Nineteenth-Century Contexts

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Pleasurable Suspension: Erotic Asphyxiation in the

Nineteenth Century

Clayton Carlyle Tarr

To cite this article: Clayton Carlyle Tarr (2016) Pleasurable Suspension: Erotic
Asphyxiation in the Nineteenth Century, Nineteenth-Century Contexts, 38:1, 55-68, DOI:
10.1080/08905495.2015.1105486

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/08905495.2015.1105486

Published online: 22 Nov 2015.

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 NINETEENTH-CENTURY CONTEXTS, 2016
VOL. 38, NO. 1, 55–68
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/08905495.2015.1105486

Pleasurable Suspension: Erotic Asphyxiation in the Nineteenth

Century
Clayton Carlyle Tarr
Department of Writing, Rhetoric, and American Cultures, Michigan State University, MI 48824, USA

Darkling I listen; and, for many a time

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I have been half in love with easeful Death,

Called him soft names in many a musèd rhyme,
To take into the air my quiet breath.
—John Keats, “Ode to a Nightingale” (50–54)

[H]ang me up at the door of a brothel-house.

—William Shakespeare, Much Ado about Nothing (1.1.226–27)

On 2 September 1791, Frantisek Kotzwara enlisted the services of Susannah Hill, a London pros-
titute. According to Hill’s testimony, Kotzwara, a Czech composer known for his sonata “The Battle
of Prague,” initially requested that she sever his “means of generation” and then cut it in two (Ober,
“Sticky” 146). She refused, but did agree to purchase a cord, which she placed “round his neck. He
then tied himself up to the back parlour door, a place where he hung very low, and ben[t] down his
knees” (146). At Kotzwara’s instruction, Hill cut the cord after five minutes. But it was too late. The
surgeon’s attempt at bleeding the victim was unsuccessful, and Kotzwara was found to have
asphyxiated during the act. Following an inquest, Hill was tried for murder, but the judge ultimately
dismissed the case. The event inspired an anonymous pamphlet titled Modern Propensities, which
detailed the proceedings, provided an imaginative illustration of the event (Figure 1), and supplied
a descriptive account of intentional hanging—one of the “certain aids” that help its patrons “ascend
the upper sphere of conjunctive transports” (145–46).1 Kotzwara’s case remains the most notorious
example of an accidental death resulting from sexual hanging, what is today known as (auto)erotic
asphyxiation. To the detriment of his once-respected career, news of Kotzwara’s unfortunate demise
spread widely in contemporary periodicals and was routinely alluded to in diverse sources through-
out the nineteenth century.2
The volume of information on Kotzwara’s death suggests that the topic of sexual hanging,
coupled with the attendant consequence of accidental asphyxiation, was not suppressed by
anxious authorities, but rather was discussed widely among medical professionals and dissemi-
nated to the general public. When the act of sexual hanging makes its way into contemporary
fiction, moreover, we can begin to understand not only its epistemological scope, but also its sig-
nificance to the nineteenth-century discourses that make up the “science of sexuality” (Foucault
300). As if cognizant of Jacques Lacan’s concept of jouissance, subjects who experience the
euphoric stimulus of restricting blood flow to the brain appear to seek sensual pleasures that
transcend the boundaries of reality. For this reason, the frequent cases of (auto)erotic asphyxia-
tion in the nineteenth century suggest a cultural fixation with the comprehensive liberation that
reality denies and that death provides. By examining both actual accounts and fictional represen-
tations of sexual hanging, we may begin to form a picture of why a particular sexuality was per-
formed and how it was understood. This essay investigates nineteenth-century representations of
sexual hanging found in James Hogg’s The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner

CONTACT Clayton Carlyle Tarr tarrclay@msu.edu

© 2015 Taylor & Francis
 56 C. C. TARR
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Figure 1. “Modern Propensities: Title Page Engraving,” from Modern Propensities; or, an Essay on the Art of Strangling, &c. Illustrated
with Several Anecdotes. With Memoirs of Susannah Hill, and a Summary of Her Trial at the Old Bailey, on Friday, September 16, 1791,
on the Charge of Hanging Francis Kotzwarra, at her Lodgings in Vine Street, on September 2 (The British Library Board, 1414.f.32).

(1824), Robert Browning’s “Porphyria’s Lover” (1836), and Arthur Machen’s The Great God Pan
(1890). That these authors employed implied rather than explicit descriptions indicates that they
worked within an alternative discourse to explain and to delineate divergent sexuality. In so
doing, the resulting fictional cases confirm Michel Foucault’s refutation of the “repressive hypoth-
esis” by demonstrating that the nineteenth century neither concealed nor disregarded sexuality,
but instead created it through diverse networks of clandestine and coded discourse. The increas-
ing legibility of the act, moreover, demonstrates that nineteenth-century writers were becoming
progressively bolder at defining and representing aberrant sexual practices. What is buried and
then grotesquely unearthed in Hogg’s Confessions, in other words, is openly performed in Brown-
ing’s “Porphyria,” and ultimately highlighted in Machen’s Pan.
 NINETEENTH-CENTURY CONTEXTS 57

