The Way of a Man with a Maid is an anonymous work of sadistic[1] pornography,[2] attributed by Evelyn J. Hinz to John Farmer,[3] first published in 1895[4] or 1896[3] and later in Liverpool by H.W. Pickle & Co. in 1908.[5] The story is told in the first person by a Victorian gentleman called Jack, a serial rapist who sees nothing wrong with - and indeed, takes considerable pride in - the meticulously-planned rapes which he describes in minute detail.
The rapes all take place at a room in his house called 'The Snuggery', which he converted into a kind of erotic torture chamber equipped with beds to which women can be strapped and held helpless and which is soundproofed to make their screams unheard.
The underlying assumptions which Jack takes for granted, and which form the basis for the book's plot, are:
- A man has the right to have sex with any woman he wants, at any time he wants, with or without her consent;
- A woman rejecting a man's advances has committed a sin for which she deserves to be punished by being raped and subjected to particularly humiliating sexual acts
- All women "want to be raped". However strong and persistent their protest and resistance, should the rapist ignore these protests and go on with his acts, they would (typically, on the moment of penetration) come to enjoy the sexual act enforced upon them. Afterwards, they would likely "come back for more".[4]
The first of many victims lured into 'The Snuggery' to be raped is a girl called Alice, a member of Jack's social set who had earlier jilted him and on whom he takes revenge by subjecting her to a whole series of sexual acts without her consent (and without any more thought of marrying her). The very detailed description of Alice's rape, with the narrator repeatedly expressing great satisfaction at her fear and humiliation, takes the whole of the first part, called "the Tragedy". At its end, Alice had completely submitted and become Jack's willing sexual partner.[6]
In the second part, called "The Comedy", Alice locates for Jack further victims, helps lure them to be raped in turn, and actively helps in making them sexually available to Jack. The rape scenes of Alice's servant Fanny and Alice's friend Connie follow the same pattern, with the new victim vainly protesting and resisting the gloating Jack, only to be finally converted (as Jack puts it) into a willing and eager sexual partner and an active accomplice in the rape of the next victim.[7]
By the final episode, when the wealthy Lady Betty and her daughter Molly had been lured into the rape room, Jack need not exert himself to tie up and undress the new victims. All this dirty work is being performed eagerly by his earlier victims tuned accomplices. Thereupon, mother and daughter are not only subjected to repeated rape but also forced into a long series of incestuous acts with each other, carried out so as to inflict the very maximum of humiliation and degradation upon mother and daughter and accompanied by endless gloating and taunting from Jack and his three female accomplices.
Though British courts at the time of writing dealt severely with rapists, Jack has no hesitation in again and again raping women who know him and then setting them loose with not the slightest apprehension that they would complain and lead the police to him - feeling completely and arrogantly sure that once having been forced to taste the "charms" of his love-making they would not do anything of the kind.
In addition to the "quite perverse" scenes of rape, bondage, mother-daughter incest, whipping and "odd things done with feathers" in order to force women into orgasm, the book has a major element of lesbianism. The writer seems, however, to have had little knowledge of the subject, assuming that lesbian sex consists mainly of women lying on top of each other in the missionary position, in direct mimicking of heterosexual sex.
The book can be considered to be irreverent of the British class system prevailing at the time of writing - all women, be they servants or great ladies, are "equal" in having to submit to the narrator's every sexual whim.
The book's title is derived from the Bible's Book of Proverbs, where the wise King Solomon mentions "The Way of a Man with a Maid" as one of the "things which are too wonderful for me, yea, which I know not" [8]. The ancient king's wonderment is manifestly not shared by the arrogantly self-assured Victorian narrator.
The book being anonymous and thus not copyrighted, there were variant texts with changes and additions. For example, a Hebrew translation current in Israel in the 1970's had an added "flashback" not found in the English original, according to which Molly had already undergone repeated anal rape by the doctor in her boarding school, before falling into Jack's hands.[citation needed]
The protagonist Jack returns in another anonymous work of erotica called A Weekend Visit, in which he "entertains" three lady friends at their house in the country - in this case there is no rape involved, but two older women inviting Jack to "initiate" a younger girl into sex.[citation needed]
The Way of a Man with a Maid was adapted as a film entitled What the Swedish Butler Saw (1975) starring Sue Longhurst as Alice and Ole Soltoft as Jack. Sweet Sinner studios released a hard core pornographic version of the story as A Man With A Maid - Tales Of Victorian Lust on November 18, 2009. The film stars Ben English as Jack, Nicole Ray as Alice, Stephanie Swift as Fanny, Magdalene St. Michaels as Mrs. Blunt and Elexis Monroe as her daughter Molly. The film takes liberties with the story by adding a new character, "Jack's Nephew" played by James Deen. The studio claims that it was filmed in a "landmark Victorian Mansion" and features "real period Costumes"
References
- ^ Katchadourian, Herant A.; Donald T. Lunde (1972). Fundamentals of human sexuality. Holt, Rinehart and Winston. p. 380. ISBN 9780030830532.
- ^ Gifford, Don; Robert J. Seidman (2008). Ulysses annotated: notes for James Joyce's Ulysses. University of California Press. p. 309. ISBN 9780520253971.
- ^ a b Hinz, Evelyn J. (1985). For better or worse: attitudes toward marriage in literature. University of Manitoba. p. xii. ISBN 9780919475267.
- ^ a b Zatlin, Linda G. (Autumn - Winter 1990). "Beardsley Redresses Venus". Victorian Poetry (West Virginia University Press) 28 (3/4): 111-124. JSTOR 40002293. ISSN 0042-5206.
- ^ Mendes, Peter (1993). Clandestine erotic fiction in English, 1800-1930: a bibliographical study. Scolar Press. ISBN 9780859679190.
- ^ Pease, Allison (2000). Modernism, mass culture, and the aesthetics of obscenity. Cambridge University Press. p. 158. ISBN 9780521780766.
- ^ Lansbury, Coral (1985). The old brown dog: women, workers, and vivisection in Edwardian England. University of Wisconsin Press. p. 121. ISBN 9780299102500.
- ^ Book of Proverbs, 30:18 [1]
Bibliography
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Wikisource has original text related to this article: |
- The Wordsworth Book of Classic Erotica (2007) contains the full text of The Way of a Man with a Maid and A Weekend Visit.
- Simon Sheridan Keeping the British End Up: Four Decades of Saucy Cinema (3rd edition) (Reynolds and Hearn books 2007) discusses the film.
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