Class Blog

Despite being one of the most prominent Christian feminists in the Victorian era, Catherine Booth is not regarded as someone who challenged prevailing concerns on sexual morality. Yet through her sermons she delved into topics most of her audience would probably have balked at if they were discussed in any other context. The two excerpts I grouped together in my archive post do not propose queer alternatives to Victorian perceptions of sexual “deviancy.” Instead, they unveil Protestant fears about those susceptible to “wicked passions,” in this case (oddly enough) children and theologians. Booth’s words today might be as credible as William Rathbone Greg’s position on redundant women, but they also come from a female minister and Salvation Army co-founder whose presence in England outshone that of her husband. Implicitly, her lectures (as she calls them) complicate our current understanding of Victorian sexuality among ardent advocates for a chaste-until-marriage, heteronormative society.

I decided to focus on Booth’s second lecture, which deals with “mock salvation,” a hypocrisy that, according to her, afflicts many Christians. She states something that made me think of Oscar Wilde: “No mere intellectual beliefs can save men, because right opinions do not make right hearts. Alas, we all know the little practical effect opinions have on character” (Booth 38). While she applies this argument to good effect later on in the passage when talking about duplicitous people, by itself, it is more or less a comical absolutism. Notice the rhetorical move with “alas, we all know,” as well. Perhaps the strangest part of the lecture, however, is Booth’s unsubtle foray into children and sexuality:

“Hence wise parents universally recognise, whether they make any pretensions to Christianity or not, the necessity of family government and careful training in order to check, counteract, or eradicate, as the case may be, these tendencies to evil; and thus they acknowledge the necessity for a certain kind of salvation in their children, and they recognise also this fact, that if they do not attempt to work out this salvation, the children will bring them to wreck and ruin” (30).

She asserts that the institution of “family government” is the only thing protecting children from their malignant natures. It is a cynical perspective on kids, perhaps shared by many a Protestant during that time. Coming from a woman with multiple children, however, it is even more shocking. Is she suggesting that the only path to salvation requires “eradicating” our innate “tendencies to evil?”

http://vqa.dickinson.edu/essay/lecture-ii-mock-salvation-and-real-deliverance-sin

Booth, Catherine. “Lecture II. A Mock Salvation and a Real Deliverance from Sin.” Popular Christianity. A Series of Lectures Delivered in Princes Hall, Piccadilly. 3rd ed., The Salvation Army, 1891, pp. 30; 38-39.

My text for the Victorian Queer Archive is called “The Study of Sexual Inversion”, which is a chapter in the book “Studies in the Psychology of Sex” written by Havelock Ellis. This text was written in 1893. The text discusses a professor of psychiatry at Berlin who studied a case of sexual inversion in which the young woman dressed like a boy, played boys games, and was attracted to women. While this type of behavior would normally be dismissed as vice or insanity, Westphal, the professor of psychiatry discussed in the text, came to the conclusion that the young woman’s sexual inversion was congenital, therefore not a vice, and could not be considered insanity.

This text belongs in the Victorian Queer Archive because it discusses a young woman who is homosexual, which, as Holly Furneaux stated, “differs from the life-script of opposite-sex marriage and reproduction”. This woman was “absolutely indifferent in the presence of men” (Ellis). This woman also liked to dress like a boy and play boy games, two things that differ from the ideals of how a Victorian woman should behave.

This text also belongs in the Victorian Queer Archive because even though most doctors during the Victorian Period would consider sexual inversion to be an instance of vice or insanity, the text discusses how Professor Westphal determined that sexual inversion is in fact congenital, therefore not a vice, and can not be considered insanity. It therefore looks at sexual inversion and homosexuality in a way that differs from the way they were typically thought about during the Victorian Period.

This text differs from other texts written during the Victorian Period because it openly discusses orgasm. Most novels and poems written during the Victorian Period do not openly discuss anything sexual, instead the writing is just full of sexual undertones.

This text can be found here: http://vqa.dickinson.edu/essay/study-sexual-inversion

Jane Eyre was written by Charlotte Bronte in 1848 and published under her androgynous pseudonym, Currer Bell. Based only on the fact of Charlotte Bronte’s revision of herself into a male (or at least uncertainly gendered) writer, Jane Eyre becomes weighted with the question of gender: who is a woman? who is a man? why might a woman wish to be or behave as a man? who gets to do what in Charlotte Bronte’s world?

The typed Victorian understanding of gender rested on a binary system: male and female. Men behaved masculinely (riding horses, killing animals, being manly) and women behaved femininely (embroidering, accepting marriage proposals, wearing corsets). Despite the Victorians’ efforts to uphold and perpetuate this kind of gender, their extremized gender system often fell through, as people of the “wrong” sex acted according to the gender norms of the opposite sex.