Sexual hanging has been performed for centuries, first evidenced in Mayan relics and in Renais-
sance art.3 The practice was very likely inspired by the postmortem stimulus of the sexual organs
following the corporeal punishment of hanging, which evidently suggested to some witnesses not
only a cure for impotency, but also a means to intensify sexual pleasure. Nineteenth-century medical
journals regularly corroborated this link.4 Two years after Modern Propensities circulated the events
of Kotzwara’s death, a pair of articles appeared in the Bon Ton Magazine, titled “Origin of Amorous
Strangulation” and “Effects of Temporary Strangulation on the Human Body,” which were written
by the eccentric quack Dr. Martin Vanbutchell.5 Hoping to sell his particular brand of elastic
“spring-bands,” Vanbutchell seems to have promoted publicly the virtues of sexual hanging. The
wave of publications on sexual hanging in the late eighteenth century brought the practice into
the mainstream, and medical texts highlighted it throughout the next century. As one writer in
1857 notes, “there is real pleasure in being hung” (“Editors” 137).6 The most interesting, albeit
fictional, anecdote appeared in the Medical Times in 1846: A doctor receives a recently hanged
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cadaver for examination, but notices that its “bump of innocence … predominated in a great degree”
(“Gossip” 302). The doctor leaves momentarily and returns to see the corpse restored to life. The
man, now sitting in the doctor’s chair, boasts: “I will tell you strange things. You have heard of
the pleasures of hanging. It requires a more eloquent tongue than mine to relate them. Picture to
yourself the intoxication of delights of the upper and lower regions both at once—all that the
voluptuary could imagine of the most enervating and the most refined” (302). The doctor sets up
a “Society for Hanging”—an intriguing precursor to Victorian London’s actual “Hanged Man’s
Club” (Milner 401)—which subsequently gets him banished from London. Before the doctor leaves,
however, he and “Lord Quakerton” hang themselves for pleasure, but their supervisor (the initial
revitalized man) refuses to cut them down, and instead steals their money and leaves them for dead.
In favor of the dark humor of duplicitous crime, the tale sidesteps the real danger of sexual
hanging—the regular occurrence of accidental asphyxiation.7 Achieving the distinctive euphoric
sensation requires the hazardous constriction of veins that supply the brain with oxygenated
blood. Too much pressure from the cord or too much time in suspension results in brain damage
or death. For some, however, the experience was worth the risk. Henry Spencer Ashbee, author of
a scandalous three-volume bibliography of erotica (1887–85), remarks that the “strangulation of
Kotswarra [sic], however whimsically fatal, has not entirely discouraged the practice of animal sus-
pension” (406). In fact, the preponderance of discourse on the event suggests that it inspired others,
who were “desirous of trying Kotzwara’s remedy” (Wolfe 60). For example, the 1830 hanging death
of Louis Henri, the final Prince of Condé, remains draped in mystery, though the circumstances
suggest erotic asphyxiation (Figure 2).8 Another case recorded in 1831 is particularly interesting:
[A]n Italian castrata singer at the opera was found suspended by the bedstead, and when a surgeon was called in
the man was dead, although (as stated by the landlady of the house) he had hung himself unintentionally. The
facts of the transaction were thus stated by this woman to the jury summoned to sit on the body; she said “that
the deceased had informed her (when he came to lodge at her house) that he had been deprived in the most
barbarous manner of certain essential parts for sexual gratification, but that at certain times he experienced
a very powerful desire, and that he had accidentally discovered that by partially hanging himself he allayed
the desire, and had certain delightful sensations,” and she assured the jury that she had been in the habit of
cutting him down on many occasions; and that during his last pleasurable suspension she heard a rapping at
her street-door, and ran down to answer it, but although she returned as quickly as possible, the gentleman’s
life was gone. (Levison 49)9

The parallels to Kotzwara’s death are many—not only that both were musical entertainers, but also
that they chose to solicit prostitutes to assist in the act. The unfortunate reality is that both victims
took the precautionary step of employing a spotter, but ultimately the practice proved too danger-
ous.10 In an 1836 text, Michael Ryan notes that “[e]xamples are recorded of both sexes, who, to excite
the venereal appetite, allowed themselves to be suspended for some time; and some of them lost their
lives in not having been taken down before asphyxia occurred” (Manual 358).11 Since any genital
enhancements are dubious at best, sexual hanging seems to have been practiced primarily for its
 58 C. C. TARR
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Figure 2. “Death of Prince Condé,” from Amédée Boudin, Histoire de Louis-Phillippe, Roi des Français. Paris: Bureau de la Publication,
1847. 31 (Private Collection: C. Tarr).

euphoric effects, if not also for the thrill of mortal danger that necessarily attends it. We might be
reminded of Edmund Burke’s 1757 definition of the sublime: “When danger or pain press too nearly,
they are incapable of giving any delight, and are simply terrible; but at certain distances, and with
certain modifications, they may be, and they are, delightful” (36–37). Sexual hanging is one of the
“certain modifications”—or, as Vanbutchell calls it, the “certain aids”—that help a subject experience
the sublime, to transcend the limits of reality and to muddle the categories of pleasure and pain. Read
in this light, it is productive to examine the act’s relation to Lacan’s concept of jouissance, the over-
whelming, indescribable pleasure that we strive to experience, but that remains frustratingly
unreachable in reality.
The foundation of Lancanian psychoanalysis concerns the relationship between three orders—the
Real, the Imaginary, and the Symbolic—which roughly correspond to the stages of human develop-
ment. Although we abject the earlier orders when we enter the symbolic system of language, they
remain omnipresent antagonisms to our sense of subjective stability. We unconsciously desire to
return to a pre-symbolic state, the chaotic welter of primordial life that is impossible to represent
in symbolic reality. For Lacan, jouissance is the ultimate sensual experience that reaches beyond
Freud’s “pleasure principle.” Like the Real, jouissance is unreachable in the symbolic world, but fan-
tasy allows us to experience it partially and to confirm its existence safely. “[T]he only moment of
jouissance that man knows,” Lacan writes, “occurs at the site where fantasms are produced, fantasms
that represent for us the same barrier as far as access to jouissance is concerned, the barrier where
everything is forgotten” (298). When approached without the protective frame of fantasy, however,
jouissance becomes dangerous to the subject’s identity. Slavoj Žižek explores the “intensity of the
[R]eal of jouissance,” which is “always traumatic,” and asserts that “its full confrontation is lethal”
(Abyss 25, 53). Sexual hanging, taken in Lacanian terms, is the perfect portrayal of the subject’s
attempt to transcend the limits of symbolic pleasure, to reach into the realms made impossible by
linguistic structures and moral codes. Asphyxiating from the act suggests a fatal encounter with
jouissance, a pleasure that is insuperable in reality. In each of the fictional examples examined
below, the subject seeks to escape from the confines of symbolic reality—a “pleasurable suspension”
 NINETEENTH-CENTURY CONTEXTS 59

