Class Blog

“Thursday, 25^th July. I had the oddest dream last night that I ever dreamt; even the remembrance of it is very extraordinary. There was a very nice pretty young lady, who I (a girl) was going to be married to! (the very idea!). I loved her and even now love her very much. It was quite a settled thing and we were to be married very soon. All of a sudden I thought of Teddy and asked Mama several times if I might be let off and after a little time I woke. I remember it all perfectly. A very foggy morning but Henry said it would be fine, but I do not think it has. It feels very thundery. This afternoon we began making our Harmonicons. I did not succeed very well, and got rather out of patience. Sent one piece to the Carpenter to plane, as that is the only thing we cannot master. Went out for about half an hour. It rained hard, this evening, so we did not go out.”  – Emily Pepys

During the Victorian era, diary entries helped provide insight to the coded and hidden thoughts and lives of Victorian women. This is why I chose a series of diary entries from the ten-year-old Emily Pepys written over July 1844 to January 1845 as my primary text. The entries range from day to day interactions with other young children and adults, playing outside, and other activities a ten-year-old Victorian girl would take part in. Ideas circulating marriage, social responsibilities, and proper etiquette also litter the diary. One entry in particular struck me as it addressed relations among women. Throughout our course of study and reading The Women in White I have been fascinated with these types of relations and the way in which female sexual politics are expected to play out in Victorian society. And in this entry, Emily Pepys rather unknowingly steps outside of heteronormative modes of being, securing her entry’s rightful place in this archive.

This entry from July 25^th, 1844 is loaded with hidden meanings. Emily writes that she had “the oddest dream last night that [she] ever had dreamt” but it was truly extraordinary. The word “odd” in particular strikes me immediately as it is linked to the rudimentary definition of queer as being strange or odd. But also this attention to something being extraordinary allows this queerness to exist in an acceptable way. Dreams are also a concept that we’ve talked about a lot in this course as a sort of space to play out non-normative or sexual ways of being, and Emily does just this. She tells us the rather sensational news of her dream, “There was a very nice pretty young lady, who I (a girl) was going to be married to! (the very idea!)” (Avery, 32). The use of Emily’s form is key here. She uses italics and parentheticals to exclaim just how exciting but also different this dream was. The young “lady” in question seems to be an ideal wedding partner; she’s nice, pretty, young and Emily would “be married to” her! This excerpt followed along with “(the very idea)!” shows us how this dream differs from normative ways of being in her society. This idea of her marrying another young lady is rather crazy to Emily because of the society she lives in, but she welcomes it whole-heatedly. She claims that she “Loved her and even now love her very much,” and it was “quite a settled thing” (32-33). Emily’s refreshing but maybe also childish acceptance of this dream is what queers her from her Victorian counterparts. But in some fashion, I hope she does see the value in woman to woman relations.

Despite this uplifting take, Emily takes a step back when she “All of a sudden” thinks of Teddy, the boy she has a crush on (32). Now this could be explained in two ways. It could be that just the mere mention of marriage makes her want to revert back to heteronormative ways of being, as evident in this quote in a prior entry: “I think in that way I shall be quite fit to be Teddy’s wife,” (28).  Or simply she’s a child with a short attention span that has a crush on a boy. I think both might be true. But the above quote suggests that there’s a certain way that she has to act in order to become his wife, while with this other young lady it is already “quite a settled thing”. Emily then goes about her day, claiming that the morning is very “thundery” or as our class would like to describe, filled with vibrations. She then makes Harmonicons with friends, but finds herself distracted and out of patience, and the entry ends rather abruptly. What makes this entry queer is that there are two relations at play: one that is very concrete and definite yet existing in this dream world, and one that hasn’t quite figured itself out yet. It’s queer because the woman to woman relationship is concrete while her relationship with Teddy is not. And although she may be engaged to this woman in a dream world, she seems way more sure of it, than with the heteronormative one. Although Emily might be young, this sort of naive same-sex desire is rather refreshing during the Victorian Era. In a time where heteronormative relations are required, this young girl’s dream falls excitingly out of place.

 

Archive Link: http://vqa.dickinson.edu/diary/journal-emily-pepys

Full text/photos from:

Avery, Gillian, ed. The Journal of Emily Pepys. England: Prospect Books, 1984.

