Stefan Zweig - The Society of the Crossed Keys

However, the morality of this society, which on the one hand tacitly assumed the existence of sexuality running its natural course, but on the other would not publicly acknowledge it at any price, was in fact doubly mendacious. For while it turned a blind eye to young men and even, winking the other eye, encouraged them to ‘sow their wild oats’, as the jargon of the time jocularly put it, society closed both eyes in alarm and pretended to be blind when faced with women. Even convention had to admit tacitly that a man felt and must be allowed to feel certain urges. But to admit honestly that a woman was also subject to them, that for its eternal purposes creation required the feminine as well as the masculine principle, would have offended against the whole concept of women as sacred beings. Before Freud, it was an accepted axiom that a woman had no physical desires until they were aroused in her by a man, although of course that was officially permitted only in marriage. However, as the air of Vienna in particular was full of dangerously infectious eroticism even in that age of morality, a girl of good family had to live in an entirely sterilised atmosphere from her birth to the day when she went to the bridal altar. Young girls were not left alone for a moment, for their own protection. Girls had governesses whose duty it was to make sure that they did not—God forbid!—take a step outside the front door of their homes unescorted; they were taken to school, to their dancing classes and music lessons, and then collected again. Every book they read was checked, and above all young girls were kept constantly occupied in case they indulged in any dangerous ideas. They had to practise the piano, do some singing and drawing; they had to learn foreign languages and the history of art and literature; they were educated, indeed over-educated. But while the idea was to make them as educated and socially well brought up as possible, at the same time great care was taken to leave them ignorant of all natural things, in a way unimaginable to us today. A young girl of good family was not allowed to have any idea of how the male body was formed, she must not know how children came into the world, for since she was an angel she was not just to remain physically untouched, she must also enter marriage entirely ‘pure’ in mind. For a girl to be well brought up at the time was equivalent to leaving her ignorant of life, and that ignorance sometimes remained with women of those days all their lives. I am still amused by the grotesque story of an aunt of mine, who on her wedding night suddenly appeared back in her parents’ apartment at one in the morning frantically ringing the bell and protesting that she never wanted to set eyes on the horrible man whom she had married again, he was a madman and a monster! In all seriousness, he had tried to take her clothes off. It was only with difficulty, she said, that she had been able to save herself from his obviously deranged demands.

I cannot deny that, on the other hand, this ignorance lent young girls of the time a mysterious charm. Unfledged as they were, they guessed that besides and beyond their own world there was another of which they knew nothing, were not allowed to know anything, and that made them curious, full of longing, effusive, attractively confused. If you greeted them in the street they would blush—do any young girls still blush? Alone with each other they would giggle and whisper and laugh all the time, as if they were slightly tipsy. Full of expectation of the unknown that was never disclosed to them, they entertained romantic dreams of life, but at the same time were ashamed to think of anyone finding out how much their bodies physically craved a kind of affection of which they had no very clear notion. A sort of slight confusion always animated their conduct. They walked differently from the girls of today, whose bodies are made fit through sport, who mingle with young men easily and without embarrassment, as their equals. Even a thousand paces away in our time, you could tell the difference between a young girl and a woman who had had a physical relationship with a man simply by the way she walked and held herself. Young girls were more girlish than the girls of today, less like women, resembling the exotically tender hothouse plants that are raised in the artificially overheated atmosphere of a glasshouse, away from any breath of inclement wind; the artificially bred product of a certain kind of rearing and culture.

But that was how the society of the time liked its young girls—innocent and ignorant, well brought up and knowing nothing, curious and bashful, uncertain and impractical, destined by an education remote from real life to be formed and guided in marriage by a husband, without any will of their own. Custom and decency seemed to protect them as the emblem of its most secret ideal, the epitome of demure feminine conduct, virginal and unworldly. But what a tragedy if one of these young girls had wasted her time, and at twenty-five or thirty was still unmarried! Convention mercilessly decreed that an unmarried woman of thirty must remain in a state of inexperience and naivety, feeling no desires—it was a state not at all suitable for her at her present age—preserving herself intact for the sake of the family and ‘decency’. The tender image of girlhood then usually turned into a sharp and cruel caricature. An unmarried woman of her age had been ‘left on the shelf’, and a woman left on the shelf became an old maid. The humorous journals, with their shallow mockery, made fun of old maids all the time. If you open old issues of the Fliegende Blätter or another specimen of the humorous press of the time, it is horrifying to see, in every edition, the most unfeeling jokes cracked at the expense of aging unmarried women whose nervous systems were so badly disturbed that they could not hide what, after all, was their natural longing for love. Instead of acknowledging the tragedy of these sacrificial lives which, for the sake of the family and its good name, had to deny the demands of nature and their longing for love and motherhood, people mocked them with a lack of understanding that repels us today. But society is always most cruel to those who betray its secrets, showing where its dishonesty commits a crime against nature.

If bourgeois convention of the time desperately tried to maintain the fiction that a woman of the ‘best circles’ had no sexuality and must not have any until she was married—for anything else would make her an immoral creature, an outcast from her family—then it was still obliged to admit that such instincts really were present in a young man. And as experience had shown that young men who had reached sexual maturity could not be prevented from putting their sexuality into practice, society limited itself to the modest hope that they could take their unworthy pleasures extramurally, outside the sanctified precincts of good manners. Just as cities conceal an underground sewage system into which all the filth of the cesspits is diverted under their neatly swept streets, full of beautiful shops selling luxury goods, beneath their elegant promenades, the entire sexual life of young men was supposed to be conducted out of sight, below the moral surface of society. The dangers to which a young man would expose himself did not matter, or the spheres into which he ventured, and his mentors at school and at home sedulously refrained from explaining anything about that to him. Now and then, in the last years of that moral society’s existence, an occasional father with ‘enlightened ideas’, as it was put at the time, put some thought to the matter and, as soon as the boy began to show signs of growing a beard, tried to help him in a responsible way. He would summon the family doctor; who sometimes asked the young man into a private room, ceremoniously cleaning his glasses before embarking on a lecture about the dangers of sexually transmitted diseases, and urging the young man, who by this time had usually informed himself about them already, to indulge in moderation and remember to take certain precautions. Other fathers employed a still stranger method; they hired a pretty maidservant for their domestic staff, and it was this girl’s job to give the young man practical instruction. Such fathers thought it better for a son to get this troublesome business over and done with under their own roof. This method also, to all appearances, preserved decorum and in addition excluded the danger that the young man might fall into the hands of some ‘artful and designing person’. One method of enlightenment, however, remained firmly banned in all forms and by all those in authority—the open and honest one.