Gender, the New Woman, and the Monster [1st ed. 2019] 978-3-030-30475-1, 978-3-030-30476-8

Table of contents :
Front Matter ....Pages i-x
Introduction: Gender, the New Woman, and the Monster (Elizabeth D. Macaluso)....Pages 1-17
“I Love You with All the Moods and Tenses of the Verb”: Lucy and Mina’s Love in Bram Stoker’s Dracula (Elizabeth D. Macaluso)....Pages 19-36
The Monstrous Power of Uncertainty: Social and Cultural Conflict in Richard Marsh’s The Beetle (Elizabeth D. Macaluso)....Pages 37-69
The Rise of Harriet Brandt: A Critique of the British Aristocracy in Florence Marryat’s The Blood of the Vampire (Elizabeth D. Macaluso)....Pages 71-97
Conclusion (Elizabeth D. Macaluso)....Pages 99-104
Back Matter ....Pages 105-110

Citation preview

Gender, the New Woman, and the Monster Elizabeth D. Macaluso

Gender, the New Woman, and the Monster

Elizabeth D. Macaluso

Gender, the New Woman, and the Monster

Elizabeth D. Macaluso Queensborough Community College Queens, NY, USA

ISBN 978-3-030-30475-1 ISBN 978-3-030-30476-8  (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-30476-8 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2019 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover illustration: Maram_shutterstock.com This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Preface

My book considers the way that the figure of the monster contributes to the debate about the New Woman and gender at the British fin de siècle. The figure of the monster contributes three conclusions to this discussion. (1) The figure of the monster reveals that there was a conflict in culture in Britain at the fin de siècle between British subjects who held traditional values (conservatives) and those who exhibited progressive viewpoints (New Liberals, radicals, and socialists). (2) The figure of the monster collapses social categories and boundaries that traditionalists held dear, like race and colonialism (native-ness versus foreignness), gender and the New Woman, homo/sexuality, and discourses on poverty. (3) The figure of the monster shows that the New Woman and gender are also indeterminate and liminal subjects. Friendships between women can be queer. The British populous viewed the New Woman as either a monstrous figure (a threat to family, nation, and Empire) or a laudable figure (a role model for New Women and women to emulate). The foreign and perverse violence of the monster shows that conflict was embedded in colonialism, the New Woman, sexuality, and poverty at century’s end. Finally, the figure of the monster demands that New Women who were racially and ethnically “Other,” or different from the white English norm, should be incorporated into British society not banished to its limits. Queens, USA

Elizabeth D. Macaluso v

Acknowledgements

I would like to acknowledge the scholars who helped me to write this book. Thank you to the tremendously inspirational intellectual community at Oberlin College. To Nick Jones, Phyllis Gorfain, Bruce Richards, Jennifer Bryan, Wendy Kozol, and Kirk Ormand: Without your constant support and inspiring examples, this book would not have been possible. Also, I acknowledge the tremendous mentorship I received from Amy M. King. From you, I learned what it means to be a scholar who works on women’s lives in the Victorian and British fin de siècle periods. Also, I thank Steve Mentz, John Lowney, Kathie Lubey, Rachel Hollander, Steve Sicari, and Derek Owens. You taught me what it means to be an author, scholar, teacher, and mentor to countless students. Thank you for your guidance, support, and shining examples of what is good in humanity. I am also thanking the entire faculty at Binghamton University, particularly, Melissa Free (Arizona State University), Michael Conlon, Joseph Keith, Kristi Murray Costello, Praseeda Gopinath, Jessie Reeder, Zoja Pavlovskis-Petit, and Susan Strehle for their support of this manuscript, my Ph.D., and my success on the job market. Your support through this process has been invaluable. I’d also like to give a special thanks to Maria Mazziotti Gillan who provided countless hours of encouragement with these and other matters, namely, the publication of my first volume of poetry, The Lighthouse. Thank you, Maria! Finally, I acknowledge Lisa Surridge, Mary Elizabeth Leighton, Marlene Tromp, Diana Maltz, and Heidi Kaufmann. Your unfailing support of my manuscript and your countless hours of work so freely given to new scholars vii

viii  

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

means more to me, and to our community, than it is possible to express in words. I thank you for your friendship. Lastly, I thank my friends, students, and family—because of you, I am a professor, scholar, and author. These acknowledgments are a testament to what it means to realize one’s dreams and they encourage all to continue this work even in challenging times.

Contents

1 Introduction: Gender, the New Woman, and the Monster 1 1.1 Methodology 9 1.2 How This Book Engages Scholarly Debates 10 References 15 2 “I Love You with All the Moods and Tenses of the Verb”: Lucy and Mina’s Love in Bram Stoker’s Dracula 19 2.1 Cultural and Personal Contexts for Lucy and Mina’s “Intimate Friendship” 20 2.2 Lucy and Mina’s “Intimate Friendship” 23 References 34 3 The Monstrous Power of Uncertainty: Social and Cultural Conflict in Richard Marsh’s The Beetle 37 3.1 The Novel’s Social Conflicts in Their Historical Context 41 3.2 Homosexuality as an Abomination and a Tool for Liberation 46 3.3 Holt and the Poor as Undesirable Vagrants and Everymen 50 3.4 British Colonialism in Egypt: A Conversation Between Jingoism and Anti-imperialism 55 3.5 The New Woman as “Wild Woman” and Rational Agent 59 3.6 Finale: The Power of Marsh’s Monstrous Uncertainty 65 References 67 ix

x 

CONTENTS

4 The Rise of Harriet Brandt: A Critique of the British Aristocracy in Florence Marryat’s The Blood of the Vampire 71 4.1 The Vitriolic Effects of Elinor’s Xenophobia 73 4.2 Phillips’s Injurious Racism and Sexism 80 4.3 Harriet’s Humanity: A Critique of the British Aristocracy 88 4.4 Finale: Harriet’s Humanity Implores Readers to Question Her Fate 95 References 96 5 Conclusion 99 References 104 Index 105

CHAPTER 1

Introduction: Gender, the New Woman, and the Monster

At the height of Britain’s power, at the fin de siècle, British subjects were plagued by specific cultural anxieties that were made in response to very complex social issues. In the literature of the age, the figure of the monster became a marker of these cultural anxieties as Britons could project their fears onto these monsters (Halberstam, 1995, p. 92). Dracula reflects Britons’ anxieties about the flood of Eastern European immigrants who made their way back to the British metropole (Arata, 1996, p. 115).1 Stoker’s novel expresses real concerns that white, conservative British had about the aftereffects of British colonization (imperialism and colonialism) (Arata, 1996, p. 107). Additionally, Dracula, Richard Marsh’s The Beetle, and Florence Marryat’s The Blood of the Vampire are meditations on the significance of the New Woman. British subjects did not know what to make of New Women, like Mina Harker and Lucy Westenra, who wished to have control over their romantic relationships. Neither did they know how to deal with women who wished to govern their own lives, like Marjorie Lindon, or who insisted on living independently like Harriet Brandt (prior to her marriage). Dracula takes on the subject of homosexuality and Dracula, himself, has been read as a doppelganger for Oscar Wilde (Schaffer, 1994, p. 406). The Beetle looks closely at the problem of poverty in Britain and aims to address it by eliciting readers’ sympathy for its indigent protagonist, Robert Holt. This book, however, will focus on gender and I will argue that the liminal figure of the monster elicits new conclusions about women’s lives, women’s issues, the New Woman, and gender at the fin de siècle. I am adding © The Author(s) 2019 E. D. Macaluso, Gender, the New Woman, and the Monster, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-30476-8_1

1

2

E. D. MACALUSO

to the debate about gender, made famous by Judith Butler, and am concurring with her that gender is an indeterminate social construct that resists categories and boundaries (1990, p. ii). As opposed to solely focusing on modern studies of women’s lives and gender theory or Victorian studies of gender, women’s lives, and female characters’ fictional lives (which I definitely involve in the book), to add to this already established conclusion, I am focusing on the special interrelationships that monsters have with female protagonists of British fin-de-siècle fiction to understand some of the new ways that gender is indeterminate and resists categories and boundaries in both fiction and the history of the British fin de siècle. I will answer the question: How does the figure of the monster invite conclusions about the indeterminacy of gender in Stoker’s Dracula, Marsh’s The Beetle, and Marryat’s The Blood of the Vampire? My answer to this question is: the monster shows that female friendships can be almost lesbian, and that the foreign and perverse monster2 invokes a contentious debate between fin-de-siècle feminists, who see the New Woman as a role model for future generations of women, and antifeminists, who see her as a threat to family, nation, and Empire. My specific contribution to this well-established history of debate is: the New Woman, like the foreign and perverse monster (the Beetle), is an indeterminate figure herself and the foreign and perverse monster incites more debate about her and other pressing social issues like colonialism, sexuality, and poverty. The monster figure, and his/her foreign and perverse violence, helps to define her by inciting and presenting the debate about her to the reader of The Beetle, so that she (the reader) decides how to understand her. The final focus of my study is a female monster herself, Marryat’s Harriet Brandt. And, so, the subjects of gender and the monster become inextricably intertwined. Instead of writing a plot that solely attempts to get rid of the monster (like Dracula and The Beetle boast), Florence Marryat makes the monster female and, in doing so, asks her readers to sympathize with a woman, who paradoxically has the ability to take the lives of her acquaintances, but is so accomplished and lovely, otherwise, that it becomes difficult to solely condemn her. Though the British characters of Marryat’s novel wish to be rid of Harriet, because to them she bears the curse of heredity, race, and she is so modern and “New” (independent, wealthy, and accomplished, like the New Woman), Marryat, through the perspectives of Anthony Pennell and Miss Wynward, defends her monster by emphasizing Harriet’s good qualities (her kindness, beauty, talent, generosity and charity, and eventual maturity and fairness). Thus, instead of engaging in a circuitous debate

1

INTRODUCTION: GENDER, THE NEW WOMAN, AND THE MONSTER

3

about whether Harriet is good or monstrous, Marryat dares to sympathize with a monster and argues that she (an indeterminate subject), too, belongs to, and should be incorporated in, British society, and not be banished to its limits. Marryat even points the finger of “monster” at the other British protagonists of her novel and asserts that their attempts to castigate Harriet are “monstrous” themselves. In these ways, the book will also reveal that gender is related to other issues that may seem tangential but are actually deeply vetted to gender like sexuality (in the Dracula chapter), race, sexuality, and class (in the Beetle chapter), and race (in the Blood of the Vampire chapter). My book’s secondary argument is that the liminal figure of the monster and the liminal figure of the New Woman present a conflict in finde-siècle culture between conservative Britons who held traditional values and liberal British subjects who had progressive viewpoints. This conflict is also embedded in the aforementioned issues of race, gender, sexuality, and class. Traditional Britons were conservatives in Parliament, and conservatives in the general populous, who believed that imperialism and colonialism were centrally important to the maintenance of Empire, the castigation of the New Woman was integral to preserving the traditional femininity of the British “woman,” the capital and/or criminal punishment of male homosexuals preserved the purity of the state and the marital relationships that made it so, and the “hands off” approach to dealing with the poor strengthened the social makeup of the state. Contrarily, progressive subjects (radicals and socialists), New Liberals in Parliament, were committed to anti-imperialist/colonialist agendas and independence movements, the enfranchisement of the New Woman and all women, the humanization of homosexuals, and the unionization of the poor. There were socially liberal moderates, who lived during Britain’s fin de siècle, but their financially conservative agendas were swept up in conservative Party politics, thereby strengthening the schism between traditionalists and progressives even further. The liminal figure of the monster collapsed the boundaries of these aforementioned subjects, or, again, colonialism and race, gender, sexuality, and class.3 Is Dracula a British enthusiast with his British books and maps, and is the Beetle a British subject, since he/she comes from Britishoccupied Egypt, or are they both threatening insurgents from Britain’s feared Eastern Europe and colonial Egypt? Was the New Woman a terrible challenge to traditional, Victorian femininity or a role model for women to lift themselves from obscurity, like Marjorie Lindon, who is criticized

4

E. D. MACALUSO

by her antifeminist father, friend, and captor but supported by her fiancé? Are Lucy and Mina overly sexual and/or practical women or do they love in ways that challenge these stereotypes? Is Harriet Brandt a monster or an angel? Does Dracula’s effeminacy mean that he is gay? Is he gay or straight? He has both male and female sexual victims. Does the Beetle’s effeminacy and his/her masculine femininity connote stereotypes about gay men and women? What does the Beetle’s foreign and perverse attack on Holt suggest about homosexual men? Are they monsters or benevolent lovers? Finally, does the Beetle’s foreign and perverse use of Holt suggest that Holt should be left to live a life as a corruptible vagrant or should his victimhood mean that he is a sympathetic everyman? These are the ways that the liminal figure of the monster suggested a conflict in fin-de-siècle culture and in race, gender, sexuality, and class at century’s end. The liminality of the monster and the New Woman proves that these other subjects were unsettled, too, that the violence between Dracula, Lucy and Mina, the Beetle and Marjorie Lindon and the Beetle and Lessingham and Holt, and the conflict embedded in Harriet Brandt’s selfhood, as monster and woman, shows. Dracula triangulates the relationship between himself, Lucy, and Mina and makes their friendship almost lesbian. The Beetle’s foreign and perverse attack on Marjorie Lindon shows that the New Woman and colonialism/race, sexuality, and discourses on the poor are all vexed subjects. Harriet Brandt’s monstrosity/angelic qualities make her a liminal subject who deserves to be included in British society not left at its margins. Scholars who write about late Victorian monsters maintain that their bodies are often coded to represent what the Victorians feared about race, gender, sexuality, and class (Halberstam, 1995, p. 92). Halberstam writes that Dracula evoked anxieties about the Jew (1995, p. 95). H. L. Malchow adds that the description of Dracula’s body, his aquiline nose, his black hair and sallow skin, and his long fingernails all match the description of “The Wandering Jew,” a Jewish character in George Lander’s stage version of Eugène Sue’s novel The Wandering Jew (1996, pp. 156–157). Both authors claim that modern anti-Semitism is literally mapped onto Dracula’s “Jewish” body (1995, p. 95; 1996, p. 150). Malchow also contends that Hyde is Jekyll’s fetishized “Other,” the salacious self that Jekyll refuses to acknowledge (1996, p. 81). Jekyll’s divided self could have many implications (1996, pp. 82–83). Malchow posits that Jekyll’s monstrosity evokes perversity and even “Semitic and Negroid features” (1996, p. 82). Finally, in Marsh’s The Beetle, Holt becomes embroiled in the Beetle’s vengeance

1

INTRODUCTION: GENDER, THE NEW WOMAN, AND THE MONSTER

5

and Holt’s body is used as a conduit for the Beetle’s monstrosity and criminality, showing how Holt’s poverty can be linked to the Beetle’s foreign and perverse monstrosity. Most of the scholarship on monsters returns to this same conclusion: reading the monster’s body will reveal larger truths about race, sexuality, class, and gender. However, Bram Dijkstra’s work on the female vampire as insatiable and sexual New Woman enables my own claim about the interrelatedness of monster and New Woman. Dijkstra suggests that the female vampire was a way to speak about the predominant view that late Victorian men had about New Women’s sexualities. Mostly, these men thought that these women sucked the virility right out of them (Dijkstra, 1986, p. 348). And, most of the scholarship on the New Woman, as written by Ledger, Sutherland, Jusova, Ardis, Heilmann, and Richardson and Willis, explores the New Woman as a subject with a “multiple identity” (Ledger, 1997, p. 1), a social subject whose middle-class work defined her identity (Sutherland, 2015, p. 1), a subject with colonial ties and implications (Jusova, 2005, p. 1), and a fierce fiction writer (Ardis, 1990, p. 1; Heilmann, 2000, p. 1; Richardson & Willis, 2001, p. 1). However, my study will contend that the relationship between the monster and the New Woman, in Stoker’s, Marsh’s, and Marryat’s novels, explores the relationships that New Women had with other New Women. Instead of focusing on the history of these relationships in biographies of New Women’s lives, I am looking at what monstrosity can reveal about these relationships. Monstrosity shows that friendships between New Women can be lesbian and that these women are indeterminate subjects. Late Victorian New Women were either monsters or laudable figures in the eyes of the populous (conservatives or New Liberals). The conflict embedded in fin-de-siècle Britain’s idea of the New Woman, as shown by the foreign and perverse monster, also reveals the fraught nature of colonialism, sexuality, and poverty. Finally, these women deserve to be included in society not exorcised from it. Dracula explores the ways that New Women secretly loved one another in the face of so much prejudice and violence. There are other New Woman novels that deal with relationships between women, like Diana of the Crossways , On the Threshold, and The Image Breakers . However, these relationships are “diluted by the emergence of a male suitor for one of the women” (Ledger, 1997, p. 125). Lucy and Mina’s friendship, that falls somewhere between platonic friendship and a lesbian relationship, shows Dracula’s readers that these relationships between women did exist and are different from the relationships depicted in the aforementioned novels even if

6

E. D. MACALUSO

Lucy and Mina do have husbands. Novels like The Moonstone, The Odd Women, The Picture of Dorian Gray, and Jude the Obscure are Victorian and late Victorian novels that each deal with a particular social issue, like colonialism, the New Woman, sexuality, and poverty. Marsh’s novel The Beetle involves all four of these issues and shows how the monster’s foreign and perverse monstrosity is at the forefront of delineating the complexity of these issues. Finally, novels that punish monsters, like Dracula and The Beetle, are eventually upstaged by Marryat’s The Blood of the Vampire, which dares to support a monstrous New Woman in the face of the campaign to eliminate her. In the paragraphs that follow, I will discuss these concerns more fully and provide an overview of the book. My Dracula chapter examines female friendship. Lucy and Mina share a strong and almost lesbian friendship that conflates sentiments normally found in platonic female friendship or female marriage. Rather than separate “female friendship” into categories, as Sharon Marcus does, female friendship (hetero), female marriage (homo), and unrequited love (other) (2007, p. 43), my book argues that feelings of friendship, romantic love, passion, and eroticism are conflated in Lucy and Mina’s friendship. This conflation of sentiments makes their friendship stronger than sisterly friendship and almost a lesbian relationship. Dracula, the monster, acts as a romantic/sexual catalyst that brings Lucy and Mina together. He helps to make their friendship involve romantic, passionate, and erotic sentiments. He also enables a triangulation between himself, Lucy, and Mina that makes Lucy and Mina’s friendship as romantically strong as the relationships they have with their fiancé and husband. Ultimately, Stoker uses this almost lesbian relationship between Lucy and Mina to argue for a same-sex spiritual or religious love that surpasses the danger of bodily temptation (which Dracula represents) and instead produces a new generation of Britons. Stoker’s message is that heterosexual marriages solely based on work and economics can and should involve love. He also contends that the queer community should not relinquish their love relationships even when they are faced with prejudice and violence. My Beetle chapter focuses on the way that the monster, through his/her foreign and perverse violence, reveals the contentious debate about the New Woman and thus her own status as a slippery or indeterminate construct. In the beginning of Marsh’s novel, it seems as though he sides with Miss Lindon as a New Woman. He has her choosing her own fiancé, the Liberal MP, Paul Lessingham, in the face of her father’s conservative politics. He has her participating in politics (through a Working Women’s Club

1

INTRODUCTION: GENDER, THE NEW WOMAN, AND THE MONSTER

7

Meeting and her fiancé’s great speech) and solving the mystery behind the Beetle’s attacks at great personal peril to herself. However, when the monster, the Beetle, attacks Miss Lindon, Marsh shows that this monster figure (this perverse Arab Egyptian Beetle) is so threatened by Miss Lindon’s modernity that he/she strips Miss Lindon of her hair and clothes, and dresses her as a man, in order to mock her modernity and identity as a New Woman and to stop her from figuring out his/her plans for revenge against Paul Lessingham. This violent moment, characterized by the Beetle’s foreignness and perversity (as it is a foreign man/woman who strips Miss Lindon of her clothes and violates her in a slightly sexual way), shows that Marsh is conflicted in terms of how he wishes to represent the New Woman. On the one hand, Miss Lindon is a rational and powerful character that is a credit to the figure of the New Woman. On the other hand, she is made into an effigy or a mockery by the Beetle and even by some of her male friends (her father and Atherton). Is the New Woman a tool for women’s empowerment and liberation or a monstrous mistake? Marsh does not provide a clear answer to this question, which supports my reading of Miss Lindon and the New Woman as indeterminate figures. There is plenty of evidence to support two views of Miss Lindon, that she has been chastened in the end, as she returns home to marry and experiences bouts of insanity after her marriage (to please more mainstream or conservative readers of the text), or that she is, in fact, a laudable New Woman heroine because she survives a horrific attack and she still manages to do what she wishes with her life—marry Paul Lessingham and write (to please the staunch feminist readers of the text). The violence of the Beetle’s attack on Miss Lindon, and its foreign perversity, does not only reveal the contentiousness about the debate over the New Woman, and that she is a nebulous construct, this violence also reveals the contentiousness of debates about colonialism, sexuality, and poverty. The Beetle makes war against Paul Lessingham for Lessingham’s murder of the priestess of Isis, a response to British colonialism in Egypt. Is the British presence in Egypt warranted or is there another perspective at work, here? Should the British be responsible for their colonial atrocities and feel the remorse of their actions thereby leading to debates about anti-colonialism and independence movements? The Beetle sexually attacks Robert Holt and raises the question: Are gay men monsters or benign lovers that should be left in peace? The Beetle makes a mockery of Holt’s poverty and uses Holt to his/her own nefarious ends. Should the poor be relegated to the whim of the streets or should they be

8

E. D. MACALUSO

taken care of? Should the government decide the fate of the poor or should Britain’s subjects (working people and philanthropists) do this? Finally, in The Blood of the Vampire chapter, I argue that the reader is given the opportunity to sympathize with a female vampire, Harriet Brandt. This is a rare (and perhaps, an ironic) choice, on Marryat’s part, as most vampires are unequivocally vanquished in their fin-de-siècle novels, like Stoker’s Dracula and Marsh’s The Beetle. So, why sympathize with a female vampire/monster? Even as Harriet unknowingly takes the lives of those she is closest to, she is good and kind, beautiful, talented, charitable, and, at the end of the novel, mature and fair. She is Creole, independent, and she does not discriminate, according to gender, when it comes to selecting acquaintances. She is threatening to the other (white) British protagonists because she is biracial, a New Woman, and talented. The white British protagonists’ prejudices, their xenophobia and racism and sexism, manifest themselves into petty jealousies and rivalries that attempt to rid Harriet of their society. And, this is effectively what occurs in the novel. Harriet is banished, or ostracized, from the Pullen circle because of her rivalry for Elinor Leyton’s fiancé, Ralph Pullen, and her racial, ethnic, and foreign differences from the other British protagonists. She is eventually driven to suicide, after she loses her husband, Anthony, and her ostracization from the group is complete. Still, the utter tragedy of Harriet’s suicide (Eldridge, 1998, p. 12), especially after she has elicited sympathy as a result of her good qualities, forces a white British establishment to reconsider its cruelty to New Women who are different, racially “Other,” and independent. This begs the question: What is the cost of one’s prejudices? At their most extreme, it can mean the isolation and ruination of a human life. With the end to her novel, Marryat asks the question: Should our prejudices mean the cost of a human life? My book will show that the subject of gender, at the fin de siècle, is more complex than scholars have thought. I am contributing my own scholarship that explores monstrosity’s relationship to gender and their attendant correlations with the liminality of subjects like race/colonialism, the New Woman/gender, homo/sexuality, and poverty to already established scholarship on the New Woman and gender, like Ledger’s, Sutherland’s, Jusova’s, Ardis’s, Heilmann’s, and Richardson and Willis’s. Gender, in fact, is a slippery concept. It includes talk about almost lesbian relationships between women, the complicated debate about the New Woman and the fact that she is an indefinite subject, like the foreign and perverse monster, and other unspecific subjects (race/colonialism, sexuality, and poverty),

1

INTRODUCTION: GENDER, THE NEW WOMAN, AND THE MONSTER

9

and the call to sympathize with women who are new and different, at century’s end, which is a direct challenge to the chauvinistic impulse to destroy them.

1.1

Methodology

The book draws from multiple disciplines. I use theory, history, literary criticism, and close readings of the novels to inform my work. In my Dracula chapter, I use Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s critique of Rene Girard’s original idea, from Deceit, Desire, and the Novel, that the romantic and sexual bonds between two male rivals can be as potent as those between these rivals and a female beloved, to suggest that the bonds between Lucy and Mina are just as strong as those between themselves and Dracula, which proves the validity of Sedgwick’s idea that these bonds can forever be reworked to privilege the person (or persons) who seek/s to be empowered by them (1985, p. 27). In The Beetle chapter, Raymond Williams’s idea that the emergent will always seek to rival the dominant informs my approach to the foreign and perverse monster, the social and cultural complexity of gender, the New Woman, and other social issues in Marsh’s fictional world and of the fin de siècle (1977, p. 6). And, finally, in The Blood of the Vampire chapter, I unpack Galton’s theory of eugenics, found in “Eugenics: Its Scope and Aims,” to uncover how this theory’s sexism alienates British subjects from one another and destroys them as opposed to strengthening, and empowering, them and their bonds. I take into account the history of the period (with a special focus on the 1890s and the year 1897). I uncover the social and cultural complexities of the fin de siècle and its social movements like imperialism, the women’s movement, and the labor movement. I also apply history to more fully understand the British fin de siècle’s social constructs like Empire, the New Woman, queer Britain, and what was meant by the phrases “poverty” and “the poor” (and how historical and literary critics discuss these constructs as twenty-first-century readers). I use history to discuss Angelique Richardson’s concept of “eugenic love.” I mine the biographies of the authors that I focus on to see how their personal histories may have influenced their novels. I analyze documents that contain accounts of women’s lives, particularly New Women’s lives (like letters, diaries, journals, memoirs, autobiographies, and biographies) and other forms of life-writing that disclose

10

E. D. MACALUSO

period attitudes toward gender, race, Empire, the New Woman, homosexuality and queer Britain, eugenic love, eugenics, evolutionary science, and poverty.4 I situate my writings amidst the work of others, namely literary critics, who have worked on Dracula, The Beetle, and The Blood of the Vampire. I rework critical readings of the female protagonists of Dracula to suggest that they are New Women and they love in vastly different ways than critics have previously claimed. In my analysis of Dracula, it is my aim to dispense with reinforcing stereotypes about New Women’s riotous sexualities and to use the text of the novel to understand how Lucy and Mina love. In my analysis of The Beetle, I suggest that it is critically important to know how race and Empire, the New Woman, sexuality, and discourses on the poor exist, or come to life, in the novel to understand the social and cultural implications of the debate about the New Woman, invoked by the Beetle’s foreign and perverse monstrosity, and the other social issues that are in this novel. And, when I write about The Blood of the Vampire, I use critics’ accounts of the history of “eugenic love” and their writings about how racial and sexual stereotypes were used to subjugate British subjects who were of color and independent (or “New” after the New Woman) to suggest my own ideas about how Harriet’s acquaintanceships with the white British protagonists are undone by social and cultural biases passed off as science. Finally, the book deploys close readings to preserve the integrity of the original texts of the novels and uncover important parts of the texts that have been overlooked. My close readings of Dracula, The Beetle, and The Blood of the Vampire consider and challenge previous readings of these novels, focusing on the theories and histories that the original texts invoke, and questioning a predominantly male-centered tradition of reading Dracula, The Beetle, and The Blood of the Vampire.

