Sex and Shame

The fourth and fifth paragraphs on page 108 of Mona Caird’s The Yellow Drawing-Room illustrate how intensely the narrator feels shame surrounding his sexuality. Although the narrator does not deny that he wishes to court Vanora, throughout this passage, he places distance between himself and the actual effects of a courtship, like sex. First, despite the fourth paragraph’s equal focus on Vanora and the narrator, seven of the eight sentences begin with “I.” This repetition obviously favors the narrator’s feelings over how they may affect Vanora. However, it also highlights the difficulties he has in figuring out his feelings. Every attempt he makes at naming his emotions falls flat and necessitates another sentence. He cannot say that complex feelings he has are not just love, but also sexual desires. As with many pieces of Victorian literature, the length of a passage or even an entire book reflects how the characters skirt around the unsaid.

When it comes time for the narrator to admit his love for Vanora, he falters, and writes, “I suppose I must have been in love with her…(Caird 108).” Instead of directly saying “I loved her,” the narrator creates both physical space on the page and a string of apologies for his feelings by adding two additional verb clauses. In a setting where marriage was at stake, love equated sex. By questioning his declaration of love, he distanced himself from the thought of having to perform with the confident, liberated Vanora in an intimate setting.

The narrator’s hidden desires become clearer in the following sentence, where he writes, “I longed to make her yield to me…I had a burning desire to subdue her (Caird 108). The sentence carries dual meanings, pointing to both the narrator’s wish to quell her rebellious, “New Woman,” characteristics, and wish to subdue her sexually. Because Vanora holds power over the narrator because she reputes his advances, he secretly wishes to match her power in a physical way. Using “burning,” an adjective frequently associated with the heat and intensity of sex, further paints this picture. However, the way he explains it is characteristically confusing and shadowed by inuendo.

The narrator’s shame revolving around sex can partially be pinned on the old-fashioned views on romance that he admits that he has. However, these textual elements point to an additional factor: how Vanora emasculates the narrator by refuting him. By losing the power in courtship that his gender would normally afford him, he becomes ashamed of his inability to be viewed as a legitimate, sexual man. He wishes to act as a “man” by being sexually dominant, but to plainly admit this would also implicate his feelings of insufficient masculinity.