Introduction
Between puritanism and hedonism there is a yawning gulf of ethics, moral outlook and innate fear of emotional involvement which only now in our emancipation era of the Seventies is beginning to narrow. Its existence has brought about most of the neuroticism and the sexual repression of past societies because of the hypocritical standards which grew out of both diametrically opposed codes of living. Especially for the adolescent, who usually receives his or her first erotic tutelage from the adult in charge of his development-whether it be as parent, teacher or companion-the paradoxes of behavior as against specious sermonizing seem at times to be a negation of black as black and white as white.
Consider the mid-Victorian period, for example. It was, to the outsider and the student of history, a "good" domestic era, when good Queen Victoria extended the boundaries of the British Empire, ruled benevolently without tyranny or oppression of any class, and when the solidarity of the family and the institution of marriage were regarded as sancrosanct. And yet, if one probes beneath the elegant facades, one discerns-if only by reading the novels of Charles Dickens-the terrible squalor and poverty, the snobbish class distinctions which fixed lower-class workers in their menial positions from generation to generation, and most of all, as regards personal freedom, the sanctimonious deceit that passed for sexual morality. Perhaps never before in the history of London could one find so many brothels (and streetwalkers), or houses of "specialty," as they were called, where a respectable and wealthy commoner (as well as a member of the nobility) could purchase a girl to be flogged or put to medieval tortures or compel her to accept violation by half a dozen men including lascars, Hindus and blacks.
In a word, the female, for all her supposed pedestaled status as wife and mother, was looked upon only as an outward symbol for respectability; if she showed the least enthusiasm for her conjugal duties, she was branded a whore or harlot and trollop, and a man might even find grounds for divorce because of a "cooperative" wife. In those gaslit days, the very word "sex" was itself taboo, as were such mild terms as "leg" and "breast" and "buttock". Demonstrations of affection between husband and wife were simply nonexistent, and especially in public, even when welcoming a soldier-husband back from battle. And yet, at the very same time, this high-minded, unemotional code was celebrated as the proof of true virtue and chastity, these same men who could turn a wife out on the streets for being a "harlot" through responding to their legalized caresses frequented the houses of pleasure to revel in fellatio, pederasty, flagellation, miscegenation and even-and especially-pedophilia (the consummation of sexual desire upon underage girls as young as nine and ten).
It was held that no "decent" woman could possibly yield herself-without brutal coercion-to such intimacies as giving her husband or lover oral sex or affecting any position of intercourse other than the "missionary" (the male atop, the woman supine and passive, and preferably with eyes closed and face averted). Yet the more emphasis that was placed on conjugal fidelity and the outward parade of marital propriety, the more complex and perverse the erotic enjoyments sought by the male of the species, for whom no taboo or restriction existed.
The price of this, of course, was frustration and deception, and, as it affected America, a similar outward moral tone which expressed contempt and shock at the "depravity" of extramarital relations or any demonstration of sexuality not regarded as "normal married." The Comstockian era at the end of the last century was, for us, as full of neurotic aftermath as was for the English their own stuffy mid-Victorianism.
However, in today's milieu of greater tolerance and acceptance and exploration, the aftereffects of early parental or educator teaching are very often permanent in the conditioning of adult outlook and behavior. Any child brought up in a home or atmosphere in which the healthy expression of the sexual instinct is looked upon as "shameful" and "sinful" is likely to have powerfully latent neuroses in adolescent and adult life. And these, even when the opportunity for candid sexual adventure is offered the thus-conditioned individual, motivate and divert the reactions of the subject.
We see this in the heroine of this novel, which is actually drawn from a real-life happening; the author himself knew her and sensed her frustrations and conflicts before and after what happened to her. To be sure, the liberty of the fiction-writer has been taken, but in the broader aspect, what happened to Christine Bernard came about precisely because of what she was; and how she accepted these events and how they shaped her was similarly conditioned.
In essence, then, she represents the eternal demi-vierge. the "half-virgin" who has been taught that sex before marriage is the greatest of sins and then, even during that blessed and legalistic state, modesty and inhibition are still the proper conduct of the female towards the rapacious. predatory male. In more brutally direct terms, she might be called a "teaser" who enjoys the exquisitely daring game of rousing a male's sexual desire and then contemptuously denying it, glorying in her powers of incitement and rejection.
Yet at the same time, such a girl may very well inwardly have within her psyche not only a conflict between the urges of her healthy young body and the denial of the social code which guided her through childhood and young girlhood, but also a singular masochistic fatalism. This takes the form of what the psychiatrist calls "sexual rationalization," whereby she believes that if she is overpowered and is compelled to engage in sexual activity against her will, the sin cannot be hers. Curiously enough, this enables her to savor that sin to the fullest without condemning herself; and when she does, as Christine does in our story, even in that self-judgment there is a touch of delicious self-torment which makes her ordeal the more tantalizing and titillating for her to bear. Only the intellectually endowed female is capable of knowing this so honestly and fully as Christine does; yet that knowledge, as we shall see, leads her even further along the unknown path ... by which her fear is secretly a yearning for that which she has been taught must be denied.
Thus, as we see, there is delight in degradation not only for the egoistic degrader; but perhaps even more, and of a very subtle and different kind, for the one degraded. And thus the gulf between puritanism and hedonism has come full cycle once again!
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