1.2

How This Book Engages Scholarly Debates

At the beginning of her seminal study on gender and the New Woman, Sally Ledger writes: “The New Woman of the fin de siècle had a multiple identity” (1997, p. 1). Ledger is absolutely correct in asserting that our definition of the New Woman must ever be expanding. New scholarship in the field will find new ways to describe and define her and relate her significance/s back to the larger debate about gender at the fin de siècle. This is what my book attempts to do. I take issue with Gillian Sutherland and her contention that the New Woman can solely be understood through

1

INTRODUCTION: GENDER, THE NEW WOMAN, AND THE MONSTER

11

statistical fact and data (2015, p. 8). My study of the New Woman’s role in fin-de-siècle monster fiction certainly opens up the ways that we define and know her and make sense of her meaning/s. And, I am not alone in my studies. Ann Ardis, Ann Heilmann, and Chris Willis and Angelique Richardson have all penned studies that examine the role of fiction and its ways of defining, and making meaning out of, the New Woman. Though these studies have to do with feminism and feminist activism, the suffrage movements, education and schooling, employment opportunities, politics, art, life, fashion, transportation, etc., my study will focus on the significance of the monster protagonist and what he/she leads us to conclude about the New Woman and gender at the fin de siècle. My contention is that monster figures produce Brecht’s “alienation effect” (Booth, 1961, p. 192) and make strange the world around them so that they reveal truths that are not always seen by the conventional eye—that friendships between women can be lesbian, that New Women are more than overly sexual women, that the debate about the New Woman is expansive. She is an indeterminate construct. Her conflict, and the conflict embedded in colonialism, sexuality, and poverty, is incited by the Beetle’s foreign and perverse monstrosity. And, she deserves to be integrated into society, which necessarily suggests empowering fates for New Women, as opposed to a tradition of New Women heroines, like Herminia Barton from The Woman Who Did, Monica Madden from The Odd Women, and Tess D’Urbervilles from Tess of the D’Urbervilles who all have terrible fates. Monster, from the Latin, monstrum, means “an aberrant occurrence,” and monere, the root of monstrum, means “to warn or instruct.” In Imagining Monsters, Dennis Todd writes that monsters are “liminal creatures, straddling boundaries between categories we wish to keep distinct and separate, blurring distinctions, haunting us with the possibility that the categories themselves are ambiguous, permeable” (1995, p. 156). Even as Todd’s is a study on the eighteenth century, his words about monsters still apply to the British nineteenth century, particularly, the fin de siècle. The monster, a liminal figure, teaches us about the liminality and complexity to New Women (and women in general), women’s lives and issues, gender, and the fin de siècle, that a seemingly monolithic society, like the white male, conservative British fin de siècle, cannot, or will not, see. Is Dracula straight or gay? He chooses both female and male sexual victims. Is the Beetle male or female? His/her gender is ambiguous. Is Harriet Brandt white or black? Is she good or bad? Her race and character are also ambiguous. Again, these liminal monsters invoke equivocal conclusions about their

12

E. D. MACALUSO

female victims. Are Lucy and Mina straight or gay? Is their friendship sisterly or lesbian? Is Miss Lindon, as a New Woman, a monster or a role model/heroine? Is Harriet Brandt a demon or an angel? The answers to these questions are not clear. Lucy and Mina’s lesbian relationship rids their world of sexual danger (Dracula) and uses an example of ethical/religious love to attain virtuous ends—the birth of little Quincey and future generations of Britons. The debate about Miss Lindon and whether or not the New Woman is a monster or a laudable figure, incited by the foreign and perverse monster, reveals that these women (and, perhaps, all women) are vague constructs that make the debate about them not only contentious but complex. Finally, it is useless to attempt to categorize women or people who are different, like Harriet Brandt, as good or bad, and thus worthy of praise or censure. New Women, like Harriet Brandt, who are also racially “Other” deserve not to be demonized for their faults or imperfections but included in society. This shows that gender, at the British fin de siècle, was, indeed, indeterminate. The New Woman was an indistinct concept. Women’s friendships could be lesbian. These women should be protected by society because so much danger was levied at them on a daily basis. In terms of the specific criticism that I engage with in the book, in the Dracula chapter, I enter the debate about female friendship and how exactly the New Women, Lucy and Mina, love in Stoker’s text. Many critics have contended that Lucy is sexually voracious (Dijkstra, 1986, pp. 344–345; Hansen, 1996, p. 58; Rance, 2002, p. 445; Senf, 1982, p. 45; Signorotti, 1996, p. 621; Sparks, 2002, p. 92; Spear, 1993, p. 182; Spencer, 1992, p. 209; Wall, 2003, p. 29), which is a quality of Linton’s “Wild Woman,” while others have said that Mina is a typical New Woman: intelligent and industrious (Johnson, 1984, p. 24; Senf, 1982, pp. 35–36). My book contends that there is more to their stories and the ways that they love. Lucy is quite ambivalent about her engagement and marriage and Mina feels the tug between prioritizing her best friend and her fiancé in her intimate life. This analysis, from Stoker’s original text, is quite different from the aforementioned New Woman scholarship on Dracula. Lucy and Mina are not “Wild Women”; they are just women who love one another deeply. They share an almost lesbian friendship that combats the sexual temptation that Dracula represents. Their friendship proposes a same-sex spiritual love that Stoker argues surpasses the violence and sexual danger that homosexual culture faced and it encourages heterosexual couples to be sure that love is involved in their relationships. By the end of Stoker’s text, Mina admits that her love for Lucy is, in part, spiritual/religious: “and only

1

INTRODUCTION: GENDER, THE NEW WOMAN, AND THE MONSTER

13

there came through all the multitude of horrors, the holy ray of light that my dear, dear Lucy was at last at peace” (D, p. 262). For Stoker, religion was a means of ensuring that the queer community retained its dignity, particularly in its loving relationships, in the face of violence, and to ensure that it is not abused by that violence, like Dracula is. It is also a means for heterosexual couples to ensure that love is truly in their relationships. I am entering the debate about female friendship first theorized by Faderman, Smith-Rosenberg, Marcus, and Vicinus.5 And, I am contending that instead of categorizing women’s friendships to find out what is platonic and what is not, women’s friendships, as shown by Lucy and Mina, often conflate sentiments of friendship, romantic love, passion, and eroticism.6 Dracula, as monster, acts as a romantic/sexual catalyst that brings these women together and encourages the conflation of sentiments in their friendship. These friendships should be understood in all of their complexity. And, in order to continue to diversify the debate about the New Woman, again, New Women were not overly sexual. They were complex women who loved in unique ways. In The Beetle chapter, I reference the debate that scholars have had about Miss Lindon and whether or not she is a New Woman. Victoria Margree contends that she is while Harris and Vernooy assert that she is not (2007, p. 72; 2012, p. 346). In my reading of the novel, Marsh has made Miss Lindon into a New Woman. She defies her father to marry Lessingham, she participates in politics (the Working Women’s Club Meeting and Lessingham’s great speech), and she promises to get to the bottom of the mystery behind the Beetle’s attacks. These are all strong actions that New Women were noted for—independence of thought and choice, activism, and considerable courage and daring. However, the Beetle’s foreign and perverse monstrosity, first theorized by Hurley (1996, p. 133) and explained more fully by me, incites conservative reactions to Miss Lindon by the white British men of the novel and the Beetle. As I mentioned earlier, Miss Lindon’s father and Atherton do not approve of her modern actions. And, the Beetle makes a mockery of her independence by dressing her as a man and parading her around London so that she does not interrupt the Beetle’s plans. It’s a foreign and perverse Beetle that violates Miss Lindon because the Beetle is from the Arab district of Egypt and he/she violates Miss Lindon by removing her clothes. The foreign and perverse monster makes the debate about the New Woman very clear in Marsh’s novel. He/she reveals the indeterminate nature of the construct of the

14

E. D. MACALUSO

New Woman; to the British populous, she is both a monster and an exemplary figure. The monster’s foreignness and sexual perversity also reveal the contentiousness that defined the debates about colonialism, homosexuality, and poverty at the fin de siècle. In The Blood of the Vampire chapter, readers are asked to sympathize with a female vampire, Harriet Brandt. This move, on Marryat’s part, is quite unique and significantly important because most female vampires who were caricatures or representatives of the New Woman in the periodical press or in period art were viewed, by British men, as dangerous monsters whose only desires were to sap healthy and robust British men of their virility and vitality (Dijkstra, 1986, p. 345). Examples of these vampire women were found in Edvard Munch’s painting, The Vampire, and in collectible dolls that were fashioned at the fin de siècle (Dijkstra, 1986, pp. 347, 349). These vampire and New Women were threats to the British state and Empire because they were thought to ruin the British man and family. The fact that Marryat makes her female vampire so good, kind, beautiful, talented, charitable, and mature and fair forces the reader to look beyond the monster and see the human being in Harriet’s person. This move calls into question the conservative British values (the xenophobia, racism, and sexism) that castigate and ostracize Harriet. Instead of condemning these women to anonymous, obscure, and terrible fates, like Harriet’s suicide, the state should be theorizing ways to accommodate and assimilate these women into society. The monster, Harriet Brandt, is made into a real person and the case for her integration into society is suggested, ironically, by her suicide. In conclusion, this book explores how the figure of the monster functions to demonstrate the complexities of gender and the New Woman at the British fin de siècle. As “structures of feeling,” in Raymond Williams’s phrasing, gender is rarely a straightforward matter (1977, p. 6). It is messy, complicated, slippery, and indeterminate. Through the liminal figure of the monster, we see the conflations and confusions of friendships (the “variations, fluctuations, and mixtures” of sentiments [Bradford, 2004, p. 9]) and the challenges of self-definition in women’s lives.

1

INTRODUCTION: GENDER, THE NEW WOMAN, AND THE MONSTER

15

Notes 1. This is one way of reading Dracula. For a complete history of scholarship on Dracula, see my Dracula chapter. The examples that I give in this opening paragraph of my introduction are simply ways to open up or begin the conversation in regard to what I will argue and prove in the entire book (introduction, Dracula, The Beetle, The Blood of the Vampire chapters and the conclusion). 2. Kelly Hurley initially describes the Beetle’s foreignness and perversity (133). She writes that the Beetle’s foreignness (his/her Arab Egyptianness) also connotes sexual perversity in Marsh’s novel because the Beetle’s foreign body, his/her status as an Easterner, also conveys ideas about the East’s sexual perversity (133). I am contending that the Beetle’s foreign and perverse monstrosity incites debate about the New Woman and suggests that she is viewed as either a monstrous figure to fin-de-siècle antifeminists or as a role model to finde-siècle feminists. I am also contending that the Beetle’s foreign perversion makes real the conflict found in social movements and issues like colonialism, again, gender and the New Woman, homosexuality, and poverty. 3. The Beetle’s foreign and perverse monstrosity collapses these categories in The Beetle. Dracula’s and Harriet Brandt’s monstrosities make an almost lesbian relationship between Lucy and Mina and invoke sympathy for a paradoxically monstrous and human female vampire and encourage her (Harriet’s) inclusion in fin-de-siècle society. 4. …like scientific treatises, physiognomic evaluations, tracts from the periodical press, studies on sexuality, Parliamentary records, and personal accounts. 5. Faderman and Smith-Rosenberg asserted that strong feelings were included in female friendship (1981, p. 16; 1985, p. 1). Marcus defines the “female identified” or straight woman and her friendships as platonic but have a basis in the admiration of the female and the feminine (2007, p. 1). These relationships were often formed to help women’s marital relationships, too (2007, p. 1). Vicinus writes about same-sex love and relationships (proto-lesbian relationships) (2004, p. xxiv). 6. The difference between my and Faderman’s study is that my contention about female friendships is that they can be lesbian. Faderman solely contends that these friendships could be “intense” (16).

References Arata, S. (1996). Fictions of loss in the Victorian fin de siècle: Identity and empire. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Ardis, A. L. (1990). New Women, new novels: Feminism and early modernism. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.

16

E. D. MACALUSO

Booth, W. C. (1961). The rhetoric of fiction. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Bradford, M. (2004). The bisexual experience: Living in a dichotomous culture. In R. C. Fox (Ed.), Current research on bisexuality. Binghamton: Harrington Park Press. Butler, J. (1990). Gender trouble: Feminism and the subversion of identity. New York, NY: Routledge. Dijkstra, B. (1986). Idols of perversity: Fantasies of feminine evil in fin-de-siècle culture. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. Eldridge, R. T. (1998). The other vampire novel of 1897: The blood of the vampire by Florence Marryat. The New York Review of Science Fiction, 10(6), 10–12. Faderman, L. (1981). Surpassing the love of men: Romantic friendship and love between women from the renaissance to the present. New York, NY: William Morrow. Halberstam, J. (1995). Skin shows: Gothic horror and the technology of monsters. Durham, VA: Duke University Press. Hansen, T. (1996). Unholy matrimony: The kiss of the vampire. The Texas Review, 17, 56–63. Harris, W. C., & Vernooy, D. (2012). “Orgies of nameless horrors”: Gender, orientalism, and the queering of violence in Richard Marsh’s The Beetle. Papers on Language & Literature, 48(4), 339–381. Heilmann, A. (2000). New Woman fiction: Women writing first-wave feminism. New York, NY: St. Martin’s Press. Hurley, K. (1996). “The inner chambers of all nameless sin”: Richard Marsh’s The Beetle. In K. Hurley (Ed.), The gothic body: Sexuality, materialism, and degeneration at the fin de siècle (pp. 124–141). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Johnson, A. P. (1984). Dual life: The status of women in Stoker’s Dracula. Tennessee Studies in Literature, 27, 20–39. Jusova, I. (2005). The New Woman and the empire. Columbus: The Ohio State University Press. Ledger, S. (1997). The New Woman: Fiction and feminism at the fin de siècle. Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press. Malchow, H. L. (1996). Gothic images of race in nineteenth-century Britain. Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press. Marcus, S. (2007). Between women: Friendship, desire, and marriage in Victorian England. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Margree, V. (2007). “Both in men’s clothing”: Gender, sovereignty, and insecurity in Richard Marsh’s The Beetle. Critical Survey, 19(2), 63–81. Rance, N. (2002). Jonathan’s great knife: Dracula meets Jack the Ripper. Victorian Literature and Culture, 30(2), 439–453.

1

INTRODUCTION: GENDER, THE NEW WOMAN, AND THE MONSTER

17

Richardson, A., & Willis, C. (2001). The New Woman in fiction and in fact: Fin-de siècle feminisms. New York, NY: Palgrave. Schaffer, T. (1994). “A Wilde desire took me”: The homoerotic history of Dracula. ELH, 61(2), 381–425. Sedgwick, E. K. (1985). Between men: English literature and male homosocial desire. New York, NY: Columbia University Press. Senf, C. (1982). “Dracula”: Stoker’s response to the new woman. Victorian Studies, 26(1), 33–49. Signorotti, E. (1996). Repossessing the body: Transgressive desire in “Carmilla” and “Dracula”. Criticism, 38(4), 607–632. Smith-Rosenberg, C. (1985). The female world of love and ritual: Relations between women in nineteenth-century America. In C. Smith-Rosenberg (Ed.), Disorderly conduct: Visions of gender in Victorian America (pp. 53–77). New York, NY: Alfred. A. Knopf. Sparks, T. (2002). Medical gothic and the return of the contagious diseases acts in Stoker and Machen. Nineteenth-Century Feminisms, 6, 87–102. Spear, J. L. (1993). Gender and sexual dis-ease in Dracula. In L. Davis (Ed.), Virginal sexuality and textuality in Victorian literature. Albany, NY: State University of New York. Spencer, K. (1992). Purity and danger: Dracula, the urban gothic, and the late Victorian degeneracy crisis. ELH, 59(1), 197–225. Sutherland, G. (2015). In search of the New Woman: Middle-class women and work in Britain 1870–1914. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Todd, D. (1995). Imagining monsters: Miscreations of the self in eighteenth-century England. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Vicinus, M. (2004). Intimate friends: Women who loved women, 1778–1928. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Wall, G. (2003). Different from writing: Dracula in 1897. In H. Bloom (Ed.), Bloom’s Modern Critical Interpretations: Bram Stoker’s Dracula. Philadelphia, PA: Chelsea House Publishers. Williams, R. (1977). Marxism and literature. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.

CHAPTER 2

“I Love You with All the Moods and Tenses of the Verb”: Lucy and Mina’s Love in Bram Stoker’s Dracula

For many decades, critics have understood Dracula as a novel about sexuality or sexual perversity. Christopher Craft (1984) and H. L. Malchow (1996), for example, identify Dracula’s “red lips” and sharp teeth as the loci of sexual infection and pollution: For Craft (1984), mixing the blood of Dracula with that of the Crew of Light allows the male protagonists to touch one another intimately in a socially sanctioned way (p. 110); for Malchow (1996), this vampiric mingling of blood elicits late Victorian cultural fears about syphilis (p. 92). Talia Schaffer (1994) argues that, in the wake of Oscar Wilde’s 1895 trials for “gross indecency,” Stoker’s novel reflects the author’s trauma over Wilde’s conviction—a trauma that indicates, she suggests, Stoker’s closeted homosexuality (p. 381). Indeed, Stoker wrote romantic letters to Walt Whitman, the openly bisexual American poet (Schaffer, 1994, pp. 383–384). In such critical formulations, Dracula becomes an exploration of secretive intimacies between the novel’s male characters, including the members of the Crew of Light (connected intimately through blood transfusions) as well as Jonathan Harker and Dracula. However, little critical attention has been paid to the secretive intimacies between Dracula’s female characters. In fact, Lucy and Mina’s intimacies have not even been described as secretive. Lucy has been characterized as “overly sexual” and Mina as a stereotypically practical New Woman.

© The Author(s) 2019 E. D. Macaluso, Gender, the New Woman, and the Monster, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-30476-8_2

19

20

E. D. MACALUSO

In this chapter, I argue that these female characters, and the ways that they love, are far more complex than critics have imagined. Drawing on the work of Sharon Marcus and Martha Vicinus, who analyze historical female friendships in the nineteenth century, I claim Lucy and Mina’s friendship as approaching a lesbian relationship or an “intimate friendship” (Vicinus, 2004, p. xxiv). I demonstrate how Stoker draws on contemporary late Victorian ideas about women’s friendships, particularly the metaphoric creation of the family, and the use of metaphoric language and religious devotion, to suggest this. Analyzing Vicinus’s “intimate friendships” alongside Stoker’s representation of Lucy and Mina’s friendship suggests how we might recuperate a fictional model of friendships between late Victorian women that exemplify friendship paradigms laid out by Vicinus. Finally, Dracula, as monster and beloved, signifies the novel’s allegiance to queer relationships and reveals that Lucy and Mina’s friendship approaches a lesbian relationship.

2.1

Cultural and Personal Contexts for Lucy and Mina’s “Intimate Friendship”

At a time when studies about homosexuality, like Havelock Ellis’s Sexual Inversion (1897) and Edward Carpenter’s Homogenic Love and Its Place in a Free Society (1894), were published and seemed to suggest a burgeoning interest among intellectuals in same-sex love, the 1895 Wilde trials were an attack on the gay community (Schaffer, 1994, p. 381). The gay and lesbian communities experienced violence and suppression before and after the trials. This discrimination is exemplified by the prosecution of Boulton and Park (Cocks, 2003, p. 105), the incarcerations of hundreds of gay men (Cook, 2008, p. 109), the pressure for lesbian women to keep their sexual and intimate relationships completely chaste (Halberstam, 1998, p. 65), and the demoralizing effects of the obscenity trials over the publication of Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness (Miller, 2006, pp. 187–188). Still, stories of survival, among his friends, attracted Stoker and eventually served as his rejoinder to a homophobic British society. Edward Carpenter, and his partner, George Merrill, lived together for the duration of their lives. And, even as they risked alienation from their families, Rosa Bonheur and Nathalie Micas and Frances Power Cobbe and Mary Lloyd were in “female marriages” that lasted until death (Marcus, 2007, p. 2). The Ladies of Llangollen, Eleanor Butler and Sarah Ponsonby, experienced the most recorded acceptance of their “female marriage” (Marcus, 2007, p. 2) or

2

“I LOVE YOU WITH ALL THE MOODS AND TENSES OF THE …

21

“intimate friendship” (Vicinus, 2004, p. xxiv). They prompted their friends to see their relationship as a true marriage between “man and wife” or “wife and wife” (Marcus, 2007, p. 201). In fact, female same-sex relationships were often seen as more benign than relationships between men because there was less evidence of violent sex between women. When Elizabeth Barrett Browning met Charlotte Cushman and her partner in 1852, she said of their relationship that it was a “true marriage” (Marcus, 2007, p. 201). As I will show, Stoker was aware of the power of these female “friendships” (Vicinus, 2004, p. xxiv). He uses Lucy and Mina’s female friendship that approaches lesbianism to suggest that same-sex relationships can be productive. In this way, Stoker privileges same-sex intimacy between women in Dracula and shows that it is an alternative to a homophobic culture’s castigation of same-sex love. Before the 1895 Wilde trials, gay men were accosted and prosecuted privately by British police officers and solicitors. “Sodomy” took place in private locations like homes, alleyways, clubs, and even private gardens (Cook, Mills, Trumbach, & Cocks, 2007, p. 132). Most of gay culture that subsisted around these practices was secretive. After the Wilde trials, gay men’s lives were made public with the publication of the trials’ transcripts in the newspapers (Bristow, 2008, p. 237). Violence against gay men, which had previously been a clandestine affair, was made public. The Marquess of Queensberry could ruin Oscar Wilde, the police could apprehend Boulton and Park, and any member of the British populous could destroy the lives of gay men. Publically sanctioned violence against gay men became a recognizable part of fin-de-siècle culture. Similarly, prior to the Wilde trials, women in proto-lesbian relationships, or “intimate friendships,” had relative security and privacy in these relationships, because these women were thought to be in “romantic friendships.” Women expressed romantic and even erotic love for one another, because this kind of passionate emotion was typically expressed between female friends (Faderman, 1981, p. 16; Smith-Rosenberg, 1985, p. 1). However, after the Wilde trials, when lesbianism was being discussed and written about by sexologists like Krafft-Ebing, these women experienced backlash over their loving relationships. “Michael Field,” Katherine Bradley, and Edith Cooper were aunt and niece. They experienced serious disapproval of their “intimate friendship” from Britons outside of their intimate circle of friends (Ehnenn, 2008, p. 51). Sarah Geals, who wished to live as a man to marry her partner “Caroline,” was fired from her job for this wish (Townsend, 1993, pp. 217–220). Finally, when Radclyffe Hall published

22

E. D. MACALUSO

The Well of Loneliness , a lesbian novel, it was sanctioned to remove it from the marketplace (Miller, 2006, pp. 187–188). The British public sanctioned discrimination against gay men and women at the fin de siècle. Stoker was a part of this culture, because he lived in it. He may have belonged to the gay and lesbian community, because he was very close with Oscar Wilde, he exchanged intimate letters with Walt Whitman, and he lived a life in the theater with Henry Irving, who was rumored to have been Stoker’s lover. Stoker and Wilde grew up together, they went to school together (primary school and Trinity College), they had Christmases together, and they chased the same woman, Florence Balcombe (Schaffer, 1994, pp. 381, 390–391). Rene Girard’s theory that two loving rivals expressed as much passion for each other as they did for their beloved rings true for Wilde and Stoker, as neither man was truly interested in Balcombe (Sedgwick, 1985, p. 27). Wilde married another woman, Constance Lloyd, but immersed himself in having male lovers. He eventually entered into a serious affair with Lord Alfred Douglas. Stoker married Balcombe but spent most of his time at the Lyceum Theatre with Henry Irving whom Stoker worshipped. Stoker even exchanged romantic letters with Walt Whitman. Whitman spoke openly about his own homosexuality, even his bisexuality, in his lyrical poem, “Song of Myself.” After reading this poem and Leaves of Grass , Stoker sent Whitman a letter that said that Whitman validated Stoker’s childhood wishes (Schaffer, 1994, pp. 383–384). Stoker wrote about homosexuality, and the possibility of his own homosexuality, in a way that would be palatable to a late Victorian audience. Lucy and Mina’s friendship that approaches lesbianism recuperates examples of nineteenth-century love between women, or “intimate friendship,” that was benign and even attractive to this audience. Stoker used the best examples of this love to create the friendship between Lucy and Mina. The “female marriages” between the Ladies of Llangollen, Rosa Bonheur and Nathalie Micas, Frances Power Cobbe and Mary Lloyd, and Charlotte Cushman and her partners served as useful examples for this work. Stoker uses the examples of these women to talk candidly about their love; this love becomes the basis for the affection between Lucy and Mina. Very important scholarly research has been done on “romantic friendships” between women in the Victorian period. Lillian Faderman (1981) and Carroll Smith-Rosenberg (1985) claimed that passionate emotion and language were integral parts of friendship between women in the British nineteenth century (pp. 16, 1). Sharon Marcus and Martha Vicinus have

2

“I LOVE YOU WITH ALL THE MOODS AND TENSES OF THE …

23

taken these studies further. Marcus argues that female friendship between “female identified” women involved socially sanctioned eroticism between these women (Marcus, 2007, p. 1). And, according to Vicinus, “intimate friendships” or proto-lesbian relationships did exist at this time. These “friendships” shared common attributes that made these relationships what they were (Vicinus, 2004, p. xv). I am arguing that there is precedence for Vicinus’s case studies in Dracula; my analysis of Lucy and Mina’s friendship that approaches lesbianism makes this so. Love between women, Lucy and Mina’s love for one another, is expressed by the metaphoric recreation of the family, metaphoric language, and religious devotion in Dracula. While many critics claim that authors, like Stoker, were not writing about lesbian relationships for the sake of privacy or the avoidance of scandal, Stoker wrote candidly about these relationships and even argues that they are the antidote to a loveless society.