 

Playwright and poet Oscar Wilde is a prominent figure of the late Victorian Era, known for his aestheticism and somewhat scandalous nature. He is also an important queer writer, persecuted for his sexuality and eventual self-imposed exile from England. Many of his poems and plays contain double entendre and hidden meanings, a way of communicating homoerotic and homosocial desires. Wilde’s 1893 play Salomé: A Tragedy in One Act tells a story of forbidden and unrequited love, a theme which is captured in Aubrey Beardsley’s illustrations of the text.

If we are to look at these illustrations and consider the queerness of them, we cannot just think about their significance in relation to Wilde’s homosexual desires, after all, those are contemporary terms by Victorian standards. Holly Ferneaux defines queer as “that which differs from the life-script of opposite-sex marriage and reproduction.” Thus we have to ask how her definition applies to Beardsley’s illustrations of Salomé. Aubrey Beardsley had been asked to create a series of illustrations as a response to the play’s publication in 1893. Most of the images, sixteen in all, were censored and prohibited from being published in their original form. They were eventually published in the 1907 edition of the play, but some of the images were still censored.

Most of the illustrated characters, in particular Salomé and Iokannan (otherwise known as John the Baptist), possess the same appearance in figure, hair, and face. There is a sort of macabre androgyny attached to them, especially in the 15^th illustration: “The Climax.” Salomé is depicted hovering in mid-air above lilied waters, bringing the severed head of Iokannan closer to her face in order to kiss it, as she has vowed to do multiple times throughout the play. Aside from her facial expression the two characters are almost like twins, having neither overtly feminine nor masculine characteristics. This is also the case with the second illustration, “The Title Page.” A devilish creature enwrapped in rose bushes is depicted with breasts as well as a penis and testicles (what is often described as “male genitalia”).

The question to ask now is why Beardsley’s artistic decisions matter for creating queer illustrations. Both of these images are examples of being queer, disrupting the gender binary by creating figures that exists outside of expectations of appearance based on perceived gender, allowing not only for homoerotic desire to be displayed, but for any desire and identity outside of the life-script of heterosexuality. Both the play and illustrations also invert heteronormative concepts of sexual conduct, making Salomé, despite being the femme fatale, the more active (or masculine) partner while Iokannon is, while resistant, feminine and passive. The OED defines the term “Uranian” as relating to homosexual love, but other dictionaries and Wikipedia also equate the word with “genderqueer” and other non-binary terms used by transgender and gender non-conforming people. Thus the illustrations capture a part of Wilde’s position as a queer person in Victorian England and subverting the societal expectations of desire, gender and performance.

A portion of the script as well as Beardsley’s illustrations can be found on the Victorian Queer Archive.

There is also a collection of the images on the British Library website.

Citation: Beardsley, Aubrey, and Oscar Wilde. Salomé: A Tragedy in One Act. 1893. John Lane, The Bodley Head, 1907.

 

Havelock Ellis’ first volume of Studies in the Psychologies of Sex (1897) closely examines a number of ideas and issues surrounding queer topics. Ellis was a writer, and a doctor, thus where his interest in the body, and sexuality comes into play. His work acknowledges the absurdity of certain ideas or theories that may have previously been believed. In his preface, Ellis states, “Sex lies at the root of life, and we can never learn to reverence life until we know how to understand sex. —So, it seems to me” (X). His work is not just an examination of sex, and other pertaining topics; it is also an attempt to further understand human existence as a whole.

The section that I am focusing on is titled, ‘The Theory of Sexual Inversion.’ This work gives a queer reading of the Victorian era as it allows a current-day reader to see how people of different socioeconomic classes viewed sexual inversion and other non-heteronormative tendencies. This specific excerpt also considers the characteristics of one’s sexuality and how these characteristics come about or if they come about, as the argument that one’s sexual orientation is congenital is approached as well. There is a contrast in the second and third lines, Ellis writes, “Is it [sexual inversion], as many would have us believe, an abominably acquired vice, to be stamped out by the prison? or is it, as a few assert, a beneficial variety of human emotion which should be tolerated or even fostered?” (129). The words ‘many’ and ‘few’ clarify that the more popular belief is also the more negative one. Ellis acknowledges that there are reasonable truths in both sides of the argument, ‘is sexual inversion congenital or not?’ He determines that ultimately, one cannot argue that sexual inversion is acquired without counteracting his or her own point— therefore, the only valid argument is that sexual inversion is congenital. The progressiveness of this argument is made evident in the beginning with the word ‘few’ being attributed to this opinion, and to the opinion that sexual inversion should be accepted.