Jane Eyre is a deeply female text, relying on female strength and female spiritual power. However, its understanding of “femaleness” does not owe much to the Victorian understanding of female as feminine. Throughout, Jane behaves with her own volition, expresses her own agency, and insists on her own independence. In the scene of Rochester’s proposal to her, she addresses Rochester as an equal, despite their status differences. Her angry (and deeply unfeminine) speech to him ends in the declaration, “‘It is my spirit that addresses your spirit; just as if both had passed through the grave, and we stood at God’s feet, equal, — as we are!'” (Chapter 23) Despite the tempering of religion, Jane clearly believes herself and Rochester to be spiritual and mental equals. Her repetition of their equality, as well as her claiming of her own natural independence (“I am a free human being with an independent will”), subverts the Victorian gender binary and expected female behavior.

In this way, Jane Eyre presents a queer understanding of gender. Jane behaves not as a “womanly woman” but as a “free human being”; by degendering herself, Jane in effect revokes her role as a feminine woman and claims agency over her own life. Her direct revision of “normal” behavior for a woman creates androgyny in the text, as she performs typically “masculine” behavior in her attempts to reach a level of equality with Rochester.

Jane tells Rochester directly, “‘I am better than you'” (Chapter 23). In context, the phrase seems only to point out that Jane is more morally admirable since she would never accept a spouse she did not love. However, in the gendered hierarchy of Victorian status, Jane’s expression of a direct superiority overturns Victorian understandings of gender position.

Thus Charlotte Bronte’s writing of Jane Eyre. However, fifty years after Jane Eyre was published, an edition came out featuring illustrations by Edmund Garrett, whose understanding of Jane Eyre’s gender owed more to Victorian norms than to the novel itself. Garrett’s representation of Jane and Rochester’s togetherness is wholly different than Bronte’s degendered, stormy Jane: in Garrett’s picture, Jane is below and behind Rochester, demoted to the background of their pose, while Rochester’s hands are occupied in hiding and enclosing (therefore possessing) Jane.

The illustration entirely misunderstands the scene and its implications for gender in the text. Jane Eyre is not a shrinking woman to be covered and protected by a male guardian, nor is Rochester (despite his attempts to fill the role) a stoic man offering protection and guidance to a young female. Jane Eyre herself subverts both these typified gender roles – but Garrett’s illustration misses this entirely, down to the title.

Garrett captions the picture “‘Are you happy, Jane?'” Clearly, we’re meant to decide that Jane is happy: head dropped onto Rochester’s shoulder, face half-hidden behind Rochester’s hand, body covered and dominated by Rochester’s, she’s leaning into him, submitting to him. Neither look happy in the picture, but Jane’s eyes are mostly closed, suggesting another form of submission (sexual or emotional) in addition to her stance.

The Victorians’ troubled relationship with gender stemmed mostly from their insistence on a binarized system, which contributed to their confusion when humans didn’t fit into “masculine” or “feminine” categories but understood themselves as simply human. Jane Eyre expresses this, but Edmund Garrett refuses to see it. In some ways, the fifty years between Jane Eyre‘s publication and Garrett’s illustration solidified the gender binary; although Jane Eyre explicitly refuses to be feminized, Garrett represents her as a stereotype of Victorian feminine womanhood. Neither Jane herself nor Charlotte Bronte understand Jane as a feminized woman; rather, she is a human woman, whose understanding of herself as a woman depends on herself rather than the cultural expectation of her time.

Because of this deviance from the Victorian norm, as well as the novel’s revisions and subversions of gender, Jane Eyre can be understood as a queer text. Jane herself is a queer character: she is not all man or all woman, but simply Jane.

Link to VQA: http://vqa.dickinson.edu/novel/jane-eyre-autobiography

If there’s anything I’ve learned about the Victorian era, it’s that it contained sexually frustrated men and women. While the romantic sensation novel was present, it was read when the housewives were home and the husbands were out to work and play. Though these sensations and sexual interests were often cloaked behind books and language, there were a series of events that captivated the London eye and brought sex to the forefront of discussion, pushing back against the modest pretenses of the time.

During the year 1888, a serial killer made his presence known in Whitechapel, a district of East London. The murderer targeted female prostitutes, ripping them apart with such anatomical accuracy that many believed him to be a doctor. The killer became known as Jack the Ripper, and articles, illustrations, and letters written by Jack the Ripper or people claiming to be him were all released to the public during this time period. The Jack the Ripper scandal became a real life sensation novel for the public to engage in, there was even a horrifying similarity between each new killing as a new “chapter” in a novel. As these letters and articles were published in newspapers and became the hot topic of debate in London, the men and women were forced to address the reality of sex crimes.

