Body Fluid Desire: My Secret Life.

Hall, Donald E.

While feminist theory and applied criticism has usefully isolated certain qualities of Victorian and post-Victorian masculinity that the now widely-used term "phallic" accurately captures, other manifestations of male behavior and belief have gone generally unnoticed. The erotic autobiography My Secret Life expresses a surprising dissatisfaction with rigid gender roles and forms of sexual expressions; it reveals a continuing fixation on fluidity (even a fetishization of actual bodily fluids) that opens up the possibility of more viscous, metamorphic, and unstable masculinities. Yet even as the narrator appears to strain toward fluid forms of sexual expression, the text also reveals the discursive barriers inhibiting such exploration.

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Numerous illuminating studies of twentieth-century Anglo-American and Continental masculinities have traced back through the nineteenth century a persistent connection between the rigidity and penetrative trajectory of many men's social roles vis-a-vis women (and a host of feminized "others") and the physical qualities of the alternately pen-like, sword-like, gun-like erect penis--metaphors not imposed on, but emerging insistently from philosophy, literature, and the arts. (1) Indeed, the historical significance of what has been termed "phallicism" is beyond question, (2) with some of its most enduring qualities captured succinctly in Herbert Sussman's account of early Victorian representations: "In Carlyle's vision, male is to female as order is to chaos, external hardness to internal fluidity, boundedness to dissolution, containment to eruption, health to disease" (21). (3) As Sussman and others have argued, masculinity's "phallic" parameters are hardly unique to the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, yet certainly they have been both exacerbated and uniquely inflected by post-Enlightenment tensions between and within science and religion, simultaneously-occurring new threats to ruling-class male power posed by women and the lower classes, and exponentially increasing suspicions regarding the inherently unfixed nature of men's and women's social roles. (4)

These are standard readings of Victorian and post-Victorian masculinities, ones that I wish only to complicate here rather than dispute, to augment rather than supplant. The range of behavior and belief among men of the last two centuries is wide, and while the significance of phallicism as a cultural force is clear, coexisting with its most prevalent forms are less common--but still quite noteworthy--undercurrents of discontent and subversion by some men. Critics working in the field of gay studies, for example, have pointed out those sites of response and resistance found in works by gay (and, one might say, "proto"-gay) men whose partly-in/partly-out states of social privilege have made for compelling explorations of negotiation and revision. (5) But certainly discontent with prevailing paradigms can cut across both orientational and sexual boundaries. Heterosexual/homosexual, male/female: the slashes between those terms do not invariably represent the lines of battle separating homogenous groups of oppressors and oppressed individuals, (6) though certainly those slashes are not meaningless. In turning now to a text in which a heterosexually hyperactive man is fascinated by--indeed, writes with considerable longing about--the qualities of viscosity rather than phallic rigidity, (7) I will explore the sometimes fuzzy line separating the behaviors associated with the previously mentioned terms, a line as shifting and indeterminate as the text's own substance of obsessive interest: semen.

In My Secret Life, an apparently factual, anonymous text first published in 1888, (8) the erotically adventurous narrator Walter H. becomes interested in his own semen upon his discovery of its existence during an accidental masturbatory session in early adolescence:

 One day I ... had a cock-stand, and felt again my prick sore, and
 was washing it with warm water, when it swelled up. I rubbed it
 through my hand, which gave me unusual pleasure, then a voluptuous
 sensation came over me quickly so thrilling and all pervading that
 I shall never forget it. I sunk on to a chair, feeling my cock
 gently, the next instant spunk jetted out in large drops, a full
 yard in front of me, and a thinner liquid rolled over my knuckles.
 I had frigged myself, without intending it.... Then came
 astonishment, mingled with disgust. I examined the viscid, gruelly
 fluid with greatest curiosity, smelt it, and I think tasted it.
 (44)

As a surprising by-product of a mysterious new process, semen's interest for Walter here is perhaps unsurprising (though tasting it does indicate a degree of interest that presages much). Yet soon thereafter, his curiosity takes a striking turn:

 [O]ne Sunday I had erections all day long. After dinner lust drove
 me nearly mad, so I went to my room, took a clean sheet of white
 paper, and frigged myself over it. My prick only slightly subsided,
 I frigged myself again.... I may say here that on several occasions
 of my life I have frigged myself over a clean sheet of foolscap
 paper; it was done mostly for curiosity, to see what my sperm was
 like, whether it was as thin or as thick, or as large a quantity as
 at the last time I had previously masturbated. (132)

While Walter does not offer a sustained "reading" of his semen in this passage, it and the numerous others that I discuss below reveal that semen operates consistently as a "text" within the text of My Secret Life, its quantity and qualities bearing a wide variety of potential meanings. Semen's color, smell, and even taste, its origins and targets, all suggest interpretive possibilities. (9) It can operate metaphorically, metonymically, or both simultaneously. Yet through and beyond all of the possible readings of semen that I will explore here, Walter returns time and again to its lubricious qualities: "my spunk--his spunk--her spunk--all in her cunt together.... The idea of my prick being drowned in these mixed exudations overwhelmed me libidinously" (386). (10) Physical manifestations of fluidity and shifting forms of erotic pleasure are linked throughout My Secret Life, are key, in fact, to its own narrative flow. In reading the seminal text within the text of Waiter's narrative, I would suggest that we too "go with the flow" and allow for multiple and shifting interpretive possibilities.