Ellis states those who wish to “enlarge the sphere of the congenital [opinion]” include “Krafft-Ebing, Moll, Féré” but also “today the majority of authorities” (130). At first glance, this seems to negate my original point of ‘few;’ however, I believe the key word in this line is ‘authorities.’ A question is, who is authorities ascribed to? The answer to this question exposes more about how Ellis’ work gives a queer, or non-heteronormative view of the Victorian Era. Those who have authority are most likely educated to some extent. Though in 1880 an education act made school attendance mandatory for children of any economic standing, this law was not followed and only about 80% of children were attending school. This 80% were mostly from the higher class. However, the majority of adults there, at the time, are not or were not educated, making the authority figures, those who are educated, and of higher social and economic standing, the minority, or the ‘few.’

Ellis’ work gives a queer point of view on the Victorian era by allowing one to see the perspectives that many people of different backgrounds possess on the topic of sexual inversion.

 

Link to the uploaded work on the VQA: http://vqa.dickinson.edu/essay/studies-psychology-sex

Consulted information on education can be found here:

http://www.parliament.uk/about/living-heritage/transformingsociety/livinglearning/school/overview/1870educationact/

And here:

http://www.victorianchildren.org/victorian-schools/

Citation of Havelock Ellis’ work:  Ellis, Havelock. “The Theory of Sexual Inversion.” Studies in the Psychologies of Sex, vol. 1, London, The University Press, 1897, pp. 129-30. 6 vols.

I looked at the collection of essays Aphrodisiacs and Anti-Aphrodisiacs: Three Essays on the Powers of Reproduction: with Some Account of the judicial “congress” as practised in France during the seventeenth century by John Davenport. As Steven Marcus writes in The Other Victorians: A Study of Sexuality and Pornography in Mid-Nineteenth-Century England, the book Aphrodisiacs and Anti-Aphrodisiacs treats “gossip” as “a form of erudition” (Marcus, 72). Marcus also mentions that while “at the bottom of the title page is printed ‘London” Privately Printed 1869[,]’ the work was in fact printed in 1873” (72).

The book discusses multiple past and present ways of inciting sexual desire in both men and women, but all first-person accounts of anything too scandalous is printed in French, “the disgusting obscenity of which is such we cannot venture upon translating” them (Davenport, 111). The aristocracy being perfectly fluent in French, this “disguising” of the more scandalous material was paper-thin and completely useless.

My section in particular described the appeal of erotic spanking and then includes examples, such as Rosseau’s interest in being spanked by an elder woman. The details are in French, but a rough translation (many thanks to my patient and kind translator!) is:

“For a long time,” he says, “Madame Lambercier stuck to the threat of a new punishment, one that seemed very dreadful. But after the execution of the punishment, I found it less dreadful than the thinking about it beforehand, the waiting for it. The strangest part was that I liked the punishment, better than I liked her imposing the punishment on me. The truth of this affection is there was a battle between my sweet nature and my desire to be punished, because in pain and even in shame I have found a mix of sensuality that have given me more desire than fear of feeling immediately from that same hand. Without a doubt it was true, as I was flirting with a precocious sexual instinct, the same punishment given by my brother did not feel as pleasant.” (111)

Rosseau is describing not only a fetish for being spanked and a predilection for BDSM (both already very outside of the Victorian norm), but also his enjoyment in being submissive to a woman, thereby reversing the expected Victorian gender roles and further subverting the Victorian norm of heterosexual sex being about reproduction rather than pleasure. Based on Eva Sedgwick’s list of elements of sexual identity in her book Tendencies, Rosseau is subverting the gender binaries of “preferred sexual act(s) (supposed to be insertive if you are male or masculine, receptive if you are female or feminine),” “most eroticized sexual organs (supposed to correspond to the procreative abilities of your sex, and to your insertive/receptive organs),” and “enjoyment of power in sexual relations (supposed to be low if you are female or feminine, high if male or masculine)” (Sedgwick, 7). Rosseau leans more toward the feminine side of the binary on all of the above categories, despite being male. Thus, his proclivities subvert the Victorian gender binary – but despite being in French to “disguise” anything too obscene, Rosseau’s description is perfectly understandable to most of the Victorian aristocracy (who were fluent in French) and is on display for the Victorians to enjoy.

