Before women had pubic hair

Scholar Peter Gay talks about "Exposed: The Victorian Nude" at the Brooklyn Museum of Art.

By David Bowman

Sep 13, 2002 | If you've never read eminent Victorian scholar Peter Gay, you'd assume the Victorians were as repressed about naked bodies as Attorney General Ashcroft.

The neo-Puritanical Victorian era lasted as long as the reign of Queen Victoria did, 1837-1901; it was a time when a woman had to wear bathing garments for convention's sake -- even in the privacy of her own bath. The hems of Victorian skirts touched the floor because the sight of a woman's limb would be shocking beyond belief. Victorians even pulled stockings over the legs of their pianos.

Famously, Victorian art critic John Ruskin had been to Venice and Paris but had no idea that women possessed a triangle of fur above their genitals. Thus on his wedding night he went into apoplectic spasms when presented with his naked wife Effie's tuft of pubic hair.

During the mid-20th century, pornography became legal, then respectable, and Victorian Puritans were accused of hypocrisy for hiding the legs of their pianos by day, and engaging in unspeakable perversions behind the locked doors of private clubs by night.

Writer Peter Gay discovered a different crop of Victorians, however  bourgeois folk who were sexually aware, sexually active, just discreet about it. Gay's revisionist vision of the Victorians is confirmed by an art show that originated at the Tate Museum in London, and is currently showing at the Brooklyn Museum of Art. "Exposed: The Victorian Nude" is not an exhibit of a few daguerreotypes of naked piano legs. Rather a viewer wanders among more than a hundred paintings and sculptures and photographs of naked women, men and children. This art doesn't redeem the Victorians, exactly, but we can see proof that they were at least as sexually knowing as the average modern subscribers to HBO.

Gay argued this same point more academically in 1984 when he wrote "Education of the Senses," the first volume of his Victorian saga, called "The Bourgeois Experience: Victoria to Freud."

Not that Gay had anything to do with curating the Brooklyn show. The 79-year-old scholar wanders the exhibition as an outsider, but freely admits he feels vindicated. "I don't want to sound impossibly gracious about myself, but the exhibition is what I've been saying for quite a long time. I argued that certain views of Victorian sexuality were quite wrong. After 1901, Edwardians like Bertrand Russell and so on began lambasting the prudish Victorians. Then after World War II, quite a bit of literature took the same position, suggesting that there was an underground obsession in sexuality with mistresses and whorehouses and all the sexual entanglements that nobody knew about. And so on. I argued that this second view was even more wrong than the first."

Rather than study what historians said about the Victorians, Gay went to the original material  autobiographies, medical reports, letters and diaries. What he discovered was a split between what people publicly talked about and what they did privately. "It was not hypocrisy or prudishness, but a highly developed sense of privacy," Gay says. "A separation from the public domain and the private. And in that private domain, [Victorian] people enjoyed a great many things that weren't publicly talked about. So from that point of view I developed this simple thesis called the 'Doctrine of Distance.'"

Victorians needed such a doctrine because they were not without hang-ups. They were very concerned about thinking "pure thoughts." And the way to think such thoughts while viewing, say, a sculpture of a naked woman was to give the lass a historical context. "Give the work a name from mythology or ancient history," explains Gay. "Or something symbolic. For example, you could have a very naked model surrounded by leaves and called it 'Spring.' That was fine. Or you could deal with the camp of Alexander the Great and a nude could be a famous Greek courtesan."

The Brooklyn Museum has more such naked women than can be digested in a single day of gazing. Naked medieval women stand chained to a tree, rescued by embarrassed knights. A naked siren (or "syren") embraces Goethe's fisherman. Lady Godiva mounts her mare. Venus slips off her robe before slipping into a bath. All of these women have a languid, small-breasted, Gwyneth Paltrow-type body. All these women possess a shaved mound of Venus  no wonder poor John Ruskin was horrified by wifely fur!

That said, the Victorians did not skimp on naked men. In fact, most of the guys like Icarus or Perseus have their penises exposed in lieu of a fig leaf or tunic.

Next Page: These nudes are the grandmothers of the Vargas girls

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