Sex and (the historical) Sensibility: Sickness, Seaside, Seduction

In my last post, I wrote about needing to know about Regency boating attire. And how the good advice I got from generous colleagues in the romance writing biz helped me develop the boating scene I was writing.

Which scene happily led to The Seduction Scene by the Sea.

Mutual seduction, let me add, a good time being had by all including the author.

Because I'm not the kind of romance writer who's given to protest that she writes the hot stuff purely in the Service of Plot and Character Development and at great personal cost to herself. Erotic writing, as I always stress in the Writing the Hot Historical workshops Janet Mullany and give from time to time, ought to be its own reward. While also, of course, carrying with it the feeling of its historically understood world, quite as fully as any other scene in the novel.

My own shorthand for thinking this way is that while you probably need to get some of characters' clothes off (in this case, the boating costume I worked so hard to put together), you don't want to ignore the constraints and complexities of authentic period underwear.

Or the constraints and complexities of a period's assumptions and beliefs -- many of which I've been happily learning on a website Kalen recommended to me during the discussion of beach attire (and of which I've recently become a Facebook fan). The Jane Austen Society of Australia offers a wonderful set of discussions of Jane Austen "at the seaside": reports of talks recently given to the Society, both about Austen's own travels to English seaside resorts, and about how the various venues figure in her work.

Reading these discussions (as well as one important source, Roger Sales's book Jane Austen and Representations of Regency England), I felt once again the pleasure of researching historical romance: the discovery of everyday meanings in earlier times, of assumptions and associations we wouldn't make now, but which were only common sense then.

As in the title of this post. Sickness, seaside, and seduction are not a set of categories I would have thought to link together (as Sales does in his chapter on Emma). But the more I considered it, the more sense it made.

Of course we know that the state of medical science was pretty primitive. No antibiotics to kill germs -- well, there was no germ theory of disease. We sometimes finesse this in our romance novels by imagining a wise herbalist, often a woman, who can cure this or that via the natural antibodies in this or that leaf or twig.

And doubtless there were such healers. But in the main, this was a society that knew a great deal of invalidism, whose middle and upper classes built a holiday culture of health resorts based upon dubious therapeutic regimens, and whose popular imagination held some highly romanticized views of disease -- particularly of tuberculosis, or (as it was so evocatively called) consumption, with the hectic flush, the wasting, the heightened sensitivity the popular culture attributed to it.

Jane Austen, who had a hypochondriac for a mother, wasn't much for romanticizing disease. What we remember instead are her tyrannical or comically passive-aggressive semi-invalids like Mr. Woodhouse and Mrs. Churchill of Emma. Nor do we find much about consumption -- perhaps because the creator of popular romance fiction had her own wonderfully complex and highly ambivalent views of the romantic sensibility (qua Marianne Dashwood in Sense and Sensibility and Captain Benwick languishing over Byron in Persuasion); or because this most poetical of nineteenth century conditions was perhaps more readily seen as a disease of urban bohemians and the demimonde.

But consumption does lurk (at least in memory) along the sunny country lanes of Emma's Highbury. Jane Fairfax's mother (née the younger Miss Bates) died of it (along with grief for her husband killed in battle) when Jane was three. Miss Bates never speaks of it, but I think I hear the worry behind her voice every time Jane shows sign of catching a cold. And though it's ultimately impossible to prove a literary point by its absence, it makes sense to me that the threat is simply too real and too frightening for even Miss Bates to chatter about.

What people do chatter about in Highbury, and of course at length, is what they eat, how they keep warm and dry, whether or not to take the sea air at the coast, and which of the resorts along the coasts to frequent. Jane Austen wasn't much for the culture of inland watering places -- some of her finest satire is reserved for the manners and customs at Bath (we're ready to think the worst of the wife Mr. Elton finds there even before he introduces her to the citizens of Highbury).

But Austen did enjoy sea bathing, via the curious contrivance of bathing-machines, closed carriages in which you changed into bathing attire, were pulled into the sea, opened the doors, and were helped into the water by "dippers" employed for that purpose. One of the most delightful pages at the JASA site discusses this activity in detail. I've linked to some of the illustrations, and urge you to check out the discussion itself.

And how nice, given the state of medical science, that such a pleasant set of pseudo-therapies developed. During the Regency, those who could afford it went to watering places for a wide variety of illnesses; it seems to me they drank mineral water or plunged into the sea for just about everything -- in Emma, Jane Fairfax's guardian Colonel Campbell goes to Weymouth in hope of a cure for deafness; one hopes he had a good time anyway.

For Bath and Brighton, Weymouth and Ramsgate became a great deal more than health resorts -- and it's certainly not surprising that resorts originally devoted to physical culture would also come to be places of sociability, sexual license, and perhaps even a whiff of exotic foreignness.

The Prince Regent built his pavilion at Brighton. And Brighton was where Wickham successfully seduced Lydia Bennet, after failing to have his way with Georgiana Darcy at Ramsgate. Jane Fairfax and Frank Churchill became secretly engaged at Weymouth. According to Roger Sales, "watering places were among the favored refuges for French émigrés during the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars." Mr. Knightley, that staunchest defender of English values, worries that Frank Churchill may be bringing French manners to Highbury, when he tells Emma that "your amiable young man can be amiable only in French, not in English."

Clearly, as Sales points out, Emma is built around a struggle between the values of Frank's looser, Frenchified, watering-place morals and the "true" Englishness of Mr. Knightley's squire-archical Highbury Village. And yet, as Sales also reminds us, when Mr. Knightley and Emma (who up until now has never even seen the sea) do take their honeymoon journey, it's for two weeks at the seaside.

All of which makes me want to travel to Brighton, to Weymouth, even to Chesil Beach, site of Ian McEwan's achingly sad and beautiful novel (an anti-romance, I think, that comes awfully close to romance in a strange and compelling way).

Have any of you traveled on the English coast? Where shall I go?

And (with a nod to Susan Sontag's Illness as Metaphor, which got me thinking about consumption): how many literary and artistic consumptives can you list, from Mimi in La Bohème to Keats and Kafka?