genitals, but rather something more narrowly feminine: smallness, plumpness, softness, blonde hair, white skin and a lack of body hair.21 This revised list was taken at times throughout the century to define an actual type of woman, providing a visible connection between a particular temperament and the lack of pleasure in copulation.

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Seven years later, in 1823, Virey published De la femme sous ses rapports physiologique, moral et littéraire (Of woman in relation to her physiological, moral and literary qualities).22 As the title declared, Virey was laying claim to a broad range of knowledge about woman, adding the literary to the physiological and the moral. He deplored the fact that most of what had been written on the subject to date had been either medical or moral, but not both.23 And he declared Roussel’s book on woman to be out of date – out of date, one supposes, precisely because his own book constituted a later version of the same thematic. The question of temperament was very much in play, and Virey noted that ‘there are cold girls whose entire virtue resides in their lack of temperament’.24 But temperament – and it is important to note that he was speaking here of froideur more frequently than frigidité – was a quality of character or humour. One of its effects was to ensure that cold women never suffered from nymphomania or fureur utérine.25 Another was to provoke unease if they experienced excessive copulation. But it was not a cause of sterility: ‘In our latitudes, one finds many cold women, as Roussel notes. A number of them suffer more than men as a result of frequent coitus, and even appear to feel no pleasure in the act, without however being sterile.’26 Keeping coldness of temperament apart from sterility was broadly akin to distinguishing impotentia coeundi from impotentia generandi, as Zacchia and others had done in the preceding centuries. Yet Virey could not maintain that definitional separation through to the end, since he envisaged a necessary function of copulative pleasure at the heart of generation: it seems to us that the woman who, after claiming to have been raped, becomes pregnant, proves by the very fact of conceiving that she has lied. She must necessarily have acquiesced in pleasure, since it does not seem possible for impregnation to occur in the face of outright hatred. [ . . . ] There are certainly women who engender without great pleasure, although that is rare and it should be noted that they do not always tell the truth in that regard, but when they do so it is without repugnance. Sensual pleasure, or at least the absence of antipathy, seems indispensable for the formation of a new being.27 This was a rather different way to undo the opposition between frigidity and sterility from that found by Fodéré, but the effect on later writers was to be much the same. Both approaches were regularly taken as examples of confusion. As it happened, conception after rape became an

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exemplary instance for some of those who followed, as we will show in Chapter 6. It was then taken as certain proof of the complete disjunction of impotence and sterility. Only Virey, of the major nineteenth-century French writers on impotence and frigidity, took it as proof of the contrary. The first text in our history to adopt a polemical approach to the definition of key terms was published in 1831, and was entitled De l’impuissance et de la stérilité, ou recherches sur l’anaphrodisie distinguée de l’agénésie (On impotence and sterility, or research into anaphrodisia distinguished from agenesia). It was by Michel-Etienne Descourtilz, who had lived an adventurous life as a young doctor in the Caribbean before establishing himself as an expert on the flora of that region. He had in fact presented his doctoral thesis on the subject 17 years earlier at the Paris Faculty of Medicine, although the views expressed in the thesis were generally less elaborate.28 In the book of 1831, Descourtilz made a frontal attack on the question of definition in a manner that was to prove characteristic of nineteenth-century writing on the question. Paying no attention at the outset to questions of biological sex, he announced that ‘this work has been conceived with the intention of establishing a clear-cut distinction between ANAPHRODISIA (genital syncope) and AGENESIA (absolute sterility)’.29 The use of these Greek-derived terms appears to have been overdetermined: they were generically characteristic of learned medical discourse, but they also made it possible to displace the Latinate terms frigidité and stérilité. As it happened, the key distinction Descourtilz was making was perfectly homologous with Zacchia’s distinction between impotentia coeundi and impotentia generandi. Here is how he defined the term that is of most interest to our history: ‘anaphrodisia is, in our opinion, a genital syncope, or suspension of the sensations necessary for a perfect copulation’.30 Defined thus, anaphrodisia did not mean a lack of desire for copulation, but the suspension of any ability to carry it out in a ‘perfect’ manner. Just what notion of perfection underlay this definition was not specified. Zacchia and his colleagues had had a theological basis for defining the perfection or completeness of copulation: it meant becoming ‘one flesh’. And while Descourtilz was a doctor of medicine with no ostensible commitment to theology, he seemed to depend, like many of his contemporaries, on a normative sense of the natural, which fitted quite snugly into the space vacated by theology, and helped by the same token to ensure that theology was indeed displaced. So anaphrodisia, for Descourtilz, was impotence, although that word had to be laundered of its traditional double meaning so that the focus

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would be strictly on coitus: ‘Impotence, that word with its double meaning that has always been confused with sterility, refers particularly, in our opinion, to the incapacity to exercise the venereal act or the impossibility of doing so.’31 It was certainly true that ‘impotence’ had referred in the canon law tradition to both sterility and the inability to copulate, but the two had not been confused by Sanchez, Zacchia and their colleagues. The confusion had arisen only in the few decades preceding Descourtilz’s book, when Fodéré and Virey had, for different reasons, blurred the boundary between the two. Regardless of that, Descourtilz set energetically about his task. Having effectively put aside sterility or agenesia – what the canonists called impotentia generandi – he then strained to establish the conceptual space of coital impotence. One of his requirements was to find a definition of this condition that was not simply material. In order to do so, he denied any decisive role to temperament, thereby undoing Virey’s notion of the standard type of frigid woman. In fact, he said, ‘Each temperament can produce anaphrodisia: the pituitary by coldness, the melancholic by preoccupation, the bilious by an excess of desire, and the sanguine by resistance.’32 That may also explain why he appeared suspicious of the term frigidité, which may well have been too closely associated in his view with discourses of humour or temperament: That is why the expression genital syncope appears to us more appropriate than venereal frigidity. Most often, this temporary suspension of the genital functions is the result of a painful affection of the soul, or of excessively violent desires that are only temporary, and lead to the premature emission of seminal liquid.33 There are two things in this quote that are of particular interest to our argument. One is that talk of premature ejaculation shows how central male physiology was to Descourtilz’s conception of anaphrodisia. The other is that the soul or psyche was very much in play in this account. As he said a little further on, ‘From the foregoing it is evident that this affection can be produced by physical causes and by moral ones.’34 In re-describing the difference between anaphrodisia and sterility, he sought to make a place for the moral. What did this mean for Descourtilz’s understanding of female impotence? He was prepared to entertain two views of the question, and both will have a familiar air after our discussion of canon law impotentia coeundi. The first, which he quoted in full but did not finally take as his own, was that anaphrodisia was the physical impossibility of engaging

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in coitus, thus making redundant any other causes, be they physical or moral: if one considers anaphrodisia to result from the physical impossibility of engaging in coitus, women will only be affected by it when they suffer from organic alteration of the generative parts. Causes, either physical or moral, which are likely to weaken these parts or disturb their function, cannot be such as to make it impossible for the woman to lend herself to the desires of the man.35 This was essentially the view defended by Sanchez whereby female impotentia coeundi was no more or less than genital malformation. The second view, adopted by Descourtilz after due consideration, was broadly Zacchia’s, that women could experience anaphrodisia within themselves as a loss of desire accompanied by some form of paralysis: But if perfect coitus or true copulation depends on the equal, reciprocal engagement of both sexes, the woman can encounter, in the same way as the man, circumstances that snuff out the flame of desire in her, paralyse her organs, and thus make her, either momentarily or constitutionally, an anaphrodite.36 Much depended here, as we have indicated, on the notion of naturally perfect copulation. The very establishment of it as a norm allowed the absence of desire or pleasure in women to be identified as an incapacity, and to be given the name ‘impotence’ or ‘anaphrodisia’.

Genital potency in females In 1836, five years after the publication of Descourtilz’s work, Joseph Morel de Rubempré published Le Conservateur et le réconfortateur des facultés génitales chez l’homme et la femme (The Conserver and comforter of the genital faculties of man and woman). Morel de Rubempré was a graduate of the Paris Faculty of Medicine, but not an eminent figure in the profession. He pursued a career in the vulgarization of medical knowledge with La Médecine sans médecin (Medicine without a doctor), and drew ironic comment for this perceived attempt to devalue the profession and, somewhat paradoxically, for his self-aggrandizement, which was indeed remarkable.37 When not engaged in writing his many and varied books, Morel practised medicine in Paris as a specialist in the treatment of syphilis and other genito-urinary diseases.38 In 1829,

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he had published a book that contributed expansively to the medical application of a theory of temperament,39 but his work on the ‘genital faculties’ branched out in a different direction. Unlike other writings about impotence and sterility, this book focused on genital lesions: One of the main reasons why we do not possess any ex professo treatise of genuine theoretical and practical value about the diverse genital lesions known by the names impotence, sterility, anaphrodisia, etc., is the wrong idea that almost everyone has associated with these expressions. Indeed, these words have almost always been understood to refer to morbid entities independent of the organism, of vital forces in general, and of individual life.40 This rather went against the grain of appeals to include the moral alongside the physical, since the emphasis on lesions served to exclude ‘neuroses’ (névroses), which were defined precisely by the absence of any lesion. The principle that medicine should confine its work in this area to the description of lesions was not particularly influential in succeeding decades, but it may have helped give a new biological emphasis to the debate. Insisting on the role of ‘forces vitales’, Morel moved easily into speaking of ‘potency’ rather than ‘impotence’. His stated aim was to identify ‘all disorders that might create an obstacle of any kind either to coital potency or to reproductive potency; these lesions will naturally need to be distinguished according to those that occur in men and those that occur in women’.41 In practice Morel had little to say about women specifically, turning to the subject only on the third last page of his book. Having described a remedy for impotence in which decoctions made from wine were to be rubbed on the virile member and the testicles, he extended the remedy to women, supposing, as Zacchia had, that the disorder in women was also to be understood as one of laxity: Women whose sexual parts are more or less limp or affected to a degree by fluor albus (which is very often the cause of sterility, especially in cities) use these different methods in the same way as men, as well as injecting them [decoctions of wine] into the vagina, to tone themselves up more rapidly.42 This hardly constitutes advanced medical thinking for the time, but the very application of this talk to women’s genitals may have helped to produce some interesting discursive effects. Morel seemed to be pointing, in fact, to a rather new path through some old difficulties. His talk of

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‘potency’ rather than ‘impotence’ amounted to more than an accident of syntax. As Sylvie Chaperon observes, ‘genital potency’ in this context ‘seems to range all the way from genital appetite to pregnancy’.43 By foregrounding the workings of life itself, such talk sharpened the question of the woman’s role: what exactly was ‘coital potency’ in women, and how was it to be recognized? Morel hardly bothered to answer these questions,44 but they took on meaning and substance in the writings of others. The first of those was a German, Georg Kobelt, who was a professor of anatomy at Freiburg.45 Kobelt’s book on the anatomy and physiology of the genitals appeared in Germany in 1844, and was published in a French translation in 1851. Having begun with a careful description of how the male sex organs functioned, Kobelt devoted a significant proportion of his book to females. A key point in the light of our historical thematic was his demonstration that the sexual organs of females function analogously to those of males: I have been particularly concerned to demonstrate that one finds in the female an organic apparatus perfectly analogous in each of its parts to that of the male. This point has been obscure until now, and I have had the good fortune to bring it to light by the anatomical research I have undertaken.46 In one sense, the idea of the analogy between male and female organs went back to the ancient Greeks, but ancient medicine had not given an account of the dynamic by which the female genital parts acted as one ‘apparatus’. Furthermore, Kobelt described how male and female genitals collaborated in the process of copulation: ‘each movement of copulation has an influence on both sexes at once. Eventually, at the climax of this mutual, reciprocal arousal, they provoke the ejaculation and reception of seminal fluid.’47 The clitoris in particular, said Kobelt, had now rewarded close study, after being treated in earlier times as ‘a little rudimentary body without any importance’.48 There is no reason to suppose that the clitoris had been as thoroughly forgotten as Kobelt was suggesting, but there was something new in this account of its functionality. Kobelt claimed to have identified its structural place in the female genitalia, identifying the ‘source of its turgescence’49 and describing later exactly how that turgescence worked.50 Such an account of the female’s contribution to copulation made it hard to maintain the long-established notion of female material passivity. Women’s genitals now made up ‘a special complete apparatus which has been allotted

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the important mission of creating a particular sensation in the female person by the harmonic coincidence of activity in each of its parts’.51 Not only did women have the physiological power to become aroused, but they were possessed of a distinctive muscle, the constrictor cunni, which played a key role in copulation.52 This understanding was incompatible with the canon law view of woman as vessel, since it described the female genitals as participating actively in coitus. It would be misleading to suggest that Kobelt’s discoveries led immediately to a widespread change in the understanding of impotence and frigidity in France. In the 1850s, for example, following the appearance of Kobelt’s book in translation, Jean-Alexis Belliol published several editions of a book over a thousand pages long entitled Conseils aux homme affaiblis, traité de l’impuissance prématurée ou de l’épuisement nerveux des organes générateurs, suite des excès de la jeunesse et de l’âge mûr (Advice for weakened men, a treatise on premature impotence or the nervous exhaustion of the generative organs, as a consequence of youthful and mature excesses). This book, as the title indicated, was directed solely at men concerned about impotence. Belliol had set up in Paris as a specialist in the treatment of this disorder, and his introduction invited men, having once diagnosed themselves as sufferers, to make contact with him either by correspondence or face to face in his rooms. He made it clear from the outset that only his own medicines were to be used in the treatments he would prescribe.53 Belliol’s work is, it must be said, part of a genealogy other than ours – that of male impotence – except for the fact that Belliol continued to mark the place of female impotence in the manner of his predecessors. He did not say that female impotence was nonexistent, but that it was difficult to locate: ‘impotence is difficult to observe in women’.54 And besides – this secondary point is equally familiar – ‘such inertia on her part is not a barrier to a sexual conjunction; the particular disposition of her organs provides sufficient proof of that’.55 The very configuration of female genitals could still be taken by Belliol as proof that women were unlikely to provide an enduring obstacle to copulation. He then completed the classic thematic arrangement by adding that impotence must not be confused with sterility. Sterility, he says, is ‘very rare’ in men, whereas it has a long series of possible causes in women.56 In his view, impotence was effectively the province of men, and sterility that of women. That marks, so to speak, the unimproved position against which one might measure advanced medical knowledge in the mid-nineteenth century. Kobelt’s research into the physiology of copulation might not have had a significant place in French medicine had his findings not been

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taken up by Félix Roubaud, who was a medical graduate with a taste for controversy, as his various writings on hashish, blood transfusion and parapsychological phenomena testify. Unlike Morel de Rubempré, Roubaud had a strong interest in the medical profession as such, producing a successful and innovative Annuaire médical et pharmaceutique de la France (Medical and pharmaceutical yearbook for France), which contested the place of the well-established Almanach général de médecine.57 He was also editor-in-chief of La France médicale, a review that presented the latest in medical research to an educated general public.58 In 1855, Roubaud published a book entitled Traité de l’impuissance et de la stérilité chez l’homme et chez la femme (A Treatise on impotence and sterility in man and woman), in which he devoted some 30 pages to the exposition of Kobelt’s findings.59 This was an energetic intervention, marking a turn in the history of frigidity – what Alain Corbin referred to in a recent study of nineteenth-century writing on sexual pleasure as the ‘Roubaud moment’.60 Yet we will forbear for two reasons from making Roubaud a hero of our story. The first is that the story we are telling is not in any proper sense a history of progress. Everything we describe as a gain in medical knowledge can also be seen as a further encroachment of medical attention, so that every potential hero can readily be recast as a villain. The second reason is that the role of individual agency in broad discursive change remains unclear. While the net effect of the long-term changes we are describing was undoubtedly enormous, the discursive shifts that we observe at particular moments seem to take the form of displacement or realignment, rather than seismic upheaval. Roubaud began his book much as Descourtilz and Morel de Rubempré had begun theirs, by deploring the widespread habit of treating ‘impotence’ and ‘sterility’ as if they were synonyms: ‘these illnesses have been confused by many authors’, he said.61 There were in his view two kinds of error abroad: One kind, envisaging only the final goal, the result to be attained, gives the names impotence and sterility without distinction to morbid conditions of whatever sort that prevent the reproduction of the species. These authors take the two words as synonyms referring to the same kind of disorder.62 This had been exactly the view taken by Fodéré. The second kind of error we can recognize as that of Virey, and also of Belliol: The other group, who are of the opinion that the role of the woman in generation is largely passive, whereas the man’s role is entirely

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at the bidding of his will, describe as impotent any man who cannot procreate, whatever the cause of that impossibility, and use the word sterile to refer to any woman who finds herself in the same situation.63 The first view critiqued by Roubaud regarded impotence and sterility as the same thing because all that counted for such authors was the generative outcome, allowing impotence no other specificity. The second view was that the only consequential matter for men was the ability to engage in coitus. If men were potent in that sense, the question of their possible sterility did not arise. And by the same token, since women were sexually passive it made no sense to speak of them as impotent. The disorder that characteristically afflicted women was sterility, and the two key terms could then be distributed according to sex. Roubaud rejected this second view, saying that it was unscientific because it was a mere play on words. Whether a pathological condition occurred in men or in women, he said, it ought to be covered by the same terminology.64 Having thus dismissed the second view out of hand, he then turned back to criticize the first one. He conceded that this first view followed a proper medical logic, but rejected it for assimilating under the same names conditions that ought to have been distinguished nosologically. To exemplify the failure to make a necessary distinction between sterility and impotence, he contrasted a man who was unable to have an erection, and therefore unable to copulate, with one who copulated without difficulty, but failed to reproduce.65 A key object of medical attention, he insisted, ought to be the act of copulation itself – rather than, for example, desire or pleasure.66 This would hardly have surprised Zacchia, but it did allow Roubaud to shift the focus of nineteenth-century debate and to resolve the definitional ambiguity he had identified: I consider that the word impotence must be used to name any morbid condition which, in a man or a woman, stands in the way of the physiological union of the two sexes, i.e. of coitus, and the word sterility reserved for any morbid condition which, in either sex, prevents the reproduction of the species.67 Accordingly, his book proposed a full, elaborate description of all the four disorders identifiable in principle by this logic: impotence in men, impotence in women, sterility in men and sterility in women.68 Fundamental to Roubaud’s attack on these questions was a quite specific understanding of the fullness of coitus. Such a concept had existed

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for the canonists, who refined the idea of copula perfecta as the making of ‘one flesh’. And much more recently Descourtilz had appealed in rather general terms to ‘the sensations necessary for perfect copulation’.69 But Roubaud spoke about this notion with a ‘physiological’ precision, which, following Kobelt, gave equal weight to the woman’s pleasure alongside the man’s. Copulation, he said, was not complete without it: ‘In the man, coitus is complete only if he experiences a feeling of sensual pleasure during spermatic ejaculation. Similarly in the woman, copulation is only entire if a feeling of sensual pleasure accompanies the male’s approach.’70 He made a concession to the old view that women could always ‘lend themselves’ to intercourse, but that concession was closely bounded: Woman is probably more favoured than man in that, apart from a few malformations and some pathological cases, she can always lend herself to the coming together of the sexes. But if her genital sense is not awoken from its torpor, if her sensitivity remains foreign to the act, if genital turgescence [orgasme, in its then standard sense] has not aroused her organism, the act of copulation is physiologically incomplete, as incomplete as if the virile member had limited itself to arousing the clitoris without penetrating the vaginal cavity.71 Roubaud continued here to follow what Laqueur would call a two-sex model. He did not regard woman as a vessel, and he had no truck with the old theme of the woman’s seed being ejaculated in symmetry with that of the man.72 He simply asserted that female pleasure was equivalent to that of the male, and equally necessary in principle to the event of coitus. This created an obligation that was different from the conjugal duty posited by the canonists. For Roubaud, it was a natural duty, and a duty to nature: ‘Venereal desires and pleasures are incumbent on woman for the same reason as they are on man. Both sets of desires and pleasures belong to the normal order of physiological conditions for coitus.’73 So the notion of naturally complete coitus became for Roubaud the base for a new definition of female impotence. He cited the narrow definition – that which provides a physical barrier to copulation – and rejected it. Such a definition only made room for ‘quelques vices de conformation’, a few cases of malformation.74 That had been good enough, as we saw, for Sanchez, but Roubaud found it thoroughly inadequate. Moreover, he was not moved by the old consolation, which he actually quoted in Virey’s words, that ‘she can always receive the caresses of the man passively’.75 There was a suggestion in Roubaud’s language that it

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was unfair towards women to confine them to such a limited role, but his key argument was that the old view was scientifically mistaken: Meanwhile the role of the woman in normal coitus is not entirely passive. She should not be deprived [déshéritée] of the sweet emotions and the pleasure attached to generation. While her will is necessary to the completion of the act, the same will may be opposed to the fulfilment of it by refusing the man’s approaches.76 There is something of a thematic mix at this point in Roubaud’s argument. Was the woman’s pleasure necessary to the fullness of coitus because copulation simply did not work physiologically without it, or was it that, for ethical reasons, the woman simply deserved to be allowed her pleasure in the act? To the extent that she was ‘disinherited’ of pleasure, was that a denial of her biological inheritance, or of her conjugal rights? It was in any case an irregularity in the order of pleasure. The fact that the woman might reject the man’s advances had doubtful status as proof of the natural behaviour, but Roubaud took it to prove that no coitus worthy of the name could take place were the woman unwilling. Roubaud devoted a significant proportion of his book to the definition and consolidation of a medical concept of female impotence. And he did so, as we have already suggested, by firstly establishing a positive notion of female copulative potency, then defining impotence by its absence. Having affirmed that venereal desires and pleasure were ‘incumbent’ on women, he then made the strong move of declaring that their absence in any given case had to be considered pathological: Since it is undeniable that a pathological condition exists on every occasion where a function is not carried out within the limits ascribed to it by nature, it must be acknowledged that the absence in the woman of one or more prerequisites for normal coitus constitutes a morbid or pathological condition. It is this morbid condition that I am calling impotence.77 The forms taken by morbid female impotence were threefold, and Roubaud’s classification of them distributed them across the range from the ‘moral’ to the physical. The first kind was a lack of venereal desires which, he said, had to do with the soul (l’âme). The second corresponded perfectly to Sanchez’s impotentia coeundi and the many forms it had taken since: it was the inability to admit the penis into the vagina, which

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was entirely organic. The third was the lack of pleasure in copulation, which, he said, had its source in both the soul and the organs. It was, as we shall soon see, the third kind that most interested Roubaud. He could deal with the second, the merely physical definition of impotence, in the manner we have already seen. It was, to say the least, clinically rare and nosologically misleading when taken as generic. But the first also called for his critical attention. The notion of a lack of desire that came from the soul was broadly consistent with a medical discourse of temperament that had claimed a central place, for example, in Virey’s account of frigidity. But Roubaud was seeking to undo the force and the relevance of such talk. Indeed, he rejected out of hand the idea that impotence might be a matter of temperament in men: ‘with the exception of states of illness, there is no constitution or temperament capable of producing impotence in man’.78 Or, to put it the other way around, ‘impotence is a sickness, and not an attribute’.79 And when he came to speak of women, he was at pains to exclude any recourse to temperament as an explanation: ‘It would be a great mistake to think that a bad constitution is a cause of frigidity in woman.’80 Following through with this critique, he was led to ask whether frigidity in women could in fact ever be simply the result of temperament, or whether it ought always to be thought of as a morbid condition. His answer was that there were indeed some women who were frigid by temperament, but that complete insensitivity was rarer than was generally thought.81 This was not meant primarily as an epidemiological point, although it was widely taken as such in the latter half of the century. Its point for Roubaud was to circumscribe the explanatory power of temperament. In fact, he said, many cases of frigidity that were attributed to temperament had quite other causes, notably the quality of venereal relations within marriage: ‘one often encounters women who owe their frigidity either to their husband’s clumsiness or to a lack of harmony in mutual arousal’.82 This may have been the first occasion in discussions of frigidity on which the husband was pointed to as a possible culprit, but it was far from the last. In place of the old theory of natural temperament, Roubaud was suggesting that frigidity was actually produced in many women by the poor quality of conjugal relations. This move began to open up a space of medical attention and moral strain that became central to discussions of frigidity for the next 50 years, as we shall see in Chapter 5. Despite these attempts to minimize the importance of temperament or constitution, Roubaud briefly and surprisingly indulged the theme, developed at some length by Virey, of the typical appearance of frigid

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women. Their hair was blond, fine, lacking resilience and generally rather sparse.83 A lymphatic temperament, he added, was the one most likely to be associated with frigidity. It was characterized by fair colouring, a relative lack of body hair, and a general intellectual and spiritual listlessness (alanguissement).84 This habit of identifying a frigidity-prone type persisted, as it was to do in succeeding decades, in the face of stringent revision of older theoretical notions on which it appeared to be founded. After impotence by physical obstruction and by temperament, Roubaud came to consider the third kind he had listed at the outset: the lack of venereal pleasure that ‘has its source in both the organs and the soul’.85 It was this kind that was to lead him to a thorough revision of the theme of frigidity, which he now located at the intersection of the moral and the physical. Roubaud clearly saw himself as engaged in a struggle to ensure firstly that frigidity would be taken seriously by doctors, and secondly that they would refine their knowledge of the condition in such a way as to be able to circumscribe it effectively. After acknowledging that frigidity in women might seem not to have decisive consequences for the propagation of the species, he hastened to add: ‘But the fact that frigidity alters none of the functions that are necessary to maintain life or propagate the species should not be taken as a basis for concluding that this abnormal condition is unworthy of the attention of the doctor and the meditations of the philosopher.’86 What made this condition important, requiring the combined efforts of doctors and philosophers, was the very fact of its abnormality. And while it was not of itself either life-threatening or life-making, there was every reason to believe that it interfered with the business of procreation, and was a source of disharmony in couples.87 The lack of genuine medical interest in frigidity could be attributed, said Roubaud, to ongoing failures of definition. Because doctors had been unable to differentiate clearly between the different sites and forms of frigidity, they had turned away from it as an object of knowledge and of therapeutic intervention: ‘This lack, nay this absence of any differential diagnosis must be considered the reason why doctors have abandoned frigidity as incurable, and therefore unworthy of their study.’88 Roubaud was clearly determined to draw frigidity more closely into the domain of medicine, and in doing so he was helping to align the physical and the moral. ‘Frigidity’, like ‘impotence’ and ‘sterility’, was said by Roubaud to have its own history of terminological imprecision. There was, he asserted, a ‘happy distinction’ in the invention of a ‘morbid entity’ called frigidity that accounted for failures of normal coitus in women. But the term

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did not prove useful in practice because ‘for some, frigidity was the absence of venereal desires, while for others the word referred to the absence of pleasure’.89 The consequence was nosological confusion and taxonomic looseness: ‘in whatever sense the word frigidity was taken, this morbid condition, which generally does not result in sterility, was neither impotence nor sterility, but something separate, which ended up in the class of neuroses [névroses] because it could not find a place in a methodical classification’.90 Roubaud’s solution to the problem of classification, having established in principle the normalcy of female pleasure in coitus, was to define impotence in women as the inability to experience pleasure, and frigidity as a particular form of impotence: ‘When pleasure is considered one of the physiological conditions of congress for women, and when impotence is defined as the impossibility of accomplishing coitus according to the laws of nature, frigidity becomes a case of impotence.’91 The careful definition of female impotence, based on the absence of normal female potency, was for Roubaud the way to make sense of the old term ‘frigidity’, but also to make the term more or less redundant. Almost nothing was to be left 50 years later of this redefinition of terms – since ‘frigidity’ eventually replaced ‘impotence’ in reference to women – but the pathologization of frigidity had taken a decisive step. And while men continued to be diagnosed as frigid – Roubaud saw frigidity in men as ‘a variety of anaphrodisia’92 – women were now being accorded a significant place in medical discourse on the subject. In 1859, four years after his two-volume treatise, Roubaud published pseudonymously a more compact book aimed at a rather different public. It was entitled Le Livre des époux (The married couple’s book), and its explicit purpose, expressed in the subtitle, was to provide medical advice to couples on a range of ‘genital ailments’, including impotence and sterility. A few quotations from this book will serve here as a summary of the key arguments in Roubaud’s earlier work, as well as provide a clear indication of how his ideas could be applied as practical medical knowledge. The first point of note was the advice provided to couples on how to ward off any threat of impotence. It was a matter of finding the perfect convergence of the moral and the physical: ‘This double condition of the physical and the moral is such a necessity for human copulation that a disturbance in the harmony of these two elements in our nature can be immediately followed by impotence.’93 After making the standard statement that ‘woman is rarely impotent’ because she can always ‘receive the man’s embrace passively’,94 Roubaud confronted the old theme of passivity directly by declaring it to be the defining quality

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of frigidity: ‘Frigidity is a condition particular to woman in which she participates only passively in the act of copulation.’95 Passivity had thus become a morbid symptom with a strong ‘moral’ component. Le Livre des époux also supported Roubaud’s attack on the supposed role of temperament as a cause of frigidity: There is no such thing as a cold temperament. A condition that gave rise to frigidity would no longer be a temperament, but an illness. However, temperaments involve a greater or lesser degree of predisposition to the pleasures of love. Sometimes, through the exaggeration of their distinguishing characteristics, they cease to be temperaments and become forms of illness.96 Not temperament, then, in the case of frigidity, but ‘moral causes’: ‘We shall see that moral causes play the main role in the production of frigidity.’97 Moreover, in response to this moral-and-physical aetiology, the doctor’s role had to change. It would not suffice, presumably, for him to learn to think like a philosopher while practising medicine, as Roussel seemed to suggest in 1775. The doctor was now required – as the very existence of this congenial guide implied phatically – to take on the role of counsellor: In these circumstances, the doctor must make way for the friend. The advice and the reproaches of a loved one such as a mother, a father, a relative or a friend will have more influence than all the medicines in the world. The doctor still has a role to play since his calling is not just to heal with medicines but to bring consolation and calm to troubled souls and to families in which he alone may know all the secrets.98 This change in roles was entailed by the extension of medical knowledge beyond the narrowly physical. Frigidity and impotence were, par excellence, the afflictions of ‘troubled souls’, and in order to practise ‘genital medicine’ properly, the doctor had to become a friend. There was another book on the subject written in the same year as Roubaud’s Le Livre des époux was published, although it did not actually appear in public until 1882. This was a text by Jules Guyot, best known for his observations of French wine and fruit production,99 entitled Bréviaire de l’amour expérimental (A manual of experimental love). According to the preface of the 1882 edition, it was written by Guyot on the occasion of the marriage of Prince Napoleon and Princess Clotilde

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of Savoy in 1859, and offered to the royal couple as a wedding gift. The preface by Georges Barral and Charles Dufaure de la Prade is as interesting as the manual itself, partly because the authors of the preface make no qualifying comments to suggest that Guyot’s work might be in any way dated. Both the preface and the manual seem rather disjunct, in fact, from the kind of scientific change exemplified and advocated by Roubaud. The preface itself is nonetheless consistent in at least one regard with Roubaud’s advanced position. Barral and Dufaure de la Prade deny that it is possible for women to opt out of the physiology of love: Some virtuous women, although tender-hearted, have no idea of physical pleasures. They rarely have any experience of them. Yet for them as for other women, love is more than a matter of sentiment. It is a precise physiological fact. When it is no longer understood or no longer functional, temperaments degenerate and fall into decrepitude, leading to singularity of various kinds, and then to hysterical madness.100 All women, no matter how virtuous, needed to participate in the physiology of love. Failure to do so would lead to the worst kinds of pathology. Guyot’s rather different version of this theme in the main body of the text led him to assert that ‘there are no women without needs. There are no women deprived of their senses. There are no women who are impotent for the genesic spasm.’101 In other words, there was no class of women who were by temperament, by virtue, or by some coincidence of the two, outside the domain of genital pleasure. There was, however, Guyot went on, a very large group of wives who were victims of the ignorance, selfishness or brutality of their husbands. Any apparent impotence was not part of their nature, but could be attributed to an unfortunate conjugal circumstance.102 In the 23 years that had elapsed between the writing and the publication of Guyot’s text, a significant medical dictionary had given an account of the state of medical knowledge on impotence and frigidity. This was the Dictionnaire encyclopédique des sciences médicales, which was published over a period of about 25 years from 1864. It had no entry for ‘Frigidité’, but contained one entitled ‘Anaphrodisie, Anaphrodisiaques’ written by Jean-Baptiste Fonssagrives, who was a professor at the Ecole de Médecine at Brest, and later at Montpellier. The article began with the usual attack on the widespread failure to make the proper distinctions – as if decades of previous attacks on exactly the same point, beginning with Descourtilz in 1831, had borne little or no fruit:

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The word anaphrodisia has quite often been taken, mistakenly, as a synonym of impotence. [ . . . ] We consider the word frigidity to be a synonym of anaphrodisia, and we define the latter as follows: the absence, whether congenital or acquired, of the genital arousal necessary for the regular accomplishment of the sexual functions. Normal arousal is manifested in fact in three different ways: (1) by venereal appetite; (2) by tumescence [orgasme] which brings the apparatus to the point where it is able to function physiologically; (3) by the sensation which satisfies desire and constitutes the cerebral or voluntary spur to its later recurrence. Anaphrodisia exists whenever one of these conditions of the normal sex act is missing.103 This definition showed that the work undertaken by Roubaud in response to Kobelt had made it possible to multiply the instances of frigidity. As the description – and the concomitant prescription – of normal coitus became more differentiated, new locations for pathological dysfunction could be identified. There was a normal condition of desire, a normal state of arousal and a normal experience of pleasure that ensued. The absence of any one of those phases in the narrative was sufficient to justify a diagnosis of anaphrodisia or frigidity. We shall have occasion to observe in Chapters 6 and 7 how this differentiation and complexification took on great significance for therapy. In addition, Fonssagrives maintained the old theme of the visibly frigid type of woman, although he gave it a marked inflection characteristic of the later nineteenth century. Citing Virey’s description, as had many before him, he rejected a key assumption on which it was based. Contrary to Virey’s claim, said Fonssagrives, ‘femmelettes’, excessively soft and feminine women, were not the ones prone to frigidity. Those most likely to be so were viragos.104 This was a view that came to the fore in the latter part of the century; that is, where gender differentiation was insufficiently clear, desire and pleasure were likely to fail. Hermaphrodism was becoming a locus of anaphrodisia. During the 1880s, there appeared a series of substantial books by Pierre Garnier under the general title Hygiène de la génération. Sylvie Chaperon notes that Garnier published more and was more widely read than any other French ‘vulgarizing doctor’ of the time.105 While we will raise questions about the notion of vulgarization in a later chapter, we can certainly say that Garnier’s account of impotence and frigidity was the most ambitious, most detailed, and certainly most pretentious, since Roubaud’s in the 1850s. His 1882 publication, L’Impuissance physique et morale chez l’homme et la femme, is entirely devoted to the topic, as are

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significant sections of other books in the same series. And it is quite without surprise that we find his first book discussing from the outset questions of definition. There had, Garnier said, been a habit of confusing impotence with sterility. But he went beyond earlier versions of this critique by providing a diagnosis of how the confusion had arisen. It was because at those times ‘the visible phenomena of impotence for the generative function were the only ones known’. This meant that ‘impotence was confused with sterility, the causes of which remained obscure, hidden by dark mystery’.106 There was some condescension here towards a benighted past, but there was also an attempt to understand the ‘confusion’ through its history. Much like Roubaud, Garnier targeted the habit of thinking that made impotence the exclusive province of men, and sterility that of women.107 A retrospective view from the standpoint of the twentieth century might have suggested that the notion of female impotence ought to have been on the wane at this late stage in the nineteenth, but Garnier’s intervention shows that this was not yet the case. Far from considering the notion dépassée, Garnier was carrying on the struggle begun nearly 100 years earlier, as he sought to mark out the place of women in the field. After criticizing Descourtilz who, along with Virey, had become a whipping boy of later nineteenth-century medical talk on the topic, he came to declare that ‘impotence is no more specific to men than sterility is to women’.108 Having begun in that time-honoured manner, Garnier then made a move that, while less innovative than Roubaud’s had been in the 1850s, was in keeping with a general shift occurring in the last decades of the century. Broadly speaking, Roubaud had undoubtedly been the bolder, more original thinker, but Garnier appeared better aligned with the values of his own time. Indeed, Garnier defined his position in large part by pulling back from what he deemed Roubaud’s excesses, while consolidating some of the advances made by his predecessor. His relation to Roubaud’s work involved doses of theoretical complicity and explicit disapproval. Analysing this mix of agreement and disagreement will require us to assess the role played late in the century by the ‘moral’– ‘physical’ pair. Most of those who had written about impotence in the preceding 100 years – not least of them Roubaud – had found a way to refer to the combined role of these two factors in the aetiology of the disorder. But Garnier’s decisive move was to mark an actual opposition between the physical and moral, establishing this as the very basis of his definition of terms. There were, he said, separate kinds of impotence: ‘Two kinds of impotence are thus to be distinguished in man and woman: one is physical and entirely local; the other is general. The

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causes of the latter often exist in the brain, in the imagination, in weakness, anemia, or disturbance caused by the sickness of other organs.’109 This was the base on which he established a new distinction between ‘impotence’ and ‘anaphrodisia’: A fundamental distinction that had not yet been made explicitly has served as our base. It is the absolute separation of impotence, which arises from purely physical causes, and anaphrodisia, the causes of which are entirely moral. Confusion which has reigned until now between these two opposite causes and the words that represent them has led to inextricable chaos in discussions of the subject.110 It is not at all clear that this redefinition constituted a genuine theoretical advance. It left behind the challenging materialist understanding of desire and pleasure that had been developed by Roubaud and others. But it did succeed in accommodating the physical–moral pair in a more straightforward manner. Most importantly, it opened up a space for a particular form of impotence, now to be called ‘anaphrodisia’, that was located in the brain and the imagination. Far from having its seat in the genitals, anaphrodisia needed to be understood as a more ‘general’ disorder. This allowed ‘anaphrodisia’ – and with it frigidity – to be understood as something other than a material phenomenon. Frigidity was being firmly located in the domain of the moral. For this distinction to be fully operative, it had to be possible for (physical) impotence to exist in women more or less independently of (moral) anaphrodisia. Garnier did in fact consider, unlike Roubaud, that female sexual passivity was normal, but he criticized earlier writers who had been drawn into supposing that a woman therefore had no active role in copulation, that is, no role of which she might in a given circumstance prove to be physically incapable: The fact that the normally constituted woman is able to play a passive role in the physiological act of copulation does not expose her to all the causes of physical impotence that have been identified in man as a result of his active role. That is why physical impotence is as rare in women as it is frequent in men. But the fact that the woman’s passivity can sometimes bring about the same state in the man proves indubitably that her share of sexual activity in the act also exposes her to impotence, contrary to what has long been mistakenly believed.111

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He then went on to give a schematic history. Virey thought in error that women could not experience any such infirmity because they could always (underlined by Garnier) passively receive the man’s embrace. Descourtilz had failed even to mention it, and it was only in Roubaud’s work that female impotence was explicitly distinguished and separated from male impotence.112 Yet Roubaud was the main target, and the most serious rival, because of his ‘excessive, absolute organicism’.113 By focusing on the coordinated action of the female genitals in copulation, Roubaud had done great damage, in Garnier’s view, to the prestige of a moral view of love. In his determination to give the woman the same role as the man in the act of copulation, Roubaud had been led to ‘confuse frigidity with physical impotence in most cases’.114 And that confusion had meant that it was no longer possible to discern the singular importance of moral frigidity, especially for women. Here is how Garnier formulated his criticism in a later work in the series, La Stérilité humaine et l’hermaphrodisme, which dates from 1883: This is how Roubaud takes hold of the simple probability of spasmodic movements of the womb as if they were proven fact, and makes those movements into an organic cause. He even claims to find the same cause in the extreme mobility of the womb in certain women, all the better to demolish the doctrine of the harmony of love. As if the primary condition of the double spasm of pleasure and fertility could be anything other than the most profound love and all the feelings to which it gives rise.115 Garnier went so far as to accuse Roubaud of ignoring the moral dimension ‘by considering only the organic act without seeing the entirely moral cause which provokes and determines that act’.116 The point, put more fairly, was that Roubaud’s ‘theory’, as Garnier insisted on calling it,117 did not give moral causes primacy over physical ones. Garnier’s tactic throughout was to present himself as the proponent of balance, while at the same time defending a hierarchy of values that supposed the moral to be superior to the physical. A moderate position, he said, had to be found in accounting for both kinds of phenomena, just as the act itself kept the two in play: ‘There is a middle way to be sought in moral emotions and physical impressions for the effectiveness of copulation. With too much or too little of either the act usually remains impoverished.’118

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Caught up in Garnier’s disagreement with Roubaud was an ambiguity about the very concept of the normal that was widespread in medical discourse during the second half of the nineteenth century. For Roubaud, copulation understood normatively must follow the laws of nature, which were inscribed in the genital apparatus and could be determined by the experimental study of the apparatus at work in optimal conditions. For Garnier, the first point of reference in discussions of the normal appeared to be clinical or epidemiological. He asked first how things worked in actuality, and concluded that, on average, women simply did not experience pleasure in equal measure with men: How often is copulation practised without pleasure, with the sole intention of provoking that instantaneous sensation that brings it all to an end! How can physical pleasure [volupté] be a condition of genital capacity [puissance] when so many women put up with coitus or endure it by force or even violence, experiencing distaste or complete insensitivity while being fertilized at the same time? To understand copulation in [Roubaud’s] extended manner is to exclude the woman in her passive role and take account only of the man.119 By a neat rhetorical twist, Roubaud was held responsible, through his insistence on the woman’s active role, for ignoring the fact that she was not active in practice, and he was thereby condemned for slighting her capacity to receive. But Garnier’s assertions about what was clinically recurrent did not prevent him from reimporting into his argument powerfully normative ideas of female behaviour that had not been exposed to empirical examination. He was able to assert that moral rather than physical impotence was most common among women precisely because he considered the moral part of woman to be naturally and normally predominant in any case. That was for him what underlay the standard notion of ‘frigidity’: This leads to the moral impotence of woman, known and referred to under the name Frigidity. Much more widespread than female physical impotence precisely because the moral element is predominant in woman’s love, frigidity corresponds to the anaphrodisia that occurs in man. It is the secret that underlies her native modesty, her reserve, her impassiveness even. And that is why it is a mistake to seek the cause of frigidity in the thoroughly material absence of the clitoris [as Roubaud had done], or in the incomplete development or lack of sensitivity of that organ. The centre of love, and of the tenderness

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and warmth it radiates cannot be so low. Her desires come from the heart and the imagination, and it is by awakening them, by arousing her noblest feelings that a remedy can be found for this form of female impotence.120 Garnier saw himself as saving womanhood from the baseness of clitoral accounts of impotence. As he said elsewhere, ‘We must look higher and further afield.’121 So his answer to Roubaud was double: most women did not experience potency or impotence in the way that Roubaud described. And in any case, the urge to copulation and the seat of pleasure in women had to be in some nobler place than the genitals. While maintaining a view of the feminine that allowed him to claim the metaphorical high ground both for his own argument and for women in general, Garnier missed no opportunity to attack Roubaud for his failure to enter properly into the detail of clinical observation and practice. Roubaud had failed to remember that Impotence provoked by indigestion, or by accidental euphoria, or by a chill is assimilated to the entirely moral anaphrodisia caused by emotion or sadness. In the absence of a minute analysis of the facts, one must focus on the cause that produced them in order to classify them methodically and apply a rational treatment.122 Against Roubaud’s materialist and ‘theoretical’ subsumption of the moral to the physical, Garnier offered evidence that physical and moral impotence could sometimes be quite disjunct phenomena, and should therefore be designated by different medical terms. It might happen, for example, that erection occurred, especially in women, in ways that were ‘involuntary, abnormal, pathological and purely carnal’.123 In such instances, there was no organic blockage whatsoever, and copulation was perfectly able to occur. But copulation might then take place ‘in complete anaphrodisia, especially where the woman is concerned’.124 Certainly, clinical experience suggested that physical and moral impotence were likely to occur together, but that they were disjunct in principle. Further evidence of the same sort could be found in the fact that ‘many women who are physically impotent as a result of malformation, illness or local obstacles are nonetheless filled with the most ardent venereal desires’.125 In the first cases, there might be physical symptoms of pleasure with no actual (moral) pleasure. In the second, (moral) desire might be present in an uninhibited form while its realization was blocked by a physical impediment. The business of definition, for

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Garnier, required that the moral be established as the dimension of both desire and pleasure, and that it be considered separately from organic genital functions. Whereas Roubaud characterized frigidity as an illness,126 Garnier insisted that it was not. Physical impotence in women had to be the result of malformation or illness, but not so frigidity: ‘frigidity alters none of the functions necessary to maintain life and propagate the species. So it is not a sickness [maladie], merely an infirmity.’127 Twenty pages further on, he contradicted himself in formal terms, but he was in fact further pursuing this train of thought: Besides, it is far from being a sickness or an infirmity, as most authors claim. Female frigidity is a matter of degree. No matter how habitual or essential it may be, it is often only relative, with no absolute qualities. [ . . . ] Very rarely does it prevent a woman from marrying; it never makes her sterile; and it makes her an excellent mother nonetheless.128 All this contributed to the relocation of frigidity above and beyond the organic. Frigidity was to be understood as a ‘neurosis’. That term signified, as it had throughout the century, the absence of physical lesions, but here Garnier gestured towards a ‘psychical’ aetiology: The origin of frigidity is therefore, like that of anaphrodisia [which by definition he located in men], essentially moral, in other words nervous, and obviously has its principal source in the brain. Disturbances or ailments of the mind, the imagination, or even intelligence can bring about frigidity because of the predominance of these faculties over the genital functions. In that sense, it is a veritable neurosis, without any visible material lesions. Its determining cause is purely psychical [psychique].129 In keeping with his interest in the clinical, Garnier foregrounded the therapeutic dimension. It mattered whether frigidity was thought to be an illness or a natural tendency in women, not just because there was a contest between noble and base conceptions of womanhood, but because different nosologies would lead to different methods of treatment. Here was a practical reason for distinguishing between (physical) impotence and (moral) anaphrodisia: ‘They must be separated according to their causes and their signs in order to recognize them better and treat them accordingly. That is the main practical value of this

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division.’130 Providing treatment for physical disorders was a matter of established medical practice, whatever the uncertainty surrounding particular cases. But moral therapy – especially of the kind most likely to be needed by women – was not so well defined professionally in Garnier’s time. Roubaud had talked 20 years earlier of the requirement that the doctor become a ‘friend’,131 but Garnier was attempting to be more specific about the (moral) procedures to be followed. In cases of frigidity – and especially in view of the general tendency of most women to experience some degree of coldness or reserve – the task of medicine was to deal primarily with ‘moral anomalies, or psychical [psychiques] ones, as they are being called now’.132 Whether these generic forms of therapy were to be combined or opposed became a vexed question for late-nineteenth-century medicine, as we will demonstrate in Chapter 6. Garnier failed in the long run to impose the opposition of ‘impotence’ and ‘anaphrodisia’ on medical discourse, but he did exemplify in detail a historical shift of attention. He probably helped to circumscribe the notion of female impotence by taking it to be a merely physical phenomenon. His view was quite close, in its own way, to the doctrine that Thomas Sanchez had defended in the sixteenth century against those who considered female impotentia to be anything but physical. But in the 1880s, Garnier’s restrictive definition may have had an effect Sanchez could never have envisaged: that of disqualifying female physical impotence as an object of psychical knowledge. At the same time, by insisting on the moral dimension of coldness, Garnier helped to give new pertinence to the old term ‘frigidity’, making it available to define a syndrome found characteristically in women. And as the conceptual space of female impotence closed, so to some extent did that of male frigidity. The terrains now being laid out by medical knowledge were those of female frigidity and male impotence. And since our history has set aside the roughly parallel genealogy of male impotence for reasons of economy, it will suffice for our purposes to note that female frigidity, having been staked out in ‘moral’ terms, was to be thoroughly mined in the decades that followed by sexology and psychoanalysis, as we shall show in the rest of this book.

3 Vaginismus

We saw in Chapter 1 that female impotence was a well-established concept in medical and legal thought from the seventeenth century onwards, without usually being considered an enduring obstacle to copulation or marriage. In only a few cases, most doctors declared, was the woman prevented from yielding to the man’s desires. Those cases were generically defined in canon law as arctitudo, or narrowness of the genital parts, and some version of that view continued to be influential for centuries: there was thought to be a small, exceptional class of women who were physically incapable of intercourse. But some equivocation was produced in the nineteenth century by the increasing preoccupation with ‘moral’ causes in addition to physical ones. Did ‘narrowness’ itself have a moral dimension? Was it strictly anatomical, having to do only with the configuration of the genitals, or did it also include pathological muscular contraction of the vagina? These questions are worth asking not simply for the sake of completeness, but because such muscular spasm is difficult to locate on the long-standing conceptual maps of impotence and frigidity. Consider for example Descourtilz’s formulation in 1831 of a classic divide in understandings of female impotence or anaphrodisia. As we noted in Chapter 2, Descourtilz set out for nineteenth-century medicine a broad theoretical option between positions that had already been occupied within canon law debates. The first of these was that if anaphrodisia was defined as the impossibility of engaging in coitus, then the only form it could take in women was ‘the organic alteration of the generative parts’, since any genital disorders, ‘physical or moral’, could not be such as to make it impossible for a woman to ‘lend herself to man’s desires’.1 The second view was that the woman might actually find herself in (moral and physical) circumstances that ‘extinguish her desires’ 67

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and ‘paralyse her organs’. Anaphrodisia would then be defined as a failure to achieve ‘perfect coitus’ as the satisfying copulation of man and woman.2 We have shown that this divide served as a theoretical watershed, but it must be said that the question of vaginal muscular constriction is hard to locate in terms of this divide. Such constriction was never clearly defined in this period as either anatomical deformity or as pathological paralysis. When we consider the terms in which it was discussed, it is clear why the dichotomy asserted by Descourtilz could not account for it. To the extent that spasm was sustained, it would surely produce a form of narrowness. But even where this was recognized as occurring, there remained some doubt about whether it constituted a definitive impediment to intercourse. However, if frigidity did occur in women in such a way as to produce ‘paralysis of the organs’, the ‘organ’ most likely to be paralysed must have been the vagina. So, on the one hand, vaginal constriction might be seen as a kind of deformity, while, on the other, it could appear as a symptom, if not the symptom par excellence, of frigidity. It must be said that any such equivocation appears not to have posed a problem to canonists such as Paolo Zacchia. That is because their preoccupation was typically with consequences rather than causes. In this instance, as in others, what mattered in practice was whether the condition could be treated in such a way as to remove the impediment, and thus allow the marriage to remain valid. The only significant difference between forms of narrowness was therefore whether they could be removed without danger to the subject. This is how Zacchia put it: If the impediment to coitus of narrowness in a woman is able to be treated by surgery [per scissionem], the marriage is not to be dissolved. Narrowness of the woman can be removed by surgery when this can be done without endangering her life.3 Having marked these legal and theological limits – the preservation, wherever possible, of both marriage and life – Zacchia did not need to specify whether surgery might be more or less appropriate as a means of dealing with, say, unusual pelvic shapes or muscular contractions. While the discourse he and his colleagues produced about the various forms of impotence was extraordinarily elaborate, that particular detail was not pertinent to their deliberations. At this point our genealogy is obliged to do more than simply expand on the thematic that informed Chapters 1 and 2. We find ourselves compelled, in fact, to adopt a rather different historiographical style in

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order to respond to a different kind of change. In the previous chapters, we tried to show a degree of continuity, or at least of discursive and conceptual inertia, in the understanding of impotence and frigidity over several centuries. The story we are about to tell here is, by contrast, that of a quite self-conscious discovery within the medical profession: the description and naming in 1861 of the syndrome of ‘vaginismus’. This was a term coined by a leading American gynaecologist and widely taken up within his medical field. If ever there was a moment of ‘invention’ in the history of frigidity, surely this was it. So here we will tell a story of invention, but we will also show that it is not as agential or as linear as the term vaginismus would imply. Vaginismus did have significant antecedents, and it was contested in some medical circles even as it was being invented. In November 1861, a note naming and describing the condition of vaginismus was read to the Obstetrical Society in London. The note was by the American Dr J. Marion Sims, who had practised in Alabama, then moved to the Woman’s Hospital in New York, where he had achieved high professional standing, although not without controversy. During the year that followed his discovery – or his neologistic invention, since this development has qualities of both – Sims left the USA. He went to Europe, spent much of his time in Paris in what he called ‘the highest circles of practice’, and was awarded the French Legion of Honour.4 It would be misleading to suggest that he saw travel to the Old World as any sort of career move; he felt the need to leave America, he said, ‘because of its political troubles’.5 Presumably he found it uncomfortable to be a prominent Southerner in New York during the Civil War.6 He served under Napoleon III, treating the Empress Eugénie, although in what capacity it is not clear.7 This provides a chance connection to a later psychoanalytic thinker about frigidity, Marie Bonaparte, whom we discuss in Chapter 8, and it certainly helps to explain how Sims’ work became so well known to French gynaecologists of the late nineteenth century. While in Paris, he took advantage of his reduced clinical activity to produce a book based on notes made during his time at the Woman’s Hospital. The book, Clinical Notes on Uterine Surgery, was published in New York in 1867.8 The French translation of his work appeared so promptly that it actually bears the date of the preceding year.9 We will take Sims’ book as our key source for the definition and description of vaginismus. It is worth noting in passing that in the twentieth century Sims has been both celebrated and condemned, on the one hand for his invention of new implements and techniques for vaginal examination and surgery, and on the other for his practices of experimental operation

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on Afro-American slave women.10 Indeed, his career seems always to have been attended by a mixture of praise and criticism. Many of his European peers saw his surgical procedures as bold and indelicate, not to say extreme, and characterized him in explicitly national terms. But in expressing their reservations about his ‘American’ approach they made no mention of the exploitative racial practices that have made Sims a target of criticism for some recent medical scholars. Sims’ newly coined ‘vaginismus’ differed in two striking ways from the terms considered in the previous chapters. Firstly, the syndrome it designated was by definition an exclusively female condition. Secondly, it continued to function entirely as a specialist term. The second fact might seem unremarkable in itself, but it is worth remembering that the latter part of the nineteenth century saw the extension beyond medical circles of a number of key terms for sexually related pathologies. The word ‘hysteria’, for example, became ubiquitous. Hysteria was sometimes declared to have reached epidemic status at the time, as was reflected in the discursive contagion of the term itself.11 The same was true to a degree for ‘epilepsy’, which circulated all the way from faculty medical texts to the music hall.12 Similar points could be made about ‘nymphomania’ and other terms. Yet ‘vaginismus’, as far as we can determine, never crossed over into more popular usage. In French the word became truncated to produce the less sententious vaginisme, but we have not found the French term in middlebrow fiction, despite the fact that so much other medical knowledge was retailed and narrativized there, as we will show in Chapters 4 and 5. In his book, Sims defined vaginismus as ‘hymeneal hyperaesthesia with a spasmodic contraction of the sphincter vaginae’, that is, hypersensitivity of the area around the hymen accompanied by a spasmodic contraction of the vaginal sphincter muscle.13 The first sign of this in consultation, he said, was the very difficulty of conducting an examination: This irritable spasmodic reaction is produced by the gentlest touch: often the touch of a camel’s-hair pencil or fine feather will produce such agony as to cause the patient to shriek out, complaining at the same time that the pain is that of thrusting a sharp knife into the sensitive part.14 The most drastic consequence was that ‘in a very large majority, the pain and spasm conjoined are so great as to preclude the possibility of sexual intercourse’.15 The constitutive move that allowed this set of symptoms to be a singular disorder was the fact of linking the hypersensitivity to

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the spasm. Sims declared succinctly: ‘the hypersensitiveness is diagnostic; the spasm is pathognomonic’.16 He went on to describe the first case in which he had encountered this set of symptoms. It was marked by an outright failure on his part: ‘I attempted to make a vaginal examination, but failed completely.’17 Sims found that ‘the books throw no light on the subject’18 – although we will later see that some French doctors had in fact written about remarkably similar cases in the preceding decades. But with no precedents known to him, Sims could envisage only one form of effective treatment. ‘It appears to me’, he wrote in his notes, ‘that the only rational treatment would be surgical.’19 Only by surgical means could the doctor overcome a disorder that might otherwise block, quite literally, not only the patient’s reproductive activity, but the very exercise of the doctor’s clinical skill. The remedy for vaginismus, in Sims’ view, was not even to be found in forced dilatation. That might seem an expedient measure, but it would not put an end to the woman’s pain: ‘I would not pretend to deny that we can dilate a case of vaginismus so as to permit sexual intercourse, but in most of the cases so treated the act is very painful.’20 To remove the source of pain, there had to be some form of incision: ‘In every case that I have operated on by removal of the hymen, and then by division and dilatation, sexual intercourse has been accomplished without pain.’21 ‘Division’ here meant cutting the vaginal sphincter muscle: ‘the septum between the fourchette and the rectum was divided on each side, down through the fibres of the sphincter muscle and the fourchette to the perineal raphé’.22 When this was done, the outcome was assured: ‘I have now operated on thirty-nine cases of vaginismus’, Sims wrote, ‘and in every instance with perfect success.’23 His clear-cut achievement, so to speak, was to remove the pain, with no thought for the fact that he was incidentally removing a capacity for pleasure. Sims won fame for this work. He had made a singular syndrome out of a variety of symptoms, established that it was of the gravest consequence, and devised a practically infallible method of treatment. He summed his work up as follows: From personal observation I can confidently assert that I know of no disease capable of producing so much unhappiness to both parties of the marriage contract, and I am happy to state that I know of no serious trouble that can be cured so easily, so safely, and so certainly.24 Despite Sims’ concern with alleviating pain in his female patients, he seems never to have been visited by any concern with the quality of their sexual pleasure. That was not uniformly the case during

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the nineteenth century, as we saw in Chapter 2; Roubaud’s work, in particular, made women’s pleasure a point of reference for sexual medicine. But Sims appeared to be untouched by any such concern. What made vaginismus so important, he affirmed, was that it created an obstacle to coitus, and therefore to pregnancy.25 It was important for its consequences. In that sense, Sims’ approach had much in common with that of Zacchia and his canonist colleagues. They might not have studied the medical detail of this syndrome, but they would have found the framing rationale quite familiar. Seen from the French side, the discovery of vaginismus could appear as a matter of rivalry between the Old World and the New. Writing about it 40 years later, Dr Sylvius (Eugène Labbée) referred to Sims with a vigour born of lingering national resentment. He began a discussion of vaginismus by referring to the now standard story, which dates the discovery from Sims’ pioneering work in 1861, adding: ‘The American Sims had no doubt about it: vaginismus had been born on Broadway, near Williams street!!! . . . ’26 In reality, says Sylvius, vaginismus had already been known in France for some decades. It was just that French doctors did not proclaim their discovery: In France from 1834 onwards, people talked quietly about the disorder. The research done by Huguier, Dupuytren, Lisfranc, Tanchou, Hervez de Chégoin, Simpson, Vidal de Cassis, Debout, and Michon, before Marion Sims’ work saw the light of day in 1862, bears precursory witness to this bizarre ‘neurosis’, which has grave consequences for conjugal relations. Sims, it must be admitted, was skilled in the art of description, while favouring the darkest tones. He drew attention to himself and to his clever appellation, vaginismus.27 If one were to set aside the chauvinism of these comments, not much would remain. The main point would be that the key discoveries had taken place in France, and that Sims was no more than a gifted publicist. But it is noteworthy that Sylvius was writing at the very beginning of the twentieth century. In the decades since 1861, Sims’ professional celebrity in France had been assured by sustained specialist interest in vaginismus. But over that same period, his standing – and most particularly the standing of his operative treatment – had steadily diminished, as we shall see. The story of the invention of vaginismus is a transatlantic one, and one of the most interesting things about it from a historiographical perspective is that French writers on the topic tended to counter a

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successful invention from the New World with a genealogy that sought its antecedents in the Old.28 There were in fact histories produced in France that were far more detailed and more scholarly than the breezy one by Sylvius that we have just quoted, but these histories typically included many of the same names. The most important figures on the French side were Emile Debout and Louis-Marie Michon, who published a number of relevant case studies in the Bulletin de thérapeutique of 15 August 1861.29 On 26 November 1861, T. Gallard published an article in L’Union médicale that pointed to the etiological significance of vaginal spasm in Michon’s cases and others.30 Sims’ defining note on vaginismus had been read in London on 6 November of that same year. Naming rights, one might say, were decided by a matter of weeks. Indeed, an article by Debout and Michon dating from January 1862 was summarized in the very issue of the American Half-Yearly Abstract of the Medical Sciences in which Sims’ first article was abstracted.31 So the story could in fact have been told as one of those breathless race-against-time narratives in which French medicine was pipped at the finishing line, but that is not how it was told in actuality. We noted at the beginning of this chapter that the appearance of vaginismus in our history might be seen as an invention, and we have already begun to indicate why – a new term appeared at a precise point in time, appearing to draw together a set of symptoms that had not previously been described in that way. But it can be seen that in the Old World Sims’ vaginismus was being claimed as a discovery that had long since been made under other names. As our Introduction sought to make clear, we do not accept either of these accounts. While the tendency in historical scholarship to consider medical categories as ‘inventions’ leaves something to be desired, we do not wish to adopt the obverse view, that Sims and others merely ‘discovered’ a real condition that already existed, and had been waiting for science to name it. The intriguing feature of the ‘discovery’ of vaginismus is precisely the process through which ideas about female genital spasm came to hold a diagnostic place in medical gynaecology of the nineteenth century. It may be that the diagnosis was a product of the increasingly frequent practice of internal genital examination and of women’s uneasy responses to it. It may be too that the emerging notion had its genealogy in the medical literature of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. One thing is clear: Sims’ attribution of a name and his claim to discovery led quickly to widespread proliferation, citation and contestation, all of which gave life to the condition as a diagnostic category and affirmed it as an object of medical knowledge.