The full excerpt can be found at: http://vqa.dickinson.edu/essay/aphrodisiacs-and-anti-aphrodisiacs-three-essays-powers-reproduction-some-account-judicial

Works Cited:

Marcus, Steven. The Other Victorians: A Study of Sexuality and Pornography in Mid-Nineteenth-Century England. New York: Basic Books, 1966. Print.

Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. “Queer and Now.” Tendencies. Durham: Duke University, 1993. 1-22. Print.

Dear class,

In a comment below, please type the title of your text and any other information (author, year, publication history, etc) that you currently have.  This will simply serve as a running list for us in class tomorrow.

cheers!

SK

Christina Rosetti’s Goblin Market was originally published as a children’s poem. It tells the story of two sisters whose curiosity gets the the best of one of them. “Sweet-tooth Laura” (4) was enticed by the goblin’s “apples and quinces/lemons and oranges,/Plump unpecked cherries,/Melons and raspberries”, and exchanged a lock of her golden hair in order to, literally, taste the forbidden fruit (1). Laura falls dreadfully ill due to tasting the fruit, and it is up to her sister Lizzie to come to her rescue. While the story does have a neatly packaged moral at the end common in most children’s stories, this poem contains multiple sexually explicit descriptions that, upon further examination, make it much less suitable for children.

In the scene where Laura gives way to her temptation and tastes the exotic goblin fruit, one would think that the emphasis would be placed on how the fruit tastes. Instead, the action of Laura sucking the juice out of each fruit is described in great detail: “she sucked and sucked and sucked the more/Fruit which that unknown orchard bore;/She sucked until her lips were sore”(4). Perhaps my reading of this is tainted from my 21st century reading, but this description seems extremely sexually charged. If one accepts this description as sexual, the moral at the end of the story becomes even more disturbing. When looked at as the story of a woman who follows her sexual desires, the consequences she faces are rather drastic. After eating the fruit, the narrator implies that she had possibly “gone deaf and blind” and that “her tree of life drooped from the root”(8). The fact that she is a woman following her sexual impulses and is severally punished for doing so perpetuates the Victorian ideals and norms regarding female sexuality: that it should be be acknowledged or acted upon. Similarly, the idea that this poem was something that was made for children reiterates how early these sexual stereotypes were ingrained in Victorian youth, even if they were unaware of the poem’s sexual innuendos. The poem’s ending moral can have many different interpretations, but one of them is undeniably this: women should not follow their desires, or there will be dire consequences.

Perhaps the last thing that comes to mind when reading Christina Rossetti’s poem The Goblin Market is the concept of the femme fatale. However, there are a few instances in the poem where Lizzie, the older sister, seems to possess some femme fatale-like qualities. In this post, I’ll examine how Rossetti’s definition of the femme fatale in her poem In an Artist’s Studio can be applied to Lizzie in The Goblin Market.

The term “femme fatale” was shaped by the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood in the mid 19th century. Members of the group included artists like Dante Gabriel Rossetti, who depicted a self-absorbed and beautiful femme fatale in his painting Lady Lilith, among others. And although Christina, Dante’s sister, was never officially a member of the Brotherhood, she played a crucial role within the group. Her poem In an Artist’s Studio was written in 1856. The poem references Dante’s art stuido and the many portraits of Elizabeth Siddal, the model for most of Dante’s work at the time.

In the poem, Rossetti notes how “one face looks out from all [Dante’s] canvases,” referring to the many portraits of Elizabeth Siddal. Through Dante’s paintings, Rossetti explains, Elizabeth can be depicted as anything, from “a queen in opal or ruby dress” to “a saint [or] an angel.” Now, the femme fatale, as defined on Merriam-Webster, is an attractive woman who causes trouble for the men who become involved with her. Dante spends all of his time and energy painting this one woman with “all her loveliness,” so Elizabeth must be at least somewhat attractive. Another line from Rossetti’s poem also hints that Dante is obsessed with Elizabeth: “he feeds upon her face by day and night.” The word ‘feed’ suggests that Elizabeth is Dante’s sustenance, in which case he physically cannot live without her and her beauty. At the end of the poem, Rossetti adds: “Not wan with waiting, not with sorrow dim; / Not as she is, but was when hope shone bright; / Not as she is, but as she fills his dream.” Rossetti explicitly states that “she” never waits for the man sorrowfully, but she did when he had hope, when she was in the man’s dream. This description precisely defines a female fatale, a beautiful woman who appears in a man’s dream but not in reality–at least, not for long periods of time.