2.2

Lucy and Mina’s “Intimate Friendship”

Instead of privileging a Bildungsroman narrative structure, as in Austen, or Brontë, Eliot, or Dickens, that uses female friendships as building blocks to marriage (Marcus, 2007, p. 1), Stoker relies on an almost epistolary form—a series of personal and disjointed life-writings—to illustrate Lucy and Mina’s love for one another. Though these female characters start off engaged and married (and seem to have reaped the rewards of the marriage plot), Dracula separates them from their fiancé and husband. The rest of the novel focuses on their same-sex relationship, their friendship that approaches lesbianism. Stoker, then, shows, through the metaphoric recreation of the family, metaphoric language, and religious devotion, the ways that Lucy and Mina love one another. Their love becomes a response to passionless heterosexual relationships and to violence against the queer community. Lucy and Mina’s letters reveal that the two women are focused on one another (not their men) for psychological and emotional intimacy. Mina wishes to write to, and see, Lucy, instead of Jonathan, to share all of her emotions, secrets, and “plans” with her (Stoker, 1998, p. 86).1 In a letter dated 9 May, Mina tells Lucy that she is overwhelmed with work, because she is both an assistant schoolmistress and a secretary to Jonathan. However, she still “longs” to see Lucy so that they can “talk together freely and build our castles in the air” (D, p. 86). Mina intimates to Lucy that she

24

E. D. MACALUSO

wishes to escape the heterosexual world of work and duty to join Lucy in their imagined world. This world privileges the women’s creativities and dreams. Mina wishes to see Lucy “by the sea” (D, p. 86), so they can build an intimate world together without interruption from a patriarchal Victorian society. Mina’s longings indicate that she and Lucy share a secret life together, one that does not include men and that solely privileges the bond that Lucy and Mina have. Lucy, too, seeks Mina for psychological and emotional succor. Lucy is deeply anxious about the proposals she receives from Seward, Morris, and Holmwood. She confesses to Mina that it is very trying to reject Seward and Morris not a gluttonous pleasure, as Kathleen Spencer (1992) asserts (p. 210): Oh, Mina dear, I can’t help crying and you must excuse this letter being all blotted. Being proposed to is all very nice and all that sort of thing, but it isn’t at all a happy thing when you have to see a poor fellow, whom you know loves you honestly, going away and looking all broken-hearted, and to know that no matter what he may say at the moment, you are passing quite out of his life. (D, p. 90)

Lucy’s recounting to Mina the sadness that she feels as she rejects her suitors tells of a phenomenon quite typical of “intimate friendships” at the fin de siècle. Often, “intimate friends” rejected their male suitors to be together, as Bessie Raynor Parkes did Samuel Blackwell to be with Barbara Leigh Smith (Rendall, 1989, p. 144). Lucy rejects her suitors and relies on Mina to be the confidant for her deepest feelings. Although Kathleen Spencer (1992), Bram Dijkstra (1986), Tom Hansen (1996), and Nicholas Rance (2002) have written that Lucy wishes to accept all three suitors, as a prelude to her more voracious sexuality that appears when she is a vampire (pp. 210, 344–345, 58, 445), Stoker’s text suggests that Lucy is deeply concerned that she cannot accept all of them. Like lesbian women who have rejected their suitors and have had so much difficulty loving men, Lucy’s serious unhappiness over her rejections mimics the lesbian’s sexual paradigm. Like the lesbian women in Krafft-Ebing’s studies, Lucy has difficulty accepting the men that she is supposed to marry. And, Lucy looks to her “friend,” Mina, for the intimacy that she does not find in engagement or marriage. As Lucy negotiates very difficult relationships with men—first, the rejections of her suitors and, then, a distant engagement with Arthur, Arthur

2

“I LOVE YOU WITH ALL THE MOODS AND TENSES OF THE …

25

leaves Lucy to take care of his dying father (Johnson, 1984, p. 28)— Mina is the “friend” she turns to for love and care. Lucy and Mina create a metaphoric family when they are together. They have intense visits at Whitby, during which they hold hands. They have a very “severe tea,” during which their “New Womanish appetites” for food and sex are showcased (D, p. 123; Dominguez-Ruè, 2010, pp. 302–303).2 They admire one another’s beauty and character: “Lucy and I sat a while, and it was all so beautiful before us that we took hands as we sat … Lucy was looking sweetly pretty in her white lawn frock; she has got a beautiful colour since she has been here. … She is so sweet with old people; I think they all fell in love with her on the spot” (D, pp. 100, 97). Lucy and Mina’s handholding mimics Kit Anstruther-Thomson’s taking hold of Vernon Lee’s wrist during their “intimate friendship” (Gardner, 1987, p. 206). And, Mina’s admiration of Lucy’s beauty also imitates Margaret Leicester Warren’s appreciation for Edith Leycester’s looks (Marcus, 2007, p. 47). Mina even takes care of Lucy during, and after, Dracula’s attacks: “Fortunately, each time [Lucy’s sleepwalking episodes] I [Mina] awoke in time, and managed to undress her [Lucy] without waking her, and got her back to bed … Lucy walks more than ever … she is a trifle stouter” (D, pp. 120, 105–106). Vicinus (2004) claims that the creation of the family, making something familiar out of the unfamiliar, is what lesbian women, or women in “intimate friendships,” did with one another to signify their bond: Neither a pornographic nor a scientific vocabulary provided women with the language of love, so nineteenth-century educated women fashioned their sexual selves through metaphor. Women who loved women created metaphoric versions of the heterosexual nuclear family. Change, especially, personal change, depends in part on an imaginative reworking of the known. The non-normative is in dialogue with the normative. (p. xxv)

Dracula, as monster, enabler, “sexual catalyst” (Dominguez-Ruè, 2010, p. 302), and non-normative “beloved,” brings Lucy and Mina together and heightens the romance, or the “stronger emotions” (Vicinus, 2004, p. xxvi), of their friendship. Dracula is the non-normative “beloved” (Sedgwick, 1985, p. 27)3 or the monstrous figure that signifies Dracula’s fidelity to a queer world and queer relationships. He points out that Lucy and Mina’s friendship is stronger than a sisterly friendship and approaches a lesbian relationship or an “intimate friendship” (Marcus, 2007, p. 1; Vicinus, 2004, p. xxiv). Dracula docks at Whitby, imperils Lucy’s life, and makes

26

E. D. MACALUSO

Mina love, and care for, Lucy as a spouse or family member would—not a friend. Marcus (2007) explains: “Friends had some of the force and status of spouses, parents, or children, but without sharing households or sex, as spouses did, and without immersing themselves in the total caretaking provided between parents and children” (p. 69). But, Mina does take care of Lucy; she even lives with her at Whitby. Mina becomes Lucy’s caretaker, family member, and spouse as a result of Dracula’s attacks. She watches over Lucy, protects her, notices her beauty, and loves her. This is what makes Lucy and Mina a metaphoric family. They love one another and take care of one another, in the face of danger. Lucy and Mina’s friendship is queer from the very beginning of Stoker’s text. However, Dracula enables readers to see how this is true. Dracula declares “Your girls that you all love are mine already; and through them you … shall be mine” (D, p. 347), which implies that he helps to “express and distort” the stronger emotions that create Lucy and Mina’s friendship and that this is the effect of his influence over them—the fact that they are “his” (Craft, 1984, p. 107). For instance, the storm that comes to symbolize Dracula’s killing of the men of the Demeter rouses Lucy from her sleep and causes her to sleepwalk thereby solidifying her connection to Dracula: “Lucy was very restless all night, and I [Mina], too, could not sleep. The storm was fearful…Strangely enough, Lucy did not wake; but she got up twice and dressed herself. Fortunately, each time I awoke in time, and managed to undress her without waking her, and got her back to bed. It is a very strange thing, this sleepwalking” (D, p. 120). Lucy and Mina are subject to Dracula’s power as he rouses them from sleep (due to the storm) and causes Lucy to sleepwalk, which is a telltale sign that he has chosen Lucy as his first victim and that Mina as her caretaker will be embroiled in his hunting. More importantly, though, Dracula’s influence (through the storm and Lucy’s sleepwalking) forces Mina to begin to take care of Lucy and to love her in this more intimate way than she normally would if Dracula did not exist.4 Just as there are signs and symbols that signify Dracula’s presence and his sexual attacks on his victims (an open window, Lucy’s sleepwalking, and his manifestations as dog, bat, and wolf), there are also signs and codes that show his influence upon Lucy and Mina’s friendship and this friendship’s stronger emotions and erotic potential. After Dracula docks at Whitby, Lucy and Mina have a “‘severe tea’…over the seaweed-covered rocks of the strand” (D, p. 123). This scene metaphorically shows the encroachment of Dracula from the Demeter to Whitby; he becomes a presence in Whitby

2

“I LOVE YOU WITH ALL THE MOODS AND TENSES OF THE …

27

like the “seaweed-covered rocks of the strand” (p. 123). It is no accident, then, that Lucy and Mina’s tea, that takes place over the seaweed-covered rocks, progresses so that the two women exhibit what Mina calls “New Womanish” appetites (p. 123). On the surface of things, Mina is referring to her and Lucy’s hunger for food. However, Dominguez-Rué (2010) asserts that Mina’s reference to “New Womanish” appetites really refers to the women’s sexual appetites (pp. 302–303), the intensity of which is expressed between Lucy and Mina alone as the two women dine together under (or over) Dracula’s influence. This queer coding of food for sex, intimacy, and stronger emotions not only expresses the significance of Lucy and Mina’s queer friendship, but also shows the triangular link between Dracula, Lucy, and Mina, and how Dracula directly influences the bond between these women. It also shapes the events of the scene on the East Cliff, which expresses the possibility of sex between Lucy and Mina as well. Halberstam (1995) and Malchow (1996) famously write about Dracula’s sexual perversity being mapped onto his monstrous body (pp. 90, 153). However, they never talk about Dracula’s monstrosity serving as a catalyst for romantic relations between Lucy and Mina. My use of Girard’s queer theory, the notion that the two rivals/friends’ relations are just as potent as those with their beloved is a new way to understand the function of Dracula’s monstrosity and monstrosity in general. Dracula demonstrates the queer nature of Lucy and Mina’s friendship by enabling and enhancing the queer aspect of their friendship and by making stronger emotions and sexual desire between Lucy and Mina visible after Dracula attacks Lucy on the East Cliff.5 This scene between Lucy and Mina becomes a “theater for female eroticism” (Maltz, 2017, p. 222).6 Sexual desire between Lucy and Mina becomes visible as they experience what is like sexual orgasm together.7 When Mina discovers Lucy in the churchyard, Lucy is “breathing - not softly, as usual with her, but in long, heavy gasps, as though striving to get her lungs full at every breath” (D, pp. 125–126). As Mina approaches Lucy, Lucy responds by “pulling the collar of her nightdress close around her throat. Whilst she did so there came a little shudder through her” (p. 126). As Lucy “shudders” in Mina’s presence, Mina realizes that Lucy is “unclad” (p. 126). Lucy’s long, heavy breaths, her shudders in Mina’s arms, and her nakedness are all moments from Stoker’s text that suggest sexual intimacy even if sex is not actually occurring in this scene. Additionally, in an effort to “warm” and care for her, to cover Lucy’s exposed body with clothing, Mina accidentally pricks

28

E. D. MACALUSO

Lucy with a “big safety-pin” (p. 126). Mina’s “pricking” of Lucy suggests female penetration, especially after Lucy “moans occasionally” after being “pricked” (p. 126).8 Both women recognize the taboo nature of this encounter as the two women rush to get home; Lucy “trembled[s] a little” and clings to Mina while Mina’s “heart beat[s] so loud all the time that sometimes I thought I should faint” (p. 126). Mina even “daubs” her “feet with mud” to deflect discovery of the illicitness of this encounter (Willis, 2007, p. 316). Both women say “a prayer of thankfulness together” when they reach home and they vow to keep what has occurred a secret from everyone (especially Lucy’s mother) (D, p. 127). Both women realize that what they have experienced together is unspeakable and unpardonable since Victorian women are not supposed to engage in erotic activities together.9 They cannot deny the illicit nature of their encounter or of Dracula’s influence,10 and this is what frightens both women into praying vehemently and keeping their encounter a secret once they reach home. Dracula’s influence on both Lucy and Mina is certainly evident in this scene. He helps to make their friendship queer by suggesting sexual desire between the two women, and he succeeds in intensifying the already strong feelings of friendship that the two women have for one another. Like other Victorian women in “intimate friendships,” Lucy and Mina use metaphoric language to talk about the strength of their friendship and the love that cements their bond (Vicinus, 2004, p. 233). Even as Lucy attempts to declare her love for Arthur, she ends up speaking about how much Mina means to her: Mina, we have told all our secrets to each other since we were children; we have slept and eaten together, and laughed and cried together; and now, though I have spoken, I would like to speak more. Oh, Mina, couldn’t you guess? I love him [Arthur]. I am blushing as I write, for although I think he loves me, he has not told me so in words. But oh, Mina, I love him; I love him; I love him! There that does me good. I wish I were with you, dear, sitting by the fire undressing, as we used to sit; and I would try to tell you what I feel. I do not know how I am writing this even to you. I am afraid to stop, or I should tear up the letter, and I don’t want to stop, for I do so want to tell you all. Let me hear from you at once, and tell me all that you think about it. Mina, I must stop. Good-night. Bless me in your prayers; and, Mina, pray for my happiness. Lucy. P.S. – I need not tell you this is a secret. Good-night again. “L.” (D, p. 88)

2

“I LOVE YOU WITH ALL THE MOODS AND TENSES OF THE …

29

Lucy begins her “confession of love for Arthur” with her recollection of how much she loves Mina. She speaks of their passionate childhood together full of shared secrets, meals, and beds. This passion inspires and fuels her declaration of her love for Arthur. However, her words about this love, “I think he loves me, he has not told me so in words” reveal that Lucy is unsure of Arthur’s reciprocal love. She is not certain that he loves her because he has not told her so. And, Lucy says: “There that does me good.” It is “good” for Lucy to pronounce her love for Arthur. This does not necessarily mean that she really loves him. She follows this suspect declaration with how much she wishes to be alone with Mina by a hot fire, semi-clad, so they can confess their deepest feelings to one another: “I wish I were with you, dear, sitting by the fire undressing…and I would try to tell you what I feel.” Lucy alludes to a secretive intimacy that she cannot name—“the love that dare not speak its name”—and a wish to understand what this love means with Mina’s help. Like Lucy’s allusion to a secretive intimacy (one that is unspoken), Vicinus (2004) maintains that women in “intimate friendships” did not directly speak about their love for one another (p. 233). Lucy suggests that her deepest feelings, directed toward Mina, are secretive. She cannot name them: “I do not know how I am writing this even to you. I am afraid to stop, or I should tear up the letter.” But, she wants to understand these feelings by talking about them with Mina. Elizabeth Signorotti (1996) claims that Lucy’s turning to Mina for emotional and erotic sustenance in this scene reveals Lucy’s “lesbian tendencies” (p. 622). While Signorotti believes that Lucy’s “lesbian tendencies” only occur at this moment of the novel, I argue that it is Stoker’s intention to discuss the ways that lesbianism is made between the women of Dracula. Lucy struggles with a secretive passion for Mina that reveals Lucy’s unhappiness with her engagement to Arthur. She is praying for happiness; she is not actually happy in her life with Arthur. She even tells Mina that she cannot be happy in her engagement to Arthur until “it can be all happy” (D, p. 92). In this confession, Lucy is waiting for her mood to change. She is waiting to come out of depression so that she can feel happy about her engagement to Arthur. Her secretive intimacy with Mina is a rival for Lucy’s engagement to Arthur. After all, Lucy’s engagement is one of esteem, the most “socially advantageous match” (Spear, 1993, p. 182) made by Lucy’s mother for Lucy11 ; it is not yet passionate love. Mina, too, uses metaphoric language to talk about her love for Lucy. She not only wishes to build “castles in the air” with Lucy “by the sea”; she also tells Lucy “I love you with all the moods and tenses of the

30

E. D. MACALUSO

verb” (D, p. 191). The possibility of erotic, sexual, and passionate love are all evoked by Mina’s claim since she loves Lucy “with all the moods” of the verb. In fact, Anna Cogswell Wood asserted that her partner, Irene Leache, taught her about “love and all its forms” (Faderman, 1981, p. 161), which also implies romantic and sexual love between two women. Mina expresses this love to Lucy when she says she loves her. Mina also says that she loves Lucy with all the “tenses of the verb” as well. Her love for Lucy persists through time. Mina also uses metaphoric language and physical description to illustrate her admiring love for Lucy. Vicinus (2004) asserts that it was not uncommon for “intimate friends” to express their love for one another based on what they said of one another’s beauty (p. 233). Of Lucy, Mina writes: “Lucy was looking sweetly pretty in her white lawn frock; she has got a beautiful colour since she has been here. … She is so sweet with old people; I think they all fell in love with her on the spot” (D, pp. 100, 97). This admittance of Mina’s, that Lucy looks “sweetly pretty,” suggests that Mina does admire Lucy’s beauty. Her declaration that anyone falls in love with Lucy mimics Margaret Leicester Warren’s admission that she loves her distant cousin, Edith Leycester: “Edith looked very beautiful and as usual I fell in love with her” (Marcus, 2007, p. 47). Mina even adopts the erotic gaze of Lucy’s fiancé, Arthur Holmwood, to express her admiring love for Lucy: “Lucy is asleep and breathing softly. She has more colour in her cheeks than usual, and looks, oh, so sweet. If Mr. Holmwood fell in love with her seeing her only in the drawing room, I wonder what he would say if he saw her now” (D, p. 123). Mina’s erotic gaze does indicate that Mina, at times, sees Lucy as more than just a “friend.” Mina even uses the language of religious devotion to explain her love for Lucy. Vicinus (2004) argues that this was done between “nineteenthand-early-twentieth-century women [who] used the language of religious love to explain their passionately erotic and spiritual feelings” (p. 86). After Dracula has killed Lucy, Mina privately confesses to herself that Lucy is the person that Mina cares about most, even more than herself and Jonathan: If I hadn’t gone to Whitby, perhaps poor dear Lucy would be with us now. She hadn’t taken to visiting the churchyard till I came, and if she hadn’t come there in the daytime with me she wouldn’t have walked there in her sleep; and if she hadn’t gone there at night and asleep, that monster couldn’t have destroyed her as he did. Oh, why did I ever go to Whitby? There now, crying again! I wonder what has come over me today. I must hide it from Jonathan,

2

“I LOVE YOU WITH ALL THE MOODS AND TENSES OF THE …

31

for if he knew that I had been crying twice in one morning – I, who never cried on my own account, and whom he has never caused to shed a tear – the dear fellow would fret his heart out. I shall put a bold face on, and if I do feel weepy, he shall never see it. I suppose it is just one of the lessons that we poor women have to learn… (D, pp. 296–297)

Even though Mina is Anglican, this scene reads like a Catholic confession, because Mina evaluates her feelings privately and blames herself for Lucy’s death. Her guilt over Lucy’s death causes her to shed tears. Mina’s grief over Lucy causes her to reveal that Lucy is the person that Mina cares for most, even more than Jonathan and herself: “I, who never cried on my own account, and whom he has never caused to shed a tear.” Mina feels that she should hide her feelings from Jonathan so as not to frighten him with her grief. But, this passage, too, might be read more subtly. Late Victorian women who loved women often had to hide their passions for one another because their love was not sanctioned by the state (Vicinus, 2004, p. xv). Mina’s hiding her true feelings from Jonathan doubles as one woman hiding her passion for another woman. And, this is the burden that women who love other women “have to learn.” However, Mina turns her love and passion for Lucy into a religious quest to vanquish Dracula. She convinces the Crew of Light to take up this quest “for dear Lucy’s sake” out of devotion to Lucy (D, p. 269). Mina takes up this quest to ensure that Lucy has not died in vain. For Mina, Lucy’s spiritual redemption and immortality are what also allows Dracula to be redeemed and commended to heaven: and only there came through all the multitude of horrors, the holy ray of light that my dear, dear Lucy was at last at peace (D, p. 262) … I [Mina] know and you [Crew of Light] know, that were I once dead you could and would set free my immortal spirit, even as you did my poor Lucy’s (p. 371) … That poor soul [Dracula] who has wrought all this misery is the saddest case of all. Just think what will be his joy when he too is destroyed in his worser part that his better part may have spiritual immortality. (p. 349)

Mina fantasizes about a spiritual union with Lucy since she cannot have one on earth. As long as Lucy and Mina’s love is spiritually pure, God and the Victorian state sanction it. A dream, or a prayer, in which both women are spiritually removed from their baser selves, or their sexualities, and can have spiritual immortality, is quite attractive to Bram Stoker and his Victorian readers. Mary Benson, a woman who loved women, also writes about

32

E. D. MACALUSO

her love for her lovers as: “it is all of God. [Not] one whit less than all you will I have, in that mysterious sacramental union where one can have all, and yet wrong no other love –” (Vicinus, 2004, p. 94).12 Bram Stoker was a deeply religious man. His prayer for same-sex love is it can escape bodily or sinful temptation, represented by Dracula, and actually be quite pure and productive. After Mina and the Crew of Light commit to Mina’s spiritual mission to vanquish Dracula for “dear Lucy’s sake” (D, p. 269), they do, indeed, kill Dracula and rid the world of his sexual danger (Schaffer, 1994, p. 406). But, it is Lucy and Mina’s love that does this. It is Lucy and Mina’s same-sex love that births little Quincey and benefits the state by contributing to its subsistence. This beautiful ending to Stoker’s novel suggests that same-sex love does not bring about violence. The Crew of Light creates a violent monster in Dracula, who was a doppelganger for Oscar Wilde or Henry Irving, Stoker’s gay friend and rumored lover, respectively. This love births future generations and rids its world of its perils—passionless heterosexual bonds and violence against the queer community. Even Van Helsing recognizes this love’s power: “Oh, Madam Mina, by that love [the one between herself and Lucy], I [Van Helsing] implore you, help me. It is for others’ good that I ask – to redress great wrong, and to lift much and terrible troubles – that can be more great than you can know” (D, p. 217). Mina and Jonathan consummate their marriage with the help of Mina’s love for Lucy. And, this love stops all of the violence in the characters’ world. This love shows that same-sex love is just as valuable as love between a man and a woman. Stoker makes this claim after he watched his friend, Oscar Wilde, be ruined simply because Wilde loved men. Stoker’s hope is same-sex love, like Lucy and Mina’s, rids the late Victorian world of its homophobic violence. And, instead, encourages late Victorians to love in the face of this violence.

Notes 1. Stoker’sDracula (Peterborough, Ontario: Broadview Press, 1998) will hereafter be referred to parenthetically as D followed by a page number. 2. Dominguez-Ruè asserts that when Mina talks about her and Lucy’s “New Womanish” appetites, which they exhibit after a very “severe tea,” (D, p. 123) this passage is meant to allude to the women’s sexual appetites (2010, pp. 302–303). Since Lucy and Mina have tea together, they are expressing sexual appetites toward one another. 3. Dracula is the “beloved” that makes the bond between Lucy and Mina just as strong as the one between him and the women. This is my conclusion about

2

4.

5.

6.

7.

“I LOVE YOU WITH ALL THE MOODS AND TENSES OF THE …

33

Dracula’s role in Lucy and Mina’s friendship. This conclusion is inspired by Girard’s assertion that the bond between two romantic rivals is as strong as the bond between the rivals and the “beloved” (Sedgwick, 1985, p. 27). And, this is only one example of Dracula’s symbolic influence on many of the conditions that create Lucy and Mina’s heightened intimacy with one another. The etymological connection between the words “monster” and “demonstrate” is profound, because Dracula as monster and enabler shows that Lucy and Mina’s friendship is queer; stronger emotions and sexual desire are present in their relationship. This makes their friendship straddle the line between heterosexual and homosexual; it also reveals that friendship, sexuality, and gender are complex matters in Dracula. In Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire, Sedgwick (1985) takes a critical look at the triangle of desire as referenced by Rene Girard in Deceit, Desire, and the Novel and argues that rather than allow a Platonic triangle to stand for the erotic relations between all people (as the Platonic triangle privileges the deep bond between male rivals in their relation to a woman “beloved”), Sedgwick suggests that this triangle, after it has been re-critiqued by Lacan, Chodorow and Dinnerstein, Rubin, Irigaray, and others, can actually be “a sensitive register precisely for delineating relationships of power and meaning, and for making graphically intelligible the play of desire and identification by which individuals negotiate with their societies for empowerment” (p. 127). As Girard concluded that “the bond that links the two [male] rivals is as intense and potent as the bond that links either of the rivals to the beloved [female],” I suggest, in my reading of Dracula’s text, that the bond between Lucy and Mina is as intense as the one that Girard describes between the two males and that Dracula, in turn, serves as the “beloved” (the “female,” the sexual catalyst [Dominguez-Rué, 2010, p. 302]) that brings these two women together and intensifies their loving and erotic bond. Stoker, then, privileges this bond and calls special attention to the power of its queer nature. Lucy and Mina are not literally in the throes of sexual orgasm in this scene. It should be noted that Stoker is famous for suggesting sexual intimacy even if he does not rely on an actual occurrence of sexual activity to do it. He does this in this East Cliff scene between Lucy and Mina. He also does it in an earlier scene between Harker, Dracula, and the three vampire women when Harker longs for them to “kiss me [him] with those red lips” (D, p. 69). The events of Stoker’s novel come to readers in fragments from letters, journals, and diaries. Readers are familiar with the events of this East Cliff scene from Mina’s journal. It is her language that also makes this scene passionate and sexual. In a journal entry dated (August 11), Mina recounts this scene and it is she who puts what occurs between herself and Lucy in erotic terms.

34

E. D. MACALUSO

8. Mina penetrates Lucy “in the secret places that no boy can fill” (Craft, 1994, p. 87). Just as there is anxiety that surrounds the notion of penetration between males in Dracula (Belford, 1996, p. 9), there is also anxiety about the penetration that occurs between Lucy and Mina. The penetration between Lucy and Mina is romantic and benign, but Stoker still shows critics the culturally conservative impulse to be wary of this type of penetration and erotic sex scene as Mina does daub her feet in mud to hide her shame and to deflect public discovery (Willis, 2007, p. 316) and the two say a prayer of thankfulness once they reach home to atone for what they have done (D, p. 127). 9. An English magistrate acquitted Woods and Pirie from all of the charges of sexual misconduct that their student, Cumming Gordon, accused them of on the grounds that Victorian ladies do not have sex with one another. This attitude permeated itself into Victorian culture even as it was clear that Victorian women could share strong affections for one another and even live together so long as they were perfectly chaste or at least their relationship looked like it was perfectly chaste (Halberstam, 1998, p. 65). 10. Dracula “expresses and distorts an originally sexual energy” (Craft, 1984, p. 107, “emphasis mine”). 11. “That was Mr. Holmwood. He often comes to see us, and he and mamma get on very well together; they have so many things to talk about in common” (D, p. 87). This passage discloses that Arthur is Mrs. Westenra’s pick for Lucy’s engagement. 12. Mary Benson even talks about loving women in the face of the compulsory heterosexual bond with her husband. This is a historical model for Lucy and Mina’s predicament.

References Belford, B. (1996). A biography of the author of Dracula. London, UK: Phoenix Giant. Bristow, J. (2008). Oscar Wilde and modern culture: The making of a legend. Athens: Ohio University Press. Cocks, H. G. (2003). Nameless offences: Homosexual desire in the nineteenth century. New York, NY: I.B. Tauris. Cook, M. (2008). London and the culture of homosexuality, 1885–1914 (Cambridge studies in nineteenth-century literature and culture). Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Cook, M., Mills, R., Trumbach, R., & Cocks, H. G. (2007). A gay history of Britain: Love and sex between men since the middle ages. Santa Barbara, CA: Praeger. Craft, C. (1984). Kiss me with those red lips: Gender and inversion in Bram Stoker’s Dracula. Representations, 8, 107–133.

2

“I LOVE YOU WITH ALL THE MOODS AND TENSES OF THE …

35

Craft, C. (1994). Just another kiss: Inversion and paranoia in Bram Stoker’s Dracula. In C. Craft (Ed.), Another kind of love: Male homosexual desire in English discourse, 1850–1920 (pp. 71–105). Berkeley: University of California Press. Dijkstra, B. (1986). Idols of perversity: Fantasies of feminine evil in fin-de-siècle culture. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. Dominguez-Ruè, Emma. (2010). Sins of the flesh: Anorexia, eroticism and the female vampire in Bram Stoker’s Dracula. Journal of Gender Studies, 19(3), 297–308. Ehnenn, J. R. (2008). Women’s literary collaboration, queerness, and late Victorian culture. Abingdon, UK: Routledge. Faderman, L. (1981). Surpassing the love of men: Romantic friendship and love between women from the renaissance to the present. New York, NY: William Morrow. Gardner, B. (1987). The lesbian imagination (Victorian style): A psychological and critical study of “Vernon Lee”. New York, NY: Garland. Halberstam, J. (1995). Skin shows: Gothic horror and the technology of monsters. Durham, VA: Duke University Press. Halberstam, J. (1998). Female masculinity. Durham, VA: Duke University Press. Hansen, T. (1996). Unholy matrimony: The kiss of the vampire. The Texas Review, 17, 56–63. Johnson, A. P. (1984). Dual life: The status of women in Stoker’s Dracula. Tennessee Studies in Literature, 27, 20–39. Malchow, H. L. (1996). Gothic images of race in nineteenth-century Britain. Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press. Maltz, D. (2017). Baffling arrangements: Vernon Lee and John Singer Sargent in Queer Tangier. In J. Edwards & I. Hart (Eds.), Rethinking the interior, c. 1867–1896: Aestheticism and arts and crafts (pp. 201–226). Abingdon, UK: Routledge. Marcus, S. (2007). Between women: Friendship, desire, and marriage in Victorian England. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Miller, N. (2006). Out of the past: Gay and lesbian history from 1869 to the present. New York, NY: Alyson Books. Rance, N. (2002). Jonathan’s great knife: Dracula meets Jack the Ripper. Victorian Literature and Culture, 30(2), 439–453. Rendall, J. (1989). Friendship and politics: Barbara Leigh Smith Bodichon (1827–91) and Bessie Raynor Parkes (1829–1925). In S. Mendus & J. Rendall (Eds.), Sexuality and subordination: Interdisciplinary studies of gender in the nineteenth century (pp. 136–171). Abingdon, UK: Routledge. Schaffer, T. (1994). A Wilde desire took me: The homoerotic history of Dracula. ELH, 61(2), 381–425. Sedgwick, E. K. (1985). Between men: English literature and male homosocial desire. New York, NY: Columbia University Press.

36

E. D. MACALUSO

Signorotti, E. (1996). Repossessing the body: Transgressive desire in “Carmilla” and “Dracula”. Criticism, 38(4), 607–632. Smith-Rosenberg, C. (1985). The female world of love and ritual: Relations between women in nineteenth-century America. In C. Smith-Rosenberg (Ed.), Disorderly conduct: Visions of gender in Victorian America (pp. 53–77). New York, NY: Alfred. A. Knopf. Spear, J. L. (1993). Gender and sexual dis-ease in Dracula. In Virginal sexuality and textuality in Victorian literature. Albany, NY: State University of New York. Spencer, K. (1992). Purity and danger: Dracula, the urban gothic, and the late Victorian degeneracy crisis. ELH, 59(1), 197–225. Stoker, B. (1998). Dracula. Peterborough, ON: Broadview Press. Townsend, C. (1993). “I am the woman for spirit”: A working woman’s gender transgression in Victorian London. Victorian Studies, 36(3), 293–314. Vicinus, M. (2004). Intimate friends: Women who loved women, 1778–1928. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Willis, M. (2007). The invisible giant, Dracula, and disease. Studies in the Novel, 39(3), 301–325.