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In the 30 years after 1861, there appeared in France three doctoral theses devoted exclusively to the topic, and all attempted to tell longer histories reaching back to the 1820s. The first and best researched of them, written by P.-F. Visca, appeared in 1870. The second, published by Gabriel Gillard in 1884, contributed relatively little, owing far more to Visca’s work than it acknowledged.32 The third, published in 1890 by Placide-Joseph Dubois, helped carry discussion onto some rather new terrain, as we shall see in due course.33 The history produced by Visca found its very first antecedent in an 1828 observation in which Pierre Guillemot described a ‘spasm of the vulvo-vaginal muscle’ that prevented the insertion of even a small probe.34 Visca then went on to consider a more detailed discussion in Pierre-Charles Huguier’s Dissertation sur quelques points d’anatomie, de physiologie et de pathologie of 1834. There, Huguier declared that he had been unable to find anything written about ‘this disorder, which offers the clearest of analogies with spasmodic constriction of the anus’.35 Like Guillemot, Huguier spoke of the difficulty of inserting a probe, in his case a large swan’s feather.36 But he added that the ‘opening of the vagina’ was ‘completely insensitive’.37 That was hardly consonant with Sims’ observations about sensitivity of the vulva, and only the difficulty of inserting a probe seemed to justify Visca’s rapprochement. An even earlier antecedent not mentioned by Visca or others can in fact be found in the writing of François-Emmanuel Fodéré. In a book dating from 1813, Fodéré refers to Italian research that preceded his own: One can read in the works of Morgagni several examples of an extraordinary, invincible tightening [resserrement] of the vagina and the vulva. This condition is sometimes not even a constriction, but a hypersarcosis, a natural continuity of substance, with no void in its thickness [épaisseur].38 What makes this quotation interesting from a genealogical point of view is that it shows a rather different way of conceptualizing the disorder producing the key symptom. Reference to resserrement would seem to indicate the action of a muscle, but Fodéré’s talk of continuity of substance, implying the actual disappearance of the vaginal passage, has a different emphasis. The most easily recognizable element – perhaps the only one that recurs in all these descriptions – is the difficulty of inserting a probe. The condition is defined, as in Sims’ work, as that of being impenetrable to medical examination, as well as to the husband’s

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penis. ‘Benevoli was required to treat a woman whose vagina was no wider along its whole length than a quill pen’, says Fodéré,39 adding an example from his own clinical experience: ‘A girl who had been married at the age of sixteen had a vagina so narrow that one could hardly insert a quill pen into it.’40 If we wanted to be metaphorically clever we might insist on the recurrence of the feather or quill pen as a sign that vaginismus represented a frustration specifically on the part of medical writers and scholars about their failure to narrativize female sexual pathology in this period. But what it tells us most transparently is that a high level of intertextuality characterized the spread of ideas about vaginal constriction. The example is sufficiently bizarre (of all the things that might be inserted into the patient’s vagina, why a feather?) to suggest a diagnosis derived as much from discursive habit as from any technical requirement of clinical practice. Of the earlier authors brought to light by Visca’s history, the most significant was Jacques Lisfranc. In 1842, Lisfranc published a book entitled Clinique chirurgicale de l’Hôpital de La Pitié (A surgical clinic at La Pitié Hospital), which contained a chapter devoted to ‘excessive sensitivity of the genital organs of woman’. Quite unlike Huguier, Lisfranc established a direct connection between hypersensitivity of the vulva and vaginal spasm. What is more, he went on to draw the same inference as Sims was later to do about the significance of this for conjugal relations: Touching in order to explore the vagina and the uterus is unbearable, and often provokes nervous irritation which can produce a convulsive state. The woman feels a great repugnance for coitus itself, and even though she is governed by a sense of duty and the fear of losing her husband’s affection, she avoids coitus as much as circumstances permit. Eventually it becomes so irritating, so exasperating, so painful, that she refuses intercourse and rejects it with a kind of terror. This refusal is a dreadful thing, and almost always results in fateful consequences for conjugal union.41 This is far more than the extreme difficulty of introducing a quill pen observed by Fodéré and Huguier. It indicates that the attempt to probe is itself likely to provoke spasm. The obstacle to intercourse is a material one, but it has a visibly ‘moral’ dimension, producing a terrible reluctance to engage in intercourse, and a consequent threat to the sexual dimension of the marriage contract. Lisfranc adds that in such cases examination reveals no obvious signs of illness: ‘If one examines the organs of generation, no matter how diverse the means of

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investigation employed, the organs appear essentially healthy.’42 Sensitivity on contact, reactive spasm of the vagina, uncertainty about its cause, the absence of organic lesions, the woman’s fear of intercourse and a grave threat to conjugal harmony: this is, 20 years beforehand, the full set of elements found in Sims’ description of vaginismus. It is quite surprising that all these French histories, from Visca’s carefully researched thesis to Sylvius’ tirade, should have omitted to mention Félix Roubaud’s response to Sims’ work. Six years before Sims’ note, Roubaud had published a two volume work entitled Traité de l’impuissance et de la stérilité chez l’homme et la femme (A treatise on impotence and sterility in man and woman).43 This work showed great familiarity with French medical writings, and actually included, among many, the quotes from Lisfranc cited above.44 This first edition of Roubaud’s work contained a section on impediments to intercourse in woman, including a subsection on ‘neuralgia of the vulva and the vagina’. Of the latter, Roubaud wrote: ‘Before Lisfranc, this condition was little known, but since he provided a description of it [ . . . ] it has been the object of serious studies.’45 But that was what Roubaud wrote before encountering Sims’ work. Seventeen years after this first edition, Roubaud published a new edition of his book in which the section on ‘neuralgia of the vulva and the vagina’ had changed significantly, allowing historians to measure quite directly the impact of Sims’ work on Roubaud’s thinking. Large sections of the first edition remained intact, although the two volumes of the first edition were now merged into one. But that particular section, in which Lisfranc’s work had received such honourable mention in 1855, was now replaced by a longer section on ‘vital lesions of the copulative apparatus’ in which Sims and vaginismus held a prominent place.46 In the first edition, the discussion of neuralgia had been followed by a separate account of ‘spasms of the vagina’. At that stage of Roubaud’s thinking, the opposition between the ‘moral’ and the ‘material’ made it possible to mark a clear difference between the two disorders: ‘By contrast with neuralgias of the vulva and the vagina, which are in effect a moral obstacle to the meeting of the sexes, spasms of the vagina constitute a material obstacle to the insertion of the penis into the woman’s sexual organs.’47 Neuralgia was a moral obstacle in the sense that the woman’s suffering was a painful anticipation and an anticipation of pain, whereas vaginal spasm constituted of itself a material impediment. But Roubaud went on, in 1855, to allow that the material symptom of vaginal spasm might itself have an aetiology in which moral elements played a part. Spasm might sometimes be triggered by attempts at coitus,

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he said rather vaguely, but ‘it is rather difficult to determine the immediate causes that give rise to a disorder of this kind. Nevertheless, nervous women more than any others appear to be predisposed to it, especially if they experience strong moral emotions, or cherish erotic ideas.’48 A second kind of spasm, which he called primary, was ‘typically found in women who are nervous and subject to erotic thoughts’.49 The notion of a kind of female sexual failure caused by the very presence, rather than the absence, of erotic thoughts or fantasies is a coupling we see more commonly in early-twentieth-century texts. It was recurrent in later psychoanalytic accounts of frigidity, as we shall see in Chapters 7 and 8. According to Roubaud’s account, some agency might be at work in the muscular tightening, as if the narrowing were deliberate. That might make nervous women with erotic thoughts and ideas more prone to vaginal spasm. And since the disorder was seen to have a strong nervous or moral dimension, it could be understood as a properly sexual pathology in the modern sense. The later edition of Traité de l’impuissance, in 1872, was markedly different on these points. Roubaud began the relevant section by referring, as he had in 1855, to ‘neuralgias of the vulva and the vagina’, but it quickly became clear that what was previously a mere list of disorders was now presented as a range with its own logic of gradation: The disorders that fill this new chapter on the obstacles impeding the physiological conditions of coitus in woman are vulvo-vaginal neuroses, from simple hyperaethesia that makes sexual congress difficult and painful through to vaginismus which, in addition to the suffering it imposes on woman, prevents the insertion of the penis into the vagina.50 The word ‘neurosis’, referring to an illness that occurred without observable organic lesions, was used by Roubaud to gather these disorders under a generic heading. In his classification, hyperaesthesia appears at one end of the scale, as a simple phenomenon, and vaginismus at the other, as a more complex set of symptoms that includes hyperaesthesia. Roubaud was particularly exercised by the difficulty of finding appropriate treatments for vaginismus, as we shall see shortly. For Roubaud too then, vaginismus represented a risk of medical failure, the condition in which a woman’s genitals showed no outward signs of pathology (lesions), and resisted attempts at treatment. As it appeared that the pathological vagina might be both unexaminable and untreatable, and that the causes of this condition were nervous and moral, we find an

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early version of the key components that later made up the notion of frigidity as a psychological disorder. The acknowledgement of professional uncertainty, not to say inadequacy, on the part of Roubaud and others suggest that their methods and diagnoses were taking them close to the limits of their knowledge structures. Roubaud’s allusion to moral and nervous dimensions signalled that some new initiative was needed to cast light on the mysteries of the doctor, the husband and the resistant vagina. Those initiatives will be the subject of our last three chapters. Logically prior to the question of treatment was that of medical examination. Vaginal spasm posed a problem for medical examination, not just because the difficulty of conducting it provoked doctors to the unproductive and invasive use of feathers,51 but because the examination itself was likely to provoke vaginal spasm and might well aggravate the disorder. It was as if the pathology entailed not just the inability to perform married coitus but the inability to perform the role of the patient. Sims instructed his colleagues in the need for gentleness: Pass the finger into the vagina – do it gently – if otherwise, we may jar the nervous system, and produce involuntary spasmodic action of the abdominal muscles. The patient may become agitated and alarmed, and we may perhaps be compelled to procrastinate a very minute examination to some future time.52 Gaillard Thomas, an American gynaecologist whose work was translated into French in 1879, described just how the process might go wrong, precluding the use of either finger or feather: So soon as the finger is brought into contact with the site of the hymen, the patient will spring from her place, complain of agonizing pain, and become much disturbed in her nervous system. Should the examination be persisted in, introduction of the finger will be found almost impossible, and if it be forced into the canal, a violent contraction of the sphincter will be perceived. If, instead of the finger a camel’s hair brush or feather be employed, severe pain and contraction will follow even this application to the surface.53 Gillard, in his 1884 thesis, considered it quite impossible in such cases to use a speculum since vaginismus constituted ‘an insurmountable barrier precluding not only coitus, but sometimes medical examination as well. This contraction sets up an invincible barrier to the speculum.’54 Sims

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had suggested earlier that patients were likely to permit more intrusive general examination only in specific circumstances: While a patient with such a terrible infirmity as vesico-vaginal fistula is ready and willing to be placed in any position, however fatiguing, a moment’s reflection will show that this kneeling posture would be quite out of the question in the treatment of the simple forms of uterine disease, as they occur in the higher grades of life.55 There is every reason to suppose, in fact, that vaginismus often served in the minds of doctors as a test case for the professional practice of genital examination. The technical difficulties posed by the disorder and the fact that it was supposed to occur, as we shall see, in women in ‘the higher grades of life’ may have served in the long run, if not to produce, at least to justify less aggressive forms of professional practice. In 1895, Auguste Lutaud, who had earlier translated an American gynaecological text into French, provided a detailed set of instructions for his colleagues about how to exercise caution in such cases, warning in particular that the finger should not be inserted.56 That vaginismus was characterized by its ‘invincible’ or ‘insurmountable’ resistance to probing might be said to mark something of a longterm discursive shift in the understanding of womanly resistance. The ancient Romans called the Empress Messalina ‘invicta’ as a way of referring to her capacity to go on experiencing sexual pleasure indefinitely. And the lower case ‘messalina’ became, in erotic talk, a generic term for such women. But Messalina and her colleagues were ‘unconquered’ without being strictly invincible: they could in fact be repeatedly ‘conquered’ in intercourse without ever being definitively so.57 On the other hand, there were famous historical examples of women who were heroically, triumphantly inured against penetration, such as Joan of Arc.58 But the syndrome of vaginismus entailed a precise articulation of genital muscular strength with impenetrability. Women who suffered from vaginismus experienced and communicated in a pathological way the power of the vaginal sphincter. The understanding of female and feminine power implicit here is consonant with a broader pattern that emerged in the second half of the nineteenth century. Representations of feminine and female strength were, so to speak, smuggled through talk about such disorders as hysteria and epilepsy. While lending themselves to distressing stories of victimhood and loss of control, these illnesses also provided a vehicle for arresting demonstrations of female power. The resistance of many

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hysterical women to pain and their capacity to hold extreme positions almost indefinitely are but two examples of this tendency.59 Yet such assertions of power did not systematically displace older discourses about intrinsic feminine weakness. The older thematic can be found, to take just one example from the period, in J.-P. Dartigues’ 1887 book, De l’amour expérimental ou des causes d’adultère chez la femme au XIXe siècle (On experimental love, or the causes of adultery in the nineteenthcentury woman). Dartigues indulged the classic paradox whereby it is woman’s weakness that constitutes her strength: ‘The power of woman is thus born out of her very weakness: she seeks the strength that she lacks and subjugates man by submitting to him.’60 This humdrum dialectic continued to be available in the latter part of the nineteenth century just as it is today, but it was sometimes contested and partly displaced within medical texts, especially those with a sexual focus. Vaginismus provides a striking example of the tendency to understand female power in thoroughly material, non-dialectical ways. The syndrome was in fact eminently compatible with a new understanding of female genital strength developed in the work of Georg Kobelt, first published in German in 1844 and translated into French in 1851. As we showed in Chapter 2, Kobelt’s research into the physiology of copulation described the active function of the female genital apparatus in coitus and drew particular attention to the role of the constrictor cunni or vaginal sphincter muscle.61 Vaginismus, as described by Sims and others, was a spasm at the heart of this apparatus. The fact that it took the form of a spasm had particular significance for an emerging view of the relationship between pleasure and pain. We have shown in another publication that the notion of the spasm, which was extraordinarily widespread in the latter part of the nineteenth century, established a thematic resonance between intense sexual pleasure and acute symptoms of illness, especially hysteria and epilepsy.62 When Roubaud, who contributed greatly to the dissemination of Kobelt’s work in France, spoke in 1855 about vaginal spasm, he did so in terms that kept in play the double thematic of pain and pleasure: spasms of the vagina offer a material obstacle to the introduction of the penis into the woman’s sexual organs. The convulsive tightening of this canal is sometimes so pronounced that the opening of the vulva will scarcely permit the insertion of a quill pen. Fortunately, these constrictions are intermittent, and when they are continuous, they occur in association with vaginitis or the puerpural condition.63

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Vaginismus could in fact be understood as a pathology of the very mechanism of pleasure. At the beginning of the twentieth century, Havelock Ellis spelled out this logic when he wrote: ‘It is recognized by gynaecologists that the condition of vaginismus, in which there is a spasmodic contraction of the vagina, making intercourse painful or impossible, is but a morbid exaggeration of the normal contraction which occurs in sexual excitement.’64 Contraction of this kind had an undeniable – indeed an apparently invincible – physical quality, but it was also increasingly thought at that time to have a ‘moral’ dimension, so that examination and treatment were problematized. Exactly what kind of obstacle was provided by vaginismus? It was considered to be the most extreme of all female sexual disorders, doubtless because of the close convergence of physical and moral forces. According to Pierre Garnier, writing in 1882, there were many husbands who would be undeterred in their desire for coitus by a whole range of genital disorders and malformations. Cries, tears, marks of pain would not suffice. In their aroused state, only something resembling vaginismus could defeat them: All these serious obstacles, and many other comparable ones that may arise by accident are, however, incapable of stopping man when he is gripped by love or passion. [ . . . ] In his unaroused state, a gesture, a word, a noise can paralyse him in an instant, but when aroused he will forge ahead in the face of pleas for understanding, cries of pain, and tears, stopping only when he encounters invincible organic resistance, of which vaginismus offers the example.65 This is how vaginismus could serve as an exemplary disorder. It represented, all at once, female genital power, the convergence of the physical and the moral, and the capacity of certain women’s bodies to resist the most aggressive attempts at penetration. For Garnier, who sought to give authoritative advice about sexuality to young couples, there was an excruciating discrepancy between the apparently tenuous moral causes, for which no one could be held directly responsible, and the insurmountable physical consequences: It is the cruellest disappointment that can happen to newlyweds, without being the fault of the girl. Her ignorance is in fact the best sign of her virginity, since what occurs is most often a simple spasmodic condition, with no apparent lesion of the constrictor

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muscle. It produces a convulsive tightening of the canal, to the extent that one cannot touch it or insert a feather without provoking cries of pain. The husband’s approach sets off so much pain, through hyperaesthesia of the parts, that the wife rejects him involuntarily. Nervous, hysterical girls are particularly subject to this, and the extreme sensitivity forms an insurmountable, absolutely invincible barrier to the accomplishment of marriage.66 Seen thus, the power of vaginismus transformed the girlish moral qualities of innocence and reluctance into an invincible spasm of genital resistance. The diagnosis of vaginismus was not difficult for doctors to make, if only because the very difficulty of conducting a thorough examination served in practice as the distinguishing symptom of the disorder. But treatment was another matter. Sims himself appeared quite certain about the proper procedure to be followed. He advocated and practised invasive surgery that would remove the hymen and ‘incis[e] the vaginal orifice’.67 This was to be followed by controlled dilatation. Without the surgery, said Sims, dilatation was perfectly useless.68 But when both steps were taken, ‘easy and perfect success’ was assured: ‘After incision, patients are given a glass dilator to wear for several hours per day. This is maintained until the parts being entirely cured and all sensitiveness removed, the patient may be pronounced competent to fulfil comfortably and pleasantly the duty of a wife.’69 On that basis, Sims claimed to have cured every one of the 39 cases he had treated.70 It may seem extraordinary to modern readers that the removal of all sensitivity should itself be considered a ‘perfect’ solution to the problem. Sims was quite literally cutting through the physiological exigencies of thinkers like Roubaud, who saw the woman’s pleasure as essential to ‘perfect’ coitus.71 Sims’ assumption was clearly that the removal of pleasure was an entirely acceptable price to pay for the removal of pain, and that wifely conjugal duties could be straightforwardly carried out once both pain and pleasure had been removed. Far from understanding vaginismus as a form of frigidity, Sims treated it simply as narrowness or impotentia coeundi, for which a surgically induced form of insensitivity constituted a technical solution. The Sims operation, as it came to be known, was open to question from the outset. Debout expressed the view in his 1862 article that doctors had been too quick to resort to surgery in response to spasmodic contraction of the vagina. He thought it best treated by cold, using hip baths and ‘ice frequently renewed’.72 Michon responded to Debout’s

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work by citing some cases from his own clinical experience. In his view, it was sometimes necessary to practise ‘forced dilatation by means of the fingers’.73 Conceding that ‘some patients object to this’, he did add that, where those patients were concerned, ‘the somewhat slower process of dilatation by tents [inflatable devices] must be substituted’.74 French doctors generally were reluctant to practise surgery, although Michon’s method of breaking the muscle’s resistance with the fingers found favour with some. Dr A. de Soyre contributed an article on vaginismus to an 1885 medical dictionary in which he described that practice as a ‘simple’ treatment: The treatment of vaginismus is simple. If some lesion has been observed that seems to be responsible for causing the contraction, that cause has to be removed. In all those other cases where nothing unusual has been found (and these are much more frequent), the method to be used is sudden dilatation of the vulvar ring with the fingers, tearing it as one would a fissure of the anus. The patient should be anaesthetized beforehand. Attempts at gradual dilatation using metal, wood, glass or rubber dilators have never yielded satisfying results in the case of pronounced vaginismus.75 Physical intervention to reduce the constriction could take two forms: incision or forced dilatation. Sims, as we have seen, advocated one followed by the other. In France, incision was sometimes practised but was considered drastic, and there was some tendency to avoid it, while claiming such avoidance as a national trait. Roubaud’s response to Sims, in the 1872 edition of his book on impotence and sterility, was quite nuanced. He began with a history of the term ‘vaginismus’, referring to Sims’ famous note of 1861 and providing his own history of related work in France. With no show of resentment, he gave a list of names closely resembling those given by Sylvius. But his most substantive contribution on the topic was a detailed discussion of possible methods of treatment. In general, he asserted that vaginismus was susceptible to treatment by medical rather than surgical means: ‘Happily, as I will shortly explain, the disorder is not beyond the resources of our art. It usually responds to simple medical means, so that there is no need, despite what has been advocated by some, to resort to operations that draw blood [opérations sanglantes], which are sometimes themselves not without danger.’76 Instead of referring here to ‘the Sims operation’, he referred anonymously to surgical treatment. The very fact

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of doing so can be read as a sign of his reservations about that method. And while in French the term opérations sanglantes was a more or less technical term for certain kinds of operation, the word sanglant has powerful connotations. It was just one step, in everyday terms, from saying that the Sims method was a gory and dangerous way of dealing with a problem that could be addressed by less extreme measures. The choice of therapies corresponded in Roubaud’s view to competing theories of the aetiology of vaginismus. Again, the theories were presented anonymously, but there were two distinct views of the matter. When the disorder was understood as having an organic, material aetiology, surgery was likely to be the preferred method of treatment. But when it was understood as a nervous condition, other, less specific methods of treatment appeared to be called for: For some, vaginismus is always governed by an organic lesion, either in the copulative apparatus or in some deep part of the genital apparatus. For others, while they do not contest the influence of local or distant organic lesions, the disorder is, in many cases, idiopathic [that is, arising spontaneously from an unknown cause], and is to be included in the category of spasmodic nervous disorders.77 It is important to hold this problematic in its historical context. Roubaud was claiming vaginismus for medicine at a time when clinical psychiatry was not a professional option. What he wanted was for medicine to take full theoretical and practical account of moral causes that might have material effects. Accordingly, without wishing to deny the influence of various pathological conditions on vaginismus, he took the side of those who accepted what he called the essentialité of the condition, that is to say, its primary nature, its phenomenal discreteness and its relative autonomy.78 He therefore proposed a range of measures to be adopted more or less in sequence, including various therapeutic baths, washes, fumigations and lotions. Surgical intervention was not excluded from the list, but it was to be considered a last resort: ‘Surgical treatment has been enriched in recent years by operations that are not without pain or danger, and our advice is to resort to them only when all the other medications have failed.’79 Within the range of surgical operations, incision was itself to be considered an extreme measure: ‘Among the means that the surgeon should first attempt is dilatation, which can be carried out either gradually or abruptly.’80 And even when incision did take place, incision of the mucous membrane, as conceived by Michon, deserved to be considered before any division of the muscle.81

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Roubaud’s understanding of vaginismus mobilized a binary theoretical opposition between the material and the moral; however, he spread that opposition across a range of therapies from the gently medical to the dangerously surgical. And in a concluding assessment of the therapeutic options, he showed clearly where his sympathies lay: To Mr Marion Sims’ statistic which counts thirty-nine cases of vaginismus out of thirty-nine healed by section of the sphincter muscle, I oppose that of Scanzoni [a Czech gynaecologist who practised in Germany],82 who declares that he has healed more than a hundred patients without ever having recourse to an operation that drew blood. I am certainly of that opinion, and my long personal experience confirms my view.83 There was, as we have suggested, a tendency in France to question opérations sanglantes, but it would be quite naïve to suppose that French doctors were systematically more attentive to their patients’ sexual needs and/or moral rights than their American counterparts. It may have been that Sims’ experimentation on slave women provided him freer reign to explore more drastic techniques than anything French doctors could have attempted without alarming their clientele. However, De Soyre’s account of forced dilatation, quoted above, indicates that Sims’ method could be set aside in favour of another that was no less harsh, and no less destructive of the patient’s sexual capacity. Despite the currency of such practices, writers on the French side typically insisted that there was a national difference, and located that difference in specific ways. When, in 1879, the Frenchman Auguste Lutaud translated the American Gaillard Thomas’s A Practical Treatise on the Diseases of Women, first published in English in 1868, he garnished his translation with critical comments that served to mark – or to claim – such a difference. The fact of translating the American text was itself a tribute, and the preface reminded French readers that America was now ‘a great centre for gynaecological studies’.84 But at one point in the text, during a discussion of the examination and treatment of vaginismus, the translator felt compelled, not only to modify the original, but to add some notes of his own. The first issue he raised had to do with the nature of the obstacle provided by muscular spasm: Some authors claim that the insertion of the finger is rendered impossible as a result of muscular constriction. That is an error. There is no

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invincible vaginismus, and the finger can always penetrate the vagina if it deploys the necessary force. What makes insertion of the finger impossible is the fact that examination is halted by the very great pain experienced by patients.85 The point of this intervention by Lutaud may not be immediately clear. It could seem as though he was denying the power of the vaginal sphincter and affirming the digital power of doctors. But the import of his note, seen in context, was that resistance to examination in these cases is not purely physical since it has a moral dimension. The doctor was required to engage in a moral transaction by exercising a form of tact. When, in practice, doctors actually refrained from probing forcefully, they were carrying out a moral duty, rather than being absolutely defeated by a physical obstacle. This was entirely consistent with the point of a second translator’s note on the same page, which spoke of the ease with which Sims and his American colleagues resorted to surgery, contrasting it with French clinical practice: The publications on vaginismus that have appeared recently have largely modified the treatment proposed by Sims and American surgeons. We have therefore found it necessary to make significant changes in this chapter so as to align it with the work of Demarquay, Saint-Vel, Gosselin, and other authors who turn to surgical treatment only as a last resort.86 Notice that surgery was positioned here just where it had appeared in Roubaud’s set of possible treatments: at the farthest extremity. Lutaud conceded that Sims’ radical surgery had produced results, but questioned its necessity: ‘Deep incisions have yielded very good results for Mr Sims, but we wonder ourselves, along with most French surgeons, if an operation that draws so much blood is indispensable to rid a patient of vaginismus.’87 This stylization of a transatlantic difference about the place of surgery involved a degree of systematic forgetting on the French side. Sims himself talked about a highly intrusive operation of the same order practised by Lisfranc: Amputation of the cervix uteri belongs essentially to French surgery. It was a very frequent operation in the hands of Lisfranc. He amputated the cervix in ninety-seven cases, and lost but two patients.

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Lately Huguier has brought it more prominently before the profession in generalizing it for all cases of what he calls hypertrophic elongation. His success is all that could be desired.88 In his own terms, Sims could simply give credit for the Lisfranc operation to his French colleagues. And even as Roubaud resisted the Sims operation in 1872, he did so by considering an ‘opération sanglante’ developed in France: Among the operations that draw blood, not all have the same degree of severity. Incision of the mucous membrane, as conceived by Michon, has no disadvantages and can be attempted when the treatments set out above have failed. This operation consists in making some superficial incisions in the vaginal mucous membrane, then carrying out progressive dilatation with dressings containing belladonna.89 Roubaud goes on to disturb the stylized transatlantic opposition even further as he refers to French versions of muscular incision: Division of the vulvar sphincter had been done in France long before M. Marion Sims advocated it. Huguier was the first to have the idea, and also the first to carry it out in 1834. Later, Pinel-Grandchamp and Dupuytren followed his example, as did Michon who, in 1850, added dilatation from rear to front and laterally.90 It seems clear that a manifest opposition between American surgery and French therapeutic tact could only be constructed later in the century, doubtless by writers who knew the history of French medical practice in less detail than Roubaud or even Sims. Lutaud’s intrusive notes in his translation of Thomas’ work reveal that the quarrel about methods of treating vaginismus had been occasioned, not by differences of moral principle between doctors, but by disagreement about the aetiology of the disorder. At one point, Lutaud simply made an unacknowledged corrective and explanatory addition to Thomas’ text, affirming homologous opposition between treatments and aetiologies: ‘The treatment of vaginismus has varied of necessity according to the way people conceive of the disorder. Understood as a neurosis, it simply calls for general medical treatment. But if it is considered a contraction resulting from a lesion, it is thought to require surgery.’91 The very fact of setting out the options in this binary fashion was foreign to Sims’ or Thomas’ view of the matter. When it was put this

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way, a moral aetiology, testified to by neurosis – meaning precisely the lack of any lesion – called for a corresponding treatment; a physical aetiology resulting in a lesion might, on the other hand, justify the recourse to surgery. This division of the problematic tended to prevail in France, where the significance of the two kinds of aetiology became progressively more unequal. The dominant French tendency was to seek moral causes for vaginal spasm, so that vaginismus became subject to the same equivocation and the same historical drift as impotence. The view of it as a physical phenomenon requiring physical treatment tended to be displaced by a view that saw it as moral, requiring a kind of treatment that was not so clearly identified. Broadly speaking, there were two places in which possible moral causes of vaginismus could be located. The woman – always a wife – might be seen as the locus of deleterious social forces, and the husband might be seen as an incompetent sexual actor. As early as 1861, Debout and Michon related the incidence of vaginismus to the patient’s social position. The disorder had not hitherto been discussed in books, they suggested, because cases of it were rarely found in hospitals. Women suffering from vaginismus generally belonged to a higher sphere of society in which education developed the functions of the nervous system at the expense of physical powers. And since the sensibility of these women had been exalted, spasmodic affections were more likely to occur.92 Visca reflected on this hypothesis in his thesis of 1870, noting that Michon, Debout and Sims had all agreed that vaginismus is more likely to occur in refined urban women of the upper classes, thereby showing the effects of advanced civilization.93 Visca himself suggested that this pattern might not be so clear as they had claimed, pointing out that the lack of detailed clinical descriptions of vaginismus might also reflect the fact that many women, not just women of the upper classes, did not want any kind of public consultation about such matters, and certainly did not wish to stay in hospital for that purpose. He then drew attention to some cases occurring in women of modest means that had been studied previously.94 But such subtleties seemed not to prevail against powerfully seductive notions of the civilizing process, which had a strong hold on medical thinking of the time. To the extent that vaginismus was seen as a product of excessive refinement, it could be aligned with hysteria and other nervous disorders, all of which were frequently described as the consequences of an advanced civilization that had feminized society, producing in women dangerously refined and pathological versions of femininity itself. So Visca’s

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reservations were easily forgotten, and Gillard, writing 14 years later, felt able to say without qualification that vaginismus was a sickness of the rich.95 Occasionally in the literature on the topic there was a suggestion that the woman might herself contribute to vaginismus other than by nervous predisposition and excessive refinement. It might be, said Visca, that masturbation had produced lesions contributing to the onset of the affliction.96 The abuse of coitus prior to marriage might have produced inflammation or wear of the genital parts. Or the use of astringent liquids might be responsible.97 All of these may have been regarded as physical sources of contraction, but they effectively belonged in the category of moral causes since they occurred at the meeting point of the moral and the physical, which is where medical knowledge of the time typically located the sexual. In any case, whether the cause in the woman was a general outcome of civilization or a form of local indulgence, it seemed quite inappropriate to many French doctors to use surgery as a way of treating it. But the moral cause of vaginismus mentioned most often, and with increasing conviction, was not located in the woman herself. It was some form of ineptitude on the part of the husband. Debout and Michon had pointed to that from the outset, observing that ineffective efforts at penetration in some cases, resulting from either the lack of perseverance or defective virility, might create an irritation of the tissues followed by spasm.98 Note that the husband’s failure took the form here of relative impotence, or at least inefficacy. The very lack of success in copulation led to repeated activity of an inconclusive sort. Visca spoke of excessive delicacy on the husband’s part: while it is clear that many husbands stop short out of consideration or reticence at the first pain experienced by their wives, in other cases there has been reason to suppose that any imperfection of the copulative act was due to the husband’s weak or delicate constitution, caused by advanced age, previous venereal excess [excès vénériens], or congenital impotence. Repeated attempts to overcome the obstacle have lacked sufficient energy and potency, and have served only to irritate the sexual parts so that spasm has set in.99 Civilizational fatigue, as this quotation shows, was thought to afflict husbands as well as wives. Supposing this to be so, Debout and others claimed that true potency in the husband would overcome the problem, although Sims himself disagreed:

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Churchill, Debout, and some others, have thought that a state of vaginismus could hardly exist long where the husband possessed strong copulative capacity; but I am sure this is an error; for I have seen several instances in which the virile power of the husband was unusually strong, but yet powerless to overcome the obstruction.100 It was as if the power of female impotence at its most tense was greater than that of male potency at its most robust. Visca, in his thesis, followed the logic of this aetiology through to its double conclusion. There were in fact two ways in which husbands could fail and thereby provoke the disorder, he said. They could be weakened by past indulgence, being too old in every sense of the word, or they could be clumsy and misapply their strength, falling victim to the incompetence of youth.101 It appeared difficult for them to be at just the right point of cultural and sexual maturity. In Placide-Joseph Dubois’s thesis of 1890, the husband and his inadequacies became the primary object of aetiological attention: What is the husband’s share in the genesis of this disorder? It is certain that he can be incriminated for several reasons. Either because of the abruptness, often even the brutality with which he practises coitus on the first occasion, or because of the weakness of his erection, which may be the inescapable result of excesses in an earlier life. Or even because of his signal lack of experience: his efforts are not well directed and the goal frequently cannot be attained because both partners are put off [dépités] by so much unproductive effort, becoming ashamed in their dealings to the point where, at the end of it all, they are genuinely afraid of each other.102 Dubois’s ‘incrimination’ of the husband adds a new element to earlier accounts of inadequate potency and repetitious inefficiency. This is indeed how Dubois took his place in the field, correcting what he saw as the failure of other medical writers: ‘We see that the husband’s responsibility is great. Despite the fact that many authors have claimed that he is always innocent, we shall not hesitate to affirm that the husband is frequently the only cause, often an involuntary one, of vaginismus.’103 Dubois was not in fact able to cite a host of authors who spoke of the husband’s innocence, but he did wish to confront those who, like Sims, asserted that potency in the husband could never overcome the obstacle.104 Those doctors were, he implied, tending to make the husband appear ‘innocent’ by keeping his sexual behaviour disjunct from

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his wife’s pathology. Dubois, by contrast, found the husband’s responsibility at every point: he could certainly fail his wife by weakness, but he could also fail her by an ill-considered application of strength. In pointing to the moral risks that lay on either side, Dubois was aligning vaginismus with other forms of sexual pathology seen during his time as the outcome of husbandly incompetence, particularly on the wedding night. This set of widely rehearsed themes will be the subject of Chapter 5. Confident in the view that the husband ought to be seen as the guilty party, Dubois was able to adopt a strong position on the question of treatment. Surgical intervention now appeared not only drastic, but fundamentally misconceived. Early in his thesis, he had marked a general reluctance on the part of the medical profession – notably in France – to follow the Sims method: ‘Sims, in 1861, created the name vaginismus, but frightened the medical world by his great incisions.’105 In his conclusion, having put forward a moral aetiology focused on the husband’s behaviour, he felt able to take a bolder position: ‘Of the different treatments that have been established for the cure of vaginismus, we reject the bloody [sanglante] method used by Sims.’106 Sanglante continued to function here as a kind of pun. It had a technical function, referring to operations that drew blood heavily,107 but it also had emotive force when applied to Sims’ method as a whole. In Dubois’s perspective, however vaginismus was to be treated, it could not and should not be with the knife. Our view of this transatlantic discord has so far been from the French side, but we will now adjust our perspective by looking more closely at medical writing in English produced during the same period. The main purpose of this incursion into the English-speaking world is to show that French medical writers used a quite stylized image of American gynaecology in their discussion of vaginismus, making of Sims’ work both a celebrated innovation and a target of criticism. Two things will quickly become clear. Firstly, there was no uniformly ‘American’ practice of radical surgery, any more than there was a uniformly French refusal of it, and secondly, the authority and influence of Sims’ approach within the English-speaking world was not as great as French writers usually supposed. At the very time when Sims’ ‘discovery’ was first being publicized, the eminent Scottish physician Sir James Young Simpson was delivering a series of clinical lectures on diseases in women in Edinburgh. That coincidence would not have allowed Simpson the time to modify the content of his talks in response to the note on vaginismus, but he was so

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far from doing so that when his lectures were published in Philadelphia in 1863, and again in a revised edition in 1872, there was still no change to the relevant section.108 Unlike Roubaud in his revised work, Simpson maintained the general category of ‘hyperaesthesia and neuralgia of the vulva’.109 Under a different heading, he discussed morbid closure of the vagina as a result of inflammation or adhesion, but the terms of that discussion were closer to those of Fodéré quoted at the beginning of this chapter. Such closure was, in Simpson’s nosology, ‘obliterative or adhesive vaginitis’,110 in which muscular spasm had no part.111 At a later point, Simpson discussed ‘contraction of the vagina [ . . . ] in consequence of the patient suffering unusually from marital intercourse, or from the completion of that act being impossible’.112 However, he accounted for this condition in terms that would have been familiar to Zacchia and his canonist colleagues: ‘I allude to cases in which there is a mere congenital narrowness or contraction of the circle of the os vaginae, not from the presence of the hymen, but simply from congenital smallness of the vaginal orifice.’113 There can be no question here of ignorance on Simpson’s part. Jeffrey Sartin says that he was a ‘fierce rival’ of Sims, and was given to making ‘barbed criticisms’ of his American colleague.114 The fact is that Simpson was able to ignore Sims’ work, pursuing his own lines of inquiry unhindered by talk of vaginismus. Another leading British medical figure, William Morse Graily Hewitt, published a book in Britain and the USA on ‘diseases of women’ that adopted a quite diffident attitude towards Sims’ work. The 1874 edition contained a section entitled ‘Extreme narrowness of the vagina’ in which ‘Spasm and hyperaesthesia’ figured as a subsection. Graily Hewitt did not take the term ‘vaginismus’ as his own, noting cautiously that ‘Marion Sims, Debout, and others, have of late years redirected attention to it, especially as a cause of sterility, and as interfering with sexual intercourse’.115 One reason he gave for caution in adopting the term was that ‘the affection may not be due to the same cause in all cases. I am of the opinion that the essence of the disorder is a local alteration or irritation of the nerves at the spot itself.’116 In discussing treatment, he did not even mention surgical division of the muscle, but did recommend ‘rather freely incising the mucous membrane at the situation of the hymen’, which was in fact Debout’s procedure.117 When William Hammond, a leading American specialist in sexual disorders, published a study of ‘sexual impotence in the male and female’ in 1887, Sims’ work appeared, so to speak, to have been put in its place. It received honourable mention in a chapter on ‘vaginism’, but was not taken to define the current medical agenda. Sims’ term itself had been

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truncated and, so to speak, banalized.118 Hammond recognized that the condition had been known before Sims named and described it, as some French writers had so energetically claimed: ‘Although the condition to which the late Doctor Marion Sims gave the designation vaginism was known before he wrote on the subject, it is this distinguished physician to whom we owe the first complete and systematic account of [the] disease.’119 With regard to the prospects for treatment of the disorder, Hammond was unreserved in his confidence: ‘The treatment of vaginism is as satisfactory as that of any other disease known to science. Indeed, with our present knowledge of the nature of the affection, failure to cure a case of the disease is out of the question.’120 But while Hammond’s show of confidence was equal to that of Sims 25 years earlier, the clinical basis for it was quite different. Hammond’s treatment included bathing with various solutions, the use of static electricity and stretching of the vagina.121 The Sims operation was not even mentioned as an option. Criticism of the Sims operation could in fact be found in some American gynaecological writing at the end of the century, but that criticism was not of the same nature as French attacks on its bloodiness. American gynaecologists had largely built their standing and collective competence through the development of surgical techniques, and it was those techniques that took up most of the space in their publications and in the proceedings of their societies. So when these techniques were questioned, as they regularly were, it was with a view to refining them and assessing their relevance in particular cases rather than making a turn towards the moral or the psychological, as French medical writers tended to do later in the century. What is evident is the persistence among American doctors of approaches emphasizing physical treatment, in spite of frequent reference in their general discussions to the moral or nervous dimension. In 1895, Josephus Henry Gunning presented to the New York Obstetrical Society a paper entitled ‘Vaginismus: Its Causes and Treatment’ that exemplified the professional process of technical review. Without speaking of sexual pleasure or its absence, Gunning did refer to the wife’s – not simply the husband’s – quality of life within the marriage: ‘No condition of the body more frequently undermines the life of the young wife in the first bloom as such, and none is more fatal and destructive to her marital life and happiness than the symptoms recognized under the title of this paper.’122 Drawing on the work of French doctor Adrien Pozzi, he distinguished three forms of the disorder: hyperaesthesia with contraction, hyperaesthesia alone and contraction without hyperaesthesia. But while he paid close attention to

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extreme sensitivity (hyperaesthesia) and insisted that it be treated appositely, his focus was not on moral or psychological causes. Even when he did speak of nervous excess, he did so in material terms, referring to ‘an excessively general nervous state (possibly a direct reflex from the clitoris)’.123 There might be, he allowed, ‘other continuing causes’, but he had nothing to say about them. The ongoing challenge for Gunning and his colleagues was to find the best physical therapy, and his paper took as its premise the idea that there had been widespread failure to date. In tortured syntax, he suggested that the professional standing of doctors in the field was itself at stake because established procedures were having so little positive effect: there is hardly a condition against which different plans of treatment have been invented, and in none possibly has the result been less favourable, both as to the condition to be treated and to the physician called to treat it, knowing as he does beforehand that as a rule he will reap very little glory for his labor and his pains.124 In response to this, Gunning offered a new treatment, which he presented as an adjunct, perhaps even an alternative, to existing ones.125 Describing the procedure in some detail, he considered certain technical variations and assessed their relative merit. What was needed, he argued, was to intervene more directly in the tissues themselves by ‘a general and generous application of electricity’.126 Electricity properly applied would have the effect of ‘controlling the irritation of the nerves and inducing anaesthesia of the parts’.127 As with Sims’ treatment, the primary clinical aim was to treat hyperaesthesia by inducing anaesthesia. But the discussion that followed revealed a range of professional opinion in the society, and, indeed, a certain mobility on Gunning’s part. One member of the society responded by expressing a view that had been regularly rehearsed on both sides of the Atlantic since it had first been articulated by Michon and by Sims: ‘Dr H.L. Collyer thought vaginismus was not very uncommon among newly married women in high life. Of course among the lower classes, where sometimes morals were not so strict, it occurred less frequently.’128 We have seen that in France this pseudo-epidemiological claim contributed to the notion that vaginismus might be attributable to moral causes. But the moral–physical divide did not serve to define the positions taken in this discussion. For Collyer, it was simply a matter of degree, and the

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decision whether or not to operate depended not on considerations of aetiology, but on the severity of the symptoms: The treatment should be ordered under the operative and the nonoperative. In non-operative treatment he agreed with the author that electricity caused subsidence of pain and was easily applied but he thought that it would fail in severe cases. It had been his experience that it was necessary to place some patients under the influence of an anaesthetic and divulse or stretch the hymen or vagina before relief was obtained. [ . . . ] In many cases, however, simply applying cocaine or overstretching the hymen was sufficient to give relief. The same result could be obtained by electricity, only it would require many more sittings.129 In this view, the choices between electricity and cocaine, between stretching and cutting, were based on a range of treatments to be selected according to the gravity of the clinical circumstances. This was not unlike the approach advocated in 1872 by Roubaud. Dr Thomas Addis Emmet also intervened in the discussion, speaking in turn of degrees of severity, although he insisted that surgery was sometimes a strict necessity: ‘In a few cases it was necessary to divide the muscle, but usually stretching was sufficient. [ . . . ] He knew of no way to relieve a severe case but by surgical means.’130 This last comment evinced a strong response from Gunning, one that revealed considerable disenchantment with the Sims method. Incision of that kind or any other, Gunning said, had repeatedly proven to be a clinical failure: Regarding the cutting operations, he had seen cases in which the treatment had been started with Sims’ operation, and this having failed, every other form of operation had been performed until the vulva was so scarred as to present the appearance of having been burned with nitric acid, and no relief had been given. Electricity has been recommended in the paper as a means of cure because this plan of treatment had been found useless; and in many of the cases, if it was used, it would save the patient the operation.131 The epithet ‘useless’ amounted to outright rejection, despite the rhetorical precautions taken at the beginning and end of the paper itself. Surgery was, however, being rejected here for technical, clinical reasons, and not because of a fundamental divergence of views about aetiology.

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There was a further intervention, by Dr E. L. H. McGinnis, who noted the appropriateness of using electricity as a treatment: ‘[this] treatment of vaginismus [was] [ . . . ] certainly worth considering when it was remembered that the disease was largely a nervous condition’.132 By ‘nervous’, McGinnis meant a disease that had an effect on the nerves. Electricity was likely to have a beneficial effect because ‘it was a well-known fact that the faradic current [ . . . ] was a powerful antispasmodic’.133 McGinnis went on to describe its use in a particular case: ‘Examination afterward showed no muscular spasm, the muscular fibers being quite relaxed. The treatment was repeated three times a week for about six weeks, at the end of which the husband had no further trouble.’134 It seems extraordinary that McGinnis should have so located the ‘trouble’ in the husband, while the wife presumably had only hypersensitivity, cramping, anxiety and pain of various kinds. It certainly raises questions, to which we have no evidential response, about how vaginismus came to be diagnosed: what kind of complaint was reported to the doctor and by whom? McGinnis had one thing in common with his peers in approaching the condition: it was not the woman as such who required treatment, but the marriage. Between Dunning, Emmet and McGinnis, there were considerable differences of opinion about treatment, with McGinnis being the unchallenged champion of clinical insensitivity. McGinnis may have been the only one to see the husband as the locus and the subject of copulative difficulty, but none of these doctors so much as alluded to the discourse about husbandly responsibility that had become so widespread in France at the time. On the European side of the Atlantic, far from seeking to ensure that the husband ‘had no further trouble’, Dubois and his colleagues were now doing their best to ensure that husbands would be pressured by harsh criticism and insistent medical advice until they learned to play their role in coitus with suitable tact and precision – although the prospect of such moral reform was slim. In the same year as this discussion was being conducted in New York, Dr A. Lutaud published a book entitled Consultations sur les maladies des femmes. This was the same Auguste Lutaud who 16 years earlier had translated Gaillard Thomas’ American gynaecological work into French, intervening heavily at certain points to question the ‘American’ practice of surgery. Lutaud’s new book was not focused on vaginismus: it was concerned more generally with women’s illnesses. But it is interesting to note that considerations about the value and pertinence of surgery that had been aired around vaginismus seemed here to have reached a higher level of generality. Surgery was not a topic for debate

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in Lutaud’s book: it was simply set aside with just a trace of irony. He said in the introduction that he had systematically left out everything to do with gynaecological surgery, not because he was opposed to it in principle, but ‘because I happen to consider that there are very many affections that are not punishable [justiciables] by the scalpel’.135 A few pages later, he included a section devoted to ‘the treatment of anaphrodisia in woman’.136 It should be noted, incidentally, that ‘la femme’, at the end of this title, is ambiguous in French: the title could readily be translated ‘the treatment of anaphrodisia in the wife’. Lutaud referred to the fact that gynaecologists – now established as a profession in France – were consulted by young couples facing this problem: ‘All those who do gynaecology know that the doctor is often consulted by young couples who have come to ask why the sex act for the woman, instead of being associated with sensual delight, often provokes nothing more than repugnance and distaste.’137 Whereas medical writings in preceding decades, including those of Roubaud and Garnier, had considered impotence and frigidity in both sexes, Lutaud was making frigidity, along with vaginismus, the province of gynaecology. He was supposing that frigid women belonged not on the operating table but in the doctor’s consultation room, accompanied by their husbands. Lutaud began this section of his book by insisting that frigidity was to be understood as a sickness, and a serious one at that: ‘The question of frigidity in the wife is more serious than is generally believed. It can, in certain cases, have considerable importance by separating the couple. It must therefore be treated as a morbid entity.’138 Having established the gravity of the disorder and the capacity of his profession to deal with it in principle, he went on to outline the range of descriptions and treatments available to him and his colleagues in 1895. The first means to hand was the ‘moral and hygienic advice’139 retailed so lavishly by colleagues like Garnier. But Lutaud’s specialist role demanded more of him than that, and he proceeded to give a more careful account of the aetiology of the disease. He discerned two main causes. The first was a lack of menstrual flow in the wife, that is, the absence of sexual maturity. The second was a failure of the husband to play his role. What appeared to link the two was the notion that it was the husband’s role to trigger sexual maturity in the wife. There was a visible physiological dysfunction, he said, anchoring the problem in physical medicine, but the dysfunction was brought about by the husband’s failure to arouse desire: ‘Frigidity in the wife is often linked to amenorrhoea and to insufficient development of the genital apparatus. In many cases, this is attributable to the husband, who has not succeeded in awakening

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venereal desire.’140 To the extent that the husband could be led to modify his behaviour, there was still space for ‘moral and hygienic advice’, and that space was, in the succeeding decade, to be deluged with subprofessional literature. But Lutaud the gynaecologist was committed to other kinds of treatment. Having set aside the scalpel, he offered a series of pharmaceutical formulae. These might, he said, have a beneficial effect. However, he then rather undermined the value of pharmaceutical treatment by describing the problem as primarily cerebral: It should not be forgotten that genital erethism [arousal], while it manifests itself in woman by clitoral erection, always has its point of departure in a cerebral impulse. The cure is therefore in the husband’s hands rather than those of the doctor. Genesic [venereal] sense is only acquired in the civilized woman/wife through education and culture.141 As if to compound the difficulty of treatment, Lutaud added at the end of the section on frigidity that ‘electricity has never produced any results for me when applied to anaphrodisia in women’.142 Even as he was claiming frigidity for his profession, he was indicating that the established methods of physical medicine were unlikely to prevail. A great space was being left that would allow ‘moral advice’ to develop into more detailed, more technical forms of medical intervention. That space was to be occupied in the decades that followed by psychosexual medicine and, in a rather different way, by psychoanalysis. We will endeavour to show in Chapters 6 and 7 that those therapies emerged, not as the result of some progression towards a compelling truth, but in response to theoretical and practical opportunities that arose along the way, including the disappointments and inadequacies of physical medicine. Nearly all of the key medical terms examined in our genealogy, ‘female impotence’, ‘anaphrodisia’ and ‘frigidity’ itself, have lost currency in the professional discourse of modern psychiatry. Of the terms we have discussed so far, only vaginismus maintains today the formal status of a psychological disorder. According to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-IV-TR), primary vaginismus is a female sexual dysfunction, specifically a genital pain disorder, consisting in lifelong involuntary spasms of the vaginal muscles, not caused by a general medical condition, which interfere with intercourse, causing distress and interpersonal difficulty.143 It is striking that, of all the terms used to denote female sexual failure, only vaginismus has been

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considered sufficiently technical or physical to remain part of the medical lexicon after feminist critiques had debunked the notion of frigidity during the latter part of the twentieth century. But that is not to say that the definition of vaginismus is unquestioned. An article published in 2003 in the Journal of Psychosomatic Obstetrics and Gynaecology raises doubts about the central, pathognomonic symptom identified by Sims and all those who followed or even preceded him: ‘The definition of vaginismus has proven problematic as there is no evidence that either the superficial or deep pelvic muscles or the smooth muscle of the vaginal wall itself exhibits any muscular “spasm”.’144 It is worth noting that if such revision of the definition were to be successfully pursued, modern vaginismus, however defined, would become quite detached from the set of nineteenth-century themes we have identified in this chapter. No longer would ‘moral’ reluctance in young women be directly articulated with the resistant muscular power of the female genital apparatus. The word might happen to survive, but the historically specific thing would have disappeared, just as ‘female impotence’ did about 100 years ago.

4 The Late Nineteenth Century: A Multiplicity of Genres

In this chapter, we will see how, during the period 1880–1930, a set of propositions about frigidity came to be elaborated and disseminated. In a range of contexts that we are about to describe, it came to be affirmed that many women who seemed cold and unfeeling at the outset might be awakened to pleasure by intercourse with a virile male. In other cases, it was affirmed that cold demeanour in a woman was the result of a perverse denial of her natural dependence on men. Women blocked by the shape of their bodies from the full satisfaction of procreative pleasure might still offer the prospect of a form of sexual excitement despite being constrained by enforced chastity. And others might long for ‘normal’ sexual pleasure while only experiencing desire, occasionally and exceptionally, as the utter loss of self-control. In short, sexual coldness was not so much the mere absence of pleasure that had for so long been given the name ‘female impotence’. Anaphrodisia came to be spoken of primarily as a terrible malfunction of desire, as frigidity became for the first time an object of common knowledge and a commonplace generalization. In this chapter, we will consider where and how this set of routine propositions emerged. In order to do so, we must look in some hitherto unexplored places. However, it is not only the places that are rather new, it is the kind of analysis they require of us. Being careful, not to say self-conscious, about that brings to the fore some issues raised in our Introduction. We referred there to a paradox that attends the history of frigidity. It is that in this book we take sexual coldness as a theme while arguing that a thematic approach of the classic kind is unsuited to our work because it supposes that the central object is more or less identical over time and space. We spoke about this apparent contradiction in terms of ‘words’ and ‘things’ and indicated that our study would begin with words, taking the set of terms frigidity, frigidité and frigiditas as its vade 100

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mecum. It is now time to return to that paradox and address it in a new way. The aim of this chapter will be to tease out and exemplify some methodological implications for any study that finds the same thematic ‘thing’ in a wide variety of genres. Accordingly, this chapter will be different from the first three. We will of course continue to examine the historical development of ideas about female coldness, and we have just indicated some new propositions that will emerge, but we want to insist on the historiographical implications of pursuing our theme across a range of generic places. As noted in the Introduction, Thomas Laqueur’s work provided us in the recent past with an occasion to reflect on historiographical method. We took the opportunity in a collective publication, while interrogating Laqueur’s practice, to affirm the mutual implication of words and things.1 If words and things are understood to be inextricably bound together, the object of historical study readily becomes what Foucault and so many others call discourse. It might be said that the concept of discourse, understood well, captures both the inertia of language and the materiality of reference – the fact that words tend to persist in usage, and the fact that referring produces concrete effects. But there is a further question that calls for attention at this point in our study. It is that the objects of knowledge carried by or embedded in discourse are themselves likely to vary according to generic circumstance. That is a point made by Ivan Crozier in a 2004 review of Laqueur’s Solitary Sex. Crozier regrets the fact that Laqueur’s ambitious study fails to take proper account of discursive fields: Laqueur’s book is definitely far-reaching. He romps from these various treatments of masturbation with an unnerving ease. There is not a careful mapping of discursive fields that treated the problem; the object of masturbation is widely treated as the same thing after the watershed of the period around 1712. In all, for my tastes, there is too much jumping about between these various fields. More than this, there is too much ‘influence’ from culture (economics, philosophy, etc.) on medical thought, and too much counter-influence from medicine. A solution to this historiographical tension would be to address the problem in terms of fields, not themes, and demonstrate more actively re-articulation of concepts between these fields, rather than impute ‘cultural influences’.2 What Crozier discreetly refers to here as a matter of taste is clearly an important issue of historical method, and has to do with the

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epistemological status of themes. The point of his objection is that ‘masturbation’, despite what Laqueur seems to suppose, is not reliably the same object of knowledge when constituted within, say, theological, medical or economic discourses. Taking account of each field, and understanding its specific constraints and its overall economy, is, for Crozier, if not a strict requirement, at least a highly preferable way to write cultural or intellectual history. Crozier does not appear to be arguing that there is, in any given instance, only one discursive field worthy of the historian’s attention. That might commit him to the notion that, for example, a history of masturbation ought to concentrate exclusively on popular medical advice manuals. Nor does he appear to be saying that the theme of masturbation, as developed by Laqueur, has no consistency or substance. His concern, presumably, is not to put an end to Laqueur’s brilliant thematics, but to restrict their speed of movement across discursive fields – at the very least to make that movement more self-conscious, more deliberate. It cannot be a matter of confining a given history to a specific genre, but of paying attention to generic difference as one moves from place to place. We see something like this operative in the work of Niklaus Largier, In Praise of the Whip, which, in the author’s words ‘brings together numerous forms of archivization, description, textual paraphrase, archeological cross sections, and genealogical links’.3 Largier’s text spans a historical range comparable to that of our own study, focusing on flagellation conceived variously as religious practice, ecstatic experience, libertine pleasure and corporal punishment. His study works across a range of genres, at each point allowing for the shifting nature of the object of study, with its specific conceptualization and its local definition. We share that concern about genre, and are endeavouring to translate it here into what might be thought of as a circumscribed thematics, a thematics constrained by attention to fields of discourse. We see this as an application of the Foucauldian principle, enunciated by Paul Veyne, that ‘ontologically speaking, there exist only variations, the transhistorical theme being only a name void of meaning’.4 It would be misleading to suppose that all genres are equally available to the same extent for the study of a given theme, and there are in fact two reasons why that is so. The first is that genres are topical: a given genre tends to have its habitual subjects. The second reason is that, while genres typically have unequal prestige, any hierarchy of genres is not historically stable. The first reason, topicality, motivated our choice of method in the early chapters of this book. But it is the

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second reason that matters most in this chapter. A hierarchy of genres, we contend, is an artefact of intellectual and cultural history. We have already had cause to note how medical and legal discourses were governed in early modern canon law by the authority of Catholic doctrine, which diminished from the eighteenth century onwards. Ecclesial prescriptions have long since ceased to be the place in which the most influential notion of frigidity might be found. From the early twentieth century onwards, frigidity’s most prestigious location was in the specialist field of psychological medicine. But it would be naïve to suppose that the authority to define frigidity somehow migrated intact from canon law to psychosexual medicine. In between, there were striking changes in generic and discursive hierarchies, and we are about to focus here on a period of critical change in that regard. Twentieth and twenty-firstcentury medical knowledge is typically elaborated in specialist places, then interpreted, applied and disseminated in others. But neither that hierarchy of genres nor that locus of authority was reliably established in the concluding decades of the nineteenth century – certainly not in France. In the late nineteenth century, we have found forms of discourse about sexuality that traversed artistic, literary, medical, psychiatric and pornographic genres. New types of intellectual labour and publication culture emerged in this period, depending variously on the authority and seductive currency of these genres. This is where the challenge to the historical method arises. How does one read the multiplicity, instability and mobility of discursive fields within the rhetorical framework of a single study that is, by academic habit and professional necessity, rhetorically committed to a singular object? Or, to put it in terms that respond directly to Crozier’s stricture, how do we read instability without taking it as a pretext for a loosely associative thematics? How do we bring care and precision to the study of mobile objects of knowledge? We can best do so by describing the circumstances in which mobility manifests itself, attempting to understand where and when a hierarchy of discourses proved in the past to be unstable. In the history of sexual coldness and the related concepts we chart here, just such a moment occurred in the last decades of the nineteenth century and the first decade of the twentieth. That was a time when, as we shall demonstrate, psychosexual medicine developed in several places at once, across a range of genres. After 1880 or so, ideas about frigidity in particular did not always appear first in the discoveries and pronouncements of eminent medical specialists, to be subsequently popularized and disseminated through a range of less prestigious genres. We will in fact trace the emergence of a highly iterative, if not always

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logically consistent, set of propositions for which leadership was taken at different times by different genres. And that is what calls for a change of method. We were able in Chapter 1 to confine our attention to canon law texts, since in early modern times frigiditas was most often discussed in forensic contexts. And because female impotence was to the fore in medical discussion for about 100 years from 1780, we concentrated on that discursive field in Chapter 2. Moreover, since vaginismus was a product of specialist medical discourse, we were able in Chapter 3 to consider only texts in the field of gynaecology. But we shall argue in Chapters 4 and 5 that, during the last decades of the nineteenth century and the first decade of the twentieth, frigidity functioned quite broadly as a theme, developing across a range of genres, including authoritative medical writing, popular writing about sexual hygiene and a variety of fictional texts. We will point to evidence that, at least during a period of about 30 years beginning around 1880, a certain kind of fiction came to the fore, functioning as a discursive field in which standard narratives about sexual coldness were elaborated and their consequences explored. Other historians have had occasion to observe that French fin-desiècle culture was characterized by a remarkable mixture of genres. Rae Beth Gordon, for example, talks about the ‘unbelievable pot-pourri’ of genres to be found in Montmartre music halls.5 How was it possible to move so freely, in that one place, between ‘epileptic’ dancing and maudlin sentimentality? Angus McLaren describes the quasi-medical texts of Dr Jaf (Jean Fauconney) as a ‘curious and comforting hodgepodge’ filled with ‘ambiguous or contradictory information’.6 McLaren notes that ‘Dr Fauconney even tried his hand at writing a pornographic novel about prostitution.’ How could a writer navigate so freely between scientific popularization, moralizing talk and pornography?7 And how could all of his works be listed in the same publisher’s catalogue? Those are the kinds of questions that interest us here. The challenge as we see it is to take generic amalgams of this kind, not as mere curiosities, but as demanding objects of study. There must be a configuration of knowledge here that historical inquiry can seek to retrieve. Our hypothesis is that it was precisely thematic commonplaces that allowed these genres to cohabit so easily. By ‘commonplace’ we mean propositions that are routinely available within a given discursive space, and indeed help to constitute that space as an intellectual and rhetorical place. During this period in France, it seems that a multiplicity of genres were held together by shared views about sexuality, including the notion of frigidity. This remarkable clustering made room for new forms of authorial versatility, such as that of Jean Fauconney, whose ideas could traverse fields as

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diverse as middlebrow fiction, pornography, marriage advice manuals and medical tracts. Our first task, then, is to give an account of a fluid milieu. In late-nineteenth-century Paris, works of imagination were published and distributed alongside other kinds of texts that might loosely be termed scientific. The very looseness, the uneven, shifting relationship between genres meant that knowledge about sexual coldness circulated and developed in ways that modern observers might find surprising. Although most of us are used to supposing, for example, that medical and literary writing are quite distinct in principle, many of the texts that we discuss in this chapter are likely to resist classification and analysis. Anyone who supposed, furthermore, that only the most prestigious medical and literary writings were worthy of study would not only fail to consider a profusion of other texts, but might also fail to find those promiscuous places in which our theme was most clearly at work. One factor worthy of note here is the uncertainty that surrounded the professional boundaries of medicine in nineteenth-century France. Historian George Weisz has followed the rather fraught process by which medical education was standardized in the course of the century: Numerous attempts were made during the Restoration and July Monarchy to transform the system of medical training. These failed because of ministerial instability and because educational reform became entangled with a variety of controversial political issues, notably the suppression of the officiers de santé and the extension of state power in the field of health care.8 Lowering the status of officiers de santé, holders of what Weisz calls ‘a kind of second-class doctorate permitting the practice of medicine under severe restrictions’,9 and eventually eliminating this underqualified group from the profession were important phases in the process, but they were not quickly achieved. An entry in Paul Labarthe’s Dictionnaire populaire de médecine usuelle d’hygiène publique et privée showed that the matter was still contested and unresolved in 1885. In an entry titled ‘Medicine’, Labarthe wrote: Any officier de santé [health officer] who practises medicine outside the administrative area in which he was admitted can be charged with practising medicine illegally under the law of Ventôse. If he takes the title of ‘docteur’, he is wrongfully assuming that title according to Trébuchet. The Appeals Court is not of this opinion, and has

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ruled that a health officer holding a degree who takes the title of doctor commits a reprehensible act of vanity, but is not punishable under the law of Ventôse. The Tribunal of the Seine has accepted that interpretation.10 Only in 1892 did the elimination of officiers de santé come into law, along with the official recognition of medical syndicates.11 That was a major victory for professional medicine, but the legislation did not put an end, as we shall see, to the use of the title ‘Docteur’ by purveyors of medical knowledge whose qualifications were uncertain or unofficial. It is indicative of the state of the field that medical writing at this time did not function as a singular genre. For the sake of an overview, it is better to focus attention on publishers and on the groups of authors who made up their catalogues rather than on individual writers. There were, of course, eminent medical figures who published their work, but many others of lesser standing were active and influential in various ways. Without entering into an extensive discussion of medical publishing, we will endeavour to indicate the thematic and generic range of the works published during this period. Sylvie Chaperon, in her history of the origins of sexology in France, gives a helpful lead by describing localities in Paris where medical publishers were found. The first of these was the Carrefour de L’Odéon, near the Faculté de Médecine, and it included such successful houses as Baillière and Vigot.12 Another, less well-defined group could be found scattered more widely throughout Paris. These publishers attempted to reach a broad public by producing, in Chaperon’s words, ‘works of popularization [French vulgarisation] that rubbed shoulders more and more with decadent fin-de-siècle literature’.13 On the Right Bank, a third group of publishers who were also booksellers moved to capture a ‘market that lumped together pornographic literature, studies of sexual customs [études de mœurs], guides to sexual tourism in Paris, medical treatises on sexuality, erotic postcards and condoms, all of which were sold by correspondence’.14 It should be apparent from Chaperon’s description that the multiplicity of genres increased as one descended the scale of prestige. The specialist medical publishers traded in works written by the most eminent professors for other members of the profession. The second group produced texts in which medical knowledge was made available to an informed public alongside literary works. And the third group offered an extraordinary variety. That variety did, of course, have a commercial rationale: all of the objects for sale had to do with sexuality. To put it in our terms, a thematic coherence of sorts was all the more

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visible, and doubtless all the more necessary, as the variety of genres increased. In the most eminent group were professors at the leading Facultés de Médecine and members of the Académie de Médecine. Some of them made significant contributions to the development of psychosexual medicine, but they usually did so by focusing on specialist topics such as hysteria, epilepsy and the symptoms of assault. Included in their number were Ambroise Tardieu (1818–79) and Léon Thoinot (1858–1915), both professors at the Paris Ecole de Médecine. Prominent alienists (specialists in the treatment of madness with leading roles in the asylums La Salpêtrière and Bicêtre) can also be seen as belonging to this group. JeanMartin Charcot (1825–93), Henri Legrand du Saulle (1830–86), Valentin Magnan (1835–1916) and Charles Féré (1852–1907) were undoubtedly the best known.15 One of the characteristics of their writing that distinguished it generically from other works we are about to discuss was the extensive use of protocols of reference that served to position their work in relation to that of other leading scientists, in France and elsewhere. These professors of medicine, it should be noted, are the figures who have primarily drawn the attention of historical scholars to date.16 The second class of medical writing merits closer attention here, precisely because it treats sexuality as a thematic gathering place. Vigot Frères, a respectable publisher, entered this field by producing a series that was initially titled ‘Perversions sexuelles’, later becoming ‘Perturbations sexuelles’, with the addition of the explanatory subtitle ‘Psychologie, Pathologie, Thérapeutique’. ‘Perversions’ had connotations that were perhaps difficult to manage, and ‘perturbations’ may have appeared to be a more neutral, more scientific term, while the subtitle certainly attempted to hold the series firmly within the medical field. The title page of each volume listed the author’s qualifications, and each was a member of the medical profession. Most of these titles appeared during the last few years of the nineteenth century and the first decade of the twentieth, although some of them were re-editions of works that had appeared a decade or two earlier in a series published by Bataille entitled ‘Bibliothèque des perversions sexuelles’. Works of this kind exhibited a number of recurring tendencies. They were quite often self-conscious, for example, about the business of popularization. Edmond Langlebert produced a short work entitled Syphilis et mariage with the explicit purpose of being socially useful in just that way. He was, according to the title page, both a ‘docteur en médecine’ and an ‘officier d’académie’, and his self-appointed task was ‘the popularization [vulgarisation] of this very important aspect of social

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hygiene’.17 His 24-page book was, as an internal reference makes clear, a condensed version of a learned work, which was more than 300 pages long and had been published a few years before by Langlebert himself.18 Despite the exiguity of the text, Langlebert still found space to belittle another author who had written on the subject. That author, whose name was Fournier, had previously described Langlebert as a master of this field of knowledge, but had since gone into print taking positions that were implicitly critical of the master. The unfortunate Fournier was referred to only by his family name, but was presumably Henri Fournier, whom we will have cause to mention a little later. Langlebert set about putting him in his place, by calling him a ‘vulgarizer’: This is not the first time that we have had to defend ourselves against the excessive pretentiousness of this doctor who, despite the most generous compensations, has not yet resigned himself to playing the straightforward role of vulgarizer for which he is suited by his talents and by his lack of seniority in our ranks.19 Even as Langlebert himself was engaging in vulgarisation, he made a clear distinction between himself and those doctors who, in his view, were not qualified to play more distinguished roles. He ended his note with a provocative statement that was not so much a challenge to Fournier as a call for a scientific assessment of his worth: ‘we challenge anyone at all to show us in Mr Fournier’s books, beneath their pompous, sonorous rhetoric, one single idea that comes from him, one single new fact that he has contributed to science’.20 Unlike the professors, who were not required to do this kind of defensive work, Langlebert was consolidating his position in the hierarchy by attacking someone who occupied a less prestigious place. That was precisely what it meant in practice to occupy an intermediate position: one could ill afford to ignore contestation from below. A second feature of books in this category was their quite regular use of fictional stories as medical examples. In Sadisme et masochisme, which appeared in 1903 and was the eleventh in the Vigot series, Dr Emile Laurent entered into a seven-page discussion of Zola’s La Bête humaine, declaring that ‘Emile Zola, in his novel [ . . . ] provides a masterly analysis of a sadistic type that has almost the value of a medical case study. It really is a human document.’21 Later in the same book, Laurent offered Jean Richepin’s play La Glu as an example of ‘sexual servitude’.22 And in another work, L’Amour morbide (1891), he made the general point that stories of the kind he was presenting as exemplary case histories

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were often told by novelists: ‘Indeed novelists have been able to draw admirably on these unfortunate effects of pathological passion, and their books are full of painful stories like those I have just been telling.’23 Later in the same text, he mentioned a further example in Zola’s work, citing La Faute de l’abbé Mouret as an example of ‘erotomania’.24 For all these marks of professional and literary dignity, books in the Vigot series also promised readers a prurient mix of experiences. They carried a number of generic markers whose function was to guarantee a scientific purpose, but thrilling emotions were on offer as a bonus. In Sadisme et masochisme, Laurent presented a particular section of his text as both a ‘parade’ and a ‘document’: We are going to review in this chapter the best known sadists who have been called to account for their crimes by courts of justice. This horrible parade of monstrosities will constitute a medicopsychological document drawn from the sources that are most reliable and most interesting from a scientific point of view.25 In another book in the same series, L’Occultisme et l’amour, Laurent indulged in some cross-promotion: ‘L’Amour morbide by Dr Emile Laurent can be purchased at the bookshop of Vigot Frères. This work, which has been well received, is one of the most curious to be found on this disturbing topic.’26 ‘Curious’ and ‘disturbing’ (troublant) were epithets often associated with erotic literature, and Laurent was happy to attach them to his own work along with the claim to scientificity. But he refused to include in his texts anything that could readily be identified as obscene, arguing that the scenes he described as occurring in supposedly oriental phallic cults were specifically excluded from that category: ‘There is nothing obscene about them’, he said.27 Books like Laurent’s claimed to inhabit an exciting and scientifically valuable space on the near side of the obscene and the pornographic. The genre-troubling effects of sexuality as a theme seem to have been felt by most publishers, including those who were located close to the Faculté de Médecine. Not only did Vigot claim a place in this market, but so did Baillière, the publisher of Legrand du Saulle and Tardieu. Baillière attached to one of its 1893 publications a list of books for sale that included major works by its most prestigious authors – Legrand du Saulle on hysterics, Tardieu on sexual assault – but also offered, among these, titles that belonged to a ‘Petite bibliothèque médicale’, on subjects such as contraception and onanism. Cohabiting in the list with both of these kinds of texts were books that belonged to a ‘Bibliothèque

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médicale variée’. The latter was a collection actually named for its ‘variety’, although the variety in question was supported and contained by a shared thematic. The (sub)collection included books about such topics as hygiene for virginal young women, female genital malformation, hermaphrodism and sexual customs (mœurs) in ancient Rome. There were no books about topics unrelated to sexuality. It was as if ‘variety’ itself had become a publicist’s code word. Another characteristic of books in this intermediate class was their concern with standards of reference. The fifth book in the Vigot series was entitled Psychopathie sexuelle I. De l’onanisme chez la femme, and was written by Thésée Pouillet, a fully qualified medical doctor who practised at Noisy-le-Sec on the eastern outskirts of Paris. Pouillet had defended a thesis on gonorrhoea in men at the Faculty of Medicine of Paris.28 His works on masturbation were reprinted many times throughout the 1870s, 1880s and 1890s by the publishing houses Delahaye, Bataille and Vigot.29 The 1897 edition of De l’onanisme chez la femme in the Vigot series appears to be a revamped version of an earlier work from which Pouillet had drawn a number of publications over several decades. In this later version of the book, Pouillet launched an attack on Henri Fournier, the author of a work on onanism published in Baillière’s ‘Petite bibliothèque médicale’.30 This was presumably the same Fournier who had drawn the ire of Langlebert for his lack of originality. But Pouillet’s point against him was a narrower one. It was not that Fournier’s work failed to innovate – it was that much of it was actually plagiarized. Fournier’s ‘booklet’ on onanism was hardly more than ‘an assemblage of passages and quotations taken from various authors whose names are not identified nearly as often as they should be’.31 Professional standards would have required due recognition of the work of others, but this unworthy author was failing to observe them. The fact that Fournier was denounced for unsourced quotations, just as he had been denounced elsewhere for his lack of scientific invention, suggested that this was a milieu in which professional standards were being applied.32 The third group of bookseller–publishers, of whom the most successful were Offenstadt, Paul Fort, the Bibliothèque du fin du siècle and Méricant, produced a remarkable range of texts in a manner unconstrained by the rules of the medical profession or by scruples about the use of others’ material. Yet while they made no show of professional standards, they were far from indifferent to the prestige of medical discourse. Indeed, that is the particular challenge they present to our study, for they could not exploit medical knowledge about sexuality without actually retailing and disseminating it. The fast and loose

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exchanges in which they engaged were, in our view, historically significant for the elaboration of discourse about the sexual, including frigidity. The catalogues of these third-class publishers were full of works by authors who claimed the title Docteur but provided no evidence of their qualifications. While they can be readily disparaged as an undistinguished group of self-appointed experts, there is much to be gained from examining the views they borrowed and shared, even though historians of sexuality have so far paid them almost no attention. The list of docteurs includes such names as Caufeynon, Riolan, Rhazis, Désormeaux and Eynon.33 Most of these names are not to be found in indexes of qualified medical practitioners, or even in civil records, and some are clearly pseudonyms. Riolan was the name of not one but two famous doctors who had lived and practised in sixteenth and seventeenth-century Paris, while Rhazis was the name of a Persian doctor who lived and wrote in the ninth and tenth centuries. The name Caufeynon, moreover, is an anagram of (Jean) Fauconney, and it is perfectly possible that Dr Eynon was another pseudonym for the same writer. Besides, it is far from certain that each of these names corresponds to an individual author. We are sure that Jean Fauconney used at least two noms de plume: Dr Caufeynon and Dr Jaf. A close examination of the texts produced by these authors obliges us to think of them as a group that exchanged identities almost as readily as they exchanged the statements that made up their knowledge. The names of some docteurs were attached to collections – that extended in one case to 20 slim volumes – offering quasi-encyclopaedic medical instruction of a sexual kind. Whereas the ‘petites bibliothèques’ produced by more distinguished publishers such as Vigot and Baillière had been compilations of specialist contributions, the ‘libraries’ published by Offenstadt and his colleagues were presented in their entirety as the work of a single author. During the first decade of the twentieth century, Dr Désormeaux produced the ‘Bibliothèque sexuelle du Dr Désormeaux’, Dr Caufeynon (Fauconney) published the ‘Bibliothèque populaire des connaissances médicales’, and Dr Riolan a ‘Collection exclusive d’hygiène et de medicine’.34 All attempted to cover the range from virginity to venereal disease, all contained some discussion of frigidity, and all, it might be said, were aimed at a reading public that could paradoxically recognize itself in a library claiming to be both ‘populaire’ and ‘exclusive’. It seems to us important not to neglect these quasi-medical writings on the grounds that they were found in publishers’ catalogues alongside texts of a broadly pornographic kind. One might well argue, in fact,

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that this was, at the time, one of the rare environments in which knowledge about the sexual could be gathered and commercially exploited. Charcot had effectively found another form of exploitation by publicly displaying the bodies of hysterical women in his famous Tuesday demonstrations at the Salpêtrière, but there were few formal opportunities in late-nineteenth-century France for the public dissemination of medical knowledge about sex. The opportunities that arose were taken up by this unstable set of publishers who borrowed authors and texts from each other. Evidence of that traffic can be found, for example, in a 1909 catalogue produced by the publisher De Porter, which is included at the end of Dr Rhazis’s L’Initiation amoureuse. The catalogue contains Amour inverti, by Jean de Cherveix, which had long been a staple of the Offenstadt catalogue, as well as Hypnotisme et magnétisme, by Caufeynon, which appears to be the same text as his Hypnotisme et suggestion, published by Offenstadt without a date a few years earlier. The De Porter catalogue also contains Les Mémoires d’une chaise longue, by Victorien du Saussay, which had been published by Méricant in 1903, and Caufeynon’s Scènes d’amour morbide. Observations psycho-physiologiques, published by Paul Fort in 1903. Similarly, in the catalogue that appears at the end of Riolan’s Chasteté, virginité et célibat, published in 1909 by the Librairie Artistique et Médicale F. Pierre, we find La Volupté féroce, a novel by René Saint-Médard, which had been published by the Bibliothèque du fin du siècle in 1905, together with Caufeynon’s Scènes d’amour morbide once again. The latter must have been a great success because it also appears in the advertising at the end of Dr Désormeaux’s Anatomie et fonctions des organes génitaux (1905), which bears the publisher’s name ‘Librairie P. Fort, L. Chaubard, Successeur’. Paul Fort had gone out of business by 1905 and Offenstadt by 1909 after he had been fined and sentenced to a month in prison ‘for having placed on sale books that ran counter to public morality’.35 But publishers could come and go. In this milieu, every publisher was likely to find an immediate, self-appointed ‘successor’. Unreferenced borrowing was rife among the authors, and may have actually been productive in its own way. While it must have seemed appropriate for Pouillet to call Fournier to account as an unworthy and marginal member of the medical profession, no eminent colleague called Désormeaux, Caufeynon or Riolan to account for such things. Partly as a consequence of this, the circulation of borrowed statements in their work produced knowledge about sexuality that had historical moment without being original in any scientific or literary sense. Brigitte Lhomond, who is one of very few historians to

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mention this group of publishers and their authors, speaks of them rather dismissively, but is obliged to note the evidence of their impact: A number of publishers shared and exchanged authors and endlessly republished certain titles, creating a set of descriptions, injunctions and prescriptions for their reading public. These collections were sold by correspondence, and the number of titles as well as the number of reeditions points to a significant readership.36 Some of the propositions that made up these descriptions and prescriptions seemed to have become so thoroughly available for iteration that hardly anyone in this milieu could forbear from reproducing them. Questions of individual authorship were in fact so completely lost from view that it becomes difficult and perhaps unrewarding, in retrospect, to define the individuality of one person’s thinking or the integrity of one text. Whole sentences and even paragraphs reappeared from one publication to another, in a manner which was hardly ever subject to censure. Against that background, a tirade about unreferenced quotations published in 1887 may seem to provide a kind of moral relief for modern readers. J.-P. Dartigues, in a book entitled De l’amour expérimental ou des causes d’adultère chez la femme au XIXe siècle, expressed strong disapproval of the tendency in his time not to acknowledge sources: In the eighteenth century, it was still considered highly meritorious for an author to display great erudition and cite many passages from the most respectable authorities. That made it possible to identify the author’s personal contribution. [ . . . ] In our day, people have moved from one excess to another, and a young man just out of high school is likely to put together a book made of borrowed parts in which he avoids mentioning his sources, and by means of which he sometimes passes, in the eyes of those who have no taste for going back to originals, for a man of letters who has many years of observation and experience behind him.37 In practice, no one appears to have been shamed by this reprimand. Caufeynon was not deterred from copying several pages of that very book, reproducing them without acknowledgement in his own text Orgasme. Sens génial jadis et aujourd’hui.38 But there is really no reason why Caufeynon or anyone else should have been shamed. The tirade itself had been copied word for word from a much earlier text that stood

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nearer to the cusp of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries: FrançoisEmmanuel Fodéré’s Traité de médecine légale et d’hygiène publique ou de police de santé, which dated from 1813.39 It may perhaps be a sign of the times, or of the milieu, that Dartigues had to go back more than 70 years in order to find a strong attack on plagiarism that he could plagiarize. This seems to have been an environment in which it was a matter of indifference to most writers, readers and publishers who said what first. Historians might decide to interpret this set of habits, somewhat generously, as a symptom of the excitement generated by the diffusion of new knowledge. At the very least, it seems to have been a time in which repeated affirmation was the dominant rhetorical mode. Indeed, the milieu on which we focus in this chapter offers a study in commonplaces – in the sense of propositions serving to constitute ‘common sense’ within a group – that were exchanged freely across a broad generic range. This is when frigidity actually became a theme in Laqueur’s sense, as it moved between scientific discourse (including ‘popular’ science) and fictional representation. For that reason, we will consider some ideas about frigidity here, not as the subject of those learned polemics that opposed Zacchia to Sanchez in Chapter 1, Garnier to Roubaud in Chapter 2, and Lutaud to Sims in Chapter 3, but as late-nineteenth-century home truths. We need to understand the trade in unsourced knowledge, and that calls for a refinement of method. We could have set out to track and denounce particular cases of plagiarism, but there seems little point in that. It would effectively be an exercise in anachronistic interpretation, since we have little or no evidence that the notion of individual intellectual property was pertinent in this milieu. Instead, we have two positive aims in this chapter. The first, which has occupied us to date, is to describe the range of publishing about sexuality in France. The second, on which we are about to begin, will be to show that certain propositions about sexuality and about frigidity in particular were circulating freely, and to relate those propositions to ideas that had been the subject of more formal debate in earlier times. Were these the most important things said at the time on the subject of sexual coldness? They were not particularly original, but the fact that they were disseminated so widely is testimony at the very least to their persuasive force. It would be better to speak here of the ‘currency’ of certain propositions rather than their ‘authority’, reserving the notion of authority for works emanating from the Faculty of Medicine and places of comparable standing. But we will suggest in effect that the circulation of propositions across discursive fields tended to blur the difference

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between currency and authority, allowing frequency to do the work of eminence. It is worth recalling briefly some pertinent aspects of our history up to this point. In Chapter 2, we showed that, from about 1830 onwards, almost everyone who took on the question of female impotence and its attendant themes began their discussion by insisting that key terms in this field had not been properly defined. The very fact that each new author attacked the topic in much the same way suggested that previous attempts to define terms had been unsuccessful, or at least unpersuasive. Roubaud, in 1855, had drawn a clear difference between female sterility and female impotence, the latter being defined as a pathological inability to play the normal female role in coitus. Fonssagrives, in 1864, insisted on making a clear distinction between frigidity (or anaphrodisia) and impotence, identifying the three elements of frigidity as the lack of appetite, the lack of arousal and the lack of satisfaction. Garnier, in 1882, defined anaphrodisia as arising from purely moral or psychical causes, impotence being occasioned by physical ones. Each of these was a contribution to a slowly emerging understanding of female frigidity as a pathological dysfunction of sexual desire and pleasure. In order to follow talk about frigidity during the decades following 1880, we are obliged to look in a variety of places, as ideas about sexual coldness were traded freely and without copyright in a middlebrow, medico-literary milieu that was inhabited, among others, by pseudonymous doctors, by novelists, and by assorted historians and anthropologists. The ideas and stories that circulated were not radically new with respect to those we have been discussing so far, as can be seen by the titles of individual volumes in each of the three ‘libraries’ of popular medical knowledge referred to earlier. Volume 9 in Caufeynon’s collection was entitled L’Impuissance et la stérilité chez l’homme et la femme, volume 8 of Désormeaux’s Impuissance et stérilité, and volume 7 of Riolan’s collection Impuissance, frigidité, stérilité. Clearly, ‘frigidity’ was still to be found dwelling alongside the concepts that had been its neighbours in early modern canon law. But the very fact of deploying these terms in less distinguished generic locations effected a kind of change. Frigidity became current in non-specialist discourse, as the commercial exploitation of psychosexual medicine gave it a place in everyday discussion. We will now consider a few examples of the thematic work done by unacknowledged quotation. They will enable us to exemplify the process of circulation even as we pursue our intellectual history. The first example is a straightforward enough reprise of a proposition

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encountered in Chapter 2, and it will allow us to demonstrate the kind of textual exchange that typically went on between popular medical texts. In 1909, Dr Riolan published the eighth volume of his ‘Collection exclusive d’hygiène et de médecine’. In it, Riolan offered a definition of frigidity, and was at pains to distinguish frigidity from impotence. He was in fact doing what had been done for the best part of a century, rehearsing an old habit of thinking while seeking to undo it. Frigidity was defined here as a distinctively ‘moral’ thing, while impotence was a physical inability to achieve satisfaction: Sexual frigidity, or anaphrodisia, is indifference to the pleasures of love, moral indifference of course. Anaphrodisia must not be confused with impotence. The first is the absence of venereal desires, whereas with impotence there are desires, but it is physically impossible to satisfy them.40 At the end of this book, as with all the others in the series, there are pages advertising other titles being distributed by the same publisher. Listed among them is Dr Eynon’s Manuel de l’amour conjugal. In that book one can read a statement in which most of the words are exactly the same as in Riolan’s text: Frigidity or the indifference to the pleasures of love has as its scientific name ‘anaphrodisia’. It constitutes the state of inertia of the genital organs and the moral indifference of the person concerned toward everything that has to do with the reproductive act. Anaphrodisia must not be confused with impotence. The first is the absence of venereal desires, whereas with impotence there is desire, but it is physically impossible to satisfy them.41 There are many more sentences common to both texts. Did Eynon copy from Riolan, or Riolan from Eynon? Did both copy from a third person? Are they different names for the same person? Is Eynon a truncation of ‘Caufeynon’, and therefore a previously unidentified synonym for the ubiquitous Fauconney? And why was the publisher offering both titles in the same catalogue? Was it just to multiply sales? None of these questions is likely to find a definitive answer. But the very fact that the two texts are so similar without being identical serves to exemplify our point about discursive circulation. By about the first decade of the twentieth century, there was something sayable and knowable about frigidity that required one to distinguish between a complete lack of desire on

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the one hand, and the inability to achieve true pleasure on the other. More particularly, the ‘moral’ element of desire was now given a primary definitional role, so that impotence had become the very inability to satisfy desire, where it had once been the impossibility of performing coitus. That use of the moral–physical distinction was consonant with the position of Pierre Garnier discussed in Chapter 2, except that the ‘moral’ had now moved closer to the libidinal. When Eynon reproduced Riolan’s text – or when the same pseudonymous author wrote both – it was clearly not a matter of copying word for word, although it is intriguing to note that the last phrase contains a plural complement that is grammatically correct in Riolan’s text and incorrect in Eynon’s. This suggests that part of the second text may have been somewhat carelessly transcribed from the first. Perhaps Eynon’s statement is both a slightly inaccurate copy and a thorough reiteration of Riolan’s. Here is a second example of the same practice. In Dr Caufeynon’s L’Impuissance et la stérilité chez l’homme et la femme, which dates from 1904, we read: ‘Frigidity is much less common in women than people suppose.’42 In his Histoire de la femme, we find exactly the same sentence,43 but we should not be surprised to find him repeating key statements from one text to another. What is noteworthy is that the same sentence appears once again in Dr Désormeaux’s L’Impuissance et la stérilité, the first volume of which dates from 1905.44 We know in this case that neither was the inventor, since Fonssagrives had used almost the same words – ‘frigidity, much less common in women than people suppose’ – in his 1864 dictionary entry on anaphrodisia.45 But there is some evidence to suggest that the meaning of this proposition had shifted by the time it came to circulate between Caufeynon and Désormeaux. Roubaud had argued in 1855 that complete insensitivity in women was rarer than was generally thought, but he was making a physiological point about the functioning of female sexual organs, which Fonssagrives took up in turn. Their target was the old notion that women were naturally cold by temperament. Caufeynon did not take a consistent position on that, so his point could not have been simply the same. He and Désormeaux, as well as any others who copied the sentence, must have been using this statement to make an epidemiological point: instances of pathological frigidity, in their view, were clinically rare. That point was not, of course, based on case studies carried out by them or by anyone else. Unacknowledged quotation made it a matter of dogma. Readers of popular medical texts were being reminded of the old view and then called on, without evidence, to give it up in favour of the new one.