Semen is a slippery text, one presenting daunting interpretive challenges for those trying to fix, once and for all, its cultural and (in the Victorian era certainly) its biological meanings. (11) Waiter's narrative emerges from a context of intermittent and only very tentative interest in semen. The influential British sexologist William Acton, working in the decades of My Secret Life's setting, was also overwhelmed finally by semen, not "libidinously" as Walter was, but rather by its quantitative and qualitative variety. In The Functions and Disorders of the Reproductive Organs Acton constructs a chart based on the work of a Dr. Davy, Assistant Inspector of Army Hospitals, who extracted semen from the cadavers of twenty men (see Figure 1). At first glance Acton seems as eager as Walter to place semen on paper for the purpose of gaining understanding through physical comparison. But Acton, as a reader of another physician's work on dead men, is textually far removed from the ejaculation of semen or even a close physical examination of it; he never mentions any professional contact with the substance. For Acton, semen exists only as a print text. He therefore can draw no conclusions about the relationship between semen and his topic--sexual functions and disfunctions--beyond unsupported admonishments such as "to obtain perfect and fertile semen some rest must follow each sexual effort" (136). (12) Acton opens his commentary with a disclaimer: "Science is very deficient in any accurate examination of the state of seminal secretions. It is a field still open to the examination of strict observers, and would amply repay the trouble" (132); he closes the same section with another: "in the human adult the seminal fluid varies much in different subjects, at different times, and at different ages. Thus it may be more or less matured and elaborated, and it may be secreted in larger or smaller quantities. I do not think sufficient attention has been paid to these circumstances" (135). (13) Yet in spite of such calls for action, Acton certainly seems loath to pursue further research; despite his text going through six different British editions over the course of three decades, he records only the sketchy work of others while simultaneously chastising his colleagues for their general inattention. (14) He appears far more interested in repeatedly warning his readers about the dangers of losing semen through masturbation and other forms of incontinency than he is in actually looking at a specimen of it.

[FIGURE 1 OMITTED]

Acton's work provides clues to the discourses pervading a specific place and time--Britain during the middle decades of the nineteenth century--even as a few American doctors (such as Homer Bostwick) and British sexologists of the turn of the century (Havelock Ellis, for example) were slightly less loath to interact with semen as a rich and multivalent text. (15) Yet even such spotty attention stands out as rare exceptions to the general rule of silence on semen, one that Luce Irigaray has argued characterizes much of Western history and philosophy:

 [W]e might ask (ourselves) why sperm is never treated as an object
 a? Isn't the subjection of sperm to the imperatives of reproduction
 alone symptomatic of a preeminence historically allocated to the
 solid (product)? And if, in the dynamics of desire, the problem of
 castration intervenes--fantasy/reality of an amputation, of a
 "crumbling" of that solid that the penis represents--reckoning with
 sperm-fluid as an obstacle to the generalization of an economy
 restricted to solids remains in suspension. (113)

Calvin Thomas has elaborated recently on Irigaray, stating that "Semen must remain invisible both sexually and discursively, both to perception and to apperception, to the eye and to the mind's eye" (59), for "the phallogocentric economy converts all fluids to solids.... works ... to convert the semen that flows out of the male body into the hard skull of the (preferably male) child that finally emerges from the female's conscripted womb" (53). Yet any discussion of semen is not only complicated by that substance's implication of fluidity at the core of the spuriously ever-rigid phallus, semen itself is rendered further disquieting because it is not even a free-flowing liquid (as water or urine is), but rather a viscous substance. The indeterminacy of the viscous threatens the binary "solid/fluid"; furthermore, it undermines the reified status of other binaries in whose service solid/fluid has been deployed.

Viscosity's best-known cultural critic to date has been Jean-Paul Sartre, whose Being and Nothingness (though written 60 years after the publication of My Secret Life) captures usefully certain stereotypically "phallic" responses to that which threatens to undermine hardness, boundedness, and containment (to adopt Sussman's terms). Sartre asserts, "even very young children show evidence of repulsion in the presence of something slimy, as if it were already combined with the psychic" (771). But as Bataille says of our reaction to another "repulsive" substance, "We cannot even know if excrement smells bad because of our disgust for it, or if its bad smell is what causes our disgust" (62). Sartre's truisms may capture prevailing paradigms but certainly not the ways those paradigms were and are subverted (it is hard to know what Sartre would think of the recent mass marketing of candies such as "Boogers" and "Slime," and toys such as 1995's "Dr. Dreadful's Squeem Lab," which oozes edible goo from a figure's mouth and ears). Indeed, some of the powerfully cultural, though potentially mutable, bases of Sartre's profound "horror of the slimy" (778) are revealed in his perception of its "constant hysteresis ... a spreading out like the flattening of the full breasts of a woman who is lying on her back" (775). For Sartre, the slimy, the viscous, is inherently "feminine" (776); yet the full measure of its potentially deconstructive threat to hardness/boundedness/containment/health is revealed in his binary-undermining admission, "the slimy is myself" (777). In the viscous, Sartre finds physically manifest an indeterminacy that challenges some of Western culture's most fundamental ontological categories: solid/fluid, order/chaos, self/other. Nevertheless, he insists that "the slimy, the greasy, a hole, etc. [cannot lose] their general ontological meaning" (782). In rigid fashion, the slimy simply must be "feminine" because it is so clearly non-rigid. Sartre will finally force a binary of masculinity and femininity onto a substance that could help reveal the untenability of those terms. He is trapped in a tautology, leading him to beg the question, "what kind of person am I if ... I love the slimy?" (783). Indeed, given the parameters above, how could he respond? The formlessness, changeability, and uncontainability of the slimy connect it almost inextricably with a host of phallic fears concerning a loss of control and self-possession, ones both constituting and accounting for some of the most oppressive nineteenth- and twentieth-century constructions of gender. (16)

Yet fundamental to most recent theories of political agency, (17) and to this essay, is the belief that some degree of extrication from and interrogation of the definitional forces surrounding one is possible, if one's questions are more than rhetorical and if one's "will to knowledge" carries one beyond a statement of challenge to others. (18) Certainly a potential starting point for disruption of the rigid, naturalized tautology of phallicism (masculinity = rigidity = masculinity) is active inquiry into what "natural" means, but that potential (as we see with Sartre) is wholly contingent upon how thoroughly phallicism has already corrupted one's position as a seeker of knowledge, with what rigidity one conducts one's inquiries, and finally, how rigidly one clings to the a priori. Of course, all of these variables are themselves evident in degrees rather than appearing in cut and dry, neatly binary form. Thus while active inquiry is evident throughout My Secret Life, it is a text that also reveals to us how such questioning is always already shaped by the very discursive context it may work finally to abrade.

