Sweet White Violet

[sienamystic]

jonquil requested a cite for the book I’m currently reading, Searching the Heart: Women, Men, and Romantic Love in Nineteenth-Century America by Karen Lystra.



Lystra quotes extensively from letters between Robert Burdette and Clara Baker, he a 53-year-old lecturer, Presybterian minister, and later pastor of the Temple Baptist Church, and she a 42-year-old clubwoman who was active in many charities and civic organizations. She had been married twice before, he had been married once. They were, in every respect, the type of person we think of today as a typical Victorian – much interested in piety, domesticity, “service to God and humanity,” and “good-natured interest in moral order.” And so it is surprising to us to see that these people who would seem to us to be rather stodgy carried on a courtship via letters (and in person) for years, and that these letters, while very much a product of their times, are frequently bolder than we would think possible. By creating different characters for different parts of Clara’s personality, he was able to create intimate tableaux for the two of them to play out in their minds. He called Clara his “Sweet White Violet,” “Little Girl,” “Mrs. Baker,” “and “Lady Violet.” He invisioned himself as a parent tucking her into bed – which enabled him to verbally describe undressing her. He pictures her sitting on his lap so that he can kiss her:

“And this broad collar with its frills of lace may be open a little bit? For I have one free hand, you see, and it wants to play hide-and-seek with two sweet, soft, snowy play fellows now and again. ‘And you have a hand?’ Well, my Violet, it has its own hiding places…”

He asks her to be the aggressive partner:

“Just now, my darling, I want to be kissed. Am I heavy, dear? … Can you hold me-so-just for one little minute, while you rain your sweet honey-kisses on my face, and cover me with dearest, tenderest caresses? … And I, the happiest, happiest, happiest man am lying in the shower of your caresses, giving you not one in return. Just taking all the love and petting you have to give. Do you mind, Violet dear? Does it bring a flush of protest to your woman’s cheek, when I ‘make’ you do this for me?”

Clara censored her letters far more than Robert did (after the fact – either with ink or by cutting out passages) but she responded to his ardent letters with tableaux and flirting of her own. She was apparently unsure of marrying him at first, although at some point they did consummate their relationship, but had few real hesitations about telling him that his “Little Girl” was “spoiling for a little romp – and much kissing.”

When Clara tells him that “Violet wants to be loved,” he writes back, “Violet must let me take off some of these things then. And this that is left I will gently raise out of my way, till its fleecy folds lie above the milk-white breasts. How beautiful you are, my Violet! Howe delicately graceful are all the curves in your dear white body! How smooth and satin-like. How ravishing the perfume of your breasts. And this soft brown silken thicket that discloses and yet conceals your - how strong are your clasping limbs, my Violet-so beautiful and yet so strong. Is that right, my darling? There, dear! Do I hurt you, Sweet? Hold me close, close, close then my darling.”

In another letter, he proposes a contest between them, to see who can do the most petting, and he threatens to kiss her from her “sweet brown hair” to her “dainty instep”

I admit to flushing a little bit reading this as I walked to my car on the way home from work yesterday. Even though the language seems so dated to us now, there is still a very strong sense of love, and beauty, and a glorying in erotic possibilities that is not just charming, but genuinely arousing. This new light on our typical stereotype of Victorians and their sexual mores (the women prudish, the men either equally prudish or all haring off to prostitues to be spanked) is a very engrossing one, and only a small part of the interesting things to be found in this book.