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Here is a third and final example of unsourced quotation, among many that we could have provided. Dr Jaf (Fauconney) writes in L’Amour secret: ‘In amorous coupling, there should really only be common, reciprocal pleasure [jouissance]. But ignorance and neglect on the part of the man about the conditions and laws of love are the most frequent causes of coldness in the woman.’46 In L’Amour conjugal, Dr Désormeaux produces the same two sentences.47 Fauconney and Désormeaux together help to reinforce and disseminate the theme of the male partner’s responsibility for frigidity in the female. That theme had already taken a strong place in talk about sexual coldness as a pathology. We saw it emerge in Chapter 3, and will return to it at length in Chapter 5. Here, with the help of unacknowledged quotation, it is treated with all the familiarity that might attend a fundamental truth. Examples like this allow us to see discourse at work. We saw in Chapter 3 how the talk of feathers as vaginal probes seemed to have a life of its own in professional medicine, but here we see something more substantive. The insistent statement that women were not generally frigid, and that it was a mistake to believe them so marked a significant historical change. The constantly repeated claim to correct popular beliefs about ubiquitous female frigidity can be taken as a sign that something we might properly call a discourse was in circulation. In evoking that perhaps overused Foucauldian term, we refer not merely to the repetition of expressions and even entire slabs of text about frigidity, vaginismus and the like, although repetition is certainly a crucial element. Rather we have cause to call these articulations ‘discourse’ as a way of describing their movement across genres, their rapidly proliferating uptake, and their fixation in particular claims and expressions. All of this suggests that the ideas concerned had developed a contagious currency, a kind of cultural power that engaged with concrete institutions in the medical profession. If metaphorical paradox were to be indulged here, we could say that frigidity had become a hot topic. Analysis of these texts teaches us relatively little about the individuals in this milieu, but it does allow us to identify a set of turn-of-the-century commonplaces about frigidity: a complete lack of desire had to be distinguished from an inability to find satisfaction; frigidity in women was not nearly as widespread as was generally supposed; and women’s coldness was typically caused by men’s ineptitude. This seems to be how knowledge developed in such discursive circumstances: it was sustained by insistence, and disseminated by routine plagiarism. It did happen on occasion that third-class medical writers cited eminent medical figures in their texts, but the inconsistency of this practice

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and the lack of precise referencing when it did happen to appear suggest that the authors were seeking to benefit rhetorically from the standing of those referred to, rather than providing documentation for scientific purposes. Their practice of citation, while occasional in both senses of the word, raises an interesting problem of definition that leads us back to a comparison with the more distinguished Vigot and Baillière series. Is it appropriate to think of Fauconney, Riolan and so on as popularizers? Did they stand between the advanced medical knowledge of the professors and a reading public that identified its reading as ‘populaire’ and ‘exclusive’? Did they work to transpose the knowledge of leading scholars in order to make it broadly available? It seems safe to say that they hardly ever played that role. They did not typically begin with the outcomes of Tardieu’s and Charcot’s work in order to render them accessible to their readers. Rather, as we have already seen, they engaged with and elaborated a set of home truths about the sexual, referring to distinguished figures whenever they found it useful. Contrast that with the kind of work undertaken by such popularizers of Charcot’s work as Charles Richet and Jules Claretie. Richet published quite a number of articles in the Revue des Deux Mondes, which regularly brought scientific and technical knowledge to a cultivated public. The Revue des Deux Mondes, let it be noted, would have had no truck with the contents of the Offenstadt catalogue. To the Revue Richet contributed pieces on alcohol, hashish and demoniacs, all of which might have been considered at the time to be medical topics within the purview of La Salpêtrière. Charles Féré himself contributed an article on Charcot and morbid heredity.48 And Claretie published an extraordinary number of journalistic pieces, including eulogistic accounts of the great man.49 But it might fairly be said that none of their distinguished popularization actually reshaped knowledge about psychosexuality. Detailed everyday discussion of the psychosexual, with the short-term profits and the continual threat of legal sanction for publishers those practices entailed, was more often produced by Fauconney and his colleagues. The majority of texts in the catalogues of third-class publishers, however, were not medical libraries but fictional works. Dozens of romans de mœurs (novels about customs, usually sexual customs), romans passionnels, romans parisiens and romans contemporains occupied a place in the catalogues alongside the medical libraries and the flagellation pornography. We are now going to discuss a number of these novels with the intention of showing that they did not just float free in a world of literary imagination: fictional narrative enabled the exploration of the new commonplaces about frigidity. Indeed, our point about the place

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of novelistic representation is stronger still. While the medical libraries we have been discussing all appeared during the last few years of the nineteenth century and the first decade of the twentieth, novels about frigidity were published from about 1880 onwards, sometimes by publishers who, while not the most eminent, were more distinguished than Offenstadt and the like. By examining novels of this kind, we can follow the development of some psychosexual home truths before they emerged in medical compendia. Narrative fiction helped to consolidate commonplace knowledge about frigidity, and did so in a manner that was well suited to the genre. In the sexual libraries, these routine statements of truth usually took the form of broad generalizations, dire warnings and imperious advice, with occasional illustrative anecdotes. In the novels we are about to examine, story lines were developed at greater length. Narrative fiction was able to envisage frigidity as a condition subject to long-term transformation, so that routine understandings were developed about what frigidity might typically become. There was a lot at stake in this for public understanding of the disorder. When given the name ‘anaphrodisia’, as it was so often in nineteenth-century scientific discourse, frigidity might be understood in theory as resisting any possible evolution or transformation. In its extreme forms, it might correspond to the absolute lack of desire or pleasure. But anaphrodisia was not in fact spoken about in scientific or in literary texts as the degree zero of sexual responsiveness. Its most radical manifestations certainly took the form of what Tardieu called ‘a veritable atony of the genital organs and a more or less complete absence of need for and pleasure in physical love’,50 but even there the expression ‘more or less’ revealed that this was a tendency rather than an absolute state. Add to that the reiterated claim that anaphrodisia was rare – in Tardieu’s words, ‘infinitely more rare and very difficult to find’51 – and it became clear that anaphrodisia could not usually be thought of as immutable. It might after all be partial, and subject to remedy. It might only be apparent sometimes, and might be capable of being transformed into something else. Dr Eynon, indicated, perhaps unwittingly, where this might lead when he said in his Manuel de l’amour conjugal: ‘Many physiologists have said that women, even in normal health, often suffer from frigidity. One cannot reasonably deny that fact, but we are persuaded that this anaphrodisia is only accidental and, so to speak, artificial [factice].’52 Since it was neither absolute nor natural, anaphrodisia could be understood as accidental. So fiction might reveal not only those accidents by which it was produced, but perhaps also those accidents by which it

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came to be resolved. Eynon simply declared that a frigid woman was one whose senses had not been properly awoken. He supposed that a capacity for natural sexual response lay dormant beneath the symptoms of anaphrodisia, and that it was subject in principle to transformation by some agency.53 In Eynon’s view – and all of his views were widely shared – ‘true’ anaphrodisia of an enduring kind was to be understood not as a pathological condition in its own right, but as the consequence of some other illness: ‘In reality, anaphrodisia occurs only in women who are suffering from an organic illness.’54 Intractable anaphrodisia, Eynon seemed to be saying, did not result from ‘moral’ or psychological causes: it was always an accidental consequence of some other, quite physical malfunction. By implication, there was every reason to think of anaphrodisia in most circumstances as ‘tractable’ and treatable. It was, in that sense, subject to narrative, and fiction could put the theme to work for its own generic ends while at the same time giving it a rather new shape. There was scope for novels to tell stories of sexual awakening, or indeed stories of the traumatic loss of sexual sensitivity. They could do more than provide brief examples and illustrations: they could elaborate and explore moral or psychological scenarios. The story of sexual awakening is told, for example, in Femme, amour, mensonges (Woman, love, lies), a roman passionnel by Victorien Du Saussay published in 1905 by Méricant, one of the publishers who belonged squarely in our third class. Du Saussay’s novel tells a story of equivocation, interrogation and problematic self-development focused on the main woman character. Yvonne is presented at the outset as sexually unfeeling. She certainly enjoys her first experience of adultery, but the pleasure she takes in it cannot be considered sensual. In fact, she finds her lover’s display of pleasure ridiculous. ‘What got into him?’ she wonders. Whatever it is, ‘it will always be a secret for her, supposing that unfeeling people [les insensibles] cannot have even a faint idea of the heights of sensual pleasure’.55 Insensitivity appears to her as a given: it will ‘always’ be so. But the very fact of making this resigned observation so early in the story provokes a question about her future: ‘Some natures are born dead. Would she have a resurrection?’56 There is a logical contradiction in this question, for only those who were once alive can be reborn, but that contradiction is germane to the notion that a woman might, in overcoming frigidity, ‘return’ to a state that is naturally and normally hers. This vaguely hopeful question about a possible future transformation comes to occupy the heart of Du Saussay’s story. Yvonne’s release from frigidity is slow and uneven, enduring almost the length of the novel. She has observed her husband’s sexual pleasure

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from the early days of their marriage without ever sharing it, but in the company of her lover she begins to have intimations of a possibility deep within herself: ‘she is violently aware of a deep sensation working away in the secret part of her being, setting her body on fire and accentuating the beating of her heart’. This gives her hope, but as yet nothing more: ‘She had never until then had the desire to yield accompanied by the belief that the pleasure she had hoped for but never conquered would now arrive.’57 The narration continues to present her story as a matter of progressive sensitization, rather than temperamental immutability, even if progress is only defined in principle: ‘But, alas! She finds herself painfully marking time, as her sensations fail to make any progress at all.’58 She is still inclined in moments of resignation to return to the notion of natural coldness: ‘Her beauty is inert and dead. She accepts this situation and does not hate herself because fortune did not give her a passionate nature. Is she to be held responsible for its insipidity? She cannot blame herself.’59 But even as she speaks of resignation she does find someone to blame, thereby retrieving one of the commonplaces we have already identified in medical writing. As it happens, ‘her husband and her lover do not have the power to awaken her senses from their slumber’.60 This is a decisive articulation at the heart of the theme of frigidity: frigid women can and should be awoken from their state through the sexual agency of men. Yet for some time Yvonne seems to turn away from any narrative of sexual development as she constructs her life around concerns of another kind, concentrating on improving her husband’s status and wealth. She is actively consoled in this by an argument of economy: ‘she will act out the role of great lasciviousness, and because she will be very calm, feeling nothing at all, she will be able to play the role with much more persuasive force’.61 Indeed, she sees herself as avoiding certain forms of bestial expression to which her lover is given in moments of intense pleasure; were these to emanate from her, they might make her less attractive.62 The stability of this moral and sexual regimen is disturbed by Yvonne’s encounter with a more virile lover named Margal. Her experience of pleasure with him is more intense than any she has ever known: ‘It all vibrates, heats up, and bursts out. There is a wonderful explosion in which she loses herself, sobbing, overcome, smiling, radiant.’63 It might seem at first that this intense experience is the end point of her sexual progress, but it is not allowed to count as such. She still associates herself, at least in defensive and deceptive conversations, with the classic images of sexual coldness: ‘nature made me out of marble’, she says, referring to her ‘icy coldness’.64 But that is becoming less and less true.

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The ‘lies’ in the novel’s title, which are many and varied in the case of Yvonne, now seem to include the fiction of her essential frigidity. Eventually she reaches the full height of pleasure, achieved through a series of partial climaxes with Margal: And suddenly, just like an avalanche that shudders, rolls, collapses and falls, Yvonne celebrated her triumph by crying out. Sensual pleasure in its most joyful form took hold of her! She groaned, begged, and blessed the moment! So at last it had come, the hour of soothing martyrdom that makes human creatures into divine beings! At last, she had grasped the secret of fertile lust.65 Sexual pleasure happens here as both revelation and confirmation. That is indeed how the novel makes frigidity an object of narrative, making an initial show of it but eventually undoing its appearance through the manifestation of an inner truth. The transformation of the apparently frigid woman through the encounter with a virile male will hardly seem new to modern readers of erotic narrative. It has become one of the clichéd verities of female sexuality: natural desire is the truth that underlies apparent frigidity, and it is just waiting to be revealed by potent males. Our historical point is that the theme of frigidity developed this feature most fully through novelistic stories of its thrillingly decisive cure. The frigid woman’s narrative destiny was to undergo the treatment called for by her disorder: to be subject to the agency of others and be brought, no matter how long that might take, to the fullness of sexual pleasure. In Du Saussay’s novel, as if to seal this truth by putting an end to any further progress or regress, the climax of Yvonne’s sexual life also becomes its denouement. She catches a fever at the very moment of rapture and dies, so to speak, of overheating, leaving Margal to look back alone on the dramatic perfection of the experience: ‘The ultimate farewell of love! The final caresses of sensual delight!’66 The long-hopedfor resurrection allows Yvonne, in reality, to find the most thrilling way to die. Narrative fiction thus makes the emergence of sexual truth into a dramatic event, one so powerful as to bring the heroine’s life to an end. There is another, equally commonplace, understanding of frigidity that finds a place in turn-of-the-century fiction. It too is predicated on the notion that sexual desire and pleasure are natural in women, and that frigidity is rare. It is that, in many cases, frigidity has a voluntary dimension. Dr Eynon sets out the popular medical version of this belief in his Manuel de l’amour conjugal. After speaking of the need for sexual

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awakening in apparently frigid women, he goes on to express suspicion about a particular group: When faced with the insensitivity of certain women, admittedly a rare occurrence, there is no reason to express a view for or against their attitude. Nonetheless, if one did wish to take issue with this insensitivity, one might be inclined, and not without reason, to wonder if in some women this unusual, lamentable condition is not to be attributed to the sullen refusal of love, rather than any actual mutism of their flesh.67 This amounts to saying that some women are cold out of resentment or ill will. We have just seen that most apparently frigid women were thought to be simply alienated from their own true desire and pleasure and might well come to be reconciled with it. This second commonplace accounts for a residual phenomenon: there exists a rare minority who might otherwise have been responsive but have lamentably chosen to be unfeeling. Novels of the time found two ways to develop versions of the latter idea. The first was by representing the lapse into insensitivity of a hitherto passionate woman. Adolphe Belot’s La Femme de glace (The ice woman) (1878), the earliest of the novels we will consider here, describes how a fiery Brazilian woman named Esther is turned to ice when the lover who had betrayed her seeks unexpectedly to rekindle her passion: A bizarre phenomenon then took place, one that is often observed in the most expansive women. Either because surprise, anger and indignation suddenly paralyse them or because they have in them a strong will that can subdue the violence of their temperament, they sometimes become, either inadvertently or deliberately, every bit as cold, as icy as they had been passionate at other times.68 Sexual coldness is presented here as a quite sudden change, and indeed a somewhat mysterious one. It may be a reversal of temperamental polarities, or simply a radical moral event. Esther’s ‘force of will’ is so great, but also so thoroughly spontaneous, that it silences her passionate sexual nature. For all its focus on mysterious forces at work within the passionate woman, this version of the theme continues to see the actions of a man as the decisive ‘accident’ in this radical change. This is also the case in a less dramatic version of the same transformation told in a 1907 novella by Marcel Prévost entitled ‘Un Voluptueux’

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(A Voluptuary).69 Jean de Guercelles is a great womanizer, and Henriette an innocent young woman who is attracted to him. He forbears at first from seducing her and promises marriage, but later betrays her trust. To this she responds with great disappointment, but a surprising degree of calm. Desperate to win her back, he exclaims, ‘You’ve become unfeeling!’ This ancient seductive cliché is given a new twist by her reply, for his wrongdoing actually has made her spontaneously insensitive: ‘That’s true. I am no longer moved by you. Something died in me as a result of the shock I had yesterday. But I do like you. Let me say goodbye to you forever.’70 When frigidity appears dramatically in this way, it appears to be a ‘moral’ response in the nineteenth-century sense of the term, the effect of a psychological shock. Henriette finds the perfect convergence of resolution and numbness. Her coldness and that of sister heroines like Esther functions in these narratives as a radically anti-sexual response to moral trauma. A rather different way to understand a woman’s ‘choice’ of frigidity can be found in Le Mensonge du féminisme (The Lie of feminism), by Théodore Joran, which dates from 1905, and is itself a generic mixture of pamphlet and fiction. Léon H., the central character, is married to a beautiful woman called Blanche. Blanche’s name bespeaks her essential quality, but Léon’s ambition when they marry is to ‘take the marble statue who was his young wife and make her quiver, to bring about her humanization’.71 The standard husbandly ambition is in fact doomed to failure in this case. Léon comes to wonder whether he has not been guilty of ‘exaggerated delicacy’ in his dealings with Blanche,72 but it may well be that she is not one of that supposedly great majority of women whose inner sensuality lies dormant until awoken by a man. She is reserved, poised, dignified and unspontaneous.73 In Blanche’s case, coldness is an attitude consciously adopted and diligently maintained. In fact, it might be said anachronistically that Blanche’s coldness towards her husband is ‘political’ in the sense familiar to some forms of modern feminism. From one perspective, her frigidity is protoDworkinian74 : ‘As if on purpose, she remained the passive, inert being, the living corpse who puts up with embraces but does not return them, who carries out the divine act with the indifference one brings to a chore. She remained the one who paralyses the flesh and chills the heart.’75 As if to compound her refusal of standard feminine behaviour, Blanche has a close friend, Mary, who is English. Blondness, Englishness, ‘puritan severity’ and ‘intellectuality’ come together here to produce icy coldness as a perfect alliance of temperament and will: ‘A will of iron and a temperament of ice, that’s Blanche through and through.’76 The novel,

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through Léon’s eyes, claims to identify the inhuman temperament that lies at the heart of feminism: frigidity is diagnosed as a stubborn refusal of normal, male-centred sexuality. Joran’s polemical novel may indeed have the dubious honour of being the first French text to take advantage of a polemical opportunity opened up by the theme of frigidity, by allying feminism with sexual perversity.77 This was an elaborate rehearsal of what was to become – during the century that followed – a routine insult directed against assertive women. It is striking that three of the most widespread commonplaces about frigidity that continue to circulate in our own time are articulated and affirmed through narrative fiction, rather than being advanced in medical writings – even medical writings of a loose and racy kind. It is novels that tell us most clearly that: (a) all women are filled with desire deep down, even if they often seem cold on the surface; (b) frigid women need men to awaken them; and (c) women who criticize or resist domination by men have perversely chosen to be frigid. In addition to fiction that helped to formulate clichés of popular sexology, and indeed of modern pornography, certain novels actually explored emerging topics in complex ways that were seldom, if ever, present in medical writings. In the concluding section of this chapter, we are going to talk about two novels of that kind – both published by the same middlebrow publisher in 1883 – reserving some similar ones for consideration in Chapter 5. The two novels we will examine here are La Femme impossible, by Richard Lesclide, and Mademoiselle de Tantale, by Jean-Louis Dubut de Laforest. Neither of these novels could be considered part of the canon of high literature, and to our knowledge neither was republished after the end of the nineteenth century. Yet it is arguable that in these texts propositions about frigidity and impotence were more thoroughly explored according to their developmental logic than in any medical texts of the time. The first of the two, La Femme impossible, announces in its title, albeit discreetly, the physical impossibility of coitus on which the novel’s plot turns. Lady Arabelle Dudley is a blonde Englishwoman of marmoreal beauty who does not sleep in the same hotel room as her husband: ‘She was a beautiful person whose features had the coldness and rigidity of marble.’78 The narrator–hero, Stéphen, is drawn to her by what he describes as ‘a kind of aspiration toward the ideal’,79 responding to her air of aloofness with appropriately restrained admiration. It happens by chance, however, during a hike in the mountains, that he and Arabelle are trapped together in a snowstorm. She is, figuratively speaking, in her element. During the night they spend together waiting to be rescued,

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she confides a great secret to him: there is between her and her husband ‘an insurmountable barrier’. ‘It’s a matter of pathology’, she adds, ‘an exceptional case.’80 Stéphen does not say in his account exactly what the secret is, but Arabelle refers a little later to her ‘eternal virginity’.81 She would appear to have some physical impediment to coitus: an unperforated hymen, or perhaps vaginismus. The word ‘impossible’ functions here as code, as if to warn the reader that the narrative transformation witnessed in stories like Du Saussay’s Femme, amour, mensonges will not occur here. Arabelle hints that her husband has mistreated and condemned her because of her inability to play the role of wife and mother: ‘By denying me motherhood, God denied me love.’82 But in this thematic environment the impossibility of coitus does not entail the impossibility of desire. It becomes eminently clear to Stéphen – and the novel’s plot turns on this – that Arabelle, for all her apparent coldness, has not given up the desire for love: ‘if only you knew, Stéphen, how I thirsted for love’.83 This is how the narrative promises to advance, as Arabelle no longer seems so severe in Stéphen’s eyes: ‘She no longer showed that marble face whose austere quality weighed on the heart.’84 He eventually sleeps with her, but only in the literal sense. And while he continues to compare her to a statue, that very metaphor seems to have lost some of its coldness: ‘she appeared to me like a wonderful statue, spreading perfume and light around her’.85 This is where fiction does the work of representing inner processes, pointing to a change deep within the heroine that is more than a matter of perception: ‘She would sometimes go to sleep while being caressed, but the caresses awoke strong disquiet in her, and caused unknown ardour to circulate in her blood.’86 The ‘impossible’ woman is experiencing the quickening of desire after all. This leads Stéphen and Arabelle to the most intimate of impasses, as they share the experience of copulative impotence coupled with fervent desire: ‘our love grew feverish through its impotence’.87 It may seem for a time that Arabelle will be healed of her moral frigidity, and perhaps even of her physical impediment when an operation is carried out by a charlatanesque doctor. But the evolution of her condition is different from that experienced by Yvonne in Femme, amour, mensonges, as the novel confirms the destiny inscribed in its title. There will indeed be some experience of pleasure for Arabelle, and an evident seduction in its telling, just as there was in Du Saussay’s novel. But the pleasure and the beauty of Arabelle’s sexy frigidity consist primarily in the quality of her impotence itself, and in the feverish ‘chastity’ it imposes: ‘Yes, I loved her with a passion that was intensified by the chastity and impotence of our love.’88 What appeared initially as

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icy anaphrodisia has been transformed into a mixture of snow and fire. Stéphen describes her on her deathbed in these paradoxically elemental terms: ‘I can see her now, dying, buried, lost among the cushions that supported her, as pale as snow, with her hollow eyes lit up by livid flames.’89 In Du Saussay’s novel, the heroine died young as if to mark indelibly the high point of her sexual awakening and to value the process of awakening over its outcome. In Lesclide’s, the heroine dies young as if to highlight the extreme tension produced by burning desire even in a woman to whom pleasure is physically denied. The last of our novels, first published in 1890, is remarkably explicit about its relation to medical knowledge, for Jean-Louis Dubut de Laforest attempted in the preface of his Mademoiselle de Tantale to define the place of his work in relation to that of the most distinguished professors. He began with an open letter to Charcot in which he both marked an allegiance and disturbed a hierarchy. Charcot was claimed from below, so to speak, as a colleague. The prefatory letter explains that the study of sensations – the narrowly scientific domain – can be ‘applied’ to the history of les mœurs, sexual customs, in novels. While admittedly not a ‘degreed engineer’ like Charcot, Dubut declared himself to be an ‘attentive observer’.90 Both Charcot and Cesare Lombroso were drawn into an acceptance of this hierarchy, and thanked publicly for their supporting letters in response to Dubut’s project. It can be seen that the novelist’s humility is quite relative, and that his very recognition of faculty psychosexual medicine implied a claim for status on behalf of the roman de mœurs. Indeed, his ambition went well beyond mere vulgarization: he assured both the professors and his other readers that he would actually advance scientific knowledge by applying it. He claimed to have identified a new disorder, which he would study closely in Mademoiselle de Tantale. That disorder, as it happened, was ‘female impotence’.91 Dubut described this as a ‘new’ theme, and was not contradicted by his eminent interlocutors, who seemed, at least for the sake of polite conversation, to join with him in forgetting all the forerunners discussed in the first two chapters of our history. What made the theme count as new was undoubtedly the rearticulation of female impotence with a psychology of frigidity, rather than with the old notion of genital narrowness. The heroine of Dubut’s novel is named, not for a physical ‘impossibility’ but for the experience of desire without satisfaction associated in classical mythology with Tantalus. Her proper name is Mary Folkestone, and like the frigid women characters in Joran’s and Lesclide’s novels she is blonde and English. Stereotypes of pigmentation and nationality

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clearly allowed England to figure in French fiction of the time as the environment par excellence in which frigidity was likely to occur. But Mary’s impotence appears to be overdetermined. In addition to being English, she is a sculptor, someone whose artistic vocation is to bring stone to life, ‘to give movement and strength to all these cold stones’.92 In moments of discouragement, sculpture seems to her a derisory activity, perhaps even a morbid one – ‘carving a corpse out of a block of marble’ – although at other times she is caught up in the excitement of her craft.93 When this material complicity with marble is added to the burden of Englishness, the combined effect of the two influences is much to be feared. But Mary suffers from the further disadvantage of having a lover who is neither strong enough nor wild enough to awaken her to pleasure: Hector was a handsome young man, but he was too weak, too lacking in ferocity. He was too much given to sentimentality. He did not devote himself enough to carnal pleasure. His eyes did not have that wild glow, his body did not have those extraordinary surges that would finally awaken her from her lethargy!94 It is made clear that Mary’s ‘lethargy’ is not the simple absence of desire, not one of those very rare cases of absolute anaphrodisia. She suffers rather from a profound malfunction of desire, from a kind of inner deadness: ‘Her own desires creaked in the wind like dead trees.’95 Yet there is something other than insensibility within, and the role of fiction, as in Du Saussay’s and Lesclide’s novels, is to evoke this. Here it is dark and threatening, a noisy but unproductive rumbling: ‘the terrible effluvia that rumbled within her flesh’.96 All the focus is on the quality of her desire. In the language of the period, Mary is suffering from moral impotence, a pathology of desire marked by terrible suffering. It cannot be said of Mary Folkestone that she is essentially or elementally cold as Lesclide’s Arabelle was, since she can locate the cold within as a symptom. She suffers from a painfully frigid sensation in the heart of her being, as she confides to her now estranged lover: ‘I too feel cold in the seat of my heart!’97 Worse than numbness, she feels a hard resistance within: ‘Mary complained of bitter cold. She said that she had a long piece of ice along her spine, and that nothing could melt that ice, neither rubbing nor red hot irons.’98 Various remedies are tried to warm her inner being, including treatment by a famous Parisian doctor, but nothing succeeds. Finally, in desperation, while staying in a villa in the South of France, Mary resorts to crushing and eating some Spanish

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flies which happen to be buzzing about. She has made a potion of cantharides, the most notorious of aphrodisiacs,99 and the effect is drastic, as Mary’s body is traversed by the symptoms of uncontrollable desire: ‘This blonde body was overtaken by shivering, by muscular quivering, by sudden surges of life that gave way to pain.’100 Whereas Lesclide’s Arabelle experienced ‘livid’ fire at the heart of coldness, Mary Folkestone actually experiences a dark surge of inner heat: ‘ardour that she was no longer able to bear set fire to her, extending all the way to her sex’.101 The symptoms of frigidity suddenly give way to those of nymphomania: ‘For a moment, as if exhausted, the poor woman remained motionless, and soon the erotic disorder [le mal érotique] reached its paroxysm, showing all the marks of the most fearful nymphomania.’102 In extremis, her lover arrives to rejoin her, and they embrace violently: ‘The woman kissed the man’s mouth. She kissed it with such violent rage that the lips of both were bruised and bleeding.’103 But the very suddenness of this change is proof that the remedy is toxic, and Mary dies on the spot, poisoned by pharmaceutical desire: ‘This burning kiss went cold and icy [ . . . ] The victim’s body stiffened [ . . . ] Mary Folkestone was dead.’104 As in Du Saussay’s and Lesclide’s stories, the heroine dies young; however, while it does indeed seem to be a rule in the roman de mœurs that heroines die of sexual causes, the point of Mary’s early death, as far as the theme of frigidity is concerned, is not quite the same. Mary is awoken to desire by drastic external means, but those means are so radical that they kill her. Finding relief from anaphrodisia through aphrodisiacs is not the answer, as they simply reveal a potential for nymphomania. That is how pathologies of desire, frigidity and nymphomania are shown to be equivalent and symmetrical. Dubut’s ‘female impotence’ is the obverse of a terrible libidinal potency. Some women, to put the commonplace in its most humdrum form, can only be awoken from frigidity by being precipitated into le mal érotique. They cannot inhabit the intermediate space of normalcy. Between them, middlebrow medical texts and novels elaborated a set of propositions during the period 1880–1910 that enriched and encumbered the theme of frigidity. Through repeated affirmation and narrative representation, they established a number of functional ‘truths’. Many women who seem cold and unfeeling at the outset may be awakened to pleasure by intercourse with a virile male. Some women of cold demeanour can be shown to have adopted that attitude by a perverse denial of their natural dependence on men. Some women really are blocked by the shape of their bodies from the full satisfaction of procreative pleasure, but there may be sexual excitement to be had in

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exploring their enforced chastity. Some women long for sexual pleasure, but can only experience desire, in rare moments, as the utter loss of selfcontrol. Sexual coldness was not so much the mere absence of pleasure that had for so long been given the name ‘female impotence’. Frigidity or anaphrodisia was now primarily a terrible malfunction of desire. Frigidity had become interesting and seductive because it was understood to be quite other than the natural absence of sexuality. Apparent lack of desire became grist to the novelistic mill, as it was transformed, recounted and unclothed through narrative. There can be no doubt that the French ‘sexual libraries’ of the period 1900–10 constitute a remarkably insistent, if somewhat anarchic, exercise in the dissemination of knowledge about sexuality. But next to them, and quite often before them, the roman de mœurs helped bring frigidity to account, establishing the patterns of what could be said about it, and giving it a recognizable place in the new knowledge of sexuality.

5 The Wedding Night

A favoured story of the French nineteenth century, retold in a range of genres from the literary to the medical, was that of the incompetent husband. In the early days of his marriage, so the story goes, especially on the occasion of the wedding night, the husband acted in such a maladroit and ill-considered way that his wife’s subsequent behaviour suffered drastic effects. Yet while the story was retold with great regularity over the course of the century, its significance came to be transformed. This chapter will attempt to trace that transformation, and demonstrate its import for the history of frigidity. The first thing to note is that the story of the incompetent husband did not initially have a place within the field of moral-and-physical medicine in which female impotence and frigidity were elaborated as topics. It was, so to speak, captured and reframed by that field, coming eventually to play an edifying role within it. For much of the nineteenth century, the husband’s incompetence typically took the form of a lack of guile. By his failure to perceive what was going on in his wife’s mind, by his failure to manipulate her effectively, he was likely to provoke her to deception and infidelity. During the last decades of the century, however, husbandly incompetence was conceived and recounted rather differently. It became a failure to induct the wife into womanhood, a failure to manage her sexuality that gave rise to pathologies such as frigidity. In its early versions, the theme belonged largely to a comic genre in which deception and blindness were the rule. In its later, more sombre versions, it became a disturbing narrative of male violence and female victimhood. The early version of the story was told by Honoré de Balzac in his essay Physiologie du mariage, which dates from 1829. Balzac’s version deserves to be considered canonical, not just because of the author’s eminence as a novelist, but because the essay was much quoted in advice 132

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manuals and popular medical texts during the rest of the century. Unlike many later manuals, his essay was not addressed to women. Indeed, a prefatory note attempted to discourage women from reading it, purportedly because they already knew everything that was going to be said. It soon became clear on reading, however, that sharing this advice with women would actually have defeated Balzac’s purpose. He was exclusively addressing men because he understood women to be their adversaries. His aim was to teach husbands how to deal with their wives, to forestall their potential infidelity and to see through their wiles.1 This led him to speak, not of pathologies, but of ‘situations’, of circumstances that presented recognizable tactical and strategic problems. His explicit concern was with domestic politics: The art of governing a wife is even less widely known than that of choosing her well. And yet marital politics hardly require anything more than the constant application of three principles that must be the soul of your conduct. The first is never to believe what a woman says. The second is always to look for the intention behind her actions and avoid taking them literally. And the third is to remember that a woman is never so talkative as when she is saying nothing; she never acts with more energy than when she is at rest.2 So the difficulty faced by the husband was one of discernment. He had to see through the artfulness of the wife in order to divine her true intentions and respond to them adroitly. Not surprisingly, Balzac devoted a considerable proportion of his essay to techniques of surveillance. As if to remind readers of the generic location of this knowledge, he referred more than once to the comic theatre of Beaumarchais. There he could find a model of surveillance, and of successfully conducted intrigue. In this theatrical game, the wedding night was a critical moment: ‘the fate of a married couple depends on the first night’, said Balzac unequivocally.3 That first night was the occasion for the opening gambit, and by the same token an opportunity for error. The most obvious error in Balzac’s eyes was to ‘begin the marriage with a rape’.4 What made rape a mistake was not so much any injury that might result for the wife, but the fact that the ménage, the couple as a functioning domestic unit, would suffer damage. By alienating his wife and failing to give her pleasure, the husband would have compromised his capacity to manipulate situations in the future, since ‘the woman who loves more than she is loved will necessarily be tyrannized’; well-managed tyranny of the husband being in Balzac’s eyes the desirable outcome.5

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The measure of failure here was not any sort of moral-and-physical harm experienced by the wife. It was quite simply the number of acts of infidelity she would subsequently commit: ‘The wife’s sins are just so many acts to be charged to the self-centredness, insouciance and incompetence of the husband.’6 If husbands were alert to the art of seduction and manipulation, such acts would not occur. One of the dominant metaphors in Balzac’s essay, regularly taken up in subsequent writing on the topic, was that of the musical instrument. The wife, he said, was a beautiful instrument, to be played with art, the sad thing being that husbands played so badly.7 It could hardly have been made clearer that conjugal relations were to be understood in their fine detail as a matter of art: forestalling feminine deception, maintaining discreet surveillance, but also producing the woman’s pleasure by erotic tact. In 1842, about 13 years after the publication of Balzac’s text, Octave de Saint-Ernest published a book entitled Physiologie de la première nuit des noces (Physiology of the wedding night), with a preface by Morel de Rubempré, whose limited contribution to the history of female impotence was discussed briefly in Chapter 2. Morel began his invasive and self-serving introduction to Saint-Ernest’s book with an epigraph about the wedding night that spoke of it as a pregnant and propitious moment. It was made to sound dramatic, fecund with the possibility of future happiness and bitter disappointment.8 But he also made an incidental connection with the history of frigidity by talking about ‘cold women’ in terms that would have made perfect sense to Balzac, since coldness was in this case a mark of duplicity: There are wives definitively captured by their lovers who spend long years with the most accomplished husbands without ever receiving the least sensation of physical pleasure in the marriage bed. These wives are widely referred to as cold women, but are nonetheless perfectly capable of burning with ardent passion in the embrace of their lovers. Most husbands who have wives of this kind treat them with complete confidence, blinded by the fact that they appear utterly indifferent to sensual pleasures. The husbands sleep peacefully, spend time away from home without anxiety, and are in no way suspicious of men who frequent their households. The torment of jealousy never disturbs the serenity of their soul. In every circumstance they remain completely untroubled.9 Coldness of this sort was patently not to be understood as a pathological condition in women. It was, for Morel, a local or opportunistic

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phenomenon, occurring in certain sexual circumstances and not in others: What scenes of misery and desolation are these in which husbands whose passion ought to be fully reciprocated reach exhaustion and burn themselves out while fruitlessly striving to share their sensual delights with spouses who are entirely given over to other pleasures, and so constantly preoccupied elsewhere that they can offer him only indifference, coldness, frost and repulsion!!!10 For Morel as for Balzac, it was the husband who was likely to be the victim of coldness, not through any failure of passion or effort on his part, but for a lack of jealous vigilance. Husbands needed to know that in these cases feminine ruse was at work, allowing women to choose the place of their pleasure, whether solitary or with a lover,11 while at the same time maintaining perfect indifference towards conjugal intercourse. Saint-Ernest’s own text, it must be said, had none of the defensive, male-centred vigour that characterized the preface. He actually recommended that his book be given by parents to any young man on the verge of marriage, then passed on by the young man to the wife-tobe.12 The stated purpose of this circulation of knowledge was that the young bride should not be left in the victim’s role: ‘Instead of being dragged over the battlefield like a trembling victim, she would be able to offer herself graciously, confidently awaiting her conqueror, and sure of achieving a victory of her own.’13 In this case, the woman’s ‘victory’ was not to be won by duplicity or achieved at the expense of her husband. Advice given to her could ensure in principle that the wedding night would not be a moral rape. Yet, having made this broad claim about the value of his book, Saint-Ernest proved remarkably unconcerned about following it up with relevant advice. He displayed none of the gravity that was later to attend psychosexual writing about the wedding night in particular, offering merely a disparate collection of sayings and lists, accompanied by ethnographic chat about different mores and anecdotes from ancient times. So despite the intensity of Morel’s preface, the book as a whole bears witness to a lack of discursive and professional mobilization around the theme in 1842. Marriage, for Saint-Ernest, was a diverting theme, although not an intriguingly comic one. He seemed about to make of it something more substantive when he began a late chapter with the double title, ‘The Last Indiscretion of the Bridal Chamber. The Wedding Night’, but the indiscretion in

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question was not described in either its actuality or its consequences. The wedding night appeared to involve no danger, so that Saint-Ernest was able to refer blandly to ‘pleasant difficulties’ that might initially delay or impede the fullness of conjugal pleasure, without entering into further detail.14 There was not much else in Saint-Ernest’s 1842 essay of the Balzacian notion of husbandly incompetence and the threat it might provide to his command of the marriage, but a new version of the theme began to take shape in subsequent decades. This occurred, for example, in advice manuals for women such as Hygiène pratique des femmes, by Aristide Reinvillier, published in 1854. Reinvillier, like so many other writers of the century, was committed to the view that ‘the physical and the moral are intimately connected, and it is difficult to attend to the one without taking some account of the other’.15 Marriage was not, in actuality, his principal topic, since he wished to cover the full extent of women’s existence in the space of one book, but he did speak of the suffering of certain women for whom marriage had become ‘hell on earth’.16 That was the fate of any woman who found herself ‘chained to a man of brutal character and crude instincts’.17 The French word brutal, which had no place in Balzac’s description of husbandly ineptitude, was to become one of the key adjectives in the new version of the story that was told in the latter part of the nineteenth century. Brutalité, with its strong connotations of animality, suggested a lack of sensitivity, a yielding to low instincts that typically resulted in harm to women. Reinvillier had nothing particular to say about the wedding night, but his text began to identify the possibility of male ‘brutality’ within marriage. And that notion became one of the favoured topoi of later writers on failed conjugal relations. Yet the story told by Balzac did not simply disappear. The advice book written by Jules Guyot in 1859, Bréviaire de l’amour expérimental, which we examined in Chapter 2 for its view of female impotence, sustained the metaphor of the wife as instrument. There was no particular difficulty or complexity here, for ‘the husband’s task is easily carried out’,18 but some discipline was required if he was to achieve a full measure of success. He needed to apply the power of ‘art and science’ in order to bring about ‘conjugal tenderness and confidence’.19 In some cases, after the honeymoon the wife might seem to be cold, so that the husband felt entitled to include her ‘in the class of cold and indifferent women’ as he vowed to seek pleasure elsewhere.20 But in Guyot’s view any husband who drew that conclusion about his wife deserved to be considered as negligent. He was not, we should note, guilty of brutality. He had not

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done irreparable moral and physical damage to his wife. He had simply failed to play the instrument as he should – failed to learn, and failed to execute. Any man who declared his wife to be cold and began to look elsewhere for his pleasure, said Guyot, ‘resembles [. . .] a bad minstrel changing violins in the hope that his new instrument will supply the melody he cannot play’.21 There is no stricture of morality, physiology or religion requiring the man to be ‘a consummate artist’. But he had to be able to play the tune, ‘to execute at least the essential, basic theme’.22 Playing the tune effectively had for Guyot a double function that Balzac would have happily accepted. It recognized the wife’s right to the ‘voluptuous sensations of love’, while at the same time ‘safeguarding the chastity of the home’.23 All this could be achieved, it seemed, with an acceptable level of sexual mediocrity. The notion of the wife as an erotic instrument to be played for her own pleasure and for the sake of domestic harmony was a recurring theme in advice about conjugal relations. Félix Roubaud has already claimed a strong place in our history by his insistence on the role of the female genital apparatus in the physiology of coitus, discussed in Chapters 2 and 3. But his Livre des époux (Book for marriage partners), published under the pseudonym ‘Dr Rauland’, maintained the Balzacian theme in largely unrevised form. His explicit concern was with ‘the harmony of the couple’ to be experienced by both partners.24 And while Roubaud spoke of husbandly incompetence in pathological terms that would have been uncongenial to Balzac, he did not anticipate pathological consequences for the wife, as later writers were to do. Many older husbands, said Roubaud, were worn out by debauchery and were therefore likely to be impotent. As a result, they would be unable to satisfy their wives. But the lasting consequence of that failure, as he envisaged it, would not be some moral-and-physical disorder in the wife. The outcome he feared was the one anticipated by Balzac: the unsatisfied woman would be unfaithful, and take a lover.25 It is characteristic of the history of sexual coldness in the nineteenth century that the story of the husband’s failure was told across a range of genres. Doctors like Morel de Rubempré, Reinvilliers, Guyot and Roubaud all took their turn at it. But so did Balzac in his role as a moralist and ‘physiologist’ of human behaviour. And so too did another moralist who wrote plays, novels and poems: Ernest Legouvé. In 1849, Legouvé published an essay entitled Histoire morale des femmes that was to go through a number of editions and find an echo in the writings of quite a few others. The fifth edition appeared 20 years after the first, and included in its introduction a list of those, including Michelet, whom

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Legouvé deemed to have written about the subject in direct response to his work.26 The author also took the liberty of including in his essay relevant examples from his own plays. His guiding moral principle, spelt out in the introduction, was that of a complementary equality of the sexes. While affirming the essential difference of women, Legouvé deplored the fact that they were treated unequally in education and under the law.27 Perhaps the most dramatic example of unfairness that he was able to adduce was the treatment of innocent young brides on their wedding night. With all the verve one might expect from an accomplished author of fiction, he told a dreadful story of violence: ‘This girl, who may have scarcely heard speak of love, whose fiancé had not so much as shaken her hand until a week earlier, finds herself given over to this man whose brutal violence jeopardizes in a second the happiness of their whole lives!’28 Feminine innocence and ignorance were thus assaulted by male brutality, and a lifetime of happiness was compromised. According to Legouvé, the situation ought to have been seen from the young woman’s point of view: What sort of impact must be felt by this trembling, delicate, nervous young girl as a result of this crude attack? Do people not understand the image of love that this will engrave on her mind? Some young women have been so horrified by this wild act of possession that they have experienced incurable suffering. The simple memory of it has been enough to estrange some of them, making their husbands into objects of repulsion.29 Legouvé was solely concerned to evoke the terrible impact of the wedding night and to represent the quality of the bride’s suffering. He did not go on, as others later would, to describe any kind of moral-andphysical morbidity, even though he referred to ‘repulsion’. Indeed, the primary consequence he envisaged was the one that had preoccupied Balzac. The young woman who had been abused on her wedding night would be ripe for infidelity: Is that how she will be approached in society by the young man who is trying to attract her? Is that how he will represent love to her? How will she be able to resist when, instead of a military style nocturnal assault, she encounters respectful glances and hears begging words pronounced ever so softly? [. . .] She will be astonished and euphoric, won over by her very surprise. She will have no defence

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against the feeling she had previously calumniated. The husband will have created the circumstances for the lover’s success.30 Legouvé, more than any who had gone before, developed a powerful image, not just of the husband’s incompetence, but of the bride’s victimhood. Having been treated thus on the wedding night, she was effectively absolved of responsibility for any later infidelity. Yet what was damaged on that fearful occasion was her understanding, her image of love, not her natural ability to experience pleasure. There might be lifelong repulsion towards the husband and a distorted image of love, but there was no suggestion that even those strong feelings would result in any permanent incapacity to love someone else. The painful experience of the wedding night, for all its intensity, was not connected in Legouvé’s thinking to psychosexual pathology. To our knowledge, the first work to make that connection was a book by Pierre Garnier, one of the most active exponents of the genre of middlebrow medical writing about sex that began to appear in the 1880s. Garnier’s ideas about female impotence and vaginismus, it will be recalled, were the subject of discussion in Chapters 2 and 3. In 1879, before the appearance of his most influential works, he published Le Mariage dans ses devoirs. This was in fact a much-altered version of a work that had first appeared in Spain in 1853. Garnier was anything but a respectful translator, and permitted himself some unflattering observations about the retrograde qualities and the unscientific nature of the original, but was nonetheless able to draw its concern with moral ‘hygiene’ into the field of medicine as he understood it.31 In addition, by a less strenuous effort of recuperation, he made a place in his text for Legouvé’s indignant moral account of the wedding night, which he quoted at length.32 For the first time perhaps, the story of the wedding night was now interpreted in recognizably medical terms, as Garnier’s brand of medicine confidently claimed the moral as part of its terrain. Like many who had preceded him, Garnier spoke of the solidarity of married couples, but he understood solidarity in the terms of his profession. Where Balzac and others had spoken of harmony and fidelity, Garnier spoke of health and sickness: ‘If marriage is selfishness for two, as Mme de Staël wrote, it is also health and sickness for two.’33 So when he asserted that ‘it is the man who makes the woman because, at the beginning of their union, he holds the strength to educate entirely in his hands’,34 he was committed to understanding the husband’s educative capacity rather differently from Balzac. From Balzac’s point of view, the man’s strength was to be used for manipulation, both literal and

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figurative, resulting in a virtuoso performance of domestic power. But for Garnier the educative power of the husband was itself a force for sickness or health. And when brutally misapplied, it could only have pathological consequences. Garnier spelled out more fully what he understood by the educative process and its malfunctions in a work published in 1882, L’Impuissance physique et morale chez l’homme et la femme (Physical and moral impotence in man and woman). In this text, as the title indicates, Garnier read the sexual difficulties of marriage from both sides. He was interested in the conjugal behaviours that tended to make men impotent, and in those that made women impotent and frigid. The primary error made by men was the assumption that women were always available for intercourse: ‘When he mistakenly considers the woman as always ready to receive his advances and uses her as a passive instrument [. . .] the man exposes her and exposes himself to so many causes of impotence.’35 The woman, despite Balzac, was not an instrument to be played a piacere, since she did not just present a surface – a keyboard or a set of strings – on which the man could practise his manipulative art. There might of course be physical obstacles to intercourse resembling those described by the canonists when they spoke of narrowness, but there were, more importantly, secret obstacles that were likely to go unperceived: ‘In the absence of physical, apparent obstacles, there are often occult, hidden ones that give her a reason, and even a strict requirement for utter abstinence.’36 Balzac deplored the failure of husbands to see through feminine wiles, which was, as we have noted, a failure of discernment. But Garnier feared their failure to read the inner secrets of feminine reluctance, and that was a failure of sexual sensitivity. It was, he said, ‘the most frequent cause of her coldness, of her frigidity, as it is called’.37 Garnier actually used one of Balzac’s favoured words, surveiller, but gave it a rather new meaning. Balzac had wanted the wife kept under surveillance, but Garnier had in mind a different quality of attention: The man who does not examine, respect and closely watch [surveiller] his companion’s intimate dispositions is a man who fails to understand the very conditions for conjugal relations. He is neglecting the secret of pure and true delights [jouissances] of the body and the soul. In the place that ought to be occupied by complete happiness he puts crude, brutal excretion, a spasm, a convulsion, or even pain.38 The woman’s reaction to such a violent approach, read with any care at all, should have served for the husband as a sign of her nature. It ought

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to have been ‘the physiological indication of the necessity’ of a gentle approach.39 Yet husbands most often made the elementary mistake of reading their wives’ reaction to brutality as proof of frigidity, whereas it was nothing more than the manifestation of a virginal need to be treated gently: ‘Horrified, stunned, transfixed by the husbands’ brutality, they remain estranged [from the act]. The poor fools of husbands! They interpret as signs of frigidity what are in fact the surest signs of virtue and virginity.’40 This is a failure of discernment, certainly, but it is also a failure of intuition, and a failure to manage instinct. Crude possession of their partner does not allow men to read the hidden possibility of desire and pleasure in her. The moral and psychosexual resonance of the husband’s failure became stronger in the last two decades of the nineteenth century and the first decade of the twentieth. It was still possible to make comic capital out of husbandly blunders, as the genre of bedroom farce developed by Gyp and other writers who wrote for a fashionable bourgeois audience attested.41 But that was, so to speak, the trivial, glossy version of a theme that was being developed with considerable gravity in other genres. One of the things that added new weight to the old story was the notion that the wedding night would imprint indelible memories in the bride. It was not just an opportunity for manipulation, or even an occasion for unpleasant experiences – it had become the theatre of moral trauma. In 1885, Charles Montalban published an advice manual for young married couples that carried a great challenge for the husband. Given that the groom’s knowledge of ‘the pleasures of love’ was likely to be based on experiences with prostitutes, the young man now needed to prepare himself for something quite different. The key thing to remember was that the first experience of love-making was going to be a transforming one for the bride. The man was about to ‘open the book of love and read through it with the girl, effecting a radical metamorphosis of her being, the memory of which would stay with her until the day she died’.42 This was not simply the classic rite of passage in which a woman’s social status was changed by the ritual breaking of the hymen; it was a transformation of her inner self, and the inscription of an indelible memory. Montalban talked about it all in positive terms – what a fine role was the husband’s!43 – and the advice genre lent itself to an edifying story of just how this was done, but the author felt obliged to interrupt the happy story before it was even fully told in order to tell the unhappy one, with which we are becoming familiar in this chapter. This was how a young woman known to the author

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had recounted her wedding night: ‘He treated me like the lowest of his former trollops. With no pity for my youth, my innocence or my pain, he did not desist from his attack until he had satisfied his brutal passion. [. . .] I have never been able to forgive him.’44 The author then cited other cases in which wives took revenge for similar treatment on the wedding night by taking several lovers. Here the danger was not the trauma and consequent revulsion the wife thereafter experienced, but the resentment and vengeance she demonstrated following her mistreatment. Once these cautionary tales were told, Montalban felt free to return to the edifying version of the wedding night story, rehearsing it in sufficient detail to show how lifelong hurt could be avoided. When the husband was gentle and tender, he would quickly find forgiveness for the pain that accompanied the short period of transition.45 And by giving his wife time to recover from the pain of the first occasion before renewing his attentions, he would prove to her that she was ‘not an instrument of pleasure, but his companion forever’.46 If conjugal sex was for the young bride a life-transforming experience, that was because she was being inducted into sexual adulthood, perhaps even into sexuality itself. And as a consequence, for many who wrote about the subject in the following decades, the wedding night was subject to every danger that might attend a sexual being. In an essay written in 1887, J.-P. Dartigues saw himself as making a courageous statement about the victimhood of married women, although the courage he displayed in making it was well supported by a discourse that had been developing for several decades: ‘Someone must have the courage to say that almost all women are victims of the most elementary injustice on the part of their husbands, who frustrate them [. . .] of their undeniable right to satisfy in the marriage bed desires and emotions they must inevitably feel.’47 Dartigues was reaffirming a principle that had been set out 30 years earlier in the writings of Félix Roubaud: wives had a natural right to conjugal pleasure. And he was broadly agreeing with Balzac that by assuring the wife’s pleasure the husband could safeguard the chastity of the home.48 But he identified a whole range of ways in which men could and did fail, and that range corresponded to the complexities of sexuality. The focus here was not on the husband’s lack of discernment or even on his clumsiness, but on ‘the ignorance of the husband in the genital act’.49 By attending so closely to the husband’s sexual role, Dartigues and others were able to complexify their understanding of it, as they identified a whole range of ways in which sexual failure could occur. Some men, said Dartigues, were simply too hasty: ‘Nothing turns a woman off her husband more than the unfortunate disposition of the man to

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satisfy himself promptly, with no preliminary caresses.’50 In these cases, women would be led to seek elsewhere for ‘men whose temperament or technique is more in keeping with their own’.51 Other husbands failed by giving in to brute instinct on the wedding night: ‘If at the beginning of the marriage a candid girl of delicate feelings is delivered up to one of those men whose brute instincts win out over moral considerations, that girl is lost. As a woman, she will be destined for adultery, if not indeed for a life of prostitution!’52 Her victimhood, we should note, was now destined to work itself out, not simply in the form of intrigue or revenge, but in thoroughly sexual ways, ending in depravity. In addition, Dartigues identified another style of failure that had not so far been mentioned by others writing on the topic. The husband might fail by inducting his wife, not into domestic sexuality, but into thoroughgoing libertinism: At the outset these women were virtuous, but their husbands have imprudently exacerbated their desires at the very moment when they have been most in need of satisfaction. [Instead of straightforward satisfaction,] the husbands have offered them the shameful refinements of lubricity. And even more maladroitly, after taking these kinds of pleasures to the point of satiety, the husbands have gone looking for adventures of other kinds in order to vary their pleasures. These women, their senses overstimulated and their selfrespect deeply wounded, have naturally come to put into practice with other men the lessons learned at the hands of their husbands.53 By being too quick or too direct, men could cause sexual harm to their young brides. By being too slow and too indirect, they could lead them to shameful practices. As the range and variety of unfortunate outcomes appeared to increase, the margin for error on the husband’s part appeared to decrease. Dartigues himself summed up the dilemma: Excessive pleasure in women, which leads to satiety, and the total absence of pleasure, which allows unsatisfied desires to keep all their strength, can be equal causes of these multiple shameful vices. That is how causes that are truly opposed can bring about the same result.54 It may seem contradictory to evoke the dangers of perversion and libertinism alongside those of frigidity and coldness as equivalent consequences of failed consummation but, as we shall see, these themes increasingly cohabited in warnings about inadequate and inappropriate sexual conduct in marriage. During the first decade of the twentieth century, this newly sexualized version of the wedding night story was

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regularly rehearsed in the middlebrow milieu we described in Chapter 4. It had a place in popular medical ‘libraries’, and informed romans de mœurs, those ‘novels of customs’ that tended to make sexual behaviours the subject of plot and the explanation of character. As we have shown, popular medical libraries were devoted to an array of topics that effectively defined the extent of the sexual, and marriage was prominent among them. The fifth volume of the ‘Bibliothèque sexuelle du Docteur Désormeaux’ was entitled Le Mariage,55 and the twentieth volume of Dr Caufeynon’s ‘Bibliothèque populaire des connaissances médicales’, Le Mariage et son hygiène.56 Within marriage, the focus was largely on the quality of amorous relations between husband and wife: Dr Désormeaux added a separate volume to his library entitled L’Amour conjugal,57 and Dr Eynon contributed his own Manuel de l’amour conjugal.58 Dr Rhazis, in a work entitled L’Initiation amoureuse ou l’art de se faire aimer et de plaire (Initiation to love, or the art of attracting and giving pleasure), devoted a chapter to ‘Free love and conjugal love’.59 Advice about marriage found itself rubbing shoulders in this milieu with a wide range of texts about sexuality, including works likely to be classified as pornographic. And that very cohabitation of genres tended to produce thematic effects. The nineteenth-century advice manuals we have considered in this chapter, those of Reinvillier, Guyot, Rauland, Montalban and Garnier, could hardly have been accused of impropriety. But there certainly was an older precedent for the mix of advice and stimulation. Nicolas Venette’s Tableau de l’amour conjugal, first published in about 1686 and republished continually thereafter, had been one of the great successes of French publishing in previous centuries.60 Venette’s book managed perfectly well to combine medical advice with indulgence in erotic detail, and it is unsurprising that it should have found new favour in the discursive circumstances we are describing. On occasion, the work was simply republished as a classic. Paul Fort, the publisher of Désormeaux’s ‘Bibliothèque sexuelle’, presented it as such in 1903.61 More often, however, as one might expect in this publishing milieu, it was reappropriated in various ways. In 1907, Jean Fort published a Bréviaire de l’amour dans le mariage in which Venette’s text had been ‘revised and augmented’ by Dr Caufeynon.62 In 1909, he also published Bréviaire de l’amour dans le mariage, ou l’homme et la femme considérés dans l’état physiologique du mariage (A Handbook of love in marriage, or man and woman considered in the physiological condition of marriage) by a certain Dr Wolf. This was a gross case of plagiarism in which Venette’s work was attributed to another author.63

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The very recycling of this earlier work, while authorized by the environment, tended to produce thematic dissonance, as Venette’s work was pressed into service for which it had not been designed. Venette’s authority and his proven commercial value were thoroughly exploited by early-twentieth-century publishers, to the point where he was maladroitly claimed as a modern doctor, but the tendentiousness of that claim becomes clear in historical perspective. As it happened, the understanding of conjugal love presented by the various Venettes and pseudo-Venettes did not coincide properly with the emerging twentiethcentury view. This was recycling without renovation, appropriation without aggiornamento. Most visibly, moral and religious themes carried by Venette tended to be out of keeping, not only with the secularity of the various medical compendia, but with almost all the other texts in this milieu. The Bréviaire attributed to Wolf made the defensive claim that this was, despite first appearances, a book that would influence people to be more virtuous,64 but that emphasis was quite out of step with other texts in the early-twentieth-century catalogue. They had nothing to say about virtue as such, preferring to deplore vice as perversity and describe perversion as illness.65 The same version of Venette contained a chapter entitled ‘Conjugal Duty’ in which the first concern was how the wife should behave after giving birth so as to prepare herself for a prompt return to intercourse.66 This was ‘conjugal duty’ in the sense of the canonists: the sacred requirement to engage in the work of procreation. It applied equally to men, of course,67 so that there was undoubtedly a greater symmetry of gender roles in Venette than in the more modern works: ‘The husband gives exactly to the wife what he owes her, and the wife what she owes to her husband.’68 But this was not the currency of modern conjugal love. Both partners, in the view that had come to prevail in the early twentieth century, had a duty to natural sexuality and to fidelity, although the man held the moral initiative. Also smuggled into the milieu by the careless reappropriation of Venette was the now rather archaic notion of temperament. Wolf’s version talked in general about women’s temperament as a given, offering examples from ancient Rome and referring to instances of natural coldness and natural ardour.69 This was out of step with an assumption that had been to the fore since the middle of the nineteenth century: that wives were generally capable of ‘normal’ degrees of desire and pleasure, equal to each other and to men, if only their sexuality was properly cultivated. Balzac’s views on marriage were also recycled to a degree, with some comparable effects of thematic dissonance. His Physiologie du mariage

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was republished only once in this milieu, during the first decade of the twentieth century,70 but it was widely available from the most respectable publishers. Yet despite the similarity of topic, authors of popular medical works do not appear to have found nearly as much to quote or plagiarize in Balzac’s text as they did in Venette’s. They used Balzac almost exclusively for the one imperative that had been regularly cited in nineteenth-century moral and medical writing.71 ‘Balzac quite rightly said: “Never begin a marriage with a rape” ’, wrote Dr Désormeaux.72 ‘Balzac, who should always be quoted on this subject, said: “Never begin a marriage with a rape!” ’ wrote Dr Jaf.73 This was, as we have already indicated, a thematic slippage: Balzac had been concerned with the domestic exercise of seductive power by men, whereas the earlytwentieth-century docteurs were warning of the dangers of wedding night sexual trauma for the woman. We can gauge the lack of accord between Balzac’s views and those of the docteurs by recalling the importance attached by Balzac to art and finesse on the husband’s part. The man’s role was to play the instrument. But that is not exactly how this appeared to popular medical writers in the early twentieth century. They certainly called on the husband to show tact, but the guiding purpose was not the same. He was now being enjoined to new forms of sexual behaviour in which nature and naturalness had to play a crucial role. Husbands needed to exercise a form of self-mastery, said Caufeynon, as if to echo everyone from Balzac to Garnier: ‘the ends of marriage are always attained by gentle cajolery and ingratiation, not in a brutal, authoritarian manner’.74 But the notion of an actual art of seduction and pleasure-giving aroused suspicion among these popular sexologists since it tended to imply excessive refinement, and therefore perversity. The difficult thing was to be straightforwardly natural without being unthinkingly crude. Dr Rhazis recycled a 40-year-old statement in which Guyot had talked about the husband as instrumentalist, but made no mention of the original metaphor or indeed of the original author. He reframed the statement by acknowledging that there was certainly a need for artistry in conjugal relations, but the source of that need, as he saw it, was nature: ‘While nature does not require a husband to be a consummate artist, it commands that he at least know how to carry out the essential act in a logical, intelligent manner.’75 By definition, nature could not possibly require consummate artistry, but it did require a certain discipline if its essential programme was to be carried out. Uncultivated natural behaviour – of the kind that could be characterized as brutalité – was known to have destructive effects.