This dynamic too has received only spotty critical attention. In her rich and nuanced study of pornographic representation, Linda Williams briefly notes that

 One of the most striking features of the 1888 My Secret Life is its
 male protagonist's incessant desire to investigate the genitals of
 his numerous female sexual conquests--not just to feel his own
 pleasure and to witness the social disruption caused when a woman's
 pleasure diverges from communal expectations of female modesty, but
 to have a precise knowledge of the details of her pleasure. (31)

But I would suggest that My Secret Life is not so much a text narrating the sexual "conquest" of women as it is one detailing an obsessive acquisition of sexual knowledge, for certainly the birth of Waiter's "incessant desire ... to have a precise knowledge ... of ... pleasure" predates and exceeds any heterosexual activity:

 He commenced moving his hand quickly up and down on his prick,
 which got stiffer and stiffer, he jerked up one leg, then the
 other, shut his eyes, and altogether looked so strange that I
 thought he was going to have a fit, then out spurted little pasty
 lumps, whilst he snorted, as some people do in their sleep, and
 fell back in the chair with his eyes closed; then I saw stuff
 running thinner over his knuckles. I was strangely fascinated as I
 looked at him, and at what was on the carpet, but half thought he
 was ill. (26-27)

Of course, in this scene (which occurs when he is about thirteen), Walter's "strange fascination" at the spectacle of semen production is tinged with concern for the health of his exhibitionistic young relative. Given the historical and "psychic" limitations traced above, it appears inevitable that the spectacle of the swooning orgasm and the snorting, strange production of the "pasty lumps" and "thinner stuff' would be taken as a revelation of an ever-present threat to male self-possession, one of potential physical debilitation, with semen's transgressive move from inside to outside indicating points of weakness in the outer armor defining and defending the masculine self. (19)

Indeed, Victorian science lent its full support to such fears, with one of the most widely accepted sexual "truths" of the era being a connection between the spillage of semen and an exhaustion of male power. Acton discusses at length "spermatorrhoea," the diseased "state of enervation produced, at least primarily, by the loss of semen" (146), a Victorian medical obsession as G.J. Barker-Benfield and others have pointed out. (20) Michel Foucault traces such anxieties back to Greek theories of semen's inherent preciousness and of ejaculation as "expenditure":

 [E]manating from the whole body, or coming for the most part from
 the head, semen is regarded as the result of a process that
 separates, isolates, and concentrates "the most potent part" of the
 bodily fluid: to ischyrotaton. This force is manifested in the rich
 and foamy nature of semen, and in the violence with which it is
 expelled; it is also evidenced in the weakness that is always felt
 after coition, however small the amount excreted.... In every
 emission of sperm there was something that was issued, and was
 withdrawn, from the most precious elements of the individual. (131)

For Aristotle and, indeed, for Acton and his contemporaries, "Whether semen is drawn from the whole organism, or originates where the body and soul are joined to one another, or is formed at the end of a lengthy internal processing of food, the sexual act that expels it constitutes a costly expenditure for the human being" (Foucault 132-133). Waiter's godfather confronts him with these "facts" after hearing from a schoolmaster that Walter too has indulged in "frigging": "You look ill ... you've been frigging yourself.... I can see it in your face, you'll die in a mad-house, or of consumption" (45). Though Walter denies his activity to his godfather, he later capitulates briefly to the general wisdom; he and several friends leave off frigging after "having come to the conclusion [that it] made people mad and worse, prevented them afterwards from fucking and having a family. Fred, my favorite cousin, arrived at the same conclusion--by what mental process we all arrived at it I don't know" (49). Of course that "conclusion" is overdetermined; more remarkable is that such a conclusion is not, itself, conclusive.

"Why?" is a question that is difficult to answer definitively, one that can only be met with fluid speculation rather than rigid declaration. If we find traces of the "normal" in Waiter's reaction here--and inevitably throughout his narrative--they seem thoroughly complicated by a continuing desire to expand his knowledge beyond received parameters. Certainly his "strange fascination" in the scene recounted above did not contribute to a perfectly seamless conflation of semen expenditure and sickness: "Afterwards he frigged himself several times before me, and at his request I frigged him, wondering at the result, and amused, yet at the same time much disgusted. ... This was the first time I ever saw frigging and male semen, and it opened my eyes" (27); later he adds, "After having seen frigging, it set me reflecting" (30). (31) That process of reflection never ends, though it comes in constant conflict with social norms that inhibit reflection. Indeed, we can read Waiter's simultaneous feelings of disgust and wondering amusement above as the tension between the social and that ineffable which counters the social--call it the critical, the curious, the iconoclastic, or the idiosyncratic--even as the summary statements "it opened my eyes" and "it set me reflecting" lay the bases for the narrative that follows, one in which Waiter's forever awakened will to sexual knowledge will even lead him to an investigation of why his own responses are so thoroughly complicated.