CHAPTER 3

The Monstrous Power of Uncertainty: Social and Cultural Conflict in Richard Marsh’s The Beetle

The fin de siècle was notable for complex and conflicting attitudes toward social issues that affected Britain.1 British subjects both embraced and protested the complex colonial history of its Empire. While Cecil Rhodes believed in the sanctity of the Empire and its mission to “civilize” its colonial subjects, Mary Kingsley believed that a more equitable treatment of these same subjects was in order. While General Charles George Gordon believed in a military show of force to subdue colonial uprisings in Egypt, Annie Besant believed that a more diplomatic solution was necessary to end the colonial skirmishes in Egypt. There were cultural conflicts over gender and sexuality as well. While feminists like Sarah Grand and Mona Caird supported the cause/s of the New Woman, antifeminists like Henry Maudsley and Charles Harper insisted that the New Woman threatened family and British society. While there were women who embraced the popular style of “rational dress,” which enabled them to perform their particular affinities for female masculinity/ies and empowerment, like Rosa Bonheur and Radclyffe Hall, there were others who insisted on traditional femininity in dress, behavior, and heterosexual marriage like Eliza Lynn Linton and Margaret Oliphant. And, while there were men who embraced the lifestyle and philosophy/ies of the dandy, like Oscar Wilde and Walter Pater, there were other men who insisted on policing these aesthetics and life choices, like the Marquess of Queensberry and lawmakers who outlawed “sodomy.” These conflicting attitudes also defined the debate on poor relief in fin-de-siècle © The Author(s) 2019 E. D. Macaluso, Gender, the New Woman, and the Monster, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-30476-8_3

37

38

E. D. MACALUSO

Britain. Henry Fleming proposed that the management of outdoor relief should be centralized (e.g., controlled by the government), while working men, like Sam Brambley, believed that they had the right to control relief efforts and to determine wage rates for the poor. These conflicting relations between “traditional” and “progressive” members of British society were all the more pronounced during the fin de siècle, because the British Empire was changing, as it approached the modern period. Colonial uprisings meant talk of independence movements in Britain’s colonies, the New Woman meant new ways to define the British “woman,” the definition of homosexuality meant new ways to conceptualize sexuality, and new talks about the poor in Parliament meant new ways to address the long-standing issue of poverty in Britain. “Traditional” members of British society embraced the status quo or the conventional ideas, and ways of doing things, adopted from the early and mid-periods of the Victorian era. “Traditional” members of British society often supported imperialism and colonialism, they castigated the New Woman and the homosexual, and they refused the poor help that would (somewhat) alleviate the problem of poverty. The members of Parliament who shared these “traditional” views were often conservatives, who belonged to the land-owning elite and had a real economic interest in maintaining the status quo (they would keep their livelihoods, property, and power). “Traditional” ideas were popular during the fin de siècle because they represented a “dying” or a “lost” culture (Arata, 1996, p. 1), a Victorian culture that believed that its ideology was the most promising of all the world’s civilizations and, therefore, the most lasting. “Progressive” members of British society, on the other hand, embraced modernity at the fin de siècle, anti-imperialism, and independence movements. They supported the New Woman, they were interested in de-criminalizing homosexuality, and they made conscious efforts to improve the lives of the poor. The members of Parliament who shared these “progressive” views were often New Liberals who were interested in reforming society by adopting “progressive” ideas. Radicals and socialists also supported New Liberals and were interested in reforming society by giving control of poor relief to the poor and by imagining a society based on service to one’s fellow man and the state (by rejecting capitalist ideology and practice). These “progressive” ideas challenged the traditional response to social change, which often endorsed the use of force to solve the problems at hand.2 The progressive response to these changes was to understand why they were occurring and to accommodate them. For instance, when the British were faced with colonial uprisings in

3

THE MONSTROUS POWER OF UNCERTAINTY …

39

Africa and in India, the traditional response was to use force (often military action) to subdue them (e.g., Gordon’s battles in Egypt, Rhodes’s in South Africa, and Campbell’s in India). The progressive response was to invent new ways for colonials and the colonized to interact in order to solve the problem of the British presence abroad and, in some cases, to act against it by working for diplomacy like Annie Besant did in Egypt and India and like Olive Schreiner did in South Africa. Just as there were traditional and progressive responses to British colonialism at the fin de siècle, there were also traditional and progressive responses to the New Woman. Punch often caricatured her as a threat to society in light of her desire to become more educated and independent. Her effigy was even hung from Cambridge’s Senate House while a vote was taking place to admit women to the University in 1897 (Sutherland, 2015, p. 138). In contrast to these traditional reactions, many progressive women revered the New Woman as a means to their own success, as Sarah Grand embraced the concept of her in order to write her novels. By the same token, Mona Caird and Ella Hepworth Dixon wrote widely read tracts about marriage that reconsidered its worth and questioned its hegemony. At the end of the nineteenth century, “sodomy” was still considered a crime in Britain even as Havelock Ellis, Edward Carpenter, Walter Pater, and Oscar Wilde were all writing tracts and/or novels that addressed the issue and, at the very least, humanized it by asking their audiences to consider homosexuality as “abnormal, but natural” (Miller, 2006, p. 14; Symonds, 1999, p. 75). In terms of addressing the issue of the poor in Britain, traditionalists worked to centralize their care of the poor; they relegated them to institutions and curbed the outdoor relief fund, while progressive people and politicians worked to give control of the poor’s money to the poor themselves. In this chapter, I will identify the traditional and progressive responses to colonialism, the New Woman, sexuality, and the treatment of the poor and argue that they are both present in Richard Marsh’s The Beetle; they come to life in the novel in important ways that allow critics and readers to understand the complexity of the cultural attitudes that defined the fin de siècle. Even as cultural responses to social movements of the British fin de siècle were complex, as Marshall suggests (vii–viii), I contend that they are still defined by a clash between traditional values and progressive viewpoints that emerge as a result of the violence of the liminal figure of the monster, the Beetle, in The Beetle. The violence of the Beetle’s revenge against Britain shows that there is an anti-colonial perspective, which fights

40

E. D. MACALUSO

for attention with the conservative support for the British colonial project and the Beetle’s continued violence against Paul Lessingham, Miss Lindon, and Robert Holt suggests that this conflict trickles down to other issues like sexuality, poverty, and the New Woman. The liminal figure of the monster reveals that there is a complex debate informing the caricature of the New Woman and that she is a historical and cultural figure and an indeterminate construct. The monster shows that the British populous, at the fin de siècle, viewed the New Woman as either a monster/social threat or a role model/commendable figure. Mr. Lindon, Atherton, and the Beetle versus Miss Lindon champion both perspectives in the novel. This means that the New Woman was often not valued for her complexity, as Sally Ledger would have it (1997, p. 1), but for the disparate conservative and New Liberal ways of viewing her that her paradoxical monstrosity and true value often represented. The violence of the monster, and his/her3 attack on the New Woman, Miss Lindon, and the other protagonists, Lessingham and Holt, also reveals the contentiousness of the debates behind colonialism, sexuality, and poverty (traditional values versus progressive viewpoints are delineated in all of these cases). This means that there were real tensions between jingos and anti-imperialists, antifeminists and feminists, homophobes and allies, and the bourgeoisie and the proletariat. These subjects, too, are nebulous and portrayed strongly in Marsh’s novel. The monster does more, in this study, than simply represent anxieties about race, gender, sexuality, and class (Halberstam, 1995, p. 1; Malchow, 1996, p. 8), he/she shows, through his/her violence coupled with his/her foreignness and “perverse” sexuality, that there was a schism in culture, at the British fin de siècle, between traditional values and progressive viewpoints. He/she reveals the dichotomous way that the British populous viewed the New Woman (as a monster or admirable figure) and he/she delineates the ways that colonialism, the New Woman, homosexuality, and poverty were all subjects that were rife with conflict. As I mentioned in my introduction, studies have been written about the New Woman’s relevance to feminism and feminist activism, suffrage movements, education and employment, arts and leisure, fashion, entertainment, fiction and the periodical presses, and transportation. I am adding to the studies that explore the antifeminist and feminist critiques of the New Woman, like Ledger’s, Ardis’s, Heilmann’s, and Richardson and Willis’s by writing about how monstrosity reveals antifeminists’ threatening rhetoric about the

3

THE MONSTROUS POWER OF UNCERTAINTY …

41

New Woman as enemy to the state and feminist notions of her as “woman’s” heroine. I explore how these discourses manifest themselves in history and Marsh’s novel. On a broader scale, the figure of the monster unearths the willful blindness that traditional, white male, conservative British (like Cecil Rhodes) had toward the social unrest and progressive social change that was altering their society irrevocably. A monster figure, like Stevenson’s Jekyll/Hyde, perfectly captures the dual consciousness, or social and cultural conflict, of the British fin de siècle. On the one hand, Britain, at this time, was like Dr. Jekyll; it was prosperous and could boast marvelous accomplishments, like the spoils of Empire. On the other hand, like Hyde, the murderer, it was responsible for colonial violence, hostility toward women and homosexuals, and the neglect of the poor. A monster, like the Beetle, and his/her violence coupled with his/her foreignness and sexual perversity, again, make the debate about the New Woman, and the fact that she is an indefinite construct, clear. And, he/she, through violence, foreignness, and sexual perversity, reveals the contentiousness that defined the debates about colonialism, homosexuality, and poverty and shows that these subjects, too, are conflicted.

3.1

The Novel’s Social Conflicts in Their Historical Context

To understand the kinds of cultural conflict that Marsh was writing about in his novel, it is necessary to understand the complex and conflicting social and political history that shaped his writings. Marsh’s dramatization of the traditional forces that attempted to subdue New Women and the progressive forces that insisted that New Women reformed the position of women reflects metropolitan Britain’s own ambivalence toward this figure. Antifeminists, like Eliza Lynn Linton, viewed the New Woman not only as a threat to traditional femininity but also as the symbol of a movement to relegate men to a new matriarchal order (Ledger, 1997, p. 12). Linton was afraid that this would mean the destruction of the British social system as she knew it; that the British family and social hierarchy would be destroyed (12). W. R. Greg and Walter Besant both believed that the family would be threatened if “redundant” women refused to marry and/or if new relationships formed as a result of New Women’s independence (12). Margaret Oliphant called New Women, “The Anti-Marriage League,” because she believed that New Women’s insistence on independence meant the

42

E. D. MACALUSO

destruction of marriage even when some New Women were proponents of marriage (12). Linton, Greg, Besant, and Oliphant argued that the idea of the New Woman could not possibly enfranchise and empower fin-desiècle women because, to them, the New Woman meant the degradation of “woman,” the destruction of the family and of metropolitan Britain. Even with all of these voices attempting to silence New Women, New Women themselves helped to reform marriage by addressing, and supporting, the question of women’s independence in fin-de-siècle Britain. Sarah Grand, Mona Caird, Ella Hepworth Dixon, and Althea Crackanthorpe (to name only four) were writing tracts about marriage in the daily newspapers to improve the institution itself and to attempt to make marriage better for women; this meant reforming marriage after the Married Women’s Property Act of 1882, which gave women more access to property (and power) in their marriages. Marriage reform also meant rejecting marriage altogether for a free union, rejecting partnerships entirely, or creating the conditions for women to be independent. New Women like Frances Power Cobbe, Edith Simcox, and Emmeline Pankhurst attempted to make conditions better for women by encouraging more education and employment opportunities for women, by making these employment opportunities lucrative and safe, and by encouraging women to fight for suffrage. Some New Women took advantage of new employment opportunities and professions by becoming medical doctors like Sophia Jex-Blake and Elizabeth Garrett Anderson. Some women became artists and were examples of what more education could do for women like the visual artists Mary Lloyd, Rosa Bonheur, and Anna Klumpke and the poets Amy Levy and “Michael Field” (Katherine Bradley and Edith Cooper). Even as Mr. Lindon and Atherton are threatened by Miss Lindon’s rebelliousness as a New Woman—“Don’t talk to me li-ike that, girl! – I [Mr. Lindon] – I believe you’re s-stark mad!” (B, p. 169)4 —and the Beetle tortures Miss Lindon for her modernity—he strips her of her hair and clothes and makes her into a man and a mockery of the New Woman—Miss Lindon, herself, still represents the New Woman and all of her ambitions for liberation that we find in Marsh’s novel. All of the ways in which Miss Lindon stands up to the male protagonists of the novel show that she really has an allegiance to the figure of the New Woman. The way that she challenges her father and Atherton by choosing Lessingham for a fiancé, her interest and activity in politics, her insistence that she solve the mystery behind the Beetle’s attacks, even after she endures great personal peril as a result of this, all signify independent and rebellious actions for which New

3

THE MONSTROUS POWER OF UNCERTAINTY …

43

Women were noted. Marsh captures the debate about the New Woman in this way. He identifies her as both a monstrous figure that antifeminists found to be threatening and a laudable figure that fin-de-siècle and feminist women, like Miss Lindon, wished to emulate. As I will show in subsequent paragraphs, the Beetle’s foreign and perverse violence against her, and the other protagonists of the novel, shows the conflicted nature of the debates over colonialism, sexuality, and poverty as well. In terms of the social history and conflict that defined the debate about colonialism in The Beetle, most conservative Britons in Parliament, and British subjects who supported imperialism and colonialism, supported Britain’s entry into, and occupation of, Egypt in 1882 (Powell, 2003, p. 2). Lord Cromer believed that the key to subduing the people of Egypt and the Sudan lay in abolishing slavery and assuming control of the government, thereby deposing the Egyptians and the Sudanese after British military forces gained control of the countries’ infrastructures (Egypt in 1882, Sudan in 1898) (5). However, Egyptian nationalists, like the Urabi rebels, believed that Britain had no legal right and no religious right to gain control of their nation, and they considered the institution of slavery a source of unity between Egypt and the Sudan (5). Battles between the British, the Egyptians, and the Sudanese ensued in these territories until the British were the ultimate victors, occupying Egypt in 1882 and remaining the influential power in Egypt and the Sudan well into the 1920s (168).5 Marsh captures the sentiments of the traditional British who believed in imperialism, and their right to “civilize” and control Egypt, when Atherton identifies the Beetle as an “Arab of the Soudan” and not the “spick and span Arab of the boulevard” (B, p. 103). Atherton believes that the Beetle will only be civilized when he/she cleans him/herself up and removes the traces of the degradation of the Sudan (the “dirtiness” and the “blackness”) and embraces the pristine qualities of the Egyptian boulevard (already conquered by the British). When the Beetle becomes a threat to Miss Lindon, later in the novel, Atherton shows his contempt for the Beetle when he angrily calls him/her “that humorous professor of hankey-pankey,” minimizing the Beetle’s mesmeric powers, which the British stereotypically believed belonged to all “Arabs” (B, p. 286; Winter, 1998, p. 199). Miss Coleman identifies the Beetle as “that Arab party,” which makes him “Other” than, different from, and oppositional to “Christian landladies” who have “their rights … in this country [England]” (B, p. 273; Said, 1978, p. 1). Miss Coleman implies that she is Britain’s enfranchised subject whereas the Beetle is simply a “foreigner” with no rights in England.

44

E. D. MACALUSO

Lessingham is frightened and enraged by the Beetle, who comes from the street that reminds him of his murder of the priestess of Isis, the Rue de Rabagas (B, p. 78), and he shows his rage in his attempt to subdue Holt (who is under the Beetle’s command). Atherton, Coleman, and Lessingham all express the traditional British belief that foreigners like the Beetle will degenerate the British race and wreak havoc (as terrorists) upon the Empire. And yet, Champnell’s narration highlights, in clear and descriptive terms, the ambiguity of Lessingham’s attitude. On the one hand, Lessingham wants to kill the Beetle for his/her torture of white, British women in Cairo; on the other hand, Lessingham feels great remorse for killing the Beetle’s relative: “His [Lessingham’s] voice faltered. I [Champnell] thought he would break down” (B, p. 245). While there are frightened and violent reactions to the Beetle by Coleman, Atherton, and Lessingham, as a result of the Beetle’s disturbances of, and attacks on, them, there are also moments, as in Champnell’s narration, that evoke sympathy for the Beetle’s motivations, especially when Champnell’s narration portrays Lessingham’s remorse so precisely. Marsh portrays the conflict between a traditional, conservative population of Britons who thought that Britain’s imperial and colonial projects were justified and progressive subjects who thought that Britain’s presence in its colonies should be resisted and undone. Furthermore, it is the Beetle’s foreign and perverse violence against Holt, Lessingham, and Miss Lindon that also shows this conflict in cultural attitudes toward colonialism (and, then, the New Woman, homosexuality, and poverty). After readers witness the violent encounter between Holt and the Beetle, homosexuality in Marsh’s novel is something to be feared and acknowledged. As a result of law enforcement, men could be hanged for committing homosexual acts up until 1861 (8921 men were prosecuted for sodomy after 1806, 404 were sentenced to death, and 56 were executed). After this, men charged with “gross indecency,” like Oscar Wilde, would serve prison terms. Holt clearly expresses his fear of the sexually perverse, foreign (and male) Beetle when the Beetle begins to attack and subdue him: “I [Holt] stood still and bore it all, while it enveloped my face with its huge, slimy, evil-smelling body, and embraced me with its myriad legs. The horror of it made me mad” (B, p. 52). On the one hand, this expresses what late Victorians thought was the unnatural and dangerous nature of homosexuality in these scenes. On the other hand, Holt’s benevolence as a character raises the question: Are gay men monsters or relatable subjects? Marsh

3

THE MONSTROUS POWER OF UNCERTAINTY …

45

explores the debate between traditional British subjects, like the Marquess of Queensberry, who believed homosexuality to be an abomination, and progressive people like Havelock Ellis, John Addington Symonds, Edward Carpenter, and Oscar Wilde who knew that homosexuality was inborn and worthy of acknowledgment and understanding. The Beetle’s violent attacks on Holt make Holt both an undesirable vagrant and a sympathetic everyman. Holt represents both the traditional and progressive attitudes that bourgeois British citizens had toward the poor even as they worked for the relief of the poor’s suffering. There were some Poor Law supporters and economic theorists (Spencer, Fleming, and Longley) who wished to centralize relief efforts for the poor by supporting the Poor Law Amendment and Act (1834 and 1844), which stipulated that workhouses, institutions, and asylums were the best places to accommodate the poor, and that crusades to end the seemingly arbitrary giving of outdoor relief were just efforts to ensure that relief was distributed properly and effectively to those who truly needed it (Hurren, 2007, pp. 17–27). However, there were others, working people, including laborers themselves, who, by century’s end, wished to take control of their rights and the ways in which relief was being doled out to the poor. They formed unions, like the NALU (the National Agricultural Labourer’s Union), to ensure that they were the ones who decided what kinds of relief were (and how much was) given to them (219). Decisions that were made to centralize relief to the poor and to end arbitrary outdoor relief were often supported by conservative members of Parliament as some of these men were members of the land-owning elite who liked to ensure that they had most to all of the control over what they believed the poor needed (39). Giving the poor ownership of poor relief was a cause that New Liberal members of Parliament encouraged as they supported “a right and duty to make the best of their [paupers’] opportunity” (32). The mixed responses of antipathy and sympathy to Holt (despised by the workhouse overseer and the Beetle and liked by Miss Lindon and the other British characters), as a result of the monster’s foreign and perverse violence against Holt, reflect the conflicting views of the poor in fin-de-siècle British society. Holt is both an undesirable vagrant who must conform to the government’s strict policies for his containment and one who represents a spirit of reform that dictates that there must be a better way for the nation to accommodate its paupers. Marsh engages the conflicting social and political issues mentioned above by emphasizing some characters’ traditional reactions to the violence of the

46

E. D. MACALUSO

Beetle and colonialism, the New Woman, sexuality, and the plight of the poor while also supporting progressive points of view.

3.2

Homosexuality as an Abomination and a Tool for Liberation

The trials of Oscar Wilde were arguably the most notable events that represented Britons’ fear of homosexuality between men at the fin de siècle. After a hung jury initially acquitted Wilde, the Marquess of Queensberry convinced his lawyer, Sir Edward Carson, to ask for a second trial. This time a combination of statements from young men who subsisted as prostitutes and blackmailers and physical evidence from the Savoy hotel convicted Wilde of the charges filed against him (Kaplan, 2005, p. 246). Judge Wills sentenced him to two years of hard labor (247). While in prison, Wilde wrote De Profundis , a letter to his former lover, Lord Alfred Douglas (Bosie), the son of the Marquess of Queensberry, describing his utter dejection after being sentenced to live his life as a prisoner (230). Prison ruined Wilde; it cost him his life. He died of cerebral meningitis after he completed his sentence. Once the Marquess of Queensberry decided to ruin Wilde, his cohorts succeeded at this task by slandering Wilde in newspapers, by following him, and by finding evidence to convict him (246). Queensberry’s men literally turned the tide of popular and legal opinion against Wilde, insisting that he should be sentenced to prison (246). The slandering of Wilde was so severe that even Carson, who prosecuted Wilde, asked the solicitor general to “‘let up on the fellow now’ on the grounds that Wilde had already suffered enough” (247). The homophobia and violence levied against gay men, at the fin de siècle, was now a public affair as a result of Wilde’s trials. This same homophobia and violence emerges in Marsh’s text when Holt exhibits his fear of the Beetle when the Beetle attacks Holt in “his” lair.6 Holt’s fear of the Beetle’s homosexual behavior is coupled with his apprehension regarding the Beetle’s “foreignness,” because, as Hurley points out, “foreignness” connotes “sexual perversity” in Marsh’s novel: “the text intended to shock the Victorian reader with what would have been an unexpected depiction of male homoerotic desire, establishing the general idea of sexual perversion which is to pervade the novel and associating sexual perversity specifically with the Oriental” (Hurley, 1996, p. 133). Sander L.

3

THE MONSTROUS POWER OF UNCERTAINTY …

47

Gilman and Crais and Scully note that “foreignness” (as a result of a finde-siècle stereotype of its “riotous nature”) has been associated with “overwrought,” perverse, and even queer sexualities (1985, pp. 79–83; 2009, pp. 1, 3). It is the Beetle’s “foreignness” and his use of “mesmerism” that enables “him” to force a homoerotic encounter between “himself” and Holt. There were documented cases of “sodomy” that involved violence and assault between one man and another, and, often, the man who was considered to be the “sodomite” was characterized as an “energetic, powerful, irresistible sodomite” while his partner was a “passive, powerless victim” (Katz, 2001, p. 52). This is precisely what occurs between the Beetle and Holt; they take on the roles of the powerful sodomite and his passive victim. The Beetle uses his leverage as a “foreigner,” who can mesmerize anyone to submit to his command, to assault and violate Holt in a sexual way. Marsh aims to convey a violent homoerotic encounter between Holt and the Beetle by emphasizing the Beetle’s “foreignness” and penchant to dominate Holt sexually. At first, Holt only sees a pair of eyes that command him to do their bidding: “Nothing could have exceeded the horror with which I awaited their [the eyes’] approach – except my incapacity to escape them” (B, p. 50), and a body with a “peculiar yellow hue” (B, p. 50) that signifies both the body of the Beetle (as a creature) and his “foreignness,” as yellow was often used to describe the bodies of foreigners, particularly the skin color of foreigners from the East (Hurley, 1996, p. 132). This foreign creature, the Beetle, then, “mounts” Holt “as if I [Holt] had been horizontal instead of perpendicular” (B, p. 51). He then uses his “spider’s legs” to “embrace” Holt “softly and stickily” (51). While Hurley deems this attack to involve “female genitalia” pressed up against Holt’s body (1996, p. 138), it is not the cavernous imagery of the vagina that is suggested here but, “spider’s legs” (B, p. 51, “emphasis mine”) that evoke a phallus, particularly as Holt then describes the “yellow” body as the “monstrous member” that continues to embrace Holt with its “foetid odour” (51). This scene and its imagery of a “monstrous member” and “foetid odour” suggest sex between men. The “stickiness” suggests ejaculation while the “foetid odour” implies anal sex between men. Similar evidence was used to convict Wilde of “sodomy” in 1895 (Schaffer, 1994, pp. 406–407). It is the Beetle’s “foreignness”—his “yellow” body—that establishes the queer “sexual perversity,” together with the “spider’s legs” and “foetid, monstrous member”—that defines this attack on Holt and makes it queer. It also shows the absolute horror that Holt endures as the Beetle, with his yellow eyes and body, approaches him and then violates Holt in a sexual way

48

E. D. MACALUSO

that Holt describes as disgusting and terrifying. This, in turn, demonstrates the fear with which Holt regards the “foreign and homosexual” Beetle and the complete repugnance that Holt has for this Beetle and “his” behavior. This repugnance signifies the fear and loathing that traditional British had for gay men at the fin de siècle. Marsh shows Holt’s hatred for, and fear of, the perverse and “foreign” Beetle in the man’s inability to resist the command of the Beetle’s “foreign” voice. Holt’s inability to resist this command sets the scene for evidence of a violation that Holt experiences at the hands of the Beetle. The Beetle implores Holt to “Undress!” and Holt notes that the voice that commands him is “foreign” and belongs to a “foreign” body: When he spoke again that was what he said [Undress!], in those guttural tones of his in which there was a reminiscence of some foreign land. I obeyed, letting my sodden, shabby clothes fall anyhow upon the floor. A look came on his face, as I stood naked in front of him, which, if it was meant for a smile, was a satyr’s smile, and which filled me with a sensation of shuddering repulsion. (B, p. 55, emphasis mine)

It is the Beetle’s “foreign voice” that completely mesmerizes Holt and brings Holt under the Beetle’s homoerotic control so that Holt has no choice but to “obey” or submit to the Beetle’s homoerotic behavior. But Holt is utterly “repulsed” by the terrifying power of the Beetle’s homoerotic behavior. Holt uses the image of the “satyr”—an ancient Greek deity, both man and horse, that followed the insatiable Bacchus—to imply the inhuman (almost), foreign, and homosexual sexuality that the Beetle uses to completely subdue Holt. Not only does this show the complete terror that Holt experiences at the Beetle’s charge and the abhorrence with which Holt regards the “foreign” and perverse Beetle, it also sets the scene for a complete violation of Holt’s body by the Beetle. This violation that occurs between the Beetle and Holt truly exemplifies Holt’s fear of “foreignness” and homosexuality at this moment. Marsh’s representation of this “foreignness” and homosexuality inspires terror and abomination. Holt’s violation is complete when: “Fingers were pressed into my cheeks, they were thrust into my mouth, they touched my staring eyes, shut my eyelids, then opened them again, and – horror of horrors! – the blubber lips were pressed to mine – the soul of something evil entered into me in the guise of a kiss” (B, p. 57). Holt describes the way that the Beetle assumes mastery of his body by controlling important parts of its

3

THE MONSTROUS POWER OF UNCERTAINTY …

49

functioning, again, through Eastern mesmerism. And, Holt describes a kind of rape in this scene when the Beetle presses his lips to Holt’s and something “evil enters” Holt. The phrase that Marsh uses to describe this moment, “something evil entered into me,” suggests a forced penetration of Holt by the Beetle. The utter control of Holt’s body and the penetration that he endures as a result of the Beetle’s “foreign” and homoerotic domination in this scene support the traditional idea that homosexuality should be feared, and that it is a foreign perversion on the part of the Beetle’s violence toward Holt, that suggests this fear of homosexuality. Popular reactions to homosexuality between women were much different from reactions to men at the fin de siècle. Earlier in the century, Elizabeth Barrett Browning visited Charlotte Cushman and her partner in Paris in 1852. Cushman and her partner chose to live together as “intimate friends,” and of their relationship, Browning had this to say: “they have made vows of celibacy & of eternal attachment to each other – they live together, dress alike … it is a female marriage. I [Browning] happened to say, ‘Well, I never heard of such a thing before,’ to a friend who answered, ‘Oh, it is by no means uncommon’” (Vicinus, 2004, pp. 9–10). Even as Browning has never heard of a homosexual relationship, or a female marriage (Marcus, 2007, p. 2), between women before, this kind of relationship is slightly more acceptable than a homosexual relationship between men. Celibacy, the idea that these women were not having sex, made their relationship more palatable to a culture of people, like Browning, who were unfamiliar with, or afraid of, homosexual relationships between women. In spite of this unfamiliarity and fear, women participated in these relationships and their friends accepted this. The way that Browning describes Cushman and her partner’s bond is with sympathy and the desire to really call it a “female marriage,” which assumes as much fidelity between the two women as if they had been “man and wife.” By mid-century, “intimate friends” were a part of social life, of high society, at this time (Vicinus, 2004, p. 10). After the Wilde trials, women who dressed as, and desired to live as, men were often prosecuted and incarcerated for attempting to do so and, in some cases, for claiming employment, better wages, and a legal way to marry their spouses like Sarah Geals and “Caroline” (Townsend, 1993, p. 293). Women who did live together as lovers and partners like Rosa Bonheur and Anna Klumpke, Katherine Bradley and Edith Cooper (“Michael Field”), and Frances Power Cobbe and Mary Lloyd often had to face

50

E. D. MACALUSO

discrimination against their partnerships. Anna Klumpke’s and Rosa Bonheur’s families did not approve of their relationship, but that did not stop them from living together either (Klumpke, 1997, p. 68). And, because Bradley and Cooper were related (they were aunt and niece), there were many people outside of their intimate circles who also disapproved of their relationship (Kastan, 2006, pp. 311–312). Like the women whose homosexual relationships were accepted by society and were thought to be benign and non-threatening (like Charlotte Cushman and her partners and the Ladies of Llangollen), Holt is a benevolent character whom the other protagonists esteem. After Miss Lindon takes Holt into her home, she marvels at his tears that he sheds while she takes care of him: “When he [Holt] saw me [Miss Lindon], and heard who I was, the expressions of his gratitude were painful in their intensity. The tears streamed down his cheeks. He looked to me like a man who had very little life left in him” (B, p. 208). And, when the Beetle is done using him, all the protagonists lament Holt’s early death: “‘This time he’s [Holt’s] gone for good, there’ll be no conjuring him back again.’ I felt a sudden pressure on my arm, and found that Lessingham was clutching me [Champnell] with probably unconscious violence” (B, p. 306). The reference to “conjuring” supports the Beetle’s “foreign” and perverse monstrosity as responsible for Holt’s victimhood. Holt’s vulnerability as a passive subject, like the sodomite’s victim, suggests that homosexual subjects should be understood and embraced not castigated as villains or victims. This, necessarily, lends complexity to the debate about homosexuality at century’s end. Are gay men monsters? Are they benign lovers who should be left in peace? Marsh does not give an explicit answer to these questions. The subject of homosexuality remained a vexed and debatable issue until well into the twentieth century.