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There was, in the popular medical libraries, a broadly consensual and routinely plagiarized view about what was at stake in conjugal relations, and on the wedding night in particular. Dr Rhazis’s L’Initiation amoureuse ou l’art de se faire aimer et de plaire (Initiation into love or the art of making oneself loved and giving pleasure) provides a fairly complete example. The wedding night was, for Rhazis, the occasion par excellence of l’initiation amoureuse, a crucial time in a lifelong sexual history. There was, he declared, arduous work to be done at that moment: ‘The wedding night is rightly regarded as immensely important in conjugal life. Indeed it is a terrible ordeal from every point of view.’76 What made it an object of such apprehension was not the pain of defloration but the crucial task to be undertaken by the husband, for it was he who was the subject of the ordeal: ‘The wife’s role is quite undemanding; the husband’s active role is very difficult’, he said, reversing what Guyot had asserted some 40 years earlier.77 The difficulty confronted by the husband was not the material one envisaged by classical medicine, including that of the canonists. It was not just a matter of achieving an erection, penetrating the hymen and ejaculating into the vagina. The ‘essential’ task on that night was not copulative or procreative: it was strictly sexual. The husband’s role was to bring about his bride’s transformation from girlhood to womanhood, to take her from a pre-sexual to a properly sexual condition. Yet the sad fact for Rhazis was that the husband almost invariably failed to get the job done: ‘In reality it has to be admitted that the husband is almost always quite incapable of carrying out his delicate and dangerous role. He proves to be clumsy and crude, lacking power [sans pouvoir], with nothing more than repugnant appetite.’78 The double requirement and the prediction of double failure seem familiar enough. From Balzac onwards, the wedding night had connected ‘delicacy’ with ‘danger’, but the danger of which Rhazis and his colleagues spoke was not that envisaged by earlier writers. It was more precisely sexual. Husbands behaved awkwardly and distastefully because they failed to master their own sexual desires, as Rhazis showed in an emblematic narrative: Here we have a young, ardent husband. No sooner has he entered the conjugal bed than he presses on without any preamble to satisfy his purpose in marriage. But how often do these men miscalculate their strength and find that their flame has dimmed before they can reach the desired goal? He has hardly had time to knock on the door, and he has done so in a clumsy, brutal way that ensures that it will be a long

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time before it opens so readily again. All this because he has provoked pain without having the time or opportunity to produce the opposite sensation that would have caused the pain to be forgotten.79 In this full version of the story, the groom’s incompetence had two phases. Beyond the fumbling, painful attempts to enter, there was a more consequential failure: the young woman had not been taken to the point of pleasure that would have led her to forget the pain of first penetration. That failure of delicacy was dangerous because it was likely to have pathological consequences. Other docteurs spoke of the wedding night with equal trepidation. According to Dr Désormeaux, ‘the husband’s first approach is for him one of the most delicate passages to be gone through in his life’.80 Unfortunately, husbands were given to revealing just how delicate the task was by their very failure to carry it out with any success. The first thing to be remembered, for Désormeaux, was that ‘impetuosity and brutality are quite unsuited to the first embrace’.81 That initial encounter was a crucial intervention in which the groom had to prepare the bride for her future role as a domestic sexual partner: ‘The man must slowly and gradually initiate his wife into the new role that is unknown to her, the role she must play in the practice of marriage.’82 Unhappily, failure was the rule, as the slowness that ought to have obtained was forgotten or ignored in a headlong rush towards penetration and ejaculation. In consequence, all that the bride retained of the wedding night might be a painful memory: ‘It is common enough, as a result of the husband’s abruptness or the wife’s excessive sensitivity, for terror, distaste and even insurmountable aversion to be the outcome that the husband finds at the end of his wedding night.’83 Not just a ruptured hymen, then, but a deep psychosexual wound, inflicted unthinkingly. Men did not know the damage they were doing on the first night. In the eyes of medical writers who confidently included the moral within their domain, they were open to a medicalized form of the reproach that had first found expression in Legouvé’s writing some 40 years earlier. Dr Riolan put it this way: ‘The man is selfish, impatient and crude in lovemaking. Without taking any account of whether his partner is well or ill disposed, he wants to have his pleasure, and she must submit.’84 Yet unlike Legouvé, Riolan and his colleagues were not simply making a moral appeal or even seeking to ward off future infidelity in the wife. They were only too confident that natural retribution was at hand, and that it would take the form of lifelong sexual disorder.

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The docteurs made it clear that the husband had a quite specific sexual duty. Not just to love and honour his new wife, but to ensure shared sexual pleasure in the marriage bed. Here is how Dr Jaf put it: ‘In amorous coupling, there should only ever be common, reciprocal pleasure. But the man’s ignorance or negligence of the conditions and laws of love is the most frequent cause of coldness in the woman.’85 Dr Désormeaux put it in exactly the same words, by the way, but that is how it often worked in this milieu.86 The key thing, in their writings, was that the ‘laws of love’ were being identified and spelt out as domestic requirements. Dr Eynon spoke of two levels of obligation, the first being more or less a matter of civility and the second of obedience to nature: Love is the agreement of need and feeling between spouses, and it follows that, in order to be happy, a man is obliged to respect certain rules of honour and delicacy. Having obtained the benefit of the social law that consecrates need, he must obey the secret laws of nature that give rise to feelings.87 The husband needed to keep in mind – although all of these doctors of sexuality seemed convinced that he would not – that the imprint of this first night on the woman was likely to be indelible: ‘That first night will perhaps imprint on her senses and her mind a memory that will never be erased, whether the memory be good or bad.’88 The moral impact of this event was such that, for better or for worse, the woman’s sexual life would be forever governed by what happened on that night. It was the moment of greatest danger, the occasion par excellence for moral or psychological trauma. So the wedding night was perilous, and brutality a terrible mistake. But there was another kind of danger. Not only could husbands get it wrong by clumsiness and crudity, they could also get it wrong by hesitation and indirectness. This was to be understood as excessive delicacy, and indeed a failure to achieve the requisite degree of ‘brutality’. As Dr Caufeynon said in Le Mariage et son hygiène: ‘The act is carnal, and the lead-up to it is no more lofty than its nature. The most delicate minds must be subject to animal laws, and the purest feelings must give way to brutal instinct.’89 While the adjective brutal so often expressed moral disapproval, it also served in contexts such as this to designate the natural domain of brute beasts. There was a law of gentle seduction to be followed for the sake of the wife’s awakening to adulthood, but there was also a law of animal violence to be obeyed in order to bring the natural act to completion. These were the Scylla and Charybdis of

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conjugal sexuality: there were dangers on both sides, and any deviation from the narrow course of normality was likely to have drastic effects. One of those effects was vaginismus. While the term did not ever find a place outside medical writing, popular medical libraries extended its usage beyond the specialist domain of gynaecology in which it had initially developed. They attributed to it an aetiology in which the husband’s incompetence played a decisive role. Dr Désormeaux characterized the disorder by the presence of hypersensitivity and convulsion – both of them symptoms that, in a lesser degree, might have been marks of sexual pleasure: ‘Vaginismus often poses an obstacle to coitus. This affection is marked by excessive sensitivity of the generative organs, to the point where touch is unbearable, and may trigger a convulsive state.’90 Désormeaux was quick to explain the principal cause of this disorder. It was none other than the usual culprit: The cause of vaginismus must be identified in most cases as the man who has not had the delicacy or the feeling for the preliminary caresses that are owed each time he approaches his wife. He begins with a kind of rape, provoking sharp pain and a legacy of insurmountable repulsion. Vaginismus has thus been created by moral impression.91 This is vaginismus caused by brutality, and by a far too rapid conclusion to the initial encounter. But it could also be caused by what might be described as the husband’s other kind of failure. Dr Caufeynon suggested that it might be the consequence of his repeated but ineffectual attempts to complete the act. If, with insufficient erection, he persisted in ‘his incomplete, timorous efforts’, that too could result in a ‘spasmodic contraction of the vagina’.92 The ‘laws’ of sexual nature were thought to punish excess of any kind. Ripping through the hymen might lead to vaginismus, but so too might repeated ineffectual prodding. Even where the outcome was the infidelity feared and predicted in Balzac’s and Legouvé’s versions of the story, that behaviour was seen as a compulsive response to trauma, rather than as a considered act of revenge. Dr Rhazis spoke of causation: ‘The spouse’s infidelity is often caused by nothing other than the wife’s coldness and the husband’s lack of tact.’93 The woman who had been made cold by her husband would be physically and morally driven to seek warmth elsewhere. But there was another equally pathological way into adultery, for the husband’s brutality might precipitate the virgin bride into a kind of moral ruin. As Dr Jaf wrote – without acknowledging his source in Dartigues94 – relations with the husband would then become a form of

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suffering for which adultery provided the only relief: ‘If at the outset of marriage a candid girl of delicate feelings is delivered up to one of those men in whom brute instincts win out over moral considerations, that girl is lost. As a woman, she is doomed to suffering or adultery.’95 That deviant behaviour produced morbid outcomes became in this milieu a matter of certain principle: Secret love is real love, natural love, love without excess. Anyone who loves in another manner, anyone who seeks in love only material pleasure or debauchery will pay for that mistake, whether by dreadful pain, or premature death, or sickly and incomplete offspring.96 The policing of sexual behaviours had thus become, in a sense, utterly redundant. No vengeful gods or vigilant public moralists were required, because (sexual) nature was always at work, sanctioning every deviation: ‘Nature does not need man to make rules about it. It never allows the least violation to go unpunished.’97 And since the laws were inexorable, the high purpose of popular medical writing – as distinct from the unacknowledged commercial one – was to warn against any such violation. Because the wedding night was the determining moment in a woman’s sexual life, the self-appointed task of the docteurs was to solemnize it in their own quite secular manner. The elaboration and dissemination of their knowledge made the whole thing into a ‘terrible ordeal’, surrounded on every side by moral and physical dangers – a kind of epicentre of the sexual. As in the previous chapter, we now turn to some works of fiction in pursuit of our theme, and our purpose in doing so will be much the same as it was there: to identify more elaborate, more thoroughly consequential versions of the standard story. We have already seen in an extract quoted above that the docteurs made room in their own works for emblematic narrative; nevertheless, the richest versions of the new wedding night story were worked out in fiction. Novelists developed plots in which the husband’s actions on the wedding night shaped the wife’s development in a variety of negative, more or less pathological, ways. They also produced representations of feminine interiority that served to demonstrate its impact. In Jane de la Vaudère’s Le Sang, published in this milieu in 1898, the heroine carries the memory throughout her life as a painful recollection: ‘In her memory she continued to find, with painful persistence, the scene of their first night of love.’98 She remembers how it was when her husband’s ‘feverish hands placed on her body moved from caressing to brutalizing’.99 There is no gentle seduction here, and the young woman recoils defensively as her

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husband lays hold of her: ‘a remarkable physical coldness, an increasing repulsion made her limbs go painfully cold’.100 But the coldness she feels at this moment does not congeal into the pathological form of frigidity, rather she experiences a desire of the kind anticipated by earlier writers. Yet La Vaudère’s version is characteristic of her time in that the desire is felt to be uncontrollable. The heroine seems positively compelled to flee into infidelity: ‘His presence was so unbearable to her that she would have liked to run off with the first man who came along.’101 The impetus towards adultery resulting from the trauma of violent first contact is the stuff of novelistic plot, as René Maizeroy noted reflexively in a work of fiction published in 1902. Maizeroy’s anonymous narrator–hero thinks back on his many adulterous affairs with women who had been similarly marked: ‘Yes, from the time of first embrace, of the first attempt to possess them began their suffering, their anguish, their gradually increasing repulsion, the bad dreams that plant the seed of adultery in a haunted soul.’102 In some cases, as in La Vaudère’s story, the husband eventually becomes a victim, committing suicide in despair at being rejected by his wife, but it is the woman’s wounded sexuality that leads to adultery and drives the plot towards the fatal outcome that concludes most romans de mœurs. Maxime Formont’s La Grande Amoureuse, published in this same milieu in 1904, also makes of the wedding night the critical moment, but draws from it a moral and sexual consequence that goes beyond mere adultery, exemplifying the moral ruin evoked by Dr Jaf. This is a story told in retrospect by Lyse, a famous courtesan. Lyse had once been a virtuous young bride named Marie, but a horrible wedding night had set her on her current path: The marriage, the wedding night! Marie’s sensitivity had remained inert throughout the whole time of the engagement. After being indolent, resigned, and detached, she suddenly awoke with a dreadful jolt. Conjugal brutality, which she endured like a punishment imposed by law, left her soiled and joyless. So that was men’s idea of love? How odious!103 This husband offers a perfect example of the lack of psychosexual tact deplored in the medical texts: Someone gentler and in particular more skilful would have tried to conquer her by using those amorous little tricks that allow a lover to win the involuntary complicity of the senses and prepare the

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surrender of the heart. But this was not how he did things. He just threw himself at her. His embrace, which his wife did not always dare refuse for fear that he would kill her in a fit of lubricious rage, seemed just like rape.104 Revulsion at male violence drives Marie/Lyse towards a gentler form of sexual contact, to be found in same-sex relations: ‘Marie was not subject to the powerful influence of the opposite sex, founded on fear and the love of being beaten. Her sensuality was attuned to something else: she wanted to be gently aroused by contact with a delicate creature like herself.’105 Indeed, by the same logic of desire, conjugal brutality compels her not only to sapphism, but to prostitution: But after the twin experiences of husband and lover, she was persuaded that contact with men could only ever be indifferent or distasteful to her flesh. Since she had already borne it to so little purpose, why not resign herself to it with a view to winning the greatest prizes life has to offer: wealth and independence?106 It is not clear in the novel’s account of things if these behaviours are to be considered properly pathological, as Fauconney and his colleagues would have it, or merely the products of social circumstance. Indeed, that distinction itself was not easily maintained in a society whose mores were often described as degenerate and ailing. Lyse herself says later: ‘I am not a monster or even an exception. I am simply a person of my own milieu and my own time. And both of those are dreadful.’107 At the very least, the story supports her claim that it was her husband’s brutality that started her on her sexual career: ‘I tried to be an honest woman, you know. But some husbands make our task too difficult. Whose fault is it that I am now a courtesan?’108 The wedding night had been made into a turning point in two novels of a more distinguished kind published in the last decades of the nineteenth century. In Le Vice suprême, by Joséphin Péladan, which dates from 1884, the beautiful princess Léonora d’Este experiences her own life-changing moment of atrocious conjugal violence at the hands of her debauched husband Sigismond Malatesta. On the wedding night, he forgets himself, forgets all tact, and forgets anything he might ever have known about virginal sexuality: At the sight and the touch of this body which set before him the longing of his flesh and the dream of his vice, Malatesta was seized

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by the demon of depravity. He forgot everything: prudence, dignity, consequences. He possessed her with wild passion, in selfish, sadistic rape. The palace bedroom rang out with what the people call the cry of the virgin. With the blind drunkenness of a Nero embracing the ideal, he took advantage of the ignorance of that virgin body. Without a word or a caress, he followed his lubricity right through to the end. He finally collapsed, exhausted yet not satisfied, empty of strength but filled with desire, by the side of his wife. She was left bloodied and incoherent, crying but not sobbing, with the slow heavy tears of numb confusion. Her surprise and terror at Sigismond’s ferocious attack and the nervous shock which followed left her unable to think. She was stupefied by the whole ordeal, and fell into fitful unconsciousness traversed by nightmares.109 Léonora has red patches on her body which she calls ‘these stigmata of brutal possession’,110 but most durable in its impact is the ‘nervous shock’, which turns her into a ‘monster’ of coldness.111 She experiences the destruction of her virginity as the lifelong ruin of desire: ‘We married. You were motivated by lubricity, but so was I, as it happens. If you had satisfied me, I would have no reason to complain. But you spoiled something that belonged to me, something I had been at great pains to conserve.’112 Léonora will henceforth be uncommonly free of desire. She will have a long series of lovers for whom she will simply prove to be ‘a marble tormentor’.113 Péladan’s sexual lexicon in this text of 1884 is itself indicative of the rapid transmission between fiction and sexual psychiatry, as we see in the description of Malatesta’s violence as ‘sadistic’. That word, freshly invented by Krafft-Ebing only a few years previously, was still being debated among psychiatrists at the time Péladan was writing.114 More elaborate in its plot and more complex in its thematization of sexual coldness is Méphistophéla by Catulle Mendès, first published in 1890. The central character of Mendès’s novel, like that of Formont’s La Grande Amoureuse, changes her name as if to mark the radical sexualization of her adult life. As a girl, she is called Sophie, but later takes the name Sophor. Her story is not told in strictly chronological order, and at the beginning the narrative presents a mature woman whose whole demeanour bespeaks a blend of desire and frigidity: ‘her cold desire is like an icy claw’.115 The classic image of the marble statue is applicable to her, but with a particular inflection, for Sophor is ‘furious and cold like the twisting of a marble statue’.116 Metaphorical torsion of this kind signifies something other than material inertness: it gives shape

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to the half-dead metaphor of the ‘turn’ inscribed in the word perversity. Méphistophéla requires its readers, in fact, to construct a close relation between frigidity and perversion. Not for Mendès the ready-made figure of the blonde Englishwoman and her ‘puritan stiffness’ encountered in the novels discussed in Chapter 4. He finds a figure more suited to his thematic construction in another of the period’s exotic stereotypes, that of the degenerate Slav. Sophie’s mother carries a grim and ugly secret – ‘a hideous past like pond mud stirred up by tadpoles under a layer of duckweed’ – which is that of a whole line of forbears who carried degenerative perversions.117 Her father had wished to be the last of the Tchercélews, believing that it was his duty not to perpetuate their degenerate lineage, but Sophie’s mother was conceived inadvertently.118 As if to confirm her father’s drastic judgement, Mme Luberti had engaged as a child in forms of ‘infamy’ that are to be understood as congenital. Corruption and perversity simply manifest themselves by a kind of fatality: ‘these are the mysteries of childhoods doomed to infamy by some obscure law of atavism or by the inexplicable will of a malevolent providence’.119 If the same law applies to her daughter, as it surely must, then Sophie is likely to be perverse from the outset. Passionate childhood friendship with her neighbour Emmeline can thus never be properly innocent: it always bears the hereditary taint of perversity. Moreover, while still a child, Sophie displays many of the symptoms of hysteria. Forbidden at one point to see Emmeline because their mothers have quarrelled, she literally stiffens in resentment and revolt: ‘she looked like an angry little corpse’; ‘her limbs were stiff’.120 This condition, which leaves ‘the sick child as if frozen in motionless contraction’,121 might well be thought of as an adumbration of frigidity in the adult, and a way of associating frigidity with the most spectacular of late-nineteenth-century disorders. Indeed, the child Sophie actually forms the arc-en-cercle, one of the most famous hysterical poses documented at La Salpêtrière, although none of the characters close to her at that time has the medical knowledge needed to make the diagnosis.122 Yet while it can be said that there is an atavistic law at work driving Sophie towards some mixture of frigidity and sapphism, that hereditary pattern is not so strong as to diminish the life-transforming climax of her wedding night. When she learns that she is to marry Emmeline’s brother Jean, she has an intimation of something terrible to follow: ‘a shiver went right through her; in each of her pores she felt the sharp sting of a needle of ice’.123 On the appointed night, Jean sets about the task of defloration with a frontal attack worthy of his military vocation, resembling only too well the ‘nocturnal soldier’s attack’ described with

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such horror by Legouvé.124 Of course, Jean has not read Legouvé or any of the advice manuals: he is a ‘simple’ man, quite without refinement or perversity. But moral–medical knowledge certainly informs the novel’s plot, and Jean’s ignorance of it proves decisive. With no thought for any possible psychosexual damage, he drives Sophie to a terrible extremity. She can only resist by falling back on a pathological disposition, that of the hysteric: ‘all he held in his arms was the resistance of a marble statue whose motionless sensitivity was made of hatred’.125 This is where the husband’s brutality, a typical cause of frigidity, meets the wife’s cold hatred, a radical, indeed pathological form of ill will. He makes her frigid by his brutal penetration of her, yet she is already determinedly frigid in her hatred of the male. When Sophie proves so unresponsive on the wedding night, Jean’s singularity of purpose is in no way impaired. He is determined to ‘revive’ Sophie to normal sexual feeling, and she is even more determined to maintain an attitude of death: ‘He kept working away on this silent, motionless body with all the frantic energy of a sacrilegious man violating a tomb, determined to revive a dead woman and bring her to the resurrection of pleasure.’126 Out of this fateful event, the novel produces genuine ethical ambiguity. Sophie is hysterically, degenerately perverse, but Jean is no more than a brutal rapist disguised as a virtuous husband. Her introduction to sexual intercourse has taken place with ‘the dreadful swiftness of a rape’.127 Overcome with grief and pain during the night, she flees next door to her friend Emmeline’s house, and finds herself in Emmeline’s bedroom, contemplating the young woman’s sleeping form. At this point, Jean bursts in and begins to thrash her with a dog whip. By punishing her nascent lesbianism with such ferocity, he is in fact driving her towards a conscious, adult version of it. This is how Sophor’s ‘furious, cold’ condition is cruelly overdetermined by Slavic degeneration, childhood hysteria and male brutality. She does not finish in death like the heroines of most romans de mœurs, but her fate is worse, as she eventually comes to resemble ‘those wild idiot women who sit with their hands under their chins in the courtyards of every Salpêtrière’.128 It may not matter to the author whether Sophor actually ends up in Charcot’s clinic: what matters in Méphistophéla is that the heroine should finish in some generic place of late-nineteenth-century female sexual madness, both fatal victim and militant exponent of the most terrible frigidity. In this manner, fictional plots write out the drastic consequences of husbandly brutality. But they are equally attentive to the deleterious effects of excessive gentleness. Eugène Delard, in Le Désir: journal d’un

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mari, which dates from 1899, effectively tells the long story that follows from a husband’s failure to practise an appropriate degree of natural violence. In his first sexual dealings with his virginal bride, the husband is attentive to her wishes, and to her reticence. Confident of his virility, he takes the time to reassure her, ‘capable of overwhelming her with an embrace, but preferring to reassure her with a smile’.129 Being a true man, he says to himself, consists in having the strength and the kindness to forbear from directness: ‘True males are like that. The very violence of their desire allows them the delicate generosity, the refined self-interest of delayed satisfaction.’130 But it soon becomes clear that gentleness or refinement of this sort is a terrible error, indeed the first step on the long downward path of a pathetically unsatisfied and eventually tragic destiny. The immediate consequence of the husband’s tact is one that Balzac might have feared: his wife comes to exercise power over him through displays of aloofness, with the result that his own desire is endlessly exacerbated. By the same token, her desire has not been born as it should have on that first night of marriage. When it all begins to go bad, the husband now comes to ask how he could have been so foolish as to hold back: ‘Why had I hesitated? Why had I become transfixed in the position of the timorous lover? After all, Denise was a woman like any other. Was she not my wife, the one with whom I had a right and a duty to behave boldly?’131 Here gentleness is equivalent to hesitation, and tact to a failure of the will. So this husband has failed in his duty, both to his role as a male and to pleasure itself. He should have shown daring, for only a vigorous attack could have bridged the unnatural distance maintained by his wife. His fundamental strategic error has been to imagine that he might close this gap at will, moving across it step by gentle step with seductive elegance, enhancing his own eventual pleasure all the while through the practice of delay: ‘My main thought had been to go gently on her innocence. I wanted to delay the pleasure of making her mine in order to enjoy it to the full.’132 This artfully erotic approach is now made to seem a form of excess, what he later calls ‘the excess of delicacy on my part’,133 and it proves to be a psychosexual blunder. His refusal to give vent to the ‘crude’ and ‘brutal’ desire he feels134 leads eventually, by an implacably natural process, to the build-up of anger that drives him to kill his wife. This tragic end is to be understood as the consequence of an unnatural beginning. It is a failure to observe the requirements of virile action, beginning with the wedding night. As if to give a more precisely sexual point to the long-predicted outcome of adultery, some novels give voice to the woman’s judgement as

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she speaks of the husband’s failure to be sufficiently direct. In Victorien du Saussay’s Rires, sang et voluptés (1901), the newly married Elisabeth, now bearing the title of vicomtesse, writes to her former lover Raoul, telling of her insipid relations with her husband, who is so smitten as to be absurdly respectful. Elisabeth reveals her frustration at no longer experiencing the violent sexual embrace that she regularly knew with Raoul: D’Almide is all the time kneeling in adoration of my beauty, my body, my figure. He goes into ecstasy and exclaims that I am the most perfect of human creatures. But what does all that matter to me if he is not bold enough to crush this beauty against him, and bruise this flesh that is too fine and too virginal in spite of everything!135 Precisely because her sexuality has already been woken, Elisabeth knows that something fundamental is missing in her marriage. She searches on her body for some visible trace of the psychosexual imprint made by her former lover: And I have to say that I examined my arms, looking to see if they did not bear the imprint of your brutal fingers. I looked on my neck to see whether I would find marks left by your kisses. Alas! All those dear wounds born of your kisses have long disappeared. I found no trace of them.136 This is the sexual woman in search of her own wounds, in love with her own memories of love. It might easily be described in modern psychological terms as a form of pathological dependence, but there is no evidence that it is considered so here. A similar point about a feminine or female need for an appropriate degree of brutality is made in a narrative of female sexuality told in Charles Epheyre’s Possession (1887). The heroine, Marie-Anne, thinks back to her wedding night: ‘Marriage without love is almost legal rape. And Marie-Anne shivers when she remembers how her virginity was brutally ravished!’137 This shiver (frisson) is profoundly ambivalent, as it turns out. It certainly expresses revulsion at being raped, but it also constitutes sexuality through memory. Another man, Stéphane, is in love with her, and he makes as if to launch a brutal attack, but she resists. Yet even as she does so she has a sense of resisting true womanhood:

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Yes, alas! She had to admit that she loved him because of this violence. Despite her horror of brutal love as Stéphane understood it, she was torn by a bitter regret, regret at not yielding to him, at not being a woman like everyone else, one who was capable of abandon, of unreserved love, with all the passion of body and soul.138 Novelistic representation sometimes showed the terrible effects of wedding night brutality, and it was also able to show, with no real contradiction, a sexual need in women for male ferocity. The extraordinarily difficult thing, the ‘terrible ordeal’ for the husband, was to find the narrow path between violence and gentleness. Novels of this time quite often represented calamitous wedding nights, and displayed the extent of the calamity by writing it out as a series of inescapable consequences. This was how novels did their semiotic work on frigidity and related pathologies alongside medical writings. Romans de mœurs dealt in critical scenes and thematic nodes: they recounted sexual events as decisive moments. Medical texts sold by the same publishers presented knowledge as an array, their most basic rhetorical figure being the list. And while the authors of popular medical texts were affirming that deviant behaviour would reliably produce morbid outcomes, novelists were turning trauma into unrelenting narrative. That is how female characters in fiction whose wedding nights were mismanaged found themselves caught up in an inexorable process. The fictional wedding night was in fact a crisis in the Aristotelian sense, a turning point of destiny. The full extent of uxorial sexual pathology, the range of maladies to which mismanaged wives were subject, was no doubt best displayed in medical catalogues of pathologies and perversions. In some novels – Le Vice suprême, for example – there was relatively little medical talk, merely the implacable demonstration of laws of behaviour. But in many narratives doctor characters were present, offering their diagnoses as authoritative predictions of the novel’s denouement. And in almost every case, sexuality was read as destiny. Dr Caufeynon and his colleagues typically uttered dire warnings about what would ensue after a traumatic wedding night, whereas the novelists whose works appeared in the same catalogues generally followed the consequences of trauma all the way to sickness and death. In the course of the nineteenth century, the wedding night maintained its shape while being reframed and reinterpreted in a number of different ways. It was always the case that the husband was confronted with a difficult task. He was called on in earlier versions of the story to

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forestall his wife’s capacity for deception and infidelity. In later versions, he carried the moral responsibility of treating his wife humanely: she should not be frontally attacked or brutalized. And in the versions of the story that circulated at the turn of the twentieth century, the husband became the custodian of his wife’s sexuality, the agent of her problematic maturity. It was up to him to manage the transition from girlhood to womanhood with a finely judged measure of gentleness and violence, finesse and animality. The very difficulty of finding that measure reflected the conceptual strictures that surrounded the emerging notion of sexuality: it was understood as a primitive force to be both heeded and restrained. As things stood in the first decade of the twentieth century, any failure of the husband on the wedding night would condemn the wife to one or more of a range of pathological conditions, frigidity being undoubtedly the most widespread.

6 Treatment 1: Medicine

As we noted in the Introduction to this volume, there may appear to be a ready-made place for frigidity in the history of sexuality insofar as research in that field is given to documenting the pathologization of sexual behaviours and types of sexualized person. Foucault and many others have shown that certain behaviours, newly envisaged as pathologies, became, with the rise of modern psychological medicine, a terrain for medical theory and practice.1 Homosexuality, auto-eroticism, sadism and the like were made the subjects of nosological description, etiological inquiry and clinical therapy.2 So there is good reason, prima facie, to expect that much the same story could be told about frigidity. But we have shown that it did not happen quite like that. Frigidity was not simply produced as a new set of problems in the course of the nineteenth century. It had a long history of antecedents in the canonist notion of frigiditas and in the related notions of coldness, spasm, anaphrodisia and vaginismus in medical and forensic talk. The disorder in question was differently conceived over time because the very orders that made it appear disorderly by contrast were themselves subject to change. As we saw in Chapter 1, frigiditas was of considerable import to canonists because it obstructed the double purpose of holy matrimony – procreation and the making of one flesh – while for most of the nineteenth century, as Chapter 2 demonstrated, sexual coldness was seen as a form of bodily impotence experienced in parallel by men and women. Taken together, those two chapters showed that from medieval times some version of frigidity had been made visible as an ailment, a deficiency of temperament or a congenital inadequacy. In that broad sense, frigidity, however defined, was viewed from the outset as an aberration, if not clearly a pathology nor yet in any sense a perversion. Certainly, it was not regularly envisaged as an object of clinical treatment before 161

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the middle of the nineteenth century. Only from that time onwards were sustained and systematic attempts made to develop a set of professionally administered therapies for the condition most often called then anaphrodisia. And in the development of those therapies a practical question arose. To what extent would the condition(s) respond to the various forms of physical treatment available to nineteenth-century doctors? By claiming frigidity, anaphrodisia and vaginismus as objects of medical knowledge, those doctors were in fact putting medicine to the test at the very point where theory met practice. Once sexual coldness was defined as a specifically medical problem, what resources did medicine have at its disposal to provide any reliable remedy? We saw also in Chapter 2 that medical writers had regularly claimed, from the late eighteenth century onwards, to deal with the ‘moral’ alongside the physical. But how could that claim be made good in the case of frigidity, which typically presented such patently ‘moral’ symptoms as the lack of a desire for coitus? Nineteenth-century medicine had, as we shall see, some means at its disposal for treating physiological, material coldness, but there could be no certainty at all about its clinical access to such phenomena as indifference or unresponsiveness. Even as French doctors tried to think through this difficulty in practice, asking what other forms of treatment ought to be applied in addition to medication, they were in effect weakening their claim to contain frigidity, and by the same token the moral in general, within their field of expertise. At the very point where medicine identified and confronted frigidity as an object of professional care, it risked revealing its inadequacy for the task. In practice, anaphrodisia appeared to call for a form of medicine that took moral disorders as its core business, and did so on the basis of a developed theory of moral aetiologies. There was of course, in the nineteenth century, an emerging form of institutional medicine with a claim, albeit a contested one, to do just that. Alienists, as specialists in the treatment of the insane, typically dealt with patients who had at least some symptoms that could be classified as moral. It would be tempting to hypothesize that the term ‘moral’ acted as a kind of place-keeper for the later term ‘psychological’, but as Kathleen Grange says with disarming simplicity: ‘To equate “moral” with the modern term “psychological” is not entirely satisfactory, especially as its original connotation continued to the end of the nineteenth century.’3 The task of a careful intellectual history is to forbear from narratives of straightforward terminological substitution, and our first aim here is to develop a more precise analysis of the discursive economy in which the word ‘moral’ took its place. Later, in Chapter 7, we will

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analyse the psychological, so to speak, on its own terms, although even there we will see that the terms are not straightforward. Our aim in the long run is in fact to understand psychological treatments of frigidity as they emerged at the end of the century, but our commitment here, as everywhere in this book, is to measure our steps along the way. With this in mind, we can consider the challenge provided to moral medicine – and to all medicine insofar as it claimed to have a moral dimension – by the forms of ‘moral treatment’ (traitement moral) developed by certain alienists, the first of whom was Philippe Pinel, who was director of the Bicêtre asylum from 1793 and was held in high regard for his humane attitude towards the insane.4 Jan Goldstein, in her richly detailed history of the psychiatric profession in nineteenthcentury France, notes that Pinel’s moral treatment marked a turn away from physical methods: the moral treatment meant the use for the cure of insanity of methods that engaged or operated directly upon the intellect and emotions, as opposed to the traditional methods of bleedings and purgings applied directly to the lunatic’s body. While it did not entail a total abandonment of the old repertory of physical remedies, it did entail an acknowledgement of their grave insufficiency.5 In effect, the moral treatment constituted an alternative ‘repertory’ of available techniques. One of Pinel’s alienist disciples, François Leuret, provided in 1840 a list of the methods used at the Bicêtre asylum: ‘Among the moral means that are considered to have an auxiliary effect in the treatment of madness, isolation is most prominent. After that come games, walks, reading, conversation, music, work projects, and travel.’6 Following Pinel, Leuret applied the physical–moral binary to his account of treatment at Bicêtre, insisting that, of the two, only moral treatment had the capacity to cure madness: Contrary to the most generally held doctrine, I consider moral treatment to be the only kind that is capable of healing madness. Against this sickness, physical treatment, which consists in the use of bleeding, baths and pharmaceutical preparations seems to me as useless as, in the course of a discussion of philosophy and morality, resorting to physical means in order to convince one’s adversaries.7 Leuret positioned himself at one end of the spectrum on this issue, but the key point for our intellectual history is that there was indeed

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a spectrum.8 Moral treatment was the subject of earnest advocacy and everyday experiment. And while Leuret hastened to add that his patients often had physical symptoms that needed physical attention,9 he asserted unequivocally that madness could not be cured by the methods of physical medicine.10 Was the same true, to a degree, of anaphrodisia, and were there specific forms of traitement moral that ought to be applied to it? This was a matter of professional uncertainty, since it was not even clear who was fully qualified to ask questions of this nature. The institutions in which the alienists practised, such as La Salpêtrière and Bicêtre, typically housed patients with striking symptoms like those of hysteria and epilepsy in advanced stages, as well as manias of various kinds. Whatever the alienists’ professional interest in nymphomania or hysterical anaesthesia, they made no bid to include genital anaesthesia within their own field. Impotence and frigidity were left to doctors in private practice, some of whom, such as Belliol, Roubaud and Garnier, figured in Chapter 2. Yet there were taxing questions that tended to undermine any claim to specialism on the part of those doctors. Might it be that the treatment of frigidity had something in common with that of mania or hysteria? Could treatments be inferred or transferred in some manner from the therapies developed for those disorders? The answers to those questions were uncertain for some decades, and the very asking of them quite intermittent, but debate among alienists promised to open up a space for the treatment of any disorders that were deemed to have a strong moral component. To the extent that sexual coldness was able to be seen as a primarily moral disorder, it was likely to appear inaccessible to medication and to routine physical treatments. Anaphrodisia could be understood first of all as a (moral) failure of ‘normal’ desire and pleasure, rather than a morbid deficiency of bodily heat. For this reason, as we are about to show, attempts by doctors to sharpen the pathological understanding of frigidity for the purposes of clinical treatment actually helped make room for its eventual psychologization. Sexual coldness was to enter, during the period from about 1880 to 1930, under the leadership of German-language clinicians and writers, the province of what were variously called ‘moral’, ‘mental’ or ‘psychical’ treatments. We began to follow this trajectory in Chapter 3, without generalizing our claim at that point, when we showed how vaginismus, initially defined by American gynaecology as the target of surgical treatment, came eventually to be considered by many French medical writers as a moral condition caused primarily by insensitive sexual initiation on the part

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of the husband. We showed that, as the aetiology of vaginismus was rethought, established methods of treatment came to appear not only inadequate but improper. In this chapter and the next, we will follow a more general change in aetiological and therapeutic accounts of frigidity, eventually coming to indicate in passing in Chapter 7 how vaginismus was claimed, along with frigidity and various other forms of sexual coldness, as a domain par excellence for the practice of psychiatry and psychoanalysis. The point of these two chapters is to understand how psychological approaches came to take precedence over longer-established forms of medicine in the description and treatment of sexual coldness. True to form, we will tell no stories of sudden collapse or dramatic emergence, and will in fact devote all this chapter to forms of medicine that did not owe their primary allegiance to psychology. Our starting point will be a mid-nineteenth-century writer who was committed to the practice of clinical medicine: Félix Roubaud. Roubaud, as we showed in Chapter 2, made a decisive contribution to the theory of impotence and frigidity, confronting and dispelling ambiguities that had led to confusion about the relationship between frigidity and sterility.11 As part of this revision, he built an understanding of female sexual health based on the idea that female pleasure was an essential component of natural coitus. This led him to describe the absence of female pleasure as a pathological phenomenon in itself: Since it is undeniable that a pathological condition exists on every occasion where a function is not carried out within the limits ascribed to it by nature, it must be acknowledged that the absence in the woman of one or more prerequisites for normal coitus constitutes a morbid or pathological condition.12 This was a decisive theoretical move: once coital pleasure in women was established as part of the natural order, its absence had to count as a disorder. But Roubaud was not prepared to limit himself to matters of definition. Having established impotence and frigidity as pathologies, he set about the business of therapy. By the time a second edition of his book appeared in 1872, 17 years after the first, he had added a new element to the title, promising now a discussion of ‘remedies’. We will concentrate in this chapter on that later edition, and on the import of the remedies it proposed. As we showed in Chapter 2, Roubaud used the experimental work of German physiologist Georg Kobelt to produce a description of the male

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and female genital apparatus at work in coitus.13 On material grounds, he was thus able to dismiss the idea that the woman’s genitals functioned as a mere vessel for the reception of sperm.14 This emphasis on the physiology of coitus was later criticized, as we shall see, for its ‘excessive, absolute organicism’.15 But while Roubaud certainly gave full value to the friction and hydraulics of coitus, he was not slow to point out the inadequacy of a purely physical account. Rape provided him with a striking example: The woman who is raped or compelled to coitus with a man whom her heart rejects is passive throughout the act, allowing it to take place without any experience of pleasure. And yet there has been no lack of external stimulus. Her genitals have felt the rubbing of the penis, and that rubbing would in other circumstances have plunged her into sensual delight. But now it leaves her cold and insensitive. That is because moral incitement has been absent.16 Roubaud’s point was precisely that the ‘organic’ description of genital contact could not give an adequate account of copulative pleasure: the moral was its necessary complement. Indeed, as he went on to say a few pages later, ‘More than any other part of the organism, the genital apparatus is under the influence of the moral.’17 In effect, the genitals – especially the female genitals – were seen as the point in the organism at which the physical and the moral most closely converged. Therapy for genital disorders clearly needed to attend to both, and to attend to the fact of their local convergence. Passing discussions about the possibility of pregnancy from rape, and about a woman’s vulnerability to penetration without pleasure on her part, are found in many of the same texts that formulated ideas about frigidity, anaphrodisia and vaginismus throughout the period of our study. Joanna Bourke’s work on the history of rape examines the specific discourses about such questions in a range of British medical and legal sources, showing how problematic the notion of consent might be.18 Rape stood in the background of many discussions of frigidity since both questions rested upon the recognition that women were physiologically disposed to coitus without pleasure or consent, so that the accomplishment of coitus in no way implied female complicity. Physiological accounts of female arousal might have complicated that recognition by suggesting that coitus, as a natural function, would result in an inevitable set of genital mechanisms of arousal in both male and female. But the emergent moral–physical dualism gave room to account

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for both rape and frigidity, by suggesting a missing element that distinguished the mechanical accomplishment of coital functions from harmonious sexual fulfilment. Frigidity helped to maintain a tension in scientific physical accounts of coitus, by insisting upon the importance of the moral component. Here was a failure of organic function that could not be explained in physical terms. Physical treatments alone would not suffice, then, but the difficulty was more acute still. Old traditions of quack medicine had produced a host of patent remedies for impotence – if not usually for impotence in females – that were themselves utterly inadequate. All were based on the assumption that a person suffering from these disorders needed some pharmaceutical infusion of vital force. Here is how Roubaud evoked that history: As innervation or vital force were declared to be inert, an effort was made to remedy that state of weakness by resorting to warming substances and stimulants of every kind, bringing together an endless list of things and calling them aphrodisiacs. The three kingdoms of nature were put to work. People dug around in the entrails of animals; they distilled vegetable substances from both worlds; and they subjected minerals to the most adventurous reactions of alchemy.19 The target of Roubaud’s irony here was a whole genre of therapy. Pharmaceutical stimulants he rejected more or less en bloc: ‘the number of aphrodisiacal formulae left to us by our predecessors is immense, and none of them are of any interest’.20 Modern doctors, said Roubaud, no longer fell into the pitfalls of this ‘ridiculous polypharmacy’,21 and modern medicine had other kinds of physical treatment at its disposal. Yet, even so, the picture was not much improved. Since Roubaud’s contemporaries, in his view, hardly had a better understanding of the aetiology of impotence than their benighted predecessors, they continued to think in terms of augmenting vital energy and ‘nervous genesic forces’.22 As a consequence, they found themselves ‘resorting without distinction to stimulants and local excitation, prescribing as if at random nux vomica, phosphorus, electricity, and sometimes cantharides, mustard, sea bathing and hydrotherapy’.23 The very disparateness of this list had to be read as a mark of medical irresolution. Roubaud was equally severe about those forms of physical treatment known in pharmacy as ‘specifics’. While he was prepared to allow that some substances might have aphrodisiacal effects, he rejected in principle the notion that any single medication might overcome a general

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lack of genital responsiveness: ‘the available substances do not include any aphrodisiacs, and that term is not a proper qualification for any of the medications, physical agents or mechanical means that I will discuss below’.24 Physical treatments were not without value: it was just that, given the complex nature of anaphrodisia, no single medication could possibly overcome it. A propos of impotence in males, Roubaud spelled out the clinical logic of treating a disorder that was both physical and moral: No medication can act on the whole of the genital sense, that is, address all at the same time the moral and physical conditions that preside over erection. But there are agents that, generally or locally, respond more or less directly to one of these conditions. So by combining them as needed, it is possible to have an effect on the genital sense, either as a whole or in the parts of it that are deficient.25 There was no panacea to be had, but there was room for the judicious use of certain substances, most often in combination with other agents. Where physical treatments were concerned, Roubaud showed more interest in non-pharmaceutical than in pharmaceutical means. As a treatment for impotence – and we should not forget that he was claiming throughout to address ‘impotence’ in both sexes – he gave favourable mention to electricity, declaring electricity applied to the genitals to be ‘far superior to any other medication’ as a means of producing arousal.26 Other physical treatments were considered worthy of mention: ‘Flagellation, urtication, massage and dry friction on the lumbar region also form part of the therapeutic arsenal on which the practitioner can draw.’27 Note that diversity could appear here as a clinical virtue. By contrast with the disparate and rather desperate list of ‘aphrodisiacs’ that had served to signify medical confusion, this ‘therapeutic arsenal’ provided an orderly array, and an occasion for the exercise of tact: These means should not all be used simultaneously. One should have recourse to them by turns, should any chosen treatment fail. There may also be some individual disposition [in the patient] that will help the doctor to make his choice. It should be left to his sagacity to decide which treatments best apply.28 In defining frigidity as a moral-and-physical condition, Roubaud was at pains to minimize any recourse to a notion that continued to provide

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difficulties for nineteenth-century medicine – that of the névrose, the neurosis, or illness without ‘an anatomico-pathological lesion allowing the aetiology to be established’, to use Foucault’s definition.29 Whenever doctors found themselves having recourse to this notion, as they did regularly for such conditions as hysteria, they effectively marked a failure to give a thoroughly material account of the disease, and indicated by the same token the difficulty of devising appropriate physical treatment. This problematic notion lay in Roubaud’s path. There were, he said in a summary comment, two elements that motivated the copulative function: the moral and the physical. Where the first was lacking, impotence was characterized by the absence of venereal desires. But where moral excitability occurred without arousing a response from the genital apparatus, there must be a physical problem located in the nerve centres or in the nervous apparatus of the genitals. By applying the moral–physical dichotomy, he was able to identify the physical dimension in principle, but there was a risk, once that was done, of not finding any sort of lesion in the patient’s body. This set of symptoms – desire without genital arousal – had been identified during the preceding decades, notably by Descourtilz, as ‘genital neurosis or syncope’.30 But Roubaud saw a need to contain any talk of ‘neurosis’. He gave credit, in fact, to some of his predecessors for having helped to ‘remove the title of neurosis from certain forms of impotence whose cause is in fact manifest in lesions of the genital apparatus’.31 Every time that had occurred, there must have been in Roubaud’s eyes a theoretical and practical gain, as particular forms of impotence and frigidity were brought more squarely into the category of disorders whose aetiology could be traced, making them more likely to be treatable. Despite these local successes, Roubaud saw a need to allow for a condition that could not be accounted for by physical or moral aetiologies. He called this condition ‘idiopathic impotence’, and made some statements about it that were to exercise medical writers in the decades to follow. Again, the description was produced a propos of men, but was taken to apply to women also: I give the name ‘idiopathic impotence’ to the impossibility of engaging in coitus, in the absence of any apparent or identifiable lesion of the genital organs, in the absence of any pathological condition of an apparatus other than the genitals, in the absence of the physiological effects of age, constitution and temperament, in the absence of any intervention of the moral faculties. In short, a state of inertia of genesic activity that is not explained by moral anatomy, pathological

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anatomy, or by relations of physiological or morbid sympathy of the generative sense with the other functions of the animal economy. This is the only condition that can properly be called genital neurosis or syncope.32 Roubaud presumably saw idiopathic impotence as a useful element in a general theory of the disorder. As a syndrome that was somehow beyond both physical and moral aetiologies, it occupied a defined, if residual place. But he hastened to minimize its clinical importance: ‘this neurosis is extremely rare’.33 It seems as if he was locating genital ‘neurosis’ as a limit case, one that stood at the very edge of medical knowledge. And by defining it thus he was undoubtedly helping medicine to pull back from attempting to treat this radical form of impotence, thereby focusing attention on those partial and curable forms encountered most often in patients. Alongside the rare condition of ‘idiopathic impotence through incapacity for arousal’ Roubaud placed another that he considered to be more common: ‘idiopathic impotence through perversion of the capacity for arousal’.34 Here again, the binary opposition did its work. ‘Impotence’ could take two forms. One was physical, and corresponded to the absence of ejaculation or sperm. It is not at all clear how that applied to women, but we will return to that issue later. Physical impotence was also found in priapism, which involved a failure to reach the natural conclusion of pleasure. The other form of impotence was moral, and corresponded to the presence of desires not oriented towards natural coitus. It was found in ‘the masturbator, the sodomist, the pederast, and the tribade’.35 Roubaud had made a quite striking inference – the earliest example we have found of a move that was to be made regularly in later, psychological accounts of frigidity. Once coitus and its pleasures had been defined as physically and morally normal, as we have seen, the absence of pleasure and desire in that context could be declared a morbid condition. And by that same logic, desire for any other kind of sexual activity deserved equally to be considered pathological, since it did not follow the channel of natural pleasure. It was then just one further step, taken here by Roubaud, to declare that any genital desire or pleasure that turned away from normal coitus was by definition a form of frigidity. Taking frigidity and impotence as functional synonyms, he spoke elsewhere in the book of ‘idiopathic impotence through perversion of the capacity for arousal’. In cases of that kind, ‘the [moral] consensus or the [physical] genital sense may rebel either simultaneously or separately against their natural sources of arousal, and respond only to abnormal enticements’.36

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This was, we believe, a new development. As long as frigidity had been thought of as a bodily deficiency of substance or temperament, the term could hardly have been applied to those who followed strong desires that happened to take them along other paths. Behaviours of that kind had sometimes been seen, especially in the eighteenth century, as libertine indulgences. More often they had been described as reprehensible or depraved. But a form of medicine predicated on the concept of normal desire and pleasure was now able to make a triple set of moves: every departure from the norm was a perversion, every perversion a lack, and every lack part of the same general pathology. As a consequence, the theoretical and clinical scope of ‘frigidity’ was much extended: it became a generic diagnosis for masturbation and same-sex attraction, and later for sadism, masochism, clitoridism and androgyny.37 Roubaud himself seemed to acknowledge how adventurous this move was, for he conceded that there was an apparent contradiction in interpreting frigidity so widely, yet maintained his position in spite of that. A propos of masturbation he said: Strictly speaking, the frigidity brought on by these habits may only be relative, since there remains a mode for genital sensitivity to manifest itself. Nevertheless, when one enters into the laws of physiology and considers that onanism is not the natural arousal of genital sensitivity, one is able to say that the aversion experienced by masturbators for sexual intimacy constitutes a morbid moral condition, aggravated by the perversion of genital sensitivity.38 According to this principle, all sexual orientations not directed towards coitus were forms of frigidity. The practice of conflating non-coital desires with frigidity gained wide currency in the final decade of the nineteenth century and in early-twentieth-century accounts, both sexological and psychoanalytic. While Roubaud stood alone in the mid-nineteenth century in asserting the close relationship, something similar was implied by numerous other medical writers in the following decades. Thésée Pouillet, for example, spoke of masturbation and frigidity as twin threats to marital contentment and health.39 Frigidity was not always named as a perversion in its own right, but took its place within a tableau of anomalous sexual functions. By insisting that frigidity could account for all non-coital desire, Roubaud took a decisive step towards a view of sexual pathology as lack, and indeed of lack as perversion. It was clear to Roubaud that any treatment for idiopathic frigidity had to find a means of addressing as directly as possible the absence of

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‘natural’ venereal desires in the patient. That called for some form of moral treatment, but moral treatment entailed considerable risks for the medical practitioner: ‘it demands the intervention of a moral medication that the doctor can only point to with understandable restraint’.40 Moral treatment, as practised by alienists, involved repeated attempts to influence and persuade the patient to reasonable behaviours. Leuret spoke of the forms of verbal suasion and coercion practised at Bicêtre: The doctor in the asylum must aim to be master of all his patients. But he will never achieve this goal unless he deploys an almost infinite number of means of action. He must use, according to need, abruptness or civility, condescension or tyranny. He must encourage or suppress certain passions, set traps, or behave with the utmost confidence and candour. In a word, he has to seek in the minds of those he wishes to heal a spring or a lever that, once activated, will restore to the intelligence the energy or the rectitude it has lost.41 If traitement moral was to be applied to anaphrodisia, the doctor who provided it needed by inference to persuade the patient to desire natural coitus. This was a delicate matter indeed, since it called for the doctor to address the patient’s intimate desires: ‘At the outset, the treatment must aim at the patient’s intimate sense, and attempt to reach his sensitivity by both moral and physical means.’42 Not to put too fine a point on it, the doctor’s moral goal was to arouse or excite his patient, and that called for the utmost tact: One must observe a gentle gradation in the choice of stimulants in order to avoid provoking the reaction of disgust that cold minds always feel when they encounter conversations that are too uninhibited, reading matter that is too licentious, paintings with too much nudity, and shows that reveal too much flesh.43 Roubaud found himself saying here what leading aliénistes had regularly said about traitement moral. It had to be finely adapted to the patient’s needs:44 The line to be followed must vary with each patient. It must take its lead from his or her conduct, beliefs, habits, affections, productive work, turn of mind, etc., etc. In these circumstances, the doctor needs all his tact, all his prudence, all his resolve. He must never hasten, but walk a path that is fraught with danger, always making sure of

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his footing before advancing. Like an educator, he must employ the gradual method, and avoid precipitation. Only then can success be achieved.45 In translating Roubaud’s text, we have supplied the masculine pronoun where the doctor is referred to – even though French anaphora does not mark biological gender – since all the doctors we have encountered in Roubaud’s time were men. But the translation of references to the patient posed a difficulty for us. Roubaud almost always claimed to be discussing male and female disorders in much the same terms, which is why we used ‘his or her’, but it is undeniable that the need for caution in providing moral stimulus to patients was likely to be inflected by the patient’s sex. Already subject to great caution in the treatment of male patients, treatment of that kind was likely to be hedged about with interdictions where female patients were concerned. But Roubaud was determined to push on. It was not easy to do so because moral treatment was difficult to carry out and dangerous even to describe, presumably for reasons of propriety: ‘Here I find myself at the most fertile sources of impotence and, as a consequence, faced with difficulties that are equally arduous for the writer and the practitioner.’46 But the ‘moral element’, since it was both central and elusive, demanded a theoretical and practical commitment: The fact is that the moral element in our nature, which holds the genital organs almost completely in its sway, undergoes the most diverse and mysterious influences. That makes it almost impossible to fathom all the reasons for choices and all the motives for passions. Meandering and elusive, the moral element seems to escape all analysis, and thwarts any attempt to take hold of it.47 Moral aetiology was the determining factor, and knowledge of it was essential to the treatment of genital disorders – that much had now been established. But when the moral element was envisaged as a terrain of medical exploration, it appeared hard to locate and harder still to map. Roubaud was coming close here to positing a medical hermeneutics of the moral underpinned by a theory of the mysterious, but he had no such theory or practice to hand. Those would be developed a few decades later, for better and for worse, by psychoanalysis. What medicine did have to hand in the 1870s were of course forms of traitement moral. For alienists, that involved establishing authority over patients, reasoning with them, but also resorting to such

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coercive measures as isolation and cold showers when the patient failed to respond appropriately. And while, in the specialist treatment of anaphrodisia, punitive measures had no place, authority appeared to Roubaud a significant weapon: In using it [moral treatment], the doctor must draw on all his authority. He must promise triumphant success, not entertaining scientific doubt, but speaking with the assurance of one who is utterly convinced. In circumstances like these, any hesitation is fatal. The nature of the prescription matters little. The most important thing is to seem assured of its effectiveness.48 Doubt, for Roubaud, was an important aspect of scientific method, but it had no place in moral treatment. Even as the doctor was trying to have an influence over moral forces he found quite ‘mysterious’, he knew in practice that the best clinical outcomes would occur when he displayed certainty. As he dealt with forms of impotence produced by the patient’s imagination, he was required to lie: ‘in general when dealing with disturbances of the imagination, one has to condemn oneself to a lie, for that lie is authorized by the legitimate goal of science. And one must usually hold to it throughout the whole course of medical treatment.’49 The irony was patent. At least in certain cases, the doctor was reduced to asserting that the manner in which he made his prescriptions was more important in practice than the prescriptions themselves. It was all very well to talk about the legitimate goals of science: the scientific basis of moral medicine could hardly have been less certain. This was evidence that Roubaud’s clinical practice was drawing him away from his theoretical knowledge base. There was a further fundamental difficulty: the management of sexual difference. We have remarked more than once on Roubaud’s commitment to describing male and female ‘impotence’ in exactly the same terms, and we now turn to confront some of the issues he raised – or rather the difficulties he failed to avoid – by this parallel conceptual arrangement. We will have occasion once again to note a strained relationship between theory and practice. Three-quarters of the section on impotence in the 1872 edition is taken up with the discussion of the disorder in men. We might expect nonetheless that in the discussion of women particular attention would be paid to the moral element, since in Roubaud’s view ‘the moral influence, as a consequence of education, of feelings of modesty, of more exquisite sensitivity, etc., is more marked in her than in man’.50 But in practice – at least in the practice

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of writing – Roubaud devoted 112 pages to the description and treatment of physical sources of impotence in women and less than two to ‘moral frigidity’. Having discussed the latter at length in men, he felt entitled to say very little about women precisely because he claimed close parallels between the two sexes. The same ‘sympathies’ between the genital apparatus and the digestive and cerebral ones were to be found in both, although women did not suffer from failures of erection and ejaculation. They simply experienced lack of desire and pleasure in coitus.51 There was not one female case cited, not one specific suggestion regarding the treatment of moral frigidity in women.52 Referring to the earlier section on moral impotence in men, he simply said: ‘I can add nothing further on the subject, and I refer the reader back to it.’53 Yet if the reader conscientiously returns to that section in search of enlightenment about the treatment of frigidity in women, she will find very little on the subject. The topic is deferred in the first part of the book, and referred to in the second as if it had somehow been resolved or exhausted in the interim. In terms recognizable to readers of Thomas Laqueur’s Making Sex, a one-sex model persisted into mid-nineteenthcentury accounts of the treatment of frigidity, even at a time when gender-differentiated biology was the subject of general consensus. That is why Roubaud’s contribution to the treatment of frigidity in women is both laboured and deficient. If the gender differentiation of sexual response was deemed important for the aetiology of frigidity insofar as women were more given to the moral than men, that difference appeared to have no impact upon therapy. Whatever the uncertainties of theory, this was a serious discrepancy of practice. Roubaud was, after all, a self-styled pioneer of therapeutic approaches to frigidity, and a recent history of French sexology refers quite appropriately to the ‘Roubaud turn’ in the history of female anaphrodisia.54 He claimed that his predecessors had lacked the capacity to make a specific diagnosis of the disorder, notably where women were concerned. They did not have a detailed understanding of the different parts of the female genital apparatus, and of the ways in which those parts could malfunction. As a consequence, ‘frigidity has been abandoned by doctors as incurable, and therefore unworthy of their contemplation’.55 But despite this declaration of intent Roubaud’s own clinical efforts were limited in two quite telling ways. The first was that the particular topics he was able to discuss at length under the heading of female impotence and frigidity were physical ailments and impediments, rather than the moral ones he declared to be the most important in principle. The second was simply that he had no female

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cases to report, and was almost certainly inhibited even in his general description of clinical practice with women, as we shall see. It should be noted that Roubaud did devote more than 100 pages to the physical causes of impotence in women. That was clearly his preferred terrain. Vaginismus was discussed at length, and it is not difficult to see why. However contentious its aetiology, its symptoms were manifest in examination, and Roubaud could offer precise techniques for easing the pain and thus making intercourse possible.56 Many other physical impediments to pleasure were also considered: irritations, infections, tumours and congenital malformations.57 There were, he said, forms of frigidity that were ‘purely moral’, while in other cases, ‘by contrast, desires exist but, as a result of some organic disturbance, general or local, they cannot act on the sensitivity of the copulative apparatus. In those cases, frigidity is thoroughly physical [toute physique], and belongs more particularly in our domain’.58 There is an expression of professional relief in this marking of ‘our domain’. A little further on, having referred to physical and moral frigidity, he continued to narrow his focus: ‘Only the latter two will concern me here, especially the first, which belongs more particularly in the domain of medicine.’59 Roussel and so many who had followed him since the late eighteenth century had declared at every turn that the moral could and should belong within the field of medicine, and Roubaud had not resiled from that position in the treatment of impotence, but here he seemed to pull back from occupying the terrain they had all claimed. There were, he had established, no specifics or panaceas to be had, and it did appear that the use of any given physical treatment mattered less than the authoritative manner in which it was prescribed, but physical treatment remained the primary business of the profession to which he belonged. Clinical tact was, as we have already seen, an essential virtue for Roubaud, and it was never more necessary than in the moral treatment of female patients. Speaking of women with defective or undeveloped clitorises, he entertained the idea that their genital apparatus might in fact be made stronger by clinical stimulation. That would, as it happened, have made for the close convergence of moral and physical treatments at the organic seat of genital pleasure. But ‘society’ and ‘morality’ called for great caution in the use of this or any other method of erotic stimulation on female patients: ‘The doctor should therefore be very circumspect, and use only with the greatest prudence the dangerous weapon of erotic [cynique] arousal in woman.’60 Indeed, whatever methods may actually have been used could presumably not be described in print here without further professional risk.

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In cases where no physical symptoms of frigidity could be discerned, an even more fundamental difficulty presented itself in the treatment of women: that of diagnosis. This was notably the case with women of ‘intellectual temperament’, for whom diagnosis required a kind of moral examination: ‘the manifestations of it must be sought in the behaviour, personal habits, and moral character of the woman, even if those circumstances do not always have very great value. One must pay close attention to the confessions [aveux] of the patient who, when she makes them to a doctor, can hardly be suspected of trickery.’61 What was needed was an art of provoking confession, even if in Roubaud’s view no great skill was required to interpret confessions once they were made. Yet again, he was describing a therapeutic practice that was at the very limit of his professional capacity, and probably beyond the range of his theory. Even as he referred to the range of skills involved, he seemed to be invoking more than one profession: ‘this investigation of individual moral qualities must be left to the tact of the clinician, the observation of the doctor, and the analytical mind of the philosopher’.62 As before, the set of skills and professional claims required for moral treatment bore a close resemblance to those that were later to be claimed by psychoanalysis in particular. Medicine driven by therapeutic concerns was being led here onto terrain that it wished to claim, but was unable to map. This ambitious self-description could be framed as pre-psychoanalytic conjuring of the role of the therapist, but we will resist any temptation to read that development backwards. It is certainly true that by virtue of its dual nature, moral and physical, frigidity called for the doctor’s professional attention while exposing the limits of his knowledge. In that sense, Roubaud displayed a distinctive mixture of inertia and mobility: he remained committed to medical procedures, but was drawn to the ingenious clinical resolution of matters that were not properly constituted in medical terms. This led him to conceive of the therapeutic persona needed to treat frigidity as a clinician–doctor–philosopher, and in doing so sketch a persona that would later be adopted by psychoanalysis. On that basis, it might just be possible to argue that frigidity played a role in the development of psychotherapy. But we will not take that hazardous step. Our aim is to understand the intellectual impasse reached by Roubaud in the terms that were available at the time – when psychoanalysts were not waiting in the wings ready to take on the therapist’s role. Our key point is that this was an intellectual impasse rather than a resounding defeat for clinical medicine. Roubaud did not give up

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medical practice as a consequence of the problems we have outlined, and the tradition to which he belonged and contributed did not come to a halt. It was continued directly in France during the last two decades of the nineteenth century by Pierre Garnier, whose writings on impotence we considered at some length in Chapter 2. We propose to return to Garnier’s work here, just as we did to Roubaud’s, in order to understand how the medical treatment of frigidity was further developed, and how the impasse that surrounded it was further put to the test. Referring to Roubaud’s work at every turn, Garnier was often critical of his predecessor, but that is itself evidence that he was working with much the same problematic. The notion of the moral was required to do heavy duty at the heart of Garnier’s thinking, as he insisted that ‘the two acts of generation’, namely penetration and fertilization, were ‘subject to moral impressions’.63 But Garnier was able to accommodate the notion of the moral to discursive habits that had become prevalent during his time, making a place for the term that stood closer to the language of psychology. Roubaud’s favoured binary was then recast as an opposition between ‘physical lesions’ on the one hand, and causes that were ‘entirely moral, psychical, and/or constitutional’ on the other.64 That in itself might have amounted to no more than an aggiornamento of the prevailing medical view, but Garnier had wider ambitions and deeper concerns. The 1893 edition of his book on impotence and sterility, which had first been published in 1882, offered a substantial revision of his own position on just this point. He now proposed to distinguish between impotence and anaphrodisia by declaring the former to be occasioned by ‘purely physical’ causes and the latter by ‘thoroughly moral ones’.65 Instead of supposing with Roubaud that there was always a mix of causes calling for an arsenal of treatments, Garnier was bidding to make an unambiguous nosological distinction. Earlier editions of his own book, he said, had failed to make an explicit difference between the ‘essential genital syncope’, which he now proposed to name ‘anaphrodisia’, and disorders of physical origin that might ‘simulate’ its symptoms, to be called ‘impotence’.66 It was precisely because moral and physical functions were so closely connected that doctors, including Garnier himself, had previously failed to make this distinction properly: Impotence and anaphrodisia have been confused because of the connectedness of the moral faculties with the physical functions of the genital organs and their reciprocal sympathies. We will provide a factual demonstration to the effect that the difference between the two

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rests on the positive reality of their different essences. They must therefore be separated according to their causes and their signs so that they can be better recognized and treated appropriately. That is the main practical use of the following division.67 The guiding concern here was eminently practical: if (moral) anaphrodisia could be held apart from (physical) impotence, each could be treated with a method suited to its aetiology. If that were not done, problems would ensue, since ‘it is equally irrational and dangerous to arouse the organs when the cause of their inertia is moral as it is to stimulate the imagination and the feelings when the organs are missing or paralysed’.68 Garnier actually provided his own intellectual history to account for this failure to distinguish. The fault, as he saw it, lay with a ‘physiologistic’ or materialist strand in French medicine. The clinical problem, as given, was that moral and physical causes were ‘gathered together [réunies] and separated at the origin of every kind of frigidity’.69 Once – in some time past that Garnier did not specify – only moral causes had been considered. But the impact of Broussais’s materialist thought in nineteenth-century France, carried on by Roubaud, had been such that the causes of frigidity had now come to be sought in ‘an exaggerated, absolute organicism’.70 The analysis we carried out earlier in this chapter shows this to be a quite tendentious account of Roubaud’s approach, but our interest at this point is not in Garnier’s credibility as a historian. It is in how he built his own position, and he sometimes did that by using Roubaud as a straw man. According to Garnier’s history, because Roubaud had followed ‘modern anatomists’ (that is, Kobelt) in making the woman’s role in coitus equal to the man’s, he had no room for manoeuvre. He was committed to the view that frigidity was a material phenomenon indistinguishable in principle from anaphrodisia.71 As a consequence, frigidity could only be understood by Roubaud as a physiological malfunction, and its moral dimension could not be recovered. Roubaud’s allocation of equivalent roles to both sexes in coitus was countered in Garnier’s work by a set of moves that helped restore gender difference where it seemed likely to be removed, and indeed gave a gendered significance to the moral–physical binary itself. The activity of love in women, said Garnier, was primarily of a certain kind: ‘Her amorous activity is more in her heart, her mind and her imagination than in her body. Delight and pleasure are less in her senses than in the feelings that emanate from them.’72 That was so even in

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copulation itself, he said, the primary function of the female genital organs being, contra Roubaud, to increase pleasure in the male during coitus, and thereby maintain his erection.73 In sum, Garnier maintained, ‘the normal role of woman in copulation is more moral than physical’.74 So Roubaud’s focus on the clitoris as a seat of pleasure was a mistake on two levels. Firstly, it gave an inaccurate account of female physiology. Garnier conceded that it must be the case that woman ‘participates in pleasure [ . . . ] when it occurs naturally’, otherwise there would be no natural purpose for the ‘ardent desire’ and ‘febrile activity’ she displayed. But to regard the clitoris as the ‘exclusive seat’ of pleasure, as if it were simply a female equivalent of the penis and testes, was to fail to understand that ‘the principal source of happiness for woman is in the warmth of her heart, in the intensity of love and tenderness’.75 Secondly, to attach great importance to the clitoris was also a moral error of sorts. To look for the cause of frigidity in some defect of the clitoris was unworthy and demeaning. The inborn modesty and reticence of woman was such that frigidity, when it occurred, must be seen to have a moral cause: ‘the hearth and focus of love and tenderness, and the warmth that flows from it, could not come from such a lowly place’.76 In response to the requirements of physiology and morality, the doctor had to raise his eyes, and look for the source of frigidity in higher places: One must look higher and further afield. The cause must be sought in the character, the temperament, the constitution, and in the influence they have on the circulation and the nervous system. It is in the brain, especially in the moral faculties or aberrations, that the seat and principal source must be located.77 This was a very significant shift from Roubaud’s position. It amounted to saying that material accounts of frigidity in women did not deserve to have a place in medicine. And that signified, as Roubaud had undoubtedly perceived decades before, that physical medicine had little or nothing to offer to patients who were diagnosed as suffering from frigidity. Garnier was prepared to say just that, and to pursue his object onto impassable terrain. Rather than saying, as Roubaud had, that a whole variety of physical treatments might prove useful if applied with discretion, Garnier declared that he had now identified a syndrome, moral anaphrodisia, to which physical treatments could not apply by definition. Not only did he assert, with Roubaud, that ‘no aphrodisiacal remedy is applicable’,78 but he rejected in principle the use of electricity,

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regarded favourably by Roubaud, on the grounds that it bore no effective relation to the moral aetiology of the disorder: What could possibly be the effectiveness of electricity in such a case? Above all, one has to identify the cause that produced the lesion before outlining the remedy. If that cause is entirely moral, there is no point in applying electricity or any other physical means.79 In general, said Garnier, physical means such as baths, lotions and friction, could never be more than adjuncts to treatment.80 Garnier’s nosological distinction allowed him to cut through some of the tensions and complications of Roubaud’s position, at the risk of completely undoing the claims of physical medicine to treat the now exclusively moral disorders of anaphrodisia (located in men) and frigidity (located in women). Garnier no longer saw frigidity as an illness: ‘frigidity does not alter any of the functions necessary to maintain life and propagate the species. So it is not a sickness, but a simple infirmity.’81 This amounted to a specific undoing of Roubaud’s definition of frigidity as a pathological failure of natural female pleasure in coitus. Having rejected Roubaud’s ‘physiologism’, Garnier was able to assert that women’s relative lack of pleasure in coitus was in fact natural insofar as it reflected their innate modesty, and was in any case biologically inconsequential. While Roubaud’s position prefigured many ‘progressive’ twentieth-century medical approaches that sought to normalize and enhance female sexual pleasure, Garnier’s resembled many ‘conservative’ positions that declared feminine coldness to be a matter of acceptable degree: ‘female frigidity is a matter of degree: however habitual or essential it may be, it is often only relative, and certainly not absolute. Only rarely does it prevent a woman from marrying; it never makes her sterile; and it makes her an excellent mother just the same.’82 If frigidity as moral infirmity was to be kept within the domain of medicine, two things were necessary. Moral aetiology had to be translated into the language of medicine, and moral treatment had to become the central business of the doctor. The first outcome could be achieved by resorting to a long-established medical notion treated with suspicion by Roubaud, that of the névrose – the disorder without discernable lesions – which Garnier embraced heartily: The origin of [female] frigidity is therefore, like that of [male] anaphrodisia, essentially moral, that is nervous, and its main source is obviously located in the brain. Disturbances and affections of the

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mind, the imagination, of intelligence itself can cause it to occur through the predominant influence of those faculties on the genital functions. In that sense, it is a true neurosis [névrose], with no perceptible material lesion, and a determining cause that is purely psychical.83 Writing only 20 years after Roubaud, Garnier was able to speak with new confidence about the problematic notion of the névrose because its source could be located in the brain and it could be referred to as ‘psychical’. Roubaud had been uncomfortable about constructing a form of medicine that was committed to specializing in the moral, but Garnier saw this dimension, that of the moral–cerebral–psychical, as the only proper way to conceive the aetiology and treatment of frigidity. It should be noted that Garnier, for all his publishing activity, also spoke as a clinician. Indeed, he referred on occasion to the fact that his readers entered into correspondence about ‘the various anomalies or irregularities’ discussed in his works.84 One of his key references in consultations on anaphrodisia and frigidity must have been the idea that colleagues in the field had confused the syndromes of impotence and anaphrodisia, and had consequently used inappropriately physical methods in the treatment of the latter: ‘This confusion of the causes of physical impotence with those of frigidity, whose nature is essentially moral, has led to their being treated with a series of remedies that are just as material as the supposed lesions, whereas simple moral measures are applicable in the majority of cases.’85 The answer in such cases lay simply in the use of exclusively moral treatments. But, as we have seen throughout this chapter, it was something of a vexed question how ‘simple’ those moral methods might be. Garnier’s list of such treatments for men suffering from anaphrodisia bore a close resemblance to Roubaud’s: reading novels, going to dances and the theatre, looking at libertine paintings, and spending time in the company of women.86 When transposed for women patients, the list became shorter without being radically different: reading novels, walking in the forest, and spending time in the company of men.87 Furthermore, it was scarcely possible to speak of moral treatments without foregrounding the actual style of treatment to be adopted. Like Roubaud and Leuret before him, Garnier insisted that the treatment be finely adjusted to the patient’s individual qualities,88 and admitted that it was sometimes appropriate to lie to patients in order to enhance the chances of success.89 But the irony from the point of view of a history of medical treatment was that he had now energetically cleared away most of the weapons of Roubaud’s

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‘arsenal’ while offering nothing new by way of moral treatment. He had helped to weaken the claims of physical medicine to treat anaphrodisia and frigidity, but had not been able to consolidate or elaborate a claim to treat them by methods suited to their supposed ‘psychical’ nature. In a book published in 1891 containing 230 ‘observations’, Garnier allowed a rare glimpse of actual clinical interaction with a patient showing symptoms of frigidity. The woman in question had children and, by his account, had been more or less happily married for years. Yet she felt no pleasure in coitus, and was continually preoccupied by the fact that she was ‘unable to feel like other women’. Here was a classic instance in which moral treatment would seem to be called for, but Garnier’s response was remarkably narrow and abrupt. It consisted in prescriptive moral advice of the most humdrum kind. The woman was told to ‘stop worrying about it, forget about it as a Christian Catholic with a fervent love of God, and fulfil her duty to her husband and children’. To that she replied with admirable spirit: ‘I can’t manage to do so, and I’m afraid that I will lose my mind!’ But the doctor–writer had the last word: ‘Isn’t that a psychopathic state?’ he observed in his note.90 One thing is clear: the notion of the ‘moral’ was performing a double task in Garnier’s practice, if not in his theory. It effectively transformed the persona of the doctor–philosopher invoked by Roubaud into that of the doctor–moralist. And when challenged in that role, the doctor was able to defend himself by a discursive shift into the technical language of psychology. The patient was behaving like a ‘psychopath’, but Garnier did not actually refer psychopaths to other specialists. He simply used the term to characterize patients who answered back. ∗

∗

∗

We promised early in this chapter to document the attempts by clinicians such as Roubaud and Garnier to hold frigidity within their own professional domain, and we believe we have done so. We also pointed to a phase of psychologization, yet to be analysed, that occurred in the last decades of the nineteenth century and the first decades of the twentieth. It might well be thought, in fact, that we have tarried unduly with the problems surrounding Roubaud’s and Garnier’s work, rather than moving on to the subsequent studies of the disorder that are best remembered and most critiqued in our time: those of KrafftEbing and of the Vienna school psychoanalysts, notably Stekel. But our insistence on Roubaud and Garnier is more than an exercise in historical thoroughness. Our concern is not simply to arrive at the phase of

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psychologization, but to frame the narrative that allows it to be counted as a phase. We clearly have an interest here in the rise of psychiatry, but we do not wish to be drawn away from our topic. Accordingly, we will now make some points about the history of the profession, while continuing to use the treatment of frigidity as our pole of reference. Ian Dowbiggin, in his history of psychiatry in nineteenth-century France, draws attention to the journal Annales médico-psychologiques, which first appeared in 1843, serving as a locus for reflective and institutional activity.91 The lead article in the first issue, written by Laurent Cerise, defined the space of inquiry to be occupied as ‘the science of the relations between the physical and the moral’.92 There was much to be said, according to Cerise, about ‘the influence of the moral on the physical’, that is, ‘the impact produced on the organism by ideas’.93 The key terms of reference here were exactly Roubaud’s, but the orientation of inquiry was different. Like so many of his contemporaries, Roubaud asserted the connectedness of the physical and the moral, but he did not have – and could not even claim to have – a developed theory of the relations between them. That Cerise and his colleagues were claiming this space as their own hardly sufficed to establish a new profession, but this dichotomous definition might well be regarded as a key element in the intellectual history of psychiatry. Roubaud and his physician colleagues were largely reduced to envisaging moral and physical treatments in parallel, rather than actually mapping a path between them, and the approach outlined by Cerise was importantly different in principle. Yet the fact that both took as their point of departure the moral–physical binary will allow us to make our own passing contribution to the genealogy of psychiatry. By examining this binary and the displacements it underwent, we will find our way into the psychological and psychiatric treatment of frigidity. It is important here to mark the limited extent of our historical claims. We are arguing that, in dealing with impotence and frigidity, Roubaud and his colleagues encountered difficulties and contradictions that psychological approaches would later claim to resolve. It is not the case that physiologically based medicine generally gave way to psychologically based medicine as the century wore on. In fact, histories of psychiatry regularly insist on the profession’s struggle for recognition. Ian Dowbiggin says: ‘French psychiatrists feared that their specialty was not considered a legitimate branch of medicine nor a legitimate biomedical science. These fears were undoubtedly justified to a large degree.’94 Harry Oosterhuis makes the same point: ‘Despite the often triumphal rhetoric of the psychiatric profession, the position of psychiatrists

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within medicine, as well as in society at large, remained precarious.’95 Roubaud, as editor-in-chief of La France médicale, contributed actively to the prestige and solidarity of physicians, and it is unimaginable that he might have wished to become a psychiatrist. But in attempting to think through the treatment of impotence and frigidity, he was unhelpfully constrained by his own professional engagement. Rather than pursuing the vicissitudes of a history of medical professions, it seems more useful at this point to turn to Arnold Davidson’s intellectual history of ‘sexuality’. In a widely quoted and persuasive study, Davidson characterizes the late-nineteenth-century understanding of sexual instinct and its pathologies as something quite unprecedented. He calls it a ‘new style of reasoning’ in which ‘the sexual instinct and its functional diseases were introduced together’.96 This style of reasoning was distinctively psychological, claiming to identify perversions of the sexual instinct without grounding them in physiology. Oosterhuis, drawing on Davidson, notes that it was most prevalent in Germany and Austria: Krafft-Ebing, Binet, Schrenck-Notzing, and others shifted the medical discussion away from explaining sexuality as a series of interrelated physiological events to a more psychological understanding. In this new psychiatric style of reasoning, perversions were disorders of an instinct that could not be located in the body. Already – before Freud – the idea gained ground that sexual disorders could result from unconscious psychological causes which originated in childhood.97 The change was not a general one in France. As Oosterhuis says, ‘Most French doctors [ . . . ] still adhered to physiological and anatomical explanations, conceptualizing sexuality as an undifferentiated procreative instinct embedded in the biological sex of men and women.’98 To the extent that there was a shift in some medical circles from the ‘physiological’ to the ‘psychological’, it is appropriate to ask exactly what those terms might have meant in the last decades of the nineteenth century. How was the psychological constituted as a field of inquiry and a type of therapy? What made it decisively different from other forms of clinical practice? Such questions entail a genealogical study, not just of ‘psychology’, but of the opposition with ‘physiology’ that marks a shift in professional roles and allows the shift to be told as a story. We believe that we have now put in place one of the key elements of such a genealogy. The physical–moral binary as it functioned in Roubaud’s writing appears to be an antecedent of this later one.

