Alice in Pornoland

Hardcore Encounters with the Victorian Gothic

UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS PRESS

Contents

BEHIND CLOSED DOORSNeo-Victorian Pornographies

For the transgression to work, it must be played out against a background of normality.

— Umberto Eco, "How to Recognize a Porn Movie"

Humans seem to find contrasts and juxtapositions very appealing when it comes to sex. The idea of a gentleman whose impeccable manners and finely tuned social etiquette mask a depraved sexual mind — that's a turn on. The refined, upper-class lady who behind closed doors is a ravenous, insatiable slut — what man doesn't want that woman? Everything was so forbidden back then, and of course we know anything forbidden is an instant turn on.

— Nica Noelle, adult filmmaker

In his review of the notorious German video Extra Terrestrian: Die Ausserirdische (dir. Lidko and Sigi Entinger, 1995), popularly known as E.T.: The Porno, online B-movie reviewer The Cinema Snob exclaims, "This movie takes place in the Victorian era? Why? What the hell is the point of that?" ("E.T. the Porno"). His question is central to my discussion: What is the point of setting a pornographic film (let alone a pornographic sci-fi film) in the Victorian era? In the film, E.T. is sent to Earth on a mission to examine the population's "strange customs." An omnipresent voice informs E.T. on departure, "This Earth is a place inhabited by strange beings with strange customs that will perhaps leave you scared." These "strange customs" are sex acts, which intrigue E.T. enough to gradually get involved. What is interesting about this relatively plotless and amateurish production is that the filmmakers wholeheartedly committed to setting it during the Victorian period, complete with costumes, period furniture, and stilted dialect. This suggests that the premise of alien beings learning about sexual customs would do best to visit the Victorian era, where, according to this film, human sexuality and its strangeness are most emphasized. E.T. explains to the humans, "On my planet we do not have this custom, therefore I was invited to come to this planet to learn more of the earthlings. To learn of your ways to act, to think, and to get pleasure." The Victorians, the film suggests, are the best version of "earthlings" from which to learn these things.

The Cinema Snob's baffled query suggests a certain level of incompetence on the part of the filmmakers, as if the setting were a random choice, demonstrative of the hasty and slapdash process of pornography filmmaking. Porn, we are told, is simply unsimulated sexual media designed to inspire arousal, masturbation, and climax, so once the legal parameters are removed, why would a lowly pornographer bother with anything more than two naked humans going at it in a sparsely furnished apartment? Certainly, many pornographers have done just that.

With E.T., however, produced during the 1990s when video had taken over, budgets were typically scant, and quantity often took precedence over quality, it is clear that writer/directors Lidko and Siggi Entinger had something more novel in mind. The costumes and sheer gusto of the endeavor are impressive in spite of the obviously tiny budget suggesting the nineteenth-century setting was no more a random choice than that of crafting a disturbingly sophisticated E.T. costume. The sheer number of pornographic films from various decades and genres that employ the Victorian period suggest that there is indeed a point to setting hardcore films in the Victorian period, even those that feature alien beings. Pornography has consistently drawn on the Victorians as part of a sexual and pornographic legacy, as a way of staging the transgressions of the present and establishing and eroticizing different subject positions in connection to gender, class, sexuality, and race.

Neo-Victorian fictions — "contemporary fiction that engages with the Victorian era, at either the level of plot, structure or both" (Hadley 4) — have increased in quantity and popularity over the past five decades, demonstrating an interest in and need for "the Victorians" as a way of shaping and understanding modern culture. As Louisa Hadley asserts, "Rather than merely being another manifestation of that [wider] cultural fascination [...] neo-Victorian fictions seek to both reinsert the Victorians into their particular historical context and engage with contemporary uses of the Victorians which efface that historical context" (6). Moreover, the Victorians serve as a useful cultural touchstone with which to understand and grapple with present-day discourses over sex, identity, technology, and politics. The Victorians are perceived to be the originators of the bulk of our understanding of these areas and are therefore our privileged "historical 'other'" (Kucich and Sadoff xi). With this in mind, it is unsurprising that as soon as the hardcore feature became prolific in the 1970s, pornographic film took to appropriating the Victorian as part of its erotic appeal. In fact, early hardcore films such as An English Tragedy (1921), an adaptation of the 1908 erotic novel The Way of a Man with a Maid, intimate an uncanny legacy of pornographic representations of the Victorians. This legacy ties together the history of pornography, linking actual pornographic imagery of the Victorian and Edwardian eras to the neo-Victorian recreations of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Pornographic uses of the Victorian expose broader uses of the Victorian era as a way of working through gender and sexual politics. In the process, porn exposes "a surprising (and perhaps frightening) closeness to our past" (Joyce 3) that is, nonetheless, pleasurable.