that transcends the exigencies of the everyday world. Yet, transgressing the limits of physical plea-
sure, and being overwhelmed by sublime jouissance, ultimately results in death.
Fictional references to sexual hanging may have begun with Shakespeare, as Feste’s recommen-
dation in Twelfth Night implicitly refers to the practice: “Many a good hanging prevents a bad mar-
riage” (185).12 The first extended engagement with autoerotic asphyxiation might be found in Robert
Herrick’s “Upon Love” (1648), in which the speaker dreams of being led to a “Tree / Where some had
hang’d themselves for love” (2–3). The speaker is offered a “glorious end by such a Noose” (11), but
fortunately awakes before he sees “Mine Execution” (16). In like manner, Jonathan Swift writes in the
coda to A Tale of a Tub (1704) of “swinging by Session upon a Cord, in order to raise artificial Exta-
sies” (129). Perhaps the most explicit representation of sexual hanging appears, not surprisingly, in
the Marquis de Sade’s Justine (1791), as it makes up one of the sexual torments that Thérèse (Justine)
must endure during her erotic and macabre trials.13 After Roland takes his turn being hanged, he
extols the pleasures of the practice: “you cannot imagine the sensations you feel. They are beyond
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anything one can express” (214). Significantly, it seems that almost 150 years passed before the
next explicit representation of sexual hanging appeared in literature.14 In James Joyce’s Ulysses
(1918–20), Leopold Bloom engages in a conversation on the “natural phenomenon” that gives the
“human subject a violent ganglionic stimulus of the nerve centers, causing … [a] philoprogenetive
erection” (292).15
The lack of direct representations of sexual hanging in nineteenth-century literature appears to be
evidence of systematic sexual repression instituted to conform to increasingly strict moral standards.
Foucault challenges this “repressive hypothesis” (298), however, by arguing that structures of power
did not inhibit and contain sexuality, but rather “subjected [it] to a mechanism of increasing incite-
ment” (300). The nineteenth-century network of occupations that were established to regulate sexu-
ality is testimony to “the way in which sex is ‘put into discourse’” (299). Sexual hanging became one
of the century’s “disparate sexualities” (327), which were considered as aberrations from normal,
procreative sexual behavior, and transformed into discourse to be described, explained, and solved.
Contemporary medical literature demonstrates the way in which the extraordinary practice was ren-
dered a shocking perversion. In 1841, Samuel La Mert noted one patient “who had recourse to partial
strangulation to produce for himself the effects of desire, [but] he tried the experiment once too often
and became the subject of inquiry before a coroner’s jury; such are the mad aberrations of Sensual-
ism” (23). And in 1849, a writer for The Lancet argued that the “phenomena of strangulation” was
practiced by the “profligate sensualist to induce sexual excitement” (“Royal” 320). This type of dis-
course demonstrates the way that structures of power attempted to “tam[e] … perverse jouissance”
(4), in Lacan’s words. However, the nineteenth-century categorization of divergent behaviors like
sexual hanging created a discourse that ultimately publicized what was intended to be repressed.
As Foucault argues, “[t]he implantation of perversions is an instrument effect: it is through the iso-
lation, intensification, and consolidation of peripheral sexualities that the relations of power to sex
and pleasure branched out and multiplied, measured the body, and penetrated modes of conduct”
(327). Coded representations of sexual hanging suggest that an alternative discourse of this aberrant
act had found a means to infiltrate the social consciousness through the medium of popular litera-
ture. That this coded language became increasingly legible over the course of the nineteenth century
testifies to a subtle, but progressive, willingness to acknowledge the identity of divergent sexualities,
which paved the way for the social, sexual, and aesthetic liberations of modernism.16
To trace this development requires starting at a representation of the act made in oblique terms,
which is at least partially the result of the text’s “fecund and frustrating” form (Fielding 132). James
Hogg’s The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner (1824) follows the adventures and
torments of the repugnant zealot Robert Wringhim. Spurned by his alleged father, the Laird of Dal-
castle, Wringhim becomes the adopted son of Reverend Wringhim, who teaches the boy the tenets of
antinomianism, and asserts that he is part of the divine elect. Immediately thereafter, Wringhim
finds himself constantly shadowed by a mysterious doppelganger, Gil-Martin, who possesses the
“cameleon [sic] art of changing [his] appearance” (95). Convinced to enact revenge on those who
 60 C. C. TARR

had shunned him, Wringhim becomes party to a series of murders, which include his favored
brother and his fanatic mother. Eventually, Wringhim is forced to flee, hoping to escape both his
persecutors and his increasingly sanguinary double.17 Following a series of adventures in the Scottish
Borderlands, Wringhim is found by passersby hanging from a hay-rick, thus darkly confirming his
apt name. Since it is deemed a suicide, he is hastily buried in accordance with other “lost sinners”
(184).
Hogg constructs Confessions as a non-linear triptych that undermines the authority of its char-
acters, writers, and editors. The first section consists of an “Editor’s Narrative” that details the “hid-
eous events” (5) of Wringhim’s life, which is followed by a transcription of Wringhim’s manuscript
memoirs. An account of the Editor’s journey to Wringhim’s grave concludes the novel. In this final
section, the Editor describes the unearthing of Wringhim’s preserved remains, which include the
intact manuscript memoirs. Embedded in the final section is a partial transcription of an actual letter
that Hogg sent to Blackwood’s, which describes the origin of a suicide’s grave. Hogg explains that the
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“strange uncouth figure”