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Our claim, put simply, is that psychological medicine did not emerge as a brand new field: it came to occupy a place that had been designated in earlier writing, a place that had been delineated without being thoroughly surveyed. If a concern with the diagnosis and treatment of moral disorders did indeed function as an antecedent for psychological medicine, we can hope to cast some light on a key question raised by Arnold Davidson himself. Davidson characterizes the late-nineteenth-century understanding of sexual instinct and its pathologies as something quite unprecedented. These writings, he points out, mentioned perversions of the sexual instinct as deviations from a norm that remained not only unjustified but largely undescribed: ‘One might have thought that questions as momentous as these would have received extensive discussion during the nineteenth-century heyday of perversion. But, remarkably enough, no such discussion appears.’99 How was this omission possible? We suggest that the beginnings of an answer can be found in the antecedent provided by medical writers such as Roubaud. Roubaud had in fact produced a detailed account, based on Kobelt’s research, of the physiology of coitus. And he had insisted that this ‘natural’ physiology was accompanied by a natural moral tendency to seek copulation in the appropriate manner. Understood at the animal level, the moral dimension was, for Roubaud, no more and no less than instinct: ‘For the copulative function to become active’, he wrote, ‘two elements are required: one that is moral and corresponds to instinct in animals, and one that is completely organic.’100 The now familiar binary ensured that organic functions always had a moral concomitant. Physiological nature, the coupling of male and female, was supported and maintained in principle by moral nature, which took the form of the genesic or genetic instinct.101 So here was at least some antecedent for later talk of sexuality. Insofar as the ‘moral’ remained an object of medical attention, sexual instinct remained in view. In addition to our concern with antecedents, we have a further reason for not launching forthwith into a study of our prominent psychologists. That is that genetic or sexual medicine grounded in physiology continued in force after 1880, and not just in France. Far from disqualifying themselves, some leading doctors with an interest in treating impotence and frigidity maintained their practice as physicians while redefining key terms. A notable example of such professional engagement is the American William Hammond, whose work was discussed briefly in Chapter 3. Hammond was for a time the surgeon general of the United States army, and was appointed a professor of mental and

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nervous diseases at the University of the City of New York. In 1887, he published Sexual Impotence in the Male and Female, which pursued and modified lines of treatment advocated 15 years earlier by Roubaud.102 Indeed, Hammond’s book can be said to carry on a conversation with its French predecessor. The fact that it was translated into French and published in Paris at the beginning of the twentieth century shows that these forms of treatment and this particular way of theorizing them were certainly not defunct at the end of the century.103 Roubaud and Hammond shared a focus on the treatment of impotence, which they understood in the classic mode as common to males and females. Hammond was a military doctor with the most specific reasons for focusing on disorders in men, but his professional circumstances were ultimately not so different in that regard from those of the French doctors discussed in Chapter 2. Roubaud, Belliol and Garnier must all have made the best part of their living by treating male patients. So when Hammond announced in the second (1887) edition of his book that he had now modified the first edition of 1884, ‘related only to impotence in the male’, by adding a section on women, the standard order of priorities was untroubled.104 Women patients were literally an afterthought in this context, just as they had necessarily been in Roubaud’s – just as they were in every circumstance where the first object of therapy was named ‘impotence’. In a sense, Hammond’s work offers one of the strongest examples of the ‘one-sex model’ at work even at the end of the nineteenth century. All of his initial clinical experience appears to have been with men, but he was later able to cite cases of women he had treated, insisting that men and women could be spoken about in much the same terms. There was, however, one point of terminological difference between Hammond and Roubaud that deserves to be considered historically significant. Hammond led to this by announcing his intention to ‘correct certain erroneous theories which are very generally entertained, not only in regard to the normal exercise of the generative organs, but also relative to the abuses of which they are the subject’.105 The first objects of his attention were organic phenomena, grist to the mill for medical practice, but they were accompanied by a second set: ‘And I shall especially consider several forms of impotence of mental origin, which, though probably common enough, have not yet, I think, received the attention they deserve.’106 A little later, Hammond analysed the supposed consequences of masturbation – the loss of desire and the inability to achieve an erection – in the same binary terms: ‘The one is altogether a mental, the other a physical phenomenon, though very often both states exist

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in the same individual.’107 Roubaud would have concurred with this division of the topic and doubtless applauded Hammond’s understanding of the non-physical as having ‘special’ importance, but the term ‘mental’ was not part of the French doctor’s vocabulary. The neglected and important supplement of medical practice referred to by Hammond as the ‘mental’ resembles closely what Roubaud, and usually Garnier, called the ‘moral’. Hammond himself continued to use the term ‘moral’ in one of the senses in which it was used by Roubaud: to refer to kinds of treatment. In cases of impotence through lack of desire, he said, ‘the treatment must be moral and hygienic’, although he did allow for the prescription of strychnia.108 In principle, he advocated combinations of physical and moral treatment just as Roubaud had done. He spoke of a male patient of Charcot and Magnan who was obsessed with looking at the bodies of naked men – suffering thereby from ‘absolute frigidity as regards woman’. Therapy in that case had properly begun with ‘the moral treatment’, said Hammond as if following the use of the definite article in French.109 He was able as a consequence to use ‘mental’ and ‘moral’ in the same sentence without risking confusion. Of one patient he wrote: ‘I was satisfied that he was suffering from mental impotence, and that his cure would have to be effected by moral means.’110 Aetiologies and symptoms, in Hammond’s terminology, were mental, while treatment was moral. In discussing actual methods of treatment, Hammond often took a position close to Roubaud’s. He said that the doctor needed to display great confidence when using moral means, quoting one of Roubaud’s own cases in which the doctor had prescribed a dose of cantharides before following it up with a placebo. It was a matter for doctors of ‘acting through the mind’: In the employment of moral means or those acting through the mind of the patient, nothing is of more importance than to give him confidence in himself, and in the means which may be adopted for his relief. If this point can be secured the battle is half won; without it victory is always doubtful.111 Like Roubaud, Hammond considered it a delicate matter to ‘act through the mind’ in order to bring about ‘the re-awakening of physiological desire for sexual intercourse’.112 And like Roubaud he was thoroughly sceptical about aphrodisiacs and pharmaceutical specifics, favouring the use of electricity.113

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But he did part company with his predecessor on two matters of significance, both of which had to do with the treatment of women. The first was the clinical excitation of female patients suffering from frigidity. Referring to Roubaud’s guarded comments on the possible use of manual stimulation in some such cases,114 Hammond marked a strong difference to which he gave a national colouring: Such means, however, it appears to me – and doubtless all medical men in this country will agree with me – are altogether inadmissible. No woman could employ them herself, or submit to their use by others, without incurring the risk of utter demoralization. Besides, I think it exceedingly doubtful that the clitoris, like a muscle, increases in size by use.115 It is striking that his objection was not on the grounds that clitoral stimulation would interfere with a more natural or appropriate vaginal pleasure or coital desire. That approach was only suggested in texts at the very end of the century, and only consistently theorized in psychoanalytical writing, as we shall see in Chapter 8. The second major point of divergence between Hammond and Roubaud had to do with Roubaud’s claim that ‘idiopathic absence of sexual desire’ was a theoretical possibility that he had never observed in practice, and had never found in the observations of others.116 To this, Hammond responded by describing a number of cases that seemed to him to fit just that pattern. There were, in his experience, women who had never felt sexual desire or pleasure, and had not experienced particular ‘moral circumstances’ – he used Roubaud’s expression – that would explain their absence.117 At the heart of this disagreement was undoubtedly a quite fundamental theoretical difference between the two writers about the natural behaviour of women. Hammond, whose position in this regard was close to Garnier’s, asserted that ‘women as a sex exhibit far less intensity of sexual desire than do men’,118 whereas Roubaud had a stake in the naturalness of women’s desire for and pleasure in coitus. Given this, the two were bound to disagree about the urgency of treating frigidity and the means of doing so, but those very differences of opinion testified that Hammond and Roubaud were working within the same professional field. To sum up, physicians such as Roubaud and Hammond persisted in their claim to treat frigidity on their own terms, even if Garnier threatened to give the game away. The theoretical framework that informed their work depended on a male-focused understanding of ‘impotence’,

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and the great majority of the cases they studied were men. So even at this ‘late’ stage, in spite of all that our modern controversy might lead us to suppose, frigidity was not thought of as a typically female disorder. The feminization of anaphrodisia took place only when psychologists and psychiatrists mapped the field according to their own theories. It was Otto Adler, Wilhelm Stekel and their mainly Central European colleagues who put women at the centre of this problematic, as we will show in the following chapter. Only in their work did women become the principal objects of clinical practice, with all the attention and the duress that that entailed.

7 Treatment 2: Psychology

We announced in the previous chapter that we were going to use the moral–physical opposition as a conceptual entrée into psychological treatments of frigidity as they developed at the very end of the nineteenth century and in the first decades of the twentieth. We will begin that task by considering some new terms that maintained a version of the dichotomy while also reshaping and reconceiving it. The emergence of such expressions was quite a widespread discursive event, affecting at least the three languages – French, English and German – on which we are focused in these two chapters. We have already had occasion to discuss William Hammond’s use of ‘mental’ rather than ‘moral’ in certain contexts, and will soon come to consider in detail some significant terminological developments in German, but before doing so we will consider briefly the professional discourse of a later French alienist, Henri Legrand du Saulle. Legrand du Saulle was a leading doctor at La Salpêtrière whose area was formally described as ‘nervous and mental illnesses’, the same key terms as those that defined Hammond’s university chair in New York. In 1883, a year before the first edition of Hammond’s book, Legrand du Saulle published a book entitled Les Hystériques: état physique et état mental, which set forth a recognizable version of our key opposition in its title and used that binary to order its analysis.1 As before with our quotation of alienist discourse, we will not allow ourselves to be drawn here into a discussion of hysteria, and will attend only to terminological parallels. In addition to ‘mental’, Legrand du Saulle used a term that was to recur with great frequency in the decades that followed: ‘psychical’ (psychique). He promised to provide ‘a methodical description of the psychical phenomena of hysteria’,2 insisting that there was much to be gained for clinical understanding by separating ‘psychical disturbances’ 191

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from ‘somatic disorders’, even if the two typically presented together.3 In practice, said Legrand du Saulle, there was no straightforward correspondence of ‘somatic symptoms’ and ‘cerebral disorders’. That was why they had to be considered successively.4 In his professional discourse, the terms ‘mental’, ‘cerebral’, ‘intellectual’ and ‘psychical’ constituted a paradigm in the linguistic sense: they were freely substituted one for the other, always making an oppositional pair with ‘physical’ or ‘somatic’.5 Just like Hammond, Legrand du Saulle retained the term ‘moral’, using it with a comparably narrow range of meaning. He did speak of ‘moral influences’ when discussing the aetiology of hysteria,6 but his primary use of the word was with reference to forms of treatment. Indeed, his book contained a whole section on traitement moral. Where hysteria was concerned, he favoured moral treatment, especially when appropriately combined with hydrotherapy and static electricity according to individual need.7 All were part of the ‘therapeutic arsenal’, a term also used by Roubaud to refer to the range of moral and physical treatments available for impotence.8 At the heart of the business of treatment, once again, was the patient’s confidence in the doctor: ‘It is well known how much influence the patient’s feelings have over the aggravation or attenuation of her symptoms. Her feelings are very much affected by the confidence she has in her doctor and the hope of a prompt cure.’9 This was as close as the alienist came to offering professional advice that could be used by physicians treating frigidity. His book did contain a detailed discussion of anaesthesia, which was of course an important symptom in hysterical patients, but there was no indication in his work that the genital parts were ever considered a site for hysterical anaesthesia.10 Even in the professional discourse of an eminent specialist in mental and nervous diseases such as Legrand du Saulle, we do not find the words ‘psychology’ or ‘psychological’ coming to the fore. The key reason for this is that the word psychologie for most of the nineteenth century referred to a manner of thought that was constituted as a rival for physiologie. Jan Goldstein, in her history of the psychiatric profession in France, explains that this was a quite fundamental divide: The dispute between ‘physiology’ and ‘psychology’ was anything but a narrowly technical one. Rather, its wide resonance touched beliefs about almost every aspect of culture. By removing the philosophical grounding from such theological tenets as the immortality of the soul and the freedom of the will, the ‘physiological’ program became linked with or even equated to hostility to religion.11

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As Ian Dowbiggin elaborates, ‘psychology’ competed with the efforts of alienists to establish their place as specialists in the treatment of moral or mental disorders. He points out that this difficulty was particularly acute in France: Because psychological states constituted the primary clinical focus of psychiatry, there was always the threat that nonmedical people could justify their intervention in the diagnosis of insanity unless physicians could show that its causes were ultimately organic in nature.12 The ‘nonmedical people’ in question were often religious carers who continued to assert their capacity to deal with the insane, but their number also included philosophers who claimed to understand mental disorders within a secular framework.13 Roubaud himself was caught up in this understanding of the place of ‘psychology’, and clearly saw it as lying beyond the range of his own work. On one occasion, when proposing a distinction between two kinds of manifestations of the soul, he began with a disclaimer that marked a border even as he made a brief foray beyond it: ‘Without wishing to engage in psychology’, he said before going on to make a distinction between the intellectual and the affective.14 We have seen that Roubaud insisted at every turn, despite his narrow professional interest as a physician, on the importance of moral aetiologies in impotence. But he was still prepared – and was doubtless required by professional circumstance – to declare that psychology was not his field. Legrand du Saulle, in turn, despite his regular use of terms like ‘mental’ and ‘psychical’ that were not part of Roubaud’s vocabulary, used ‘psychological’ with the same hypothetical frame and the same sense of distance as his physician colleague: ‘If one adopts a psychological point of view, one can recognize in man two kinds of faculties: affective and intellectual.’15 Adopting a ‘psychological point of view’ was presumably no more a professional habit for this eminent alienist than it had been for Leuret or for Roubaud. With that in mind, we now come to the main business of this chapter: the consideration of some influential works of psychology and psychiatry produced in Germany and Austria. We will begin with Richard von Krafft-Ebing’s landmark Psychopathia sexualis, the first edition of which appeared in 1886. Krafft-Ebing was at that time professor of psychiatry at the University of Graz, and would soon become director of the first psychiatric clinic at the Vienna asylum. He was thus

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able to combine academic prestige with broad clinical experience. Fourteen new editions of Psychopathia sexualis appeared in German from 1886 to 1903, and Krafft-Ebing came to be widely recognized internationally. His text, it must be said, has not always been well served by those who have translated it into English. We will concentrate here on the twelfth edition, which appeared in 1903, offering modified translations where appropriate.16 When Krafft-Ebing came to speak of sexual anaesthesia, he continued to mobilize the moral–physical dichotomy, but did so in a manner that complexified it. Speaking of acquired (as distinct from congenital) ‘diminution of sexual instinct’, he observed that it might depend on various causes: ‘organic and functional, psychical [psychisch] and somatic, central and peripheral’.17 There are a number of reasons why this statement cannot be directly aligned with the French and English texts we have considered so far, and we will be at pains here not to elide thematic differences between them. The first difference is a matter of number: there were three pairs of terms in play here, of which psychical–somatic was but one. The second point of difference, by contrast with Legrand du Saulle, is that the oppositions were not homologous. ‘Central’ aetiologies were typically ‘degeneration of the tracts of the cord and genito-spinal centre’,18 while ‘peripheral’ aetiologies involved a mix of what the writers discussed so far would have called ‘moral’ and ‘physical’ causes: ‘castration, degeneration of the sexual glands, marasmus, sexual excesses in the form of coitus and masturbation, and alcoholism and abuse of cocaine’.19 The object of knowledge being posited and constructed by Krafft-Ebing was such that it could not always be analysed – whether for the purpose of description or for that of treatment – into the moral/cerebral on the one side, and the physical/somatic on the other. The last and most important difference to note is that another binary had supervened. Krafft-Ebing had established a broader distinction that was to have great importance for treatment: an acquired condition was not to be confused with a congenital one. This distinction was hardly unprecedented in medical thinking about frigidity. Something similar had, after all, played a role in Zacchia’s seventeenth-century account of impotentia, discussed in Chapter 1. But it was of critical importance here because of Krafft-Ebing’s commitment to a theory of degeneration. According to that view in all its varieties, the refinements of modern European civilization in the later nineteenth century entailed a loss of animal vigour and sensual directness. The intersection of degeneration theory with sexology has been finely analysed by Daniel Pick, and we see no need to enter into the detail of that analysis here.20 Our

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concern is merely to understand what this signified for the description and treatment of frigidity. The logic of degenerationism can be seen in Krafft-Ebing’s very definition of sexual anaesthesia (anaesthesia sexualis), as he identified in principle those cases in which the sexual instinct was absent despite the fact that the genitals were in no way malformed. We recall that Roubaud hypothesized the possibility of ‘idiopathic’ cases in which such a condition might occur without an identifiable moral or physical cause, but such cases posed no particular problem for KrafftEbing since he was able to account for them by ascribing them to the effects of degeneration on the brain. Patients suffering from sexual anaesthesia displayed a lack of physical feeling accompanied by the absence of psychical sensitivity: Only those cases can be regarded as unquestionable examples of absence of sexual instinct dependent on cerebral causes, in which, in spite of generative organs normally developed and the performance of their functions (secretion of semen, menstruation), the corresponding emotions of sexual life are absolutely wanting.21 The association of sexual frigidity with culturally or demographically specific groups was not new: other medical accounts of frigidity and vaginismus were prone to assert that sufferers were more common among the leisured classes, as we saw in Chapter 3. And in the literary texts we have examined, the frigid female character was most likely to be English and blonde. But in describing frigidity as an outcome of degeneration, Krafft-Ebing reconceived it in two important ways. It became a product of decadent European culture, and a disorder inscribed in the brain or nervous system of the sufferer. Many of the sexual pathologies he identified were without lesions, although some did in fact have physical manifestations. But the key thing is that all were now understood to be inheritable. So while Roubaud was keen to insist that such cases were rare aetiological exceptions, for Krafft-Ebing they did not constitute any kind of theoretical impasse. They were ‘always’ the products of degeneration: ‘These functionally sexless individuals are rare cases, and, indeed, always persons having degenerative effects, in whom other functional cerebral disturbances, states of psychical degeneration, and even anatomical signs of degeneration, may be observed.’22 The process of degeneration ensured that psychical or somatic symptoms could be attributed to physical effects on the brain produced by degeneration. As a consequence, in congenital cases the notion of any local accident of

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behaviour, any moral aetiology in Roubaud’s sense, was redundant by definition. For all its theoretical neatness, a degenerationist account of sexual pathologies presented empirical and clinical difficulties. As Harry Oosterhuis points out, psychiatrists who held this view ‘were not able in general to demonstrate lesions in the brain that corresponded to mental illness’.23 More importantly still in the light of our topic in this chapter, ‘they had little success in curing patients’.24 Degenerationism, as its critics saw only too well, hardly authorized a positive approach to therapy. How could one imagine a successful treatment for disorders caused by hereditary cerebral lesions? Albert von Schrenck-Notzing, an eminent Munich-based physician with a deep professional interest in psychological therapies, was strongly opposed to this view. He and other critics of degeneration theory went so far as to speak of ‘therapeutic nihilism’ as its typical outcome.25 But Krafft-Ebing, despite all the theoretical differences that separated him from Roubaud, displayed much the same practical resourcefulness as his French predecessor. He too was ready to deploy any weapon in the clinical arsenal according to circumstance. Harry Oosterhuis points up the contradiction nicely: ‘The determinism inherent in degeneration theory entailed a profound therapeutic skepticism. Yet this could not keep Krafft-Ebing from treating his patients with all kinds of therapies available at the time, including hydro- and electrotherapy, other physical therapies, traitement moral, hypnosis, morphine and other medications.’26 Unlike Roubaud and Hammond, or for that matter Otto Adler and Wilhelm Stekel, whom we are yet to discuss, Krafft-Ebing did not make sexual anaesthesia a central theme. His main interest was, as the subtitle of his book indicates, ‘the antipathic sexual instinct’, or same-sex attraction. For that very reason perhaps, he referred to anaphrodisia in a variety of ways. It is noteworthy, for example, that he explicitly maintained some terms used by Paolo Zacchia, which we had occasion to discuss in Chapter 1. Taking sexual anaesthesia as a point of reference, Krafft-Ebing suggested that Zacchia’s naturae frigidae (frigid natures) represented milder forms of that condition.27 The purpose of Zacchia’s interventions, we recall, was not to re-establish a natural standard of bodily heat, but to provide advice about whether a marriage might be properly annulled. Yet his casuistry shared something with Krafft-Ebing’s, and indeed with Roubaud’s. All were crucially concerned with matters of degree of frigidity. It is also worthy of note that Krafft-Ebing shared with Roubaud and Hammond the fact that the great

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majority of his patients were men.28 Of the six cases actually considered in Psychopathia sexualis under the heading of anaesthesia sexualis, five involved men.29 Most frequently, Krafft-Ebing addressed frigidity in passing while pursuing his main theme. In cases where the antipathic sexual instinct and sexual anaesthesia presented together, he indicated methods of treatment that would address them both at the same time, and in the same terms. An example of this clinical logic can be found in a discussion of what he calls partially inverted sexuality: It seems to me probable that such hermaphrodites from constitutional taint are rather numerous. Since they attract very little attention socially, and since such secrets of married life are only exceptionally brought to the knowledge of the physician, it is at once apparent why this interesting and practically important transitional group to the group of absolute inverted sexuality has so far escaped investigation. Many cases of frigidity of wives and husbands may possibly depend upon this anomaly. Sexual intercourse with the opposite sex is, in itself, possible. At any rate, in cases of this degree, no horror of the other sex exists.30 The theoretical logic here was not the same as Roubaud’s: Krafft-Ebing did not say that such anomalies of the sexual instinct effectively constituted forms of frigidity, and he did not make of frigidity a catch-all term for any failure of appropriate desire. But he did say that milder forms of apparent sexual anaesthesia might actually be explained by the partial inversion of sexual instinct. Frigidity could thus be a sign of other anomalies: ‘We may [ . . . ] safely assume that many cases of frigidity or anaphrodisia in married women are rooted in undeveloped or suppressed antipathic sexual instinct’, he said at another time.31 And in the move to identify appropriate treatment he found himself remarkably close to Roubaud, setting out a range of therapies with special emphasis on the moral (moralische Therapie): ‘Here medical and particularly moral therapy offer a rewarding field.’32 Moral treatment might well serve to overcome both mild perversions of sexual instinct and the anaesthesia they sometimes entailed. Krafft-Ebing also located partial anaphrodisia in some neurasthenic women. Their condition took the form of a nervous debility of the genitals that made them readily responsive to stimulation, but did not lead to ‘full gratification’. For such women,

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Temporary relief comes in time in the shape of neurasthenia of the genitals, which reacts promptly to the centre of ejaculation and readily causes pollutions in lascivious dreams, or some erotic crisis when awake. Full gratification, however, they cannot find any more than those of their unfortunate fellow-sufferers who abandon themselves to men. This anaphrodisia explains to a large extent the persistance of the sexual affect, i.e., that nymphomania which heaps crisis on crisis.33 This is how nymphomania, with its continual, unmet call for satisfaction, could stand very close to anaphrodisia: Neurasthenia which inhibits orgasm and sensual gratification, no doubt, fully explains this anaphrodisia which restrains the beneficent assuagement of sexual emotions, yet maintaining an incessant craving (excessive libido), forces the woman, morally devoid of all power of resistance, to auto-masturbation or psychical onanism, and eventually as a nymphomaniac to prostitution in which to find satisfaction and relief with one man after another.34 It was characteristic of Krafft-Ebing’s thinking that he should claim to find a ‘full explanation’ for nymphomania in neurasthenic anaphrodisia, just as he had found an explanation for apparent anaphrodisia in antipathic sexual instinct. Naturae frigidae were not to be seen, pace Zacchia, as primary disorders. In Krafft-Ebing’s experience, their condition had always proved to have the same aetiology: They are met with more frequently in women than in men. The characteristic signs of this anomaly are: slight inclination to sexual intercourse, or pronounced disinclination to coitus without sexual equivalent, and failure of corresponding psychical, pleasurable excitation during coitus, which is indulged in simply from sense of duty. I have often had occasion to hear complaints from husbands about this. In such cases the wives have always proved to be neuropathic from birth. Some at the same time were hysterical.35 Any treatment undertaken had to attempt to address the underlying causes of antipathic sexual instinct, whether neurasthenia or hysteria. It is not at all clear, as Oosterhuis points out in a comment cited above, that Krafft-Ebing was able to reconcile his resourceful clinical practice with his theory, and it is difficult to find general statements in his work

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that square one with the other. But it is possible to discern in certain of his case studies a pattern of treatment aimed at reorienting sexual instinct. Where a weak tendency towards heterosexual pleasure existed already, Krafft-Ebing spoke of diverting the orientation of sexual instinct from the same to the opposite sex: The main object was to strengthen the sexual inclination for the opposite sex, which was defective, but not absolutely wanting. This could be done by avoiding and opposing all homosexual feelings and impulses, possibly with the help of the artificial inhibitory influences of hypnotic suggestion (removal of homosexual desires by suggestion); by the excitation and exercise of normal sexual desires and impulses; by complete abstinence from masturbation, and eradication of the remnants of the neurasthenic condition of the nervous system by means of hydrotherapy, and possibly general faradization [electrotherapy].36 This is doubtless the full range of treatments that were thought by KrafftEbing to have a moral influence. They look remarkably like Roubaud’s, even though the theory underpinning them is different. The only practical difference is that Krafft-Ebing talks about ‘suggestion’ in a more specific, more technical manner by referring to hypnosis. We will shortly attempt to assess what was at stake in that change. By contrast with Roubaud, however, Krafft-Ebing framed his considerations about the treatment of antipathic sexual instinct by marking a critical difference between acquired and congenital perversions: ‘the prognosis of the cases of acquired antipathic sexual instinct is, at all events, much more favourable than that of the congenital cases’.37 If the inversion was indeed fully ‘mental’, it might be out of the reach of therapy. Or rather, since Krafft-Ebing always seemed to baulk at therapeutic nihilism, physical treatment had no role to play: ‘As a rule, physical treatment even though it be reinforced through moral therapy with reference to the avoidance of masturbation, the repression of homosexual feelings and impulses, and the encouragement of heterosexual desires, will not prove sufficient, even in cases of acquired sexual inversion.’38 In such cases, the classic pair of physical and moral therapy was now rejected as a companion set, since there was only one treatment with any chance of success: ‘Here a method of psychical treatment – hypnotic suggestion [die Suggestion] – is all that can benefit the patient.’39 In order to explore what hypnotic suggestion offered in practice and to measure its developing importance in psychological treatment, we

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turn now to Albert von Schrenck-Notzing, a physician who founded the Munich Psychological Society in 1886 and was an eminent, if somewhat controversial, member of the emerging profession. SchrenckNotzing published in 1892 a book that was translated into English as Therapeutic Suggestion in Psychopathia Sexualis (Pathological Manifestations of the Sexual Sense), with Especial Reference to Contrary Sexual Instinct.40 Schrenck-Notzing’s primary focus was on antipathic sexual instinct, and in that, as in many respects, he was continuing Krafft-Ebing’s work while critiquing it and giving it a significant new inflection.41 He made it clear that he planned to consider ‘functional (psychical or relative) impotence, as [a] constant accompanimen[t] of sexual perversions’.42 In other words, the study of impotence was subordinated to that of sexual perversions, notably contrary sexual instinct. And within this topic sexual anaphrodisia in females was further subordinated, since the description of hypnotic suggestion in the treatment of impotence involved only cases in males.43 This deficiency did not escape SchrenckNotzing himself, who noted baldly: ‘No case in a female was treated.’44 The reasons he gave for the absence of female cases in his clinical records were the ones that have become familiar since our discussion of Roubaud, although it must be said Schrenck-Notzing seemed less comfortable about the discrepancy than many of his colleagues. ‘The phenomena of sexual anaesthesia and uranism in the female sex’, he explained, ‘could be given but brief consideration.’ This was because ‘in medical practice and social life they have attained nothing like the importance of male homosexuality’. That argument was, as he no doubt realized, a quite circular one, and he went on to adduce a second reason, which was that ‘owing to the infrequency of these anomalies, I have had no opportunity for personal observation of them’.45 There was, of course, a further circularity in that explanation. It was adventurous to infer that the phenomenon was rare when observation was so infrequent. It might just have been the case, as so often before, that women were being accorded very little attention. As if to recognize this, Schrenck-Notzing later provided a third explanation for his lack of clinical observations. It was one that we have already seen used by Hammond: ‘Sexual impotence in women is far less frequently the object of the physician’s treatment than that in men. The lesser intensity of the sexual impulse and the form of the genitals in the female sex, as well as natural modesty, are probably sufficient to account for this.’46 Schrenck-Notzing included in his study a brief account of vaginismus, referring in a rather undifferentiated way to a range of possible causes:

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‘Usually, vaginismus occurs only after attempts at coitus as a result, for example, of spinal irritation or hysteria, but most frequently after masturbation. Sexual excesses and want of correspondence in the size of the genitals also play a part in its aetiology.’47 Somewhat surprisingly, given the controversy in France over the moral causation of the disorder, he did not seem to envisage treatment of it by hypnotic suggestion. That should presumably be thought of as an oversight – the kind of oversight that always seemed to occur more often where women’s disorders were concerned – rather than an admission of theoretical or practical inadequacy. In fact, cases of female impotence seemed to Schrenck-Notzing to call firstly for psychological analysis. Physical examination of the genitals usually proved unrevealing: In the majority of cases, endoscopical examination of the urethra reveals nothing. The majority of disturbances of the sexual mechanism are thus of a functional nature, and reveal themselves, therefore, in the subjective sensations and observations of the patients. The discovery of the cause points to the method of therapeutic procedure.48 That was why psychiatrists were well suited to the task of treating sexual problems in women: Upon the correct judgement of the physician, which, in the case of women, must be reached after the most careful psychological [psychologische] analysis of the sexual life, depends the happiness of the family and the therapeutic treatment. This often makes heavier demands upon the psychiatrist than on the gynaecologist, who looks at everything through the spectacles of local anatomy.49 Roubaud had insisted on the importance of clinical tact in this regard, but Schrenck-Notzing was here giving tact a professional dimension. Psychiatrists appeared, prima facie, to be better equipped than any other medical specialists to discern just what treatment was required ‘in the case of women’, even though, as it happened, this particular psychiatrist encountered so few of them. Schrenck-Notzing deployed the distinction between congenital and acquired perversions just as Krafft-Ebing had,50 noting the intractability of heredity: ‘Congenital pathological changes of the brain [ . . . ] cannot be influenced either by the whole armament of moral treatment or by other means.’51 But he was wary of Krafft-Ebing’s tendency, as he saw it,

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to overvalue the importance of heredity and consequently to encourage ‘therapeutic nihilism’.52 Against this tendency, Schrenck-Notzing offered two complementary and equivalent hypotheses that had a direct bearing on clinical practice. The first was that in the prevailing understanding of homosexuality – and by extension, of other aberrations – ‘the hereditary factor’ was ‘overestimated’. The second, more radical one was that (hypnotic) suggestion might in fact be capable of ‘influencing congenital abnormalities of the mind’.53 He was not prepared to insist on the second, but he offered empirical evidence of the first. To the extent that cases of sexual aberration responded to psychological therapy, this could be taken as proof that aberrations were often acquired by accident: The proof offered by me in this book, that a much larger proportion of sexual aberrations than has heretofore been presumed is, in pathogenesis, to be referred to external conditions (accidental causes, education), opens to psychotherapeutics a much wider field in this class of cases, with points of departure essentially much more favorable. In spite of the great difficulties which frequently attend the treatment of such patients, it will become a hopeful and productive task for the therapeutics of the future.54 The domain of what Roubaud would have called moral causes was here being claimed unequivocally for psychotherapy. What is more, any clinical success that had been achieved to date was being used to bolster and extend the theoretical claims of psychology. While privileging psychotherapy in an unprecedented way, SchrenckNotzing continued to advocate a range of treatments that bore a remarkable resemblance to the physician’s arsenal inventoried by Roubaud. Suggestion was not to be thought of as the sole method of treating sexual onanism, nymphomania and the like. Hygiene (in the form of sleep management, exercise and massage), hydrotherapeutic procedures, the application of electricity (faradization and galvanization), materia medica (notably bromine), anaphrodisiacs (belladonna and opiates), aphrodisiacs (cantharides, phosphorus and the like) could all be employed.55 In addition to these, the doctor might use ‘psychical treatment in the nonhypnotic state’. As Schrenck-Notzing described it, such psychical treatment differed only circumstantially from Leuret’s moral treatment of 50 years earlier. The patient was to be offered an ‘explanation [ . . . ] that he or she has become the victim of an abnormal, dominating impulse’.56 The key thing was to win the patient’s confidence: ‘an attempt must be made to win the entire confidence

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of the patient, to strengthen his self-reliance, and to overcome his erroneous ideas by repeated explanations and educational means’.57 It should be clear that hypnotic suggestion did not, in SchrenckNotzing’s view, make established treatments redundant. But it did promise to outdo them in theory and in practice. Broadly speaking, it was likely in any case that a form of suggestion was at work in the use of physical treatments: ‘The various mechanical and other remedial procedures [ . . . ] may unconsciously [ . . . ] exert a suggestive influence.’58 More narrowly, hypnotic suggestion could be said to encapsulate all the virtues of psychical treatment: ‘It may be regarded as an abridged and condensed procedure possessing all the advantages of psychotherapeutics.’59 This was not just a matter of therapeutic power or efficiency. It was actually grounded in a claim to theoretical and practical territory that was not fully developed in Schrenck-Notzing’s book, but was outlined in principle. That claim, which would have great significance for psychoanalysis, was predicated on the assumption that sexual aberrations could be understood as the result of autosuggestion. If that were taken to be the case, treatment by hypnosis could take on the cause of the aberration, so to speak, in its own terms and on its own terrain. In the following quotation Schrenck-Notzing happens to be speaking of hyperaesthesia rather than anaesthesia, but the principle is a powerfully general one: ‘In comparison with other indirect remedial measures, we may characterize therapeutic suggestion in manifestations of sexual hyperaesthesia from psychical causes as the most direct remedial measure, and one which attacks the evil at its root.’60 The talk of suggestion made psychical treatment effectively homologous with psychical aetiology. Since sexual excesses and inadequacies could be understood as the consequence of suggestions made by the patient to himself, hypnosis could intervene, with its own suggestions, in order to provide a corrective. So far in this chapter, our history of the treatment of sexual anaesthesia in women has had to pick its way along the edge of medical discussions of male patients, but a quite striking change took place in the first decade of the twentieth century. In the space of a few years, there appeared a series of observations and comments about the widespread occurrence of frigidity among women. We can lean here on the erudition of Havelock Ellis, the influential British sexologist whose medical training included a significant element of midwifery. Ellis refers to publications in German and in English: Shufeldt believes (Pacific Medical Journal, Nov., 1907) that 75 per cent. of married women in New York are afflicted with sexual frigidity, and

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that it is on the increase; it is rare, however, he adds, among Jewish women. Hegar gives 50 per cent. as the proportion of sexually anesthetic women; Fürbringer says the majority of women are so. Effertz (quoted by Löwenfeld, Sexualleben und Nervenleiden, p. 11, apparently with approval) regards 10 per cent. among women generally as sexually anesthetic, but only 1 per cent. men. Moll states (Eulenberg’s Encyclopädie, fourth edition, art. ‘Geschlechtstrieb’) that the prevalence of sexual anesthesia among German women varies, according to different authorities, from 10 to 66 per cent.61 The talk of percentages was indicative of a more general development of epidemiology, but the epidemiological perspective, when applied to sexual anaesthesia, marked an important shift in the understanding of the disorder. The change that occurred around 1900 bears some resemblance in kind to other epidemics of medical talk that marked the history of sexuality, such as the emergence of onanism in the early eighteenth century, described famously by Thomas Laqueur, or the remarkable flowering of diagnoses and treatments for spermatorrhoea, as analysed by Elizabeth Stephens.62 The very assertion that significant proportions of women were afflicted with frigidity – no matter how varied the percentages, no matter how approximate the methods of calculation – helped to make frigidity a target for clinical treatment in a way that it had not been throughout the nineteenth century. This was another of those critical ‘for better and for worse’ moments in which women patients were given recognition not previously accorded to them, even as an aspect of their behaviour was marked out for corrective intervention. The proposition that sexual coldness occurred naturally in women had a long history. As we saw in Chapter 1, it had been affirmed for centuries that most women were disposed by temperament to take little pleasure in sexual intercourse. To take but one example as a reminder, the great French Encyclopédie of 1751–80, after discussing the disorder called ‘uterine furor’, was quick to contrast the symptoms of that disorder with those found in the majority of women: ‘It can nevertheless be confirmed that the opposite temperament is infinitely more common among women, most of whom are naturally cold, or at the very least thoroughly untroubled about the physical aspect of passion that tends towards the bodily union of the two sexes.’63 The view that women were naturally cold was still extant in medical writing of the nineteenth century, even though the classical notion of temperament had by then lost much of its purchase. Cesare Lombroso, for example, had a well-developed theory of evolutionary anthropology in which

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female frigidity played a part. Lombroso marshalled a range of authors in support of the view that women were cold by nature. The historian and essayist Michelet was quoted as saying that it was presumptuous of men to think that women yielded to them out of ‘physical love’, rather than a mere desire to please.64 Lombroso went on to quote Darwin: ‘According to Darwin, sexual desires in almost all species are stronger and more ardent in males.’65 In sum, said Lombroso, woman was ‘naturally and organically monogamous and frigid’.66 But during the second half of the nineteenth century, the view also developed that sexual anaesthesia was rare. We saw in Chapter 2 how Roubaud laid down the basis for this claim by his description of the naturalness of female pleasure in coitus, affirming that he had never seen a case of ‘idiopathic impotence’ in a female patient.67 This led him to state that complete frigidity of temperament ‘is rarer than people think’.68 Ambroise Tardieu, professor of forensic medicine and dean of the Faculty of Medicine at the University of Paris, gave this view the support of his great authority, declaring that ‘anaphrodisia is infinitely more rare and difficult to observe’.69 Indeed, the statement that frigidity was rare became a refrain in medical talk from the 1870s onwards. Guyot’s guide to marriage provided its own elegant and slightly archaic rendition, maintaining as it did so a reference to temperament: ‘Few women are without temperament: they are simply imaginative and vain.’70 And in the first decade of the twentieth century straightforward statements of this theme appeared with slogan-like frequency in the writings of French sexologists. It became practically impossible in the middlebrow milieu described in Chapter 4 to mention frigidity without reminding readers that it was not to be thought a common occurrence. Jean Fauconney asserted in various of his books that ‘frigidity is much less common in women than people suppose’71 and, predictably enough, Dr Désormeaux concurred word for word.72 It might seem that we have identified a Great Debate in sexual medicine opposing, on the one hand, those who asserted that frigidity was rare, and, on the other, those who affirmed that it was widespread. But that would be a quite misleading account of how medical writers generally viewed the matter, since the two propositions regularly coexisted within certain bodies of work. Indeed, the point deserves to be made more strongly: it was the very coexistence of these two apparently contradictory propositions in the first decade of the twentieth century that helped to constitute the topic of frigidity as a domain of medical knowledge and intervention. An indication of the commitment to both views can be seen in the work of Havelock Ellis himself. Having drawn

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attention, as we noted above, to a burgeoning scientific literature about the remarkable spread of sexual anaesthesia, Ellis made a personal observation some 15 pages later that effectively supported Roubaud’s claim about its rarity: ‘I should myself be inclined to say that it is extremely difficult to find a woman who is without the aptitude for sexual emotion, although a great variety of circumstances may hinder, temporarily or permanently, the development of this latent aptitude.’73 There was no great intellectual conundrum here. The point was, as the quotation from Ellis shows, that the ‘aptitude’ for pleasure often remained ‘latent’. Absolute or congenital frigidity might be quite rare. Relative, acquired frigidity might be found on all sides. If that were so, medicine could find its place between the two, seeking forms of treatment that would bring ‘accidental’ occurrences of frigidity back to the non-frigid condition that was the patient’s by nature, leaving only a small residue of intractable cases.74 This was the intellectual context in which Otto Adler published Die mangelhafte Geschlechtsempfindung des Weibes (Deficient Sexual Sensation in Women), which first appeared in 1904.75 Adler was a prominent Berlin physician who specialized in the treatment of sexual disorders in women and served as secretary of the Medical Society for Sexual Knowledge (Ärztliche Gesellschaft für Sexualwissenschaft). In the timehonoured style of research pioneers, Adler deplored the paucity of medical writing on the topic to date. There was a degree of exaggeration in his account, as our own research has shown, but Adler did have a point. His book was, after all, the first medical text devoted exclusively to the condition in women. As if to recognize the difficulties alluded to by Roubaud, Hammond and Schrenck-Notzing, he attempted to explain the lack of published research by referring to the ‘embarrassing and difficult’ nature of the material to be dealt with.76 Earlier writers such as Zacchia had discussed the topic, he noted, and Zacchia had coined the term ‘natura frigida’, but the major textbooks in gynaecology hardly spoke of anaesthesia sexualis at all.77 In later editions of his book, Adler acknowledged contributions on the topic that had been made during the first decade of the twentieth century. Those contributions generally came from Central European writers, including Krafft-Ebing and Albert Moll. And in the third edition of 1919, Adler also referred to the potential contribution of the Freudian school of psychoanalysis. We have had occasion many times throughout this book to note that ‘frigidity’ took on a different conceptual shape according to the intellectual context in which it was conceived, and that is just as true

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here. Adler did not in fact address frigidity as a matter of temperature or temperament: his interest was in deficient sensitivity and sensation. The notion of deficiency applied equally well to desire and to pleasure, as he noted in an explanation of his title: ‘“Mangelhaft” [inadequate, deficient] applies equally to the lack of libido in general (anaphrodisia) and to the lack of orgasm (dyspareunia).’78 In effect, Adler was bidding to replace the classic metaphor of bodily coldness with an economic model in which degrees of sensitivity and satisfaction were the measure of disorder. He made it clear that he was uncomfortable with the use of ‘cold’ (kalt) and ‘coldness’ (Kälte) to describe the syndrome, since they tended to imply a substantive, inherent quality.79 Moreover, he was keenly aware of the difficulty that arose when strong but perverse behaviours were described in terms of coldness. We recall Roubaud’s discomfort at applying the term ‘frigid’ in that way, even as he continued to do so. Adler, by contrast, was prepared to give up the old metaphor. While women who masturbated were frequently unresponsive to normal coitus, he observed, ‘one cannot speak properly in these cases of an “icy, cold nature” (natura frigida). On the contrary, women of this kind are frequently only too sensual.’80 There appears to be a broad consistency of intellectual style between this quantitative, economic account of sexual sensation and Adler’s concern with the distribution and frequency of the disorder. On the latter, he had no population studies to offer, acknowledging that it was impossible to gather conclusive evidence.81 But that did not prevent him from claiming that sexual anaesthesia was ‘remarkably widespread’ as he speculated about the proportion of women affected.82 ‘Anaesthesia sexualis feminarum totalis et partialis’, he affirmed, existed with certainty in not less than 10 per cent of women, and was present in a significantly higher proportion: 20, 30, probably closer to 40 per cent.83 The numbers were patently impressionistic, but Adler was determined that they not be considered fanciful. One of the first givens in any discussion of frigidity in women had to be the frequency of its occurrence. He made it clear that this claim was grounded in his own clinical experience. Roubaud and Hammond could describe very few actual cases of female impotence, but Adler claimed to be describing gynaecological symptoms that he and his colleagues had observed ‘hundreds and thousands of times’.84 Again the numbers were flamboyant, but they served to evoke a long experience of observation and treatment. And at the same time Adler felt able to declare, with no sense of contradiction: ‘in my opinion, absolute congenital insensitivity [Unempfindlichkeit] is generally nonexistent in women’.85 This was a strong version of the double proposition

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that relative anaesthesia was widespread, while absolute anaesthesia was nowhere to be found. It was intolerable that so many women should be failing to experience desire and pleasure as they ought, and something needed to be done to provide a remedy. Adler’s clinical practice and his book presented themselves, of course, as the answer to that need, but it is worth noting that Adler referred to another style of response: feminist militancy. Medical writing of the nineteenth century had been directed at other doctors, and therefore, by definition, at men, but Adler began his book with a foreword whose explicit purpose was to introduce the topic to women readers. In the third edition, he quoted at length from a letter by a female correspondent who had responded enthusiastically to an earlier edition. His correspondent objected to the fact that men, including doctors, wanted to condemn women to a life without the pleasure of love.86 She was angry that women who sought sexual satisfaction were considered to be ‘pathological’, and she looked forward to a society in which women who did not wish to marry would find some solution other than abstinence.87 This correspondent was described by Adler as an ‘agitator’, but he was pleased to note that she was in sympathy with his psychological and social account of sexual anaesthesia.88 He went on to observe that the women’s movement offered rich possibilities for the future should it be able to take up such ideas.89 Here, Adler was offering more than sympathy of a broadly political kind. He saw close attention to woman patients as a largely unfulfilled clinical requirement. Every doctor needed to understand the language of women, which was specific to them and served to express their feelings.90 When medical specialists addressed problems of this kind, said Adler, they failed in their task by not finding key indications in the declarations of women, listening instead to husbands’ complaints about the coldness of their spouses.91 Quoting Havelock Ellis with approval on that very point, Adler went on to evoke the crucial role to be played by women doctors. If listened to with care, they could provide guidance to men in the profession. Throughout our book we have had in mind the fact that various doctors’ ‘clinical observation’ of frigidity in women may actually have been based upon consultations initiated by men who complained about the sexual non-responsiveness or reticence of their wives. Sims, we recall, welcomed husbands into the consultation room and invited them to take their turn at vaginal examination. Krafft-Ebing, we also noted, reported that many of his male patients complained to him about the sexual coldness of their wives. And Adler here expressed open frustration with the limits of medical understanding of sexual deficiency in

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women, given the reliance of doctors on masculine accounts. Considering this question, it is perfectly logical to conclude that the entire notion of female coldness, deficiency, frigidity was nothing more than an admission by men of their failure to seduce their wives or to appreciate feminine-specific forms of pleasure. Certainly that is the conclusion of some recent French psychoanalytic feminists. Luce Irigaray says that the so-called ‘frigid woman’ ‘has been moulded into models of male sexual “techniques” which do not correspond to her sexuality’.92 From the beginning of the twentieth century, however, it is clear that ideas about frigidity thrived in spite of, or even because of, the experiential and theoretical accounts of frigidity by women psychoanalysts. The perception of a ‘problem’ of frigid women, by then at least, was larger than any failure or frustration on the part of the men who tried to have sex with them. Even were this not the case, it would be no sign that the object of our study deserved to be abandoned as a centuries-long hoax, since we have argued from the outset that a careful intellectual history ought not select its topic based on a mere reflection of present values. In another respect Adler’s approach demonstrates the difficulty of situating discussions of frigidity within a history of feminism. In our Introduction, we quoted Sheila Jeffreys’ claim that frigidity was invented by sexologists and psychiatrists to forestall and obstruct the feminist movement.93 But Adler’s approach, by its orientation and its historicist rhetoric, gives the lie to that claim. This was the first book devoted exclusively to the subject of frigidity, and it was clearly framed by an expression of sympathy for militant feminism. Once again, it should be noted that a historical development produced positive and negative effects at the same time. In the work of Adler the change took the form of a more attentive attitude to women, accompanied by a concern to listen to them, to understand their language – and to help manage the space of their intimacy. From the beginning of the twentieth century, an interest in frigidity operated in close relationship with emergent feminist ideological movements: that much is undeniable. But the nature of that relationship was complex and ambivalent, as we shall have occasion to note later when we examine the work of Wilhelm Stekel and of Marie Bonaparte. Nor should we be too quick to assume that a preoccupation with frigidity was necessarily allied with feminism as if it always represented something like the defence of women’s right to pleasure. There is an element of this ideal in the work of Bonaparte, but as we have seen throughout this book, a concern with women’s rights was hardly a precondition for the formulation of frigidity, anaphrodisia or vaginismus as a ‘problem’, since it could become so because it hindered

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the sexual satisfaction of husbands, impeded harmonious marriage and, by extension, disturbed functional social relations. However, Adler’s discussion of women’s sexual deficiency alongside an expression of sympathy for feminist causes marked a shift in thinking that was to recur in many subsequent studies in the field. Once a discourse of women’s rights developed a significant cultural currency in European societies, medical and therapeutic discussions of frigidity were called on to respond and react to it. Adler’s therapeutic orientation was predominantly psychological. External observation, he said, could not be an adequate guide to diagnosis.94 Clearly, there was no place in his nosology for the old symptoms of blondness, plumpness or thinness of hair. What was required was a ‘psychological analysis of the sex life’, leading to a precise understanding of the ‘sex drive as such’.95 Gynaecologists who focused on physical phenomena typically failed in their attempts to deal with sterility and anaesthesia because they did not attend to ‘the disastrous influence of these disorders on the psyche [Psyche] of the sufferer’.96 In fact, treatment needed to begin most often with the husband: ‘the treatment of inadequate sexual sensation in women needs first of all to begin with men’, since sexual anaesthesia in the wife typically resulted from disturbances of sexual function in the husband.97 Adler saw ‘complete idiopathic sexual anaesthesia’ as posing a particular difficulty for analysis, but unlike Roubaud he did not define it methodologically by the effective impossibility of understanding its aetiology. In such cases, he said, the doctor needed to look for hidden mechanical or psychical (seelisch) sources of the problem.98 Here ‘the Freudian school of “psychoanalytical” method’, and the work of Stekel in particular, held out considerable promise of improvement.99 We will attempt to gauge exactly what was offered in this regard when we come to an analysis of Stekel’s work at the end of this chapter. The range of treatments envisaged by Adler continued to include quite a number of those that had been advocated by Roubaud 30 or 40 years earlier. Certain substances, including cantharides, strychnine and phosphorus were still accorded favourable mention, with no suggestion that they were somehow too direct or too strong to be applied to women.100 Electrotherapy was still in play, as Adler reported the use of faradization in Russia to treat a woman patient suffering from deficient sexual pleasure.101 And placebos were still part of the arsenal, with Adler concluding, much as Roubaud had, that what the doctor prescribed was probably less important than the manner in which he prescribed it.102 But there were some significant new methods of

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treatment. The most prominent of these was hypnosis, which Adler described as ‘the most important form of cure for the majority of forms of sexual anaesthesia’.103 Even more novel with respect to the work of Roubaud and Hammond was the manner in which Adler understood the psychological. In cases of ‘nervous’ anaesthesia, the doctor was called on to enter into an intimate conversation in search of the answers to key questions. Those questions sought to determine by what accidents the disorder had been acquired. Where was the psychical (psychische) trauma? Where was the blockage or bewilderment that was consciously or unconsciously confusing the patient’s sexual thinking?104 Hypnosis might well serve a purpose at this point, proving to be as useful for diagnosis as for healing.105 Once the doctor was in possession of the answers, the healing process could begin forthwith.106 An even more radical measure put forward by Adler concerned the mechanics of copulation. He returned to the work of Kobelt in order to compare the physiologist’s influential description of coitus, to which he paid tribute,107 with what he himself had learnt from consultations with his patients. This was where physiology met psychology. Kobelt had emphasized the great concentration of nerve ends in the clitoris, and maintained that stimulation of the clitoris was an integral part of normal coitus.108 Adler, in his concern with treatment, saw two difficulties in that. The first was that, while the concentration of nerve ends in the clitoris exactly as Kobelt had said,109 ‘in normal coitus’ the clitoris ‘was not directly in contact with the penis and was not rubbed by it’.110 Might the fact of adopting the standard position for copulation be a cause of deficient sexual pleasure in women?111 If so, treatment ought to involve the adoption of different positions, especially the positio a posteriore, which allowed for more direct stimulation. Recommending to patients that they make such a change required all of the doctor’s tact – just as it had when Roubaud considered manual stimulation of the clitoris, but Adler saw it as a valuable therapeutic intervention. Adler’s second reason for questioning the clinical application of Kobelt’s work was that the physiologist’s account of normal intercourse simply did not correspond to the experience of the vast majority of those women whose sensations were deficient. The physiological norm was not aligned with the distribution of cases: ‘We know quite a number of cases who are never able to arrive at the acme through the stimulation of the gland, but only ever through other points.’112 What was to be said about that discrepancy? Adler’s casuistry led him to argue that treatment should not be unduly governed by a model of normal physiology.

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Before concluding our discussion of Adler, we will comment on his treatment of vaginismus, which served in Chapter 3 as a point of contestation between physical and moral approaches. The typical cause of the disorder, said Adler, was the husband’s use of brutal strength on the wedding night.113 That view had been established for some decades, as we have seen, but Adler provided a more technical psychological description of just how the damage was done. Following ‘the brutal wedding night’, there remained in the woman’s psyche a representation of the suffering she had experienced. This took the form of an Erinnerungskrampf, a spasm held in memory, that recurred whenever coitus was attempted.114 This purely nervous or ‘psychical’ disorder appeared to Adler a promising domain for the psychoanalytical method of Freud and the Vienna school, which was ‘equipped to bring together the theoretical and practical possibilities for a cure’.115 We will see later how Stekel rose to that challenge. For his own part, Adler envisaged two kinds of treatment for vaginismus. The first was the ‘mechanicalsurgical’, for which he had little regard: mechanical treatments might very well aggravate the condition, and the surgeon’s knife was of little use, except perhaps for minor procedures to facilitate defloration.116 Most cases required the other kind of treatment, which he called ‘medicinal-psychical’. Medications could serve as calming agents, but the greatest need was for ‘psychical treatment and slow habituation’.117 Even as American gynaecology was committed to treating vaginismus with a range of physical methods, Adler was committed to a psychological approach, holding out the hope that a psychoanalytical one might do better still. Another kind of reflexivity appears to have entered thinking about frigidity through the work of Havelock Ellis. Ellis did not make frigidity the primary object of his attention as a sexologist, but his multi-volume Studies in the Psychology of Sex, which first appeared during the period 1897–1910, intersected at certain points with lines of inquiry we have been considering in this chapter. His discussion of the epidemiology of frigidity, quoted earlier, provided us with a rapid survey of the range of opinions about its spread. We now offer a second synthesizing comment that effectively marked a thematic watershed. On one side, said Ellis, lay the view that sexual anaesthesia was natural – indeed that it was a typical product of feminine modesty – and on the other lay the view that it was unnatural, needing to be explained by socio-historical circumstances: ‘By many, sexual anaesthesia is considered natural in women, some even declaring that any other opinion would be degrading to women; even by those who do not hold this opinion it is believed that there is an unnatural prevalence of sexual frigidity among

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civilized women.’118 Krafft-Ebing and Schrenck-Notzing had been exercised as therapists by the distinction between congenital and acquired anaesthesia, but this talk of naturalness was more resonant, if less clinically precise. To hold a view about the naturalness or unnaturalness of sexual anaesthesia was certainly to make a commitment for or against the pertinence of a therapeutic approach, but for Ellis and Adler it was more generally to take a position about the nature of female sexuality. Ellis actually offered in passing a schematic history that opposed ‘ancient times’ to the now-elapsed nineteenth century, providing another version of his thematic watershed. In the distant past, he asserted, women were seen as either chaste or concupiscent. The concern in those times was not with the quality of their experience but with the moral categorization of their behaviour. Only in the nineteenth century did a different view emerge: In ancient times men blamed women for concupiscence or praised them for chastity, but it seems to have been reserved for the nineteenth century to state that women are apt to be congenitally incapable of experiencing complete sexual satisfaction, and peculiarly liable to sexual anaesthesia. This idea appears to have been almost unknown to the eighteenth century.119 The point of Ellis’s historical narrative was ironic. The nineteenth century, to use a favoured expression of modern historians of sexuality, had ‘invented’ the notion that the majority of women were unable by nature to experience sexual pleasure. Our own long history does not particularly support that view, but it does seem significant to us that a claim about the recent emergence of the disorder should have been made during the first decade of the twentieth century. The early twentieth century was developing an understanding of sexual anaesthesia as cultural rather than natural, historically relative rather than timeless and essential. Widespread frigidity could then appear, not as an accident of individual development that followed a well-worn path, but as a general product of ‘artificial civilization’: This social and personal importance of the erotic life, though, under the influence of a false morality and an equally false modesty, it has sometimes been allowed to fall into the background in stages of artificial civilization, has always been clearly realized by those peoples who have vitally grasped the relationships of life. Among most uncivilized races there appear to be few or no ‘sexually frigid’ women. It is little to the credit of our own ‘civilization’ that it should be

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possible for physicians to-day to assert, even with the faintest plausibility, that there are some 25 per cent of women who may thus be described.120 In the writings of Adler and Ellis, ‘widespread sexual anaesthesia’ had become a kind of tautology. It was, par excellence, an object of attention for modernity: a misguided nineteenth century had allowed frigidity to spread in the belief that it was natural, and modern psychology was now confronted by it at every turn. Treatment continued to be an issue, even as the talk of sexual anaesthesia was framed by broader social considerations. As Ellis said simply, ‘The removal of sexual frigidity thus becomes a matter of some importance.’121 He did not offer anything resembling the classic ‘arsenal’, but drew attention to two modern methods. The first of these was massage, alluded to but not described by Roubaud. The most prominent form of massage was the Thure-Brandt method, taken up with enthusiasm in medical circles after about 1885. It involved ‘prolonged rubbing and kneading of the pelvic regions’.122 One of its strongest advocates in France, Horace Stapfer, described in detail the massage of the abdomen with one finger in the vagina and one in the rectum. A mechanical vibrator could also be used. This particular form of massage was not developed as a treatment for sexual anaesthesia, but was meant to improve circulation through the abdomen for the sake of general physiological efficiency.123 Rachel Maines, in her history of early medical uses of the vibrator, shows that abdominal massage was often prescribed for the treatment of hysteria. While it may well have produced sexual pleasure in many of those treated, its ostensible purpose was not psychosexual.124 The sexual use of pelvic massage was, says Maines, a matter of ‘social camouflage’ and ‘disguise’.125 Ellis observed at the time that the Thure-Brandt method ‘whatever its therapeutic value, cannot fail in a large proportion of cases to stimulate the sexual emotions’, but he did not go so far as to say that it ought to be used systematically as a remedy for anaesthesia.126 The form of treatment that most caught Ellis’s attention in this regard was hypnotic suggestion. Drawing on the clinical experience of a British colleague, he was prepared to speak of hypnosis as something that would in certain cases ‘remove’ frigidity: Dr Douglas Bryan, of Leicester, informs me that in several cases he has succeeded in removing sexual coldness and physical aversion in the wife by hypnotic suggestion. The suggestions given to the

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patient are ‘that all her womanly natural feelings would be quickly and satisfactorily developed during coitus; that she would experience no feeling of disgust and nausea, would have no fear of the orgasm not developing; that there would be no involuntary resistance on her part’.127 Hypnotic suggestion, as an eminently psychological form of therapy, had a particular virtue in Ellis’s eyes. ‘The fact that such suggestions can be permanently effective’, he wrote, ‘tends to show how superficial the sexual “anesthesia” of women usually is.’128 Psychological treatment of this kind could actually serve to manifest the superficiality of the disorder. Frigidity was to be understood in this light as both widespread and superficial. Its symptoms were believed to be present in at least a quarter, and possibly half, of the population of modern civilized women. But those symptoms, when encountered, were not to be taken as entirely truthful. Indeed, for Ellis, any claim to identify total sexual anaesthesia was unpersuasive in principle: But if we realize to how large an extent woman is a sexual organism, and how diffused and even unconscious the sexual impulses may be, it becomes very difficult to assert that she has never shown any manifestation of the sexual impulse. All we can assert with some degree of positiveness in some cases is that she has not manifested sexual gratification, more particularly as shown by the occurrence of the orgasm, but that is very far indeed from warranting us to assert that she never will experience such gratification or still less that she is organically incapable of experiencing it.129 Ellis went on to say that it was therefore ‘quite impossible to follow Adler’ – he might have included Roubaud or Hammond in this refusal – ‘when he asks us to accept the existence of a condition which he solemnly terms anaesthesia sexualis completa idiopathica, in which there is no mechanical difficulty in the way of psychic inhibition, but an “absolute” lack of sexual sensibility and a complete absence of sexual inclination.’130 According to Ellis, women were not naturally cold, contrary to what the nineteenth century had come to believe. And even when they might appear to be frigid, they must still have had a latent capacity for sexual sensation. As a result, pace Adler and Hammond, it became ‘difficult’ to make ‘the final pronouncement that a woman is sexually frigid’.131 The task of therapy was in fact to draw out a natural

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capacity that lay hidden behind superficial symptoms of incapacity: ‘The fact that it is almost normally the function of the male to arouse the female, and that the greater complexity of the sexual mechanism in women leads to more frequent disturbance of that mechanism, produces a simulation of organic sexual coldness that has deceived many.’132 ‘Simulation’ was a key word. In Adler’s work, frigidity had been regularly accompanied by the qualification ‘widespread’. In Ellis’s, it was likely to be called both ‘widespread’ and ‘apparent’. Apparent frigidity called for forms of treatment that would remove its symptoms, bringing to light the natural truth of women’s sexuality. If, as Ellis claimed, the symptoms of apparent frigidity ‘deceived many’, the number of those deceived must have included the husbands who, as we saw in Chapter 5, were chronically deceived about their wives’ sexuality. It must also have included the great majority of doctors, including perhaps some of Ellis’s most prominent colleagues. But it was also quite likely to include another group: the patients themselves. Whereas Roubaud and Adler had, each in his own way, expressed great confidence in patients’ accounts of their sexual disorders, Ellis was entertaining the idea that the patients might be the victims of unwitting self-deception. To speak in these terms was to open a path for psychoanalysis, which staked a uniquely ambitious claim to diagnose and treat self-deception as such. We can see where this thinking led, and precisely how it was applied, in the work of Wilhelm Stekel. In 1920, Wilhelm Stekel published Die Geschlechtskälte der Frau: Eine Psychopathologie des weiblichen Liebeslebens (Frigidity in Woman: A Psychopathology of Women’s Love Life).133 Stekel was a medical practitioner in Vienna, a pupil and disciple of Freud who had established a psychoanalytic practice in 1908, before being expelled from the Vienna school in 1912. His work still constitutes the most substantial single piece of psychoanalytical writing on frigidity. We can begin to position him within the space of our thematic by noting what he had to say about the physical–psychical binary. When people fall in love, said Stekel conventionally enough, ‘undoubtedly somatic [somatische] and psychical [psychische] factors are jointly at work’.134 But he was not prepared to give this binary the theoretical and practical value that it had had in the work of his predecessors. Rather than separating treatments according to that dichotomy, Stekel claimed the space of interaction – and indeed of confusion – as his own: If love were merely a physical [physisches] phenomenon, our task – outlining in general terms mankind’s specific love requisites – would

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be easily covered. But at the very outset of our studies we must emphasize that love is made up of two sets of components – the physical [physischen] and the psychical [psychischen]. Often it is impossible to trace a dividing line between them. Most manifestations of love are mixed, or psycho-physical [psycho-physische], and it would be next to impossible to draw a dividing line on one side or the other.135 This was not of itself a radical shift from the position established in some earlier medical writing: Roubaud, too, insisted on the complex intersection of moral and physical factors. But Stekel established a hierarchy between the two orders that reflected a strong theory about the aetiology, and therefore the proper treatment, of sexual anaesthesia. In any given case, it was likely to be difficult for the clinician to work through the mix of physical and psychical disorders, but Stekel’s guiding principle was clear. He aimed to arrive at the ‘psychogenesis’ giving rise to such varied symptoms: ‘The account is difficult for the reason that psychical [seelische] and bodily [körperliche] disorders influence one another and may be found either isolated or combined so that the clinical picture of the resulting morbid condition becomes obscured, its psychogenesis is masked, and the disorder may be mistaken for something organic.’136 Organic symptoms had to be taken into account, but they were a potential source of error, since they served to ‘mask’ underlying psychical causes. Disorders that were purely organic Stekel considered the domain of physicians, but where the symptoms were a mixture of the two kinds, the requirements of diagnosis and treatment were psychological by definition. It was on these grounds that Stekel expressed stern disapproval of ‘the so-called “psychoanalytic cure” ’ practised by a Viennese doctor ‘who at the same time massaged the patient: it is a fundamental principle of all psychotherapeutic procedures that the patients must not be handled; that they must be turned over to another physician for any organic disorders involving treatment’.137 The relation between the psychical and the physical was of the greatest interest to Stekel, but the physical itself was not the proper site of therapy as he advocated and practised it. His self-appointed task was to claim frigidity for psychoanalysis and to set about treating it accordingly: ‘I have proven that we must look upon a woman’s frigidity as a psychical [seelisches], not an organic symptom.’138 While Stekel was entirely convinced that that the psychoanalytical method was the appropriate one for frigidity, he promised no easy triumph in the treatment, or even the analysis, of the condition. For while the aetiology of frigidity had been identified in principle, it was not

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easily understood in detail: ‘Before discussing these individual forms, we must acknowledge that a consistent account of the causes of this condition is not possible. The problem is so complicated that it must be viewed in its totality.’139 Various possibilities presented themselves. It might be thought that all frigid women ‘were merely homosexuals whom men are unable to satisfy at all’, but in reality ‘nothing would be more futile than to attempt to find a single key with which to unlock the solution to this problem’.140 One thing was clear, with all the clarity of a cherished theory: ‘in all cases, we have to do with an inner “No!” ’. This was, for Stekel, the underlying psychical truth of frigidity. At its beginning lay some kind of inner refusal, which might be ‘expressed organically’. ‘Ferreting out this inner “No!” ’, he went on, ‘is the task of psychoanalysis in the treatment of these disorders.’141 And while the inner ‘No!’ might have seemed a powerfully simple thing in theory, it was always bound up in clinical complications: ‘The problem of love is a complicated riddle with numerous unknown factors. The disorder can be cured only by a specialist who knows how to discover the various unknowns which make up the neurotic equation.’142 This theoretically energetic, although of course unproven, approach allowed Stekel to find a direct path through some of the difficulties that had exercised his colleagues in the preceding 50 years. He was able to assert in principle that no woman was completely anaesthetic: ‘The anaesthetic woman is merely a woman who has not discovered the form of sexual gratification which alone can be adequate in her case.’143 Deception occurred in such instances within the patient’s own psyche: ‘There are persons who do not want to know anything about their own sexuality and they refuse to recognize the masks under which their sexuality hides itself, preferring to assume the role of ascetics; the holier-than-thou attitude suits them better.’144 The therapist’s first responsibility was not to fall victim to the patient’s error, but to understand the symptoms themselves as imaginary: ‘Certain investigators still speak of complete sexual anaesthesia, or asexualism; on closer investigation such cases prove to be largely imaginary.’145 Knowing that proposition to be true as a matter of theoretical principle allowed the therapist to see beyond the symptoms: ‘I shall not deny that we meet women and girls who are apparently lacking the very rudiments of sexual craving. My professional experience has taught me, however, that these are merely instances of a masked libido; that the craving is never absent.’146 It followed that the very construction of sexual anaesthesia as a syndrome was itself an unreflective response to superficial signs: ‘anaesthesia sexualis is a deceptive symptom which does not stand

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the test of an experienced psychoanalyst’s insight and [is] traceable to the patient’s faulty account of herself. Frigidity, too, is but a result of repression.’147 That is why Stekel saw the treatment of frigidity as a made-to-order task for psychoanalysis. Not only had the patient said ‘No!’ inside herself, but that very refusal was hidden from consciousness: ‘This “I-will-not” attitude is due to the inner obstinacy which, in its turn, is very adroitly screened from consciousness.’148 Stekel’s theoretical framework allowed him to address the question of wedding night trauma. He re-described it in his own terms, making of it an eminently psychological event: In my professional experience, I have found that even the wedding night experience may amount to a serious trauma or mental shock; that it may lead to a complicated neurosis or mark the onset of a psychosis. [ . . . ] The disappointment on account of the anaesthesia, a persistent vaginismus, the vaginal spasm expressing the subconscious resistance, or the man’s unadroit handling of the situation may lead to serious consequences. Even healthy-minded women may be shocked out of their balance by the bungling of a neurotic husband.149 What was described by earlier writers as a moral shock had become neurosis or psychosis and the husband’s much-discussed ‘brutality’ had itself given way to ‘neurosis’. But the established narrative pattern endured, as the woman’s sexuality was decided by the events of one night. The difference was that Stekel found in the wife’s response, not just trauma, not just a moral and physical wound, but an unconscious resolve: ‘Women do not easily forget an insult or an indignity visited on them during the wedding night. They avenge themselves on their husband by a lifelong avoidance of the orgasm.’150 Understood thus, frigidity was an act of will, a choice, albeit one made in the unconscious. Along with this re-description of the wedding night went a strong view about the aetiology, and by implication the proper treatment, of vaginismus. Stekel claimed to have been the first to identify the true source of the disorder: ‘I was the first to call attention to the psychic roots of vaginism. [ . . . ] The body truthfully proclaims its defying “I will not” even while the sophisticated intellect assumes the attitude of meek and loving submissiveness.’151 This claim was justifiable insofar as Stekel was the first to frame the condition in psychoanalytical terms, although it was a vast exaggeration of his originality, as the broadly comparable views quoted in Chapter 3 show. But vaginismus allowed Stekel to

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infer a compelling psychical cause behind a dramatic physical symptom. This was the point at which doctors focused on physical symptoms were likely to fail: I was astonished to find that many cases diagnosed by other physicians as heart trouble, asthma, stomach trouble, appendicitis, irritations of the skin, tics, cramps, etc., were caused by mental conflicts. These facts had been overlooked because physicians have not understood ‘the organic language of the soul’. This phrase means that neurotics have a wonderful ability to express their mental states in a symbolic language of the bodily organs. [ . . . ] Vaginism in women is due to resistance against a forced marriage; the reader will find plenty of cases in this book.152 The point of Stekel’s casuistry was always to find the hidden mental cause behind such symptoms, and vaginismus provided him, quite literally, with a textbook example. Stekel was equally confident in his explanation of the widespread distribution of frigidity. Quoting Adler’s figures with seeming approval, although with no more careful study of the population than his predecessor, he claimed that the incidence of frigidity corresponded generally to that of neurosis: ‘Very few healthy women are anaesthetic, while among the neurotics most women are so.’153 In confirmation – or rather in iteration – of this he offered a history that ‘had to be assumed’: We must assume that at one time there were no impotent men and no frigid women, just as we note that to this day these disorders of the sexual function are not nearly so frequent among the simpler people as they are among the more cultured classes of the human race.154 This more or less archetypal history bears no resemblance to our own intellectual one, but it shows the capacity of the theoretically driven accounts that emerged in the early twentieth century to describe some distant past as a time of sexual naturalness that had been disturbed, if not thoroughly spoiled, by the work of civilization: ‘We may as well recognize the sad fact: A great number of the men belonging to the higher cultural levels are relatively impotent, a large number of women belonging to the same class are sexually frigid!’155 In addition to this history, which owed much to the degenerationist views that had been so prevalent in the late nineteenth century, Stekel offered a more specifically psychoanalytical account of the

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supposed widespread tendency to frigidity in modern times. It was partly attributable to feminist thinking. He spoke of woman’s ‘will to power’: ‘Her sexual frigidity enables woman to domineer, to triumph over man [ . . . ] The growth of dyspareunia in modern times, therefore, is to be interpreted as a phase in woman’s struggle for equal rights; it is distinctly a social manifestation.’156 The politicization of frigidity was not new in itself: we saw earlier in this chapter that Adler considered widespread frigidity as evidence of the need for a woman’s movement. But Stekel reversed the relationship. The desire to play men’s roles was actually producing frigidity in modern women. The problem, as Stekel saw it, was that these women failed to respect the necessary ties between the psychical and the physical. The only hope for relief from an epidemic of frigidity lay in a return to traditional roles: A woman can never become a man; the feminine psyche is too intricately bound up with the womanly physis. The sex struggle will never abate along these lines; on the contrary, it will grow sharper and assume more grotesque forms. A reaction to the present phase of the struggle cannot fail to set in. Return to the calling of motherhood under equal political, social and sexual rights alone will furnish woman the opportunity for love without humiliation.157 Equal rights were entirely appropriate, but the order of ‘love’ could only be maintained if women returned to their ancient calling. At the end of a discussion of treatment, we find that political questions – in the broad sense of gender politics – did emerge in the writings of a few therapists. And we find also that an interest in widespread frigidity could lend itself to quite divergent views about the proper roles for women. We will see in Chapter 8 how that ambivalence played out in the work of a woman psychoanalyst, Marie Bonaparte.

