BOOK REVIEW : Steamy Mail of Victorian Lovers

Searching the Heart: Women, Men and Romantic Love in Nineteenth-Century America by Karen Lystra (Oxford University Press: $24.95, 336 pages.)

My own heart ached with envy when I learned that Karen Lystra conducted the research for her book, “Searching the Heart,” by poring over hundreds of antique love letters in the Huntington Library in San Marino. I have a vision of Lystra wandering through the elegant galleries and magnificent gardens, a packet of scented and beribboned letters clutched to her breast, whiling away the hours in a reverie of ardent words and urgent longings.

The reality was probably less lyrical, and Lystra’s book turns out to be a graceful but utterly earnest work of scholarship. Still, the raw material of Lystra’s study--the intimate words of men and women who lived long ago but whose passions are still very much alive in their love letters--infuses her book with a full measure of romantic and sexual love.

Lystra, professor of American Studies at Cal State Fullerton, set herself the task of finding out how Victorian-era Americans actually felt about love by studying two kinds of source material--the love letters that they exchanged with one another, and the “medical and moral advice books” that tutored them in the proprieties of courtship and marriage.

What Lystra discovered is that the Victorian era was not so sexually repressed as we are taught in the approved texts. “The erotic intensity of the middle-class men and women in this study, as well as their passion for sexual expression, may take some readers by surprise,” she warns. “Nineteenth-Century middle-class Americans actually held an extremely high estimation of, indeed almost reverence for, sexual expression as the ultimate symbol of love and personal sharing.”

Lystra has pondered these topics deeply and with great and insight. She is always sensitive to both the inner meanings and larger social implications of the rituals of love and courtship, and she calls our attention to the significance of romantic love in the sexual politics of men and women, the distinctions between the public and private realms of experience, and the mounting importance of individualism in middle-class society in the Victorian era.

“In America,” she observes, “romantic love was an active agent, not only a passive index, of the crucial social change that brought modern--meaning romantic--selfhood to a large group of men and women.”

The love letters that are the proof text of Lystra’s study are quoted generously but selectively; we are rarely given love letters in their entirety. But these fragments of superheated Victorian prose, whether found in the letters of a literary celebrity such as Nathaniel Hawthorne (“Oh I shiver again to think how much I love thee!”) or some otherwise obscure Victorian widow (“As the flowers open out and give fresh perfume and beauty in the sun--so does the heart warm and expand to love”), give “Searching the Heart” a sparkle and a glow that one does not often find in an academic monograph.

Sometimes the examples are hilarious. The growing ardor of one pair of lovers is revealed by the escalation of rhetoric in the closing lines of their love letters. At first, the gentleman signed his letters “Very truly yours,” but later he could hardly contain his frenzied sexual hunger: “Darling, darling, darling , Oh! how I love you!! I want to maul you. Good bye, sweetie, Yours Forever.”

Only rarely are the letters openly erotic or explicit, but the sexual tension and titillation are unmistakable. “Pray write as often as you can,” urged one yearning husband, “and when you write put on your open black dress and beautiful white under dress.” And “a respectable army wife” taunted her absent husband, who was campaigning against the Indians on the frontier, in the steamiest of prose: “How are you this hot day? I am most roasted and my chemise sticks to me and the sweat runs down my legs and I suppose I smell very sweet, don’t you wish you could be around just now.”

Lystra concludes that men and women of the Victorian era were far less timid on matters of the heart than we are led to believe by the approved texts. “ ‘Lie still and think of the Empire,’ is the wedding-night advice Queen Victoria was supposed to have given her daughter, thus representing the quintessential in Victorian repression and prudery,” Lystra writes. In fact, she insists, the Victorians regarded sexuality as a wholesome and even noble element of the relationship between man and woman: “Imbued with romantic love, sex was seen as an act of self-disclosure, not so much in the sense of revealing one’s body as one’s essential identity. Sex was identified with the inner life and was perceived as part of the privileged revelation of an “authentic self.”

Of course, as Lystra points out, Victorian morality imposed strict restraints on public expressions of sexuality--and that’s precisely why the love letters of the era are such potent stuff. “Forbidding sexual expression in public helped to create and also to explain a veritable explosion of private sexual expression whose pleasure was partially enhanced by the thought that speaking of sex was forbidden,” Lystra explains. “Victorians gleefully censored their own private correspondence and worried about being found out. But the idea of someone reading their letters hovered like a ghost of lasciviousness over correspondence, making their missives almost a secret erotic art.”

Lystra is no “ghost of lasciviousness.” She treats these most private of letters--and the men and women who wrote them for each other alone--with respect and dignity. “The mail of lovers was sacred,” she writes. “In both the act of reading and writing love letters, Victorians displayed an intimacy that affords the historian a remarkable opportunity to cross once forbidden boundaries. . . . “ And yet, in “Searching the Heart,” Lystra invites us to join her as she explores these once-sacrosanct enclaves of our history. The journey is intriguing and surprising.

Friday: Richard Eder reviews Buchi Emecheta, “The Family.”