In the first letter signed “Jack the Ripper,” he makes fun of the police’s inadequacy in finding him and his plan to continue, “ripping them [whores] till I do get buckled’ (Anonymous). Even the graphic nature of the crimes and reports, such as one victim’s uterus being removed by the killer, brought sexual organs to the forefront of thought. Men and women of all classes were captivated by these tragedies, as is evidenced with an illustration in The Illustrated Police News that depicts four women that seem to be of higher class (noting their dresses and coats) with weapons in their hands and the caption, “Ready for the Whitechapel Fiend Women Secretly Armed” (Whitechapel Murders). Thus the death and sex sensation became a part of society rather than an escape from it (through a novel). The brutal carving of the victims’ sex organs as well as the work of the women who were killed left no room to hide the sexual deviance that was coming to light in society. One article written after the death of the first prostitute highlights the social status of the victim with, “unhappily, one result of the inquiries made has been to connect the deceased with that class of women whom poverty or misfortune have driven to seeking a living upon the streets of London” (The Body is Identified). All classes, wrapped up in their real-life sex and murder mystery, had to address prostitution and the degrading conditions these women lived in in order to survive independently of a man’s income.

This letter, illustration, and article addressing the gruesome acts of Jack the Ripper upon the unsuspecting people of Whitchapel should be in the Victorian Queer Archive in order to highlight one of the first times London’s society was forced to notice the lives of prostitutes. Not only did the constant newspaper updates bring forth sex, sexual organs, and prostitution, which would normally be unacceptable topics, it also generated discussion between men and women about the act of prostitution. Sex for money, really sex outside of marriage and for any purpose other than reproduction, had not been so heavily debated until Jack the Ripper began to make society acknowledge the humanity of these prostitutes and fight to save their lives.

Victorian Queer Archive:

http://vqa.dickinson.edu/letter/dear-boss-letter

http://vqa.dickinson.edu/article/whitechapel-murders

 

Works Cited

Anonymous. “Dear Boss Letter.” Letter to Central News Office. 25 Sept. 1888. London.

Anonymous. “Whitechapel Murders.” The Illustrated Police News [London] 22 Sept. 1888: No.1,284. Print.

“Whitechapel Murders. The Body is Identified. But Where is the Murderer?” East London Observer [London] 18 Aug. 1888: n.p. Print.

In this passage, Miss Du Prel and Temperly are having a discussion concerning the “duties” of women. Miss Du Prel believes that work should be evenly distributed. She doesn’t understand why all women must do the same work despite their different passions and mind sets. Temperly feels that all women should do the same work because it is what they are best suited for. He believes that women are meant to do the household duties because it is what “Nature” intended.

While this text has the ideals of the period in Temperly’s dialog, Miss Du Prel’s dialog attempts to queer gender roles. Miss Du Prel questions the gender roles assigned to women, diverging from the societal norms of the time. Miss Du Prel challenges the ideal that women are meant to do house work as opposed to reflecting on the intelligently stimulating.

Temperly draws a metaphor that women all want to be “Mary”s and not “Martha”s, meaning that women are neglecting their duties as woman to idly sit and think. Temperly is complaining that women are no longer doing their supposed duties around the house. Miss Du Prel views the issue in reverse. She believes that too many women are being confined to their household duties which is making them idle and no women can pursue over means of work.

Miss Du Prel tries to get Temperly to think of the situation from a woman’s perspective. By doing this, she is also blurring the lines of gender because she is asking a man to view himself in a woman’s position. She is trying to get Temperly to understand the plight of woman, that people who do not identify with them are being allowed to dictate what their rights are, and she wants him to understand that this is not fair. Temperly brings the conversation to Victorian ideals however by suggesting that women should trust men’s “able judgement” (Caird 78). Temperly also uses “nature” as then reason why women are subject to men.