3.3

Holt and the Poor as Undesirable Vagrants and Everymen

Conservative Party politics, lead by Disraeli (1868–1881) and then Salisbury (1885–1886, 1886–1892, 1895–1902), took a restrained approach to the issues of social welfare and poor relief at the fin de siècle. Disraeli relied on his social welfare credentials to claim to redress “the health of the nation” (Hurren, 2007, p. 40). In reality, Disraeli performed a copious amount of political juggling and very little social welfare reform after his election (40). Though this supported the conservative Party line which

3

THE MONSTROUS POWER OF UNCERTAINTY …

51

sanctioned the status quo in terms of the organization of the state and its responsibility to its constituents, it did very little to improve the lives of the poor in Britain (40). When Lord Salisbury was elected (1885), he appeased the growing sentiment of liberalism in politics and Britain, by saying he was committed to poor relief—“he did not shrink from a little judicious assistance to the poor”—but he really supported the notion that the poor should help themselves—“self help” (41). These historical facts exemplify the conservative Party’s “hands off” approach to social welfare and poor relief, leaving much of the responsibility for this in the hands of the local workhouse overseers who were in charge of enforcing the current laws in relation to the poor. Marsh shows this abuse of the poor most clearly when Holt is dismissed by the workhouse overseer who denies him shelter at the very beginning of The Beetle. The overseer “banged the door in my [Holt’s face]” and shouts “NO room! – Full up!” to let Holt know that he is not welcome at the workhouse (B, p. 41). Readers do not miss the irony of Holt’s predicament because the workhouse is the one place that should accommodate the poor, like Holt, but does not because its overseer claims that the workhouse simply cannot take anyone else. The rigidity of the overseer is highlighted by Marsh’s refusal to describe the inside of the workhouse, and whether it is actually full or not (which suggests that it may not be). Holt’s dismissal has discouraging and dehumanizing effects on him; he is literally fighting for his survival after being turned away at the workhouse door: To have tramped about all day looking for work; to have begged even for a job which would give me money enough to buy a little food; and to have tramped and to have begged in vain, - that was bad. But sick at heart, depressed in mind and in body, exhausted by hunger and fatigue, to have been compelled to pocket any little pride I might have left, and solicit, as the penniless, homeless tramp which indeed I was, a night’s lodging in the casual ward, - and to solicit in vain! – that was worse. Much worse. About as bad as bad could be. (B, p. 41)

Holt is embarrassed by the loss of his job and his inability to pay for a little bit of food. However, his loss of self-respect, and “pride,” as a result of being homeless, and the dejection he feels, calling himself a “tramp” and a “beggar,” upsets him the most. It upsets him because he has used what little courage he has left to ask for help at the workhouse. To be turned away is not only physically and mentally debilitating for Holt, but it suggests

52

E. D. MACALUSO

the sheer inhumanity with which government employees (like workhouse overseers), who claimed to work for the poor, often treated them. The poor are often represented in fin-de-siècle novels and periodicals as belonging to another primitive civilization. In his important text, In Darkest England and the Way Out, William Booth compared the poor to the colonized as, according to him, the indigent are to the “pygmies” of Africa (1890, p. 11). To Booth, the poor, like the colonized, are problems that must be eradicated for civilization’s sake (11). Indeed, like McLaughlan’s aforementioned Beetle (2012, p. 189), the man in the “gloomy corner,” who emerges to try to help Holt get a bed at the workhouse, is represented as though he belongs to a more primitive and lawless world. He insists on breaking the law by vandalizing the workhouse to get a bed: “He picked up two stones, one in either hand. The one in his left he flung at the glass, which was over the door of the casual ward. It crashed through it, and through the lamp beyond. … He was earning a night’s rest at a price which, even in my extremity, I [Holt] was not disposed to pay” (B, p. 44). The man from the “gloomy corner” risks imprisonment so that he can have a little food and a place to rest for the night. His actions represent stereotypes that the British had about the poor; that the primitive poor (like the colonized) often turned to crime just to survive (Lombroso, 2006, pp. xxiv–xxv). Holt chooses not to break the law and appears a little more civilized than the man in the gloomy corner. Holt does not participate in the crime and he wanders on in search of shelter. However, as Gustavo Generani points out, Holt’s trip to find shelter, which eventually lands him at the Beetle’s lair, is “leaving civilization behind me [him],” because Holt travels to a section of London that is known to be a slum filled with immigrants and impoverished people not the enfranchised aristocracy (2012, p. 40). Thus, the poor in Britain are relegated to a world of abjection to the point at which they are as “low” as the indigenous from the colonies; they were often called “street Arabs” or “nomads” (40). This is the case for Holt when he ends up in the Beetle’s lair. Holt and the Beetle might work together because of their mutual abjection in Britain, but this inference is quickly dashed by the Beetle’s own reference to Holt as a “thief” (B, p. 62). Even as the Beetle is a visitor to England, he still identifies Holt as a “thief” and of a class that even the Beetle “himself” is above. For the Beetle, Holt’s thievery is also reflective of the British colonial history by which Britain stole spoils from a land that was not theirs (as in Egypt). However, when the Beetle’s foreign and perverse body and Holt’s poor body, later described by Miss Lindon as written all over “with privation,” (B, p. 208) become one in

3

THE MONSTROUS POWER OF UNCERTAINTY …

53

Lessingham’s study (B, pp. 76, 82), this is a way for Marsh to indicate that Holt’s poor body and poverty are just as “undesirable” in England as the threatening foreign body/Beetle. The traditional views of Holt as a dangerous vagrant reflect Britain’s contempt for the poor at home and its harsh colonial policies abroad. However, Champnell’s narration and the Beetle’s foreign and perverse violence against Holt, highlight Holt’s indigence, sympathize with Holt’s plight, and take a more serious attitude toward understanding the circumstances of the poor in fin-de-siècle Britain. By the fin de siècle, New Liberals focused on policy to help the poor (Hurren, 2007, p. 37). They determined that “the New Poor Law was unfair to the vast majority of the labouring poor whose poverty was involuntary” (37). Champnell’s narration and the Beetle’s foreign and perverse violence against Holt emphasize Holt’s destitution. Readers can see and feel Holt’s degradation. Holt’s difficulties, his homelessness and abusive treatment by the Beetle, are reflected in the scene when Miss Lindon takes him from the street to her house: When he [Holt] saw me [Miss Lindon], and heard who I was, the expressions of his gratitude were painful in their intensity. The tears streamed down his cheeks. He looked to me like a man who had very little life left in him. He looked weak, and white, and worn to a shadow. Probably he had never been robust, and it was only too plain that privation had robbed him of what little strength he ever had. He was nothing else but skin and bone. Physical and mental debility was written large all over him. (B, p. 208)

This scene exemplifies the physical and mental difficulties that Holt experiences as a result of poverty and his vulnerability to the Beetle. Holt’s weeping in front of Miss Lindon reflects his anguish after working to hurt a woman who is now helping him. And, his physical description foreshadows his early and untimely death. The words, that he “had very little left in him,” that he is “weak, and white, and worn to a shadow,” that he is “skin and bone,” and that “physical and mental debility,” characterize his appearance and indicate that “privation” has, indeed, robbed him of a life. Holt is dependent upon others, now, for his survival. And he is fortunate when his company is Miss Lindon and Atherton who take care of him, but unfortunate after the Beetle finds him again and insists on using him one last time to further his/her revenge. Champnell, Atherton, and Lessingham find Holt barely alive after his ordeal with the Beetle. And, they are also witnesses to Holt’s death, which is heartrending:

54

E. D. MACALUSO

A momentary paroxyism seemed to shake the very foundations of his being. His whole frame quivered. He feel back on to the bed, - ominously. The doctor examined him in silence – while we too were still. “This time he’s gone for good, there’ll be no conjuring him back again.” I felt a sudden pressure on my arm, and found that Lessingham was clutching me with probably unconscious violence. (B, p. 306)

Holt’s death is unsettling because it demonstrates the violence that Holt experiences at the hands of the foreign and perverse Beetle and Holt’s vulnerability to this violence as a result of his poverty. Lessingham’s reaction—to clutch Champnell aggressively—could be anyone’s reaction after reading about Holt’s death. The characters and readers see the physical struggle that Holt endures at the hands of poverty, which, in this scene, makes him a slave to the Beetle’s violent, foreign and perverse, machinations. These machinations take Holt’s very life. The characters (and readers) are left to feel sorry for Holt and to be terrified by the way that he dies as a result of poverty and the Beetle’s murderous and compelling influence. By concluding that all of this violence is levied against Holt simply because he is vulnerable and poor makes readers think about the condition of the poor in fin-de-siècle Britain. Generani writes that “the system of social assistance is shown as insufficient, dehumanized, and corrupt; … Marsh has created an ambiguous text that destabilizes many of the chauvinistic fundamentals of British imperial ideology by exposing a social system that produces what it condemns and cannot function as a pristine model of progress and civilization” (40). The veil of progress is pulled away from finde-siècle Britain to reveal the absolute impoverishment of the poor. Holt’s poverty evokes sympathy from the other characters of the novel, especially from Miss Lindon who bathes, dresses, and feeds Holt after she takes him into her home. This sympathy defines the progressive attitude that the text, and its emphasis on Holt’s penury, suggests should be taken in relation to the poor. Marsh suggests, then, that, to truly help the poor, the system must be reformed. Then, Britain will live up to its model of “progress and civilization” (40). The aforementioned scenes of Holt’s indigence and death suggest that there were, indeed, two ways to view the poor at the fin de siècle; they were either corruptible vagrants or sympathetic everymen. This contrast is shown by the monster’s, the Beetle’s, foreign and perverse violence against Holt. Marsh still insists, though, that not very much was done for the poor at the fin de siècle. Mostly, they were condemned to live their lives as corruptible

3

THE MONSTROUS POWER OF UNCERTAINTY …

55

vagrants. However, the sympathy that readers find for Holt suggests the possibility of a new future. British subjects did feel for the poor and could learn how to treat them fairly.

3.4

British Colonialism in Egypt: A Conversation Between Jingoism and Anti-imperialism

In the years following Britain’s occupation of Egypt, Britain established its rule of law in Egypt. The British felt that it was their duty to abolish slavery in Egypt so that the Egyptians would become “civilized” and “govern themselves” (Powell, 2003, p. 2). In reality, this was one way that the British assumed governing power in Egypt (2). If the British could control such a huge bartering system in Egypt, like slavery, then they could control the territory as well (2). Indeed, the British controlled the entire infrastructure of Egypt after the military occupation in 1882. When a famous slavery case, regarding Sudanese women who were smuggled into Egypt by wealthy Egyptians, was brought to trial in 1894, the British fought the Egyptian pashas who were harboring Sudanese slave women over who had the authority to control or even eliminate slavery in Egypt (2). Even though slavery between Egypt and the Sudan had been an established social custom in Egypt, the British attorneys and officials who had abolished slavery in Egypt still sentenced the man who admitted to buying and selling a slave woman to five months imprisonment (4). And, Shaghlub, the man who was responsible for harboring these women, was sentenced to five years of hard labor (4). This was one way the British thought they could assert their power over Egypt by punishing those Egyptians who would not conform to Britain’s rule of law (2). By disciplining the Egyptians in this way, the British asserted a racialized rule of law that placed the white British in positions of power to “protect” black African and other Sudanese slave women from “exploitation” by the Egyptians (2). This “protection,” however, demeaned both the Egyptians and the Sudanese; it implied that “Arabs” were not fit to make and maintain their own rule of law in Egypt and that black Sudanese women were so “base” and “vulnerable” that they needed the white British to keep them from being enslaved by the Egyptians. This is one productive example of how race structured power relationships and the law in British-occupied Egypt. Like the British did to the Egyptians and Sudanese, Atherton, Coleman, and Lessingham demean the Beetle because he/she is of the Arab Egyptian race; they attempt to assert their own rule of law in the face of what they

56

E. D. MACALUSO

deem to be a “foreign threat.” Atherton refers to the Beetle as “of the ‘Algerians’ whom one finds all over France, and who are the most persistent, insolent and amusing of pedlars” (B, p. 103). Atherton’s accusation is racist and degrading. He insists the Beetle needs civilizing like the Algerians whom the French have occupied, and he believes that the only suitable occupation for such a “man” (as the Beetle is a man with Atherton at this moment of the novel) is that of an “insolent pedlar” or a haughty beggar. Atherton describes the Beetle as “less gaudy” and much “dingier” than “Arabs of the boulevard” because of his/her “yellow burnoose” which signifies an Arab of the Sudan and his/her relationship to other Africans as opposed to an Arab who has been “civilized” (103). Miss Coleman refers to “that Arab party” as “the devil himself” which describes her feeling that the Beetle is “evil” and does not belong in her house or in “Christian” London (B, p. 275). Lessingham even goes as far as to threaten the Beetle with violence and imprisonment when he/she calls upon Lessingham in Lessingham’s study as Holt: “the police shall be sent for, and the law shall take its course, - to the bitter end!” (B, p. 77). Lessingham, out of fear of the Beetle’s overtly sexual relatives, particularly the Egyptian women that Lessingham encounters in a brothel in Cairo, kills the priestess of Isis after he witnesses what he thinks are white British women being sacrificed to the altar of these women’s idolatry: “And, unless I [Lessingham] err, in each case the sacrificial object was a woman, stripped to the skin, as white as you or I, - and before they burned her they subjected her to every variety of outrage of which even the minds of demons could conceive” (B, p. 244). Atherton, Coleman, and Lessingham construct the Beetle’s foreign and perverse monstrosity as a result of their racism, xenophobia, and homophobia and create the conditions for the Beetle’s colonial insurgent violence as a result of their allegiances to the British imperial and colonial projects. The Beetle responds to this hatred and the killing of his/her relative by exacting his/her own revenge against the Englishman, Lessingham, who, like English women who represented British civilization (Garnett, 1990, p. 30), has thoughtlessly, vengefully, and in the name of progress taken the life of the priestess of Isis. The Beetle refers to Lessingham as: a devil, - hard as the granite rock, - cold as the snows of Ararat. In him there is none of life’s warm blood, - he is accursed! … Her whom he has taken to his bosom he would put away from him as if she had never been, - he would steal from her like a thief in the night, - he would forget she ever was! But

3

THE MONSTROUS POWER OF UNCERTAINTY …

57

the avenger follows after, lurking in the shadows, hiding among the rocks, waiting, watching, till his time shall come. And it shall come! – the day of the avenger! – ay the day! (B, p. 64)

The Beetle accuses Lessingham of being fecklessly English in the sense that Lessingham has no regard for the Egyptian life that he has taken, or the colonial thievery that helped him to take it; the Beetle as the avenger will see to it that Lessingham is punished for his nefarious deeds. The Beetle demands that Lessingham be responsible for what he has done just like the British are responsible for the colonial atrocities that occurred in Egypt. Marsh has clearly captured the tensions between the British and Arab Egyptians. He renders traditional British attitudes of racism, xenophobia, and homophobia against a colonial insurgent Beetle, a foreign and perverse monster, whom they think is responsible for violence against Britain. And, Marsh captures the Beetle’s own hatred for a British race of people who have cost him/her a relative, thereby bringing violence to Egypt. There were British subjects who believed that Britain’s occupation of Egypt was misguided and even wrong. Annie Besant was one of these subjects. She claimed that the Arabi Pasha was not “an unscrupulous and savage adventurer” but a keen nationalist who was acting in Egypt’s best interest by fighting for its independence (Besant quoted in Burton, 2001, p. 209). After fighting took place between the British and Egyptians to possess the Suez Canal (in order to unite their individual empires), she also wrote that the British anxiety that Egypt would close the Suez Canal out of greed was simply inaccurate; that it was the British military officials who threatened to close the canal to gain power in Northern Egypt (ibid.). Also, she disapproved of Britain’s military actions to force Egypt to pay its debts to the European nations to which it was responsible, because she believed that the military use of force to try to ensure this repayment was a rash sacrifice of young British lives (210). She contended that the claim of “self-defense,” that some Britons made after the nationalist rebellions in Egypt, made no sense, because Britain had initially invaded and violently attacked Egypt (210). Besant argues that there is merit in understanding these events from the progressive perspective of the Egyptians. When Lessingham regrets his killing of the priestess of Isis, Champnell’s narration suggests that the Beetle may have some cause for revenge after all and that the British have the potential to regret their actions in colonial Egypt. Lessingham says, and he admits that this recollection is a product of his own logic: “I knew that I was struggling for more than life, that

58

E. D. MACALUSO

the odds were all against me, that I was staking my all upon the casting of a die, - I stuck at nothing which could make me victor” (B, p. 245). He admits that he acted rashly in killing the priestess out of fear for his life. The tone of Lessingham’s recollection here, and what he says, suggests that he, in part, regrets his actions: “Tighter and tighter my pressure grew, - I did not stay to think if I was killing her – till on a sudden –” (B, p. 245). When he confesses that he disregarded the notion as to whether or not he was killing her, he admits that this lapse was deplorable. Lessingham’s physical gestures express his discontent as well: “Mr. Lessingham stopped. He stared with fixed, glassy eyes, as if the whole was being re-enacted in front of him. His voice faltered. I [Champnell] thought he would break down” (B, p. 245). Lessingham regrets killing the priestess of Isis and his recollection of this event gives him great pause. He is traumatized by this event, his speech stops, he stares at empty space with tears in his eyes (hence their “glassiness”), and he almost breaks down over his feelings of guilt over killing the priestess. He asserts that he felt her life leave her body and what replaced this was “some wild nightmare” (B, p. 245). Lessingham is referring to the nightmare of the Beetle’s presence and his/her foreign and perverse monstrosity. This may also be read, however, as a reflection of his complete horror at what he has done and the responsibility he carries for his action—the fact that he killed a monster who is also an Egyptian woman (in this scene with Lessingham). The entire affair is a “nightmare” (B, p. 245). He admits that he fled the scene, out of fear and guilt; he knows that he is answerable for this immoral deed: “I fled as if all the fiends in hell were at my heels” (B, p. 245). Lessingham’s shameful recounting of this deed and his regret of his actions make the Beetle’s bid for revenge understandable. Lessingham’s regret, moreover, resembles the potential for the British to lament their own actions in Egypt. Annie Besant expresses this regret and the traditional British convey it with their blamable fear of “reverse colonization” (Arata, 1996, p. 107). Marsh leaves his readers with a sense of shame over the way these events end, which makes them all the more regrettable, and lends support for those who opposed British colonialism. Readers will both identify the traditional perspective of the Beetle as a murderous colonial insurgent and the progressive point of view that understands the Beetle’s bid for revenge as a response to the violence perpetrated out of greed in his/her homeland that has taken the life of a relative. The Beetle’s simultaneous foreign and perverse monstrosity and humanity make colonialism a vexed topic for conversation and debate in fin-de-siècle Britain. Should Britain support its

3

THE MONSTROUS POWER OF UNCERTAINTY …

59

efforts abroad or should it alter its colonial plans and support independence for the territories it possessed?

3.5

The New Woman as “Wild Woman” and Rational Agent

There was a significant amount of antifeminist response to the New Woman at Britain’s fin de siècle. Eliza Lynn Linton called these New Women, “Wild Women,” because they mostly opposed marriage, they wanted too much education and independence, and they wished for political rights and power over men (Ledger, 1997, p. 12). To Linton, these women could change the very fabric of Victorian society, because they refused their “traditional” positions as wives and mothers (12). To others, like Walter Besant, if women stopped marrying and having children, the family was threatened (12). In his famous essay, “Tommyrotics,” Hugh Stutfield contended that the New Woman’s “sexual license” was a distinct threat to the family (13). Even though he supported New Women, generally, in his criticism of their novels, W. T. Stead also sanctioned George Egerton’s Keynotes and Discords , her collection of short stories, on the grounds that it focused too much on the “Sex Question” or the study of women’s and men’s sexualities (13). Henry Maudsley and Charles Harper feared that New Women’s “masculine” bid for more education (e.g., their studying at secondary schools and colleges for women like Girton) would interfere with their “natural” duties as child-bearers (18). Maudsley is even famous for writing: “It will have to be considered whether women can scorn delights and live laborious days of intellectual exercise and production, without injury to their functions as the conceivers, mothers and nurses of children. For it would be an ill thing, if it should so happen, that we got the advantages of a quantity of female intellectual work at the price of a puny, enfeebled, and sickly race” (1894, pp. 471–472). Maudsley and Harper believed that furthering New Women’s educations would only lead to the destruction of the family, and therefore, the degeneration of the British “race.” It was clear to these antifeminists that New Women were only rabble-rousers who were akin to revolutionaries who wanted to destroy British society. Indeed, conservative Parliamentarians and officers of the law believed that these New Women, some of whom were clamoring for more rights, were truly interested in ruining society. In fact, in 1884, after a women’s suffrage amendment was submitted to the Prime Minister, “the Right Honourable William E. Gladstone, asking that a women’s suffrage amendment

60

E. D. MACALUSO

to the County Franchise Bill be submitted to the free and unbiased consideration of the House,” Gladstone rejected the amendment and forced Liberal members of Parliament to vote against it (Pankhurst, 1914, p. 14). When some women decided to introduce an independent suffrage bill, Gladstone did not even allow it to be discussed in the House (14). This condemnation of New Women, some of whom worked as suffragettes, is apparent in Marsh’s novel through Mr. Lindon’s dismissive attitude toward his own, “New,” and modern daughter, Miss Lindon. When Miss Lindon decides to “go along with” and marry the liberal Lessingham, a direct challenge to her father’s traditional and conservative politics, she shows, contrary to the comments of Harris and Vernooy (2012, p. 346), that she is far more “New” and independent than a girl who simply obeys her father and fiancé (346). Still, Mr. Lindon’s reaction to Miss Lindon’s independent choice of Lessingham for her husband is one of great consternation. In Atherton’s account, after Mr. Lindon figures out that Miss Lindon has deceived him in order to see Lessingham at Lessingham’s great speech before Parliament, Mr. Lindon, again, reacts angrily toward this: She [Miss Lindon] had just slipped her arm through Lessingham’s when her father [Mr. Lindon] approached. Old Lindon stared at her on the Apostle’s arm, as if he could hardly believe that it was she. “I [Mr. Lindon] thought that you were at the Duchess’s?” “So I have been, papa, and now I’m here.” “Here!” Old Lindon began to stutter and stammer, and to grow red in the face, as is his wont when at all excited. … “I-I-I’ll take you down to it [the carriage]. I-I don’t approve of y-your w-w-waiting in a place like this.” “Thank you, papa, but Mr. Lessingham is going to take me down. – I shall see you afterwards. – Goodbye.” (B, p. 129)

Mr. Lindon clearly expresses his dismay at his daughter’s modern partnering with Lessingham, stammering while insisting that he escorts her home. The text also suggests that Lindon objects as much to his daughter’s sense of independence as he does to her choice of Lessingham as a partner: Anything cooler in the way in which she walked off I [Atherton] do not think I ever saw. This is the age of feminine advancement. Young women think nothing of twisting their mothers round their fingers, let alone their fathers; but the fashion in which that young woman walked off, on the Apostle’s arm, and left her father standing there, was, in its way, a study. Lindon seemed scarcely able to realize that the pair of them had gone. Even after they had disappeared in the crowd he stood staring after them, growing redder and

3

THE MONSTROUS POWER OF UNCERTAINTY …

61

redder, till the veins stood out upon his face, and I thought that an apoplectic seizure threatened. (B, pp. 129–130)

Miss Lindon’s cool act of asserting her independence by walking off with Lessingham clearly threatens her father. His reaction is one of deep indignation. He stares after them in shock and his face grows extremely red to the point at which Atherton believes the old man will have a stroke. Mr. Lindon’s complete disapproval of his daughter’s actions at this moment reveals the paternal hostility that New Women, like Miss Lindon, faced as they governed their own lives according to their own wishes. Other authority figures, including medical doctors, found New Women so rebellious and menacing to society that they confined these women to institutions as hysterics. In The Female Malady, Elaine Showalter writes about this phenomenon: First of all, doctors had noticed that hysteria was apt to appear in young women who were especially rebellious. F. C. Skey, for example, had observed that his hysterical patients were likely to be more independent and assertive than “normal” women, “exhibiting more than usual force and decision of character, of strong resolution, fearless of danger” (1985, p. 55). Donkin too had seen among his patients a high percentage of unconventional women – artists and writers. From these observations, it was a quick jump to conclude that rebelliousness could produce nervous disorder and its attendant pathologies. (145)

Like the women mentioned in Showalter’s book, Miss Lindon rebels against her father to marry Lessingham, becomes actively involved in politics by lecturing at a Working Woman’s Club meeting (like Edith Simcox who often gave politically charged lectures at the Shirtmakers’ Committee [B, p. 188; Fulmer & Barfield, 1998, p. 5]), and risks endangering herself in solving the mystery behind the Beetle’s attacks. Her aggressive behavior and disregard for danger are abnormal and risky according to the traditional characters in Marsh’s novel. Atherton, as a scientist, has a particular objection to Miss Lindon’s rebelliousness and he attempts to curb it. When Miss Lindon insists on traveling to the Beetle’s hideaway with Holt and Atherton to find out who is responsible for Holt’s, Lessingham’s, and her own attacks, Atherton tells Miss Lindon that he does not think it is a good idea. Miss Lindon says to him: “I will come and help you [Atherton] to help him [Holt] find it [the Beetle’s lair]. Sydney laughed, - but I could see he did not altogether relish the suggestion” (B, p. 213). When Miss Lindon asserts

62

E. D. MACALUSO

that she will accompany Atherton and Holt on their quest to find the Beetle, Atherton thinks that Miss Lindon is making a joke and he laughs. He does not take her initiative seriously. When he seriously considers her proposal, it becomes apparent that he does not “relish” the idea (213). Aside from Atherton’s attempt to limit Miss Lindon’s behavior, he believes that Miss Lindon should receive “medical assistance” after her “ordeal” with the Beetle (B, p. 313). To Mr. Lindon and Atherton (antifeminists), Miss Lindon is the victim of her own bad behavior, in addition to the Beetle’s foreign and perverse violence and his/her own rebellious behavior, which is why Miss Lindon must be brought home and treated for trauma. It is not surprising, then, that readers learn that Miss Lindon has been confined to her home where she experiences her “insanity” within the safe walls of Lessingham’s house (B, p. 319). Additionally, after the Beetle attacks her, Miss Lindon’s strength of character and her assertive behavior are reduced to ephemera. The Beetle violently removes her hair and clothes, another indication of the Beetle’s foreign and perverse violence (as the Beetle emerges from a foreign rug and violates Miss Lindon with the removal of her hair and clothes), and Champnell asserts that she is paraded around London as a “tramp” or as an indigent young boy (B, p. 231, 313). The Beetle completely mocks Miss Lindon’s bid for modernity, as a New Woman, by dressing her as a man and ensuring that their roaming around London traumatizes her. This, too, prevents the Beetle from being apprehended initially. Mr. Lindon’s, Atherton’s, and the Beetle’s objections to Miss Lindon, as a New Woman, are made very clear by Marsh’s text and the Beetle’s foreign and perverse monstrosity. They accurately represent the antifeminist population of traditional and conservative British who were at odds with the New Woman and thought she was a threat to society. However, Marsh’s novel would not represent the historical period of the fin de siècle and its culture, accurately, if it did not also portray the progressive population of British who identified with and supported the New Woman. Like Miss Lindon, there were New Women at the fin de siècle who advocated for women’s independence and their rights. Though she was a proponent of marriage, Sarah Grand suggested, in her highly influential novel The Heavenly Twins, that women should hold their husbands accountable for their sexual health and disapprove of their philandering. Althea Crackanthorpe argued that if women could not marry, they should procure independent lives for themselves by working for a living and earning a salary that supported them in their single lifestyles (1894, p. 23). Other

