With a nod to the founders of our nation, Dorothee Kocks at first thought about calling her new ebook The Fondling Fathers.
She settled instead on Such Were My
Temptations: Bawdy Americans, 1760-1830. Still, her point is the same:
the country’s early citizens, including the Puritans we often define as
prudish, were part of what some scholars call "America’s first sexual
revolution."
"Words of freedom filled the air," writes Kocks
about the Revolutionary War period and the decades that followed. "The
pursuit of happiness became a national agenda. In this context, people
questioned the rules about sex and marriage." Her ebook is a short
compendium of often shocking drawings, engravings, poems and other
erotica from that period. Most of it is fairly tame, by modern
standards, although surprising nonetheless.
This foray into the sexual proclivities of
early Americans came as a surprise to Kocks. She has a PhD in history
from Brown University, has authored a scholarly book of non-fiction, and
was an assistant professor of American History at the University of
Utah. And then one day she picked up an accordion.
The word accordion may make you think of
Lawrence Welk and polkas. But to Kocks, the instrument was a revelation.
"The way the bellows breathed against my chest. . ." she says with a
sigh now, remembering the moment. "It made me feel more alive." The
accordion, she came to realize, was a perfect mixture of "oompah and
melancholy."
That was 10 years ago. Today, Kocks is an
accordion player, the creator of The Accordion Monologues, a novelist,
the founder of Beware The Timid Life Publishing, and the creator of the
ebook about early American mores. She is now teaching others how to
create interactive storytelling apps (see box for class information).
But let’s not get ahead of ourselves.
Not long after Kocks first picked up the
accordion, she was in the Salt Lake downtown library looking for some
accordion CDs and came upon a CD of glass harmonica music.
The glass harmonica is as much like the
harmonica we’re used to as, say, the bass guitar is like the bass drum.
Invented by Benjamin Franklin in 1761, it uses a series of nesting glass
bowls, a spinning axle and water to produce something like the effect
of running a wet finger around the rim of a glass.
During its brief popularity around the turn of
the 19th century, the glass harmonica (sometimes called armonica)
apparently made women swoon. It was said by one critic at the time to
produce music that was "celestial ravishment," and was banned in several
German towns. It was used by Franz Mesmer to mesmerize his patients.
Entranced by the history of the instrument and
the history of post-Revolutionary War, pre-Civil War America, Kocks
eventually quit her post at the U. to write a novel about a woman who
played the glass harmonica in Puritan New England.
The book, The Glass Harmonica: A Sensualist’s
Tale, was a finalist for the 2011 Utah Book Award, and inspired Kocks to
create the Such Were My Temptations ebook, which is available for the
iPad.
It actually wasn’t till after she finished The
Glass Harmonica that she heard a glass harmonica being played in person,
even though she had listened over and over to the instrument on CDs.
She was moved to tears. "The difference," she says, "is that in person
it’s like standing next to a bell; you feel it in your bones." It’s also
eventually cloying. "You can’t listen to it very long," she admits.
Kocks is the kind of writer who lets her
characters introduce themselves to her as she writes. So she was
astonished, as she began writing The Glass Harmonica, to discover that
her main character’s husband was making a living selling bawdy books
throughout Puritan New England.
At this point, Kocks realized that her book would be about music but also about the changing sexual climate of the time.
"What amazed me the most was this was not a
namby-pamby sexual revolution," Kocks says. "It was a real pants-on-fire
historical moment. You could print things you couldn’t before, travel
places you couldn’t before, marry people you couldn’t before. It was a
time of ferment that coincided with a period of inventing new standards
and laws for a new nation. What’s so hard for us to imagine is that this
was a time of real change."
She started compiling the ebook app shortly
after finishing The Glass Harmonica, partly as a way to help her New
Zealand publisher, Rosa Mira Publishing, market the novel, and partly to
prove that the books and images she talks about in the novel were
factual. "The reason I persisted is that it’s such a surprising story
and I’m enchanted by the glimpse into the humanity of our founding
fathers and mothers that it provides," she says "I like to think of how
they wrestled with these questions."
The ebook is meant to be an introduction to
some of the best readings on these topics. "It’s mostly a museum with
captions," she says, while including links to further reading. It also
includes videos, such as Salt Lake actor Jennifer Waterhouse reciting a
bawdy poem of the time.
Although we typically think of Puritans as
repressed, in fact "they thought sex was really important," Kocks says.
They believed women needed "the shudder of delight" to conceive a child.
Of course, they also tried to control who had sex and who could marry
whom. For example, an apprentice could marry only with his master’s
consent. And sinners were still made to confess their transgressions in
public.
The ebook is meant to be an introduction to
some of the best readings on these topics. "It’s mostly a museum with
captions," she says, while including links to further reading. It also
includes videos, such as Salt Lake actor Jennifer Waterhouse reciting a
bawdy poem of the time.
Although we typically think of Puritans as
repressed, in fact "they thought sex was really important," Kocks says.
They believed women needed "the shudder of delight" to conceive a child.
Of course, they also tried to control who had sex and who could marry
whom. For example, an apprentice could marry only with his master’s
consent. And sinners were still made to confess their transgressions in
public.
So, on the one hand, Aristotle’s Masterpiece —
which Kocks calls The Joy of Sex of its time — was believed to be the
third most purchased book in America after the Bible and Noah Webster’s
The American Spelling Book. And there were suddenly cheap printing
presses, and copyright law hadn’t yet been invented, which meant it was
no longer just the rich who were exposed to ribald images.
On the other hand, books like Fanny Hill —
which the Massachusetts Legislature eventually banned in 1821 — were
usually sold with fake covers.
This "first sexual revolution" died out not
long after that banning, in part, Kocks says, because of the rise of the
privacy ethic. The communal notion of guilt and repentance gave way to
the notion that what happened behind closed doors was nobody else’s
business. And, too, photography made erotica more pornographic; the word
itself was coined in the mid-19th century.
Is Such Were My Temptations pornography? The
ebook is interactive, so there is a chance to weigh in if you read it
and think so. The disclaimer on the book’s first page notes that "This
book is intended for adult viewing only."
"If I could control people’s attitudes about
what I’m putting out, I would hope people would approach it with a sense
of humor and a sense of interest about the people who came before us,"
Kocks says. " I think it’s enchanting that they didn’t have it easier.
It’s a human thing to have to navigate this border."