had fastened two of the old hay-ropes at the bottom of the rick on one side … so that he had nothing to do but
to loosen two of the ends on the other side. These he had tied into a knot round his neck, and then slackening
his knees, and letting himself down gradually, till the hay-rope bore all his weight, he had contrived to put an
end to his existence in that way. Now the fact is, that if you try all the ropes that are thrown over all the outfield
hay-ricks in Scotland, there is not one among a thousand of them will hang a colley dog; so that the manner of
this wretch’s death was rather a singular circumstance. (180)

Partially trusting witness testimony, Hogg concludes that the victim must have sought supernatural
assistance, for “those ropes are so brittle, being made of green hay, that they will scarcely bear to be
bound over the rick” (180). While it may be reasonable to assume that Gil-Martin helped Wringhim
perform the act, this inference neither acknowledges that the former was “approaching furiously”
(178) nor accounts for his promise to “protect [Wringhim] at all risks” (177). As Meredith Evans
observes, Wringhim’s suicide remains “shrouded in empirical impossibilities and supernatural
improbabilities” (201). One could speculate, then, given not only the description of the hanging,
but also Wringhim’s predilection for perversion, that he is a victim of (auto)erotic asphyxiation,
depending on whether Gil-Martin assisted him in the act.
To suggest that Wringhim’s death is an example of erotic asphyxiation, however, requires gath-
ering the scant evidence concerning his sexual nature. He reveals in his memoirs that “the men-
tion of such a thing as amours with any woman existing, to me, is really so absurd, so far from my
principles, so far from the purity of nature and frame to which I was born and consecrated, that I
hold it as an insult, and regard it with contempt” (133). The authority of his position as a divine
elect apparently prevents him from associating sexually with lesser mortals. Yet he admits that
“the intimacies and connections with the sex” gave him “indefinite pleasure” (136). His intense
desires are implicitly sexual in nature: “I had heart-burnings, longings, and yearnings, that
would not be satisfied” (136). He seems consumed by a Freudian “death drive,” a longing to escape
the responsibilities of symbolic life and to (re)experience primordial chaos. His words call to mind
Lacan’s jouissance, as he feels “an insatiable longing for something that I cannot describe or
denominate properly, unless I say it was for utter oblivion that I longed” (138). Sexual hanging
affords Wringhim the possibility not only to experience the physical euphoria he has denied him-
self through abstinence, but also to escape the horrors of reality through a “pleasurable
suspension.”
The actual letter inserted into Confessions appears without a contextual framing device that fea-
tures a conversation between Hogg and Christopher North (John Wilson’s pseudonym at Black-
wood’s) at a public-house. North remonstrates Hogg for his recent lack of input to the magazine
and requests that he look to the “phenomena of nature” for inspiration (“A Scots Mummy” 188).
The story of the suicide’s grave gives Hogg something to contribute, though it is decidedly not
what North intended. Hogg concludes the letter with a note directed at North:
 NINETEENTH-CENTURY CONTEXTS 61

I am sure you will confess that a very valuable receipt may be drawn from it for the preservation of dead bodies.
If you should think of trying the experiment on yourself, you have nothing more to do than hang yourself in a
hay rope, which, by the by, is to be made of risp, and leave orders that you are to be buried in a wild height, and I
will venture to predict, that though you repose there for ages an inmate of your mossy cell, of the cloud, and the
storm, you shall set up your head at the last day as fresh as a moor-cock. (190)