8 Relocating Marie Bonaparte’s Clitoris

We make no apology for the fact that our chapter on psychoanalytic understandings of frigidity focuses more on the work of Marie Bonaparte than on that of Freud or any other psychoanalyst. Without doubt, Bonaparte was a Freudian thinker, and Freud’s teleological mapping of feminine pleasure between clitoris and vagina helped structure the ideas of Bonaparte and of all other psychoanalytic thinkers who wrote about female sexuality throughout the first half of the twentieth century. However, Bonaparte warrants a concentrated study, not only because her elaboration of Freudian theory about female bodies into a full theory of frigidity went far beyond anything Freud had dared to envisage, but also because she complicates the history of sexuality to an extraordinary degree. The politics of gender and the medicalization of female sexual lack were for her matters of great subjective importance, and her example shows how such ideas were taken up by the first generation of articulate female intellectuals. She engaged with these issues fruitfully, if problematically and even painfully. When we read the description of female ‘frigidity’ sufferers in the accounts of nineteenth-century doctors, it is difficult to speculate credibly about the experience of those patients when confronted with the medical categories applied to them. In the writings of Marie Bonaparte, on the other hand, we have an account not only of how one woman conceived her own pathology in those terms, but also an insight into how, by theorizing that experience, she contributed to the intellectual psychologization of female sexuality. Bonaparte is also an exemplary figure for the more general historical contribution we are seeking to make in this book, in that she emphasizes the ambivalent status of frigidity from a feminist point of view. The story of Marie Bonaparte’s clitoris reveals that sexual categories often imagined today to form part of the most repressive or misogynist discourses 222

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of the past were in fact, in their own time, those most riddled with ambiguity in relation to gender, national and racial politics. On the one hand, Bonaparte’s baffling ambiguity, when measured against recent feminist contestations of genital pleasure, suggests a radical alterity of the past she inhabited, while, on the other hand, her anathematized reputation within canonical works of feminist theory shows just how much such debates continue to have relevance, as normative views of orgasm are further elaborated and disputed. Bonaparte’s bifurcated vision of clitoral and vaginal pleasure and her passionate conception of frigidity as virile clitoridism have made her the object of disdain and disavowal across feminist and psychoanalytic thought since the 1960s. For Kate Millet and Betty Friedan, Bonaparte was all the worse because she was a woman – a traitor to feminism and a lackey of the misogynist Freud. Bonaparte’s work is soaked in reverence for Freud, and that tends to obscure the important departure she made from his conclusions about the meaning of frigidity and how to treat it. It was no doubt her intention to appear obedient to Freud’s model and to show him gratitude for the unequivocal support he gave to her and to other female psychoanalysts of the time. But it would be an error to take such displays of deference as signs of a weak-minded submission, of unreflective mimesis or of a lack of initiative and originality on her part. A careful examination of the various texts Bonaparte wrote about female sexuality suggests a significantly greater complexity than is generally recognized in broad characterizations of her ideas. But there is more to it than that. By studying Marie Bonaparte, we can learn more about the place of frigidity in the history of ideas. And we can come to understand her unique intellectual persona by studying her life and work within the contexts of the international psychoanalytic community and of the national and public gender politics of interwar France and Europe. In the history of feminism Bonaparte has not merely been ignored: she has been thoroughly reviled. Betty Friedan, in that pivotal work of ‘second wave’ feminism, The Feminine Mystique (1963), openly attacked Bonaparte on feminist grounds for the first time, describing her as a lackey of Freud, who was in turn pilloried by Friedan as one of the most dangerous misogynist thinkers of the modern age.1 Kate Millet’s discussion of Bonaparte in her Sexual Politics of 1969 had perhaps even more influence on the overall establishment of Bonaparte as an anti-feminist icon. For Millet, Bonaparte was part of the ‘reactionary’ trend of Freudian women.2 In these two works that have regularly held a place in the essential reading lists of women’s studies courses throughout the English-speaking world and have seen numerous

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re-editions, Bonaparte is characterized and soundly condemned as both treacherous and imitative. Millet quotes out of context from English translations of Bonaparte’s work, focusing on biologically determinist passages that are in fact atypical within the larger context of Bonaparte’s writing. In her careless assumption that Bonaparte merely reiterated Freud’s ideas, Millet even makes false assertions, claiming that Bonaparte advised avoiding even incidental clitoral contact during intercourse.3 Such advice appears nowhere in the works of Marie Bonaparte that we have read, and Millet provides no evidence in support of that claim. Furthermore, she ignores the deeply ambivalent discussion in Bonaparte’s work regarding the relationship between vaginal and clitoral pleasure, and the importance that Bonaparte placed on the clitoris in her vision of normative female arousal. Indeed, contrary to Millet’s characterization, Bonaparte was somewhat obsessed with the question of how to ensure greater clitoral stimulation during intercourse for women who were not so fortunate as to have their clitorises located close to the vaginal opening.4 As Jean Walton remarks, for someone whose symbolic order denigrated clitorises, Bonaparte spent an inordinate amount of time talking about them.5 Bonaparte helps to show us how the question of female orgasm (and its supposed failure) brought together some of the most prevalent social anxieties of early-twentieth-century France. But there is a range of recent gender disputes and assumptions that make her a difficult figure to approach without aversion and confusion. So, in order to clear the way, we will address those disputes and assumptions first. As an object of study, Bonaparte exemplifies some of the most problematic encounters, some of the most troubling misrecognitions that can occur when feminists, gender theorists and historians of sexuality consider discourses of feminine sexual desire in a past that has perhaps not entirely passed. Sexologists, doctors and psychiatrists have varied greatly in their opinions about what kind of pleasure is normal for women, and while the specifics of orgasm have not always been a part of such discussion, within recent feminism a simple narrative has emerged defending clitoral desire and ridiculing the psychoanalytic claim that the clitoris must be repressed. Since the 1960s Anglophone feminists such as Anne Koedt, Ti-Grace Atkinson, Betty Friedan and Kate Millet, together with French psychoanalytic feminists such as Luce Irigaray, have actively critiqued the notion of ‘frigidity’ in medical and psychoanalytic thought. They have pointed out that embedded in this concept as it appears in most twentieth-century masculine writing about sex is a normative assumption of femininity in which only ‘vaginal’ orgasm experienced

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through heterosexual coitus is a true and legitimate form of pleasure.6 It is true that post-war American sexologists such as Alfred Kinsey, and Masters and Johnson emphasized the centrality of the clitoris in all forms of female orgasm, but these ideas had remained marginal among the majority of medical writers on female sexual anatomy throughout the 1950s and 1960s.7 Within psychoanalytic traditions too, the notion of female sexual maturity as ‘vaginal’ remained central to theories of female sexuality throughout the 1960s and 1970s, as can be seen, for example, in the work of Helene Deutsch.8 That notion persisted as psychoanalytic dogma until its contestation by French feminist psychoanalytic thinkers in the 1980s.9 But prior contestations had also occurred from within American feminist circles and had spread to other English-speaking and European cultures. Anne Koedt’s influential article, ‘The Myth of Vaginal Orgasm’, first appeared in 1968 and was rapidly circulated as a popular underground text prior to its official publication, as it had been unofficially translated into a number of European languages. It became widely popular in West Germany during the 1970s according to German historian Dagmar Herzog.10 Koedt actively debunked the concept of ‘vaginal orgasm’ as a masculinist myth, arguing that even where women climaxed from vaginal penetration, ‘the orgasm takes place in the sexual organ equipped for sexual climax – the clitoris’.11 Ti-Grace Atkinson boldly asserted that heterosexual coitus was patently incapable of producing orgasm in any woman.12 No consensus has ever emerged among feminist thinkers about the existence or nonexistence of the ‘vaginal orgasm’. Germaine Greer, for example, bemoaned the post-Freudian reconstruction of the vagina as passive and irrelevant to female orgasm, and cuttingly satirized the sexology-conscious lover as ‘laborious and inhumanly computerized’ as he ‘dutifully does the rounds of the erogenous zones, spends an equal amount of time on each nipple, turns his attention to the clitoris (usually too directly), leads through the stages of digital or lingual stimulation, and then politely lets himself into the vagina’.13 In the work of Betty Dodson, Annie Sprinkle, Susie Bright and other self-proclaimed sex-radical writers and performers, it is an accepted commonplace that women may (indeed should!) experience many varieties of orgasm, namely clitoral, vaginal and ejaculatory. Sex therapists such as Deborah Sundahl conduct workshops on how to find the Gräfenberg spot and how to experience vaginal orgasms and urethral ejaculations. Indeed since the mid-1980s, explicit discussion about sex in women’s magazines and television documentaries across American, British, Australian and French cultures appears to reflect a widespread lack of concern about

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the clitoral versus vaginal divide that had so preoccupied psychoanalytic and feminist thinking on women’s sexuality throughout most of the twentieth century. But that is not to say that either the dichotomy or the sense of feminist concern about the location of orgasm has passed. In recent years feminist sexologists such as Rebecca Chalker and Betty Dodson have asserted the central importance of the clitoris to feminine pleasure, as measured by the number and concentration of nerve endings.14 Dodson conducts workshops aimed at teaching women unfamiliar with it how to perform clitoral self-pleasuring, advising all women to practise some form of direct clitoral stimulation during intercourse with men, and not assume that it is possible to experience orgasm from penetration alone. She refers to the Freudian construction of the infantile clitoris as ‘one of the great sexual tragedies in history’, and sees critiques of the Freudian paradigm as being bound up with the politics of a radical sex-positive minority who celebrate female pleasure in opposition to a sea of conservative liberal feminist attitudes as typified by Eve Ensler’s ‘Vagina Monologues’ stage show.15 In attacking the failure of the ‘Vagina Monologues’ to acknowledge the clitoris, Dodson claimed that ‘Freud would be laughing in his grave’ at the triumph of a vaginacentred definition of female genital pleasure. That said, while it should be noted that Ensler’s inspiration is drawn more from ‘radical feminist’ positions on heterosexuality, pornography and violence, it is clear that aligning her with Freud functions here more as a calumniatory device than as a form of intellectual genealogy. Ensler’s unspecific vision of ‘the vagina’ bears no signs of the psychoanalytic model of mature receptivity in opposition to infantile clitoridism. It rather stands for the whole of the female sexual apparatus in a way that allows female genitality to be celebrated, but in a polite, vague fashion, based perhaps on what queer theorist Leo Bersani has termed ‘aversion displacement’ – the use of evasive language aimed at alluding to sexual relations while sanitizing their corporeal messiness.16 This is the essence of Dodson’s concern: not that the clitoris is being hierarchically demoted again, but rather that the recognition of the specific and differentiated parts of female genitalia so crucial to the exploration of sexual technique that she advocates are being subsumed under the polite category of ‘the vagina’. It must be said that the question of female orgasm remains contested across biological, psychological, feminist and sexological fields at the beginning of the twenty-first century. When philosopher and biologist Elizabeth Lloyd attacked evolutionary biological theories of female sexuality and proposed that female orgasm has no reproductive or evolutionary function, she was greeted with howls of horror

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and protest from a range of feminist activists, as well as with some more sober and rigorous critiques of her biological argument from evolutionary psychologists.17 Academic gender thinking in the past 50 years has largely come to take it for granted that female orgasm matters immensely in all new attempts to imagine gendered relations and sexual behaviours, and moreover that clitoral pleasure is not only normal but indeed is the sum total of female orgasm. As one respected feminist psychologist remarked in the 1980s, ‘the psychoanalytic sacrosanctity of the vaginal orgasm has utterly collapsed in the face of advancing physiological knowledge’.18 Similarly, notions of ‘frigidity’ that were bound up with the clitoral/vaginal dichotomy have been widely mocked and dismissed within recent feminist and psychoanalytic thought. The clitoris of the post-war era has been politically encoded as a form of feminist democratization of male-centred visions of pleasure. Needless to say, in Marie Bonaparte’s time all this was completely unheard of. Even among sexuality scholars there has been a tendency to minimize Bonaparte’s contribution to the psychoanalysis of sexuality, perhaps in part because her significance is most apparent in a study, such as our own, of the rather singular and unpopular notion of frigidity. In Angus McLaren’s account of Twentieth-Century Sexuality, Bonaparte appears only briefly as one of the many followers of Freud, and the latter’s views of female desire are taken as utterly characteristic of what Freudian psychoanalysis had to say about gender. Taking Freud as the measure of Freudian thought seems intuitively obvious, and also provides a convenient target for the claim that it was misogynist and misguided male thinkers who were responsible for generating absurd views about female sexuality and frigidity. McLaren closely locates Freud’s views on women within the context of interwar anti-feminism, but does so in a singular manner, associating Freudian thought with the tide of misogynist tracts that circulated in the interwar period and suggesting a seamless continuity between Freud and the soap-box haters of career girls and feminism. McLaren makes a valid point about Freud’s far more normative account of male sexuality, which he treated as if it were obvious, in contrast to his quite speculative views about women. And McLaren notes how little that difference has been appreciated in accounts of Freud that criticize him for extrapolating theories of female sexuality from his understanding of men. ‘As feminists later complained, Freud based his understanding of both sexes on the examination of male patients’, McLaren remarks, although he notes that it was women who most confounded Freud, and judges that ‘Freud’s portrayal of women was grossly flawed’.19

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But the psychoanalytic theorization of frigidity was not only a story told by men about women. McLaren’s reading neglects the history of psychoanalytic societies and the curious gender dynamics that occurred within them. Ironically, in joining the feminist anti-Freudian chorus, he inadvertently fails to hear the voices of female Freudians. By the beginning of the 1930s, Freudian thought was much larger than the work of Freud himself. Indeed, the theorization of female sexuality in Freudian terms was but a peripheral theme in Freud’s own oeuvre, while it had become a central concern in that of Marie Bonaparte and an important one in the work of numerous other psychoanalytic scholars. In the tidy equation of Freudian psychoanalysis with ‘Freud-the-Bastard’ himself, there is little room to appreciate someone as eccentric and politically ambiguous as Marie Bonaparte, and it is perhaps for this reason that McLaren has nothing to say about the significance of her work. We, on the other hand, have often had occasion in this book to attend to messy and incongruous writing, so that seems to make Bonaparte just our kind of person. Bonaparte’s unrecognizability in the present is, in actuality, a telling example of the way in which the meaning of frigidity has continued to shift historically. But her work also confirms our general point that no one who wrote about frigidity did so free of the logical constraints and commonplace understandings that persisted from the earlier forms of its conceptualization. Some of the misapprehensions about Bonaparte’s account of female sexuality, and much of the tendency to ignore her work, are in keeping with a broader habit of disparaging and disdaining Freud’s theories about women. Peter Gay’s account of Freud on women emphasizes precisely the kind of ambivalence towards feminist concerns that needs to be kept in mind in the study of Marie Bonaparte. Gay notes that concern about the danger of Freudian theory reducing women to the status of ‘hommes manqués’ was a central topic of debate among Freudians themselves throughout the 1920s and 1930s. In 1935 Karen Horney began her well-known challenge to the notion of ‘penis envy’ in the work of Freud, a criticism supported by influential American psychoanalyst Ernest Jones.20 Gay notes that Freud repeatedly claimed to understand very little about female sexuality, professing its mystery and the generally undeveloped scope of scientific knowledge about it. The famous claim about female desire as a ‘dark continent’ made by Freud in 1905 is taken by McLaren as a sign of Freud’s attempt to shroud women in mystery and imply that they are incomprehensible, whereas Gay places it alongside the many remarks in Freud’s opus about the poor state of scientific understanding of female psychology and the

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expressions of hope that this area of knowledge would be developed. While Freud ventured to theorize about the basic structure of female sexuality, he hoped that figures such as Bonaparte, Horney, Helene Deutsch, Ruth Mack-Brunswick and Jeanne Lampl-de Groot would elaborate, correct and reconceive psychoanalytic understanding of women. This is the burden of a lecture he gave in 1931 on ‘Femininity’ (Weiblichkeit) in which he honoured the work of Ruth Mack-Brunswick for being ‘the first to describe a case of neurosis which went back to a fixation in the preOedipus stage and had never reached the Oedipus situation at all’. He thanked Jeanne Lampl-de Groot for her work on female childhood phallicism, and Helen Deutsch for her work on female homosexuality and mother–daughter relationships.21 He particularly valued the insights of female psychoanalysts into female sexuality, both because they themselves were women with their own sexual experiences, and because he assumed they could perform a more profound analysis of female patients through the unique style of transference that a female therapist could offer. While Freud’s ideas about women may have been sketchy, modelled on masculine examples and grounded in conservative ideals of heterosexual marriage, there can be no doubt that in practice he actively encouraged female psychoanalysts like Marie Bonaparte, and gave as much credit to their ideas as he did to those of his male followers. As Gay remarks, psychoanalysis was one of the rare intellectual moments of the early twentieth century to show international female leadership within the first generation of its conception.22 The presence of women in psychoanalytic circles was crucial to the survival of the moment. Without Marie Bonaparte’s wealth and initiative in transporting Freud’s archives and notes to Britain in 1931, those materials would probably have been burnt by the Nazi government in Austria. And by the 1950s, while women remained extremely marginal in all other medical and intellectual institutions, they were some of the most influential and published scholars in psychoanalysis. The 700 or so pages of the ‘Bibliothèque de psychanalyse et de psychologie clinique’ published by the Presses Universitaires de France in the 1950s were predominantly filled with the works of female psychoanalysts: Marie Bonaparte, Anna Freud, Helene Deutsch, Germaine Guex, Kate Friedländer and Susan Isaacs.23 It could perhaps still be said that women did more for Freudian psychoanalysis than it did for them, but it cannot credibly be said that frigidity in psychoanalytic circles was the product of a uniquely male understanding of barely imaginable female client subjects, as had so often been the case in nineteenth-century medicine.

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While we will certainly not suggest here that Marie Bonaparte or the psychoanalysis of sexual frigidity need to be revived as icons of feminist consciousness, we will argue that Bonaparte’s ideas about female genital pleasure deserve to be radically reconsidered and historically recontextualized in relation to early-twentieth-century discourses of gender, nationalism and colonial difference. Indeed, viewed within a longer historical perspective of late-nineteenth-century invention of concepts of feminine sexual frigidity or coldness, Bonaparte’s intense frustration with her own lack of ‘vaginal’ orgasmic potential can be seen as being as much about a new imperative of pleasure as about a repression of the clitoris. Bonaparte did not herald a new era in which female jouissance was to be denied. On the contrary, she was part of an intensified concern among psychologists and doctors that women experience pleasure and orgasm, and that they do so in ways deemed appropriate within heterosexual coitus. In recent years, Bonaparte’s paradoxical strangeness and, more generally, the problem of psychoanalytic visions of female genitalia have also attracted a more curious kind of attention from scholars such as Jean Walton, Thomas Laqueur and Nellie Thompson. Walton has made an immense contribution to understanding the deeply racialized discourses embedded within psychoanalytic conceptions of feminine desire.24 For Laqueur, the generalized early-twentieth-century elevation of vaginal pleasure was the cause of the specific psychoanalytic denigration of the clitoris found in the work of Bonaparte.25 For Walton, on the other hand, Bonaparte’s simultaneous construction of the clitoris as both essential and pathological was a conflicting nexus of aversion and longing stemming from her self-identification as a phallic woman in opposition to a racially envisaged, castrated female colonial body.26 The mystery of Marie Bonaparte, for Walton, is why she did not explore sexual relations with women, given her continual references to the virility/frigidity question as ‘bisexuality’. She might then have elaborated her own psychosexual make-up as one fixated on female imagos.27 However, one thing that neither Laqueur nor Walton consider is the fact that Bonaparte’s account of female pleasure entailed a new fixation on the notion of frigidity as the absence of ‘orgasm’. She was not alone in taking frigidity to imply orgasmic failure. Interwar psychoanalytic visions of female pleasure rested in part on a new superiority of vagina over clitoris, but also rested upon a new medical imperative of pleasure, a demand that women experience orgasm, that their pleasure conform to this climactic, spasmodic structure of nervous organization. In France, this imperative did not replace reproductive visions

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of heterosexual normalcy. On the contrary, the latter was accentuated and complexified by pro-natalist concerns and a broad and increasing cultural pressure to reproduce, repopulate and ‘return’ to what were in fact newly constructed gender norms in the aftermath of World War I. The example of Marie Bonaparte suggests that it is appropriate to complicate simplistic assumptions about frigidity as oppressive masculine denial, and to consider the gender politics of frigidity with a more historicist sensibility, appreciating the unique conjunction of ideas about female pleasure in the interwar period. While it is anachronistic to judge past accounts of sexuality according to a modern feminist barometer, in Bonaparte’s time there clearly were feminist issues with which writers on frigidity explicitly engaged. Unfortunately, recent condemnations of Bonaparte as ‘anti-feminist’ have not taken proper account of the particular considerations of gender politics that existed in her work and in those of her contemporaries. In this chapter we offer a historically considered biographical discussion of Marie Bonaparte, focusing on that conflicted sense of desire in her that answered to psychoanalytic thought and to a concern with national politics. Firstly, Bonaparte’s ‘frigidity’ fits into the established practice of asserting, along with medical and psychoanalytic theories of the early twentieth century, that frigidity in a woman was incompatible with normality. Secondly, as Jean Walton has argued compellingly, Bonaparte’s ideas reflected the convergence of gender and colonialism that can be found in much psychoanalytic symbolism of the early twentieth century. But we will argue here that there is a third element that must be understood if we are to appreciate Marie Bonaparte’s peculiar conception of female pleasure: the context of French national politics and gender discourses of the interwar period. Bonaparte’s frigidity is thus something of an elaborate, if unstable, synthesis of the forces that dominated intellectual work in psychology and medicine in her era. She was not only a successor to late-nineteenth-century medical visions of sexuality, she was also a highly privileged yet eccentric aristocratic woman from the nationally symbolic but rogue imperial Bonaparte lineage. Her family struggled for status among traditional aristocratic circles in an age of burgeoning middle-class republicanism, and in an era of heightened imperial and national conflict. The French nation, moreover, was in this period seen by many as under threat by forces of social change that had purportedly resulted in a collapse of gender differentiation. It is only by taking into account these diverse forces and the extraordinary tension they produced that we can come to understand how someone determined to explore and defend feminine pleasure could propose clitoral

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surgery as the solution to the problem of female ‘virility’ and ‘frigidity’. In this chapter we hope to show that what may appear to be a logical contradiction in psychoanalytic concepts of frigidity and the mapping of female genital pleasure was produced by a unique circumstance in early-twentieth-century national, gender and intellectual politics. Only then can we begin to understand why Marie Bonaparte, with her lifelong desire to maximize her own and other women’s experience of sexual enjoyment, would construct her own most concentrated organ of pleasure as excessive, problematic, retarding and infantile, ultimately submitting it to the surgeon’s knife. It is not difficult to see why Marie Bonaparte has been a particularly difficult figure to reconcile with feminist historiography. From the early 1930s she published a range of works on female sexuality and frigidity – more scientific ones under her own name, and more personalized accounts under the pseudonym Narjani. This dual identity reflected the nature of her specialization, which was driven by intellectual curiosity and by the personal conviction that she was herself a frigid woman. Not only did she theorize the concept of female sexual frigidity to a greater degree than any other psychoanalytic thinker, with the exception perhaps of Wilhelm Stekel, discussed in Chapter 7, she also had her own genitalia operated on up to three times by a Dr Josef Halban between 1927 and 1931 in the hope of being able to experience orgasm from coitus without specific clitoral stimulation.28 Moreover, she venerated the sexuality of women in cultures that practised clitoral excision, and claimed that their example offered something valuable to the understanding of frigidity (defined as the failure of vaginal orgasm in coitus) among European women.29 None of this was a straightforward extension of Freud’s understanding of sexuality. The view of the clitoris as an infantile organ of pleasure was present in Freud’s work before the turn of the century but was only several years later mapped as pre-Oedipal and hence indicative of arrested development (and frigidity) if present in mature female sexuality. In a letter to Wilhelm Fliess of 1897 Freud had made reference to the centrality of the clitoris in childhood female sexual desire.30 Then, in the seminal 1905 work, Drei Abhandlungen zur Sexualtheorie (Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality) he argued that the clitoris was a kind of phallic organ, making boys and girls analogous up until puberty, at which time the locus of female sexuality shifted. The clitoris maintained a role in adult female sexuality: it was to ignite a woman’s passion, to kindle it like the pine shavings that allowed the hardwood log to burn.31 The problem was that clitoral pleasure had to be repressed at puberty, both because

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civilized society made it unacceptable for unmarried girls to be sexual, and because biology demands that the woman’s pleasure be directed towards the vagina to ensure her receptivity to coitus and reproduction. The necessary repression could easily become too global, making young women unresponsive to all forms of sexual stimulation. On the other hand, if repression was avoided by ongoing self-stimulation of the clitoris, this would prevent the relocation of pleasure to the vagina. Freud related the danger of frigidity to the larger questions of female psychological illness: ‘The fact that women change their leading erotogenic zone in this way, together with the wave of repression at puberty, which, as it were, puts aside their childish masculinity, are the chief determinants of the greater proneness of women to neurosis and especially to hysteria.’32 In Die ‘kulturelle’ Sexualmoral und die moderne Nervosität (‘Civilized’ Sexual Morality and modern Nervous Illness) of 1908, Freud suggested that sexually ‘anaesthetic’ women probably existed in all kinds of societies, but that modern civilization in particular tended to exacerbate the condition. Interchanging the terms ‘frigidity’ (Frigidität) and ‘anaesthesia’ (Anästhesie), he claimed that it was the middle-class convention of prohibiting sex before marriage along with late marriage that made women frigid, since in their formative years they were taught to repress sexual feelings and to channel these into love for their parents. The result might well be that no husband would ever be able to replace the woman’s father once she married. Her sexual feelings would remain dormant, unable to be cathected to her designated love object. The frigid wife produced frigid girl children (and neurotic boys of various kinds) because her mothering tended to be ‘overtender and overanxious’ to compensate for her lack of sexual expression. Frigidity was thus the almost inevitable fate of all women in early-twentiethcentury European polite society.33 In the repressive ambiance of modern civilized life, the relocation of pleasure often failed. It was here that psychoanalysis moved beyond other medical accounts of frigidity. Like the pseudo-doctors of early-twentieth-century France, Freud blamed prudishness and a sexually repressive culture, as well as the impotence of men, for the failure of women to experience sexual pleasure.34 What he added was a precise teleology and a sense of the epidemic proportions of the problem: primitive women are rarely frigid, but modern women almost always are. In the rest of his work, Freud would reiterate this account of female sexuality, frigidity, genitals and pleasures without adding anything significant to it.35 His work on sexuality throughout the interwar period

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remained only a small part of his larger work, as he focused on the unconscious, dreams, repression, sublimation, therapeutic technique and psychoanalytic transference, parental roles, childhood development, the Oedipus complex, ego and the id. Marie Bonaparte, on the other hand, like Karen Horney and Helene Deutsch, made the question of female sexual development the central concern of her work, and elaborated significantly on the implication of Freud’s conception, as well as reshaping the very framework through which frigidity was theorized in psychoanalytic terms. Bonaparte took from Freud the evolutionary view of sexual pleasure and female genitals that mapped them against the evolution of the psyche. The clitoris was a phallic organ (because frontal), and its pleasure represented infantile feminine sexuality corresponding to the pre-Oedipal state of androgyny. Once little girls accepted their castration and embraced their longing for the paternal imago, the locus of their pleasure should naturally shift to the vagina as the source of their childbearing capacity. But while for Freud that was a biological given, for Marie Bonaparte it was a problematic ideal. The differences between Freud’s and Bonaparte’s accounts were most apparent in relation to treatment principles. For Freud, only psychotherapy could help a frigid woman (in most cases) to accept her vaginal relocation, while, for Bonaparte, surgery could be the only solution for some, since women’s biology itself sometimes doomed them. The two agreed that some frigid women became frigid because they remained stuck in their infantile clitoral desire for pre-Oedipal pleasure. And they agreed that the clitoris should function as an ally to the vagina, rather than a competitor. But they disagreed radically about how the ‘problem’ of the persistently dominant clitoris could be fixed. They also construed the problem of frigidity very differently in relation to the politics of women’s roles in society. For Marie Bonaparte the right of women to participate as intellectual equals was central to her theorization of the place of sexuality in modernity and civilization. Freud’s ideas, as Gay shows, were considerably less consistent in that regard.36 The role of biology in the problem of female frigidity was, for Marie Bonaparte, a complex question. As Jean Walton and Thomas Laqueur have emphasized, the psychoanalytic dualism of clitoral/vaginal pleasure, while couched in biologically essentialist language, was in fact clearly founded on a cultural imperative: women must actively relocate their desire to the vagina ‘hysterically’, in spite of its lesser concentration of nerves, and against the grain of biological reality.37 This was not crucial for reproduction, hence it could not be evolutionary or biological;

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rather, it was the appropriate path to culturally construed heterosexual normality. Those who continued to desire clitoral stimulation or who failed to experience spontaneous ‘vaginal’ orgasm from coital thrusting alone were thus women who had not accepted their own castration and rescinded the phallus, but rather clung to an image of the father, resisting identification with the mother and hence falling short of full feminine sexual maturity. Bonaparte’s take on the Freudian theory of gender placed an inordinate emphasis on the clitoris as the site of feminine sexual agency. Freud, we recall, saw clitoridism as only occasionally the source of frigidity. More commonly, it resulted from an overgeneralized repression of desire at the moment of an adolescent girl’s relocation of genital pleasure or from the insufficient potency of her sexual partners. Hysteria could occur because the repression had missed its mark and spread everywhere throughout the libido, but Freud did not describe the normative repression itself as hysterical. It was not Freud, but Bonaparte who elaborated the idea of a normative hysterical displacement implied in the shift from clitoral to vaginal pleasure: ‘It is not only in the hysteric, and pathologically, that the exclusion of the phallus occurs, it is what must happen normally in the little girl if she is to adapt, later, to her erotic role as woman.’38 The phallic nature of the clitoral woman was not a perversion, but was biologically inscribed within an evolutionary vision of the psyche. Clitoral pleasure might represent the primitive stage of libidinous development for women, but it was in fact more organic than vaginal pleasure, which required a further move away from biological reality and towards social necessity.39 Bonaparte saw herself as precisely the kind of maladapted woman who could not hysterically relocate her pleasure away from the clitoris. Instead she attempted to cheat the system and move her clitoris to a position where it would be more directly stimulated by coitus. She failed in her attempt to modify her body to fit the gender expectations she held. In the years after her surgery she remarked that her libido was entirely in her head and that ‘while work is easy, pleasure [la volupté] is difficult’.40 At first glance, Bonaparte’s notorious forays into clitoral surgery and her detailed theorization of clitoral attachment as a kind of ‘frigidity’ appear then to be an extreme elaboration of Freudian dogma. In theorizing her own accounts of female sexuality and frigidity, she quoted Freud heavily and framed her account in highly deferential terms.41 But this should not be taken as a sign of submissive mimetic passivity. As Peter Gay notes, deference to Freud was a convention that all the female psychoanalytic writers (and many male ones) shared in the

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heady politics of the international psychoanalytic community with all its challengers, schisms and dramatic expulsions. Anyone who hoped to build a career and a reputation as an orthodox and respectable Freudian, having first deferred to the grand master’s founding work, could then suggest significant, even radical revisions of his conception, particularly if their financial support of the movement was considerable, as was the case with Marie Bonaparte.42 The opening pages of Bonaparte’s 1952 work, Psychologie et biologie, are characteristic of this approach. After 20 pages of agreeing with Freud’s account of the ‘refusal of femininity’ as the product of something deeper in female biology, after citing his approval of her ideas, after flattering Ferenczi for his earth-shattering observation that fear of orgasm may be related to a fear of penetration of the body, finally, 20 pages into the introduction she asserts her discordant arguments: that female sexuality is essentially bisexual, and that the duality of organs is a biological constraint on women’s potential for heterosexuality.43 Reading Bonaparte partially, and outside of the context of the history of psychoanalysis, has tended to produce a diminished view of her role. Bonaparte, perhaps more than any other psychoanalyst after Freud’s death apart from Anna Freud, regarded herself as the true guardian of the Freudian legacy. This is an obvious reason why she has been reviled in feminist discussions of sexual pleasure, while her psychoanalytic contemporaries Melanie Klein and Karen Horney, who did not have the same prominence within the psychoanalytic movement, have attracted an ongoing and consistent following, even though they too marginalized clitoral orgasm in favour of vaginal orgasm.44 Bonaparte first began theorizing about female sexuality in 1924, and in the diary she kept of her sessions with Freud wrote that she sought psychoanalytic treatment in a search for ‘orgasmic normality’.45 The surgery that Bonaparte advocated in La Sexualité de la femme, and which she herself underwent at the hands of the Viennese gynaecologist Dr Josef Halban, was not removal of the clitoris but a severing of the suspensory ligament attaching it to the mons pubis.46 The result was a dropping of the clitoris to a position closer to the vaginal opening, allowing (she hoped) for it to be stimulated more directly during coitus. Bonaparte sought this kind of surgery not to overcome her desire for clitoral pleasure, but rather to relocate it. She hoped to fuse it with what she perceived as the social necessity of pleasure in vaginal penetration. She sought clitoral relocation precisely in the belief that clitoral stimulation was an integral part of adult feminine pleasure, in contrast to the views of Freud and indeed other female psychoanalytic contemporaries

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such as Klein and Horney. Bonaparte did not emphasize the clitoris as the organ of feminine perversion as these other thinkers did, nor did her account resemble that of Wilhelm Stekel described in Chapter 7, with its insistence on the need for women to give up any will to power.47 Rather Bonaparte sought to reconcile what she saw as the external and virile with the internal and receptive qualities of female anatomy. She underwent therapy in order to feel more open to vaginal pleasure through coitus with men, but also sought to modify her own body to bring about a harmony of what she saw as the unfortunately conflicting drives of the biologically natural ‘clitoridism’ of women and the socially required receptivity of coitus. In concluding La Sexualité de la femme, Bonaparte mused that ‘humanity does sometimes know how to reach happy compromises . . . ’.48 The key to this problem, she claimed, was not for women to remove their virility but rather to know where to place it. In Bonaparte’s case this ‘placement’ was literally inscribed on her own body in the form of Dr Halban’s genital reconstruction surgery, of which Freud disapproved since he suspected her frigidity could only be overcome through psychotherapy.49 Bonaparte’s anthropological comparisons drew her to speculate that the use of clitoral excision among ‘primitive’ women demonstrated their greater acceptance of gender receptivity and femininity. But in her discussion of this possibility for European women, the surgery she advocated and had herself was not excision (removal) of the clitoris, but relocation of it. She drew from the teleological gender philosophy of the eccentric Spanish physician Gregorio Marañon, who had argued in the late 1920s that differences in gender systematically declined with the evolution of human societies towards greater levels of ‘civilization’.50 In this way Bonaparte was able to locate the clitoris within normative female biology while maintaining the Freudian Oedipal dichotomy. The virile European woman was not to be turned back in her demands; men must accommodate her in the modernizing drive towards androgyny, particularly through the acceptance of women in all fields of intellectual contribution (as Freud had done for her and other female psychoanalysts). But sexually she must not be indulged in her stagnation at an infantile stage of development. Rather her pleasure must be made to compromise, must be moved closer to that which is unique to women, in the name of greater gender differentiation, just as the clitoris must be surgically ‘moved closer’ to the vagina. Bonaparte’s conception of the problem of clitoridism was thus an argument about the tendency for gender differences to collapse with civilization, and about the tension between this force and that other social necessity for normality, heterosexual coitus. Since these pressures

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were mutually contradictory, compromises must be found by having women ‘place’ their virility where it would assist and not resist their penetration. The extent to which Marie Bonaparte’s theorization of female sexuality was imbued with political understandings of civilizing progress and pro-natalism can perhaps be better appreciated by situating her within the context of her family’s national status. The paranoia and indignation surrounding the Bonaparte family are important elements to be taken into account in contextualizing the sexual identity of Marie Bonaparte, and this is something that is absent from Célia Bertin’s biography of the Princess, as noted by Phyllis Grosskurth.51 The Bonaparte family could not trace their lineage back to centuries-old aristocracy. Their supremely privileged status only dated from the rule of Napoleon Bonaparte, whose leap of upward social mobility took him from Corsican petty noble with Jacobinist sympathies to emperor of a nation conquering European territories at a rate not equalled since the Romans and not surpassed until Hitler. By the early twentieth century, while the modernizing and aggrandizing features of the Napoleonic era were recognized within most patriotic narratives about the nation’s past, the more recent reign of Napoleon III (1852–70) conjured ambivalent responses. Scathingly critiqued by prestigious writers such as Victor Hugo and Emile Zola, the Second Empire was despised by left-wing groups as the regime that the Paris Commune had righteously defied after it had robbed the 1848 republican movement of its deserved victory. And while the vast expenditure of public funds for the beautification and modernization of Paris under Louis-Napoleon had been a powerful source of national pride, his status as the Emperor who lost Paris and lost power to the German siege of 1870 left less than glorious memories of the last example of the rule of the Bonapartes. Moreover, Roland Bonaparte (Marie’s father) was not a direct descendant of the imperial succession. His great-grandfather was the disgraced brother of Napoleon, Lucien Bonaparte; and Roland Bonaparte continued to struggle against the exclusion of his lineage by the more privileged clan of Bonapartes. Marie represented a beacon of hope and a projection of paternal aristocratic aspiration. Her family forbade her to study medicine in the belief that excessive education and professionalism would endanger the family’s chances of finding a prestigious marriage for her – one that would redeem its eminent status. This was successfully accomplished in her marriage to Prince George of Greece.52 Marriage and abundant childbirth, then, were the fate to which Marie Bonaparte

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was dedicated, against her own ambition to study medicine. Theorizing frigidity through her psychoanalytic induction was thus both a product of her overburdened heterosexuality and a vector for reclaiming the ‘phallic’ intellectualism she identified with. Marie Bonaparte’s own sexual experiences were profoundly implicated in her relationship to national politics. Her first amorous obsession as a teenager was with a man named Léandri, the Corsican secretary to her father, and a prominent political supporter of the persecuted Jewish captain Dreyfus, of the infamous Dreyfus Affair. Her love letters to Léandri allowed him to blackmail the Bonaparte family, and that, by her own declaration, marred Marie’s experiences of sexual trust for years afterwards.53 The lover who so disappointed her sexually during the First World War years was none other than Aristide Briand, several times Prime Minister of France and later Minister of Foreign Affairs. Years later, on the eve of the Nazi occupation of France, she wrote in her diary at the royal family home in Greece that the French defeat by the Germans was the ‘greatest catastrophe to happen to France since the One Hundred Years War’. At the same time she acknowledged her disappointment at missing the spectacle of ‘the rape of the mother-nation by the father-victor’.54 Marie’s description of her marriage to George reads rather like a pathetic scene from a roman de mœurs, that genre of middlebrow fiction that filled bourgeois libraries in the early decades of twentieth-century France. In the 1890 Catulle Mendès novel Méphistophela, as we saw in Chapter 5, the careless husband Jean destroys his new bride Sophie’s chances of sexual normalcy by failing to manage the delicate balance between an unmasculine timidity and an excess of brutality on their wedding night. The result for her is lesbianism, deep unhappiness and, finally, a form of madness.55 Marie’s highly unerotic experience of broken virginity is similarly marked as a site of trauma and disappointment linked to her sexual ‘pathology’: ‘That night you took me with a short, brutal gesture, as if forcing yourself . . . ’, she wrote to him in her diary of their 1907 wedding night.56 She imagined George driven only by conjugal duty without desire – a marked contrast to the middle-class ideal of imperative mutual heterosexual pleasure that abounds in both fictional and medical texts of the early twentieth century, as we saw in Chapters 4 and 5. Marie later learned that George’s real predilection was homosexual. Like a dutiful aristocratic wife, she remained married to him and reproduced with him to provide heirs, then quietly went about constructing her own elaborate existence of erotic adventures with other men.57 Before she had even encountered the work of Freud, she sought

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to test if her frustration was indeed the product of an impotent husband, as Freud would later speculate about sexually anaesthetic wives.58 As Jean Walton notes, Marie Bonaparte was also a proponent of the utterly unpopular idea – unpopular both then and now – that African and Arab women might have some greater sexual wisdom from which Europeans could learn, hence reversing dominant ethnocentric visions of African and Islamic gender relations, which tend to view European women as having greater sexual freedom and agency, as well as supposing the normativity of the white ‘intact’ female body.59 In describing primitive relations to the body as ‘autoplastic’, Bonaparte inscribed herself within prevailing interwar anthropological theories that characterized the modern civilized European as ‘alloplastic’, simultaneously transcendent or alienated from the body, from matter and muck, as signs of civilization.60 But Bonaparte’s adoption of these ethnocentric assumptions nonetheless defied the values embedded within them by crediting primitivity with a bodily wisdom lacking in civilized cultures. Walton’s rich and fascinating reading of Bonaparte as a thinker who welded sexual subjectivity into colonial difference ignores, however, the intrinsic relationship between frigidity constructed as clitoridism and concerns about gender differentiation that were rife in interwar French hygienist and pro-natalist movements. Disquiet about the declining birth rate and about women cutting their hair short, having careers, wearing revealing but more box-shaped clothing and taking lovers in the manner of a bachelor filled conservative political tracts, mainstream newspapers and popular novels. Bonaparte’s description of female frigidity, like other psychoanalytic texts, makes frequent reference to it as phallic disorder: the clitoris is like a penis and therefore the pleasure of it must be sublimated into vaginal receptivity. Any failure to achieve this is a failure of the necessary feminine castration bound up with successful resolution of the Oedipus crisis. The disorder of ‘clitoral hypersensitivity’ (hypersensibilité clitoridienne) is associated with a resistant or vengeful femininity in place of the desirable ‘woman who accepts [l’acceptatrice]’.61 A large part of Bonaparte’s major work on feminine sexuality is devoted to explaining how the gender-specific psychological development of boys and girls must proceed in order to ensure their functional masculinity and femininity. Both begin life enamoured of the phallus; the girl must mourn her own loss, while the boy must ‘renounce’ his desire for the female phallus ‘in order to be virile later on with women’. He must, in other words, learn ‘to love a total being without a phallus’.62 While these ideas were barely distinguishable from Freud’s conception of gender-differentiated Oedipal

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development, Bonaparte’s discussion of them in the context of frigidity and ‘clitoridism’ revealed a stronger relation to interwar national gender politics than can be detected in Freud’s work. Her obsession with frigidity as a failure of gender differentiation echoed pro-natalist and hygienist anxieties about French national decline. In other words, while Walton locates a colonial racial politics in Bonaparte’s visions of female desire, one can also detect in her view of things a certain national politics, as we will now try to show. That Bonaparte’s outlook on frigidity was a unique conjunction of colonial racial and nationally specific concerns might be best illustrated through a discussion of the female remains to which she was exposed as a child. Walton discusses at length Marie’s fascination with the skeleton of a ‘Hindu’ woman that her father kept in his study. The skeleton gave Marie nightmares and yet she begged her father to let her keep it in her room with the aim of conquering her fear of it. Walton suggests the ‘Hindu’ woman’s skeleton stood for the body of Marie’s dead mother, both in the eyes of Roland Bonaparte who acquired it and in the eyes of Marie who sought to domesticate it.63 It is worth noting also, however, that Marie located this symbol of both primitivity and female coldness with respect to her own intellectual development. It was in this period that she compensated for the prohibition against studying medicine by devoting herself to private study, often in her father’s office, alongside the skeleton of the ‘Hindu’ woman. But in that paternal study too was another article of female bodily remains: the skull of Charlotte Corday, the infamous murderess of the French revolutionary hero Jean Marat.64 This other macabre ornament of Marie’s youth was thus a French republican national symbol of an executed, treasonous, aristocratic femme fatale, a famous French woman’s defiant, decapitated head to be contemplated alongside the skeletal corpse of the nameless colonial feminine subject. Walton’s discussion of Bonaparte emphasizes the colonial feature of her racialized thinking about female sexuality in the context of white women’s colonially embedded visions of desire. But while Walton’s account of Bonaparte’s sexuality theories as always inherently racialized is clearly borne out by Bonaparte’s discussions of ‘primitive’ female pleasure, there are also specific European nation-state forms of symbolism that are crucial to understanding how this racialization of sexuality operated in her work. It is clear that for Bonaparte the problem of female frigidity was a question of gender conflict. Célia Bertin’s biography draws attention to the frequent descriptions of herself (and indeed other powerful women) as ‘phallic’.65 In her personal correspondence and reflection Bonaparte

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used this term to describe a dominant personality, an intelligent and independent woman, not to describe sexuality. But it was also a term she used in her theoretical writings to describe frigidity, and it was widely invoked, too, by other frigidity theorists such as Wilhelm Stekel and Robert Teutsch. This shows that implicit in Bonaparte’s writings about sexuality is a concern about female social power, an issue she was, of course, not alone in pondering during the 1920s and 1930s. The German sexologist Wilhelm Stekel’s two-volume opus on frigidity, as we saw in Chapter 7, constructed sexuality as a form of gender warfare. The opening chapter of the second volume is entitled Der Kampf der Geschlechter (The Struggle of the Sexes).66 Analysing female frigidity as repressed sexuality, Stekel added that repression was not so much an inability as an unwillingness to see the truth. Frigidity was only ever caused by one of four possible factors, he claimed: homosexuality, prudishness, hatred of the father or fixation with the mother – all of which added up to some form of active resistance to heterosexual normalcy.67 Stekel’s patient notes frequently read like scenes out of the Victor Margueritte novel La Garçonne: independent career girls reject male attempts to court and pleasure them, either because they are sexually involved with women, or because their self-defined personalities make them unwilling to submit to the will of a man. For Stekel, to fall in love or to accept pleasure is to lose control and thus to submit. A woman who does not experience simultaneous orgasm at the moment of her partner’s ejaculation is resisting his natural masculine will to dominate and refusing her own natural feminine instinct to receive pleasure, as his rhythm, on his terms. Reversing the order of attack, Dr Robert Teutsch in 1934 published a virulent attack entitled Le Féminisme in which he described ‘les frigides’ as one of the categories of feminist aberration: ‘Dressed in solid masculine fabrics, or else on the contrary, sporting soft girlish blouses . . . barely capable of true love, but thirsty for a lewdness that refuses to acknowledge itself . . . [it] tenses their personality, tortures them, then makes them choke with disappointment, often out of rage and bitterness.’68 The frigid woman was thus not asexual, but rather warrior-like (guerrière) and wilful, battling masculine social power within the terrain of her own body. Stekel’s work on frigidity was a rather marginal aspect of his writing, albeit a very lucrative one. That episode of his career is discussed by Stekel in his autobiographic account, edited by his wife Hilda after his suicide in 1940. He began working on frigidity in the period immediately following his ostracization and departure from the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society, and his bitter rift with Freud. In 1920, he gave

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a public lecture in Vienna on the topic of frigidity, and found the auditorium filled to capacity. He remarked: ‘As a consequence I obtained some rich material for further study: many frigid women, some of whom could pay for treatment and some of whom were poor.’ Stekel recognized a lucrative field for the development of a paying client base among sexually frustrated women, or those inclined to accept as pathological their unfashionable contentment with clitoral stimulation. The financial success Stekel garnered from the enterprise is recounted in his autobiography almost as a kind of revenge against the occulted mentor Freud, whom Stekel said he had first met at the turn of the century by seeking consultation with him for ‘some sexual problems’, which were cured within eight sessions.69 Following the rift, his new wife Hilda helped him with the frigidity volumes, editing, proofreading and providing him with ‘some ideas’.70 In reflecting on that period of his life, Stekel had nothing particular to say about the value of his work, the longevity of the ideas he expressed, or the contribution of his frigidity theories to psychoanalytic scholarship. He had more to say about other aspects of his work, notably his claim to have invented the term ‘death drive’.71 Apropos of his theories of frigidity, he noted instead how valuable the work was to him in securing his financial viability and in proving he did not need Freud in order to secure this: ‘Freud did not reckon with my ability to maintain an extensive practice without his help. However, through my articles in newspapers, my lectures, and, finally, through my books, I attracted a large number of patients – except during the first weeks of the war – and it was not necessary to fall back on my savings.’72 Stekel, perhaps even more than Bonaparte, was a product of his era. As gender historian Mary Louise Roberts argued in Civilization Without Sexes, and as Laure Murat has shown in La Loi du genre, the interwar period saw a marked fixation with anxieties about the failure of appropriately differentiated genders.73 While texts demonstrating these anxieties focused on the lack of maternal desire in the new ‘Career Woman’, seeing it as the source of population decline and national degeneration, they also frequently located this gender dysfunction on the body. It was read through fashion signifiers of femininity, as Teutsch demonstrated with his complaints about the excessively masculine or excessively feminine dress style of the frigid woman. Conservative and social hygienist diatribes against short haircuts and box-shaped yet revealing dresses helped to align the greater social and economic power of women in the aftermath of the First World War with a lack of reproductive drive in France, which was seen as an acute problem because of ongoing

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nationalist rivalry between France and Germany. Babies make soldiers; therefore a woman who does not make babies betrays her nation in future wars. Cartoons in the Catholic hygienist publication La Femme et l’enfant explicitly blamed French women’s rejection of motherhood for causing World War I: if the population had been more numerous, they said, Germany would not have dared make war against France in the first instance.74 But the garçonne was also undermining the nation as another war seemed to loom throughout the 1920s and 1930s, with the rise of Italian fascism and German Nazism, the outbreaks of conflict between France and Germany in the French-occupied Rhineland, the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War and the growing international tensions around it. In one cartoon of La Femme et l’enfant in 1920, Marianne in battle armour is shown dangling babies from a pair of scales, asking ‘How will I manage to replace all those who have fallen if this [war] continues?’ Fears about female criminals also came to a head in France in the late 1920s. In a 1926 doctoral thesis written for the Faculty of Law at the Université de Paris, Panagiote Yocas argued that the influx of women into the workforce since World War I had created a massive escalation in female crimes of violence and theft. The more women took part in the ‘social’ (meaning the labour market) the more they were exposed to struggles that could lead them to crime.75 The famous trial of the murderous Papin sisters in 1931 further fleshed out the imaginary link between lesbianism, frigidity, violent monstrosity and the breakdown of French social structures as exemplified by this attack of workingclass women on a bourgeois mother and daughter.76 Marie Bonaparte took part in these debates, theorizing the notion of ‘auto-punition’ (auto-punishment) as the source of murderous femininity in the muchpublished case of another murderess, Mme Lefebvre. The female killer was constructed as a frigid woman driven by a masochistic desire to suffer her own guilt, producing acts that would justify her feeling of shame; the perverse pleasure that resulted replaced normal sexuality.77 Victor Margueritte’s novel, La Garçonne, allows us further to situate Bonaparte’s vision of frigidity within prevailing gender anxieties of her time. The majority of literary interpretations of La Garçonne note its inherent reprobation of career girls, who were characterized by their sexual agency, their bisexuality, and their refusal to submit to bourgeois pressures to marry and bear children in the absence of emotional satisfaction and respect. Monique, the novel’s central character, is driven to debauchery by the betrayal of her heartless fiancé – a story that resembles Marie Bonaparte’s betrayal by her first love, Léandri, who

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blackmailed her using love letters she had written him as a teenager.78 In the novel, Monique is clearly shown to live out the worst kind of feminine behaviour, that of being unfeminine in her frigid hypersexuality: ‘Ah men! After being at first ferociously disgusted by them, then disdainful of them, she began once more to take them into consideration. But she saw them exactly the same way a boy sees girls: soullessly . . . ’79 While Monique’s typical bourgeois Parisian parents are shown to be hypocritical, her own passage through debauchery leads her to the acceptance of loving heterosexual normalcy via the discovery of her own vaginal clamping as the source of both her infertility and her failure to embrace pleasure fully. Monique is thus an archetype of the interwar frigid woman. We should not be fooled by her sexual adventurousness, say Stekel and Teutsch: the libidinous phallic woman is indeed the most frigid of all, since she resists her natural feminine impulse to submit to the will of men and to derive her pleasure from his. In other novels of a similar vein, such as Clément Vautel’s Madame ne veut pas d’enfant (1924), the selfish career motivations and boyish fashion of the New Woman are closely bound to the refusal to procreate, to the love of sex for its own sake, and to cigarettes, short hair and other masculine habits.80 What Mary Louise Roberts reveals in relation to the anxieties about women’s short haircuts in interwar France applies perfectly well to the apparent contradiction of frigidity theories that related sexlessness with hypersexuality. Roberts notes that journalists and editors in the late 1920s were as offended by the boyishness of short hair and new dress fashions as they were by the saucy and revealing nature of them.81 Inverting gender norms made women both sexless and oversexed, since they missed their natural feminine calling on the one hand, and on the other took on a virile libidinous prerogative that was seen to belong to men. This makes sense in Marie Bonaparte’s terms if clitoral pleasure is considered to be phallic, and masculine libido excess. For a woman to take on traits deemed masculine, whether haircuts, clothes or externally located genital pleasures, marked her as failing or resisting femininity while enjoying a pleasure that did not belong to her – as enjoying patently too much of the wrong kind and not enough of the right kind of pleasure and non-pleasure. The clitoris viewed as a kind of phallus became a threatening organ in interwar gender relations because it represented the potential for non-reproductive pleasure in women, a pleasure that could be shared even with other women, or with oneself – neither of which would produce babies who could later become soldiers for the nation.

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The clitoral, like the murderous frigid woman, shared with the boyish career girl a sexual excess that was deemed fundamentally unfeminine in a symbolic order that marked all forms of excess as masculine. This curiously interwar logic must be understood in all its nuances if we are to appreciate how, for Marie Bonaparte and other thinkers of the time, a sexually active woman experiencing pleasure could nonetheless be deemed frigid. The concept of frigidity was thus a way to assert the lesser sexuality of women compared to men against the new social realities of women as political agents (if not yet voting subjects), as intellectuals and as doctors, all of which suggested the falsity and injustice of this gender dichotomy. It is no coincidence that such a vision occurred at a time commonly recognized as a period of crisis of masculinity in a range of European cultures. If some men saw themselves as increasingly dispensable in a work force now far more inclined to hire women, they could at least take solace in the idea that they still ideally and normatively should possess the phallic primacy of sexual agency defined in opposition to female receptive passivity. Any woman who appeared to contradict that rule was put in her place, and that place was now called frigidity. Marie Bonaparte thus stands as a sad figure who fought with herself to accept this gender division of desire at the same time as she rebelled against it. She subjected her genitals to the knife in order to achieve the receptivity she believed necessary for feminine sexual maturity, but all the while contested the parameters of the psychoanalytic theory of the clitoris. The importance of reading Bonaparte ‘in her own time’ is made most apparent by the deeply embittered constructions of her when she is measured with a simplistic pro- or anti-feminist barometer. While all historians bring attitudes and expectations of their own era to the study of the past, it seems particularly rewarding in this context to revise some of the assumptions that have underpinned approaches to Marie Bonaparte so as to consider her relationship to the gender and sexual politics of her time, rather than to those of our own. So long as she is made into a semiotic convenience for the present, her intriguing complexity is overlooked. Debate about whether she should be considered a feminist or an anti-feminist icon closes off the possibility of appreciating forms of female agency less recognizable to twenty-first-century agendas – forms of agency that are undesirable for modern women to emulate precisely because they/we are not as burdened by the suffocating limited choices of social and political roles that women faced in the 1920s and 1930s. It is particularly rewarding to revise judgements of Marie Bonaparte that construct her as nothing more than a rather offensive (because a woman

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herself) mimic of Freudian phallocentrism. Her vision of ideal feminine desire and her perception of the role of the clitoris, while operating within a Freudian framework, were both entirely peculiar to herself – ‘idiosyncratic’ as Grosskurth acknowledges.82 They were drawn from her own experience, from her discussions with other women and from her study of ethnographic research on African cultures. While it may not provide anything useful for ongoing projects of elaborating feminist understandings of desire or of deconstructing the stereotypes of femininity that persist in our own time, Bonaparte’s opus should not be judged as the work of a mere dupe or traitor. Her theories of female desire proposed some extreme and (for most) unappealing ‘solutions’, such as genital surgery, to the ‘problem’ of clitoral pleasure. But it would be unfortunate to lose the sense of her unique intellectual and social location by collapsing her thought unproblematically into that of Freud. What greater insult could be made to female intellectuals as agential subjects than to think them only worthy of considered study if they appear as redeemable heroines, dismissing them as aberrant if they can be judged – hastily – to have engaged in passive mimesis of masculinist thinking?

Conclusion

We began our history by noting the particular difficulty that arises when one attempts to write the biography of a concept that is now often dismissed as redundant, old-fashioned and silly. And we have ended our long history with the work of Marie Bonaparte, perhaps the first and last woman to take frigidity with entire seriousness both as a theoretical concern in psychoanalytic knowledge, and as an explanation of her own sexual and social frustrations. That frigidity was a difficult concept for women to engage with was fully apparent as Bonaparte struggled to reconcile her sense that clitoral pleasure was unavoidable and necessary with Freudian suspicion of it as a phallic sign of regressive pleasure, one that women needed to abandon for the sake of sexual maturity and social belonging. That is a logical place to conclude our book. It was the moment in history when the idea of frigidity was brought to bear on the new social expectations of women, and it was the moment when frigidity failed to prove its usefulness. For most feminist thinkers after the Second World War who deigned to consider frigidity as a concept, it was clear that the matter had been settled. Women’s pleasure followed patterns different from those that medicine, psychiatry and psychoanalysis had imagined, and frigidity was one of the sites at which misapprehension of the feminine ‘dark continent’, to use Freud’s expression, was now most clearly apparent. Our history has attempted to show that, while the notion of frigidity deserved to be invalidated in this way, its mere invalidation does not actually help to understand how and why frigidity, as long as it remained alive, played significant roles in gender politics at various points in history. We want to point out in conclusion that frigidity did not simply vanish after the death of Marie Bonaparte, although it can be said to have stagnated ever since. We do not propose here to continue our history up to the present in any systematic fashion, because medical, 248

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psychological and psychiatric texts about frigidity produced since the 1950s have offered no substantially new theorization of the question. There is, nonetheless, an indication that lack of feminine sexual desire has recently taken on a somewhat different character in psychiatric discourse, and that change certainly warrants brief consideration. There are now in circulation a number of technical terms that might be said to stand at or near the point where ‘frigidity’ once stood. The notion of ISDD (Inhibited Sexual Desire Disorder) referred to in the 1987 DSMIII-R manual produced by the American Psychiatric Association was displaced in the 1994 DSM-IV by HSDD (Hypoactive Sexual Desire Disorder) – a term that was maintained in the 2000 DSM-IV-TR.1 The newer variations, on the whole, do not speak of gender difference. Even in the gender-specific FSAD (Female Sexual Arousal Disorder), there is little to suggest that this disorder corresponds to something inherent in feminine psychology. All of these conditions appear in medical and sexological literature concerned with the broader question of the lack of desire in people, and are construed as analogous pathologies in men and women.2 It also seems clear that there is simply far less written about the recent ‘problem’ of lacking female sexual desire in proportion to the mass of material written about sexual habits, behaviours, fantasies, identities and disorders than was the case for frigidity in its discursive prime, when it occupied a rather fashionable position as one of a small number of worrisome conditions of sexual life in modernity, alongside hysteria, homosexuality, masturbation, male masochism, androgyny and morbid love. Although it had lost its compelling quality in the years following the Second World War, frigidity continued to be used as a practical diagnostic construct in psychiatry and marriage counselling throughout the 1960s and 1970s, at least in France and in the USA, and can still occasionally be found in use today. It cannot therefore be said that no woman has suffered in recent times from that diagnostic account of her sexuality, or from the various treatments for it, ranging from electric shock therapy and psychiatric hospitalization to nasal surgery and clitoridectomy. There is certainly a study to be done on the extraordinary, sometimes horrific, treatments to which women have been subjected in more recent times in the name of restoring their sexual functionality. But that study would be a history of social medicine rather than an intellectual history such as ours. The most appropriate context for it would be the USA, where innovations in treatment were especially pronounced in the post-war era, rather than in the European nations where older psychotherapeutic practices tended to dominate.