Now, what if I told you Elizabeth Siddal’s nickname was Lizzie? Because it was. In fact, many articles refer to her as Lizzie, not Elizabeth.

In The Goblin Market, Lizzie isn’t the traditional femme fatale. The poem states that her sister has golden curls, so presumably Lizzie does too, an attractive feature for a young woman. Similar to the face in the paintings, though, she doesn’t seek to cause trouble. However, when the goblins attack Lizzie, tearing her gown, soiling her stockings, stomping on her feet and trying to make her eat the fruit, she resists, ultimately annoying the goblins and causing them to give up instead of submitting to them like another more submissive woman might.

Are both of Rossetti’s characters modeled after Elizabeth Siddal? Perhaps, but more importantly, her definition of the femme fatale in her poem In an Artist’s Studio can also be applied to Lizzie in The Goblin Market, connecting the two poems.

 

 

In this post I would like to address the vivid descriptions and usages of hair in Goblin Market by Christina Rosetti. I contend that hair is used in this piece as a symbol of sexual consent and female sexuality, and that Laura’s giving away of her hair is reinforcing gender norms and a form of self-subordination. I would also like to discuss the sexualization of blonde women in particular, not only as a Victorian trend, but in general.

The obsession with hair in the Victorian era is not only evident in Dante Rosetti’s many paintings that we viewed in class, but can also be found in the abundance of hair jewelry (mostly mourning jewelry) Victorians were so fond of. Laura and Lizzie in the poem are described as being blonde “Golden head by golden head” (6). In order to purchase the goblins’ fruits (aka to partake in their sexual orgy essentially) she had to ” “Buy from us with a golden curl” ” (4). Elisabeth Gitter points out in her book The Power of Women’s Hair in the Victorian Imagination that in primitive societies giving up a lock of one’s hair or shaving it was a customary practice brides were forced to undertake, linking this practice inherently with sex or virginity loss (Gitter 938). By giving the goblins her hair to purchase their fruit or partake in the sexual deviancy, she is tricked into giving away her sexual purity as well as simply subordinating herself to the male goblins by giving her intrinsic treasure or currency that is her rare, beautiful hair. This physical selling of the self to men of a different race or breed also reinforces Victorian gender roles not only of men as predators/ “more dominant” but also of women being easily tricked into giving into sexual desires (even to men of a lower class or minority race) which can have major consequences on their class status or reputation, or in Laura’s case, her health (possibly a moral suggestion that being this easily persuaded, giving up oneself in the premarital circumstance may lead to venereal disease).

It is also important to note that in the Victorian era it was typical for women to have long flowing hair as it was a symbol of youth, fertility, and beauty. Women’s hair was usually only cut in times when the woman was ill or committed to a mental asylum or prison. While this was done for ‘cleanliness’ cutting a woman’s hair was also the quickest way to take away a woman’s confidence, making her docile and compliant to the prison or asylum’s discipline. In this way Laura was docile and compliant to the goblins, unable to let them go even after they left her presence, she was constantly thirsting for their fruits and under their persuasion.

I find it additionally interesting that both women are blonde. The fiery red or blonde hair is a common trope throughout Victorian literature. Gitter also cites Medusa, Philomena, and Saint Agnes as literary figures that have been depicted with golden hair, in their cases the unique hair acts as a “prosthetic tongue” to their inner persona, displaying how unique, rare, and valuable they are as women not only in physical beauty but in their intrinsic worth (Gitter 939). I found this reading interesting and important when speaking about Laura in that “Her hair grew thin and grey” (8) after she had given herself up to the goblins. This suggests that by giving consent to the taking of her sexual purity by relinquishing her hair she has lost not only her physical appeal but even her intrinsic worth in that her beautiful hair can no longer speak to the good of her character’s well-being. In this way the text suggests that by giving up your virginity either/and before marriage or to a lower class/minority race, a woman is not only physically devaluing herself but giving up her moral/spiritual worth as a person.

Blonde bombshells still thrive past the Victorian era as well which is certainly an area for further research and how blonde-ness seems to tie in with overt sexuality over time (for example, sex symbols like Marilyn Monroe) and how many women seek to be blonde in order to channel this because “blondes have more fun”. (Just an interesting side note I have no direct thoughts nor more words to get into this, but it could be suggesting that both Laura and Lizzie were already either overtly sexual women or that they were simply extremely attractive in a sexually pleasing way)