The letter ends with a threat. If the suitor comes around again, “I’ll whale the life out of you and
make you glad to sit down on your stomach for the rest of the week”.32 In the former story, the
old woman’s sexual illegibility — “aged, shriveled, high-dried” — precedes the broken springs
beneath her seat. In this letter, presumed heavy petting, sexual energy discharged outside of
normative social structures, breaks the springs and rocking chair. With strange symmetry, the
corrective punishment (whaling) will force the beau to sit on his stomach, the way the accused
Scissors Swallower sat on hers (shark).
We encounter the same sexual trope, sans springs or sea creatures, in a poem titled “A Parlour
Secret” that circulated through various magazines and newspapers between the 1890s and mid
1910s (I found it in the Chicago Evening Post and Australia’s Mercury and Weekly Courier, to
take just two examples):
Why does the family rocking chair
That’s silent all the week
On Sunday nights in mad despair
Proceed to mildly squeak?
Whenever father rocks it will
In gentle swaying go,
It never seems to squeak until
The daughter has a beau.
Ah! Who that knows the cause would dare
To spoil the lovers’ fun?
“Two souls with but a single chair;
Two forms that rock as one.”33
A couple sharing a rocking chair in a postcard by Bamforth & Co, a West Yorkshire
film and illustration company known for their risqué, seaside content (1907)
— Source.
Adopting a cliché from Friedrich Halm’s play Ingomar, The Barbarian, this poem reduces
spiritual ecstasy to physical intimacy.34 I do not know enough about sex in the nineteenth century
to wager on the act. Furtive lap sitting? A variation of the Kama Sutra’s love swing? Or is the
rocking chair a sonic euphemism, providing a more palatable source for the squeaking? We lack
a history of the bodily techniques associated with springs and rocking furniture: a creaking
mattress in the in-laws’ guestroom; the childhood taboo against jumping on beds; or murderous
recliners. But I do know that upholstery springs and rocking chairs furnished Victorian erotic
writing. For example, this scene from The Romance of Lust, published in the 1870s:
There was a perfectly shaded walk in the east shrubbery leading from the greenhouse down to a
most charming summer house overlooking the very finest prospect, and perfectly secure from all
observation. It was furnished very appropriately for amorous purposes, the couches being low,
broad, and with patent spring-cushions. In the sequel it was the scene of many a bout of
lubricity.35
Or, let me proffer this creepy excerpt from the third volume of My Secret Life, an obsessive,
million-word, highly pornographic “memoir” that began appearing in the late 1880s:
By the sofa was an American rocking-chair, the first I ever recollect having seen. Matilda began
rocking herself in it, I rocked the chair violently for her and then as far as it would go, back and
held it there, then rapidly I pushed one hand up her petticoats.36
Rocking chairs (and seats that rocked) carried an erotic charge in the nineteenth century,
approximating, perhaps, a tumble dryer before its time.
For a certain type of Victorian mind, easy chairs made easy women. Polite society sat erect.
Some American commentators found these English regimens laughable. “I am told that the
English nation sit bolt upright, like mummies”, wrote the humorist Fanny Fern in “A Chapter on
Chairs” for The London Reader (1864). “Poor creatures! No wonder they are so red in the
face.”37
While rocking chairs had been around America since the early eighteenth century, they did not
fully enter the European consciousness until the 1830s, when travelers to the United States began
commenting on their ubiquity. “In America”, wrote James Frewin for The Architectural
Magazine and Journal in 1838, “it is considered a compliment to give the stranger the rockingchair as a seat; and when there is more than one kind in the house, the stranger is always
presented with the best.” Not everyone appreciated the gesture.
That same year, in her Retrospect of Western Travel, the British social theorist Harriet Martineau
stops off at a small inn between Stockbridge and Albany, New York. She describes “the
disagreeable practice” of rocking in chairs and finds “ladies who are vibrating in different
directions, and at various velocities, so as to try the head of a stranger almost as severely as the
tobacco chewer his stomach.”38 A similar description later appeared in the Michigan Farmer and
other magazines, echoing both the rocker’s nicotinic effects and asynchronicity; the author calls
rocking chairs a woman’s “nervine, a narcotic, a stimulant”, and describes “a woman
photographer [who] would sit in a rocker with a camera in her lap and placidly photograph a
group of rocking women in rockers of various gaits”.39