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There have been a few minor theoretical developments in recent European psychiatric writings that have to do with both the definition and the treatment of frigidity. At the same time as Marie Bonaparte was publishing her work on female sexuality in the 1950s, there was another current of thinking about frigidity that persisted alongside it, maintaining habits of thinking that had first appeared in fin-de-siècle sexual medicine. In France, even as psychoanalysis grew to be the dominant theoretical trend in academic psychology and in psychiatric therapy, there survived an older tradition of thinking, comparable to that of Fauconney discussed in Chapter 4, which understood frigidity as a pathology without lesions that could be cured with a range of medical treatments. One work of the kind that dated from 1950 was written by gynaecologists André Binet and Jean Hartemann. It was entitled Les Rapports sexuels et leurs déficiences chez la femme, impuissance et frigidité, considérations cliniques, médico-légales, religieuses et sociales (Sexual relations and their deficiency in woman, impotence and frigidity, some clinical, medico-legal, religious and social considerations) and was published by Vigot Frères, who had published the work of Emile Laurent, Thésée Pouillet and other doctors of sexuality half a century earlier.3 Binet and Hartemann’s book is of some interest both because it details the astounding treatments that gynaecologists were applying in the 1950s to ‘frigid’ women, and because it demonstrates a remarkable ossification of gynaecological thinking about frigidity at a time when there was a significant rival body of differently grounded work produced by psychoanalysts. Binet – André, not Alfred – was born in 1883 and began his career in clinical surgery in Nancy just before the First World War. He was a student of the gynaecologist and obstetrician Alexis Vautrin, and was head of the gynaecological service of the Fondation Boulanger medical institute in Nancy until his retirement in 1954. He published all of his works on female sexuality and gynaecology between 1932 and 1951. Hartemann, 16 years’ Binet’s junior, was an obstetrician who also hailed from Alsace, and came from a long family line of doctors. He ended his career in 1968 as head of midwifery in the Conseil Régional d’Obstétrique. Their collaboration appears to have resulted from discussions at the Congrès français de gynécologie in Biarritz in June 1949. They began their study with the statement that the subject of women’s sexual deficiencies appeared ‘vast, immense and cosmic’.4 But the immensity in question was nonetheless able to be arranged into six categories of ‘deficiency’. Only the last of these was designated as anaphrodisie. It was qualified as frigidity, properly speaking,

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and associated with a new term, anorgasmie. Some of the areas of sexual failure that early-twentieth-century writers would have called frigidity were here classed as discrete categories of deficiency, such as pain during intercourse or difficulty in achieving coitus. But in most other respects the general approach of this work could easily have been plucked from the year 1905 or thereabouts. One difference, aside from the classification of frigidity in rather narrower terms, was the nuance marked by the neologism anorgasmia. When orgasm is given such definitional prominence, frigidity is no longer vaginismus, no longer coldness, unwillingness, lesbianism or perversion, no longer sexual trauma or physical obstruction. It is simply and singularly the inability in women to achieve orgasm in penis–vagina penetration.5 Something similar to this was implied in Marie Bonaparte’s work also, but she tended to refer to the failure of volupté rather than of orgasme, so the problem she was addressing had to do variously with pleasure, arousal or orgasm. The narrower definition was less dramatic than it might first appear. These doctors were not going about calling every female sexual problem a sign of frigidity, though they certainly were busy with the matter of perversions and physical obstruction alike as forms of ‘deficiency’. One of their categories encompassed that class of women who were unable to enjoy coitus because they desired masochistic or sadistic types of pleasure instead: their condition called for a cure.6 Medical accounts like these differed most strikingly from psychoanalytic accounts in that they spoke of frigidity as if it were hardly a psychological problem at all. Envisaged in narrowly medical terms, frigidity was thought to result from hormonal problems: there were separate hormones governing clitoral and vaginal pleasure and every woman had a hormonal predisposition to one locus of pleasure rather than the other. Binet and Hartemann put it very simply: ‘From a sensory point of view, there are broad classes of women: the clitoral and vaginouterine.’7 Even Marie Bonaparte had not gone so far in dichotomizing these two genital zones. Yet there clearly was some overlap between Bonaparte’s approach and the one taken by Binet and Hartemann. Their book discussed the actual surgery carried out by Josef Halban, who had operated on Marie Bonaparte’s clitoris, though they certainly warned against its technical risks.8 In the place of surgery, they recommended techniques based on general hygiene such as fresh air and exercise or, in rare cases, psychotherapy for those women whose frigidity resulted from psychopathology. And they declared psychotherapy likely to be most successful when the patient was under narcotics administered intravenously. They recommended the use of medications, aphrodisiacs,

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tonics, minerals, homoeopathic remedies, perfumes and cocaine. Failing all this, there was electric shock therapy.9 Eleven years later, not much had changed in gynaecological wisdom about the troublesome matter of women who would not have orgasms when simply penetrated vaginally, if we are to judge by the writing of Dr G. Bazoilles.10 Bazoilles’ text too was aligned with the earlier traditions we discussed in Chapters 4 and 5. The only visible difference was in the treatments proposed. Like Binet and Hartemann, he tended to focus on ‘narcoanalysis’, on electric shock therapy, sedatives and tonic medicines, but also on some rather new but not completely unprecedented techniques: hypnotic suggestion, acupuncture, hormone treatments and nasal cauterization.11 The notion that frigid women could be awakened to coital orgasm by nasal cauterization appears to have gained credence during the 1960s. Its main proponent was a French doctor of laryngology and endocrinology named M. Landry who was a professor of medicine in Reims and had been writing about ear, nose and throat matters since the 1920s. In 1962 he published a study on the use of nasal cauterization as a treatment for both male and female sexual deficiency. The effectiveness of the technique, he claimed, was due to the particular density of nerves of the sympathetic nervous system in the nasal area, given that the sexual arousal mechanism (erection, ejaculation, blood flow to the genitals in both sexes), like other stress responses of human physiology, was thought to be governed by the sympathetic nervous system.12 And though Landry had only the vaguest of notions about which nerves to cauterize in order to stimulate the sympathetic nerves of the genitals, within just a few years his alternative treatment for anaphrodisia in both sexes was added to the ramshackle lists of most French doctors who wrote subsequently about frigidity. In the 1960s, psychologists also took on the role of developing treatments for frigidity. Arnold Allan Lazarus, the South African psychologist and behavioural therapist often credited for the development of Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT), conducted a study of frigid women in 1963, publishing his findings in The Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease. Lazarus represented a liberal and non-invasive approach to frigidity, defined with increasing vagueness, in contrast to the emphasis on orgasm and the continued persistence of medical and surgical solutions in French gynaecology in the same period. In Lazarus’ study, self-reporting frigid women who had consulted doctors, psychiatrists or counsellors out of concern for their lack of pleasure were taught simple relaxation techniques that the majority found helpful.13

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In French gynaecology these sorts of ideas gained increasing influence, but did not displace surgery, electric shock and other invasive treatments until very recently. The 1980 work by Paul Quinchant on frigidity and impotence discussed Landry’s nasal approach in lengthy and glowing terms, alongside a range of other possible treatments, which included hormone therapy, naturopathy, homoeopathy, vitamins, baths, physical exercise and reflexology.14 The tone of Quinchant’s book was considerably less pathologizing than the 1950s and 1960s texts on the same topics. Male impotence and female frigidity were discussed as homologous categories of the same disorder. They involved, he claimed, a failure of sufficient arousal resulting from an overly mechanistic expectation of pleasure. Masters and Johnson were Quinchant’s primary reference.15 In the same year another woman theorist of frigidity, Anne Albertini, began her professional career, publishing her doctoral thesis as Réflexions sur la frigidité.16 Others who operated in a similar vein included the Belgian doctor and self-titled sexologist, Gilbert Tordjman, who wrote a book on frigidity in women in 1976.17 Hypnosis was his preferred form of treatment throughout the 1970s and 1980s, and it was allegedly as a result of hypnotic treatment sessions that over 30 women sought legal redress against Tordjman for rape in 2001.18 It might be expected that the media publicity around such an incident would help to discredit the self-appointed healers of ‘frigid’ women, yet there are few signs that the term is out of fashion even now in European sexology. Patrick Wolf is a French hygienist currently drawing royalties from a book written in 2007 that has frigidity in its title.19 Emphasizing the endocrinological and especially metabolic dimensions of sexual arousal, Wolf recommends particular foods – increasing vitamin, especially antioxidant, intake, omega three fatty acids and minerals – to cure general sexual dysfunction in men and women. Gone are the invasive treatments and the pathologized image of the frigid woman. All that is needed is to de-stress and eat better, and a thousand erections and orgasms will bloom. This approach is in keeping with what one might term a global sexological understanding of frigidity, which is being used increasingly as a way of referring to any kind of sexual lack. This appears to have become the most common usage of the term in our own time, and it depends on looser definitions than those used by Binet and Bazoilles in the 1950s and 1960s. Recent sexological manuals no longer consider the failure to experience orgasm in coitus to be a serious problem as long as orgasms are known to be occurring through some cause or another. Masturbation too has been significantly destigmatized, with the result that frigidity, when this term does still appear,

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now tends to refer to the inability of a woman to experience orgasm in any form, through any cause. That is, for example, the sense in which the Montpellier sexologist Michel Serre currently uses the term on his English-language website where, in 2010, advice for the treatment of frigidity could be purchased for 19 euros.20 There is nothing particularly objectionable about suggestions that eating well and staying healthy contribute to our potential for sexual arousal, and yet it is striking that the continuing usage of the term ‘frigidity’ in contemporary sexology is rarely confronted with its long and troubled past. The claims of feminist psychoanalysts such as Irigaray that feminine pleasure ought to be thought of as fluid, non-climactic and as uncontainable jouissance do not appear to have gained much traction in sexological literature, which is still largely preoccupied with orgasm as the model of women’s sexual functionality, even if frigidity is not always defined in these contexts as the simple lack of it. For that matter, it is a little surprising that masculine impotence is still taken to have self-evident meaning, considering the growing trend of promoting different forms of male pleasure alongside the model of the ejaculatory orgasm.21 A form of peaceful coexistence and persistence seems to have been established, much in the style of the American Psychiatric Association’s DSM-IV, in which all terminology of sexual dysfunction is qualified with the condition that desires (or their lack) must be selfreported by individuals distressed by them in order to be classed as pathological. Considering that frigidity, even since Bonaparte’s time, has had some uptake among women frustrated with the limitation of their pleasure, a definition of frigidity that relies on self-designation is indeed likely to produce ongoing uses of the term. But perhaps the strongest force now helping to maintain female sexual failure as a pathologically defined condition is the uptake of disorders such as FSAD by multinational drug corporations intent on profiting from the sale of chemical treatments for stimulating sexual arousal in men and in women. Such treatments have increased dramatically in number since the final years of the twentieth century. Curiously, even though there is no indication that sexual dissatisfaction has grown, drug companies appear intent on developing and selling arousal-stimulating drugs to women, ranging from Viagra (sildenafil citrate, a vascular stimulator), to hormone replacement therapies or the testosterone patches and other chemical treatments that have not passed government approval processes, or did not fare well enough in clinical trials to be pursued to manufacture, such as Bremelanotide.22 But if women are now clearly the targets of drug manufacture and marketing for sexual insufficiency in the same way that men were when Viagra first

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became known globally in the 1990s, there is no sign that the pendulum has swung away from men either, as suggested by the plethora of erection stimulants so widely (often unwelcomingly) advertised by spam merchants and pop-up websites. Indeed it might be said that the pressure for everyone to perform better sexually is pervasive in a range of contemporary cultures – so long as one’s desires are not deemed perverse or criminal. Among the continuing mass of treatments and concerns about the lack of orgasms and erections, only the tiniest of minority voices dares to suggest a more radical alternative: not only that the perceived need for sexual desire and satisfaction and the types of pleasures sought or experienced might vary enormously from one individual to another, but that some people may not be suited to sexual intimacy at all. The psychiatric understanding of sex is still being put to the test in this regard, and it will be a significant event indeed if the notion of a non-pathological asexuality finds acknowledgment in future editions of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual.23 So although much of the concern with pathology that was apparent until the 1960s has now given way to more general talk about female sexual lack, it is clear from our brief survey of contemporary sexological attitudes that the notion of frigidity is not dead. Nor, by the same token, are many of the normative assumptions about orgasm, female anatomy and perversion that have long been part of its discursive elaboration. So while we might like to think that frigidity is now so disreputable a term that it no longer needs debunking, that is sadly not the case. Moreover, the hopeful assertion of its irrelevance will not serve the interests of a sound historical understanding. That frigidity was a twentiethcentury term invented by aggressive men impatient with unaroused partners, that the term that has now been routed in the victory of sexual equality are assertions and beliefs that do not stand the test of critical examination. The entry on ‘frigidity’ in the Marshall Cavendish Sex and Society volumes for high school students comfortably aligns all of these assertions in the space of one paragraph: Traditionally, a woman has been defined as frigid if she is seen as being unwilling to engage in penetrative sex with a male partner or as receiving no physical pleasure from sex. However, frigidity is not an accepted medical term . . . The term has acquired derogatory associations for reflecting a male view of female sexuality. Few, if any, sex experts use it today.24 For a term that supposedly no longer means anything to people writing about sexuality or claiming to provide therapies, frigidity is still rather

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commonly asserted to have a correct definition in opposition to other, supposedly false, ones. A website that sells natural remedies to boost libido proclaims that ‘frigidity is broadly used to refer to a low libido (sex drive) in women. This term is often used incorrectly to describe a woman who is emotionally cold or does not respond to her partner’s sexual advances.’25 We have in fact found no straightforwardly ‘incorrect’ uses of the term frigidity anywhere in our history, but rather a plethora of overlapping and competing ones that have occupied a shifting set of discursive locations. Whenever frigidity is grumpily held to have a correct or an incorrect meaning, it is clear that the term is far from dead. As we see it, the notion of frigidity is neither a crude misogynist weapon nor a credible liberationist tool. It is a historic object with a long history. Nothing would please us more than to be able to say with confidence that the history has now run its course.

Notes

Introduction: A Long History of a Pseudoscientific Object 1. Luce Irigaray, ‘Women’s Exile’, trans. Couze Venn, Ideology and Consciousness 1 (1977): 66. 2. Luce Irigaray, This Sex Which Is Not One, trans. Catherine Porter and Carolyn Burke (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985), 63. 3. This spontaneous performance of quasi-instantaneous critique is consonant with Cixous’ understanding of the role of feminine laughter. On that question, see Hélène Cixous, ‘The Laugh of the Medusa’, trans. Keith Cohen and Paula Cohen, Signs 1 (1976): 875–93. 4. Charles Rycroft, A Critical Dictionary of Psychoanalysis (London: Penguin, 1968), 55. 5. Elizabeth Wright, ed., Feminism and Psychoanalysis: A Critical Dictionary (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1992). 6. For a discussion of Inhibited Sexual Desire (ISD), which was included in an earlier version of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, see Janice M. Irvine, ‘Regulated Passions: The Invention of Inhibited Sexual Desire and Sexual Addiction’, in Deviant Bodies: Critical Perspectives on Difference in Science and Popular Culture, ed. Jennifer Terry and Jacqueline Urla (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1995), 314–37. 7. David P. Moore and James W. Jefferson, Handbook of Medical Psychiatry, 2nd edn (Amsterdam/Boston: Mosby, 2004), 99. 8. See Rosemary Basson et al., ‘Revised Definitions of Women’s Sexual Disfunction’, Journal of Sexual Medicine 1 (2004): 40–8. 9. Tim Cavanaugh, ‘When Free Love Died: Why the Sexual Revolution Plays Only in Reruns’, Reason 40 (2008): 70. 10. Anon., ‘Soviet Women: Walking the Tightrope’, Publishers Weekly 238 (26 April 1991), 57. 11. Paul Quinchant, Impuissance et Frigidité, causes et traitements (Soissons: Andrillon, 1980); Edouard Kenzy, Guérir la frigidité: toutes les questions que vous vous posez et toutes les techniques pour y répondre (Paris: Retz, 1984). 12. Dr M. Landry, Les Déficiences sexuelles masculines et la frigidité; leur traitment par le stress nasal, traitements associés (Paris: Maloine, 1962). 13. Nicky Lee and Sila Lee, The Marriage Book: How to Build A Lasting Relationship (London: Alpha International, 2000), 135. 14. Andrea Dworkin, Pornography: Men Possessing Women (London: The Women’s Press, 1981), 179. 15. Michel Foucault, ‘Nietzsche, la généalogie, l’histoire’, in Hommage à Jean Hyppolite, ed. Suzanne Bachelard et al. (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1971), 148. 16. Michel Foucault, Histoire de la sexualité 1: La volonté de savoir (Paris: Gallimard, 1976), 9–20. 257

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17. Foucault, Histoire de la sexualité 1, 150, our translation. 18. Michel Foucault, Histoire de la sexualité 2: L’usage des plaisirs (Paris: Gallimard, 1984), 11. 19. See, for example, Celia Kitzinger, The Social Construction of Lesbianism (London: Sage, 1987); David F. Greenberg, The Construction of Homosexuality (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988); Cynthia Eagle Russett, Sexual Science: The Victorian Construction of Womanhood (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 1989); Marianne van den Wijngaard, Reinventing the Sexes: The Biomedical Construction of Femininity and Masculinity (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997); Anne Fausto-Sterling, Sexing the Body: Gender Politics and the Construction of Sexuality (New York: Basic Books, 2000); Andrea Beckmann, Social Construction of Sadomasochism (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009). 20. See, for example, Georges Didi-Huberman, Invention de l’hystérie: Charcot et l’iconographie photographique de la Salpêtrière (Paris: Macula, 1982); Lynn Hunt, ed., The Invention of Pornography: Obscenity and the Origins of Modernity (New York: Zone Books, 1993); Jonathan Ned Katz, The Invention of Heterosexuality (New York: Plume, 1996); Alice Domurat Dreger, Hermaphrodites and the Medical Invention of Sex (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998); Thomas W. Laqueur, Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990). 21. Londa Schiebinger, ‘Introduction’, in Feminism and the Body, ed. Londa Schiebinger (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 12. 22. Ian Hacking, The Social Construction of What? (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), vii. 23. Hacking, The Social Construction of What?, 12–13. 24. Hacking, The Social Construction of What?, 35. 25. Hacking, The Social Construction of What?, 16. 26. See Niklaus Largier, In Praise of the Whip: A Cultural History of Arousal (New York: Zone Books, 2007); Thomas Laqueur, Solitary Sex: A Cultural History of Masturbation (New York: Zone Books, 2003); Angus McLaren, Impotence: A Cultural History (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2007). 27. See Jean Baker Miller, ed., Psychoanalysis and Women (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1973), 145–6. 28. Sheila Jeffreys, Anticlimax: A Feminist Perspective on the Sexual Revolution (London: The Women’s Press, 1990), 1. 29. See Michel Foucault, Histoire de la sexualité 1. 30. Jeffreys, Anticlimax, 2, emphasis added. 31. Jeffreys, Anticlimax, 17. 32. Jeffreys, Anticlimax, 19, 20. 33. Jeffreys, Anticlimax, 31–2. 34. Pope Gregory IX (c. 1160–1241), Titulus XV. De frigidis et maleficiatis, et impotentia coeundi. 35. Sylvie Chaperon, ‘De l’anaphrodisie à la frigidité: jalons pour une histoire’, Sexologies 16 (2007): 189. 36. Peter Cryle, ‘Les Choses et les Mots: Missing Words and Blurry Things in the History of Sexuality’, Sexualities 12 (2009): 439–52; and Alison Moore, ‘The Invention of Sadism? The Limits of Neologisms in the History of Sexuality’, Sexualities 12 (2009): 486–502.

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37. Diana Fuss, Essentially Speaking: Feminism, Nature and Difference (New York: Routledge, 1990), 4–5. 38. Largier, In Praise of the Whip. 39. Hacking, The Social Construction of What?, 30–2. 40. Daniel Pick, Faces of Degeneration: A European Disorder, c. 1848–1918 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993); James Whorton, Inner Hygiene: Constipation and the Pursuit of Health in Modern Society (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000); Anne McClintock, Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Conquest (New York and London: Routledge, 1995).

1 Frigiditas and Impotentia 1. James A. Coriden, An Introduction to Canon Law (Revised) (London: Burns and Oates, 2004), 3. 2. Coriden, An Introduction to Canon Law, xi. 3. Michel Foucault, Histoire de la sexualité 1: La volonté de savoir (Paris: Gallimard, 1976), 94. 4. Foucault, Histoire de la sexualité 1, 153. 5. Foucault, Histoire de la sexualité 1, 153. 6. Pierre Darmon, Le Tribunal de l’impuissance. Virilité et défaillances conjugales dans l’ancienne France (Paris: Seuil, 1979), 13–14. One leading Italian scholar who does acknowledge Foucault’s lead, although without taking up his theoretical insights in any sustained way, is Valerio Marchetti, author of a richly erudite work entitled L’invenzione della bisessualità (Milano: Mondadori, 2001). 7. Fernanda Alfieri, unpublished communication. 8. Coriden, An Introduction to Canon Law, 140, defines diriment impediments as ‘circumstances or conditions of a person that prevent them from validly marrying’. 9. On this question, see Darmon, Le Tribunal de l’impuissance, 25. 10. See, for example, Paulo Zacchia, Quaestiones medico-legales (Lyon, 1661), 9.3.1. 11. According to Coriden, Introduction to Canon Law, this was the first time such a collection was promulgated as an authentic, official and exclusive source of rules for the whole church. 12. Darmon, Le Tribunal de l’impuissance, 91. 13. Thomas Sanchez, De sancto matrimonii sacramento disputationum (Venice: Nicolaum Pezzana, 1726), 7.92.1. 14. Zacchia, Quaestiones medico-legales, 9.3.1. 15. For a detailed study of Sanchez’s writing on conjugal relations, see Fernanda Alfieri, Nella camera degli sposi. Tomás Sánchez, il matrimonio, la sessualità (secoli XVI–XVII) (Bologna: Il Mulino, 2010). 16. Sanchez, De matrimonio, 7.92.1. 17. Sanchez, De matrimonio, 7.92.1. See also Darmon, Le Tribunal de l’impuissance, 29. 18. Sanchez, De matrimonio, 7.92.1. 19. Sanchez, De matrimonio, 7.92.1. 20. Sanchez, De matrimonio, 7.93.1.

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21. Sanchez, De matrimonio, 7.92.1. 22. Sanchez, De matrimonio, 7.92.1. 23. Darmon, Le Tribunal de l’impuissance, 29, observes: ‘According to whether it was congenital or accidental, perpetual or transitory, curable or incurable, female impotence might or might not be considered a diriment impediment.’ 24. Sanchez, De matrimonio, 7.92.7: ‘Coitus enim solum est via ad actum conjugalem perficiendum.’ 25. Sanchez, De matrimonio, 7.92.7. 26. Sanchez, De matrimonio, 7.92.28. 27. Sanchez, De matrimonio, 7.92.7. 28. Sanchez, De matrimonio, 7.92.7. 29. Sanchez, De matrimonio, 7.92.7. 30. Sanchez, De matrimonio, 7.92.15. This secondary purpose sufficed to ensure that sterility alone could not serve as grounds for annulment. See Sanchez, De matrimonio, 7.92.26. 31. Sanchez, De matrimonio, 7.92.28. 32. Joseph Bajada, Sexual Impotence: The Contribution of Paolo Zacchia (1584– 1659) (Rome: Editrice Pontificia Università Gregoriana, 1988), 26. 33. Bajada, Sexual Impotence, 15. Darmon, Le Tribunal de l’impuissance, 15, also speaks of it as a landmark. 34. Bajada, Sexual Impotence, 18–20. 35. Zacchia, Quaestiones medico-legales, 9.3.2.5. 36. Zacchia, Quaestiones medico-legales, 9.3.2.1. 37. Sanchez, De matrimonio, 7.92.22. 38. Zacchia, Quaestiones medico-legales, 9.1.3.70. 39. Zacchia, Quaestiones medico-legales, 9.11.1.7. 40. Zacchia, Quaestiones medico-legales, 9.11.1.14. 41. Zacchia, Quaestiones medico-legales, 9.11.1.14. 42. Zacchia, Quaestiones medico-legales, 9.11.1.15. 43. Zacchia, Quaestiones medico-legales, 9.11.1.17. 44. Zacchia, Quaestiones medico-legales, 7.3.6.4. 45. Bajada, Sexual Impotence, 64. 46. Mercuriale’s work was entitled De morbis muliebribus praelectiones. 47. Zacchia, Quaestiones medico-legales, 9.3.5.1. 48. Zacchia, Quaestiones medico-legales, 9.3.5.2. 49. Zacchia, Quaestiones medico-legales, 9.3.5.2. 50. Zacchia, Quaestiones medico-legales, 9.3.5.2. 51. Zacchia, Quaestiones medico-legales, 9.3.5.2. 52. Zacchia, Quaestiones medico-legales, 9.3.5.2. 53. Zacchia, Quaestiones medico-legales, 9.3.5.2. 54. Zacchia, Quaestiones medico-legales, 9.10.2.15. 55. Zacchia, Quaestiones medico-legales, 9.3.7.1. 56. See Thomas Laqueur, Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990). 57. Zacchia, Quaestiones medico-legales, 9.10.2.15. 58. Zacchia, Quaestiones medico-legales, 9.3.1.6. 59. Zacchia, Quaestiones medico-legales, 9.2.2.6. 60. Voltaire, Dictionnaire philosophique, article ‘Impuissance’.

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61. Voltaire, Dictionnaire philosophique, article ‘Impuissance’. 62. Diderot et al., Encyclopédie ou Dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers (Stuttgart: Friedrich Frommann, 1995) [facsimile reprint of the first edition of 1751–80], article ‘Frigidité’. 63. Diderot et al., Encyclopédie, article ‘Frigidité’. 64. Bajada, Sexual Impotence, 26. 65. Peter J. Jugis, review of Sexual Impotence: The Contribution of Paolo Zacchia, by Joseph Bajada, Jurist 52 (1992): 765. 66. Alain Corbin, L’Harmonie des plaisirs. Les manières de jouir du siècle des Lumières à l’avènement de la sexologie (Paris: Perrin, 2008), 258. 67. Chiara Beccalossi, ‘The Origin of Italian Sexological Studies: Female Sexual Inversion, ca. 1870–1900’, Journal of the History of Sexuality 18 (2009): 108. 68. George Rousseau, ‘Policing the Anus: Stuprum and Sodomy According to Paolo Zacchia’s Forensic Medicine’, in The Sciences of Homosexuality in Early Modern Europe, ed. Kenneth Borris and G. S. Rousseau (London: Routledge, 2008), 75–6. 69. Rousseau, ‘Policing the Anus’, 76. On 88n2 and 88n8, Rousseau gives some modern references to texts in English and Italian that discuss Zacchia’s work.

2 Female Impotence in the Nineteenth Century 1. Kathleen Anne Wellman, ‘Physicians and Philosophes: Physiology and Sexual Morality in the French Enlightenment’, Eighteenth-Century Studies 35 (2002): 267. 2. Wellman, ‘Physicians and Philosophes’, 275n5 observes dryly that Roussel’s claim that physicians do not treat moral issues is not borne out by any collection of eighteenth-century medical texts. 3. Dr Pierre Roussel, Système physique et moral de la femme, ou Tableau philosophique de la constitution, de l’état organique, du tempérament, des mœurs, et des fonctions propres du sexe (Paris: Vincent, 1775), iv–v. 4. Thomas W. Laqueur, Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990). For a finely nuanced discussion of Roussel’s work in relation to these questions, see Anne C. Vila, ‘Sex and Sensibility: Pierre Roussel’s Système physique et moral de la femme’, Representations 52 (1995): 76–93. 5. Roussel, Système physique et moral de la femme, xvii. 6. Roussel, Système physique et moral de la femme, x–xi. 7. F[rançois-]E[mmanuel] Fodéré, Traité de médecine légale et d’hygiène publique ou de police de santé. Adapté aux codes de l’Empire Français, et aux connaissances actuelles. A l’usage des gens de l’art, de ceux du barreau, des jurés et des administrateurs de la santé publique, civils, militaires et de marine (Paris: Mame, 1813) vol. I, v–vi. 8. Fodéré, Traité de médecine légale, I, xvi. 9. Fodéré, Traité de médecine légale, I, 361. 10. Fodéré, Traité de médecine légale, I, 364. 11. Fodéré, Traité de médecine légale, I, 364. 12. Fodéré, Traité de médecine légale, I, 383–4. 13. Fodéré, Traité de médecine légale, I, 384.

262

Notes

14. See Gregory R. McGuire, review of Julien-Joseph Virey: naturaliste et anthropologue (Paris: Vrin, 1988), ed. Claude Bénichou and Claude Blanckaert, in Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences 28 (1992): 307. 15. Dictionnaire des sciences médicales, par une société de médecins et de chirurgiens, article ‘Frigidité’. This is an undated twentieth-century reprint by H. Fischer Verlag of the Paris edition published by C. L. F. Panckoucke, 1812–22, XVII, 15. 16. Dictionnaire des sciences médicales, 24–5. 17. Dictionnaire des sciences médicales, 11. 18. Dictionnaire des sciences médicales, 11; original emphasis. 19. Dictionnaire des sciences médicales, 12. 20. Dictionnaire des sciences médicales, 15. 21. Dictionnaire des sciences médicales, 15, 18. 22. Julien Joseph Virey, De la femme sous ses rapports physiologique, moral et littéraire (Paris: Crochard, 1823). 23. Virey, De la femme, vi–vii. 24. Virey, De la femme, 125. 25. Virey, De la femme, 125. 26. Virey, De la femme, 181. 27. Virey, De la femme, 371. 28. For the thesis, see M.-E. Descourtilz, Propositions sur l’anaphrodisie, distinguée de l’agénésie, et considérée comme impuissance en amour (Paris: Didot Jeune, 1814). 29. M.-E. Descourtilz, De l’impuissance et de la stérilité, ou Recherches sur l’anaphrodisie distinguée de l’agénésie. Ouvrage destiné aux personnes mariées qui ne peuvent avoir d’enfans (Paris: Masson et Yonet, 1831), I, 1; original emphasis. 30. Descourtilz, De l’impuissance et de la stérilité, 13. 31. Descourtilz, De l’impuissance et de la stérilité, 14. 32. Descourtilz, De l’impuissance et de la stérilité, 225. On page 225, after setting out a range of temperaments and making a few remarks about their tendencies in love, he makes it clear that anaphrodisia is not to be understood as a simple consequence of temperament. 33. Descourtilz, De l’impuissance et de la stérilité, 14–15. 34. Descourtilz, De l’impuissance et de la stérilité, 18. 35. Descourtilz, De l’impuissance et de la stérilité, 31. 36. Descourtilz, De l’impuissance et de la stérilité, 31–2. 37. The doctors’ newspaper, L’Union médicale, 1867, 484, described his L’Ami des peuples as a ‘news sheet written by Doctor Morel de Rubempré, the very same who wrote a pamphlet the aim of which was to make the precepts of medicine available to society people, and who placed his portrait on the frontispiece in between those of Hippocrates and Galen’. 38. Sylvie Chaperon, ‘De l’anaphrodisie à la frigidité: jalons pour une histoire’, Sexologies (France) 16 (2007): 190–1. 39. Morel de Rubempré, Le Lavater des tempéramens et des constitutions (Paris: Chez l’auteur, 1829). 40. Dr J. Morel de Rubempré, Le Conservateur et le réconfortateur des facultés génitales chez l’homme et la femme. L’art de guérir les affections accidentelles et non absolues dont elles sont susceptibles, telles que [l’]’impuissance, la stérilité,

Notes

41. 42. 43. 44.

45. 46.

47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53.

54. 55. 56. 57.

58.

59.

60. 61. 62. 63. 64. 65. 66. 67.

263

les atonies, débilités sexuelles, etc. (Paris: Chez l’auteur, 1836), 15; original emphasis. Morel de Rubempré, Le Conservateur et le réconfortateur, 23; original emphasis. Morel de Rubempré, Le Conservateur et le réconfortateur, 46–7; original emphasis. Chaperon, ‘De l’anaphrodisie à la frigidité’, 191. His main comment is a return to a male-centred model of external signs. Women who lack ‘puissance coïtive’ are identifiable by the looseness or slackness of their genitals. Morel de Rubempré, Le Conservateur et le réconfortateur, 46–7. Chaperon, ‘De l’anaphrodisie à la frigidité’, 191. Dr [Georg] Kobelt, De l’appareil du sens génital des deux sexes dans l’espèce humaine et dans quelques mammifères, au point de vue anatomique et physiologique, trans. H. Kaula (Strasbourg: Berger-Levrault and Paris: Labé, 1851), 71. Kobelt, De l’appareil du sens génital, 115–16. Kobelt, De l’appareil du sens génital, 73. Kobelt, De l’appareil du sens génital, 73. Kobelt, De l’appareil du sens génital, 87. Kobelt, De l’appareil du sens génital, 101–2. Kobelt, De l’appareil du sens génital, 112. Docteur [Jean-Alexis] Belliol, Conseils aux homme affaiblis, traité de l’impuissance prématurée ou de l’épuisement nerveux des organes générateurs, suite des excès de la jeunesse et de l’âge mûr (Paris: Chez l’auteur, n.d. [1853?]), 7–8. Belliol, Conseils aux homme affaiblis, 43. Belliol, Conseils aux homme affaiblis, 43. Belliol, Conseils aux homme affaiblis, 43. George Weisz, ‘Medical Histories and Medical Specialization in France, Britain, and the United States’, Bulletin of the History of Medicine 71 (1997): 26. Chaperon, ‘De l’anaphrodisie à la frigidité’, 191, describes it accurately as ‘a real mine of information on legislation, on medical institutions or establishments, and on practitioners in every administrative region’. On Roubaud see also Bertrand Taithe, Defeated Flesh (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999), 49. Dr Félix Roubaud, Traité de l’impuissance et de la stérilité chez l’homme et chez la femme, comprenant les moyens recommandés pour y remédier (Paris: J.-B. Baillière, 1855), I, 10–40. Alain Corbin, L’Harmonie des plaisirs. Les manières de jouir du siècle des Lumières à l’avènement de la sexologie (Paris: Perrin, 2008), 192. Roubaud, Traité de l’impuissance et de la stérilité, I, 1. Roubaud, Traité de l’impuissance et de la stérilité, I, 1. Roubaud, Traité de l’impuissance et de la stérilité, I, 1–2. Roubaud, Traité de l’impuissance et de la stérilité, I, 2. Roubaud, Traité de l’impuissance et de la stérilité, I, 2–3. Roubaud, Traité de l’impuissance et de la stérilité, I, 3. Roubaud, Traité de l’impuissance et de la stérilité, I, 4; original emphasis.

264 68. 69. 70. 71. 72.

73. 74. 75. 76. 77. 78. 79. 80. 81. 82. 83. 84. 85. 86. 87. 88. 89. 90. 91. 92. 93.

94. 95. 96. 97. 98. 99. 100.

101. 102. 103. 104. 105. 106.

Notes Roubaud, Traité de l’impuissance et de la stérilité, I, 4. Descourtilz, De l’impuissance et de la stérilité, 13. Roubaud, Traité de l’impuissance et de la stérilité, I, 33. Roubaud, Traité de l’impuissance et de la stérilité, II, 542. See Roubaud, Traité de l’impuissance et de la stérilité, II, 541–2: ‘Despite what certain physiologists have said, true erotic delirium only occurs in the man at the instant of spermatic ejaculation, whereas in the woman whether or not the ovary is emitting the ovum, the pleasure is the same.’ Roubaud, Traité de l’impuissance et de la stérilité, II, 450. Roubaud, Traité de l’impuissance et de la stérilité, II, 449. Roubaud, Traité de l’impuissance et de la stérilité, II, 449. Roubaud, Traité de l’impuissance et de la stérilité, II, 449. Roubaud, Traité de l’impuissance et de la stérilité, II, 450. Roubaud, Traité de l’impuissance et de la stérilité, I, 259. Roubaud, Traité de l’impuissance et de la stérilité, I, 259. Roubaud, Traité de l’impuissance et de la stérilité, II, 519. Roubaud, Traité de l’impuissance et de la stérilité, II, 521. Roubaud, Traité de l’impuissance et de la stérilité, II, 521–2. Roubaud, Traité de l’impuissance et de la stérilité, II, 522. Roubaud, Traité de l’impuissance et de la stérilité, II, 522–3. Roubaud, Traité de l’impuissance et de la stérilité, II, 450–1. Roubaud, Traité de l’impuissance et de la stérilité, II, 511. Roubaud, Traité de l’impuissance et de la stérilité, II, 512. Roubaud, Traité de l’impuissance et de la stérilité, II, 514. Roubaud, Traité de l’impuissance et de la stérilité, I, 155. Roubaud, Traité de l’impuissance et de la stérilité, I, 155; original emphasis. Roubaud, Traité de l’impuissance et de la stérilité, I, 155. Roubaud, Traité de l’impuissance et de la stérilité, I, 155. Dr Rauland, Le Livre des époux. Guide pour la guérison de l’impuissance, de la stérilité et de toutes les maladies des organes génitaux (Paris: Chez tous les principaux libraires, 1859), 69. Rauland, Le Livre des époux, 22. Cf. Roubaud, Traité de l’impuissance et de la stérilité, I, 33. Rauland, Le Livre des époux, 257. Rauland, Le Livre des époux, 265. Rauland, Le Livre des époux, 266. Rauland, Le Livre des époux, 267. Chaperon, ‘De l’anaphrodisie à la frigidité’, 192. Georges Barral and Charles Dufaure de la Prade, ‘Discours préliminaire sur l’amour expérimental’, in Dr Jules Guyot, Bréviaire de l’amour expérimental. Méditations sur le mariage selon la physiologie du genre humain (Paris: Marpon & Flammarion, 1882), 30–1. Guyot, Bréviaire de l’amour expérimental, 73. Guyot, Bréviaire de l’amour expérimental, 73. Drs Raige-Delorme and A. Dechambre (eds), Dictionnaire encyclopédique des sciences médicales (Masson: P. Asselin, 1864), I, 103. Dictionnaire encyclopédique des sciences médicales, I, 114. Chaperon, ‘De l’anaphrodisie à la frigidité’, 192. P[ierre] Garnier, L’Impuissance physique et morale chez l’homme et la femme (Paris: Garnier, 1882), 5.

Notes 107. 108. 109. 110. 111. 112. 113. 114. 115. 116. 117. 118. 119. 120. 121. 122. 123. 124. 125. 126. 127. 128. 129. 130. 131. 132.

265

Garnier, L’Impuissance physique et morale, 6. Garnier, L’Impuissance physique et morale, 7. Garnier, L’Impuissance physique et morale, 14. Garnier, L’Impuissance physique et morale, 16. Garnier, L’Impuissance physique et morale, 355. Garnier, L’Impuissance physique et morale, 355. Garnier, L’Impuissance physique et morale, 505. Garnier, L’Impuissance physique et morale, 485–6. P[ierre] Garnier, Hygiène de la génération. La Stérilité humaine et l’hermaphrodisme (Paris: Garnier, 1883), 87. Garnier, La Stérilité humaine et l’hermaphrodisme, 88. See, for example, Garnier, La Stérilité humaine et l’hermaphrodisme, 88. Garnier, La Stérilité humaine et l’hermaphrodisme, 109–10. Garnier, L’Impuissance physique et morale, 26. Garnier, L’Impuissance physique et morale, 358; original emphasis. Garnier, L’Impuissance physique et morale, 504. Garnier, L’Impuissance physique et morale, 351–2. Garnier, L’Impuissance physique et morale, 25. Garnier, L’Impuissance physique et morale, 25. Garnier, L’Impuissance physique et morale, 488. See, for example, Roubaud, Traité de l’impuissance et de la stérilité, I, 155, where he refers to it as a ‘morbid condition’. Garnier, L’Impuissance physique et morale, 489. Garnier, L’Impuissance physique et morale, 507. Garnier, L’Impuissance physique et morale, 489. Garnier, L’Impuissance physique et morale, 278. Rauland, Le Livre des époux, 267. P[ierre] Garnier, Hygiène de la génération. Anomalies sexuelles apparentes et cachées, avec 230 observations (Paris: Garnier, 1889), 24.

3 Vaginismus 1. M.-L. Descourtilz, De l’impuissance et de la stérilité, ou Recherches sur l’anaphrodisie distinguée de l’agénésie. Ouvrage destiné aux personnes mariées qui ne peuvent avoir d’enfans (Paris: Masson et Yonet, 1831), I, 31. 2. Descourtilz, De l’impuissance et de la stérilité, I, 32. 3. Paolo Zacchia, Quaestiones medico-legales, (Lyon, 1661), Decision XLVIII. Sanchez allowed that narrowness in women might be overcome either by medication or ‘incision’. Thomas Sanchez, De sancto matrimonii sacramento disputationum (Venice: Nicolaum Pezzana, 1726), I, Decision XCIII. 4. See the cover page of J. Marion Sims, Notes cliniques sur la chirurgie utérine dans ses rapports avec le traitement de la stérilité, trans. Dr Lhéritier (Paris: Masson, 1866). 5. See J. Marion Sims, Clinical Notes on Uterine Surgery, with Special Reference to the Management of the Sterile Condition (New York: William Wood, 1867), v. 6. For more biographical information on Sims, see Jeffrey S. Sartin, ‘J. Marion Sims, the Father of Gynecology: Hero or Villain?’, Southern Medical Journal 97 (2004): 500–5.

266

Notes

7. See H. M. Shingleton, ‘The Lesser Known Dr. Sims’, ACOG Clinical Review 14 (2009): 13–16. 8. Sims, Clinical Notes on Uterine Surgery. 9. Sims, Notes cliniques sur la chirurgie utérine. 10. Sims has been attacked most particularly for the manner in which he treated a group of African-American women for vesico-vaginal fistula. See, for example, Wendy Brinker, ‘J. Marion Sims: One Among Many Monumental Mistakes’, Chicken Bones: A Journal for Literary and Artistic AfricanAmerican Themes (2000), n.p. For a more sustained and more nuanced critique, see Deborah Kuhn McGregor, From Midwives to Medicine: The Birth of American Gynecology (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1998), 48–54. For other accounts that attempt to strike a balance between ethical critique and historicist relativism, see Sartin, ‘J. Marion Sims’, 500–5; L. L. Wall, ‘The Medical Ethics of J. Marion Sims: A Fresh Look at the Historical Record’, Journal of Medical Ethics 32 (2006): 346–50; Caroline M. de Costa, ‘James Marion Sims: Some Speculations and a New Position’, MJA 178 (2003): 660–63. For a spirited defence of Sims in the name of historical contextualization, see J. Patrick O’Leary, ‘J. Marion Sims: A Defence of the Father of Gynecology’, Southern Medical Journal 97 (2004): 427–9. 11. For a helpful analysis of the discursive and generic circulation of hysteria, see Janet Beizer, Ventriloquized Bodies: Narratives of Hysteria in NineteenthCentury France (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1994). 12. For a discussion of ‘epilepsy’ in the music hall, see Rae Beth Gordon, Why the French Love Jerry Lewis: From Cabaret to Early Cinema (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001). For a discussion of the relation between hysteria and epilepsy, see Peter Cryle, ‘The Aesthetics of the Spasm’, in Sexuality at the Fin-de-Siècle: The Makings of a Central Problem, ed. Peter Cryle and Christopher Forth (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2008), 77–92. 13. Sims, Clinical Notes, 315. 14. Sims, Clinical Notes, 318. 15. Sims, Clinical Notes, 318. 16. Sims, Clinical Notes, 320. 17. Sims, Clinical Notes, 321. 18. Sims, Clinical Notes, 323. 19. Sims, Clinical Notes, 323. 20. Sims, Clinical Notes, 335. 21. Sims, Clinical Notes, 335. 22. Sims, Clinical Notes, 335–6. 23. Sims, Clinical Notes, 330. 24. Sims, Clinical Notes, 326. 25. Transactions of the Obstetrical Society (1862): 356. 26. Dr Sylvius, Vie, Génération, Stérilité (Paris: Vigot Frères, 1901) [Les Perversions sexuelles, 9], 178; original emphasis. The italicized words are in English in the original. 27. Sylvius, Vie, Génération, Stérilité, 178. 28. Sylvie Chaperon, Les Origines de la sexologie (1850–1890) (Paris: Audibert, 2007), 97, refers to the claim that vaginismus had long been identified in France under other names.

Notes

267

29. P.-F. Visca, Du vaginisme. Thèse pour le doctorat en médecine (Paris: Parent, 1870), 11–12. 30. Visca, Du vaginisme, 11–12. 31. Dr J. Marion Sims, ‘On Vaginismus and its Treatment’ [abstracted from American Times and Medical Critic, 2 July 1862], Half-Yearly Abstract of the Medical Sciences 36 (1862): 330–1. 32. Dr Gabriel Gillard, Contribution à l’étude du vaginisme (Paris: Coccoz, 1884). 33. Placide-Joseph Dubois, Contribution à l’étude du vaginisme. Thèse pour le doctorat en médecine (Bordeaux: Cadoret, 1890). 34. Visca, Du vaginisme, 7. 35. Visca, Du vaginisme, 8. 36. Visca, Du vaginisme, 8–9. 37. Visca, Du vaginisme, 9. 38. F[rançois -]E[mmanuel] Fodéré, Traité de médecine légale et d’hygiène publique ou de police de santé (Paris: Mame, 1813), I, 385. 39. Fodéré, Traité de médecine légale, I, 390. 40. Fodéré, Traité de médecine légale, I, 391. 41. J. Lisfranc, Clinique chirurgicale de l’Hôpital de La Pitié (Paris: Béchet jeune, 1842), II, 162. For Visca’s discussion of Lisfranc, see Visca, Du vaginisme, 9–10. 42. Lisfranc, Clinique chirurgicale, II, 163. 43. Félix Roubaud, Traité de l’impuissance et de la stérilité chez l’homme et chez la femme, comprenant l’exposition des moyens recommandés pour y remédier (Paris: Baillière, 1855), 2 vols. 44. Roubaud, Traité de l’impuissance (1855), II, 490. 45. Roubaud, Traité de l’impuissance (1855), II, 488. 46. Dr Félix Roubaud, Traité de l’impuissance et de la stérilité chez l’homme et la femme, comprenant l’exposition des moyens recommandés pour y rémédier, 3rd edn (Paris: Baillière, 1876), 421–30. 47. Roubaud, Traité de l’impuissance (1855), II, 493. 48. Roubaud, Traité de l’impuissance (1855), II, 493–4. 49. Roubaud, Traité de l’impuissance (1855), II, 494. 50. Roubaud, Traité de l’impuissance (1876), 421. 51. Even Roubaud talks of the feather test as part of a first examination of cases of hyperesthesia and vaginal spasm. See Roubaud, Traité de l’impuissance (1855), II, 493–4. 52. Sims, Clinical Notes, 7. 53. T. Gaillard Thomas, A Practical Treatise on the Diseases of Women (Philadelphia: Lea, 1868), 123. The French translation of this can be found in Gaillard Thomas, Traité clinique des maladies des femmes, trans. and ed. Dr Auguste Lutaud (Paris: Lauwereyns, 1879), 123–4. 54. Gillard, Contribution à l’étude du vaginisme, 26. 55. Sims, Clinical Notes, 17. For a discussion of Sims’ systematic practice of class difference in his treatment of patients, see Sartin, ‘J. Marion Sims’, 503–4. 56. A. Lutaud, Manuel des maladies des femmes, 2nd edn (Paris: Lecrosnier & Babé, 1891), 181. A later book by Lutaud contains a long section offering detailed advice to young doctors about how to go about palpation, touching and the use of the speculum. See Dr A. Lutaud, Consultations sur les maladies des femmes. Formulaire et traitement des affections gynécologiques

268

57.

58. 59. 60.

61.

62. 63. 64.

65. 66. 67. 68. 69. 70. 71. 72.

73. 74. 75.

76. 77. 78. 79. 80. 81. 82. 83.

Notes les plus fréquents, suivi de Considérations pratiques sur l’examen gynécologique (Paris: Rueff, 1895), 192–215. For a discussion of this theme in erotic narrative see Peter Cryle, The Telling of the Act: Sexuality as Narrative in Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century France (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2001), 281–309. For a reference to Joan of Arc in a medical discussion of genital constriction, see Descourtilz, De l’impuissance et de la stérilité, 146. See Rachel Mesch, The Hysteric’s Revenge: French Women Writers at the Fin-deSiecle (Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 2006). J.-P. Dartigues, De l’amour expérimental ou des causes d’adultère chez la femme au XIXe siècle. Etude d’hygiène et d’économie sociale résultant de l’ignorance, du libertinage et des fraudes dans l’accomplissement des devoirs conjugaux (Versailles: Litzellmann, 1887), 5. See Dr [Georg] Kobelt, De l’appareil du sens génital des deux sexes dans l’espèce humaine et dans quelques mammifères, au point de vue anatomique et physiologique, trans. H. Kaula (Strasbourg: Berger-Levrault and Paris: Labé, 1851), esp. 101–16. See Cryle, ‘The Aesthetics of the Spasm’, 77–92. Roubaud, Traité de l’impuissance (1855), II, 493. Havelock Ellis, Studies in the Psychology of Sex 5. Erotic Symbolism, The Mechanism of Detumescence, The Psychic State in Pregnancy (Philadelphia: F. A. Davis, 1928) [first published 1903], 163. Dr Pierre Garnier, L’Impuissance physique et morale chez l’homme et la femme (Paris: Garnier, 1882), 457. Garnier, L’Impuissance physique et morale, 458. Sims, Half-Yearly Abstract of the Medical Sciences 36 (1862): 332. Sims, ‘On Vaginismus and its Treatment’, 332. Sims, ‘On Vaginismus and its Treatment’, 332. Visca, Du vaginisme, 104. For a summary of Roubaud’s view of normal coitus, see Roubaud, Traité de l’impuissance (1855), II, 450. Emile D[e]bout and Louis-Marie Michon, ‘On Spasmodic Contraction of the Sphincter of the Vagina’ [abstracted from Bulletin de Thérapie and MedicoChirurgical Review, Jan. 1862], Half-Yearly Abstract of the Medical Sciences 36 (1862): 330–1. Debout and Michon, ‘On Spasmodic Contraction’, 331. Debout and Michon, ‘On Spasmodic Contraction’, 331. A. de Soyre, article ‘Vaginisme’, in Dictionnaire populaire de médecine usuelle d’hygiène publique et privée, ed. Dr Paul Labarthe (Paris: Marpon & Flammarion, 1885), II, 1073. Roubaud, Traité de l’impuissance (1876), 425. Roubaud, Traité de l’impuissance (1876), 426. Roubaud, Traité de l’impuissance (1876), 426. Roubaud, Traité de l’impuissance (1876), 428. Roubaud, Traité de l’impuissance (1876), 428. Roubaud, Traité de l’impuissance (1876), 429. Friedrich Wilhelm Scanzoni von Lichtenfels (1821–91) was a Prague-born obstetrician and gynaecologist who practised in Germany. Roubaud, Traité de l’impuissance (1876), 429–30.

Notes 84. 85. 86. 87. 88. 89. 90. 91. 92. 93. 94. 95. 96. 97. 98. 99. 100. 101. 102. 103. 104. 105. 106. 107. 108. 109.

110. 111. 112. 113. 114. 115.

116. 117. 118. 119. 120. 121. 122. 123.

269

Thomas, Traité clinique des maladies des femmes, i. Thomas, Traité clinique, 124n1. Thomas, Traité clinique, 124n2. Thomas, Traité clinique, 125. Sims, Clinical Notes, 205. Roubaud, Traité de l’impuissance (1876), 429; original emphasis. Roubaud, Traité de l’impuissance (1876), 429; original emphasis. Thomas, Traité clinique, 124. Debout and Michon, ‘On Spasmodic Contraction’, 331. Visca, Du vaginisme, 26. Visca, Du vaginisme, 27–8. Gillard, Contribution à l’étude du vaginisme, 22. Visca, Du vaginisme, 31–2. Visca, Du vaginisme, 32–3. Debout and Michon, ‘On Spasmodic Contraction’, 330. Visca, Du vaginisme, 28–9. Sims, Clinical Notes, 330–1. Visca, Du vaginisme, 29–30. Dubois, Contribution à l’étude du vaginisme, 19–20. Dubois, Contribution à l’étude du vaginisme, 20. Dubois, Contribution à l’étude du vaginisme, 20. Dubois, Contribution à l’étude du vaginisme, 7. Dubois, Contribution à l’étude du vaginisme, 53. Gillard, Contribution à l’étude du vaginisme, 48, uses the term when discussing the risks of haemorrhage involved in the Sims operation. Simpson died in 1870 at the age of 58, but remained professionally active throughout the 1860s. J. Y. [Sir James] Simpson, Clinical Lectures on the Diseases of Women (Philadelphia: Blanchard and Lea, 1872), III, 284. This lecture is unchanged from the first edition, where it appears in III, 143. Simpson, Clinical Lectures (1863), III, 123. Simpson, Clinical Lectures (1863), III, 122; Clinical Lectures (1872), III, 256. Simpson, Clinical Lectures (1863), III, 131. Simpson, Clinical Lectures (1863), III, 131. Sartin, ‘J. Marion Sims’, 504. Graily Hewitt, M.D., The Pathology, Diagnosis and Treatment of Diseases of Women, including the Diagnosis of Pregnancy (Philadelphia: Lindsay and Blakiston, 1874) [second American edition, from the third London edition], 705. Hewitt, The Pathology, Diagnosis and Treatment of Diseases of Women, 706. Hewitt, The Pathology, Diagnosis and Treatment of Diseases of Women, 706. William A. Hammond, M.D., Sexual Impotence in the Male and Female (Detroit: George S. Davis, 1887), 292–8. Hammond, Sexual Impotence, 292. Hammond, Sexual Impotence, 296. Hammond, Sexual Impotence, 296. Josephus Henry Gunning, M.D., ‘Vaginismus: Its Causes and Treatment’, American Gynaecological and Obstetrical Journal 7 (1895): 613. Gunning, ‘Vaginismus’, 615.

270

Notes

124. 125. 126. 127. 128.

Gunning, ‘Vaginismus’, 613. Gunning, ‘Vaginismus’, 619. Gunning, ‘Vaginismus’, 616. Gunning, ‘Vaginismus’, 617. ‘ “Vaginismus: Its Causes and Treatment”, by Josephus Henry Gunning. Discussion’, in ‘Transactions of the New York Obstetrical Society, 15 October 1895’, American Gynaecological and Obstetrical Journal 7 (1895): 664. ‘Vaginismus. Discussion’, 664. ‘Vaginismus. Discussion’, 665. ‘Vaginismus. Discussion’, 666. ‘Vaginismus. Discussion’, 664–5. ‘Vaginismus. Discussion’, 664. ‘Vaginismus. Discussion’, 665. Lutaud, Consultations sur les maladies des femmes, 1. Lutaud, Consultations sur les maladies des femmes, 11–14. Lutaud, Consultations sur les maladies des femmes, 11. Lutaud, Consultations sur les maladies des femmes, 11. Lutaud, Consultations sur les maladies des femmes, 11. Lutaud, Consultations sur les maladies des femmes, 11–12. Lutaud, Consultations sur les maladies des femmes, 13. Lutaud, Consultations sur les maladies des femmes, 14. http://www.vaginismus-awareness-network.org/ref.html, accessed 23 April 2008. R. Basson et al., ‘Definitions of Women’s Sexual Dysfunction Reconsidered: Advocating Expansion and Revision’, Journal of Psychosomatic Obstetrics and Gynaecology 24 (2003): 44.

129. 130. 131. 132. 133. 134. 135. 136. 137. 138. 139. 140. 141. 142. 143. 144.

4 The Late Nineteenth Century: A Multiplicity of Genres 1. Peter Cryle, ‘Les Choses et les Mots: Missing Words and Blurry Things in the History of Sexuality’, Sexualities 12 (2009): 439–52; Alison Moore, ‘The Invention of Sadism? The Limits of Neologisms in the History of Sexuality’, Sexualities 12 (2009): 489–505. 2. Ivan Crozier, ‘Book Review: Solitary Sex: A Cultural History of Masturbation’, History of Psychiatry 15 (2004): 505–8. 3. Niklaus Largier, In Praise of the Whip: A Cultural History of Arousal (New York: Zone Books, 2007), 19. 4. Paul Veyne, Foucault. Sa pensée, sa personne (Paris: Albin Michel, 2008), 19. 5. Rae Beth Gordon, ‘Le Caf’conc’ et l’hystérie’, Romantisme, 64 (1989): 53, 63. 6. Angus McLaren, The Trials of Masculinity: Policing Sexual Boundaries, 1870– 1930 (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1997), 149. 7. McLaren, The Trials of Masculinity, 153. 8. George Weisz, ‘Reform and Conflict in French Medical Education, 1870– 1914’, in The Organization of Science and Technology in France 1808–1914, ed. Robert Fox and George Weisz (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), 63. 9. Weisz, ‘Reform and Conflict’, 62.

Notes

271

10. Dr Paul Labarthe, Dictionnaire populaire de médecine usuelle d’hygiène publique et privée (Paris: Marpon & Flammarion, 1885), II, 405. Adolphe Trébuchet was a doctor and administrator. The text alluded to here is his Jurisprudence de la médecine, de la chirurgie et de la pharmacie en France, comprenant la médecine légale, la police médicale, la responsabilité des médecins, chirurgiens, pharmaciens, etc., l’exposé et la discussion des lois, ordonnances, règlemens et instructions concernant l’art de guérir. Appuyé des jugemens des cours et des tribunaux (Paris: Baillière, 1834). 11. Weisz, ‘Reform and Conflict’, 87. 12. Sylvie Chaperon, Les Origines de la sexologie (1850–1890) (Paris: Audibert, 2007), 64. 13. Chaperon, Les Origines de la sexologie, 118. 14. Chaperon, Les Origines de la sexologie, 118. 15. See Ambroise Tardieu, Etude médico-légale sur les attentats aux mœurs, ed. Georges Vigarello (1859; repr. Grenoble, 1995); Ambroise Tardieu, Manuel de pathologie et de clinique médicales, 3rd edn (Paris: Germer Baillière, 1865); Dr L[éon] Thoinot, Attentats aux mœurs et perversions du sens génital. Leçons professées à la Faculté de Médecine (Paris: Doin, 1898); Dr [Henri] Legrand du Saulle, De l’épilepsie. Le mariage est-il sans danger pour les épileptiques et pour leur descendance? (Paris: Masson, 1861); Dr [Henri] Legrand du Saulle, Les Hystériques. Etat physique et état mental. Actes insolites, délictueux et criminels (Paris: Baillière 1883); Jean-Martin Charcot, Leçons du mardi à la Salpêtrière (Paris: Aux bureaux du progrès médical, 1889); Valentin Magnan, Des anomalies, des aberrations et des perversions sexuelles (Paris: Delahaye and Lecrosnier, 1885); and Charles Féré, L’Instinct sexuel. Evolution et dissolution (Paris: Alcan, 1899). 16. The most important studies of texts of this kind can be found in Jan Goldstein, Console and Classify: The French Psychiatric Profession in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987) and Janet Beizer, Ventriloquized Bodies: Narratives of Hysteria in 19th Century France (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1994). 17. Edmond Langlebert, Syphilis et mariage. Nouvelle étude sur les conditions d’aptitude au mariage des sujets syphilitiques (Paris: Adrien Delahaye et E. Lecrosnier, 1880), 3. 18. Edmond Langlebert, La Syphilis dans ses rapports avec le mariage (Paris: Delahaye, 1873). 19. Langlebert, Syphilis et mariage, 23. 20. Langlebert, Syphilis et mariage, 24. 21. Dr Emile Laurent, Sadisme et masochisme (Paris: Vigot Frères, 1903) [Les Perversions sexuelles. Physiologie – Pathologie – Thérapeutique XI], 163–9. 22. Laurent, Sadisme et masochisme, 208–12. 23. Dr Emile Laurent, L’Amour morbide. Etude de psychologie pathologique (Paris: Société d’Editions Scientifiques, 1891), 94. 24. Laurent, L’Amour morbide, 146–50. 25. Laurent, Sadisme et masochisme, 83. 26. Dr Emile Laurent and Paul Nagour, L’Occultisme et l’amour (Paris: Vigot Frères, 1902) [Les Perversions sexuelles. Physiologie – Pathologie – Thérapeutique X], 3.

272

Notes

27. Laurent and Nagour, L’Occultisme et l’amour, 38. 28. Th[ésée] Pouillet, De la blennorrhagie chez l’homme. Essai critique sur ses divers modes de traitement, XVIII, N. 271 (Thèse de Médecine, Paris, 1875). 29. For instance, De l’onanisme chez la femme (Paris: Vve A. Delahaye, 1876), and Essai médico-psychologique (Paris: Vve A. Delahaye, 1883), Des écoulements blennorrhagiques contagieux, aigus et chroniques de l’homme et de la femme par l’urèthre, la vulve, le vagin et le rectum . . . suivis d’une étude sur les écoulements blancs non contagieux (Paris: L. Bataille, 1878), republished the following year by Delahaye. 30. The book in question is Dr H. Fournier, L’Onanisme: causes, dangers et inconvénients pour les individus, la famille et la société, remèdes, 2nd edn (Paris: Baillière, 1876) [Petite Bibliothèque médicale]. 31. Dr [Thésée] Pouillet, Psychopathie sexuelle I. De l’onanisme chez la femme, 7th edn (Paris: Vigot Frères, 1897) [Bibliothèque des perversions sexuelles, 5], 19–20. 32. It is interesting to note that this attempt at disqualification was not entirely successful. In a book first published in Germany in 1892 by the leading German therapist Albert von Schrenck-Notzing, Fournier was quoted as an authority on onanism. See Dr A. von Schrenck-Notzing, Therapeutic Suggestion in Psychopathia Sexualis (Pathological Manifestations of the Sexual Sense), with Especial Reference to Contrary Sexual Instinct (Philadelphia: Davis and London: Rebman, 1895), 35. 33. There is some discussion of Caufeynon/Fauconney in McLaren, The Trials of Masculinity, 147ff., and in Brigitte Lhomond, preface to Histoire de la femme, by Dr Caufeynon (Paris, Côté-femmes, 1989), 7–15. 34. Dr Désormeaux, Bibliothèque sexuelle du Dr Désormeaux, 13 vols (Paris, 1905– 1907); Dr Caufeynon, Bibliothèque populaire des connaissances médicales, 20 vols (Paris, n.d.); Dr Riolan, Nouvelle collection exclusive d’hygiène et de médecine, 12 vols (Paris, 1909). 35. See La Gazette des Tribunaux, 26 November 1909, 1028. 36. Lhomond, preface to Histoire de la femme, 9–10. 37. J.-P. Dartigues, De l’amour expérimental ou des causes d’adultère chez la femme au XIXe siècle. Etude d’hygiène et d’économie sociale résultant de l’ignorance, du libertinage et des fraudes dans l’accomplissement des devoirs conjugaux (Versailles: Litzellmann, 1887), vii. 38. Dr Caufeynon, Orgasme. Sens génital jadis et aujourd’hui. Physiologie comparée de l’amour sexuel dans l’homme et la bête. Sensibilité physique et morale sous le rapport des sexes. Volupté à travers les âges. Ses formes naturelles et ses artifices (Paris: Offenstadt, 1903). 39. F[rançois-]E[mmanuel] Fodéré, Traité de médecine légale et d’hygiène publique ou de police de santé. Adapté aux codes de l’Empire Français, et aux connaissances actuelles. A l’usage des gens de l’Art, de ceux du Barreau, des Jurés et des Administrateurs de la santé publique, civils, militaires et de marine (Paris: Mame, 1813) I, x. 40. Dr Riolan, Impuissance, frigidité, stérilité, vol. 8, Nouvelle collection exclusive d’hygiène et de médecine (Paris: Pierre 1909), 52. 41. Dr Eynon, Manuel de l’amour conjugal (Paris: Pierre, 1909), 128. 42. Dr Caufeynon, L’Impuissance et la stérilité chez l’homme et la femme, vol. 9, Bibliothèque populaire des connaissances médicales (Paris: Nouvelle Librairie

Notes

43. 44. 45.

46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61. 62. 63. 64. 65. 66. 67. 68.

69. 70. 71. 72. 73. 74.

273

Médicale, n.d.), 67; original emphasis. In the original edition, published by F. Pierre in 1909, this quotation occurs on 122. Caufeynon, Histoire de la femme, 140. Dr Désormeaux, L’Impuissance et la stérilité, vol. 7, Bibliothèque sexuelle du Dr Désormeaux (Paris: Chaubard, 1905–07), 47. [Jean-Baptiste] Fonssagrives, Dictionnaire encyclopédique des sciences médicales, (Masson: P. Asselin, then Asselin & Houzeau, 1868–89), IV, article ‘Anaphrodisie, Anaphrodisiaques’. Dr Jaf, L’Amour secret (Paris: Offenstadt 1903), 97–8. Dr Désormeaux, L’Amour conjugal, vol. 11, Bibliothèque sexuelle du Dr Désormeaux (Paris: Chaubard, 1905–07), 25. Revue des Deux Mondes. Table générale 1831[–1921], vol. II (1874–86) and vol. IV (1893–1901). Jules Claretie, ‘Charcot le consolateur’, Annales Politiques et Littéraires (1903): 179–80. Tardieu, Manuel de pathologie, 524. Tardieu, Manuel de pathologie, 524. Eynon, Manuel de l’amour conjugal, 129. Eynon, Manuel de l’amour conjugal, 129. Eynon, Manuel de l’amour conjugal, 130. Victorien Du Saussay, Femme, amour, mensonges (Paris, Méricant, 1905), 36–7. Du Saussay, Femme, amour, mensonges, 37. Du Saussay, Femme, amour, mensonges, 46. Du Saussay, Femme, amour, mensonges, 48. Du Saussay, Femme, amour, mensonges, 49. Du Saussay, Femme, amour, mensonges, 48. Du Saussay, Femme, amour, mensonges, 60. Du Saussay, Femme, amour, mensonges, 61. Du Saussay, Femme, amour, mensonges, 165. Du Saussay, Femme, amour, mensonges, 177–8. Du Saussay, Femme, amour, mensonges, 256. Du Saussay, Femme, amour, mensonges, 280. Eynon, Manuel de l’amour conjugal, 132. Adolphe Belot, La Femme de glace (Paris, 1878), 199–200. For a fuller discussion of this story, see Peter Cryle, The Telling of the Act: Sexuality as Narrative in Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century France (Newark: Delaware University Press, 2002), 84–7. Marcel Prévost, ‘Un Voluptueux’, in Marcel Prévost, Femmes (Paris: Lemerre, 1907), 1–192. Prévost, ‘Un Volupteux’, 179. Théodore Joran, Le Mensonge du féminisme. Opinions de Léon H . . . (Paris: Jouve, 1905), 7. Joran, Le Mensonge du féminisme, 45. Joran, Le Mensonge du féminisme, 7–9. See Andrea Dworkin, Intercourse (London: Secker and Warburg 1987), 107. As we noted in the Introduction, Dworkin honours the so-called frigid women of history and literature. She sees them as having chosen the last form of defence against male aggression.

274

Notes

75. Joran, Le Mensonge du féminisme, 13. 76. Joran, Le Mensonge du féminisme, 28, 29, 43. 77. See, for example, Dr Robert Teutsch, Le Féminisme (Paris: Société française d’éditions littéraires et techniques, 1934), and Wilhelm Stekel, Frigidity in Woman in Relation to her Love Life, trans. James S. Van Teslaar, vol. 1 (New York: Boni and Liveright, 1926). 78. Richard Lesclide, La Femme impossible (Paris: Dentu, 1883), 45. 79. Lesclide, La Femme impossible, 81. 80. Lesclide, La Femme impossible, 130. 81. Lesclide, La Femme impossible, 146. 82. Lesclide, La Femme impossible, 160, 180. 83. Lesclide, La Femme impossible, 139. 84. Lesclide, La Femme impossible, 152. 85. Lesclide, La Femme impossible, 183. 86. Lesclide, La Femme impossible, 186. 87. Lesclide, La Femme impossible, 209. 88. Lesclide, La Femme impossible, 252. 89. Lesclide, La Femme impossible, 226. 90. Jean-Louis Dubut de Laforest, Mademoiselle de T∗∗∗ . Mœurs contemporaines (Paris, [1883?]). In later editions, the title is given as Mademoiselle Tantale. References here are to the collection of Dubut’s works, Pathologie sociale (Paris, 1897). The preface is found on pages 4–6. 91. Dubut de Laforest, Pathologie sociale, 6. 92. Dubut de Laforest, Pathologie sociale, 9. 93. Dubut de Laforest, Pathologie sociale, 9. 94. Dubut de Laforest, Pathologie sociale, 51. 95. Dubut de Laforest, Pathologie sociale, 28. 96. Dubut de Laforest, Pathologie sociale, 29. 97. Dubut de Laforest, Pathologie sociale, 100. 98. Dubut de Laforest, Pathologie sociale, 85–6. 99. See the chapter on cantharides in Cryle, The Telling of the Act, 96–122. 100. Dubut de Laforest, Pathologie sociale, 105. 101. Dubut de Laforest, Pathologie sociale, 105. 102. Dubut de Laforest, Pathologie sociale, 105. 103. Dubut de Laforest, Pathologie sociale, 106. 104. Dubut de Laforest, Pathologie sociale, 106.

5 The Wedding Night 1. Honoré de Balzac, Physiologie du mariage, ou Méditations de philosophie éclectique sur le bonheur et le malheur conjugal (Paris: Calmann-Lévy, n.d. [1860?]), 1–2. 2. Balzac, Physiologie du mariage, 150. 3. Balzac, Physiologie du mariage, 79. 4. Balzac, Physiologie du mariage, 73. 5. Balzac, Physiologie du mariage, 112. 6. Balzac, Physiologie du mariage, 75. 7. Balzac, Physiologie du mariage, 73.

Notes

275

8. J. Morel de Rubempré, ‘Introduction philosophique, hygiénique et morale’, in Octave de Saint-Ernest, Physiologie de la première nuit des noces (Paris: Terry, 1842), v. 9. Morel de Rubempré, ‘Introduction philosophique’, vii–viii. 10. Morel de Rubempré, ‘Introduction philosophique’, viii. 11. Morel mentions ‘onanism’ as a possible cause of coldness. See Morel de Rubempré, ‘Introduction philosophique’, viii. 12. Saint-Ernest, Physiologie de la première nuit des noces, 20. 13. Saint-Ernest, Physiologie de la première nuit des noces, 20. 14. Saint-Ernest, Physiologie de la première nuit des noces, 99–100. 15. A. Reinvillier, Hygiène pratique des femmes. Guide médical pour toutes les époques de leur vie, suivi de quelques considérations sur les maladies des femmes (Paris: Bureaux du journal Le Médecin de la maison, 1854), 11. 16. Reinvillier, Hygiène pratique des femmes, 60. 17. Reinvillier, Hygiène pratique des femmes, 60. 18. Dr Jules Guyot, Bréviaire de l’amour expérimental. Méditations sur le mariage selon la physiologie du genre humain (Paris: Marpon & Flammarion, 1882), 102. 19. Guyot, Bréviaire de l’amour expérimental, 103. 20. Guyot, Bréviaire de l’amour expérimental, 105. 21. Guyot, Bréviaire de l’amour expérimental, 106. 22. Guyot, Bréviaire de l’amour expérimental, 115. 23. Guyot, Bréviaire de l’amour expérimental, 133. 24. Dr Rauland, Le Livre des époux. Guide pour la guérison de l’impuissance, de la stérilité et de toutes les maladies des organes génitaux (Paris: Chez tous les principaux libraires, 1859), i–ii. 25. Rauland, Le Livre des époux, 3. 26. Ernest Legouvé, Histoire morale des femmes, 5th edn (Paris: Librairie académique Didier, 1869), vi. 27. Legouvé, Histoire morale des femmes, 8–9. 28. Legouvé, Histoire morale des femmes, 119. 29. Legouvé, Histoire morale des femmes, 119. 30. Legouvé, Histoire morale des femmes, 119–20. 31. Dr P. Garnier, Le Mariage dans ses devoirs, ses rapports et ses effets conjugaux au point de vue légal, hygiénique, physiologique et moral. Traduction libre refondue, corrigée et augmentée de l’Higiene del matrimonio du Docteur F. Monlau (Paris: Garnier, 1879), ii–iv. 32. Garnier, Le Mariage dans ses devoirs, 128. 33. Garnier, Le Mariage dans ses devoirs, 38. 34. Garnier, Le Mariage dans ses devoirs, 135. 35. Dr Pierre Garnier, L’Impuissance physique et morale chez l’homme et la femme (Paris: Garnier, 1882), 358. 36. Garnier, L’Impuissance physique et morale, 358. 37. Garnier, L’Impuissance physique et morale, 358. 38. Garnier, L’Impuissance physique et morale, 359. 39. Garnier, L’Impuissance physique et morale, 359. 40. Garnier, L’Impuissance physique et morale, 487. 41. See, for example, Gyp and Hector Crémieux, Autour du mariage. Comédie en cinq actes (Paris: Calmann Lévy, 1883), in which the event

276

42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47.

48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60.

61. 62. 63. 64. 65.

66. 67. 68. 69.

