Ellis, Henry Havelock 1859–1939

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Ellis, Henry Havelock
1859–1939

Born on February 2, 1859, in the small town of Croydon, south of London, Henry Havelock Ellis was one of the most significant early sexologists. These medical doctors turned sexual scientists (others included Sigmund Freud [1856–1939], Albert Moll [1862–1939], Magnus Hirschfeld [1868–1935], and Iwan Bloch [1872–1922]) revised Victorian notions about sexuality and contributed to a new sexual modernism that viewed sex as a primary and legitimate human occupation. Even in this atmosphere, Ellis's outlook on sex was markedly optimistic, tolerant, and celebratory. In fact, scholars cite this enthusiasm and openness as among Ellis's greatest bequests to sexual science, as reflected, for instance, in the upbeat tolerance of later sex researcher Alfred C. Kinsey (1894–1956).

Ellis was educated in respectable boarding schools, but his schooldays were not without problems. He was a passive boy often bullied by older schoolmates. The descendant of generations of English seafarers, Ellis sailed around the world twice with his father. After graduating, Ellis took his father's ship to Australia, where he spent happy years from 1877 to 1879 working successfully as a tutor but ineffectively as a schoolmaster. Ellis's literary interests flourished in his solitude on the Australian range, and during this time he gained the confidence that would assist him in his demythologizing and destigmatizing of human sexuality and sexual practice.

As Ellis wrote in the general preface to the first volume of Studies in the Psychology of Sex (1897–1928), "I regard sex as the central problem of life" (Ellis 1900). In 1889 Ellis secured a licentiate in medicine, surgery, and midwifery from the Society of Apothecaries, which, to his embarrassment, was the highest degree he received. He never practiced clinical medicine. The bulk of material for his studies derived from case histories that his numerous correspondents provided. Famous among these was John Addington Symonds (1840–1893), a homosexual literary critic and writer who cowrote Ellis's book on male homosexuality.

Ellis's interest in the study of sex manifested early in his career, perhaps because of his complicated erotic life. Most of his relationships with women were friendly rather than romantic. He formed lifelong friendships with numerous intellectual women, including the American birth-control activist Margaret Sanger (1879–1966). Ellis remained a virgin until his marriage at thirty-two to Edith Lees, a writer and advocate for women's rights. Lees was openly lesbian, and their sexual relations came to an end within the first year of their marriage. The two maintained a compassionate "open marriage" that allowed both affairs with women. Ellis hesitantly admitted to a proclivity for urolagnia—sexual interest in urine and urination. Although Ellis does not foreground what he calls this "slight strain … of urolagnia" in his autobiography, My Life (1967 [1939], p. 67), this inclination represents one of many sexual taboos that Ellis normalized in his work by relating anomalous behavior to "ordinary" sexual practice.

Within his rubric of "erotic symbolism," Ellis identified sexual deviations and fetishes as mere variations on common heterosexual practice—a theory wherein which, for example, a same-sex partner symbolizes a member of the opposite sex, or an animal in bestiality symbolizes a human. In his 1906 work, Erotic Symbolism, Ellis praised the power and force of human imagination in sexual activity, writing that these erotic symbolisms "bring before us the individual man creating his own paradise. They constitute the supreme triumph of human idealism" (pp. 113-114).

Characterizing sex, in The New Spirit (1890), as "ever wonderful, ever lovely" (p. 129), Ellis approached sexuality from a romantic perspective even as his prolific and systematized work relied on empirical thought. In a similar friction, Ellis's personal and wide-ranging feminism was, like that of most male sexual modernists, undercut by reactionary positions that on the whole upheld the status quo. He insisted on women's roles as nurturing mothers, regarded female sexuality as naturally passive, and was particularly critical of lesbians. In fact, whereas his work on male homosexuality detached effeminacy from male homosexuality, he defined lesbians in terms of a gendered mannishness. From a more feminist perspective, Ellis argued that masturbation was especially common in women and that women's sexual needs must be attended to by their male partners. Indeed, modern concepts of foreplay are attributed to Ellis's urging that men cater to the slower arousal of women with pre-intercourse stimulation. Despite his forthright recognition of female sexual desire and the legitimizing bent of his work, Ellis nonetheless advocated restraint, self-denial, and monogamy in sexual relations.