By questioning her “female duties,” Miss Du Prel is allowing there to be a dialog discussing the queering of the Victorian gender binary. She is questioning the expectations placed on women and suggesting that they could do other work as well. Miss Du Prel is challenging the “norm” through her questioning of the accepted social gender roles.

http://vqa.dickinson.edu/novel/daughters-danaus

This is an excerpt from “The Sunlight Falls Across My Bed,” a chapter of the New Woman Olive Schreiner’s 1898 book, Dreams, which she wrote in South Africa, where she spent much of her life.  The chapter follows a narrator’s journey through hell and heaven for which God is her tour guide. It defies expectations of Victorian literature through its manipulation of and deviation from Victorian strategies of addressing sexuality. Schreiner begins with hallmark elements of Victorian art and literature. For example, the narrator compares women to fruit and uses sensuous imagery that creates a vision of gluttonous pleasure in corporeal satisfaction. She says, “they were tall and graceful and had yellow hair… over their heads hung yellow fruit like large pears of melted gold” (Schreiner 134). The reader expects that this work will remain within the confines of Victorian depictions of sexuality in veiled terms and will paint women as passive actors and objects of pleasure. This impression is quickly shattered in the paragraphs that follow. In this way, this piece of writing defies the Victorian expectations of sexuality depictions and acceptable gender roles.

The first break from expectation is the women’s active role. Instead of tasting the fruit and being confined to hell, the women the narrator sees simply prick the fruits that they, “are poisoning” before the men eat them (Schreiner 135). Setting aside the connotations of that action, women in this scene are deciding the fates of men, something that does not happen in the sexual dynamics of typical Victorian works. Though the women possess some of the ideal traits of this era, being “tall and graceful” and “delicate,” they use these qualities for nefarious purposes (Schreiner 134). I argue this is a step past the seductive women portrayed by so many of the Pre-Raphaelites and other aesthetes, who were a danger to men, yet not through their own agency and confined to the role of passive object.

The next break from the monolithic Victorian is in the subject matter of this excerpt. Though it is coded, there is a metaphor which explains the spread of venereal diseases through the illegal sex trade. Schreiner highlights the covert nature of such interactions by repeatedly reinforcing the women’s attention to secrecy. Before piercing the fruits, each woman, “looked this way and that,” and only attempt their mission when they “saw no one there” (Schreiner 135). God explains to the narrator that the women “touch it with their lips, when they have made a tiny wound in it with their teeth they set in it that which is under their tongues: they close it with their lip—that no man may see the place, and pass on” (Schreiner 135). This depiction is much more explicit than most addresses of sexuality, prostitution, and disease seen in the Victorian canon.

This passage deviates from accepted discourse on sexuality by addressing specific aspects of venereal disease. By stating that the men do not and cannot know which fruits are tainted, Schreiner describes how symptoms present differently (or not at all) in women versus men. The fact that the author knew about such particulars would be shocking in itself, but placing them in a narrative and putting them in conversation with religion by choosing to have God explain them falls far outside the perceived Victorian norm.

More subtly, but I think more meaningfully, Schreiner addresses the emotional bankruptcy of both parties after a sexual transaction. Instead of focusing on the moral deprivation of participants in the sex trade, which would be permissible as a didactic woman’s writing informed by faith, Schreiner points out that both women and men are losers at the end of such transactions when God says they gain, “Nothing” (Schreiner 136). Going even further, she asserts that their carelessness is from fear, which eliminates other concerns. This is a claim by Schreiner that Victorian suppression of sexuality is the root cause of its most chastised behaviors and a much more pervasive threat to people’s well-being, and such a challenge is the most radically “queer” aspect of this selection.

My VQA EntryImage from HATHI TRUST

“The Naked Goddess,” a strikingly long poem by James Thomson (http://vqa.dickinson.edu/poem/naked-goddess), is the story of a goddess (surprise!) who is found communing with animals in the woods. The poem examines her influence on a community, particularly two children from that community, using these and other elements to emphasize tensions between men and women, children and adults, social order and nature, and a smattering of other dichotomies. There is even a bit of tension between religion and divinity, although the most overt queerness can be seen in the goddess’s refusal to bend to religiously based gender roles and other oppressive social structures. While I only have space to analyze a small section from the first half of the poem, the latter half deals with colonialism and a pair of lovers, allowing for even more queer readings of this text.

For my excerpt, I chose five stanzas from the second and third pages of the poem (pages 167 and 168 in the publication). The first of these stanzas (the fifth in the poem) employs sensual language while solidifying the connection between the goddess and nature. The goddess’s lack of clothing is emphasized, and she is shown fondling and caressing animals. In this situation, her sexuality is on display—along with every other part of her—and the onlooking crowd, one can assume, is rather scandalized. However, the crowd isn’t given the opportunity to express the kind of outrage that one might expect from a group of Victorians confronted with a naked woman. Instead, the next stanza sees the crowd silenced by the roar of a lion and the reaction of the goddess as she “Sprang erect, grew up in height, / Smote them with the flash and blaze / Of her terrible, swift gaze.” By using the word erect to characterize the goddess’s actions, Thomson challenges gender roles, and arguably the gender binary itself. He depicts the goddess as being full of awe-inspiring power. Since the goddess uses this power in masculine (exerting herself over the crowd) and feminine (lovingly caressing dangerous animals) ways, her gender is somewhat muddy, despite the emphasis on her status as a member of the female sex.