In the present chapter, I will explore and analyze a collection of pornographic films that set the action in the nineteenth century. They appropriate costume, customs, imagery, and other symbolism that twentieth- and twenty-first-century culture associates with the Victorian era, revealing the rhetoric employed by pornography in staging the Victorian for erotic appeal. I have chosen to include films that are representative in their use of the Victorian era and notable in the degree to which certain themes and impulses are present. The chosen texts also offer some of the conflict present in how hardcore utilizes Victorian tropes and ephemera to explore and eroticize gendered, classed, and raced subject positions.

Behind Closed Doors: Porning the Victorians

The phrase "behind closed doors" occurs in pornographic marketing materials with amusing regularity. A representative example of this rhetoric can be found in the blurb for Nica Noelle's all-male movie, Tales of Victorian Lust: Power and Struggle (2014), which promises a narrative set when "lust between men could only be expressed behind closed doors." Even when, as with Can't Be Roots XXX (2011), the story is set on a United States plantation, the nineteenth-century setting nevertheless mobilizes the rhetoric of Victorian English secrecy: "Evasive [Angles] has brought you a wild journey into the minds of white women back in the day and what really went on behind closed doors!!" The fact that all of the sexual action takes place out of doors (or in stables that don't even have any doors) did not dissuade the filmmakers from employing this tantalizing post-Victorianist catchphrase. The existence of a vast body of nineteenth-century pornography conflicts with our understanding of the repressed Victorian, generating a dual vision of the Victorians as both perverse and repressed. The mid-nineteenth century saw an explosion in pornographic works, both literary and visual, of varying price, collected and traded among the elites, and also sold in public to people of any sex, age, or class. Historian Linda Nead describes Holywell Street of London as the center of the trade in pornography in England, a trade that grew increasingly prolific as the century progressed (161). Literature and pornography are regarded as oppositional, existing in different spheres, occupied with different interests, the latter consumed by "other" Victorians. Indeed, Steven Marcus goes so far as to say pornography is "profoundly, and by nature, anti-literature and anti-art" (195). In reality, canonical works of Victorian literature were adjacent to, not separate from, pornography and obscene works not only in terms of physical proximity but also in terms of style and thematic content. As Tanya Pikula argues, the tropes and language of pornographic literature can be traced in the rhetoric of Bram Stoker's Dracula. Pikula asserts that Stoker's "descriptions of vampire-otherness are in fact thoroughly structured by the language and plot codes of the Victorian pornographic industry" (284). It stands to reason that other novelists of the mid- to late nineteenth century were similarly exposed to and influenced by the language and visuals of pornography. Neo-Victorian pornographies seem highly aware of the tensions and affinities experienced with their Victorian ancestors — the originators of the modern pornographic genre and the revolutionaries of sexual discourse.

Pornography, always the distasteful, underground, social-climbing cousin, participates in a complex symbiotic relationship to the mainstream (McNair 15). Pornographic renderings of "legitimate" culture reunite these siblings, revealing the creative influence of pornography on mainstream writers, and not merely the reverse. Neo-Victorian pornographies distance themselves from the Victorian in that they must speak the sexual silences of the nineteenth-century text too coy to speak for itself. Yet at the same time, pornography is performing a recovery project, reconnecting the strands that constitute a discursive and representational legacy stemming from the Victorian period.

Culturally, we recognize and enjoy the competing images of the Victorians. Victorianist Peter N. Stearns argues that scholars of the early twentieth century constructed a stereotype of "the repressed Victorian" (47), which led to the cultural truism that the Victorians were "responsible for creating the sex-negative culture that twentieth century 'moderns' have rebelled against" (47). In an attempt to revise this stereotype, more recent scholars have unwittingly established a new stereotype of Victorian sexuality that is, in Stearns's view, "overly sanguine" (47). The truth, Stearns asserts, is a combination of the two stereotypes: Victorians regarded sex as a powerful force that could lead to good or ill, depending on whether the sex act was "sensual" or "spiritual" in nature. Likewise, in her book Unauthorized Pleasures: Accounts of Victorian Erotic Experience, Ellen Bayuk Rosenman explores Victorian sexual dissidence and uncategorized sexual pleasures, arguing that Victorian erotic pleasure was characterized by "fluidity and multiplicity" (4). Rosenman cautions that "the meanings and ideological valences of Victorian sexual behaviors are seldom simple and cannot be understood in terms of our own modern politics of sexual transgression" (4). Nevertheless, we persist in forcing the Victorians into this model for our own erotic gratification. This persistence is particularly visible in neo-Victorian pornography.