Ellis's magnum opus, the seven-volume Studies in the Psychology of Sex is a synthesis of case studies, sexual theories, and a comprehensive précis of early sexology. The most influential volume, Sexual Inversion (1897), was the first book in English that confronted the topic of homosexuality with tolerance and sympathy. Ellis rejected the term homosexuality as merely provisional and instead preferred to use the expression sexual inversion to categorize and explain same-sex relations. He defined sexual inversion as a congenital condition that directed sexual instinct at persons of the same sex. Ellis argued that inversion could not be cured and analogized it to color hearing—thus radically rendering homosexuality an ability rather than a vice, crime, defect, or disease. He furthermore presented a list of cultured historical inverts (Sappho, Erasmus, Leonardo da Vinci, and Michelangelo) to argue against inversion as degeneracy.

Incidentally, Ellis was the first to outline (in Sexual Inversion's third edition) the homosexuality of the American poet Walt Whitman (1819–1892), and the book provided the theoretical crux for Radclyffe Hall's notorious novel about female inversion, The Well of Loneliness (1928). Hall's novel, which was tried and banned for obscenity in England, featured a short preface written by Ellis. Sexual Inversion had likewise incited conflict and suspicion in England. A progressive bookseller, George Bedborough, went to trial in 1898 for selling the book to an undercover detective. Ellis was never charged, but he and his wife were traumatized by the stress surrounding the case.

Ellis's straightforward theorizing facilitated a shift in public opinion surrounding sex and sexuality. His work incorporated the research of continental scholars, and thus exposed the theories of sexologists such as Freud and Hirschfeld to a wider audience, though one still composed of educated elites. His alliance with social reformers of his day, in addition to his own radical recommendations for public tolerance and understanding, make Ellis a central figure in dawn of sexual enlightenment in Europe and North America.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

WORKS BY

Ellis, Havelock. 1890. The New Spirit. London: George Bell and Sons.

Ellis, Havelock. 1900. The Evolution of Modesty; The Phenomena of Sexual Periodicity; Auto-Eroticism. Vol. 1 of Studies in the Psychology of Sex. Philadelphia: F. A. Davis Company. Available from http://www.gutenberg.org/files/13610/13610-h/13610-h.htm.

Ellis, Havelock. 1903. Analysis of the Sexual Impulse; Love and Pain; The Sexual Impulse in Women. Vol. 3 of Studies in the Psychology of Sex. Philadelphia: F. A. Davis Company.

Ellis, Havelock. 1906. Erotic Symbolism; The Mechanism of Detumescence; The Psychic State in Pregnancy. Vol. 5 of Studies in the Psychology of Sex. Philadelphia: F. A. Davis Company.

Ellis, Havelock. 1919. The Philosophy of Conflict, and Other Essays in Wartime. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.

Ellis, Havelock. 1967. My Life. London: Spearman. (Orig. pub. 1939.)

Ellis, Havelock. 1972. Psychology of Sex: A Manual for Students. New York: Emerson Books. (Orig. pub. 1933.)

Ellis, Havelock. 1974. Man and Woman: A Study of Human Secondary Sexual Characters. New York: Arno Press. (Orig. pub. 1894.)

Ellis, Havelock. 1990. Preface to The Well of Loneliness, by Radclyffe Hall. New York: Anchor. (Orig. pub. 1928.)

Ellis, Havelock, and John Addington Symonds. 1897. Sexual Inversion. Vol. 2 of Studies in the Psychology of Sex. London: Wilson and Macmillan.