In the fourth and fifth stanzas from this excerpt, a priest and a sage take turns asking the goddess to give up her wild nature. The priest emphasizes religiously based values such as self-sacrifice and virginity, while the sage attempts to convince the goddess that she is wasting her mind. Both stanzas are full of queerness, emphasizing many of the ways in which the goddess does not fit into Victorian British society. She is given clothing with which she is supposed to cover up, again highlighting her nakedness. Furthermore, by encouraging her to become a “clean and chaste” virgin, the priest implies that the goddess is not “clean and chaste” (the latter being a reasonable assumption, given that she is naked and fondling animals in the woods). This is clearly meant to be a shameful suggestion, but the goddess isn’t fazed. Meanwhile, the sage suggests that living with the beasts makes her ignorant in an attempt to enforce a separation between humans and nature, a separation that the goddess blatantly ignores.

The rest of the poem is no less queer than my chosen excerpt. While she makes a polite effort to listen to both men, the goddess eventually rejects the stifling lives offered by the priest and the sage. As the story develops, the themes I mentioned at the start of this post combine to form a nuanced critique of Victorian social norms, resulting in a fascinating piece of literature.

Citation:

Thomson, James. “The Naked Goddess.” Our Corner, vol. i, no. 3, 1883, p. 166+. Nineteenth Century Collections Online, tinyurl.galegroup.com/tinyurl/3yo9Y2. Accessed 17 Nov. 2016.

The text that I chose to submit for the archival project was a poem written by Samuel Butler in 1895 entitled “In Memoriam H.R.F.”, an emotional piece that discusses Butler’s feelings after the departure of his close friend and possible lover, a Swiss student named Hans Rudolf Faesch.

The poem opens by describing the condition of Hans as he departs “into the night”: Hans is sick since he has “a racking cough” and weak lungs.  Butler wishes for Heaven to guide and guard him well.  Butler then discusses about “three lights” and how now there are only two remaining; this is a reference to himself, Hans, and Henry Festing Jones, another close friend whom Butler lived with.  Since Hans, one of the three lights, is leaving Butler and Jones, there are now only two lights left, which saddens the two friends left behind but they have confidence in Hans since his light was “clearer and stronger than ours.”

The poem continues to praise Hans in the following stanza.  There is a line that states that Hans enjoyed his time with Butler and Jones: “We gave you the best we had, such as it was, It pleased you well, for you smiled and nodded your head.”  This line interested me since I saw it as a subtle innuendo to a passionate emotional and possibly homoerotic relationship that existed between the three men.  Either way, the stanza implies that Hans was in good company during his stay in England.

The next stanza recounts how when the three companions began crying on the eve of Hans’ departure, Hans called themselves “a little weak.”  Butler then asks what is wrong with men displaying their emotions so openly.  He continues on by stating, “Therefore let tears flow on, for so long as we live No such second sorrow shall ever draw nigh us, Till one of us two leaves the other alone And goes out, out, out into the night…”  This was another line that intrigued me because I interpreted this as not only a sad farewell but also as a emotional lamentation over the fact that Hans cannot remain with Butler as a possible lover.  Butler adds on to this sorrow by broadening the audience to other people with similar hidden homoerotic desires: “Yet for the great bitterness of this grief…May pass into the hearts of like true comrades hereafter, In whom we may weep anew and comfort them, As they too pass out, out into the night…”

In the last stanza, Butler’s feelings over Hans’ departure are now even more prominent when he states, “…he whom we loved is gone, The like of whom we never again shall see.  The wind is heavy with snow and the sea is rough.”  Such lines are quite passionate since they display how special Hans was to Butler and Jones and how distraught they are over his farewell.

After reading the poem and the notes Henry Festing Jones published in the book, “Samuel Butler, Author of Erewhon (1835-1902): A Memoir, Volume 2”, I am convinced that this text is appropriate for the Victorian Queer Archive.  This is because I believe that Samuel Butler’s closeted homosexual desires are evident once one studies certain stanzas of the poem as well as the notes added by Jones.  Jones calls it a “Calamus poem” in reference to Walt Whitman’s own homoerotic poetry.  It should also be noted that Butler had the poem removed from the public due to the ongoing Oscar Wilde trials; Butler feared that the trails, with its heightened awareness of homoeroticism in the literary world, would expose his closeted sexuality (http://www.gaynz.net.nz/history/Butler.html).

Link to my Victorian Queer Archive post: http://vqa.dickinson.edu/poem/memoriam-hrf