The phallic euphemism contained in this passage is difficult to ignore, and it is made further overt by
the condition of Wringhim’s corpse in the novel. Although Wringhim is hastily interred, the particu-
lar ecosystem of the burial site preserves his body and his manuscript. The Editor reveals that the
men who originally buried the body hastily dug the grave too short, and in their attempt to force
it into the grave, they noticed that it “being stiff … would not go down” (184). This remarkable
and enduring rigor mortis might subtly allude to the engorged genitals of hanging victims. That
the first group of excavators “pulled and pulled” by the rope that remains about his neck might
further confirm the events of his demise—especially because his phallic body eventually protrudes
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from the grave erect and fleshy, with a “broad blue bonnet on its head” (181). What is more, the
description of Wringhim’s death given by Hogg in the Blackwood’s letter unmistakably parallels con-
temporary records of erotic asphyxiation. While Wringhim “slacken[s] his knees, and let[s] himself
down gradually,” Kotzwara “hung very low, and ben[t] down his knees” (Ober, “Sticky” 146). A simi-
lar account appears in an 1844 article on the “pleasing … effects of hanging,” which asserts that in
“persons who committed suicide by hanging, the majority were found either in a sitting posture,
or with their feet or knees touching the ground” (“A New Pleasure, the Delights of Hanging”
334–35).18
Compared to Hogg’s clandestine approach, the events of Robert Browning’s “Porphyria’s Lover”
(1836) seem rather explicitly to represent sexual hanging. Entering the speaker’s cottage, Porphyria
lights a fire, sheds her rain-soaked clothes, and rests the speaker’s head on her shoulder. Following
some musings on her emotions and intentions, the speaker winds her hair three times around her
neck and apparently strangles her. Browning frustrates readers, however, by keeping both the
impetus for the act and its results steeped in ambiguity. Critical assessments of the speaker’s act
range from considering it as a “ritualistic sacrifice commensurate with her ‘worship’” (Ingersoll
153) to reading its “coarse physical brutality” through the specter of domestic violence (Gregory
493). Most agree that the speaker strangles Porphyria to transform her itinerant subjectivity into per-
manent objectivity—thereby making her a “moment’s monument,” to borrow from Dante Gabriel
Rossetti. Catherine Ross has offered a convincing alternate reading, arguing that the poem is a
“tale of erotic asphyxiation, one in which Porphyria survives” (68). Although Ross’s evaluation is
exciting and provocative, it is ultimately limiting and, on one occasion, potentially offensive.
While it is true that the “sexual pathologies explored in the poem are more complicated and radical
than we may have formerly thought” (71), Ross nonetheless admits that her “reading is distasteful
and rather creepy” (70). Unfortunately, such a qualification normalizes sexuality and renders the
act of sexual hanging a perversion. In fact, given that discourse on sexual hanging was culturally per-
vasive, especially in the early 1830s, the reading is perfectly reasonable, if not ultimately correct.
It is significant initially to note that the speaker in “Porphyria’s Lover” remains un-gendered,
which offers a contrast from the overtly male voices in Browning’s other dramatic monologues.
This detail is important because it might suggest the reason that Porphyria is reluctant to commit
fully to the speaker, as she is apparently only willing to express her “worship” in private. Thus, it
is possible and productive to read in the intense relationship homoerotic undertones. Indeed, in
the poem’s opening lines, Porphyria’s actions blur gender roles, as she lights a fire and places the
speaker’s head on her “white shoulder bare” (17). That the speaker eventually reverses their arrange-
ment, as her head “this time my shoulder bore” (50), suggests that the relationship is built on gender
equality rather than patriarchal dominance. Whereas the male speaker in D. G. Rossetti’s “Jenny”
(1870) frequently compares his favorable social situation to the depressing condition of the
“[l]azy laughing languid” (1) prostitute he visits, Browning’s speaker here claims no such authority.
Nonetheless, Rossetti’s poem might inspire us to recast the roles in “Porphyria’s Lover” to read the
 62 C. C. TARR

“lover” as a prostitute who waits for her secret client Porphyria. In addition, the poem’s initial natural
imagery of a storm raging outside the speaker’s cottage, the wind “t[earing] the elm-tops down for
spite” (3), might be read as a phallic dismantling that precedes Porphyria’s introduction into the
speaker’s feminine world. Porphyria’s soft remark that she is “[t]oo weak, for all her heart’s endea-
vour, / To set its struggling passion free / From pride, and vainer ties dissever” (22–24) is a potential
indication that the heteronormative world of “gay feast[s]” (27) prevents her from publicly acknowl-
edging her true love for the female speaker. In that “moment,” secure within the confines of the cot-
tage, she is “[p]erfectly pure and good” (37), untainted by the moral barriers and the social
responsibilities of the outside world.
The revelation of Porphyria’s worship inspires the speaker to find “a thing to do” (38)—a drastic
measure to win her love permanently: “all her hair / In one long yellow string I wound / Three times
her little throat around / And strangled her” (38–41). The euphoric effects of sexual hanging confirm
the speaker’s assessment that “[n]o pain felt she” (41). In fact, if we are to follow Ross’s contention
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that Porphyria survives the encounter, the stillness she exhibits after the act perhaps indicates that
she remains awe-struck by the “unbearable, filthy, excessive pleasure” of jouissance (Žižek, Abyss 26).
That Porphyria’s eyes “[l]aughed … without a stain” (45) indicates that, at this moment of matchless
ecstasy, she is finally granted her “one wish” (57). The speaker has given Porphyria something that
she cannot access in the world outside the cottage, an experience that transcends the pleasures avail-
able in reality. Yet the ambiguity of the concluding lines means that the truth of Porphyria’s fate
remains inaccessible. Indeed, we could take the final line that “God has not said a word!” (60) as
evidence that the truth remains sheltered from all eyes, no matter their omniscience. Certainly,
her drooping head and motionless body indicate something more foreboding, and the fact that
the poem was initially published under the title Madhouse Cells suggests that the speaker has
been committed to an asylum—one of Foucault’s “places of tolerance” (293) for illegitimate sexual
discourse. Yet the speaker seems to suggest that Porphyria’s death was the only option for their illicit
worship. To ensure her freedom, the speaker merely chose the most “easeful death,” so that all she
“scorned at once is fled” (54).19
The horror of Porphyria’s hanging becomes even more sexually charged when compared to the
“epidemic of suicide” (218) in Arthur Machen’s The Great God Pan (1890).20 Composed entirely of
occlusions and fragments, the tale centers on the mysterious figure of Helen Vaughan, who is impli-
cated in a rash of suicides that have swept through London’s polite society. Although the tale lacks a
definite protagonist, the social butterfly Villiers does take over the role of amateur detective. In the
opening narrative, Dr. Raymond invites his friend Clarke to witness a novel experiment on the brain
of his patient, a formerly destitute girl named Mary. Raymond asserts that “[t]here is a real world …
as beyond a veil,” and boasts that after years of work he has perfected an operation that will bridge
the gap between “the world of matter and the world of spirit” (184–85). The invisible realm that
Raymond hopes to unveil might be considered through Lacan’s concept of the Real, especially
that of “insupportable, limitless, horrifying jouissance” (Žižek, Sublime 186). Although the exper-
iment is purportedly a success, it leaves Mary permanently incapacitated. Through a patchwork
of successive accounts, we learn that she thereafter bears a child, Helen, who taints every environ-
ment she inhabits with a mysterious horror, and eventually settles in London under the alias Mrs.
Beaumont. Helen becomes the femme fatale of the season’s most fashionable dissipations. Austin,
one of Villiers’ acquaintances, remarks that her parties are the talk of the town, and contends
from hearsay that they are “uncommonly jovial” (210). Villiers soon learns, however, that a spate
of suicides among the city’s elite are connected to the mysterious lady of the house.
In his 1916 introduction to the tale, Machen recalls that he was inspired by certain “visions” he
saw as a child, but he stops tantalizingly short of revealing anything further about his experiences
(xiii). Contemporary critics found The Great God Pan either lacking in continuity or materially
offensive, but the Westminster Review offers the most intriguing reading: “a nightmare in coherence
of sex and the supposed horrible mysteries behind it, such as might conceivably possess a man who
was given to a morbid brooding over these matters, but which would soon lead to insanity if
 NINETEENTH-CENTURY CONTEXTS 63

