BOOKS

SEX IN HISTORY, by G. Rattray Taylor (London: Thames & Hudson, 1953. 306 pp.)

Originally published in the Newsletter of the Chicago Mattachine Society, by Harold G. O'Leary. This is another in a series of reviews of serious and provocative books.

It was perhaps inevitable, in this generation of theorists of history, that Freud should eventually be invoked in the persistent attempt of historians to bring order and coherence into the bewildering spectacle of the human past. Mr. Taylor's book is es sentially a Freudian theory of history. In itself this would seem to be a promising sort of approach: the game of historical interpretation, as typified by Toynbee, his folTowers, and his opponents, has often seemed to me to be one in which the rules were determined solely by the prejudices of the historian himself. Whether history was to be seen as a "progress" or as a perpetual alternation or as a meaningful procession towards a meaningful goal; what was "significant" and what could be ignored; what was a "main current" and what was a minor digression all these seem to be determined by the personal bias of the individual historian toward Humanism, Materialism, "Hebraism," or Mysticism. Not that Mr. Taylor is unbiased: he is perfectly straightforward about his Freudian and Humanist orientation. But what is promising is that in basing his interpretations on psychoanalitic theory, he is employing a fairly precise tool, developed and sharpened by others and not wholly dependent upon his own whim. Furthermore, Mr. Taylor is interested in more or less ultimate historical causes: the fact, for instance, that the idea of the "divine" mistress (leading to the tradition of the adulterous, courtly love, which flourished among the Provençal minstrels in the midst of severe sexual repression imposed by the Church) was probably "influenced" by elements in Arabic poetry, or the fact that the marked rise of homosexuality among the English clergy and laity in the twelfth century may have been "influenced" by the Norman invasion these appeals to "influence" do not satisfy the author. He wishes to ask why there should have arisen at these times in history groups of people who were willing to accept these "influ ences" and to act upon them. ·

The rationale of his approach is simple: society consists of individuals; the Freudian theory has a number of illuminating things to say about the development of individ uals and the basic psychic dispositions which mold their future behavior and the choices they make among the many, influences in their environment; their attitudes toward sex are significant indexes of their basic psychic dispositions; ergo history of human sexual practices and attitudes, interpreted by the Freudian theory.

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The author's procedure is likewise simple perhaps too simple. He operates es sentially with only two sets of terms: (1) Eros and Thanatos: these he defines as opposite forms of man's basic irrational libidinal drive: when Eros, the drive toward love, creation, and pleasure, is blocked of normal outlets, it forces itself out de viously and obsessionally in forms of destruction, pain, and death Thanatos. (2) Matrism and Patrism: given two parents, the child is, in most human societies, more or less forced in the process of becoming an individual to make a basic identimaltachine REVIEW

fication with one or the other of them and with the quities they represent. (The mother, in general, is conceived of as the loving, permissive, protective giver of life and nourishment; the father, as the stem commander, disciplinarian, and inhibitor of basic drives.) Thus the mother-identifier or matrist tends to become a permissive, spontaneous, pleasure-loving, progressive individual, who accords women a high social status, worships a loving, forgiving, Mother-like deity, is more interested in human welfare than in chastity but who harbors a deep, constant fear of incest as the most horrible of crimes and as an ever-present threat. The fatherIdentifier or patrist, conversely, tends to develop a conservative, authoritarian character, fearing pleasure and spontaneity, valuing chastity above human welfare, lookIng upon women as inferior, unclean, sinful creatures, worshipping a stem, repres sive Father-like deity and harboring a deep fear of homosexuality as the most horrible of crimes and as an ever-present threat.

Armed with these neatly opposed concepts, the author marches through European history, from the Mother-religions of the ancient world, through the patrist repressions of Paulist Christianity, to what he believes is the growing matrism of the twentieth century. What he shows us is, essentially, a perpetual alteration of ages domInated now by patrists, now by matrists, pointing out the evils which have resulted when either of these orientations toward sex was carried to excessive, obsessional limits by the dominant group. He is at best exposing the dark eruptions of Thanatos in the patrist ages. The outbreaks of mass hysteria, the possession by demons, the epidemic of incubi, the witch-burning and torture, the brutality of the Crusades, and the masochistic perversions of some of the Christian saints of the Catholic Middle Ages he attributes to the obsessional attempts of patrist Church rulers to repress their own sexual fears by suppressing almost all the normal sexual outlets of both clergy and laity. Similarly, he ascribes the condemnation of the arts, of dancing, and of almost all other forms of human spontaneity and pleasure in the Puritan Re formation to the obsessional patrism of Calvin, Knox, and other Protestand leaders. He takes pleasure in revealing the obsession with sex that underlay the surface purity of nineteenth-century Victorian prudery, and the sadistic quality of the devices employed by stern Victorian fathers to suppress the sexuality of their sons. To these dark periods he opposes the creative, permissive matrist epochs of history: the Troubadors, the cult of the Mary-worshippers, the Italian and English Renaissance, the Restoration and early eighteenth century, the Romantic movement pointing out that these eras, too, had their evils of excess: public lawlessness, mob violence, corruption and cynicism among the clergy. These excesses he attributes to the failure of extreme mother-identifiers to form a conscience strong enough to control their impulses. Despite his apparent partiality to the relative sanity of the matrist periods, the author mildly deplores the endless rounds of violent oscillation engendered by either of these exclusive identifications and several times holds up a hypothetical ideal of a civilization which would allow its children to mold themselves upon the best qualities of both their parents. He does not seem to believe very seriously, however, in the possibility of the actual accomplishment of this ideal.

Plausible and attractive as the author's scheme is in its simplicity, one must point out that there are many questions which it fails to answer. Does this sexual history correlate with the intellectual and political history of the same periods? For instance, were the execution of Charles I, the challenge of the divine right of kings, and the establishment of a Commonwealth by the English Puritans (hidebound