Pornographic articulations of the Victorian draw specifically on both the repressed and the sanguine stereotypes of Victorian sexuality to initiate this sense of transgression: while the pornographic adaptation utilizes the repressed stereotype as a way of "exposing" or "opening up" some kind of off-limits group of people, the appropriation would not work without an accompanying sense that what was really going on was much more dirty and perverse. Wash West, writer/director of the neo-Victorian all-male porn films Dr. Jerkoff and Mr. Hard (1997) and Gluttony (2001) observes, "Repression necessarily forced the writers and artists of the [Victorian period] to find metaphors — terrestrial or supernatural — that gave voice to their unexpressed desires" (West). The act of porning seeks to demystify the metaphor and express those desires.

However, porning upholds other repressed ideas in the process. Pornography needs repression in order to speak transgressively. As Carmine Sarracino and Kevin M. Scott ambivalently observe in their book, The Porning of America, "The main difference, then, between Puritanism and porn is that instead of fleeing from sex, porn, proceeding from the same premises, indulges in it transgressively and promiscuously" (200). Pornographic appropriations of the Victorian bring to bear the public/private, sensual/spiritual split that Stearns delineates, both upholding these divides and deconstructing them. This tension is at the heart of pornographic pleasure.

Pornography utilizes "the Victorian" rather loosely as a generic rhetorical lure connoting secrecy, hypocrisy, and strict divisions between public and private. In the majority of these films and the blurbs they utilize, any era marked as antique or more generally "old" will be categorized as Victorian or Edwardian without much concern for the distinctions between periods. The only concern is that antiquity equates to repression and hypocrisy, and repression and hypocrisy equate to the Victorians. The Victorians are sexy in their uptight clothing and attitude insofar as the pornographic film might expose naughty goings-on behind closed doors. A handy example of this tendency in action is the press release for My Mother's Best Friend Vol. 4: Lost in Time (2011) posted on the adult film site Adult DVD Talk. The film is part of an older woman/ younger man series that flirts with incest, and is a period piece. The publicist states, "It's set in the Edwardian Era and has a Jane Austen look to it." When a porn consumer remarks, "My first thought is that Jane Austin [sic] wasn't an Edwardian. She was a Georgian and died 80 years before the start of the Edwardian period." The writer of the press release responds, "I was describing more the style of the porn as Jane Austen not the time period — as in period piece with forbidden love and great costumes" ("Jane Austen Porn"). Likewise, the specific 1915 setting of Bedtime Tales is simultaneously referred to as "Victorian" in the film's dialogue. The blurb states that it is an era "when even a hint of ankle could be considered scandalous," but on the other hand, "of course, behind closed doors they were showing off a lot more than just ankles!" In this way, porn flattens the past even as it exploits it for erotic affect.

The Naughty Victorians (1975) is based on an Edwardian pornographic novel, The Way of a Man with a Maid (1908). However, probably due to the novel's consistency with Victorian pornographic style (and the accompanying tendency on the part of publishers to include it in Victorian erotica anthologies), the filmmakers either assumed the novel was indeed Victorian or felt audiences would be more intrigued by a Victorian-set film. No matter the reason, the marketing rhetoric confirms a trading in the Victorian that emphasizes an exposure of sordid behaviors going on behind a screen of propriety: "Queen Victoria would be appalled ... publicly, at least!" Films such as this demonstrate a pornographic rhetoric that capitalizes on the eroticism of the sexual practices of the supposedly repressed Victorians, but viewed from the vantage point of the supposedly sexually enlightened.

Reclaiming the Feminine in Neo-Victorian Pornography In a recent interview with oral history podcast The Rialto Report, adult-film legend Nina Hartley describes her one and only visit to an X-rated film theater to see the Sharon McNight–directed 1976 film, Autobiography of a Flea: "I didn't think at the time, 'Wow, I'm being so bold and feminist by going in by myself!' It was like, I want to go and see the movie and I didn't have any friends who I could say, 'Hey, let's go and sneak into a dirty movie!' I didn't think to ask anybody to go with me. I just went. ... that was the only one — the only time I did it. ... I just never thought to do it again." The film Hartley snuck into is an early example of a female-directed film as well as one of the first feature-length hardcore adaptations of a Victorian pornographic novel. Marketed using a feminine appeal to high production values and class, the film was what McNight describes as "pretty porn": "It did very well, as it was a great deal more femininely oriented than most of the movies of the time had been. It was pretty porn; it looked like Barry Lyndon" (Frank).