unrestrained” (xxii). Although Machen never explicitly reveals the subject matter of the story’s hor-
ror, he strongly suggests that it is sexual in nature.21 Helen evidently possesses the power to bring out
“The Great God Pan,” whose presence irrevocably scars children and drives grown men to suicide.
Raymond argues that the horror is fundamentally supernatural in origin, and that his experiment
opened a portal through which the demonic Pan passed into reality. Yet, echoing Hogg’s approach
in Confessions, Machen expertly leads readers to question the motivations of every character,
especially Raymond. Rather than speculating on the supernatural aspects of the tale, then, it is
more productive to approach the text in terms of the far more disturbing reality that its Gothic
charms might conceal.
Raymond reveals that the operation left Mary pregnant with a child that he raised into adoles-
cence and then shipped off to a willing family in rural Wales. Yet his account of immaculate con-
ception, an allusion made overt through the victim’s Biblical name, is a potentially ludicrous
excuse to cover his actual crimes. He admits to Clarke: “I think her life is mine, to use as I see fit”
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(186). That he “kissed her mouth, kindly enough” (189) is a rather blatant sign of their sexual
relationship. One could speculate that the entire experiment was a ruse to disguise the fact that
Raymond impregnated a young girl who was materially below his social standing. It is also worth
noting that Helen was raised by Raymond, which potentially suggests that her enmity stems not
from the supernatural specter of Pan, but instead from her actual biological father. Read in this
context, Helen’s adult crimes rather pointedly appear to be either revenge against the father who
spurned her or the result of his iniquitous patriarchal designs. In order to enact her crimes with
impunity, Helen deviously preys on the particular sexual desires of her victims, making
their deaths appear to be suicides, when in fact they are carefully planned acts of (auto)erotic
asphyxiation.
Villiers begins his detective work following a surprise encounter with an old friend Herbert, who
is shockingly “disfigured by poverty and disgrace” (197). We learn that Herbert was married to
Helen, and that she had forced him to experience “things which even now I would not dare whisper
in blackest night” (198)—encounters that have caused “some slight bruises on his shoulders” (201).
Herbert’s death shortly thereafter prompts Villiers to investigate the matter. Unlike Clarke, who stays
securely indoors and refuses to examine the case, Villiers is a “practiced explorer of such obscure
mazes and byways of London life” (197). He reveals that he has “chanced upon some queer custo-
mers, and queer cases too” (203). Nothing about London’s dark underbelly is a surprise to him, for it
appears that he has himself been a patron of several salacious establishments: “I have always been
fond of diving into Queer Street for my amusement” (222). The first victim of suicide is reported
to be Lord Argentine, who had “persisted in enjoying life” (214). One night, a servant stumbles
upon the “distressing circumstances” of Argentine’s “body leaning forward at an angle from the
bottom of the bed. He found that his master had tied a cord securely to one of the short bed-
posts, and, after making a running noose and slipping it round his neck, the unfortunate man
must have resolutely fallen forward, to die by slow strangulation” (214–15). Machen’s description
of the death not only explicitly echoes accounts of (auto)erotic asphyxiation that appear in medical
journals, but also parallels Wringhim’s demise in Hogg’s Confessions. Argentine’s is the first of
several deaths purported to be suicides:
[W]ithin three weeks, three more gentlemen, one of them a nobleman, and the two others men of good position
and ample means, perished miserably in almost precisely the same manner. Lord Swanleigh was found one
morning in his dressing-room, hanging from a peg affixed to the wall, and Mr. Collier-Stuart and Mr. Herries
had chosen to die as Lord Argentine. (215)

Yet another man was found “hanging dead from the branch of a tree in his garden” (218). Helen’s
path of vengeance leads her to exploit the particular sexual desires of her victims by promoting the
matchless euphoria of sexual hanging. That each is “rich, prosperous, and to all appearance in love
with the world” (216) suggests that suicide is a less plausible answer than accidental asphyxiation
during the transports of intense sexual pleasure. Whether Helen was present at the acts as a complicit
 64 C. C. TARR

