On beating up Victorians

A few kind words, please, for Victorians

DAN ROTTENBERG

The first act of Caryl Churchill’s Cloud 9, currently at the Wilma, takes great delight in spoofing the sexist conventions of paternalistic Victorian society (“It is through our father that we love our queen and our God”). It’s all great fun, but it’s fun largely because the Victorians make such easy and obvious targets today.

In fact every custom of the past had some rational explanation, including the obsessive double standards of 19th-Century Victorians, to whom appearances meant everything and substance nothing. A man could be a swindler, a womanizer and even a murderer (Jack the Ripper was rumored to have been a member of the royal family), but if he dressed properly, maintained a respectable front and kept his dirty dealings quiet, Victorian society accepted him as a gentleman. Edward VII, Victoria’s son, kept a mistress who was tacitly accepted by all who knew about her as long as her presence wasn’t publicly acknowledged.

Today we claim to have liberated ourselves from such hypocrisy. With the benefit of Freud, Kinsey, Oprah and Caryl Churchill, we now know that perfectly decent people talk dirty, masturbate, commit adultery, get divorced and love people of the same sex. Yet the Victorians were not stupid; they knew these facts of life almost as well as we do. They simply refused to acknowledge them publicly.

Don't knock illusion

And with good reason: In our modern institutionalized world, we tend to take an orderly society for granted. But in the Victorian world, individuals had only each other, and they needed to feel they could depend on each other— a feeling they achieved through a rigid set of social conventions and manners. The Victorians perceived that order in society is as much a matter of illusion as substance— that if people believe the world is orderly and dependable, to a large extent it will be.

When forced to choose between truth and order, the Victorians chose order. Writers like Oscar Wilde and D.H. Lawrence, who acknowledged sexual fantasies that everyone else kept to themselves, were prosecuted and suppressed not becausetheir writings were false, but because they brought disruptive truths into the public domain, where they could not be denied. (Pornography flourished in Victorian England, but it was always underground, never public. Wilde's and Lawrence’s crime was that they insisted on bringing sex into the open.)

Franklin's formula for successful marriage

The Victorians were ostriches, of course, who got so caught up in appearances that they lost sight of substance. But the fact remains that they were on to something. Benjamin Franklin— certainly no Victorian— once observed, “Before marriage, keep both eyes open; afterward, one eye closed.” He meant that if you insist on confronting the whole truth about your spouse, you will wreck your marriage. By extension, if we insist on knowing the whole truth about life’s most private matters, we could wreck society. Without our illusions— that our lovers adore us, that our children are brilliant, that our public officials are honest— we could not get through the day.

The Victorians sought to cover up pain and discomfort in the belief that the social order was too fragile to withstand it, like a patient who can tolerate only so much surgery. But the repressive Victorian society was also the foundation for the liberated society we enjoy today. The only societies willing to tolerate wholesale truth (as we in he Western world do now) are those where a sense of security— physical and psychological— has already been established, as the Victorians did.

I don’t envy Victorian men and women, who seem to have spent much of their lives in a psychological darkness. On the other hand, I don’t envy those liberated modern neurotics who discuss their orgasms and breast implants on “Good Morning America.” As a journalist, I’m grateful to live in a society where truth can be published and works by playwrights like Caryl Churchill can be produced openly. The irony (which appears lost on Churchill) is that a society capable of facing the truth could only evolve out of a society dedicated to avoiding the truth.

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Andrea Mitchell follow-up

My recent critique of TV news reporter Andrea Mitchell’s memoir, Talking Back (April 17, 2006), elicited numerous responses (see Letters). But the most baffling was the contention— made by several Internet bloggers as well as Mitchell herself— that my review must have been motivated by some personal animus. It is of course always gratifying to discover total strangers blessed with the gift of reading my mind. But as a professional journalist who’s relatively new to the relatively unprofessional world of the Internet, here’s my question: Must every commenttor in the world always have a hidden agenda? Is it not possible for a professional critic to offer his criticism as criticism, nothing more nor less?

One friend of Mitchell’s chastised me for dredging up Mitchell’s personal past and asked how I’[d feel if someone did the same to me or my daughter Julie, the TV sitcom writer. My reply may be instructive:

“I’ve admired Andrea since her days in Philadelphia, and perhaps that is why I was so disappointed by what I felt was the shallowness of her book. Your loyalty to your friend is laudable, but I hope you understand that my first obligation as a journalist must be to provide my honest impressions to my readers before they invest $25.95 plus a chunk of their valuable time in a book. The notion that journalists should accord special treatment to their friends is repellent to me, and I hope to Andrea (and you) as well.
“As for your hypothetical question about my daughter Julie: I have strived throughout my career to practice my craft according to the Golden Rule. Were Julie or I to delude ourselves, as I believe Andrea has deluded herself, into marketing a promotional book as an ‘unvarnished’ and ‘candidly written’ memoir (these phrases appear on the book jacket)— yes indeed, I hope somebody would take me (or Julie) to task for that.”

Cronkite and Koppel no, Edwin Newman yes

In that same Andrea Mitchell review, I cast a jaundiced eye on books written by TV personalities: “Plumb the depths (or read the books) of even the deepest thinkers in the history of TV news— Walter Cronkite, say, or Ted Koppel or Peter Jennings— and you will find, as Gertrude Stein said of Oakland, California, that there is very little there there.”

My thanks to reader Mel Friedman of New York for coming up with at least one example of a TV newsperson whose books pass muster on their own merit. That would be Edwin Newman, the longtime NBC News anchorman and author of pop-scholarly books on language, such as Strictly Speaking: Will America Be the Death of English? (1974) and 
A Civil Tongue (1975). I will grant that Newman (still kicking at 87) is the exception who proves my rule. But can you think of even one other example?