That investigation soon continues, in spite of his "conclusion" above. Both Walter's father and godfather die, and at the same time, he experiences his "first wet dream; that set me frigging again.... [M]y imagination was very ripe" (49). With the removal of the most immediate voices of phallic authority and with his imagination-driven resumption of what we might call "hands on" research, Walter achieves a degree of critical engagement that is not even evinced in the scientific writings of the era. While he still carries a "feeling of disgust at [him]self ... after frigging" (64), his desire for physical pleasure and for knowledge push him past a point of reliance upon seemingly incontrovertible "feeling." This is a quest that soon includes female partners but that evinces a flexibility and interest in reciprocity that Williams' term "conquest" wholly belies. When Waiter's first lover, Charlotte, expresses "curiosity about male emissions,"

 I told her how the sperm spurted out, then discussing women's, she
 told me of the pleasure I had given her when fingering her in the
 manner described already; we completed our explanations by my
 frigging myself to show her, and then my doing the same to her with
 my finger. I bungled at that, and think I hear her now saying, "No,
 just where you were is nicest." "Does it give you pleasure?"
 "Oh, yes, but I don't like it that way, oh!--oh!--I am doing
 it--oh!" (70)

Walter's methodology is decidedly unscientific, but in presuming little a priori knowledge in the scene above ("each of us knew about as much as the other, and we had much to learn" [74]) he seems more capable than many men of his age of actually acquiring factual information about his own sexuality and that of women. (22) Slightly later he tells us, "[f]rom Charlotte I had my first knowledge of menstruation and of other mysteries of her sex. Ah! that menstruation was a wonder to me, it was marvellous, but all was really a wonder to me then" (74). And most pertinent to my argument here is the fact that by conducting extensive primary research, without knowledge of the erroneous notions guiding that of others, Walter is finally able to read more accurately than his scientific counterparts certain aspects of semen and its production:

 How the young beggar's legs quivered as his juice left him. Nelly
 leant over and looked as he spent.--His sperm was thinner than it
 should have been, tho he said he had neither fucked for a
 fortnight, nor frigged himself for a week. I believe he lied.--My
 sperm would have been at his age thicker after a week's abstinence.
 (568-569)

Here and elsewhere in the text, semen's thickness and quantity are signs of short-term sexual activity or inactivity: a reading of it can reveal something of one's immediate history, but little beyond that. Walter learns that while semen may be depleted, it is also quickly renewed, which leads to his relinquishing much of his personal anxiety over its expenditure: "I was delighted with the spunk we left on the sheets; then we dined at the Cafe, and went back to the baudy house" (124-125).

Yet certainly such "delight" in semen bespeaks of something more than its utility as a text conveniently and accurately revealing short-term history; indeed, semen not only remains a focus of extraordinary attention, it even becomes a locus of desire: "She opened her thighs, there a glut of manhood was in and about her cunt, the oscillations of her buttocks, and the sight of his prick had moved my lusts to its depths, the sight of the sperm finished me, my prick stood stiff and up into her it went" (496). Semen has taken on a fetish value for Walter. (23) Beginning with a scene recounted from his late adolescent years, Walter expresses a burgeoning desire to touch semen in and see it around the vaginas of the women with whom he has sex: "One night when I was full of sperm I made her remain in the exact posture until all my spunk had run out of her cunt, and sat holding a candle towards her rump till I was satisfied with the sight; and more than once kept her in that position, looking at the gruelly lips until I fucked her a second time" (133-134). These are scenes seemingly tailor-made for a Freudian reading of "fetish," which (though slightly anachronistic--after all, Walter was writing during Freud's childhood) might suggest that Waiter's interest is an attempt to assuage castration anxiety. Semen, conveniently representing the phallus through metonymy, becomes libidinally invested as a temporary, but comforting, replacement for the missing phallus of the woman. (24)

Yet even though intriguing, such a reading remains far too partial; it is clear, for instance, that a reading of semen as "fetish" in My Secret Life can work in a Marxist sense as well. As a substance that is both expended and reaccumulated, semen is clearly similar to another such "resource": money. Stephen Heath has usefully read My Secret Life through such a lens, relating its sexual ideologies to those of competitive capitalism. He points out that the verb "to spend" connects an "economy of the body" with a "commerce of bodies," specifically in the buying of prostitutes: "In a drastic condensation of this mirroring play of expenditures, Walter at one point recounts the fascinated pleasure he gained from filling a prostitute's vagina with silver shillings, eighty in all" (14). Williams also makes a pertinent point when she connects the "money shot" (the scene of male ejaculation in porn films) to the dynamics of consumer culture: "Perhaps in the money shot's repeatedly inflated 'spending' penis we can see condensed all of the principles of late capitalism's pleasure-oriented consumer society: pleasure figured as an orgasm of spending; the fetish not simply as commodity but as the surplus value of orgasm" (108). While Waiter's narrative obviously predates "late capitalism," his fetishization of semen arguably depends upon an elision of the various meanings of "spending" and the deployment of class-based power that helps fill an existential void. And certainly it is noteworthy that even at his most inquisitive, Walter never directly interrogates the economic power that he wields over the many women whom he pays for sex.

Yet as useful as an interpretive connection between semen and money is, Waiter's notion of "spending" certainly is more egalitarian than Heath acknowledges, for Walter usually discusses the dynamics of "our spend" (81) as the pleasure of his female partners receives as much attention as his own:

 I got on my knees, contemplating the sausage lips half open, from
 which my sperm was oozing, and then got off sorry it had been so
 quick a business. She laid without moving and looking kindly at me
 said, "Ye may ha me agin an yer loike." ... Such coolness in a
 woman was new to me. I scarcely knew what to make of it. She got
 hold of my tool [and] opened her legs in a most condescending
 manner.... I was soon fit, which she very well knew, for
 immediately with a broad grin on her face she pulled me on to her
 and put my prick in her cunt herself.... I fucked quickly, but it
 was now her turn; she heaved and wriggled so that once she threw my
 prick out of her, but soon had it in again. "Shove, shove," said
 she suddenly, and I shoved with all my might ... then, with a close
 wriggle and a deep sigh, she lay still, her face as red as fire,
 and left me to finish by my own exertions. (80-81)

The scene above is worth quoting at length because it reveals a libidinal economy that is not adequately accounted for by a methodology rigidly constituted on the basis of bourgeois oppressor and proletarian oppressed; nor can we say that Walter is a phallic "subject" acting unilaterally upon a phallus-less (even if "condescending") "object." Indeed, the circulation of pleasure and power in such scenes, the relative ease with which Walter allows himself to be directed, and the continuing connection between the sight of oozing semen and his own increasingly fluid sexual practices leads one to find metaphorical significance in semen over and above its Marxist and Freudian fetishistic values.