3

THE MONSTROUS POWER OF UNCERTAINTY …

63

New Women like Hepworth Dixon and Caird believed that marriage was becoming less popular with modern women and that the institution itself should be reformed. Hepworth Dixon believed that if: young and pleasing women are permitted to go to college, to live alone, to travel, to have a profession, to belong to a club, to give parties, to read and discuss whatsoever seems good to them, and to go to theatres without masculine escort, they have most of the privileges – and several others thrown in – for which the girl of 20 or 30 years ago was ready to barter herself to the first suitor who offered himself and the shelter of his name. (86)

She argued that since women acquired new privileges by fin de siècle’s end, they had employment, decent salaries, apartments of their own, entertainment and friends that they enjoyed, then, why would they need to marry? Marriage, according to her, seemed superfluous. To Caird, marriage was in serious need of reformation. She contended that marriage was only constructed as an institution after the reformation (2000, p. 186). According to Caird, marriage should no longer be a social contract. Instead, it should simply be a loving bond between two people (197). Caird was responsible for encouraging women to consider whether they truly benefited from marriage or a single lifestyle. Since social conditions were improving for women, Sarah Grand thought that the most significant problem for women to be amended was to encourage men to support women in their independent endeavors. In fact, in her essay “The New Aspect of the Woman Question,” Grand writes that New Women should extend: “a strong hand to the child man” to help him to support women’s rights (1894, p. 273). These women wrote about these specific issues in periodicals and novels that they published during the fin de siècle. They posed a significant challenge to the dominant discourse on the New Woman. Marsh, too, challenges the more prevalent and significant voices that condemned New Women by making his character, Miss Lindon, a New Woman. As I mentioned earlier, Marsh identifies Miss Lindon as a modern, or “New,” woman after she leaves Lessingham’s speech at the House of Commons, arm in arm with him, and Marsh’s text marks her as one who ascribes to the modern, “New,” or feminist movement: “This is the age of feminine advancement. Young women think nothing of twisting their mothers round their fingers, let alone their fathers; but the fashion in which that young woman [Miss Lindon] walked off, on the Apostle’s arm, and left her father standing there, was, in its way, a study” (B, p. 129). Marsh

64

E. D. MACALUSO

recognizes Miss Lindon as a woman of “the age of feminine advancement” and her rebellion against her father signifies her allegiance to this time and culture. She is also a New Woman because of her interest in politics. Her seconding of a formal resolution for a Working Women’s Club in Westminster, again, puts her at odds with her father—“I don’t know what papa would have said” (B, pp. 188–189)—and aligns her with women who were active in politics at this time—Miss Lindon mentions the Primrose League (B, p. 189). As Victoria Margree argues, Miss Lindon is a New Woman precisely because she disobeys her father and is active in politics (2007, p. 72). It is also Miss Lindon’s fearlessness in her aim to discover who is responsible for the attacks against Holt, Lessingham, and herself that also makes her a New Woman. Miss Lindon is not deterred by Holt’s body that she finds in the street or by his horrific calling out of Lessingham’s name (B, p. 202). She does not let fear stop her from finding out who attacked her in her home and who attacked Holt and Lessingham. She is the only one who keeps a rational perspective, when the Beetle is on the loose, suggesting that she accompany Holt and Atherton to find out who is responsible for the recent attacks: “Of course you understand, Sydney, that I [Miss Lindon] am coming with you” (B, p. 213). Holt and Lessingham react with fear when they encounter the Beetle. Holt is terrified during his initial encounter with the Beetle—“I was trembling so that I could scarcely stand. I was overwhelmed by a fresh flood of terror” (B, p. 49)—and so is Lessingham, even as he attempts to maintain an undisturbed demeanor—“His [Lessingham’s] very voice seemed changed; his frenzied choking accents would hardly have been recognized by either friend or foe” (B, p. 77). Miss Lindon does not let the Beetle’s foreign and perverse monstrosity ruin her life even after he/she attacks her. She dares to survive. And, she marries the man she loves and continues to write. This is the paradoxical way that the Beetle’s foreign and perverse monstrosity both imperils Miss Lindon’s modernity as a New Woman and forces Miss Lindon to reassert that modernity as an act of survival. Marsh’s support of the women’s movement and the New Woman is evident when he chooses to make his most rational and powerful character, Miss Lindon, a member of these movements. Marsh accurately portrays the cultural conflict surrounding the figure of the New Woman when he chooses to dramatize reactions to her by traditionalists, like Mr. Lindon, Atherton, and the Beetle in contrast to Miss Lindon’s progressive narration and its support of her as a New Woman and her narrative of survival. The

3

THE MONSTROUS POWER OF UNCERTAINTY …

65

debate between antifeminists and traditionalists and feminists and progressives about the New Woman (and how they view her) is clearly shown by Marsh’s novel and the Beetle’s foreign and perverse monstrosity. The New Woman is a complicated figure and a conflicted construct as readers see Miss Lindon as a victim who must be rounded up by her male friends and an empowered woman who survives a horrific attack, chooses the man she loves, and gives meaning to the rest of her days by writing. The Beetle’s foreign and perverse violence, his/her attack on Miss Lindon, allows us to see this conflict in the representation of the New Woman. His/her foreign and perverse violence against the other protagonists also allows readers to see the conflict that defines the debates about colonialism, sexuality, and poverty.

3.6

Finale: The Power of Marsh’s Monstrous Uncertainty

Instead of showing allegiance to one cultural perspective in The Beetle, Marsh creates multiple perspectives. Readers might identify with both the traditional and progressive perspectives portrayed clearly in relation to the primary social issues of the text—the New Woman, colonialism, sexuality, and poverty. And though the Beetle’s foreign and perverse violence suggests that the poor should be understood, what should be concluded about the New Woman, colonialism, and sexuality is less clear. The monster’s foreign and perverse violence has accurately captured the nationalistic spirit of the traditional members of British society who believed that foreigners were a problem that had the potential to ruin the British nation. However, when Lessingham almost loses his own sanity over his killing of the priestess of Isis, the vulnerability of a man of Parliament reveals the sympathies that some British had for the effort to rethink Britain’s colonial presence abroad. Still, the Beetle’s foreign and perverse monstrosity does not take an explicit position on this issue of colonialism, because the issue is fraught with conflict. This is the same for the issues of the New Woman and sexuality. The jury was still out on the New Woman and whether or not she was a progressive force for social change or if she was a threat to Britain. This conflict embedded in the British populous’ views of the New Woman, again, suggested by the Beetle’s foreign and perverse violence, extended to homosexuals: Were they degenerates who should be brought to justice, or were they benign lovers who deserved asylum? The answers to these questions are not clear; they reflect a dominant culture’s attempt

66

E. D. MACALUSO

to accommodate the emergent (Williams, 1977, p. 123). And, as Raymond Williams argues, the emergent will always vie with the dominant for power producing an ambiguous “new” culture that reflects both the dominant and the emergent (124). The Beetle’s foreign and perverse monstrosity reflects this same measure of cultural conflict and ambiguity. The figure of the monster, the Beetle, through his/her foreign and perverse violence, allows readers to see the conflict embedded in these issues and makes the identity of the British fin de siècle and the subjects of the New Woman, colonialism, sexuality, and poverty forever controversial.

Notes 1. Gail Marshallwrites that critics can no longer categorize the fin de siècle as of a particular cultural mode, or movement, or feeling. She writes that the fin de siècle was rife with many very different movements and complex cultural responses to all of these movements (movements like the study of psychology, decadence and aestheticism, the study of sexual identity, socialism and radicalism, the study of empire, the study of publishing industries and practices, the study of the visual arts and poetry, the New Woman, realism, the study of fantastic fiction, and varieties of performance) (vii–viii). 2. For the rest of the chapter, “traditional” and “progressive” will be referred to without the quotations. 3. I use the term his/her to refer to the monster, the Beetle, because his/her gender is ambiguous. He is a man with Holt in the opening and subsequent scenes of the novel. However, “he” changes into a woman after he/she is with Atherton in Atherton’s laboratory. 4. Marsh, R. (2004). The Beetle. Peterborough, ON: Broadview, will hereafter be referred to parenthetically as B followed by a page number. 5. There were other events that defined the colonial tensions between Britain and Egypt and that helped to make Britain the ruling presence in Egypt. Britain demonized the Arabi Pasha and his rebels, in the periodical press, for wishing to reclaim Egypt as their own nation through nationalist rebellions. The British also attempted to take control of the Suez Canal in Northern Africa to solidify their power and presence in the region and to ultimately unit their entire empire. They also engaged in military action to persuade Egypt to pay its debts to its European creditors and they also made a mockery of the Egyptian Khedive so that more Egyptians and Britons would support Britain’s ruling power in Egypt (Powell, 2003, p. 5). 6. In this scene, Holt identifies the Beetle as a male even after Holt is confused about the Beetle’s gender: “But, afterwards, I knew it to be a man, - for this reason, if for no other, that it was impossible that such a creature could be feminine” (B, p. 53).

3

THE MONSTROUS POWER OF UNCERTAINTY …

67

References Arata, S. (1996). Fictions of loss in the Victorian fin de siècle: Identity and empire. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Booth, W. (1890). In darkest England and the way out. London, UK: Funk & Wagnalls. Burton, A. (2001). Politics and empire in Victorian Britain: A reader. New York, NY: Palgrave. Caird, M. (2000). Marriage. In S. Ledger & R. Luckhurst (Eds.), The fin de siècle: A reader in cultural history c. 1880–1900 (pp. 77–80). Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. Crackanthorpe, B. A. (1894). The revolt of the daughters. Nineteenth Century, 35, 23–31. Crais, C., & Scully, P. (2009). Sara Baartman and the Hottentot Venus: A ghost story and a biography. Princeton and Oxford, MS: Princeton University Press. Dixon, E. H. (2000). Why women are ceasing to marry. In S. Ledger & R. Luckhurst (Eds.), The fin de siècle: A reader in cultural history c. 1880–1900 (pp. 83–88). Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. Fulmer, C. M., & Barfield, M. E. (1998). A monument to the memory of George Eliot: Edith J. Simcox’s Autobiography of a Shirtmaker. New York and London, OH: Garland. Garnett, R. (1990). Dracula and The Beetle: Imperial and sexual guilt and fear in late Victorian fantasy. In R. Garnett & R. J. Ellis (Eds.), Science fiction roots and branches: Contemporary critical approaches (pp. 30–54). New York, NY: St. Martin’s Press. Generani, G. (2012). The Beetle: A rhetoric betrayed. In P. Marks (Ed.), Literature and politics: Pushing the world in certain directions (pp. 35–45). Newcastle upon Tyne, UK: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. Gilman, S. L. (1985). Difference and pathology: Stereotypes of sexuality, race, and madness. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Grand, S. (1894). The new aspect of the woman question. North American Review, 158, 273. Greg, W. R. (1869). Why are women redundant? London, UK: Trubner. Halberstam, J. (1995). Skin shows: Gothic horror and the technology of monsters. Durham: Duke University Press. Harper, C. G. (1894). Revolted woman: Past, present and to come. London, UK: Elkin Matthews. Harris, W. C., & Vernooy, D. (2012). “Orgies of nameless horrors”: Gender, orientalism, and the queering of violence in Richard Marsh’s The Beetle. Papers on Language & Literature, 48(4), 339–381.

68

E. D. MACALUSO

Hurley, K. (1996). “The inner chambers of all nameless sin”: Richard Marsh’s The Beetle. In K. Hurley (Ed.), The Gothic body: Sexuality, materialism, and degeneration at the fin de siècle (pp. 124–141). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hurren, E. T. (2007). Protesting about pauperism: Poverty, politics and poor relief in late-Victorian England, 1870–1900. Woodbridge, UK: The Boydell Press. Kaplan, M. B. (2005). Sodom on the Thames: Sex, love, and scandal in Wilde times. Ithaca and London, OH: Cornell University Press. Kastan, D. S. (2006). The Oxford encyclopedia of British literature. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Katz, J. N. (2001). Love stories: Sex between men before homosexuality. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Klumpke, A. (1997). Rosa Bonheur: The artist’s (auto)biography. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan. Ledger, S. (1997). The New Woman: Fiction and feminism at the fin de siècle. Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press. Lombroso, C. (2006). Criminal man. Durham: Duke University Press. Malchow, H. L. (1996). Gothic images of race in nineteenth-century Britain. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Marcus, S. (2007). Between women: Friendship, desire, and marriage in Victorian England. Princeton and Oxford, MS: Princeton University Press. Margree, V. (2007). “Both in men’s clothing”: Gender, sovereignty, and insecurity in Richard Marsh’s The Beetle. Critical Survey, 19(2), 63–81. Marsh, R. (2004). The Beetle. Peterborough, ON: Broadview Press. Marshall, G. (2007). Introduction. In G. Marshall (Ed.), The Cambridge companion to the fin de siècle. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Maudsley, H. (1874). Sex in mind and education. Fortnightly Review, 21, 471–472. McLaughlan, R. (2012). Re-imagining the “dark continent” in fin de siècle literature. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Miller, N. (2006). Out of the past: Gay and lesbian history from 1869 to the present. New York, NY: Alyson Books. Pankhurst, E. (1914). My own story. London, UK: Eveleigh Nash. Powell, E. M. T. (2003). A different shade of colonialism: Egypt, Great Britain, and the mastery of the Sudan. Berkeley: University of California Press. Said, E. W. (1978). Orientalism. New York, NY: Vintage. Schaffer, T. (1994). “A Wilde desire took me”: The homoerotic history of Dracula. ELH, 61(2), 381–425. Showalter, E. (1985). The female malady: Women, madness, and English culture. New York, NY: Pantheon Books. Sutherland, G. (2015). In search of the New Woman: Middle-class women and work in Britain 1870–1914. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

3

THE MONSTROUS POWER OF UNCERTAINTY …

69

Symonds, J. A. (1999). A problem in modern ethics. In C. White (Ed.), Nineteenthcentury writings on homosexuality: A sourcebook. New York and London, OH: Routledge. Taylor, M. R. (1997). G.A. Henty, Richard Marsh, and Bernard Heldmann. Antiquarian Book Monthly, 10–15. Townsend, C. (1993). “I am the woman for spirit”: A working woman’s gender transgression in Victorian London. Victorian Studies, 36(3), 293–314. Vicinus, M. (2004). Intimate friends: Women who loved women, 1778–1928. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Williams, R. (1977). Marxism and literature. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. Winter, A. (1998). Mesmerized: Powers of mind in Victorian Britain. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

CHAPTER 4

The Rise of Harriet Brandt: A Critique of the British Aristocracy in Florence Marryat’s The Blood of the Vampire

I can never, never consent to sap your manhood and your brains, which do not belong to me but to the world, and see you wither like a poisoned plant, the leaves of which lie discoloured and dead upon the garden path. (Harriet to Pennell, Marryat, 2010, pp. 166–167)

At the fin de siècle, British subjects were fascinated by Darwin’s theory of pangenesis—“the belief that all cells of the body carry ‘gemmules,’ transmitters of inheritable properties, and the popular use of blood as a metaphor for heredity, yielded the common belief that inheritable properties were carried in the blood” (Davis, 2007, p. 42). They were persuaded by Galton’s theory of “eugenics”—“the study of agencies under social control that may improve or impair the racial qualities of future generations either physically or mentally” (Galton, 1904, p. 82). Many subjects who ascribed to pangenesis and eugenics believed that if they could control the inheritance of “good” or “bad” blood, they could control the development or decline of the British race. As a consequence of these beliefs, romantic relationships, between two loving partners, were occasionally replaced by, what Angelique Richardson calls, “eugenic love” or “the politics of the state mapped onto bodies: the replacement of romance with the rational selection of a reproductive partner in order better to serve the state through breeding” (Richardson, 2003, p. 9). British bodies were scrutinized based © The Author(s) 2019 E. D. Macaluso, Gender, the New Woman, and the Monster, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-30476-8_4

71

72

E. D. MACALUSO

on race, gender, and sexuality to produce the strongest race that was possible to carry out Britain’s imperial missions of progress and civilization. Scientists, like Galton, believed that the bodies of British subjects of color contained “gemmules” that were degenerative due to their proximity to, and close relationships with, “the lower animals” (McClintock, 1995, p. 37; Gilman, 1985, p. 83). Similar to what they thought about British subjects of color, these scientists held that New Women could siphon the life out of their male partners with their insatiable and “vampire-like” sexualities (Showalter, 1990, p. 180; Dijkstra, 1988, p. 347). Also, many of these doctors believed that New Women, in close proximity to one another, could pose a “lesbian threat” that was corrosive to the state because no offspring would come from these relationships (Macfie, 1991, pp. 60–61). These scientists’ anxieties over race, gender, and sex—their racism, sexism, and xenophobia wrought by “science”—are the subjects of Florence Marryat’s fin-de-siècle novel, The Blood of the Vampire. Her novel is about Harriet Brandt, a Creole woman from Britain’s colony, Jamaica, a “monster” cursed by birth with the vampire’s blood, who attempts to find friendship with Margaret Pullen and lasting intimacy with Ralph Pullen and Anthony Pennell. In spite of Harriet’s attempts to form a friendship with Margaret, and romantic attachments to Ralph and Pennell, the racist, sexist, and xenophobic ideologies that Doctor Phillips and Elinor Leyton espouse (respectively) prevent Harriet from acquiring these attachments and contribute to her monstrosity, social disciplining, marginalization, and her suicide. I am arguing that Phillips’s and Elinor’s racist, sexist, and xenophobic ideologies actually have the power to interrupt the intimacies in The Blood of the Vampire. Additionally, so far as Harriet is monstrous, the text of Marryat’s novel also indicates that she is kind, talented and accomplished, beautiful, mature, honorable, and charitable. Harriet’s humanity upends her monstrosity and makes monsters out of her British compatriots who willingly castigate her and send her to her death. Harriet is both a monster and a woman. It is up to the reader to decide whether she will discipline Harriet or support, and embrace, her. Harriet’s monstrosity, her biraciality and her status as a New Woman, allows readers to see the prejudices of the other British characters, the xenophobia, racism, and sexism passed off as science, and how these prejudices turn into petty jealousies and rivalries that ultimately separate Harriet from their social coterie. However, through the perspectives of Anthony Pennell, Miss Wynward, and the power of Marryat’s text, Harriet is lauded for her good qualities. It becomes difficult to solely condemn Harriet for her

4

THE RISE OF HARRIET BRANDT …

73

major fault, her cursed nature. According to Eldridge, Harriet’s suicide is tragic (1998, p. 12), because a vulnerable woman, with so many virtues and talents, is sacrificed by prejudice. The portion of Harriet that is human allows readers to see past her monstrosity and, instead, sympathize with her and even imagine a world that includes her. While Harriet gradually rises in esteem, the other British characters are exposed as hypocritical, shallow, and self-interested. Marryat acknowledges the power of scientific determinism, and Galton’s eugenics, by having Harriet, in part, be defined by her curse and commit suicide. However, Harriet’s character also calls the British establishment into question. As Pennell claims, this establishment needlessly casts aspersions upon a woman who is kind, talented and accomplished, beautiful, mature, honorable, and charitable.

4.1

The Vitriolic Effects of Elinor’s Xenophobia

Harriet’s initial attempts to procure English friendships are met with scorn by Elinor who only sees Harriet as an unscrupulous and undesirable foreigner. Even before Elinor accuses Harriet of eating “like a cormorant,” or like a rapacious bird or animal, the text indicates that Harriet is racially “Other” (Said, 1978, p. 1), or different, from the white English women, Margaret and Elinor. Harriet has “dark eyes,” that signify racial difference (Willburn, 2008, p. 439), and “lips of a deep blood colour” that denote a racial stereotype about black African women and their “thick lips” (Malchow, 1993, p. 103). Harriet’s racial difference, and identity as “Other” (Said, 1978, p. 1), prompts Elinor’s xenophobic reading of her. Elinor describes Harriet’s eating style as that of “a cormorant” and one that “made me [her] positively sick” as “I [she] never saw anyone in society gobble her food in such a manner” (BV, p. 6).1 Elinor suggests that Harriet eats like a ravenous bird or animal, which indicates that, to Elinor, Harriet’s appetites are insatiable. Elinor’s interpretation of Harriet’s eating style resembles Herbert Spencer’s characterization of primitive man’s unappeasable physical desires (Spencer, 1862, p. 324). Elinor insinuates that Harriet is like a primitive woman in her display of barbaric eating habits. Also, Elinor’s literal comparison of Harriet to an animal evokes Mantegazza’s and Cuvier’s comparisons of black African people to animals. Mantegazza’s “Morphological Tree of the Human Races” places black Africans at the bottom of the evolutionary scale along with animals (McClintock, 1995, p. 37). Cuvier’s assessment concluded that black African women were as sexually aggressive as the lower animals they lived with (Crais & Scully, 2009, p. 3).

74

E. D. MACALUSO

Because the text indicates a latent racial difference in Harriet, that is coupled with Elinor’s detection of a foreign difference in her, one that does not uphold the scruples of an English dining table, Elinor deems Harriet to be unfit for English society and for Margaret’s friendship: “I [Margaret] feel a little curious [about Harriet] … [Elinor] why on earth do you want to know?” (BV, p. 6). Elinor continually defies Margaret’s curious interest in Harriet. Elinor’s xenophobic prejudices keep Margaret from forming any sort of lasting bond of friendship with Harriet. Elinor’s xenophobia, a psychosomatic condition that employs fears about racial and foreign forms of difference (Tromp, 2013, p. 4), is what alienates Harriet and Margaret from one another and disrupts any real friendship that they might have with each other. Elinor’s xenophobic prejudices continue to separate Harriet and Margaret from one another even as Harriet and Margaret attempt to be friendly with each other. When Elinor hears of Harriet’s independence and her traveling with another female companion, she declares that this is “very improper” (BV, p. 9)! Her fear of Harriet’s independence and Harriet’s choice of a same-sex traveling companion belie supportive references to the dominant discourse about the New Woman, that the New Woman is independent to a fault and her independence indicates a blasphemous imitation of masculinity as in the Punch cartoon “The New Woman” (Ledger, 1997, p. 98, Figure 1) (Fig. 4.1). Elinor’s fear of Harriet’s traveling with Olga Brimont is reminiscent of vituperative critiques of New Women who elected to live and work with one another often to privilege the production of “intellectual tracts” over a “strong race” (Ledger, 1997, p. 18; Maudsley, 1874, pp. 471–472). Harriet’s differences inspire Elinor to think about her fear of foreign differences, in general, and she goes on to refer to the table d’hôte at Heyst to be a “menagerie” or a grouping of animals. These judgments of Harriet’s foreign and gendered differences are formulated to protect Margaret and Elinor from foreign contamination and degeneration (Nordau, 1998, p. 471) and to keep Margaret and Harriet from being friends. By pushing her chair away from Harriet, after Harriet confesses that she has spent time in a Catholic convent, Elinor indicates that she believes Harriet to be contaminated by Catholicism, a branch of Christianity she and her peers consider inferior to the Church of England (Moorman, 1973, p. 392). Even as Margaret attempts to be friendly with Harriet by encouraging Harriet to tell her story (BV, p. 10), Elinor wishes to put a stop to this intimacy, because she believes it is dangerous for Margaret to entertain

4

THE RISE OF HARRIET BRANDT …

75

Fig. 4.1 “The New Woman” cartoon from Punch

a friendship with a foreign woman from Jamaica, who has connections to Catholicism and to the racial “scourge” that defined slavery and Jamaica’s colonial system (Zieger, 2008, pp. 199–200). Elinor’s question to Margaret—“Are you not going to take a walk this evening?”—reflects Elinor’s desire to get Margaret away from a foreign (black and Catholic) influence, like Harriet, that may be “unhealthy”: “See what you [Margaret] have brought upon us [Elinor and Margaret]?” (BV, p. 11). Elinor confesses to Margaret that she is under Ralph’s orders to be wary of any kind of foreign influence: “But you [Margaret] must remember how Ralph cautioned us against making any acquaintances in a foreign hotel” (p. 12). Elinor is worried about the possibility of Margaret’s, and her own, degeneration based solely on their proximity to Harriet. Elinor expresses this last worry to Margaret in her reference to the foreign hotel and when she entreats Margaret not to tell Harriet of her engagement to Ralph: “Anyway, Margaret, let me entreat you not to discuss my private affairs with this new protégé of yours [Harriet]” (p. 12). At all costs, Elinor wishes to maintain her propriety and social position by practicing a strict sense of decorum in regards to her own engagement. She believes that if her engagement is kept a secret, foreigners or members of the lower classes will not sully it

76

E. D. MACALUSO

with their gossip: “I don’t want to see her [Harriet’s] saucy eyes goggling over the news of my engagement” (p. 12). Elinor subscribes to Richardson’s “eugenic love,” because it serves her engagement to Ralph and her loyalty to the state and allows her to keep her ties to the aristocracy and to perpetuate British aristocratic values (2003, p. 9). She does not wish to be contaminated by the gossip of foreigners that might make she and Ralph “‘Arry and ‘Arriet” (BV, p. 12), her impression of working-class affianced characters that she deplores. She vows to Margaret that there will be no “signs and symptoms” of her engagement to Ralph to keep her sense of British aristocracy and identity intact. Elinor’s dislike of Harriet, and her entreaties to Margaret not to make the young woman a member of their social set, reflects Elinor’s deep wish to protect the integrity of her English, aristocratic identity that she believes is imperiled by Harriet’s presence, even as this identity is really endangered by her family’s loss of money: “[Elinor] who had not a sixpence to give away herself” (p. 9). Elinor’s fear is one of contamination “From outside the self or even from within. It [xenophobia] is a fear of impurities, an anxiety about the corruption and dissolution of Englishness, even by the English themselves” (Tromp, 2013, p. 4). Elinor’s xenophobia has consequences: “More than just a mindset, xenophobia is a practice that results in antagonistic behavior towards the foreigner. That is, xenophobia is a phenomenon that has very real consequences and effects – politically, culturally, socially, psychologically, materially, physically” (Tromp, 2013, p. 4). It protects Margaret, a pristine English lady, from literal illness and metaphorical contamination and degeneration. Also, it disciplines Harriet into accepting her foreign and racial difference from Margaret and Elinor, and this effectively marginalizes Harriet. Elinor’s xenophobia forces Harriet to detect her ostracization from Margaret and Elinor (Margaret especially), and this is painful for Harriet. Harriet feels bad about this even as she does not yet give up her quest for real friends. Still, Elinor and Margaret’s shunning Harriet after Harriet makes Margaret ill is the first behavior that makes Harriet feel the depressing effects of her foreign (and New Womanish) difference from Elinor and Margaret. When Elinor protects Margaret from further illness, Elinor implies that it is, in some way, Harriet’s fault, and it is Harriet’s closeness that makes Margaret temporarily ill: “…but how it [the illness] happened you [Harriet] should know better than myself [Elinor]. … It may seem a laughing matter to you, Miss Brandt … but it is none to me [Elinor]. Mrs. Pullen is very far from strong and her health is not to be trifled with. However, I shall not let her out of my sight again” (BV, p. 18).

