Before women had pubic hair

It must be said that the Brooklyn show does include scientific and "dirty" photographs of naked female Victorians who possess dense "bush." Perhaps the most fascinating thing about the Victorian art is that it was pre-Freudian. Victorians didn't know they had an unconscious.

"That's true enough," Gay says. "If you ask Freud he would have said the unconscious was not something he discovered, but rather the romantic poets had discovered it. Sometimes dreams may show us things we want, but we don't admit it, and so on."

Perhaps the most difficult aspect of Victorian sexuality is to consider that even though Lewis Carroll took photographs of naked little girls (included in the show), he was not the modern equivalent of a pedophile. In the Watson Guptill Carroll exhibit catalog Carroll is quoted as saying, "the real distinction between sin and innocence in pictures ... is whether it stimulates ... sinful feelings, or not."

"I don't believe there is any evidence that Carroll tried anything," says Gay. "I think one of the things that Freud was interested in was to argue that sexuality does not begin with puberty, but very early on. The Victorians, on the other hand, generally assumed that children were free of sexual feelings one way or another, and they were innocent, so therefore taking picture of them naked would do no harm. Lewis Carroll never, as it were, tried anything because he never got married. He may not have been very mature about dealing with women -- going out with them, marrying them and so forth. That's very probable. But the term 'pedophile' suggests something too definite to me, especially nowadays. But I think the Victorian idea was that kids are innocents and the grownups who photographed them would be innocent too."

Try for a moment to imagine an era when pedophilia was not discussed in any manner. Regardless of Lewis Carroll's subconscious desire to photograph little girls naked, it's very possible that it never occurred to him that men were physically capable of sexual intercourse with (i.e., raping) children -- any more than they would do such a thing with a naked piano.

"That could be true," agrees Gay. "The word 'homosexual' was only coined in 1896. Not that they couldn't talk about it; of course they could. But technically, for example, lesbianism was unthinkable. It would sometimes be mentioned that two women were living together, but the idea that they had anything other than a warm friendship was unthinkable."

We won't leave the Victorians forever spinning in a soup of innocence -- Gay does admit there were elaborate whorehouses where perversions were practiced.

"Sure," Gays says -- although, he argues, much of the writing about Victorian prostitution of the time was highly speculative. "There's a famous so-called confession, 'My Secret Life,' which consists of an anonymous middle-class writer who is very sexy, who does a lot of seducing of lower-class women -- not by force but by bribery and talking them up or winning them up and so on -- who exhibits (according to this book) a huge record of women screwed. The question is how true this is. The book is a debatable book." He pauses. "I really don't know the answer to all these questions because the Victorians didn't have the kind of journalism we now have along with paparazzi. I think we are still reduced to a certain amount of guessing."

But here in the Brooklyn Museum, surrounded by all these naked Victorian women posing in harems or Achilles-style brothels, one could say, "Pure thoughts be damned. Can a naked man or woman or Victorian ever become a purely aesthetic object with no sexual appreciation?"

"If you have this really lovely, terrific looking girl, the Greek slave," Gay says, "and you have engravings showing daddy and mommy and children looking at it, I guess what they're thinking may vary indeed. The man may very well think, 'I wish I knew her.'"

So we're back to "Victorian think" -- I don't have impure thoughts because I just looked at a naked Greek slave.

"I think the feeling was that pure thoughts were very hard to come by and very hard to guarantee," Gay says.

When Gay is asked if our apparently permissive anti-Victorian era will be maligned as John Ruskin's era has been, he responds, "Of course we'll be maligned -- just as writers begin to lose excellent reputation when they die and have to fight to get them back. Yeah. It's very possible." Then he laughs, "Which will give business to historians. Although I must say to write about this time considering how much print we have is going to be kind of rough."

In the end, we're left with these Victorian pictures, and we've been told a picture is worth a thousand words -- and as much as we can appreciate really good kitsch, maybe Hilton Kramer is right, that most of this Victorian art isn't very good.

"I think that it's not the art when you think of certain English painters earlier, like Constable and Turner," Gay says and goes silent before adding, "I think that the extent that I have money to buy pictures, I wouldn't buy these pictures."

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