assistant remains a mystery. As Roger Luckhurst remarks, “[m]any appear to die of unbearable ter-
ror, or possibly pleasure, or possibly both” (xxix).
The victims’ fatal encounter with jouissance leaves them in physical positions that suggest
suicide.22 Only Villiers can look beneath the surface evidence to reveal the true source of the deaths.
Indeed, as he cleverly remarks, “[s]uicidal mania is not smallpox” (217). Using his knowledge of and
connections to one of the “meanest and most disreputable streets in Soho” (222), Villiers exposes
Helen as the perpetrator of the crimes. He comes into possession of an “account of the entertainment
[she] provided for her choicer guests” (224), what appears to be a fictional representation of
London’s “Hanged Men’s Club,” and decides to return the favor: “Villiers pulled out a drawer in
the bamboo table, and showed Austin a long coil of cord, hard and new; and at one end was a
running noose” (226). Left with no other recourse after she is confronted by Villiers, Helen strangles
herself in the same manner as her victims.23 In the end, we are left with Raymond’s unsatisfactory
conclusion that “Helen Vaughan did well to bind the cord about her neck and die” (232), while he
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survives with impunity. Thus, the tale’s ostensible villain becomes another victim of London’s
“epidemic of suicide,” and Villiers demonstrates that he holds the knowledge to reignite the scourge.
The seemingly uncontrollable spread of autoerotic fatalities in “The Great God Pan” might point to a
cultural “death drive” triggered by anxious anticipations of the “Century’s corpse outleant” (Hardy
10)—a desperate final attempt to escape fin de siècle reality through the lethal transports of
jouissance.
That explicit representations of sexual hanging reappear in twentieth-century literature would
seem to suggest that the nineteenth century actively repressed the knowledge, if not practice, of
divergent sexualities. In fact, however, the alternative discourse that implicates sexual hanging—
seen especially through the distinctive manner of the fictional subjects’ deaths—confirms that the
nineteenth century created a new language of coded representations of sexual hanging that were
able to infiltrate the popular consciousness without violating social decorum. “What is peculiar to
modern societies,” Foucault remarks, “is not that they consigned sex to a shadow existence, but
that they dedicated themselves to speaking of it ad infinitum, while exploiting it as the secret”
(316). The particular language and images through which Hogg, Browning, and Machen represent
sexual hanging allowed them to engage unsettling subject matter while remaining within the bound-
aries of aesthetic propriety. However, the increasing forwardness with which nineteenth-century
authors portray sexual hanging suggests that divergent sexual practices had become widely recog-
nized at the turn of the century.24 Machen’s comparatively overt representation of the act makes
it possible to look backward to investigate both fictional and actual cases of hanging that preceded
it. But it also establishes a precedent for more direct representations in the coming century—ones
that often find comedy in the performance. In Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot (1953), for
example, Estragon impatiently declares: “Let’s hang ourselves immediately!” (12).

Notes
1. The full title is Modern Propensities; or, an Essay on the Art of Strangling, &c. Illustrated with Several Anecdotes.
With Memoirs of Susannah Hill, and a Summary of her Trial at the Old-Bailey, on Friday, September 16, 1791, on
the Charge of Hanging Francis Kotzwarra, at her Lodgings in Vine Street, on September 2 (London: J. Dawson,
1791). The pamphlet also records the death of man who “indulged himself a little too long” in sexual hanging
“and fairly expired in the process” (qtd. in Dietz 21). The details supplied in Modern Propensities are in great
part corroborated by a recently discovered manuscript titled “The Trial of Susannah Hill for the Wilful Murder
of Francis Kotzwarra September the 2d, 1791 at Justice Hall in the Old Bailey.”
2. For example, an 1816 text notes that Kotzwara “met with a premature end a few years since under peculiar cir-
cumstances of the most abandoned vice” (Pennington 91); in 1830, William Thomas Parke asserts that Kotzwara
was “in the habit of gratifying his sensual appetites to excess” and was “suspended by his own desire” (181–82); an
American writer in 1841 claims that the “extraordinary fancies of Kotzwara … are too well known, and led to his
melancholy, but unpitied end” (“Powers” 181); a writer in 1857 refers to the “atrocious composer of the Battle of
Prague” (Maitland 18); and in 1883, the Musical Standard recalled that the “unfortunate composer is said to have
 NINETEENTH-CENTURY CONTEXTS 65