4

THE RISE OF HARRIET BRANDT …

77

Elinor maintains that it is the lack of “English ceremony” in a foreign hotel, like the Lion d’Or, that encourages the mixing of foreigners, members of the lower classes, and the English that procure risky social connections that cause illness: No! Thank you, Miss Brandt! Mrs. Pullen would, I am sure, prefer to return to the Hotel alone with me! You can easily join the Vieuxtemps or any other of the visitors to the Lion d’Or. There is not much ceremony observed amongst the English at these foreign places. It would be better perhaps if there were a little more! Come, Margaret, take my arm and we will walk as slowly as you like! But I shall not be comfortable until I see you safe in your own room! (BV, p. 19)

Elinor objects to Margaret walking along with Harriet’s help when she aims to get Margaret away from Harriet, and the possibility of Harriet’s poisonous influence, refusing Harriet’s offering of her arm to Margaret and insisting that Margaret and she travel back to their rooms alone. Elinor’s friendship with Margaret involves an English purity and exclusivity. Elinor demands that pristine English femininity be protected and preserved in the face of foreign contamination and degeneration. Elinor entertains the idea that Harriet’s foreign presence could corrupt Margaret and her Englishness. This explains why she persists in traveling back with Margaret to their rooms, to preserve their Englishness in the face of depraved foreigners that solely belong in the company of one another and not with pure, native English women like Elinor and Margaret. Elinor’s xenophobia protects her and Margaret’s Englishness, their friendship, and it disciplines Harriet into accepting her own foreignness. Elinor’s antagonism toward Harriet—leaving Harriet on the Digue alone without any company—forces Harriet to consider the effects of her foreignness, and her own marginalization, which, make her quite sad: So the two ladies moved off together leaving Harriet Brandt standing disconsolately on the Digue watching their departure. Mrs. Pullen had uttered a faint good-night to her but had made no suggestion that she should walk back with them, and it seemed to the girl as if they both in some measure blamed her for the illness of her companion. What had she done she asked herself, as she reviewed what had passed between them, that could in any way account for Mrs. Pullen’s illness? She liked her so much – so very much – she had so hoped she was going to be her friend – she would have done anything, and given anything, sooner than put her to inconvenience in any

78

E. D. MACALUSO

way. As the two ladies moved slowly out of sight Harriet turned sadly and walked the other way. She felt lonely and disappointed. She knew no one to speak to and there was a cold empty feeling in her breast as though, in losing her hold on Margaret Pullen, she had lost something on which she had depended. (BV, p. 19)

Harriet keenly feels the sting of the social rebuff by the two ladies, again, as a result of their xenophobia. She feels it when Elinor implies that Harriet made Margaret ill and, again, when they leave her alone on the Digue. Harriet feels the enmity of these actions so much that she questions her own behavior: “What had she done she asked herself… that could in any way account for Mrs. Pullen’s illness?” Harriet takes the blame from Elinor and Margaret because she has no one to “speak to,” or talk with, about this painful incident. She feels “lonely” and “disappointed.” She is forced to sacrifice her hope of being friendly with Margaret and the effect of this leaves not only “a cold empty feeling in her breast” but also an actual acknowledgment that “she had lost something on which she had depended.” This moment not only indicates Harriet’s sadness but also suggests that Harriet is now in a precarious position emotionally and socially, which only makes her all the more vulnerable to the social prejudices of Elinor, Margaret, Phillips, and Ralph. Elinor attempts to persuade Margaret to be more careful of Harriet and to be slightly skeptical about Harriet’s offer of friendship. This attempt, too, comes from xenophobic, sexist, and homophobic motivations that intersect with one another. Margaret tells Elinor that she likes Harriet, but she leaves her feeling extremely weak and depressed (BV, p. 39). Elinor responds by concurring with Margaret’s hesitance about Harriet, saying: “‘And no wonder,’ said her friend, ‘considering that she has that detestable school-girl habit of hanging upon one’s arm and dragging one down almost to the earth. How you have stood it so long beats me! Such a delicate woman you are too. It proves how selfish Miss Brandt must be, not to have seen that she was distressing you’” (p. 39). Elinor contemptuously refers to Harriet’s “school-girl” habit with Margaret. As Vicinus writes, girls at English boarding schools often had raves for, or crushes on, other schoolgirls, and these relationships were normative within the context, and setting, of boarding-school life (2004, p. 604). However, when schoolgirl behavior is exhibited outside of school, in a public context, like at the Lion d’Or, Elinor deems this behavior to be inappropriate. Though there is no “lesbian threat” between Harriet and Margaret, as Macfie and Case

4

THE RISE OF HARRIET BRANDT …

79

would like to assert (1991, pp. 60–61; 1991, p. 9), the female-to-female, schoolgirlish relationship that Harriet attempts to strike up with Margaret is improper. Harriet and Margaret’s acquaintanceship is threatening to Elinor because it privileges the potential for an intimate relationship between women, and this challenges Elinor’s adherence to late Victorian patriarchy (Heller, 1996, p. 79; Major, 2007, p. 161). That Elinor mentions that Harriet “hangs upon one’s arm” and “drags one down almost to the earth” refers to the actual physical action of one girl dragging the arm of another girl down. But, the phrase also has a hidden meaning as well. That Harriet “drags” Margaret “down to the earth” is another expression of Elinor’s xenophobic anxiety over Margaret’s possible corruption and degeneration by Harriet. Elinor refers to Margaret as a “delicate woman” that needs to be protected in the face of a “selfish” West Indian woman who imperils the life of an English lady. Elinor compares Harriet to Baroness Gobelli, another character with foreign ties, when Harriet and the Baroness form a friendship that, to Elinor, is worthy of note so that Elinor can imply that the two women deserve one another. She observes: “the Gobellis and Miss Brandt have evidently struck up a great friendship” (BV, p. 39). In a scene prior to this one, the Baroness and Harriet meet and the Baroness succeeds in bringing out Harriet’s “true nature” and desires, when the Baroness promises to acquaint Harriet with German princes, who would surely wish to court her (p. 37). Elinor aligns the Baroness and Harriet, here, because the Baroness’s working-class background and her choice of a foreign husband match Harriet’s Jamaican foreignness and the fact that Harriet might have a bloodthirsty and/or lustful nature that could be dangerous—“all the Creole in her came to the surface” (p. 111). Elinor suggests that Harriet and the Baroness have comparably corrosive natures that should be prohibited. Elinor implies that Harriet’s foreignness and the Baroness’s working-class background are equally threatening to the British protagonists like Elinor and Margaret. Margaret merely thinks that Elinor is jealous of Harriet: “did her [Elinor’s] jealousy of the West Indian heiress render her capable of uttering untruths?” (40). However, Elinor holds firm in her dislike of Harriet, conveying to Margaret: “Well! I think she’s altogether odious. … I thought it the first time I saw her and I shall think it to the last!” (40). Elinor asserts that there is something nefarious about Harriet’s character—she has seen it in Harriet from “first” to “last.” Elinor’s words foreshadow, and, perhaps, even shape, the emergence of Harriet’s “true nature,” her harmful nature that she inherited from her homicidal father and sensuous/greedy mother. This proves

80

E. D. MACALUSO

Elinor’s hypothesis, and the scientific theory, like Galton’s, that Phillips adopts later, that people with terrible natures will affect those around them adversely (Stepan, 1982, pp. 111–112; Lombroso, 2006, pp. xxiv–xxx). Elinor insinuates to Margaret that since there is something wrong with Harriet’s nature, only violence can come in its wake. It is rather telling, then, that, in the next scene of the novel, baby Ethel is sick from Harriet’s attentions and does eventually succumb to them. Harriet’s deadly nature does, indeed, harm Ethel, and it alienates Margaret and everyone else from her, just as Elinor and Phillips predict. The cursed and violent parts of Harriet’s nature, and the construction, and reinforcement, of that nature by Elinor’s xenophobia, do, indeed, ruin the potential intimacy between Margaret and Harriet as Harriet takes the life of Margaret’s only child. Harriet’s foreign, racial, and sexual differences, and their purported perils (as described by Elinor and Phillips), do impede her attachments with Margaret, Ralph, and Pennell and eventually lead her to her death by her own hands.

4.2

Phillips’s Injurious Racism and Sexism

Since Margaret suspects Elinor’s motivations for keeping her away from Harriet and thinks jealousy is behind Elinor’s hatred of Harriet, it takes Phillips, and his racist and sexist account of Harriet’s personal history and parentage, to break Margaret’s and Ralph’s affections for Harriet. Phillips’s perpetuation of “Jamaican folklore and racist [and sexist] stereotypes” of the black African people like Harriet that populated Jamaica together with his claim that his ideas come from his study of heredity contribute to Harriet’s marginalization and later her suicide (Haefele-Thomas, 2012, pp. 114–115). Phillips reveals his unconscious fear of “reverse colonization” (Arata, 1996, p. 107) when he recounts how Harriet’s slave grandmother was bitten by a vampire bat in Jamaica: They declared that when her slave mother was pregnant with her, she was bitten by a Vampire bat, which are formidable creatures in the West Indies and are said to fan their victims to sleep with their enormous wings whilst they suck their blood. Anyway the slave woman did not survive her delivery and her fellows prophecied that the child would grow up to be a murderess. Which doubtless she was in heart, if not in deed! (BV, pp. 68–69)

4

THE RISE OF HARRIET BRANDT …

81

Phillip’s fear of the curse of the Jamaican vampire bat is reminiscent of Stoker’s British characters’ fears of the effects of Dracula’s vampirism. According to Arata, Dracula’s vampirism signified, in part, Britain’s fear of Eastern European people, and the Eastern European Jew, coming to Britain and corrupting Britain’s pristine power and civilization by transferring tainted foreign blood to British subjects through miscegenation (107). Similarly, Phillips suggests that the effects of the Jamaican vampire bat (the similar transference of corrupt blood from black Jamaicans to white British or the effects of “reverse colonization”) will adversely affect Harriet’s white, British victims; she will sap their lives without their ever being aware of it. According to Phillips, Harriet’s vampirism reflects Jamaica’s “reverse colonization,” and this “reverse colonization” will adversely affect refined British subjects. Willburn attests that there are two additional meanings behind Harriet’s curse that also suggest Britain’s (and Phillips’s) fear of Jamaica’s “reverse colonization.” Firstly, the effects of the violence of Harriet’s Jamaican vampirism reflect black Jamaicans’ anger about slavery and the murderous atrocities perpetrated by the white English in Jamaica (2008, p. 439). Hence Margaret’s awkwardness after Harriet discusses her joy in beating “the little niggers” (BV, p. 17). Secondly, to Phillips, women of color like Harriet, and her mother, and grandmother have an undeniable link to the occult because of their practice of “Obeah witchcraft” and their almost criminal sensuality (2008, p. 438). According to Phillips, witchcraft and sexuality, too, threaten British subjects, particularly white male British subjects (like Ralph), because these black women can seduce these men and corrupt them (Mecke, 1979, p. 189). The power of seduction is Phillips’s ultimate fear of Harriet’s mother and Harriet herself. Phillips contends that Harriet’s mother’s ability to seduce slaves and lure them into Brandt’s “Pandemonium” as a result of her “sensuous, greedy, and bloodthirsty” nature also reflects his fear of “reverse colonization” (BV, p. 68). Phillips fears that Harriet will seduce his white British friends in the same way that Harriet’s mother seduced her slaves. Phillips’s racist and sexist conjecture about Harriet’s mother’s homicidal abilities matches Lombroso’s assertion about women of color and criminal women of color. Lombroso believed that black African women’s atavism and sexuality ultimately brought about their criminality; if they were not murderers, they were most definitely prostitutes (1895, p. 111). Phillips echoes Lombroso’s rhetoric as he talks about Harriet’s mother; she is a “fat, flabby, half case,” who is “sensuous and greedy,” who is

82

E. D. MACALUSO

“bloodthirsty,” and who takes great pleasure in bloodshed (BV, p. 68). According to Phillips, she is a perfect partner for Brandt as he was famous for practicing murderous vivisection on his human patients in the name of scientific discovery; Harriet’s mother was a murderess “in heart, if not in deed” (BV, pp. 68–69), and Brandt really had a dastardly delight in murder. When Margaret suggests to Phillips that he might be “a little prejudiced, dear Doctor” and that Harriet’s parentage and her curse are “not her fault” (p. 69), Phillips insists that his account of Harriet’s background is based not on prejudice or personal beliefs but on the science of heredity: My dear Margaret, are you so ignorant as not to see that a child born under such circumstances cannot turn out well? The bastard of a man like Henry Brandt, cruel, dastardly, godless, and a woman like her terrible mother, a sensual, self-loving, crafty and bloodthirsty half-caste … She may seem harmless enough at present, so does the tiger cub as it suckles its dam, but that which is bred in her will come out sooner or later and curse those with whom she may be associated. I beg and pray of you, Margaret, not to let that girl come near you or your child anymore. There is a curse upon her and it will affect all within her influence! … We medical men know the consequences of heredity far more than outsiders do. (pp. 69–70)

Phillips contends that it is heredity, a scientific certainty, supported by Darwin’s and Galton’s findings, that verifies his idea that Harriet will most certainly kill anyone who is intimate with her. Late Victorians, like Phillips, extrapolated Darwin’s findings about evolution. Instead of understanding Darwin’s evolution and natural selection as events that took place over “thousands of generations” (Darwin, 2008, p. 90), late Victorians, like Phillips, concluded that the principal of “survival of the fittest” informed life in the fin de siècle. According to Phillips’s ideological application of the theory, it was late Victorians’ responsibilities to safeguard themselves against any hereditary threat, like the corrupting influence of Harriet’s “black blood” and her parents’ murderous legacy as a result of their relationships to “chattel slavery” (Davis, 2007, p. 42–43; Depledge, 2010, pp. xxiii–xxiv; Zieger, 2008, pp. 199–200). For Phillips, it is not racist and sexist bias that informs his conclusions about Harriet’s inheritance of her mother’s “black blood” and her parents’ “evil doings” (via witchcraft), or his assumption about Brandt’s profane connection to the murderous violence of black slavery, that condemn Harriet to social suicide; rather, it is Phillips’s use of the so-called science of degeneration, combined with Harriet’s power over people, that makes him appear credible and certain.

4

THE RISE OF HARRIET BRANDT …

83

These “certainties” convince Margaret to completely sever all ties to Harriet; Margaret ends their acquaintanceship: “You have made me [Margaret] very uncomfortable, Doctor [Phillips]. … Of course if I had known all this [Harriet’s parentage] previously I would not have cultivated Miss Brandt’s acquaintance, and now I shall take your advice and drop her as soon as possible!” (BV, p. 69). Also, she articulates that Elinor, too, has a “strange dislike to the girl [Harriet]” (p. 69). Critics see that it is Elinor’s xenophobia and Phillips’s racist and sexist conjecture about Harriet, her blood, and lineage that separate Harriet and Margaret. However, Phillips and, now, Margaret insist that it is heredity, and scientific fact, that warrant this separation. Separation must also occur between Harriet and Ralph: “If he [Ralph] will not take my advice [Phillips] you [Margaret] must get someone with more influence to caution him about it [Harriet’s parentage]” (70). Margaret ensures Phillips that she and Ralph will most certainly drop Harriet’s acquaintance. However, Margaret also notes that this separation will be hard on Harriet: “Of course I will [sever the acquaintance], but it seems hard upon her [Harriet]! She has seemed to crave so for affection and companionship” (70). Margaret recognizes that her giving up Harriet will have real consequences for Harriet. Margaret says that their separation will hurt Harriet, and Margaret acknowledges that Harriet will be left alone (and marginalized) as a result of Margaret’s actions. Margaret is conscious of the fact that she will deny Harriet the only things she ever wanted, “affection and companionship,” and the result of this will make Harriet feel deeply her social isolation. This continued social slighting and social disciplining of Harriet has real effects for Harriet as she becomes increasingly vulnerable as the novel progresses. This social vulnerability will eventually have such an effect on her that she commits suicide. Phillips even uses his argument about the validity of Darwin’s theory of heredity to separate Harriet and Ralph, even as readers know that it is really Phillips’s racism and sexism that alienates the two lovers. Phillips prefaces his argument to Ralph about the undeniability of Harriet’s hereditary curse, by saying that he has no doubt of his argument and that, in fact, it is the truth (so no one need doubt him): When Ralph grows angry over Phillips’s account of Harriet’s background, Phillips insists: “I can verify everything I say, and I fear no man’s resentment” (BV, p. 76). Phillips begins his argument to Ralph about how heredity shapes Harriet’s destiny and will prove fatal to her friends; he insists that his conclusions about Harriet are based on science, not prejudice. However, as critics read Marryat’s text (and Phillips’s explanation of the “facts”), they come to see that Phillips’s

84

E. D. MACALUSO

facts are overladen with racist and sexist conjecture. First, Phillips contends that there is something abhorrent about Harriet’s parents neglecting her as a child and of her subsequent associations with the black servants on Brandt’s plantation: “I [Phillips] was stationed in Jamaica with my regiment some fifteen years ago when this girl was a child of six years old, running half naked about her father’s plantation, uncared for by either parent and associating solely with the negro servants” (p. 76). Phillips’s racist fears about the effects of Harriet’s early care by black servants are rooted in a lack of care and breeding in a proper English manner under the watchful eye of a governess or nurse. Phillips insists that her proximity to the black servants would have had a corrupting effect on her character and, eventually, on her friendships. Degeneration cannot occur simply by being close to someone of a different race, and Phillips’s argument about heredity reflects his racial and sexual biases. Again, Phillips revives Lombroso’s stereotype about criminal women of color, that if they are not murderers, they are most certainly prostitutes (1895, p. 111), when he says of Harriet’s mother: “The mother was the most awful woman I have ever seen, and my experience of the sex in back slums and alleys has not been small” (BV, p. 76). Phillips employs the image of the prostitute working in back alleys and slums to characterize Harriet’s mother, because in Phillips’s mind, Harriet’s mother’s blackness makes her equivalent to these prostitutes. Also, Phillips recuperates the racial and sexual stereotype that Cuvier created based on his experiments on black African women and their genitalia (Crais & Scully, 2009, p. 3). Cuvier concluded that given what he saw as the largeness of black African women’s genitalia, they must have edacious sexual natures as well (Crais & Scully, 2009, p. 3). For Phillips, this implies that Harriet’s mother possesses an aggressive sexual nature (BV, p. 77). Phillips then uses physiognomic analysis (what was once thought to be scientific method/fact) to identify the criminal nature of Harriet’s mother, pointing to her “large eyes rolling” and her “sensual lips protruding” as proof of Harriet’s mother’s diabolism (p. 76). But these descriptors are drawn from racist and sexist stereotypes. Also, as Willburn asserts, Phillips’s belief in Harriet’s mother’s connection to the occult, the fact that she is “Obeah,” reflects Phillips’s belief in the criminal nature of her blackness (2008, p. 438). When Ralph finally objects to Phillips’s harsh words about Harriet and her parentage—“I really cannot see what right you have to give vent to such a sentiment! … What has this terrible story to do with Miss Brandt?” (BV, p. 77)—Phillips responds to Ralph by saying that his ideas do not come from his own prejudices but

4

THE RISE OF HARRIET BRANDT …

85

from the laws of heredity and are thus matters of fact: “‘When the cat is black, the kitten is black too!’ It’s the law of Nature!” (p. 77). Phillips’s use of heredity to encourage his friends to drop Harriet’s acquaintance really and truly comes from nineteenth-century British stereotypes about race, gender, and sexuality. Phillips even traces these stereotypes, the marks of heredity (according to him), in Harriet herself (not just her parents). After Ralph objects to Phillips’s theories and conclusions, again, by claiming that Harriet does not resemble the parentage that Phillips ascribes to her (p. 77), Phillips responds by saying: The girl is a quadroon, and she shews it distinctly in her long-shaped eyes with their blue whites and her wide mouth and blood-red lips! Also in her supple figure and apparently boneless hands and feet. Of her personal character, I have naturally had no opportunity of judging, but I can tell you by the way that she eats her food, and the way in which she uses her eyes, that she has inherited her half-caste mother’s greedy and sensual disposition. And in ten years’ time she will in all probability have no figure at all! She will run to fat. I could tell that also at a glance. (p. 77)

Phillips uses the disparaging term “quadroon” to characterize Harriet’s mixed race parentage. He also assigns the stereotypical marks of racial difference to her when he talks about her “long-shaped eyes with their blue whites and her wide mouth and blood-red lips! … [and her] supple figure and apparently boneless hands and feet” (p. 77). He even admits that he knows nothing about Harriet’s real nature (her inner nature) because he does not know her that well. This confession makes critics wonder if he would draw the same racist conclusions about Harriet if he actually knew her personally like he does Margaret. Phillips bases his conclusion solely on Harriet’s appearance and his study of physiognomy, informed by racist and sexist stereotypes, and what he believes she has physically inherited from her mother. To Phillips, Harriet must be entirely like her mother—black, sensuous, and murderous. As Ralph attempts to defend Harriet, Phillips continues to suggest to Ralph that Harriet is dangerous, because of her parentage, and that Ralph should separate himself from Harriet’s intimacy at once. Ralph contends: “It would be cowardly to desert a girl just because her father and mother happened to be brutes. It is not her fault!” (p. 78). Phillips reiterates that: “Neither is it the fault of a madman that his progenitors had lunacy in

86

E. D. MACALUSO

their blood, nor of a consumptive that his were strumous. All the same the facts affect their lives and the lives of those with whom they come in contact. It is the curse of heredity!” (p. 78). When Ralph counters Phillips by exclaiming: “Well! And if so, how can it concern anyone but the poor child herself?” (p. 78). Phillips reveals the effects of his faith in heredity (which are really the effects of racism and sexism); he claims that, like the Vampire or the “deadly Upas tree” (p. 79), Harriet will sap the life out of those whom she becomes intensely intimate with just like her mother and grandmother’s heritage foretell (p. 79). Phillips even claims that Harriet has already adversely affected little Ethel and Ralph himself. Even as Ralph objects to this theory of Phillips’s by asserting: “Do you know that you are accusing Miss Brandt of murder – of killing the child to whom she never shewed anything but the greatest kindness? … And all I can say is that I should be quite willing to try the experiment” (p. 79), the fact that baby Ethel does die from Harriet’s attentions and that Ralph finally admits to himself the effects that Harriet has had on him (and he is ashamed of them) proves that Marryat, and the text, is somewhat persuaded by Phillips’s support of scientific fact against more modern, and sympathetic, voices that support Harriet like Ralph’s (initially), Miss Wynward’s, and later, Pennell’s. After baby Ethel dies, Ralph reconsiders his original protection of Harriet and regrets it, because he now feels compelled to join Margaret and their party back to England and to sanction the purposeful separation between their party and Harriet: Ralph, remembering the hint the doctor had thrown out respecting her [Harriet] being the ultimate cause of the baby’s illness, did not like to bring up her name again – felt rather guilty with respect to it, indeed – and Doctor Phillips was only too glad to see the young man bestirring himself to be useful, and losing sight of his own worry in the trouble of his sister-in-law. Of course he could not have refused, or even demurred, at accompanying his party to England on so mournful an errand – and to do him justice he did not wish it to be otherwise. Brussels and its anticipated pleasures had been driven clean out of his head by the little tragedy that had occurred at Heyst, and his attitude towards Margaret when they met again was so quietly affectionate and brotherly that he was of infinite comfort to her. (p. 81)

Ralph remembers Phillips’s words of caution to him about Harriet, and he considers that, based on Phillips’s diagnosis, Harriet may very well have caused the death of his sister-in-law’s child. After this moment, after Ralph

4

THE RISE OF HARRIET BRANDT …

87

accepts what he now believes to be true about Phillips’s words of warning to him, he decides to give up Harriet’s acquaintance and return with his family to England. Phillips’s prejudices masked as fact do, indeed, persuade Ralph to relinquish his ties to Harriet. The text even suggests that Ralph wishes to do this. He has forgotten his feelings for Harriet and focuses on being a good brother to Margaret. Perhaps, he even remembers his duty as an English gentleman, and this, too, causes him to give up Harriet and be as attentive as he can to Margaret. The intimacy that all of the characters, Margaret, Elinor, and Ralph had with Harriet is sacrificed in the name of English duty and family; this also preserves the party’s sense of its Englishness. They will never be Harriet’s acquaintances again. The literal separation of these characters and the ocean between them (as Harriet is still in Heyst when the English party leaves for England) reinforce their emotional and social separation. Harriet can no longer have pretensions to being a member of Margaret’s social set. She feels deeply the injury of Margaret, Elinor, and Ralph’s separation from her. She is shocked after hearing about Ethel’s death: “Lost, … do you mean that the child is dead?” (p. 88). And, she immediately demands to know where Margaret has gone: “Where is she [Margaret] then? Where has she gone?” (p. 88). And, finally, when Madame Lamont tells Harriet that they have all left, Harriet is appalled that they would leave her: “I cannot believe what Madame Lamont says … she declares that they are all gone for good, Mrs. Pullen and Miss Leyton and Captain Pullen and the doctor! They have returned to England” (p. 89). By reiterating what Madame Lamont has said and by telling it to the Baroness, Harriet internalizes the final separation between herself, Margaret, Elinor, and Ralph. She says that they are “gone for good” and she is not exaggerating. She clings to the Baroness “with her eyes wide open and her large mouth trembling with agitation, until even the coarse fibre of the Baroness’s propriety made her [Harriet] feel ashamed of the exhibition” (p. 89). She even runs up to her room and “throw[s] herself tumultuously upon the bed” because she is so hurt by their disregard of her. She feels the effects of her marginalization, of her loneliness—the fact that she is completely alone in almost every respect, in spite of her friendship with the Baroness. When she is by herself in her bedroom, she muses: “How lonely and horrible the corridor on which her apartment opened seemed. Olga Brimont, Mrs. Pullen, Miss Leyton, and Ralph, all gone! No one to talk to – no one to walk with – except the Baroness and her stupid husband! … what a barren, dreary place this detestable Heyst

88

E. D. MACALUSO

would seem without him [Ralph]!” (pp. 89–90). Although part of the text emphasizes Harriet’s sole thoughts about Ralph at this moment, the part of the text that I cite suggests that Harriet knows that she is friendless. She attests to this when she says how “lonely” the corridor is; really, she is referring to herself and how “lonely” and “horrible” she feels. She grieves the loss of each of her acquaintances when she reiterates their names. And, she knows that she is truly companionless when she says that she has “no one to talk to – no one to walk with” (90). She cannot value the acquaintance of the Baroness and the Baron, because she views them as below and so very different from herself. While this vulnerability that Harriet feels, in this scene, is not deadly yet, it eventually metastasizes after she leaves the Red House, after she unintentionally takes the life of Bobby Bates and her husband, Pennell. She does commit suicide after these events have left her completely bereft and isolated.

