Sentiment in the Nineteenth Century (and Now): Bram Stoker and Others

My literature class this spring read Dracula. Consequently, I read Something in the Blood by David J. Skal (the beginning of the book is better than the end). 

As with Cary Grant, there is endless speculation about Bram Stoker's sexuality. He married and had a kid. He also spent his entire adult life in the (passionate) service of Henry Irving. 

Bram Stoker was a romantic, workaholic civil servant who found his outlet mostly as Irving's theater manager. There is no indication that he was taken advantage of, that he didn't use Irving as much as Irving used him; Stoker would likely have worked himself to death for any boss/cause that he admired (Irving did die first). 

Skal acknowledges Stoker's loyal-to-the-end personality. He also acknowledges that sexuality in Victorian/Edwardian England was more stigmatized in some ways (especially, legally) than it is now but far more fluid in other ways. Modern, progressive humans have simply moved the stigmas around.

My position is that it is impossible to understand late nineteenth century men and woman unless one understands the power of sentiment. 

In the nineteenth century, the bawdy physicality of Austen's generation and the pre-Freudian dark and dirty angst of Bronte's generation had given way--as increasingly modernized cultures tend to do--to an abstracted physical sexuality. 

Austen would have rolled her eyes. Bronte would have written, well, Jane Eyre. 

Even Walt Whitman, of the same time period as Stoker and Wilde and the rest, would have balked somewhat. 

But upperclass Irish and English women and men pushed these emotions into deconstructed expressions, in the same way that current academic theories abstract biology, divorcing it from reality. The two are cousins under the skin: the same approach (possibly for the same reasons) with equally specialized vocabulary.

Oscar Wilde's libel suit (possibly the most self-destructive legal act ever committed by a human being) while he was having sex with young male prostitutes is a great example of a smart-dumb person abstracting the physical nature of his acts into something that bore almost no resemblance to the reality.

The sentimental language of the time is an expression of that abstraction: "Soul of my soul at the center of my world, I embrace you as kin to my self and the harbinger of my will. You collect and mirror my thoughts and my affection in your every breath" could be aimed at men or women by men or women. And it wasn't sexual! Oh, no, it wasn't! (Except, of course, it was.) 

Hence, Claudia Nelson's point, based on extensive research, in Family Ties in Victorian England, that a widowed man marrying his wife's sister alarmed Victorians because it moved the supposedly platonic language/connection between two people designated as brother and sister into the sexual realm (and potentially uncovered a great many things Victorians would rather sublimate the dickens out of instead). 

Physical love/experiences regulated by quasi-spiritual/remote language will sound familiar. To the Victorians and Edwardians, it was so familiar, its use would have been automatic and unthinking.