And it is here that semen's viscosity becomes pertinent to the present reading of My Secret Life. If we remember that viscosity is the inherent property which prevents free flow in that which is nevertheless fluid, we can find in semen a symbol that can supplement our conventional notion of static phallicism. My Secret Life suggests the possibility of a viscous subjectivity, one straining toward nonrigidity even if still issuing from quite rigid forms of social definition. The tension of the viscous is manifest throughout My Secret Life, where we find a clear desire to destabilize social norms, but one hardly free from the restraints of class and gender interests:

 How is it that scarcely any woman will let you willingly look at
 her cunt after fucking, till it is washed? Most say it is
 beastly.... Is it more beastly to have it spurted up, to turn and
 go to sleep with the spunk oozing on to a thigh, or an hour
 afterwards to let a man paddle in what has not dried? They don't
 mind that, but won't let you look at it after your operations,
 willingly--why? (73)

Certainly the fact that Walter is asking questions here rather than making rigid declarations is significant, but so too is his inability to understand "why" exhibiting physical evidence of sexual activity is embarrassing for women. He wholly fails to recognize that such modesty is not only their unquestionable right (even if he does pay them for sexual services), but that their sense of embarrassment and violation can only be intensified by the all-too-common usage of women as "exhibits," of purity or of scandal. Moreover, the prostitutes in question cannot even be considered the desirable (even if objectified) "exhibit" here; they are reduced to a particularly offensive tertiary status as a convenient canvas upon which Walter displays his semen. Much like the paper upon which he occasionally ejaculates, the genitals of the prostitutes provide another surface upon which Walter can mark his presence and record his successful sexual performance.

Yet even as the phallic parameters of the demands above become clear, a viscous straining toward nonrigidity is also apparent, and not only in Waiter's tendency to inquire actively. Unlike the "money shot" that Williams explores, semen in My Secret Life certainly seems to propel narrative rather than fixing its point of closure:

 I rose to my knees between her thighs hurriedly, and holding my
 prick looked at her. Shall I ask her if she has washed, I thought.
 "What's the matter?" she asked hurriedly. Mentally then I saw the
 husband fucking her at the side of the bed, and my prick stiffened,
 again the idea of his sperm lying in her haunted me, I ... thrust
 my fingers up her cunt to feel if his sperm was there.... Then down
 I fell on her forgetting the sperm, thinking only of the two as I
 had seen them fucking. (261-262)

Rather than providing a closure to the scene, the potential traces of the previous ejaculation spur another encounter. Indeed, semen production never constitutes a finale, as chapters in this first-person narrative never end with the narrator's own climax: "her cunt discharged, my balls shot forth their sperm, and we mixed this essense of male and female in her sweet channel.... I dressed, we had tea and toast, then I licked her cunt till she was exhausted with pleasure, then left" (539). Every chapter, either with commentary or his partner's orgasms, flows past Waiter's own act of ejaculation. His semen is only a lubricant that furthers the narrative flow of My Secret Life. (25)

And this flow takes us well beyond the rigidity of mid- to late-Victorian socio-medical definitions of sexual "normality," as Walter becomes far more erotically interested in other men's semen than he is in his own. While his often-expressed desire to see and feel other men's ejaculate on women's bodies could be read as a desire for visual assurances of a general male ownership of women (semen as brand), in most scenes it is the actual physical properties of semen that Walter finds exciting; at times, women are not even present:

 Then I washed his genitals and made a complete and curious
 examination of his penis and scrotum.... I began frigging
 him.--"Now I will look at your sperm as it comes." ... At length
 after playing so for long, he said he must and would come--so I
 frigged as fine a spermatic ejaculation as I had had on the first
 night. It spurted out a yard, quite. (396)

Semen is not an inky marker of Waiter's own identity or of general male proprietorship here (indeed, ink is more useful dry than wet, but dry semen never holds interest for Walter). Instead, it is the wetness of semen, arcing through the air or oozing upon a surface, the body, the floor, or a piece of paper, that Walter finds so intriguing, and is connected inextricably to an intense process of sexual(ly exciting) investigation: "feeling his cock had made my cock stand" (396).

And therefore I return again to semen's physical qualities. While Sartre may have been disgusted by the viscous because it defies easy classification, that same quality may be wholly fascinating for other individuals who come to feel trapped by rigid processes of classification. I have argued elsewhere that My Secret Life represents a failed attempt to re-invent a quasi-Sadean, libertine identity, to find a discursive space for something like "bisexuality" in an era that increasingly demanded binary sexual definitions. (26) Yet certainly My Secret Life never indulges in simple nostalgia; it questions the rigidity of Victorian classifications of sexual "normality" in surprisingly direct fashion:

 Why may a man and woman handle each other's privates, and yet it be
 wrong for a man to feel another's prick, or a woman to feel
 another's cunt? Every one in each sex has at one period of their
 lives done so, and why should not any society of association of
 people indulge in these innocent, tho sensual, amusements if they
 like in private? What is there in their doing so that is
 disgraceful? It is prejudice of education alone which teaches that
 it is. (286)

These are questions that no Anglo-American sexologist of Waiter's day asks. (27) And if such questions appear at all timid, Waiter's conclusions finally are not: "A man had as much right to use his anus as he liked, as a man has to use his penis--that was the conclusion that I came to" (246); "in lust all things are natural and proper to those who like them. There can be no more harm in a man feeling another's prick, nor in a woman feeling another's cunt, than there is in their shaking hands" (378).