been found dead, hanging … in a public-house. Certainly he might have had a brighter career had he made better
use of his abilities and kept better company” (295).
3. The Mayan goddess Ixtab is “usually depicted on her knees with a rope around her neck and with erect nipples”
(Johnstone 327). In addition, Park Elliott Dietz notes an ancient Mayan statue of a naked man with a rope around
its neck and an engraving by Albrecht Dürer (1471–1528), which depicts a man ejaculating while being hanged
(14–15).
4. In 1831, J. L. Levison describes the case of a prisoner who “took the liberty of hanging himself, and died with penal
erection and emission” (50); in response, Guy Harling notes the “affection of the genital system consequent on the
operation of hanging” (50); and in 1832, The Lancet points out the “consequences which hanging has upon
eunuchs and criminals” (“Effects” 661). In 1839, Michael Ryan observes that “[r]espiration … is retarded by
the compression of the spinal bulb, and there results, a demi-asphyxia favourable to erection. It is well known
that priapism, with or without seminal emission, and also menstruation sometimes occur during hanging” (Pros-
titution 360).
5. Richard J. Wolfe claims that Vanbutchell was the author of Modern Propensities and asserts that the “well known
empiric and quack doctor” promoted “strangulation and suffocation for sexual pleasure” (55, 58).
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6. An American medical text disagrees: “For the popular opinion that a voluptuous sensation is felt during the first
moments [after hanging], the author finds no authority whatever. Certain persons, however, who have been resus-
citated, have described the vague languor which precedes syncope, mistaking it for sexual sensation” (“Medico-
Legal” 67).
7. William B. Ober notes that the first publicized case was probably Peter Anthony Motteux (1663–1718), editor of
the Gentlemen’s Journal and translator of Rabelais and Cervantes, who was found dead after a rendezvous with
prostitute Mary Roberts. Motteux’s biographer brings to light a marginal note: “Mr. M———x is suppos’d to have
been strangled by Whores, who forgot to cut the cord [t]hey had ty’d abt his neck to provoke venery” (Cunning-
ham 4).
8. In 1811, Louis Henri became acquainted with Sophie Dawes, who was employed at a brothel in London. For the
next two decades, the pair maintained a clandestine and tumultuous affair. On 27 August 1830, Henri was found
hanging from a loosely tied handkerchief that was fastened to a window sash. One nineteenth-century account
claims that the “hands were firmly closed, the knees bent, and … the points of the toes touched the carpet; so
that … the Prince would only have had to stand upright upon his feet, leaning against the window, to have escaped
death” (Kelly 31). A “back staircase” (36) that led directly to Dawes’s apartment implicated her in his death. In
Medical Jurisprudence (1836), Alfred Swaine Taylor, a pioneer of forensic analysis, notes the possibility that Henri
“hung himself without intending self-destruction, but merely for the sake of enjoying a certain degree of pleasure
which … is experienced on the access of this species of asphyxia” (186).
9. Iwan Bloch (1872–1922) highlights yet another example from the Bon Ton Magazine in which a man, evidentially
inspired rather than deterred by Kotzwara’s example, visited a London prostitute, who “hanged him up so that
there would be a minimum of danger and then kicked the small stool from under his feet” (Qtd. in Wolfe 60).
10. Nineteenth-century periodicals are littered with accounts of accidental asphyxiation, many of which appear to be
the result of sexual hanging. An article in 1796 reports an incident “in one of those obscure receptacles of
debauchery with which this metropolis abounds. The body of the deceased was found … suspended by the
neck from a bed-post” (“Domestic” 68). Another account appeared in 1809 concerning a man found “with his
clothes off … hanging to the bed-post” (“Coroner’s” 187). And in a case recorded in 1824, a man was “found sus-
pended in a common brothel” (“February” 24).
11. In 1837, Anthony Todd Thomson similarly notes that “persons have permitted themselves to be hung … as a
mode of exciting the venereal appetite” (212).
12. Frankie Rubenstein makes this link (120). The line appears in act I, scene V, line 17.
13. In the scene, Roland stands on top of a stool, and Thérèse places a noose around his neck and removes the stool at
his beckoning: “His face radiated the signs of pleasure alone, and almost at that very same moment jets of semen
spurted in rapid succession as far as the ceiling” (214).
14. Alfred de Musset’s Gamiani, ou, Deux nuits d’exces (1833) contains passages that indirectly refer to sexual
hanging.
15. Joyce describes the results of Croppy Boy’s hanging in detail: “He gives up the ghost. A violent erection of the
hanged sends gouts of sperm spouting through his death clothes on to the cobblestones” (551).
16. In his pioneering six-volume Studies in the Psychology of Sex (1897–1928), Havelock Ellis devotes an entire chap-
ter to sexual hanging, and includes a fascinating anonymous anecdote: “The idea of being strangled by a person I
love [appeals to me]. The great sensitiveness of one’s throat and neck come in here as well as the loss of breath.
Once when I was about to be separated from a man I cared for I put his hands on my throat and implored him to
kill me. It was a moment of madness, which helps me to understand the feelings of a person always insane” (153).
17. At his first stop, Wringhim is caught “head down an’ his heels up” (162) in a weaver’s large loom, which not only
foreshadows his death, but also might suggest that he had earlier practiced sexual hanging.
18. The article continues: “we may expect the ministers of luxury will shortly invite their patrons to be suspended, as
they now call them to a warm bath, or a shampooing chair. Parents must take care to keep halters and cross-
 66 C. C. TARR

breams out of sight, as the nursery will probably soon resound with the cry of, ‘Daddy, give me a rope’” (“New”
335).
19. In 1853, Thomas Johnson asserts that strangulation is a “very easy mode of death. The symptoms which precede
insensibility are … rather pleasurable than painful. A lady, who tried the trick of suspending herself by the neck
from a bed-tester, says, the first sensations are very much like those produced by taking chloroform” (192–93).
20. Stephan Karschay has recently offered some fascinating insights into “The Great God Pan” and autoerotic asphyx-
iation (Degeneration, Normativity and the Gothic at the Fin de Siècle [New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015],
pp. 107–10).
21. Roger Luckhurst reads Helen’s acts as “bestial pleasures that predate civilization” (xxix), while Kelly Hurley calls
them “primitive, orgiastic rites” (13).
22. One early review noted that “[g]allant gentlemen commit suicide at the mere sight of the accursed thing”
(Machen, Introduction xix–xx). Kimberly Jackson argues that “Helen Vaughn’s sexual exploits turn upstanding
middle-class men into suicidal demons” (130), and Kostas Boyiopoulos asserts that her “sexuality is a primordial
force which has a horrific impact when it invades the tissue of London’s male civility and propriety” (371).
23. A manuscript penned by a terrified Dr. Matheson details the supernatural, disgusting horror of Helen’s resulting
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liquefaction, which Aaron Worth links to the “gooey, B-movie slime Slavoj Žižek seems to have claimed in the
name of the Lacanian Real” (215).
24. Contemporary reviews of “The Great God Pan” were fascinatingly divisive, which demonstrates that the tale
appeared at the threshold between divergent aesthetic, if not cultural, periods. While one newspaper praised
the tale for being “told with wonderful realism and naturalness” (Allen 226), another critic frothed with rage:
“Why should we allow a novelist to describe abortions, moral and physical, which in reality would fill us with
horror and disgust?” (Quilter 245).

Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor
Clayton Carlyle Tarr teaches at Michigan State University and specializes in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century
British literature. He has recently completed a manuscript on frame narratives in Gothic novels and has published
on Charles Dickens, Christina Rossetti, and Edgar Allan Poe, among others.

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