Notes of sexual initiation is continually deferred by intrigue and comic misunderstanding. Dr Ch. Montalban, La Petite Bible des jeunes époux (Paris: Marpon & Flammarion, 1885), 3. Montalban, La Petite Bible, 4. Montalban, La Petite Bible, 14. Montalban, La Petite Bible, 17. Montalban, La Petite Bible, 18. J.-P. Dartigues, De l’amour expérimental ou des causes d’adultère chez la femme au XIXe siècle. Etude d’hygiène et d’économie sociale résultant de l’ignorance, du libertinage et des fraudes dans l’accomplissement des devoirs conjugaux (Versailles: Litzellmann, 1887), 144. Dartigues, De l’amour expérimental, 156. Dartigues, De l’amour expérimental, 91. Dartigues, De l’amour expérimental, 124–5. Dartigues, De l’amour expérimental, 124. Dartigues, De l’amour expérimental, 125. Dartigues, De l’amour expérimental, 124. Dartigues, De l’amour expérimental, 140. Dr Désormeaux, Le Mariage (Paris: Librairie P. Fort, L. Chaubard, Successeur, c. 1905). Dr Caufeynon, Le Mariage et son hygiène (Paris: Nouvelle Librairie Médicale, n.d.). Dr Désormeaux, L’Amour conjugal (Paris: Librairie P. Fort, L. Chaubard, Successeur, c. 1905). Dr Eynon, Manuel de l’amour conjugal (Paris: F. Pierre, 1909). Dr Rhazis, L’Initiation amoureuse ou l’art de se faire aimer et de plaire (Paris: de Porter, [1909]). On the success of Venette’s work in England, see Roy Porter, ‘Spreading Carnal Knowledge or Selling Dirt Cheap? Nicolas Venette’s Tableau de l’Amour Conjugal in Eighteenth Century England’, Journal of European Studies, 14 (1984): 233–55. Nicolas Venette, Tableau de l’amour conjugal (Paris: Paul Fort, 1903). Bréviaire de l’amour dans le mariage, d’après le Dr Venette, nouvelle édition revue et augmentée par le Dr Caufeynon (Paris: Jean Fort, 1907). Dr Wolf, Bréviaire de l’amour dans le mariage, ou L’homme et la femme considérés dans l’état physiologique du mariage (Paris: Jean Fort, 1909). Dr Wolf, Bréviaire de l’amour, 20–21. We are following, or at least shadowing Krafft-Ebing’s distinction between perversity and perversion: ‘Perversion of the sexual instinct [ . . . ] is not to be conf[us]ed with perversity in the sexual act; since the latter may be induced by conditions other than psycho-pathological.’ Richard von Krafft-Ebing, Psychopathia Sexualis, with Especial Reference to the Antipathic Sexual Instinct. A Medico-Forensic Study, trans. Franklin S. Klaf (New York: Arcade Publishing, 1998), 53. Dr Wolf, Bréviaire de l’amour, 134ff. See Dr Wolf, Bréviaire de l’amour, 135–6. Dr Wolf, Bréviaire de l’amour, 158–9, 195. Dr Wolf, Bréviaire de l’amour, 134.

Notes

277

70. Honoré de Balzac, Physiologie du mariage ou Méditations de philosophie éclectique sur le bonheur et le malheur conjugal (Paris: Ollendorff, 1901). 71. Dr Jaf, L’Amour secret (Paris: Offenstadt, 1903) carries as an epigraph on its title page the following quotation from Physiologie du mariage: ‘Skilfully grasping the nuances of pleasure, developing them, giving them new style and original expression, that is what constitutes the genius of the lover or the husband.’ 72. Dr Désormeaux, L’Amour conjugal, 23. 73. Dr Jaf, L’Amour secret, 67. 74. Dr Caufeynon, Le Mariage et son hygiène, 33. 75. Dr Rhazis, L’Initiation amoureuse, 83. 76. Dr Rhazis, L’Initiation amoureuse, 23. 77. Dr Rhazis, L’Initiation amoureuse, 32. See Guyot, Bréviaire de l’amour expérimental, 102, quoted above. 78. Dr Rhazis, L’Initiation amoureuse, 35. 79. Dr Rhazis, L’Initiation amoureuse, 80–3. 80. Dr Désormeaux, L’Amour conjugal, 32. 81. Dr Désormeaux, Le Mariage, 16. 82. Dr Désormeaux, Le Mariage, 16. 83. Dr Désormeaux, Le Mariage, 39–40. 84. Dr Riolan, Impuissance, frigidité, stérilité (Paris: Librairie Artistique et Médicale F. Pierre, 1909), 56. 85. Dr Jaf, L’Amour secret, 97–8. 86. See Dr Désormeaux, L’Amour conjugal, 25. 87. Dr Eynon, Manuel de l’amour conjugal, 6. 88. Dr Eynon, Manuel de l’amour conjugal, 29. 89. Dr Caufeynon, Le Mariage et son hygiène, 36–7. 90. Dr Désormeaux, L’Impuissance et la stérilité (Paris: Librairie P. Fort, L. Chaubard, Successeur, c. 1905), 38. 91. Dr Désormeaux, L’Impuissance et la stérilité, 40. 92. Dr Caufeynon, Histoire de la femme [1904], preface by Brigitte Lhomond (Paris: Côté-femmes, 1989), 136. 93. Dr Rhazis, L’Initiation amoureuse, 61. 94. See Dartigues, De l’amour expérimental, 125, quoted above. 95. Dr Jaf, L’Amour secret, 118. 96. Dr Jaf, L’Amour secret, 10. Original emphasis. 97. Dr Jaf, L’Amour secret, 10. 98. Jane de la Vaudère, Le Sang (Paris: Ollendorff, 1898), 11. 99. La Vaudère, Le Sang, 8–9. 100. La Vaudère, Le Sang, 8–9. 101. La Vaudère, Le Sang, 8–9. 102. René Maizeroy, Les Jeux de l’amour. Quelques gestes, quelques baisers . . . ; de la séduction; de la possession; du sacrifice; sur la rupture; sur le décor en amour; sur le mariage; et sur l’adultère (Paris: Nilsson, [1902?]), 264–6. 103. Maxime Formont, La Grande Amoureuse (Paris: Lemerre, 1904), 40. 104. Formont, La Grande Amoureuse, 41–2. 105. Formont, La Grande Amoureuse, 36. 106. Formont, La Grande Amoureuse, 61–2. 107. Formont, La Grande Amoureuse, 92–3.

278

Notes

108. Formont, La Grande Amoureuse, 19. 109. [Joséphin] Péladan, Le Vice suprême, preface by Jules Barbey d’Aurevilly (Paris: Editions du monde moderne, 1926), 69–70. First published 1884. 110. Péladan, Le Vice suprême, 70. 111. Barbey d’Aurevilly, preface to Le Vice suprême, xvi. 112. Péladan, Le Vice suprême, 71. 113. Barbey d’Aurevilly, preface to Le Vice suprême, xvi. 114. See Alison Moore, ‘The Invention of Sadism? The Limits of Neologisms in the History of Sexuality’, Sexualities 12 (2009): 489–505. 115. Catulle Mendès, Méphistophéla, ed. Jean de Palacio (Paris: Seguier, 1993), 38. 116. Mendès, Méphistophéla, 39. 117. Mendès, Méphistophéla, 84. 118. Mendès, Méphistophéla, 103. 119. Mendès, Méphistophéla, 85. 120. Mendès, Méphistophéla, 60. 121. Mendès, Méphistophéla, 61. 122. ‘Now with limbs twisted she rolled around in the sheets, then arched her back in an almost perfect semi-circle, touching the bed with only her head and her heels.’ (Mendès, Méphistophéla, 61). 123. Mendès, Méphistophéla, 125. 124. See Legouvé, Histoire morale des femmes, 119–20, quoted above. 125. Mendès, Méphistophéla, 137. 126. Mendès, Méphistophéla, 137, 138. 127. Mendès, Méphistophéla, 152. 128. Mendès, Méphistophéla, 558. 129. Eugène Delard, Le Désir: journal d’un mari (Paris: Calmann-Lévy, 1899), 35. 130. Delard, Le Désir, 35. 131. Delard, Le Désir, 58; original emphasis. 132. Delard, Le Désir, 59. 133. Delard, Le Désir, 67. 134. Delard, Le Désir, 67. 135. Victorien du Saussay, Rires, sang et voluptés. Roman d’aventures et d’amour (Paris: Bibliothèque du fin du siècle, n.d. [1901]), 243. 136. Du Saussay, Rires, sang et voluptés, 243. 137. Charles Epheyre [Charles Richet], Possession (Paris: Ollendorff, 1887), 6. 138. Epheyre, Possession, 77.

6 Treatment 1: Medicine 1. See, for example, Michel Foucault, Le Pouvoir psychiatrique. Cours au Collège de France. 1973–74, ed. François Ewald and Alessandro Fontana (Paris: Gallimard/Seuil, 2003). 2. For a quite detailed list, see Harry Oosterhuis, Stepchildren of Nature: KrafftEbing, Psychiatry, and the Making of Sexual Identity (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 44–7. 3. Kathleen Grange, ‘Pinel and Eighteenth-Century Psychiatry’, Bulletin of the History of Medicine 35 (1961): 443. Ian R. Dowbiggin, Inheriting Madness:

Notes

4.

5. 6. 7. 8.

9. 10.

11.

12.

13.

14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26.

279

Professionalization and Psychiatric Knowledge in Nineteenth-Century France (Berkeley, Los Angeles and Oxford: University of California Press, 1991), 29n, warns that ‘the term moral employed by Pinel and his successors in psychiatry is not strictly equivalent to the modern term psychological’. For a discussion of Pinel’s role, see Jan Goldstein, Console and Classify: The French Psychiatric Profession in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 67–80. Goldstein, Console and Classify, 65. For a full discussion of moral treatment as understood and practised by Pinel, see 80–9. François Leuret, Du traitement moral de la folie (Paris: J.-B. Baillière, 1840), 3. Leuret, Du traitement moral de la folie, 5. Leuret was particularly opposed in this regard to Calmeil, who played a leading role at the asylum of Charenton. See Leuret, Du traitement moral de la folie, 75. Leuret, Du traitement moral de la folie, 5. See also 368. Some historians have pointed out that Leuret’s championing of moral treatment posed a threat to the professional standing of psychiatry, since religious or philosophical qualifications might be thought to provide an equally good basis for the care of the insane. See, for example, Dowbiggin, Inheriting Madness, 38, and Oosterhuis, Stepchildren of Nature, 80. In a recent study, Alain Corbin describes Roubaud’s work as a turning point in the understanding of (female) frigidity: ‘female anaphrodisia was newly subject to detection, observation, and treatment outside of the framework of fertilization’, Alain Corbin, L’Harmonie des plaisirs. Les manières de jouir du siècle des Lumières à l’avènement de la sexologie (Paris: Perrin, 2008), 192; see also 84. Dr Félix Roubaud, Traité de l’impuissance et de la stérilité chez l’homme et la femme, comprenant l’exposition des moyens recommandés pour y rémédier, 3rd edn (Paris: Baillière, 1876), 383–4. See Félix Roubaud, Traité de l’impuissance et de la stérilité chez l’homme et chez la femme, comprenant l’exposition des moyens recommandés pour y remédier (Paris: J.-B. Baillière, 1855), 10–40. Roubaud, Traité de l’impuissance et de la stérilité (1855), II, 449. P[ierre] Garnier, L’Impuissance physique et morale chez l’homme et la femme (Paris: Garnier, 1882), 505. Roubaud, Traité de l’impuissance et de la stérilité (1876), 61. Roubaud, Traité de l’impuissance et de la stérilité (1876), 73. Joanna Bourke, Rape: A History from 1860 to the Present Day (London: Virago, 2008), 53–5. Roubaud, Traité de l’impuissance et de la stérilité (1876), 113. Roubaud, Traité de l’impuissance et de la stérilité (1876), 113. Roubaud, Traité de l’impuissance et de la stérilité (1876), 113–14. Roubaud, Traité de l’impuissance et de la stérilité (1876), 114. Roubaud, Traité de l’impuissance et de la stérilité (1876), 114. Roubaud, Traité de l’impuissance et de la stérilité (1876), 131; original emphasis. Roubaud, Traité de l’impuissance et de la stérilité (1876), 169; emphasis added. Roubaud, Traité de l’impuissance et de la stérilité (1876), 284.

280

Notes

27. Roubaud, Traité de l’impuissance et de la stérilité (1876), 294–5. He does comment elsewhere in the book (153) on the unseemliness of using flagellation as a professional treatment. 28. Roubaud, Traité de l’impuissance et de la stérilité (1876), 295. 29. Foucault, Le Pouvoir psychiatrique, 308. 30. Michel-Etienne Descourtilz, De l’impuissance et de la stérilité, ou Recherches sur l’anaphrodisie distinguée de l’agénésie. Ouvrage destiné aux personnes mariées qui ne peuvent avoir d’enfans (Paris: Masson et Yonet, 1831), I, 1. 31. Roubaud, Traité de l’impuissance et de la stérilité (1876), 114. 32. Roubaud, Traité de l’impuissance et de la stérilité (1876), 112. 33. Roubaud, Traité de l’impuissance et de la stérilité (1876), 112. 34. Roubaud, Traité de l’impuissance et de la stérilité (1876), 116. 35. Roubaud, Traité de l’impuissance et de la stérilité (1876), 116. 36. Roubaud, Traité de l’impuissance et de la stérilité (1876), 175. 37. Harry Oosterhuis observes in Stepchildren of Nature, 278, that fetishism sometimes played the same role: ‘Late nineteenth-century French psychiatrists tended to consider fetishism as the “master perversion” that included all the aberrations by which sexual desire had fixed itself on the wrong (nonreproductive) goal, be it an object, a body part, a certain act or physical type, a person of the same sex, an unusual age category, or an animal.’ 38. Roubaud, Traité de l’impuissance et de la stérilité (1876), 492–3. 39. Thésée Pouillet, L’Onanisme chez la femme (Paris: Vigot, 1897), 41–3. 40. Roubaud, Traité de l’impuissance et de la stérilité (1876), 120. 41. Leuret, Du traitement moral de la folie, 292. 42. Roubaud, Traité de l’impuissance et de la stérilité (1876), 130. 43. Roubaud, Traité de l’impuissance et de la stérilité (1876), 130. 44. On this point, see Philippe Pinel, Recherches et observations sur le traitement moral des aliénés (n.p., n.d. [1801]), 2, 38, and Leuret, Du traitement moral de la folie, 71. 45. Roubaud, Traité de l’impuissance et de la stérilité (1876), 130. 46. Roubaud, Traité de l’impuissance et de la stérilité (1876), 130. 47. Roubaud, Traité de l’impuissance et de la stérilité (1876), 352. 48. Roubaud, Traité de l’impuissance et de la stérilité (1876), 362. 49. Roubaud, Traité de l’impuissance et de la stérilité chez l’homme et la femme (1876), 365. 50. Roubaud, Traité de l’impuissance et de la stérilité (1876), 496. 51. Roubaud, Traité de l’impuissance et de la stérilité (1876), 495. 52. Corbin suggests plausibly that doctors were limited in their clinical understanding in part because they could not perform observations on themselves: ‘Practitioners are left with only confidences and confessions. The rest comes down to suspicion.’ Corbin, L’Harmonie des plaisirs, 206. 53. Roubaud, Traité de l’impuissance et de la stérilité (1876), 496. 54. Corbin, L’Harmonie des plaisirs, 192. 55. Roubaud, Traité de l’impuissance et de la stérilité (1876), 451. 56. Roubaud, Traité de l’impuissance et de la stérilité (1876), 404. 57. Roubaud, Traité de l’impuissance et de la stérilité (1876), 383–448. 58. Roubaud, Traité de l’impuissance et de la stérilité (1876), 451. 59. Roubaud, Traité de l’impuissance et de la stérilité (1876), 452. 60. Roubaud, Traité de l’impuissance et de la stérilité (1876), 453.

Notes

281

61. Roubaud, Traité de l’impuissance et de la stérilité (1876), 461. 62. Roubaud, Traité de l’impuissance et de la stérilité (1876), 465. 63. Dr Pierre Garnier, L’Impuissance physique et morale chez l’homme et la femme, 5th edn (Paris: Garnier, 1893), 13. 64. Garnier, L’Impuissance physique et morale (1893), 13. 65. Garnier, L’Impuissance physique et morale (1893), 16. 66. Garnier, L’Impuissance physique et morale (1893), 22. 67. Garnier, L’Impuissance physique et morale (1893), 286. 68. Garnier, L’Impuissance physique et morale (1893), 27. 69. Garnier, L’Impuissance physique et morale (1893), 530. 70. Garnier, L’Impuissance physique et morale (1893), 531. 71. Garnier, L’Impuissance physique et morale (1893), 509–10. 72. Garnier, L’Impuissance physique et morale (1893), 509. 73. Garnier, L’Impuissance physique et morale (1893), 510. 74. Garnier, L’Impuissance physique et morale (1893), 511. 75. Garnier, L’Impuissance physique et morale (1893), 381. 76. Garnier, L’Impuissance physique et morale (1893), 382. 77. Garnier, L’Impuissance physique et morale (1893), 530. 78. Garnier, L’Impuissance physique et morale (1893), 540–1. 79. Garnier, L’Impuissance physique et morale (1893), 520. 80. Garnier, L’Impuissance physique et morale (1893), 540. 81. Garnier, L’Impuissance physique et morale (1893), 513. 82. Garnier, L’Impuissance physique et morale (1893), 533. 83. Garnier, L’Impuissance physique et morale (1893), 513. 84. Dr [Pierre] Garnier, Hygiène de la génération. Anomalies sexuelles apparentes et cachées. Avec 230 observations, 2nd edn (Paris: Garnier, 1891), 4–5. 85. Garnier, L’Impuissance physique et morale (1893), 533. 86. Garnier, L’Impuissance physique et morale (1893), 35; see also 312–13. 87. Garnier, L’Impuissance physique et morale (1893), 540. 88. Garnier, L’Impuissance physique et morale (1893), 540. 89. Garnier, L’Impuissance physique et morale (1893), 533–4. 90. Garnier, Anomalies sexuelles, 268–9. 91. Dowbiggin, Inheriting Madness, 7, 33–5. 92. L[aurent] Cerise, ‘Généralités médico-psychologiques’, Annales médicopsychologiques. Journal de l’anatomie, de la physiologie et de la pathologie du système nerveux 1 (1843): 2. 93. Cerise, ‘Généralités médico-psychologiques’, 1–2. 94. Dowbiggin, Inheriting Madness, 22. 95. Oosterhuis, Stepchildren of Nature, 13; see also 79. 96. Arnold I. Davidson, The Emergence of Sexuality: Historical Epistemology and the Formation of Concepts (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 2001), 4. 97. Harry Oosterhuis, ‘Medical Science and the Modernisation of Sexuality’, in Sexual Cultures in Europe: National Histories, ed. Franz X. Eder, Lesley A. Hall and Gert Hekma (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 1999), 231. See also Oosterhuis, Stepchildren of Nature, 60–2, 129. 98. Oosterhuis, Stepchildren of Nature, 58. 99. Davidson, The Emergence of Sexuality, 15–16. 100. Roubaud, Traité de l’impuissance et de la stérilité (1876), 115.

282

Notes

101. Pierre Larousse (ed.) The Grand Dictionnaire universel du XIXe siècle (Geneva: Slatkine, 1982) defines ‘génésique’ as an adjective drawn from ‘génération’, meaning ‘having to do with the generative functions’. It lists ‘génétique’ as a synonym of ‘génésique’. 102. William A. Hammond, M.D., Sexual Impotence in the Male and Female (Detroit: George S. Davis, 1887). 103. Dr W.-A. Hammond, L’Impuissance sexuelle chez l’homme et la femme, 3rd edn (Paris: Vigot Frères, n.d. [c. 1903]) [Les Perversions sexuelles. Psychologie, Pathologie, Thérapeutique]. 104. Hammond, Sexual Impotence, unpaginated preface. 105. Hammond, Sexual Impotence, 10. 106. Hammond, Sexual Impotence, 10. 107. Hammond, Sexual Impotence, 26. 108. Hammond, Sexual Impotence, 25. 109. Hammond, Sexual Impotence, 39–40. 110. Hammond, Sexual Impotence, 89. 111. Hammond, Sexual Impotence, 91. 112. Hammond, Sexual Impotence, 91–2. 113. Hammond, Sexual Impotence, 200, 213. 114. Roubaud, Traité de l’impuissance et de la stérilité (1876), 453. 115. Hammond, Sexual Impotence, 280. 116. Roubaud, Traité de l’impuissance et de la stérilité (1876), 112. 117. Hammond, Sexual Impotence, 281. 118. Hammond, Sexual Impotence, 278.

7 Treatment 2: Psychology 1. [Henri] Legrand du Saulle, Les Hystériques. Etat physique et état mental. Actes insolites délictueux et criminels (Paris: Baillière, 1883). 2. Legrand du Saulle, Les Hystériques, 4. 3. Legrand du Saulle, Les Hystériques, 5. 4. Legrand du Saulle, Les Hystériques, 57. 5. See, for example, Legrand du Saulle, Les Hystériques, 64, 199–200. 6. Legrand du Saulle, Les Hystériques, 39. 7. Legrand du Saulle, Les Hystériques, 560. 8. Legrand du Saulle, Les Hystériques, 566. 9. Legrand du Saulle, Les Hystériques, 572. The patient is referred to in French as la malade. 10. He does refer to vaginismus, describing it as a form of hyperaesthesia affecting the genital parts. Legrand du Saulle, Les Hystériques, 89. 11. Jan Goldstein, Console and Classify: The French Psychiatric Profession in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 245. 12. Ian R. Dowbiggin, Inheriting Madness: Professionalization and Psychiatric Knowledge in Nineteenth-Century France (Berkeley, Los Angeles and Oxford: University of California Press, 1991), 31. 13. Cf. Goldstein, Console and Classify, 230: ‘The religious roots of the moral treatment could not, in the nineteenth century, be ignored. And unless one

Notes

14. 15. 16.

17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23.

24. 25.

26.

27.

28. 29. 30. 31. 32.

283

used the pastoral resonances of that treatment as the basis for collaboration, the only remaining stance toward the clerics was rivalry.’ Félix Roubaud, Traité de l’impuissance et de la stérilité chez l’homme et la femme, 3rd edn (Paris: Baillière, 1876), 352. Legrand du Saulle, Les Hystériques, 201. Heike Bauer, ‘ “Not a Translation but a Mutilation”: The Limits of Translation and the Discipline of Sexology’, The Yale Journal of Criticism, 16 (2003): 381–405, considers a translation of Krafft-Ebing’s text by F. J. Rebman that was first published in 1892. She speaks of cultural transposition and transformation of the German original, rather than simple inaccuracy. We have based our own translated quotations on a more recent version by Franklin S. Klaf – Richard von Krafft-Ebing, Psychopathia Sexualis, with Especial Reference to the Antipathic Sexual Instinct. A Medico-Forensic Study (New York: Arcade Publishing, 1998) – but have nonetheless felt the need to question and modify that translation in turn. In doing so, we have referred to the following German edition: Richard von Krafft-Ebing, Psychopathia sexualis (Munich: Matthes and Seitz, 1997). Krafft-Ebing, Psychopathia sexualis (New York: 1998), 45–6. Krafft-Ebing, Psychopathia sexualis (New York: 1998), 45. Krafft-Ebing, Psychopathia sexualis (New York: 1998), 45. See Daniel Pick, Faces of Degeneration: A European Disorder, c.1848–c.1918 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989). Krafft-Ebing, Psychopathia sexualis (New York: 1998), 40. Krafft-Ebing, Psychopathia sexualis (New York: 1998), 40. Harry Oosterhuis, Stepchildren of Nature: Krafft-Ebing, Psychiatry, and the Making of Sexual Identity (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 103. Oosterhuis, Stepchildren of Nature, 103. A. von Schrenck-Notzing, Therapeutic Suggestion in Psychopathia Sexualis (Pathological Manifestations of the Sexual Sense), with Especial Reference to Contrary Sexual Instinct, trans. Charles Gilbert Chaddock (Philadelphia: Davis; London: Rebman, 1895), 146. Oosterhuis, Stepchildren of Nature, 107. Cf. 118: ‘The strictly mechanistic and reductionist model of brain function [ . . . ] left no room for a psychological approach in psychiatry. Krafft-Ebing’s methodological materialism, by contrast, did not exclude psychology.’ Krafft-Ebing, Psychopathia sexualis (New York: 1998), 45. The published translation is inaccurate at this point, possibly because the translator did not understand the reference to Zacchia. See 182 and 262 for other references to Zacchia. Albert von Schrenck-Notzing actually uses a wider range of terms that are sourced to Zacchia: not only naturae frigidae, but also impotentia coeundi and impotentia generandi. See Schrenck-Notzing, Therapeutic Suggestion, 78–9. Oosterhuis, Stepchildren of Nature, 16, draws attention to this. Krafft-Ebing, Psychopathia sexualis (New York: 1998), 41–2. Krafft-Ebing, Psychopathia sexualis (New York: 1998), 232. Krafft-Ebing, Psychopathia sexualis (New York: 1998), 263. Krafft-Ebing, Psychopathia sexualis (New York: 1998), 232; translation modified.

284

Notes

33. Krafft-Ebing, Psychopathia sexualis (New York: 1998), 323; original emphasis. 34. Krafft-Ebing, Psychopathia sexualis (New York: 1998), 323; original emphasis. 35. Krafft-Ebing, Psychopathia sexualis (New York: 1998), 45. 36. Krafft-Ebing, Psychopathia sexualis (New York: 1998), 234–5. For some comparable cases, see 236, 239, 276–8. 37. Krafft-Ebing, Psychopathia sexualis (New York: 1998), 294. 38. Krafft-Ebing, Psychopathia sexualis (New York: 1998), 299. The translation has been modified because in this passage it translates both ‘psychisch’ and ‘moralisch’ as ‘mental’, which should in fact correspond to geistig, thus eliding the differences between three key terms. 39. Krafft-Ebing, Psychopathia sexualis (New York: 1998), 299; translation modified. Oosterhuis, Stepchildren of Nature, 119, observes that ‘from 1886 on, Krafft-Ebing and his assistants began to use hypnosis and the so-called “psychical therapy”, not only in the treatment of neurotic, neurasthenic, and hysteric patients in his sanatorium, but also when treating the perverts who consulted him in his private practice’. 40. Schrenck-Notzing, Therapeutic Suggestion in Psychopathia Sexualis (Pathological Manifestations of the Sexual Sense), with Especial Reference to Contrary Sexual Instinct, trans. Charles Gilbert Chaddock (Philadelphia: Davis; London: Rebman, 1895). The original German edition was Die Suggestionstherapie des Geschlechtsinnes, mit besonderer Berücksichtigung der conträren Sexualempfindung (Stuttgart: Ferdinand Enke, 1892). 41. See, for example, Schrenck-Notzing, Therapeutic Suggestion, xi, 312. 42. Schrenck-Notzing, Therapeutic Suggestion, v. 43. Schrenck-Notzing, Therapeutic Suggestion, 99–112. 44. Schrenck-Notzing, Therapeutic Suggestion, 113. 45. Schrenck-Notzing, Therapeutic Suggestion, v. 46. Schrenck-Notzing, Therapeutic Suggestion, 84. 47. Schrenck-Notzing, Therapeutic Suggestion, 84–5. 48. Schrenck-Notzing, Therapeutic Suggestion, 90; translation modified. 49. Schrenck-Notzing, Therapeutic Suggestion, 89. 50. Schrenck-Notzing, Therapeutic Suggestion, 79. 51. Schrenck-Notzing, Therapeutic Suggestion, 197. 52. Schrenck-Notzing, Therapeutic Suggestion, 146. 53. Schrenck-Notzing, Therapeutic Suggestion, v. 54. Schrenck-Notzing, Therapeutic Suggestion, xi. 55. Schrenck-Notzing, Therapeutic Suggestion, 42–5. 56. Schrenck-Notzing, Therapeutic Suggestion, 45–6. 57. Schrenck-Notzing, Therapeutic Suggestion, 46. 58. Schrenck-Notzing, Therapeutic Suggestion, 46. 59. Schrenck-Notzing, Therapeutic Suggestion, 46. 60. Schrenck-Notzing, Therapeutic Suggestion, 49–50. 61. Havelock Ellis, Studies in the Psychology of Sex 3. Analysis of the Sexual Impulse, Love and Pain, The Sexual Impulse in Women, 2nd edn, revised and enlarged (Philadelphia: Davis, 1923), 203. Hammond made a contribution to this discussion as early as 1887. Speaking of married women in America, he said: ‘it is doubtful if in one-tenth of the instances of intercourse they experience

Notes

62.

63.

64. 65. 66. 67. 68. 69. 70. 71. 72. 73. 74.

75.

76. 77. 78. 79. 80. 81. 82. 83. 84. 85. 86. 87. 88. 89.

285

the slightest pleasurable sensation from first to last. The virtuous married woman submits passively and is impotent.’ William A. Hammond, Sexual Impotence in the Male and Female (Detroit: Davis, 1887), 300. Thomas W. Laqueur, Solitary Sex: A Cultural History of Masturbation (New York: Zone Books, 2003) and Elizabeth Stephens, ‘Coining Spermatorrhoea: Medicine and Male Body Fluids, 1836–66’, Sexualities 12 (2009): 469–87. Diderot et al., Encyclopédie ou Dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers (1751–80; repr., Stuttgart: Friedrich Frommann, 1995), article ‘Fureur utérine’. Cesare Lombroso and G. Ferrero, La Femme criminelle et la prostituée, trans. Louise Meille (Paris: Alcan, 1896), 51. Lombroso, La Femme criminelle, 52. Lombroso, La Femme criminelle, 53. Roubaud, Traité de l’impuissance et de la stérilité (1876), 112. Roubaud, Traité de l’impuissance et de la stérilité (1876), 458. Ambroise Tardieu, Manuel de pathologie et de clinique médicales, 3rd edn (Paris: Germer Baillière, 1865), 524. Jules Guyot, Bréviaire de l’amour expérimental. Méditations sur le mariage selon la physiologie du genre humain (Paris: Marpon & Flammarion, 1882), 24. Dr Caufeynon, L’Impuissance et la stérilité chez l’homme et la femme (Paris: Nouvelle Librairie Médicale, [1902–03]), 67. Dr Désormeaux, L’Impuissance et la stérilité (Paris: Librairie P. Fort, L. Chaubard, Successeur, 1905–07), 47. Ellis, Studies in the Psychology of Sex 3, 218. See, for example, Dr Eynon, Manuel de l’amour conjugal (c. 1909; Paris: Librairie artistique et Edition parisienne réunies, 1924), 129: ‘Many physiologists have said that woman, even in normal health, often suffers from frigidity. That fact cannot reasonably be denied, but we are persuaded that such anaphrodisia is only accidental and, so to speak, artificial.’ The first edition of this book is quite rare. We have been able to consult only the third edition, Otto Adler, Die mangelhafte Geschlechtsempfindung des Weibes (Berlin: H. Kornfeld, 1919). In it, Adler engages with psychoanalytical work, notably that of Wilhelm Stekel, which had not yet appeared in 1904. Adler, Die mangelhafte Geschlechtsempfindung, 5. Adler, Die mangelhafte Geschlechtsempfindung, 7–8. Adler, Die mangelhafte Geschlechtsempfindung, 2; original emphasis. Adler, Die mangelhafte Geschlechtsempfindung, 12. Adler, Die mangelhafte Geschlechtsempfindung, 90. Adler, Die mangelhafte Geschlechtsempfindung, 10. Adler, Die mangelhafte Geschlechtsempfindung, 2–3. Adler, Die mangelhafte Geschlechtsempfindung, 10. Adler, Die mangelhafte Geschlechtsempfindung, 66–7. Adler, Die mangelhafte Geschlechtsempfindung, 155. Adler, Die mangelhafte Geschlechtsempfindung, iii–iv. Adler, Die mangelhafte Geschlechtsempfindung, iv–v. Adler, Die mangelhafte Geschlechtsempfindung, v. Adler, Die mangelhafte Geschlechtsempfindung, 6.

286

Notes

90. Adler, Die mangelhafte Geschlechtsempfindung, 5. 91. Adler, Die mangelhafte Geschlechtsempfindung, 13. 92. Elizabeth Grosz sums up Irigaray’s position in Sexual Subversions: Three French Feminists (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1989), 133: ‘The so-called “frigid woman” is precisely the woman whose pleasures do not fit neatly into the male-defined structure of sexual pleasure.’ 93. Sheila Jeffreys, Anticlimax: A Feminist Perspective on the Sexual Revolution (London: The Women’s Press, 1990), 1. 94. Adler, Die mangelhafte Geschlechtsempfindung, 3. 95. Adler, Die mangelhafte Geschlechtsempfindung, 13, 25. 96. Adler, Die mangelhafte Geschlechtsempfindung, 59. 97. Adler, Die mangelhafte Geschlechtsempfindung, 58–9. 98. Adler, Die mangelhafte Geschlechtsempfindung, 174. 99. Adler, Die mangelhafte Geschlechtsempfindung, 8–9. 100. Adler, Die mangelhafte Geschlechtsempfindung, 198–9. 101. Adler, Die mangelhafte Geschlechtsempfindung, 196. 102. Adler, Die mangelhafte Geschlechtsempfindung, 200–1. 103. Adler, Die mangelhafte Geschlechtsempfindung, 194. 104. Adler, Die mangelhafte Geschlechtsempfindung, 193. 105. Adler, Die mangelhafte Geschlechtsempfindung, 193. 106. Adler, Die mangelhafte Geschlechtsempfindung, 193. 107. Adler, Die mangelhafte Geschlechtsempfindung, 5. 108. Adler, Die mangelhafte Geschlechtsempfindung, 15. 109. Adler, Die mangelhafte Geschlechtsempfindung, 28. 110. Adler, Die mangelhafte Geschlechtsempfindung, 27. 111. Adler, Die mangelhafte Geschlechtsempfindung, 27. 112. Adler, Die mangelhafte Geschlechtsempfindung, 28–9; original emphasis. 113. Adler, Die mangelhafte Geschlechtsempfindung, 159. 114. Adler, Die mangelhafte Geschlechtsempfindung, 161. 115. Adler, Die mangelhafte Geschlechtsempfindung, 161. 116. Adler, Die mangelhafte Geschlechtsempfindung, 164, 189–90. 117. Adler, Die mangelhafte Geschlechtsempfindung, 164. 118. Ellis, Studies in the Psychology of Sex 3, 191. 119. Ellis, Studies in the Psychology of Sex 3, 193–4. 120. Havelock Ellis, Studies in the Psychology of Sex 6. Sex in Relation to Society, (Philadelphia: Davis, 1928), 550. 121. Ellis, Studies in the Psychology of Sex 3, 240. 122. Havelock Ellis, Studies in the Psychology of Sex 4. Sexual Selection in Man (Philadelphia: Davis, 1905), 40. 123. Dr Horace Stapfer, La Kinésithérapie gynécologique, traitement des maladies des femmes par le massage et la gymnastique (Système de Brandt) (Paris: Masson, 1899), 23. 124. Rachel P. Maines, The Technology of Orgasm: ‘Hysteria’, the Vibrator, and Women’s Sexual Satisfaction (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999). 125. Maines, The Technology of Orgasm, 108–9. 126. Ellis, Studies in the Psychology of Sex 4, 40. 127. Ellis, Studies in the Psychology of Sex 3, 240. 128. Ellis, Studies in the Psychology of Sex 3, 240.

Notes 129. 130. 131. 132. 133.

134.

135. 136. 137. 138. 139. 140. 141. 142. 143. 144. 145. 146. 147. 148. 149. 150. 151. 152.

153. 154. 155. 156. 157.

287

Ellis, Studies in the Psychology of Sex 3, 206. Ellis, Studies in the Psychology of Sex 3, 206; cf. 219. Ellis, Studies in the Psychology of Sex 3, 205. Ellis, Studies in the Psychology of Sex 3, 241. Wilhelm Stekel, Die Geschlechtskälte der Frau: Eine Psychopathologie des weiblichen Liebeslebens (Berlin, Vienna: Urban & Schwarzenberg, 1920). The German edition we consulted dates from 1921. Wilhelm Stekel, Disorders of the Instincts and the Emotions. The Parapathiac Disorders. Frigidity in Woman, 2 vols (New York: Boni and Liveright, 1926). Authorized English version by James S. van Teslaar, I, 2. Stekel, Frigidity in Woman, I, 33. Stekel, Frigidity in Woman, I, 1. Stekel, Frigidity in Woman, II, 196. Stekel, Frigidity in Woman, II, 273. Stekel, Frigidity in Woman, I, 98. Stekel, Frigidity in Woman, I, 99–100. Stekel, Frigidity in Woman, I, 155–6. Stekel, Frigidity in Woman, I, 155. Stekel, Frigidity in Woman, I, 117; see also 118, 123. Stekel, Frigidity in Woman, I, 64. Stekel, Frigidity in Woman, I, 64. Stekel, Frigidity in Woman, I, 131. Stekel, Frigidity in Woman, I, 301n1. Stekel, Frigidity in Woman, II, 61. Stekel, Frigidity in Woman, I, 91. Stekel, Frigidity in Woman, II, 24. Stekel, Frigidity in Woman, I, 134. W[ilhelm] Stekel, Conditions of Nervous Anxiety and Their Treatment, introduction by Samuel Lowy (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1923) [Routledge reprint], vi. Stekel, Frigidity in Woman, I, 96–7. Stekel, Frigidity in Woman, I, 1. Stekel, Frigidity in Woman, I, 1. Stekel, Frigidity in Woman, II, 276. Stekel, Frigidity in Woman, II, 302.

8 Relocating Marie Bonaparte’s Clitoris 1. Betty Friedan, The Feminine Mystique (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1963), 101–2. 2. Kate Millet, Sexual Politics (London: Virago, 1979), 204. 3. Millet, Sexual Politics, 205. 4. Marie Bonaparte, La Sexualité de la femme, 3rd edn (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1967), 95–6. 5. Jean Walton, Fair Sex, Savage Dreams: Race, Psychoanalysis, Sexual Difference (Durham: Duke University Press, 2001), 85. 6. Anne Koedt, ‘The Myth of the Vaginal Orgasm’, in Radical Feminism, ed. A. Koedt, E. Levine and A. Rapone (New York: Quadrangle Books, 1973),

288

7.

8.

9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17.

18. 19. 20. 21.

22. 23. 24. 25.

26. 27. 28.

Notes 198–207; Ti-Grace Atkinson, Amazon Odyssey (New York: Links Books, 1974); Millet, Sexual Politics; Friedan, The Feminine Mystique. For a discussion of such views in Anglophone medical thought on frigidity in the post-World War II era, see Carolyn Herbst Lewis, ‘Waking Sleeping Beauty: The Premarital Pelvic Exam and Heterosexuality during the Cold War’, Journal of Women’s History 17 (2005): 86–101. Helene Deutsch, ‘The Psychology of Women in Relation to the Functions of Reproduction’, in The Psychoanalytic Reader: An Anthology of Essential Papers with Critical Introductions, ed. Robert Fliess (New York: International Universities Press, 1969), 165–79. Elizabeth Grosz, Sexual Subversions: Three French Feminists (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1989), 133–4. Dagmar Herzog, Sex after Fascism: Memory and Morality in Twentieth-Century Germany (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005), 12. Koedt, ‘The Myth of the Vaginal Orgasm’, 199. Atkinson, Amazon Odyssey, 168. Germaine Greer, The Female Eunuch (London: Paladin, 1987), 41–3. Rebecca Chalker, The Clitoral Truth: the Secret World at Your Fingertips (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2000). Betty Dodson ‘Vagina Monologues and V-Day’ (2001), accessed 2 July 2008, http://www.bettydodson.com/vaginano.htm. Leo Bersani, Homos (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), 261. Elizabeth Lloyd, ‘Pre-Theoretical Assumptions in Evolutionary Explanations of Female Sexuality’, Philosophical Studies 69 (1993): 139–53; David P. Barash, ‘Let A Thousand Orgasms Bloom!’, Evolutionary Psychology 3 (2005): 345–7. Beryl Lieff Benderly, ‘Remaking Love: the Feminization of Sex’, Psychology Today 20 (1986): 68–71. Angus McLaren, Twentieth-Century Sexuality: A History (Oxford: Blackwell, 1999), 116–17. Peter Gay, Freud, A Life For Our Time (London: Little Books Ltd, 2006), 519–21. Sigmund Freud, ‘Die Weiblichkeit’, in Neue Folge der Vorlesungen Einführung in die Psychanalyse, Gesammelte Werke, ed. Marie Bonaparte (Frankfurt: Fischer, n.d.), XV, 119–45. English translation from Freud, ‘Femininity’, Lecture XXXIII, New Introductory Lectures, The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, trans. and ed. James Strachey (London: Hogarth Press and the Institute of Pyscho-Analysis, 1995 [1953]) XXII, 130–1. Gay, Freud, A Life For Our Time, 508–9. Marie Bonaparte, Psychanalyse et biologie. Bibliothèque de psychanalyse et de psychologie clinique (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1952). Walton, Fair Sex, Savage Dreams. Thomas Laqueur, ‘Amor veneris, vel dulcedo appeletur’, in Fragments for a History of the Human Body, ed. Michael Feher, Ramona Nadaff and Nadia Tazi (New York: Zone Books, 1989), 233. Walton, Fair Sex, Savage Dreams, 100. Walton, Fair Sex, Savage Dreams, 143. Célia Bertin, Marie Bonaparte (Paris: Perrin, 1992), 328–31.

Notes

289

29. Marie Bonaparte, ‘Les deux frigidités de la femme’, Bulletin de la Société de Sexologie 1 (1932): 161–70. 30. Sigmund Freud, Sigmund Freud to Fliess, 14 November 1897, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, XXI, 270. 31. Sigmund Freud, Drei Abhandlungen zur Sexualtheorie, Gesammelte Werke (Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer Verlag, 1968), V, 27–146. English translation from Freud, ‘Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality’, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, VII, 221. 32. English translation in The Standard Edition, 226. 33. Sigmund Freud, Die ‘kulturelle’ Sexualmoral und die moderne Nervosität (1908), Gesammelte Werke, VII, 143–67. English translation from Freud, ‘Civilized’ Sexual Morality and Modern Nervous Illness. The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, 198–202. 34. Freud, Die ‘kulturelle’ Sexualmoral und die moderne Nervosität, 164. 35. Sigmund Freud, ‘Der Untergang des Ödipuskomplexes’ in Gesammelte Werke, XII, 369–402. English translations from: Sigmund Freud, ‘The Dissolution of the Oedipus Complex’ [1924], in The Freud Reader, ed. Peter Gay (London: Vintage, 1995), 665. 36. Gay, Freud, A Life For Our Time, 508. 37. Walton, Fair Sex, Savage Dreams, 94–5; Laqueur, ‘Amor veneris, vel dulcedo appeletur’, 100–1. 38. Bonaparte, La Sexualité de la femme, 20. 39. Bonaparte, La Sexualité de la femme, 8. 40. Bertin, Marie Bonaparte, 320–34. 41. Bonaparte, Psychanalyse et biologie, 15–16. 42. Gay, Freud, A Life For Our Time, 520. 43. Marie Bonaparte, Psychanalyse et biologie, 1–21. 44. Melanie Klein, The Psychoanalysis of Children (London: Hogarth Press, 1932); Karen Horney, ‘The Flight from Womanhood’, The International Journal of Psychoanalysis 7 (1926): 324–39. 45. Bertin, Marie Bonaparte, 293. 46. This surgical technique was discussed by Bonaparte using her pseudonym Narjani in Bonaparte, ‘Les deux frigidités de la femme’. 47. Wilhelm Stekel, Die Geschlechtskälte der Frau: eine Psychopathologie des weiblichen Liebeslebens (Berlin: Urban & Schwarzenberg, 1921). 48. Bonaparte, La Sexualité de la femme, 285. 49. Bertin, Marie Bonaparte, 314. 50. Gregorio Marañon, L’Evolution de la sexualité et les états intersexuels, trans. Dr Sanjurjo d’Arellano (Paris: Gallimard, 1931). 51. Phyllis Grosskurth, ‘The Shrink Princess’, New York Review of Books 29 (16 December 1982), 15. 52. Grosskurth, ‘The Shrink Princess’, 15–17. 53. Bertin, Marie Bonaparte, 118, 145. 54. Marie Bonaparte, Essai sur le regret obsédant (1960), MSS13169, ‘Princess Marie Bonaparte papers, 1889–1961’, Sigmund Freud Collection, Library of Congress. 55. Catulle Mendès, Méphistophéla, ed. Jean de Palacio (Paris: Seguier, 1993). 56. Bertin, Marie Bonaparte, 181. 57. Grosskurth, ‘The Shrink Princess’, 17.

290

Notes

58. Freud, Die ‘kulturelle’ Sexualmoral und die moderne Nervosität. 59. Walton, Fair Sex, Savage Dreams, 82. 60. Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo (London: Routledge, 1966), 116–17. 61. Bonaparte, La Sexualité de la femme, 4–11. 62. Bonaparte, La Sexualité de la femme, 21. 63. Walton, Fair Sex, Savage Dreams, 125–6. 64. Bertin, Marie Bonaparte, 123. 65. Bertin, Marie Bonaparte, 35, 332–6. 66. Stekel, Die Geschlechtskälte der Frau, vol. I. 67. Stekel, Die Geschlechtskälte der Frau, I, 108. 68. Robert Teutsch, Le Féminisme (Paris: Société Française d’éditions littéraires et techniques, 1934), 167–8. 69. Wilhelm Stekel, The Autobiography of Wilhelm Stekel, the Life Story of a Pioneer Psychoanalyst, ed. Emil A. Guntheil, intro. Hilda Stekel (New York: Liveright, 1950), 107. 70. Stekel, The Autobiography of Wilhelm Stekel, 183. 71. Stekel, The Autobiography of Wilhelm Stekel, 138. 72. Stekel, The Autobiography of Wilhelm Stekel, 173. 73. Mary Louise Roberts, Civilization Without Sexes: Reconstructing Gender in Postwar France, 1917–1927 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994); Laure Murat, La Loi du genre. Une histoire culturelle du ‘troisième sexe’ (Paris: Fayard, 2006). 74. Roberts, Civilization Without Sexes, fig. 15. 75. Panagiote Yocas, L’Influence de la guerre européenne sur la criminalité (Paris: Jouve & Co. Editeurs, 1926), 44–6. 76. Carolyn J. Dean, The Self and Its Pleasures; Bataille, Lacan and the History of the Decentered Subject (New York: Cornell University Press, 1992), 43. 77. Marie Bonaparte, ‘Le cas de Mme Lefèvre’, Revue française de psychanalyse 1 (1927): 149–98. 78. Bertin, Marie Bonaparte, 145. 79. Victor Margueritte, La Garçonne (Paris: Flammarion, 1922), 131. 80. Clément Vautel, Madame ne veut pas d’enfant (Paris: Albin Michel, 1924). 81. Roberts, Civilization Without Sexes, 1. 82. Grosskurth, ‘The Shrink Princess’, 17.

Conclusion 1. Thomas A. Widiger et al. (eds), DSM-IV Sourcebook (Washington, DC: American Psychiatric Association, c. 1994), 502. 2. J. G. Beck, ‘Hypoactive Sexual Desire Disorder: An Overview’, Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology 63 (1995): 919–27. 3. André Binet and Jean Hartemann, Les Rapports sexuels et leurs déficiences chez la femme, impuissance et frigidité, considérations cliniques, médico-légales, religieuses et sociales (Paris: Vigot Frères, 1950). See also André Binet, L’Amour et l’émotion chez la femme, esquisse psycho-physiologique (Vendôme, Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1933); and André Binet, La Vie sexuelle de la femme. Introduction à la gynécologie (Saint-Amand: R. Bussière, 1932).

Notes 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12.

13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18.

19. 20. 21.

22. 23. 24. 25.

291

Binet and Hartemann, Les Rapports sexuels, 8. Binet and Hartemann, Les Rapports sexuels, 99. Binet and Hartemann, Les Rapports sexuels, 8. Binet and Hartemann, Les Rapports sexuels, 99. Binet and Hartemann, Les Rapports sexuels, 134. Binet and Hartemann, Les Rapports sexuels, 138. Dr G. Bazoilles, Le Couple, ses triomphes . . . ses échecs. Impuissance et frigidité, causes et remèdes (Paris: Guy de Monceau, 1961). Bazoilles, Le Couple, 177–85. Dr M. Landry, Les Déficiences sexuelles masculines et la frigidité. Leur traitment par le stress nasal, traitments associés, 2nd edn (1958; repr. Paris: Maloine, 1962), 25. Arnold A. Lazarus, ‘The Treatment of Chronic Frigidity by Systematic Desensitization’, The Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease, 136 (1963): 272–8. Paul Quinchant, Impuissance et Frigidité, causes et traitements (Soissons: Andrillon, 1980), 214–18. Quinchant, Impuissance et frigidité, 11. Anne Albertini, Réflexions sur la frigidité féminine (Thesis in Medicine, Université de Paris 6, 1980). Dr Gilbert Tordjman, La Frigidité féminine et son traitement (Paris: Casterman, 1976). Pierre Beylau, ‘La Chute du pape de la sexologie’ (19 January 2007), accessed 30 June 2010, http://www.lepoint.fr/actualites-societe/la-chute-du-pape-dela-sexologie/920/0/47451. Patrick Wolf, Les Aliments contre les troubles sexuels: érection, frigidité, impuissance (Paris: Trajectoire, 2007). ‘Anorgasmia and Frigidity’, accessed 26 June 2010, http://www.sexoconseil. com/gb/sexology/anorgasmia-frigidity.html. See, for example, Mantak Chia and Douglas Adams, The Multi-Orgasmic Man: How Any Man Can Experience Multiple Orgasms and Dramatically Enhance His Relationship (New York: HarperCollins, 1996); Jack Morin, Anal Pleasure and Health: A Guide for Men and Women (San Francisco: Down There Press, 1998). Ray Moynihan, ‘The Marketing of a Disease: Female Sexual Dysfunction’, British Medical Journal 330 (2005): 192–4. Anthony F. Bogaert, ‘Asexuality: Prevalence and Associated Factors in a National Probability Sample’, Journal of Sex Research 41 (2004): 279–87. Jennifer Drew, ‘Frigidity’, in Sex and Society, ed. T. Cooke (New York: Marshall Cavendish, 2010), I, 285–6. ‘Frigidity’, Native Remedies, accessed 30 June 2010, http://www.nativere medies.com/ailment/frigidity-lack-of-sexual-desire-info.html.

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Index

acquired vs congenital disorders, 194, 199, 201, 212 Adler, Otto, 206–12, 215, 216, 221 Die mangelhafte Geschlechtsempfindung des Weibes, 206–12 Albertini, Anne, 253 Alfieri, Fernanda, 25 alienism, 161, 192–3 anaesthesia sexualis, see sexual anaesthesia anaphrodisia accompanied by nymphomania, 198 brought about by ‘moral’ causes, 61 distinguished from ‘agenesia’, 44 not a synonym for ‘impotence’, 58–59 antipathic sexual instinct, see inverted sexual instinct aphrodisiacs, 130, 167–8, 180 arctitudo, see narrowness in woman (arctitudo) Atkinson, Ti-Grace, 224, 225 Bajada, Joseph, 28–9, 34–35 Balzac, Honoré de, 132–42, 145–6, 147, 157 Physiologie du mariage, 132–42, 145–6 Barral, Georges, 58 Bazoilles, G., 252, 253 Beccalossi, Chiara, 35 Belliol, Jean-Alexis, 49, 50 Belot, Adolphe, 124 La Femme de glace, 124 Bersani, Leo, 226 Bertin, Célia, 238, 241 Binet, André, 250–2, 253 Bonaparte, Marie, 12, 69, 222–47, 251 Bourke, Joanna, 166

Bréviaire de l’amour expérimental, see Guyot, Jules Bright, Susie, 225 canon law definition of, 23–24 frigidity as a cause of impotence, 26–33 impotence according to, 26–33 case studies, proportion of females to males, 175–6, 187, 190, 197, 200–1, 207 Caufeynon, Dr, see Fauconney, Jean Cavanaugh, Tim, 7 Cerise, Laurent, 184 Chalker, Rebecca, 226 Chaperon, Sylvie, 17–19, 48, 59, 106 Charcot, Jean-Martin, 107, 112, 128, 156 Claretie, Jules, 119 Clinical Notes on Uterine Surgery, see Sims, J. Marion clitoris, sexual function of, 222–35 site of feminine sexual agency, 235 clitoris vs vagina, see Freud, Sigmund constructionist history, 3, 12–17, 19–20, 73, 213 contrary sexual instinct, see inverted sexual instinct copula perfecta, see marriage Corbin, Alain, 35, 50 Crozier, Ivan, 101–3 Darmon, Pierre, 24 Dartigues, J.-P., 80, 113–14, 142 Darwin, Charles, 204 Davidson, Arnold, 185 Debout, Emile, 73, 82, 88, 89, 92 De frigidis et maleficiatis, see Gregory IX, Pope degenerationism, 194–6, 220 311

312

Index

De la femme sous ses rapports, physiologique, moral et littéraire, see Virey, Julien-Joseph Delard, Eugène, 156–7 Le Désir: journal d’un mari, 156–7 De l’impuissance et de la stérilité, ou recherches sur l’anaphrodisie distinguée de l’agénésie, see Descourtilz, Michel-Etienne De sancto matrimonii sacramento disputationum, see Sanchez, Thomas Descourtilz, Michel-Etienne, 44–6, 67–8, 169 De l’impuissance et de la stérilité, ou recherches sur l’anaphrodisie distinguée de l’agénésie, 44 Le Désir: journal d’un mari, see Delard, Eugène Désormeaux, Dr, 111, 115, 117–18, 144, 146, 148, 149–50, 205 Deutsch, Helene, 225, 229, 234 Diderot, Denis, 34 Encyclopédie, 34 DSM (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual), 98, 249, 254–5 Dodson, Betty, 225, 226 Dowbiggin, Ian, 184, 193 Dubois, Placide-Joseph, 74, 90–1 Dubut de Laforest, Jean-Louis, 128–30 Dufaure de Laprade, Charles, 58 Du Saussay, Victorien, 121–3, 127, 158 Femme, amour, mensonges, 121–3, 127 Rires, sang et voluptés, 158 Dworkin, Andrea, 10, 125 dyspareunia, 207 electrical therapy for frigidity, 94–6, 98, 168, 180, 192, 199, 210 Ellis, Havelock, 81, 203–4, 205–6, 208, 212, 214–16 Englishness and frigidity, 128–9 Ensler, Eve, 226 The Vagina Monologues, 226 Epheyre, Charles, 158–9 Possession, 158–9 epidemiology, 203–4, 207, 214–15, 220, 233

epilepsy, 104 Eynon, Dr, 116, 120–1, 123–4, 144, 149 Fauconney, Jean, 104–5, 111, 113, 115, 117–18, 144, 146, 149–53, 159, 205, 250 Le Mariage et son hygiène, 149–50 female genital potency physiological description (Kobelt), 48–9 power of the vaginal sphincter, 79–81 production of seed in intercourse (Zacchia), 32 sharing in the sexual act (Garnier), 61, 64 treatment of genitals to increase it (Morel), 47–8 female sexual arousal disorder (FSAD), 7, 249, 254 Le Féminisme, see Teutsch, Robert feminist critique of ‘frigidity’, 1–4, 7, 9, 209, 248 of Bonaparte, 222–4, 230–2, 236, 246–7 of Freud, 222–8 feminist movements, 15–16, 208–10, 221 Femme, amour, mensonges, see Du Saussay, Victorien La Femme de glace, see Belot, Adolphe La Femme impossible, see Lesclide, Richard Féré, Charles, 107 fiction, see narrative fiction and representations of frigidity Fodéré, François-Emmanuel, 39–42, 45, 74–5, 92, 114 Traité de médecine légale et d’hygiène publique, 39–40 on coldness of temperament, 42 Fonssagrives, Jean-Baptiste, 58, 117 Formont, Maxime, 152–3 La Grande Amoureuse, 152–3 Foucault, Michel on canon law, 24–5 discourse, 118 genealogical method, 10–12

Index Histoire de la sexualité, 11–12, 15 on névroses, 169 on pathologization, 161 on words and things, 18–19, 101–3 Fournier, Henri, 108, 110 Friedländer, Kate, 229 Freud, Anna, 229, 236 Freud, Sigmund clitoral vs vaginal pleasure, 222–32, 234–6 Drei Abhandlungen zur Sexualtheorie, 232 female Freudians, 209, 222–3, 228–30, 236 Freudian model of sexuality, 12 Freud’s ‘misogyny’, 223–9, 248 Die ‘kulturelle’ Sexualmoral und die moderne Nervosität, 233 Vienna school, 216 Friedan, Betty, 223–4 ‘frigid’ as an insult, 9 frigidity paired with impotence, 8, 19, 25–32 FSAD, see female sexual arousal disorder (FSAD) fureur utérine, see nymphomania Fuss, Diana, 19 La Garçonne, see Margueritte, Victor Garnier, Pierre, 59–66, 117, 139, 146 L’Impuissance physique chez l’homme et la femme, 59–66, 140–1 Le Mariage dans ses devoirs, 139 La Stérilité humaine et l’hermaphrodisme, 62 on treatment of impotence and frigidity, 178–81 on vaginismus, 81–2 Gay, Peter, 228–9, 234, 235–6 genealogy as historical method, 11, 20, 23, 33 of frigidity, 1–2, 4, 10–12, 16–17, 25, 26, 27, 31 gender differentiation, 231–2, 237, 240–6 gender warfare, 242, 245 genital potency in females, see female genital potency

313

genres mixity of genres in the late 19th century, 104–6 reading themes across genres, 100–4 shifting hierarchies of, 103–4 Gillard, Gabriel, 74, 78, 89 Goldstein, Jan, 163 Gordon, Rae Beth, 104 Graily Hewitt, William Morse, 92 La Grande Amoureuse, see Formont, Maxime Greer, Germaine, 225 Gregory IX, Pope, 25, 26, 33–34 De frigidis et maleficiatis, 25, 26, 33–34 Grosskurth, Phyllis, 238, 247 Guex, Germaine, 229 Gunning, Josephus Henry, 93–5 Guyot, Jules, 57–8, 136–7, 146, 147, 205 Bréviaire de l’amour expérimental, 57–8, 136–7 Gyp, 141 Hacking, Ian, 14, 20 Hammond, William, 200, 211 on the ‘mental’, 186–9, 191 on vaginismus, 92–3 Hartemann, Jean, 250–2 Herzog, Dagmar, 225 Histoire morale des femmes, see Legouvé, Ernest Historical method see Foucault, Michel; genealogy; intellectual history, methods of history of sexuality, 9–10 critiqued by Jeffreys, 15 Horney, Karen, 228, 229, 234, 236, 237 Huguier, Pierre-Charles, 74, 75, 87 husband’s responsibility American vs French views, 96 double constraint on his behaviour, 143, 149–50, 159 husband the cause of frigidity, 54, 58, 149, 154, 219 husband the cause of vaginismus, 89, 150, 219

314

Index

husband’s responsibility – continued husband’s brutality, 90–1, 136, 138–43, 146–9, 151, 153–6 husband’s clumsiness, 90, 142, 147–9 husband’s excessive delicacy, 89–90, 149, 156–7 husband’s failure punished by nature, 151 marital rape, 133, 135, 146, 156, 158 need for great care, 140, 146 treatment needed for husbands, 210 hypoactive sexual desire disorder (HSDD), 249 Hygiène pratique des femmes, see Reinvillier, Aristide hypnotic suggestion, 199–201, 203, 211, 214–15 hysteria, 11, 155–6, 169, 198, 214, 235 disjunct from frigidity, 11, 164, 192 impotence impotentia coeundi, 26–32 impotentia generandi, 26–32 paired with frigidity, 8, 19, 26–31, 128 types of in canon law, 26–27 see also frigidity paired with impotence impotentia coeundi, see impotence impotentia generandi, see impotence L’Impuissance physique chez l’homme et la femme, see Garnier, Pierre inhibited sexual desire disorder (ISDD), 249 insane, treatment of, see alienism intellectual history, methods of, 9, 20–1, 224, 228, 230–1, 249 inverted sexual instinct, 197–9, 200, 218 Irigaray, Luce, 1–4, 9, 209, 224, 254 Isaacs, Susan, 229 Jaf, Dr, see Fauconney, Jean Jefferson, James, 7 Jeffreys, Sheila, 10, 14–16, 18, 209 Jones, Ernest, 228

Joran, Théodore, 125–6 Le Mensonge du féminisme, 125–6 Jugis, Peter J., 35 Kinsey, Alfred, 225 Klein, Melanie, 236, 237 Kobelt, Georg, 48–50, 59, 80, 211 Koedt, Anne, 224, 225 Krafft-Ebing, Richard von, 154, 193–200, 201, 208 Psychopathia sexualis, 193–9 therapeutic practices, 196–9 Labarthe, Paul, 105 Lampl-de Groot, Jeanne, 229 Landry, M., 252–3 Langlebert, Edmond, 107–8, 110 Laqueur, Thomas, 18, 101–2, 114, 204, 230, 234 one-sex and two-sex models, 52, 175 Largier, Niklaus, 19, 102 Laurent, Emile, 108–9 Lazarus, Arnold Allan, 252 Legouvé, Ernest, 137–8, 148 Legrand du Saulle, Henri, 107, 109, 191–2, 194 lesbianism, see sapphism Lesclide, Richard, 126–8 La Femme impossible, 126-8 Leuret, François, 163–4, 172–3, 182 Lhomond, Brigitte, 112–13 Lisfranc, Jacques, 75–6, 86 Le Livre des époux, see Roubaud, Félix Lloyd, Elizabeth, 226–7 Lombroso, Cesare, 128, 203–4 Lutaud, Auguste, 79, 85–7, 96 Mack-Brunswick, Ruth, 229 Madame ne veut pas d’enfant, see Vautel, Clément Mademoiselle de Tantale, see Dubut de Laforest, Jean-Louis Magnan, Valentin, 107 maleficium, 25, 26, 34 dismissed by Virey as archaic, 41 Die mangelhafte Geschlechtsempfindung des Weibes, see Adler, Otto Marañon, Gregorio, 237 McLaren, Angus, 104, 227–8

Index Maines, Rachel, 214 Maizeroy, René, 152 Margueritte, Victor, 242, 244–5 La Garçonne, 242, 244–5 Le Mariage dans ses devoirs, see Garnier, Pierre Le Mariage et son hygiène, see Fauconney, Jean marriage Catholic sacrament of, 25–32 copula perfecta, 28, 30, 52 impediments to, 25–32 unam carnem (one flesh), 28, 44 massage therapy for frigidity, 176, 214, 217 Masters and Johnson, 225, 253 Mendès, Catulle, 154–6, 239 Méphistophéla, 154–6, 239 Méphistophéla, see Mendès, Catulle Mercuriale, Girolamo, 30 Michon, Louis-Marie, 73, 82–3, 87, 88, 89 Millet, Kate, 223–4 Montalban, Charles, 141–2 Moore, David, 7 moral vs physical complexified by Krafft-Ebing, 194 connectedness and convergence of the two, 53, 56–7, 136, 179 genitals under the influence of the moral, 166, 173, 178 moral dimension of medicine, 37–9, 45 significance for history of psychology, 38, 184, 191 significance for treatment of frigidity, 161–5, 169–82, 212 strong distinction between the two (Garnier), 60–5 moral treatment, 66, 162–4, 172–5, 177, 182, 192, 197, 199, 202–3 Morel de Rubempré, Joseph, 46, 134–5 Murat, Laure, 243 narrative fiction and representations of frigidity, 119–23, 151–60

315

narrowness in woman (arctitudo) according to canon law, 27, 31 compared to vaginismus, 67–8, 82, 92 naturae frigidae, see Zacchia, Paolo névroses (‘neuroses’) defined, 47, 169 difficulty of treatment, 169–70 frigidity a névrose (Garnier), 65, 181–2 occurring in vaginal spasm (Roubaud), 77 normal ambiguity of the term in the nineteenth century, 63 heterosexual normality, 130, 231, 235, 237, 245 normal physiology, 211 normality incompatible with frigidity, 231 normative female sexuality, 224–5, 236, 240 normative male sexuality, 227, 246 nymphomania, 43, 130, 198, 204 similar to fureur utérine, 43 Oosterhuis, Harry, 184, 196, 198 pathologization of frigidity absence of pleasure as pathological, 53–56, 59 frigidity not an illness (Garnier), 65, 181 frigidity to be treated by gynaecologists, 97 pathologization of sexual behaviours, 161 Péladan, Joséphin, 153–4 Le Vice suprême, 153–4, 159 perversion frigidity as perversion, 155, 170–1 physical vs moral, see moral vs physical Physiologie du mariage, see Balzac, Honoré de Physiologie de la première nuit des noces, see Saint-Ernest, Octave de Pick, Daniel, 194 Pinel, Philippe, 163

316

Index

plagiarism, 110, 112–15 Possession, see Epheyre, Charles Pouillet, Thésée, 110, 171 A Practical Treatise on the Diseases of Women, see Thomas, Gaillard Prévost, Marcel, 124–5 psychiatry history of, 2, 184–5, 193–4, 201–3 psychical (psychique, psychisch), 182–3, 191, 194, 211, 212, 216–17 psychoanalysis, 173, 177, 206, 210, 212, 216–19, 222–47 aetiology and treatment of frigidity, 218–21 psychological, psychology, 162–3, 192–3, 211, 217 Psychopathia sexualis, see Krafft-Ebing, Richard von quack remedies for impotence and frigidity, 167 Quaestiones medico-legales, see Zacchia, Paolo Quinchant, Paul, 253 radical feminist movement, see feminist movements rape pregnancy after rape, 43 reveals the importance of the moral dimension in coitus, 166–7 within marriage, 133, 135, 146, 156, 158 Rauland, Dr, see Roubaud, Félix Reinvillier, Aristide, 136 Rhazis, Dr, 144, 146, 147, 150 Richepin, Jean, 108 Richet, Charles, 119 Riolan, Dr, 111, 115–16, 148 Roberts, Mary Louise, 243, 245 roman de mœurs, 119, 128, 130–1, 144, 156, 159–60, 239 Roubaud, Félix, 50–7, 72, 117, 137, 142, 195–7, 205–6, 211 critiqued by Garnier, 60, 62–5, 178–80 on methods of treatment, 165–79, 185, 192–3, 200, 210

on vaginismus, 76–7, 83–5, 87, 92, 176 Traité de l’impuissance et de la frigidité chez l’homme et la femme, 50–7, 76–7 uptake of Kobelt’s work, 50–1, 59, 80, 179 Rousseau, George, 35 Roussel, Pierre, 38–9, 43, 176 Système physique et moral de la femme, 38–9 Rycroft, Charles, 7 Saint-Ernest, Octave de, 134–6 Le Sang, see Vaudère, Jane de la Sanchez, Thomas, 26–9, 34 compared with nineteenth-century medicine, 40–1, 42, 45, 46, 52, 53, 66 De sancto matrimonii sacramento disputationum, 26–9 on frigidity in women, 27 on impotentia coeundi, 27–9 sapphism, 155–6, 170–1 Sartin, Jeffey, 92 Schiebinger, Londa, 13 Schrenck-Notzing, Albert von, 196, 200–1 Serre, Michel, 254 sexual anaesthesia, 194–7, 200, 203–8, 211, 212–15, 217–19, 233, 240 Sexual Politics, see Millet, Kate Simpson, Sir James Young, 91–2 Sims, J. Marion, 69–73, 78–9, 80, 208 on aetiology of vaginismus, 87, 89–90 Clinical Notes on Uterine Surgery, 69, 72 his operation criticized, 87–8, 91, 93–7 on surgical treatment of vaginismus, 71, 82–7, 91 Slav descendency, 155–6 Soyre, A de, 83, 85 spasm of female genitals, 67–8, 70–82, 85–6, 99 Sprinkle, Annie, 225 Stapfer, Horace, 214

Index Stekel, Wilhelm, 216–21, 232, 237, 242–3, 245 Die Geschlechtskälte der Frau, 216–21 Stephens, Elizabeth, 204 La Stérilité humaine et l’hermaphrodisme, see Garnier, Pierre sterility distinguished from impotence by Descourtilz, 40–1 by Roubaud, 50–2 by Garnier, 60 Sundahl, Deborah, 225 Sylvius, Dr, 72–3, 76 Système physique et moral de la femme, see Roussel, Pierre Tableau de l’amour conjugal, see Venette, Nicolas Tardieu, Ambroise, 107, 109, 120, 205 temperament anaphrodisia independent of temperament (Descourtilz), 45 coldness of temperament equivalent to frigidity (Virey), 42–3 does not explain female impotence (Roubaud), 54, 56–7 older theories of, 33, 204–5 older theories recycled in modern editions of Venette, 145 rejected by Adler, 207 Teutsch, Robert, 242, 243, 245 Le Féminisme, 242 themes, historical mobility of, 1–4 mobility of ‘frigidity’ as a theme, 17–20, 100–4, 114, 228 Thoinot, Léon, 107 Thomas, Gaillard, 78 A Practical Treatise on the Diseases of Women, 85, 87 Thompson, Nellie, 230 Thure-Brandt method, 214 Tordjman, Gilbert, 253 Traité de l’impuissance et de la frigidité chez l’homme et la femme, see Roubaud, Félix Traité de médecine légale et d’hygiène publique, see Fodéré, François-Emmanuel traitement moral, see moral treatment

317

unam carnem, see marriage uterine furor, see nyphomania vagina vs clitoris, see Freud, Sigmund vaginismus, 67–99 aetiology, 84, 87–90, 97, 200–1, 212, 219–20 medical examination, 78–9, 85–6, 201, 208 nosological description, 66–78, 99 treatment, 82–4, 89, 91, 93, 98, 201, 212 Vaudère, Jane de la, 151–2 Le Sang, 151–2 Vautel, Clément, 245 Madame ne veut pas d’enfant, 245 Venette, Nicolas, 144–6 Tableau de l’amour conjugal, 144–6 Veyne, Paul, 102 Viagra, 254–5 Le Vice suprême, see Péladan, Joséphin Virey, Julien-Joseph, 41–3, 50, 52, 54 De la femme sous ses rapports, physiologique, moral et littéraire, 43 Visca, P.-F., 74, 76, 88, 89, 90 visible symptoms of frigidity in Fonssagrives, 59 in Roubaud, 54–5 in Virey, 42 in Zacchia, 31–2 Voltaire, 33, 34 voluntary sexual coldness, 123–6 ‘Un Voluptueux’, 124–5 Walton, Jean, 224, 230, 234, 241 Weisz, George, 105 Wolf, Patrick, 253 women psychoanalysts, see psychoanalysis Yocas, Panagiote, 244 Zacchia, Paolo, 26–33, 34–5 compared with nineteenth-century medicine, 39, 40, 43, 44, 45, 46, 47, 51, 68, 72, 92, 194, 196, 198 on frigidity in women, 29–32 naturae frigidae, 196, 198, 207 Quaestiones medico-legales, 26–32 Zola, Emile, 108–9