If the sexual philosophy underlying such remarks seems quite flexible for a time of rigid sexual and gender ideologies, then we should allow our own metaphors to capture that fluidity in ways that "phallicism" cannot. The term "slimy" is sexually pejorative because of its connotation of viscous unpredictability and physical boundary transgression, but in My Secret Life we see that sliminess is a quality to be desired. Throughout the text, images of sexual fluidity interweave with lingering descriptions of actual sexual fluids, as surprisingly polymorphous forms of sexual activity seem to flow with well-lubricated ease:

 My hands moved all over them--I slipped my hand between their
 bellies--I felt his balls.--Then slipping it under her rump it felt
 the wet spunk I had left in her cunt, now working out on to the
 stem of his prick as it went in and out.... [A few minutes later]
 Her thighs were apart, her cunt hole was blinded, hidden by spunk
 which lay all over it and filled its orifice.... I threw myself on
 her, my prick slipped up with a squashing noise I know of no other
 way of describing it. I think I hear it now. I felt a sense of
 heavenly satisfaction. Her cunt was so filled that it seemed quite
 loose, the sperm squeezed out of her and up, until the hair of both
 our genitals were saturated--I pushed my hand down, and making her
 lift up one leg, found the sperm lay thick down to her arse
 hole.... I told him to lay down by the side of us, and made Sarah
 feel his prick at the same time I did--I felt my pleasure would even
 now be too short and stopped myself. Sarah with a sigh cried,
 "Oh--my God--go on," her cunt tightened, she let go his prick and
 clasped my buttocks to her--I still held his prick, and tried to
 lengthen my pleasure but could not, her cunt so clipped me.
 Abandoning myself to her the next instant almost with a scream of
 pleasure, I was quiet on her arms and fell asleep--and so did she,
 and so did he--all three on the bed close together. (386-387)

If, during the mid- to late-nineteenth century, the forces of phallicism demanded rigid roles defined by the binaries heterosexual/homosexual and masculine/feminine, then clearly here something else is allowing slippage in and among the behaviors commonly associated with those terms. This is the slimy force of Waiter's persistent inquiries: into the constructed nature of the "natural," into the physiology of pleasure and sexual excitement, into the possibility of a more fluid ontology. Of course, even in a scene so saturated with body fluids, Walter does not lose all elements of phallic identity (she wishes to wash, for instance, but he refuses to allow it), but clearly his delight in the pleasure of others and the unanxious ways he "abandons himself" to her and to sexual contact with another man, are equally, if not more, noteworthy.

Yet such abandonment cannot be sustained, and finally My Secret Life helps clarify for us the degree of inflexibility of some of the very classifications that it attempts to breach. Throughout, Walter recounts his lingering disgust and shame over participating in proscribed activity, in particular, sexual activity with other men. He invariably attributes such reactions to "prejudices and false education" (395), but cannot overcome his inevitable, even if only partial and imperfect, scripting by his context. This is clearest when he wishes to try anal sex as the receiving partner, but finally cannot deny his own physical revulsion: "'Pull it out,' I cried.--Out it came ... and there it ended.--I did not feel pleased with myself at all.--What is the good of my philosophy?" (568). In typical fashion, Waiter's sense of displeasure is directed at his inability to continue his sexual experimentation, not at his indulgence in anal sex; nevertheless, he simply cannot put theory into practice. In probing the limits of his own "flexibility," Waiter's body fails him time and again as he attempts to break powerful taboos against anal sex with another man--in one his "prick won't stand" (311) and in another he "nearly vomited" (409)--all of which help create a lingering sense of intermittently frustrated intellectual and sexual desire. (28) Of one such attempt he writes that it "only dwells in my mind with disgust, tho it is against my philosophy even to think I had done wrong" (409). This disjunction continues to the very end of the narrative; in his epilogue, Walter writes, "My philosophy remains the same. My deeds leave me no regret--with the exception perhaps of a very few.--Would that I were young enough to continue in the same course--that all might happen to me over again" (636). Would he repeat the "disgusting" experience of anal sex or would he not? His philosophy would seem to demand so, even if his body and conscience would again revolt. I would argue that one result of this inability to reconcile theory and practice fully is to further the fetishization of semen as a viscous and mutable substance, which as we have seen, emerges as Waiter's narrative progresses.

And despite Waiter's expression of exasperation above, the "good" of his philosophy should be readily apparent. His persistence and curiosity lead him to conclusions concerning the cultural construction of "normality" that were unknown to more traditional sex researchers of his era. We might even say that Walter anticipates twentieth-century cultural critics, whose methodologies are not as rigidly defined as those of scientists, but whose critical approach to presumed "truth" can often lead to important insights as they confront directly presuppositions inhibiting inquiry. (29) Thus unlike Acton, who simply proclaims "nature herself dictates that excesses must not be commited" (179), Walter finds cause to contest the very language through which such proclamations are expressed:

 Many who have not tasted our sexual pleasures will call them
 beastly. They are not. But what if they are?--What are all the
 physical functions of man and woman, what is chewing, drinking,
 spitting, snotting, urinating, farting?--What is copulation? is
 that beastly?--Certainly it is what beasts do.--They will call that
 natural perhaps, but it's a purely animal act, tho not specially
 beastly to me.--What is a woman's cunt?--feel it when not recently
 washed, or when the prick has just left it and the semen is lying
 thick inside and out. Is that beastly or not? What is the joining
 of two tongues, the mixing of salivas, the gluing of two mouths
 together when fucking?--beastly? But there is no harm in these it
 will be said, it's natural.--Be it so.--So are other erotic
 amusements equally natural and not more beastly.... All is
 permissible if a couple do them for mutual delight, and are no more
 beastly than simple human copulation. (430-431, original emphasis)
 (30)

Here Walter asserts that first-hand experience with "sexual pleasures" clearly can affect one's perspective on them; while not setting up a simple formula for "authority" on sexuality, he does imply that distance from sexual subject matter (such as that evinced by Acton) can abet a smug, moralizing tendency that obscures complexity and thereby remains confident about its own erroneous terms and presuppositions. Indeed, he lingers in his descriptions of sexual acts and encounters with body fluids that complicate any facile use of the term "beastly" as a condemnation. As always, he questions energetically, pushing his readers into "movement" rather than allowing them to remain rigid and unreflective. Clearly neither scientists nor cultural critics are outside of their own discursive contexts, but Walter often and admirably confronted that context instead of accepting it as truthful, challenging his readers to do so as well. And these are challenges that resonate to this day, for My Secret Life and its seminal subtext call into question our own tendency to moralize without complication, to reduce the behaviors of Victorian men to a simple set of cultural codes, and to replace multivalent narratives with a single meaning.

Sussman notes that Carlyle "like many other early Victorian men" deemed male body fluids and fluid forms of male desire "unclean, diseased" (20); it is therefore remarkable that Walter can state forthrightly "Sperm is now to me dean, wholesome" (539). With such usefully different perspectives on Victorian sexuality and subjectivity, My Secret Life and other erotic texts of its era clearly demand more careful and sustained readings than they have received to date. Indeed, I am bewildered by one critic's comment that "My Secret Life ... shows us, as nothing else I know does, the pathos of perversity, how deeply sad, how cheerless a condemnation it really is." (31) On the contrary, beyond the few passages of frustration that I mention above, I find delight and exuberance evident throughout Waiter's narrative, even to its last scene:

 [S]oon the violent movement of her thighs and buttocks heralded her
 coming joy, and I heard, "Fuck dear--aha--spunk," and heard his
 murmurs of love. His ample balls were soon steady ... and both were
 quiet. She with closed eyes enjoying the blissful oozings of her
 cunt, the soothing influence of spermatic injection, his buttocks
 moving with the slightest gentlest jogs, rubbing his tender gland
 within the innermost recesses of her sexual treasure, whilst I held
 his balls, he seeming unconscious of it. "Get off," said she.
 Without a word he got. There she lay with overflowing cunt, thighs
 wide apart, looking lewdly at me who had withdrawn then to the
 bed's foot.... "There--it's--stiff--fuck me now." ... She had her
 way.--I fucked her long, long, deliciously, whilst twice she spent
 to my one libation. (633-635, original emphasis)

Yes, one could read this passage in many ways. His repetition of the word "long" could be seen as a reflection of worries about his penis size. The "soothing influence of spermatic injection" could be related to an infusion of male essence into the incomplete, unhealthy female body. The construction "I fucked her" does reveal a grammatical "subject" acting upon an "object." Yet as useful as such readings are, they erase the exchange of pleasures that occurs, one that undermines any simple notion of phallic power and pornographic pathos. For a few moments, for an afternoon or evening, with the everyday world and its norms working to script their bodily functions and determine their pleasures, Walter and his partners found always imperfect, always transitory, but nevertheless significant, forms of sexual fluidity possible. Certainly they challenge us to approach their activities with a similarly critical stance toward convention.

California State University, Northridge

Works Cited

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--. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York: Routledge, 1990.

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Cohen, William A. Sex Scandal: The Private Parts of Victorian Fiction. Duke UP, 1996.

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Notes

(1) The many critical works making such linkages are too numerous to mention here, but among the especially noteworthy are those by Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, Klaus Theweleit, Luce Irigaray, and Herbert Sussman. Like those critics, I use the term "masculinity" in this essay to indicate socially constructed behaviors, including patterns of sexual behavior. While gender and sexuality are not wholly conflarable, they are often thoroughly intertwined, and certainly so when considering the central issues raised in this essay, those of epistemology and relative performative flexibility or inflexibility. A recognition of this high degree of overlap empowers much of the commentary to date on the issue of "phallicism" and is my starting point for a discussion of more fluid forms of male behavior.

(2) See especially Irigaray for a delineation of "phallicism"'s key characteristics. For useful examinations of the murky relationship between "phallicism" and the physical penis, see Gallop, chapter 6, and Grosz, chapter 3. See also Williams, chapter 2, for an exploration of the utility and limitations of "phallicism" as a critical concept.

(3) For much more sustained examinations of the Victorian equation of women and disease, see works by Ehrenreich and English, and Showalter.

(4) Among the many useful overviews of the dramatic paradigm shifts occurring during the nineteenth century, see those by Laqueur, Poovey, Gagnier, and Hall (Fixing Patriarchy).

(5) Some of the most noteworthy of these include works by Sedgwick, Bristow, Sinfield, Dellamora, Ed Cohen, and William Cohen.

(6) This point underlies most works of gender critique influenced by post-structuralist theory. For particularly useful explanations of the theories empowering such a claim, see Weedon and Halperin. For pertinent examples of applied criticism along these lines, see works by Butler and Adams.

(7) My reasons for terming him "heterosexually hyperactive" rather than "hyperactively heterosexual" will be apparent soon. Waiter's behavior not only predates the English usage of the term "heterosexual," which as Katz points out dates from the 1890s, but also is not reducible to that category.

