Read Online Among the Bohemians by Virginia Nicholson - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Virginia Nicholson
Tags: Social Science, History, 20th Century, Modern, Anthropology, Cultural, Art, Social History, Individual Artists, Monographs
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before All – Love and Art’ and ‘Free Love’ were mantras for their time.The new generation was sloughing off the dead casings of the nineteenth century, emerging in a fresh skin, to rediscover Love and rediscover Sex.
It was probably in 1908 that Virginia Woolf, her sister Vanessa, and Lytton Strachey found they could talk about sex.The story has been often repeated, but it still stands as a mythic moment in the history of twentieth-century liberation:
… the long and sinister figure of Mr Lytton Strachey stood on the threshold.He pointed his finger at a stain on Vanessa’s white dress.
‘Semen?’ he said.
Can one really say it?I thought & we burst out laughing.With that one word all barriers of reticence and reserve went down.A flood of the sacred fluid seemed to overwhelm us.Sex permeated our conversation.The word bugger was never far from our lips.We discussed copulation with the same excitement and openness that we had discussed the nature of good.It is strange to think how reticent, how reserved we had been and for how long.
That celebratory sense of liberty, the feeling of bursting from bonds, was almost tangible at times: ‘I want to kiss people, copulate with them, dance, drink, ride in racing motor cars, climb trees, camp out…’ confided the young David Garnett to his diary.
Divesting oneself of virginity without more ado was the first thing to do – like the young Enid Bagnold, who left her stuffy parental home in the suburbs, went to live in Chelsea, and in very little time had taken the irrevocable step with literary Lothario Frank Harris:
‘Sex,’ said Frank Harris, ‘is the gateway to life.’ So I went through the gateway in an upper room in the Café Royal…
As I sat at dinner with Aunt Clara and Uncle Lexy I couldn’t believe that my skull wasn’t chanting aloud: ‘I’m not a virgin!I’m not a virgin!’
They were drunk on new delights, this unrepressed band of New Women, and they felt no shame, no need to conceal their liberation.They wanted to cry it from the rooftops.Nina Hamnett wanted a plaque on the house where she had been deflowered.There was a sense of fun about the new-found freedom.Sex was natural, loving, an expression of spontaneous lusts,preordained for human ecstasy.What was to stop one making love on a clifftop in broad daylight?Why resist, why hold back?
Kathleen Hale in her old age was indignant at the suggestion that she and her friends were dissolute or promiscuous.She regarded herself as deeply in love, committed, and quite open in her affairs.It was all-important to her that she had profound feelings about her lovers, and it was this that gave her and Bohemians like her their moral validity.
For the pioneers of free love had more than their natural inclinations and lusts to support their cause.The Bohemian romantics were steeped in the ideal of truthful living and truthful loving.They were passionately certain in their belief that sex should be seen as a mystic state released from the prison of social expectations.Today such beliefs may appear naive, but the ideal of free love was revered with almost spiritual fervour by a generation of Bohemians.This idealism was fuelled by an equal sense of the profanity and barbarism of contemporary society, which not only condemned women and many men to a life sentence of never-to-be-realised longings, but prostituted women in a degraded transaction called marriage.When the author Grant Allen wrote his novel The Woman Who Did (1895) it was a best-seller.Although its language and sentiment read somewhat mawkishly today, the heroine would find many latter-day sympathisers in her single-minded determination not to marry cynically.
The beautiful Herminia Grey wears simple Pre-Raphaelite-style clothes and white roses in her hair – she is clearly all soul.To her rather more conventionally minded suitor Alan Merrick this virginal goddess is irresistible.Their conversation is on a higher plane, their hearts unite, and
It was probably in 1908 that Virginia Woolf, her sister Vanessa, and Lytton Strachey found they could talk about sex.The story has been often repeated, but it still stands as a mythic moment in the history of twentieth-century liberation:
… the long and sinister figure of Mr Lytton Strachey stood on the threshold.He pointed his finger at a stain on Vanessa’s white dress.
‘Semen?’ he said.
Can one really say it?I thought & we burst out laughing.With that one word all barriers of reticence and reserve went down.A flood of the sacred fluid seemed to overwhelm us.Sex permeated our conversation.The word bugger was never far from our lips.We discussed copulation with the same excitement and openness that we had discussed the nature of good.It is strange to think how reticent, how reserved we had been and for how long.
That celebratory sense of liberty, the feeling of bursting from bonds, was almost tangible at times: ‘I want to kiss people, copulate with them, dance, drink, ride in racing motor cars, climb trees, camp out…’ confided the young David Garnett to his diary.
Divesting oneself of virginity without more ado was the first thing to do – like the young Enid Bagnold, who left her stuffy parental home in the suburbs, went to live in Chelsea, and in very little time had taken the irrevocable step with literary Lothario Frank Harris:
‘Sex,’ said Frank Harris, ‘is the gateway to life.’ So I went through the gateway in an upper room in the Café Royal…
As I sat at dinner with Aunt Clara and Uncle Lexy I couldn’t believe that my skull wasn’t chanting aloud: ‘I’m not a virgin!I’m not a virgin!’
They were drunk on new delights, this unrepressed band of New Women, and they felt no shame, no need to conceal their liberation.They wanted to cry it from the rooftops.Nina Hamnett wanted a plaque on the house where she had been deflowered.There was a sense of fun about the new-found freedom.Sex was natural, loving, an expression of spontaneous lusts,preordained for human ecstasy.What was to stop one making love on a clifftop in broad daylight?Why resist, why hold back?
Kathleen Hale in her old age was indignant at the suggestion that she and her friends were dissolute or promiscuous.She regarded herself as deeply in love, committed, and quite open in her affairs.It was all-important to her that she had profound feelings about her lovers, and it was this that gave her and Bohemians like her their moral validity.
For the pioneers of free love had more than their natural inclinations and lusts to support their cause.The Bohemian romantics were steeped in the ideal of truthful living and truthful loving.They were passionately certain in their belief that sex should be seen as a mystic state released from the prison of social expectations.Today such beliefs may appear naive, but the ideal of free love was revered with almost spiritual fervour by a generation of Bohemians.This idealism was fuelled by an equal sense of the profanity and barbarism of contemporary society, which not only condemned women and many men to a life sentence of never-to-be-realised longings, but prostituted women in a degraded transaction called marriage.When the author Grant Allen wrote his novel The Woman Who Did (1895) it was a best-seller.Although its language and sentiment read somewhat mawkishly today, the heroine would find many latter-day sympathisers in her single-minded determination not to marry cynically.
The beautiful Herminia Grey wears simple Pre-Raphaelite-style clothes and white roses in her hair – she is clearly all soul.To her rather more conventionally minded suitor Alan Merrick this virginal goddess is irresistible.Their conversation is on a higher plane, their hearts unite, and
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