(8) For the publishing history of My Secret Life, see Marcus, chapters 3 and 4.

(9) For compelling investigations of semen's many, varying cultural uses, see Lingus (especially chapter 8), Herdt, Looby, and Thomas (especially chapter 2).

(10) While I do not discuss below the intriguing issue of female ejaculation, to which Walter makes repeated reference, see Heath for a scientific overview and Lane and Fatale for more popular investigations.

(11) For investigations of late-twentieth-century grapplings with the biological and cultural meanings of semen vis-a-vis the AIDS crisis, see Warney and Patton.

(12) His only vague support for the generalization that I quote is wild speculation regarding why some breed horses produce "weedy" offspring. He admits in a footnote that it has proven difficult to "procure evidence" of any concrete sort to warrant such a sweeping statement.

(13) See Looby for an examination of similarly inflected, and limited, nineteenth-century American works on semen. His insightful discussion of Homer Bostwick's On Seminal Diseases complements my discussion here.

(14) Indeed, it was only in the mid-twentieth century (1954) that the first full textbook on semen was written; see Mann's voluminous The Biochemistry of Semen and of the Male Reproductive System.

(15) See Looby for relevant discussion of Bostwick's On Seminal Diseases and Ellis' Studies in the Psychology of Sex.

(16) Do recent seeming changes in reactions to the "slimy" (evinced in the popularity of "Boogers," "Slime," and "Dr. Dreadful's Squeem Lab") have any relationship to currently metamorphosing gender roles (which may not be changing fast enough for many of us, but nevertheless do appear to be changing)? I would say that it is far too early to tell, but am generally encouraged by what, again, seems to be a more widespread recognition of ontological stances other than ones dependent upon the rigid binaries catalogued earlier.

(17) See works by Butler, Halperin, and Weedon.

(18) This is in no way to presuppose any success at extrication. But certainly Linda Williams makes a very compelling case in Hard Core for the utility, indeed desirability, of the longing for knowledge of "other" posited in much pornography. In such longing she finds the implication that "there is no such thing as a discrete sexed identity who can journey from fixed self to fixed other ... [that] these identities themselves are constructed in fluid relations to fictional 'others' who exist only in our relation to them" (279), even though she recognizes that such pornography "can only speak from its phallic point of origin" (279). It is important to remember that to recognize such limitations does not demand an erasure of the ways in which phallicism is simultaneously undermined within the same texts.

(19) See Theweleit (especially Vol I, chapter 2) on the psychology of armor-plating. See also Grosz, chapter 8, who draws usefully on Kristeva and Douglas to discuss the "powers and dangers" associated with transgressive body fluids.

(20) See also Looby and William Cohen (especially chapter 2).

(21) For another interpretation of the simultaneous disgust and desire felt for a detached "body part" such as semen, see Grosz, chapter 3, especially pages 80-82.

(22) Laquer, Russett, and Schiebinger provide pertinent commentary on the misinformation predetermining many erroneous Victorian conceptions of women's sexuality.

(23) See Freud for one narrow theorization of fetish, but also McCallum and McClintock for their compelling expansions of the psychoanalytic concept. Williams, in her fourth chapter, provides a very useful overview of both Freudian and Marxist notions of "fetish."

(24) In an exceptionally useful response to an earlier version of this essay one reader for PMLA pressed me to expand significantly upon this idea, suggesting that beyond semen's assuaging of castration anxiety here, it also functions as

 an embrace of the phallic mother, the figure of plenitude and power
 that "works" because it oxymoronically erases through excessive
 inclusion the exclusionary differences signalled by "man" and
 "woman." The fetish both breaks a taboo (gender exclusivity) and
 preserves that taboo by placing the actual referent of gender
 inclusion on a purely symbolic level. ("RE," n. page)

I agree, though as the reader also notes, exploring these ideas more fully would take my essay in a different direction, one in which "viscosity" is only "a means to a bigger topic--not the topic in and of itself." While acknowledging the cogency of this response overall, I disagree that the general subject of fetishization is a "bigger" (implicitly "better") topic than viscous masculinity, and prefer to keep my focus as it is, but am sadly aware of the many possibilities that such a decision must foreclose.

(25) Further undermining any reading that fixes a single interpretation of semen as a marker of male proprietorship is that Walter does not "create" through his ejaculations; indeed, pregnancy, the marker of what here should be male generative ability (and which Thomas argues is the only issue from the penis/ pen that is culturally sanctioned), is always feared and avoided (which, of course, may also help account for Waiter's desire to see semen dripping out of vaginas).

(26) See "Graphic Sexuality and the Erasure of a Polymorphous Perversity." Marjorie Garber's Vice Versa is also useful in considering the changing discursive constraints on "bisexual" desire, as well as the historical specificity of that term; see especially Part II.

(27) German sexologists, including Karl Heinrich Ulrichs, were asking more abrasive questions about sexual "normality" during the second half of the nineteenth century. See Greenberg, chapter 9, for an overview of Anglo-American and Continental opinions.

(28) See Bersani for more information on the history and power of such taboos.

(29) See the special issue of Social Text on the "Science wars" for reflection on this issue. While Social Text46-47 (1996) is notorious for its spurious article by Alan Sokal, it does contain other, more genuine meditations on the topic of cultural studies of science. See also Lingua Franca 6.5 (1996) for the Social Text editors' response to Alan Sokal and their defense of the appropriateness of cultural critics' reflections on scientific methodologies and epistemologies.

(30) For more sustained commentary by a contemporary on the misuse of the term "natural," see John Stuart Mill's essay on the topic.

(31) Marcus, p. 127. Of course Steven Marcus' The Other Victorians is heavily dependent upon Freudian theory and demonstrates a pathologizing tendency throughout that is common in critical works that accept Freudian notions of normality and psychological health.