4.3

Harriet’s Humanity: A Critique of the British Aristocracy

Elinor and Phillips attempt to destroy Harriet’s social connections out of their own prejudices and for their own gains, their criticisms and castigations of her, while they are deeply painful and disturbing to Harriet, paradoxically have the effect of revealing Harriet’s virtues. The revelation of these virtues makes Harriet’s suicide all the more tragic. The Blood of the Vampire is not a novel that solely condemns its monster like Stoker’s Dracula or, as Eldridge writes, Le Fanu’s Carmilla (1998, p. 12). Marryat’s imbuing Harriet with a great amount of humanity makes her suicide unjust. Just as Marryat acknowledges Harriet’s monstrosity (her parentage makes her dangerous [even lethal]), she also reveals Harriet to be a sympathetic character who has laudable qualities and who finds supporters in Pennell and Miss Wynward. As Harriet procures sympathy for herself because of her humanity, the cost of Elinor’s and Phillips’s racisms, sexisms, and xenophobia looms large. Since Harriet comes to see herself as a murderess, her desire to eliminate herself, to do “what is right,” makes her that much more sympathetic; Harriet wishes to take responsibility for the deaths she has caused. This choice makes her that much more human and that much more pitiable, because she commits suicide out of a sense of honor and a concern for others, leaving, as well, her estate to Margaret. Therefore, Harriet’s monstrosity is blunted by her humanity. Her suicide calls the British establishment into question over how it treats a New Woman who

4

THE RISE OF HARRIET BRANDT …

89

is racially and ethnically different from them. As horrified as readers may be by Harriet’s victims’ deaths, they are equally disturbed by her suicide. Marryat purposely elicits this horror over Harriet’s death to suggest that New Women of color like Harriet be included in a British society that solely sought to condemn them. Harriet’s kindness is noticed and appreciated by Margaret even as Elinor seeks to lower Margaret’s opinion of Harriet out of xenophobic prejudice and jealously over the prospect of Harriet replacing Elinor in Margaret’s esteem. Elinor wishes to discredit Harriet in Margaret’s eyes. But, in the early stages of the novel (when the three women are getting to know one another), Margaret is not entirely persuaded by Elinor’s dislike of Harriet. Margaret even suggests to Elinor that Elinor is slightly jealous of Harriet: “Did she [Elinor] really mean what she said, or did her jealousy of the West Indian heiress render her capable of uttering untruths?” (BV, pp. 39–40). Even though Margaret is not completely taken with Harriet and she does not see Harriet as a friend (her interest in Harriet is not “titillative and protective” as Haefele-Thomas claims [2012, p. 110]), she sees no reason to be unkind or rude to the girl, which makes Elinor’s harping on Harriet distasteful. When Harriet kindly offers to nurse baby Ethel, Elinor takes offense: “‘Leave her alone!’ exclaimed Elinor Leyton in a sharp voice. ‘Do you not hear what Mrs. Pullen says – that you are not to touch her’” (BV, p. 14). Elinor attempts to protect Margaret from Harriet’s contamination, and she also attempts to secure Margaret’s friendship and favoritism by singling Harriet out and making Harriet feel that she will not achieve the intimacy with Margaret that she wishes for. However, Margaret is aware of Elinor’s rudeness and Harriet’s goodness which is why she counters Elinor by saying: “Of course you [Harriet] did not mean anything but what was kind” (p. 14). And, Margaret makes up for Elinor’s bad behavior by noting how she—Margaret—has been the object of Harriet’s kindness. Even if Margaret’s kindness comes from an aristocratic duty to treat Harriet properly, Harriet is the one who behaves with only benevolent intentions (even if she is gauche at moments) while Elinor, the “true aristocrat,” behaves poorly. Harriet’s talent for music elevates her above her British compatriots as neither Elinor nor Margaret can “play or sing” (BV, p. 42). Harriet’s talent is so prodigious she is even described as a professional: They [Elinor and Margaret] had opened the door and were about to leave the room when a flood of melody suddenly poured into the apartment. It

90

E. D. MACALUSO

proceeded from a room at the other end of the corridor and was produced by a mandolin most skillfully played. The silvery notes in rills and trills and chords, such as might have been evolved from a fairy harp, arrested the attention of both Miss Leyton and Mrs. Pullen. They had scarcely expressed their wonder and admiration to each other at the skillful manipulation of the instrument (which evinced such art as they had never heard before except in public) when the strings of the mandolin were accompanied by a young, fresh contralto voice. “O! hush! hush!” cried Elinor, with her finger on her lip, as the rich mellow strains floated through the corridor. “I don’t think I ever heard such a lovely voice before.” Whose on earth can it be? … “Some professional must have arrived at the Hotel,” said Margaret. … “Ah! Gounod’s delicious ‘Ave Maria’. How beautiful!” (BV, pp. 41–42)

Both Margaret and Elinor praise the skill and beauty of the music that they hear. They even raise the musician to professional status. They have implied that the female musician has achieved a career, which not many women were able to boast at the fin de siècle (Sutherland, 2015, p. 1). When they find out that the musician is Harriet, they immediately retract their compliments. Elinor even remarks: “Well! She ought to be able to sing with that mouth of hers” (BV, p. 43). As a result of Elinor’s cruelty, Harriet is immediately relegated to the status of “the little West Indian!” again (BV, p. 43). However, Harriet’s talent, the art of her fingers as they play the mandolin and the richness of her voice as she sings with a powerful contralto, overshadows Elinor’s racist comment. The narrative supports Harriet as a professional musician, first, before it returns to the issue of her race. As readers, Harriet and her musical skill already enchant us. This takes precedence over her race. Mrs. Montague articulates this fact perfectly: “O! Miss Brandt! You are a sly puss! We have all been delighted – enchanted! What do you mean by hiding your light under a bushel in this way? Do come in here for a minute and sing us another song!” (BV, p. 43). Harriet is referred to as an animal, again, a mischievous cat. But, her talent and the pleasure that the other women take in hearing the skillful, professional, and beautiful music produced by Harriet supersede this label. Thus, Harriet’s character, and role within the novel, is elevated to musician whereas Elinor comes off as an arrogant and racist gossip. Harriet’s beauty serves to attract men like Ralph and Pennell. However, it also reveals the part of her character that is good, noble, and worthy of Pennell’s praises. Pennell describes Harriet’s body as beautiful and worthy of respect. He inwardly exclaims:

4

THE RISE OF HARRIET BRANDT …

91

“By Jove! what a beautiful girl!” was Mr. Pennell’s inward ejaculation as he saw her drawing nearer the spot where he stood. It was strange that his first judgment of Harriet Brandt should have been the same as that of his cousin, Ralph Pullen, but it only proves from what a different standpoint men and women judge of beauty. As Harriet walked over the grass, Anthony Pennell noted each line of her swaying figure – each tint of her refined face – with the pretty little hands hanging by her side, and the slumberous depths of her magnificent eyes. He did not, for one moment, associate her with the idea which he had formed of the West Indian heiress who was bent on capturing his cousin Ralph. He concluded she was another young friend who might be partaking of the Baroness’s hospitality. He bowed low as she entered through the open French window looking as a Georgian or Cashmerian houri might have looked, he thought, if clad in the robes of civilization. (BV, p. 128)

As a socialist writer, Pennell believes that all British subjects, even those who are native to the colonies, serve the state (Hurren, 2007, p. 37). He concludes, therefore, that the standard of beauty held for Britons—the classically Grecian ideal (blond hair, blue eyes, pale skin) (McClintock, 1995, p. 38)—must necessarily be complicated by Harriet’s beauty. He comments on the “different standpoint” that British men and women must necessarily take to evaluate the beauty of their compatriots. Pennell tells the truth about Harriet’s beauty. He notices “each line of her swaying figure – each tint of her refined face – with the pretty little hands hanging by her side, and the slumberous depths of her magnificent eyes” (BV, p. 128). Instead of creating a lie about Harriet’s beauty, as Margaret Pullen does to perpetuate Dr. Phillips’s racist fiction about the degenerative nature of Harriet’s blackness “[Harriet has] no complexion and an enormous mouth” (BV, p. 117; Lombroso, 1895, p. 111; Malchow, 1993, p. 103), Pennell acknowledges the truth about Harriet’s good looks and “bows low” to her out of respect for the virtue that was associated with female beauty during the Victorian and late Victorian periods (BV, p. 128; Marcus, 2007, p. 47). When Pennell thinks about the stereotype of “quadroon” that the other British characters have levied at Harriet, he says: “they must be fools and blind …!” (BV, p. 129). Pennell notices Harriet’s kindness, talent, beauty, and her honorable and charitable nature, which is why he rails so hard against the British characters that only see Harriet as a “gauche schoolgirl, a half-tamed savage, or a juvenile virago” (BV, p. 137). He dares to contradict eugenics by saying that he “doesn’t believe in stigmas being attached to one’s birth” (BV, p. 139).

92

E. D. MACALUSO

He asks the very important question: Does the rumor of a hereditary taint mean that Harriet’s noble qualities are any less valuable? Pennell asserts: What difference did it make to Harriet Brandt herself, that she was marked with an hereditary taint? Did it render her less beautiful, less attractive, less graceful and accomplished? Were the sins of the fathers ever to be visited upon the children? – was no sympathetic fellow-creature to be found to say, “If it is so, let us forget it! It is not your fault nor mine! Our duty is to make each other’s lives happy as possible and trust the rest to God.” He hoped, as he sat there, that before long Harriet Brandt would find a friend for life who would never remind her of anything outside of her own loveliness and lovable qualities. (BV, p. 146)

Pennell asks the question: Should an accomplished woman’s life be ruined because of her background? Pennell maintains that our duty to one another should be that we protect and value one another for our good qualities, not condemn each other over pseudoscientific dogma. His wish for Harriet and himself is that they love one another and only recognize each other’s laudable qualities for the rest of their lives. Even when Harriet acts with honor and attempts to protect Pennell from her lethal nature, Pennell still insists that they remain by one another’s side: O! Tony! Tony! cannot you read the truth? I love you, dear, I love you! I never loved any creature in this world before I loved you. I did not know that it was given to mortals to love so much! And my love has opened my eyes! Sooner than injure you, whom I would die to save from harm, I will separate myself from you! I will give you up! I will live my lonely life without you. I could do that, but I can never, never consent to sap your manhood and your brains, which do not belong to me but to the world, and see you wither like a poisoned plant, the leaves of which lie discoloured and dead upon the garden path. … Never in the course of their acquaintanceship had Harriet Brandt seemed so sweet, so pathetic, so unselfish to Anthony Pennell as then. … “I do not believe in the possibility of you harming me,” he replied, “but if I am to die, which is what I suppose you mean, I claim my right to die in your arms.” (BV, pp. 166–167)

Harriet’s confession reveals exactly what Pennell claims that she is: She is honest, honorable, virtuous, and strong, and Pennell recognizes these qualities as “sweet, pathetic, and unselfish” (BV, p. 167). In this, and the previous, scene/s, Pennell establishes that Harriet is a sympathetic and

4

THE RISE OF HARRIET BRANDT …

93

defensible character. He is willing to die in her arms, because she is such a praiseworthy person. Even Miss Wynward, the Baroness Gobelli’s servant, is sympathetic to Harriet because Harriet has only treated her with the greatest kindness. Even as the reader knows that Harriet is responsible for the death of Bobby Bates (the Baroness’s son) and for the deaths of Ethel, little Caroline, and Harriet’s wet nurse, Miss Wynward views Harriet as innocent. While Harriet becomes likeable in this scene (even after the revelation of her parentage), the Baroness is finally chastised for her diabolical nature. At the moment of Bobby’s death, the Baroness accuses Harriet of killing him. Miss Wynward is the only character who sees how wrong it is for the Baroness to blame Harriet for Bobby’s death and question God’s judgment (p. 156). Miss Wynward calls out the Baroness’s bad behavior by saying: “‘Madame! Madame!’ cried Miss Wynward, ‘is this a moment for such recrimination? If all this were true [the curse], it is no fault of Miss Brandt’s! Think of what lies here, and that he [Bobby] loved her, and the thought will soften your feelings!’” (p. 156) Miss Wynward attempts to make the Baroness see the folly of defaming Harriet while her son lies dead on his bed. She even attempts to get the Baroness to see that Harriet is innocent (it is not Harriet’s fault that her parents were murderous) and that Bobby loved Harriet. However, the Baroness will not be mollified and her cruelty comes to the surface in this scene. She comes to be known, now, as a heartless woman instead of an eccentric. The Baroness goes as far as to say: “I could kill’ er [Harriet], because she ‘as killed ‘im [Bobby]” (p. 156). And, she advances toward Harriet with “so vengeful a look that the girl [Harriet], with a slight cry, darted from the room and rushed into her own” (p. 156). Miss Wynward reveals that she believes Harriet to be faultless in this moment: “How dare you [the Baroness] intimidate an innocent woman [Harriet] in the very presence of Death?” (p. 156). Miss Wynward points out the Baroness’s hypocrisy: “You [the Baroness] accuse that poor girl [Harriet] of unholy dealings – what can you say of your own?” (p. 156). While Harriet is blameless in Miss Wynward’s eyes, particularly as there is no physical evidence to link Harriet to these murders (even as readers know she is responsible for them), the Baroness is finally punished for her illegal and blasphemous fortune-telling racket that is only aimed at cheating the aristocracy out of their money. Miss Wynward and Harriet bond. Miss Wynward cannot believe the insults that the Baroness levies against Harriet: “The inexcusable manner in which you [the Baroness] have insulted that poor young lady, Miss Brandt,

94

E. D. MACALUSO

makes me feel that my first duty is to her!” (p. 156). Miss Wynward consoles Harriet, who is deeply distraught as a result of the new intelligence that she harms those whom she becomes close with—“O! Miss Wynward, what did she mean? Can there be any truth in it? Is there something poisonous in my nature that harms those with whom I come in contact? How can it be? How can it be?” (p. 157)—and they both ensure that they each have a place to go to, away from the Baroness, and money to get there. Miss Wynward will prepare Bobby’s burial and then go to her future husband’s home while Harriet will contact Pennell and check in at the Langham hotel (pp. 157–158). But what is most significant about these moments between Harriet and Miss Wynward is that Miss Wynward, a woman of integrity, sees Harriet as both kind and deserving of sympathy. She tells Harriet that she is not responsible for Bobby’s death, and she kisses Harriet for Harriet’s kind way of ensuring that Miss Wynward is taken care of after she leaves the Baroness: “‘Cannot you [Harriet] see that it was the Baroness’s temper that made her speak so cruelly to you?’ … Miss Wynward stooped down and kissed the girl’s brow. ‘Thank you [Harriet] so much for your kind thought’” (p. 157). While the Baroness is revealed to be truculent, almost to the point at which she is fiendish, Harriet, even while she possesses a lethal nature, is kind, thoughtful of others, honest, mature, and piteous. Miss Wynward’s support of Harriet and Pennell’s declaration of undying love for Harriet are why readers find Harriet to be a sympathetic character. Pennell articulates this brilliantly when he says: “to me she [Harriet] represents only a friendless and unprotected woman who has a right to our sympathy and respect” (BV, p. 144). Robert Eldridge writes that our sympathy for Harriet is also found in her tragedy (1998, p. 12), because a friendless woman takes her own life and chooses to be charitable until the very end of her life. Harriet leaves Margaret Pullen all of her fortune in exchange for Margaret’s sometime kindness to her at Heyst. This gesture of Harriet’s is particularly significant, because she is the one who sustains the British race. Margaret, her husband, and family can now remain in England and stay together as a result of Harriet’s fortune. This ending to Marryat’s novel is terribly ironic, because the monster, Harriet, who has been thought to degenerate and destroy the British race, has actually maintained and saved it. One might even conclude that Harriet’s virtuous qualities (mapped through her monstrous and beautiful body) suggest that fin-de-siècle Britain is morally bankrupt. This is why I contend that Florence Marryat chooses to argue for Harriet’s inclusion in society not her banishment to its limits. Even if Harriet is in some part monstrous, her

4

THE RISE OF HARRIET BRANDT …

95

good qualities outweigh the potential she has for destruction and must be acclimated into society not sacrificed at the hands of its cruelty. And so, the fate of New Women of color, like Harriet, should not always be relegated to monstrous tragedy but to redemptive life everlasting.2

4.4

Finale: Harriet’s Humanity Implores Readers to Question Her Fate

The plot of Marryat’s novel shows Harriet coming to a tragic sense of self— her capacity to bring death upon the people that she loves. She chooses suicide when she makes that discovery in Chapter XVIII: “She had killed him – she, who worshipped him, whose pride was bound up in him, who was to have helped him and comforted him and waited on him all his life – she had killed him” (BV, p. 186). In addition to the loss of her husband, she herself attributes her choice of suicide to her parents and the “curse of heredity.” Phillips and Elinor consistently act out of selfinterest to isolate Harriet from their circle, and they use faulty science, which is really racist, sexist, and xenophobic prejudice, to support their view of her as their inferior. Their hostile behavior toward Harriet has the ironic effect of raising her up, exposing their hypocritical and racist views, which the English hide behind their screens of politeness and propriety. Their behavior also invites questions about how society should respond to the “deadly” but “innocent” outlier. As the monster becomes human, generations of New Women, who are racial and ethnic “Others” (Said, 1978. p. 1), are allowed to speak, encouraging tolerance and understanding in the face of prejudice.

Notes 1. F. Marryat’s (2010) The Blood of the Vampire (Brighton, UK: Victorian Secrets) will hereafter be referred to parenthetically as BV followed by a page number. 2. It is not coincidental that Harriet takes her life in Italy surrounded by saints and nuns. Clearly, Marryat sends a message to her readers that Harriet’s life is as sacred as these holy women’s. Her suicide is as tragic as Jesus’s parable and death, because he, too, sacrifices himself for the good of others.

96

E. D. MACALUSO

References Arata, S. (1996). Fictions of loss in the Victorian fin de siècle: Identity and empire. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Case, S. E. (1991). Tracking the vampire. Differences, 3(2), 9. Crais, C., & Scully, P. (2009). Sara Baartman and the Hottentot Venus: A ghost story and a biography. Princeton and Oxford, UK: Princeton University Press. Darwin, C. (2008). On the origin of species: The illustrated edition. New York, NY: Sterling. Davis, O. (2007). Morbid mothers: Gothic heredity in Florence Marryat’s the blood of the vampire. In R. B. Anolik (Ed.), Horrifying sex: Essays on sexual difference in gothic literature (pp. 40–55). London, UK: McFarland. Depledge, G. (2010). Introduction. In G. Depledge (Ed.), The blood of the vampire (pp. iii–xxxvii). Brighton, UK: Victorian Secrets. Dijkstra, B. (1988). Idols of perversity: Fantasies of feminine evil in fin-de-siècle culture. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. Eldridge, R. T. (1998). The other vampire novel of 1897: The blood of the vampire by Florence Marryat. The New York Review of Science Fiction, 10(6), 10–12. Galton, F. (1904). Eugenics: Its definition, scope and aims. Nature, 70, 82. Gilman, S. L. (1985). Difference and pathology: Stereotypes of sexuality, race, and madness. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Haefele-Thomas, A. (2012). Queer others in Victorian gothic: Transgressing monstrosity. Cardiff: University of Wales Press. Heller, T. (1996). The vampire in the house: Hysteria, female sexuality, and female knowledge in Le Fanu’s “Carmilla” (1872). In B. L. Harman & S. Meyer (Eds.), The new nineteenth century: Feminist readings of under-read Victorian fiction. New York, NY: Garland. Hurren, E. T. (2007). Protesting about pauperism: Poverty, politics and poor relief in late-Victorian England, 1870–1900. Woodbridge, UK: The Boydell Press. Ledger, S. (1997). The New Woman: Fiction and feminism at the fin de siècle. Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press. Lombroso, C. (2006). Criminal man. Durham, VA: Duke University Press. Lombroso, C. (1895). The female offender. London, UK: T. Fisher Unwin. Macfie, S. (1991). “They suck us dry:” A study of late nineteenth-century projections of vampiric women. In P. Shaw & P. Stockwell (Eds.), Subjectivity and literature from the romantics to the present day (pp. 58–67). London, UK: Pinter Publishers. Major, A. A. (2007). Other love: Le Fanu’s Carmilla as lesbian gothic. In R. B. Anolik (Ed.), Horrifying sex: Essays on sexual difference in gothic literature. Jefferson, NC: McFarland. Malchow, H. L. (1993). Frankenstein’s monster and images of race in nineteenthcentury Britain. Past & Present, 139, 90–130.

4

THE RISE OF HARRIET BRANDT …

97

Marcus, S. (2007). Between women: Friendship, desire, and marriage in Victorian England. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Marryat, F. (2010). The blood of the vampire. Brighton, UK: Victorian Secrets. Maudsley, H. (1874). Sex in mind and education. Fortnightly Review, 21, 471–472. McClintock, A. (1995). Imperial leather: Race, gender, and sexuality in the colonial contest. New York, NY: Routledge. Mecke, J. G. (1979). Mulattoes and race mixture: American attitudes and images, 1865–1918. Ann Arbor, MI: Umi Research Press. Moorman, J. R. H. (1973). A history of the church of England. London: A & C Black. Nordau, M. (1998). Degeneration. In G. Byron (Ed.), Dracula. Peterborough, ON: Broadview. Richardson, A. (2003). Love and eugenics in the late nineteenth century: Rational reproduction and the New Woman. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. Said, E. W. (1978). Orientalism. New York, NY: Vintage. Showalter, E. (1990). Sexual anarchy: Gender and culture at the fin de siècle. New York, NY: Penguin. Spencer, H. (1862). First principles. Forest Grove, OR: Pacific University Press. Stepan, N. (1982). The idea of race in science: Great Britain, 1800–1960. London: Macmillan Press. Sutherland, G. (2015). In search of the New Woman: Middle-class women and work in Britain 1870–1914. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Tromp, M. (2013). Introduction: Coming to terms with xenophobia—Fear and loathing in nineteenth-century England. In M. Tromp, M. Bachman, & H. Kaufman (Eds.), Fear, loathing, and Victorian xenophobia. Columbus: The Ohio State University. Vicinus, M. (2004). Intimate friends: Women who loved women, 1778–1928. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Willburn, S. (2008). The savage magnet: Racialization of the occult body in late Victorian fiction. Women’s Writing, 15(3), 436–453. Zieger, S. (2008). Inventing the addict: Drugs, race, and sexuality in nineteenthcentury British and American literature. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press.

CHAPTER 5

Conclusion

This book argues that the liminal figure of the monster serves three important functions in the novels by Bram Stoker, Richard Marsh, and Florence Marryat: (1) the monster enables readers to see both sides of the conflict at the British fin de siècle provoked by issues of gender and the figure of the New Woman; (2) the monster demonstrates that the social categories and movements, the characters in these novels hold dear, are unstable and more complex than they imagined; and (3) the monster sets into sharp relief the challenges to received constructions of gender posed by the New Woman. 1. The liminal figure of the monster shows that the culture of fin-desiècle Britain was riven by a conflict between subjects who held traditional values (like Cecil Rhodes) and those who maintained progressive viewpoints (like Annie Besant). Cecil Rhodes believed that it was his duty and right to reap the spoils of the British Empire by instigating an aggressive imperialistic campaign in South Africa without questioning this “civilizing mission’s” ethical costs (the maiming, raping, and murdering of South Africa’s black African people). However, subjects like Annie Besant, who thought that Britain’s imperial missions were often misguided and wrong, worked for diplomacy in places like Egypt to lend support to the movements for independence. Jekyll/Hyde is an apt metaphor and monstrous figure that delineates the fin de siecle’s cultural conflict quite clearly. On the one hand, Britain was like Dr. Jekyll as both Jekyll and Britain acquired all the success and prestige that Britain received as a result of its harsh policies abroad. On © The Author(s) 2019 E. D. Macaluso, Gender, the New Woman, and the Monster, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-30476-8_5

99

100

E. D. MACALUSO

the other hand, Hyde, Jekyll’s mysterious “Other” self, shows, in violent terms, the murderous costs of Britain’s campaign abroad. Though there were many moderate Britons who worked for a fiscally responsible state and social liberalism, these agendas were often swept up in conservative financial agendas and contributed to this great schism between conservatives, and those who held traditional values, and progressive New Liberals. 2. The liminal figure of the monster also shows the characters in these novels, and their readers, that the social categories and movements they hold dear, like colonialism and notions about native-ness versus foreignness, gender and the New Woman, homo/sexuality, and discourses on poverty are unstable, complex categories; they were far more complex than these subjects had ever imagined. Stoker’s Dracula, Richard Marsh’s the Beetle, and Florence Marryat’s female vampire, Harriet Brandt, show that gender and sexuality are complicated and liminal. Is Dracula straight or gay, male or female? Dracula is also famous for connoting various races and cultures. Is Dracula Eastern European, Jewish, Irish, or from an “ambiguous conquering race” (Arata, 1996, p. 113)? Or, is he an English/British enthusiast as his British books and maps suggest? Richard Marsh’s Beetle is both male and female, referencing what Paulina Palmer believes is a transgendered identity (2012, p. 12). However, the Beetle’s body and his/her monstrosity also evoke the effeminate man and the masculine woman. Holt describes the Beetle’s masculine effeminacy (B 53) and Atherton encounters an aggressive female Beetle (B 152). All of these pieces of evidence point to conversations that Marsh wished to have about the fluidity of gender and queer sexualities. Additionally, the Beetle’s British-ness and his/her foreignness are considered in this novel. Though the Beetle is British, having hailed from British-occupied Egypt, Lessingham, Atherton, and Miss Coleman see the Beetle as a foreigner because of his/her yellow skin and burnoose, his/her foreign voice or accent, and his/her strange habits (never emerging from the house that Miss Coleman rented to him/her). What truly makes a British subject? Is it the white conservative English identity embodied by Lessingham, Miss Lindon, or Atherton? Or, is it the population of foreigners that Britain boasts in each of its colonies? The Beetle’s foreignness and his/her “reverse colonization” even showed British subjects that their beloved “civilizing mission” and Empire had its vulnerabilities and might even be questioned as one of Britain’s legitimate projects and strongholds. The Beetle’s foreign perversity makes these conflicts in gender and the New Woman, and colonialism, Empire, and native-ness versus foreignness quite clear. Finally, the Beetle’s

5

CONCLUSION

101

use of Robert Holt, the poor man, suggests that poverty in Britain was a rampant problem. The conservative decision to relegate the poor to asylums, workhouses, and institutions is shown to be insufficient, dehumanized, and corrupt (Generani, 2012, p. 40). And, a spirit of reform, one in which British subjects take care of one another (including their poorer counterparts) is suggested. However, Holt’s body and encounters with the monster, the Beetle, make readers aware of the dual impulse to mark Holt as both a threatening vagrant and a British everyman. Race, as the British knew it, at the fin de siècle, is complicated in Marryat’s The Blood of the Vampire, by Harriet Brandt’s biracial body and blood. Is Harriet black or white? How should a white British population of people respond/react to her? What about Harriet’s wish to be friends with both Margaret Pullen and Ralph Pullen/Anthony Pennell? What should British subjects make of her choice to be friends with both women and men at the fin de siècle? Finally, Harriet’s status as a New Woman, an extremely accomplished and independent/wealthy woman, is also threatening to her British compatriots because she is something “Other” than a traditional, Victorian lady. 3. The liminal figure of the monster collapses the boundaries of all of these social categories and movements, and in doing so, shows readers that the collapsing of these boundaries frightened conservative subjects. But, like the monster, there was another figure that collapsed the boundaries of gender—the New Woman. The New Woman was a direct challenge to traditional, Victorian femininity. She did not wish to stay at home and tend to a husband and children. She wished to have an education and employment. She did not wish to be man’s inferior. She wished for enfranchisement and equality with men. While traditional Victorian women tended hearth and home, the New Woman spoke out, wrote tracts, was active, and held parties. Essentially, Victorian femininity was challenged by this “New-comer.” And, Victorian conservatives did not like this challenge by the New Woman, which is why, she became a threat to family, Empire, and the state even as many feminist women viewed her as a role model and followed her example. The monster and the New Woman enable readers to define what conservative late Victorian Britain feared the most—the dissolution of their society and way of life as they knew it by foreigners, New Women, homosexuals, and the poor. The monster, together with the figure of the New Woman, in the three “monster novels” that my book focuses on, reveals these fears and the conflict embedded in each of these subjects—colonialism, the New Woman, homosexuality, and poverty.

102

E. D. MACALUSO

The monster and the New Woman challenge the cultural attitudes of conservative Britons. Colonialism was not the only way to organize a state, women deserved equality and enfranchisement, homosexuals were human beings, and the poor were a productive population of people that defined the state. The monster and the New Woman reveal that gender was even more complex for the New Woman at fin de siècle’s end than scholars have thought. Dracula shows that women’s friendships could approach lesbianism. This happens in the novel between Lucy and Mina and historically between Vernon Lee and her “friends.” The monster, Dracula, triangulates the bonds between himself, Lucy, and Mina, and makes their friendship lesbian by showing that stronger emotions—romance, passion, and eroticism—make a friendship approach lesbianism. This is a new function to ascribe to the monster. Previously, scholars have returned again and again to the notion that the monster is “overdetermined” (Halberstam, 1995, p. 1) or that the monster’s body suggests conclusions about race, gender, sexuality, and class (Halberstam, 1995, p. 1). However, there haven’t been too many new conclusions made recently about monstrosity (aside from popular scholarship on monsters in our contemporary American culture) and the late Victorian period. This book necessarily adds to the conversation. Lucy and Mina’s love suggests that Stoker imagined a world in which heterosexual couples did not just define themselves by the work that partners did together or by economics and arranged marriages but by love. And, for the queer community, Stoker dared to write about a love that challenged the pervasive violence levied at these peoples and communities. Lucy and Mina love in vastly different ways than their stereotypes as Linton’s “Wild Woman” and Maudsley’s “practical woman” suggest. Lucy and Mina’s love, wrought by their relationship to the monster, shows late Victorians and contemporary critics that expressions of love and gender at the fin de siècle are even more complex than these populations of people already knew. The foreign and perverse violence of Richard Marsh’s Beetle, made by his/her effeminate masculinity and masculine femininity and his/her foreignness, shows that the New Woman was also a liminal subject. According to the views of the British populous at the fin de siècle, she was both a monster and a laudable figure. She was both a threat to family, nation, and Empire and a role model for other women to follow. The foreign and perverse violence that the Beetle commits against Miss Lindon shows that her modernity as a New Woman is both scorned by Mr. Lindon, Atherton,

5

CONCLUSION

103

and the Beetle and embraced by herself and Lessingham. She embodies the liminality of the New Woman quite clearly. The violence inflicted upon these liminal figures—the Beetle and Miss Lindon—comes back to haunt the white British protagonists and shows that colonialism, sexuality, and poverty were also vexed subjects. Was British colonialism in Egypt justified? Was Lessingham’s killing of the priestess of Isis necessary? Or, is there another perspective at work, here? Is the Beetle defensible in his/her revenge? Does the Beetle get away with his attack on Holt? Are gay men monsters or lovers that should be left in peace? Should the poor be condemned to the streets or taken care of by British subjects like Miss Lindon? Just as gender is made complicated by the foreign and perverse violence of the monster, in this chapter, so, too, are these other issues. Finally, in The Blood of the Vampire, the monster and the New Woman are captured in the character—Harriet Brandt. The novel explores the ways that the conservative and white British populous often made “Others”— foreigners, New Women, homosexuals, and the poor, but, in Harriet’s case, foreigners, black women, and New Women—into monsters. The xenophobia, racism, and sexism of Elinor Leyton’s and Dr. Phillips’s views of Harriet, that are supposedly based on hereditary science written about by Darwin and Galton, disrupt the intimacies that she has with Margaret Pullen, Ralph Pullen, and Anthony Pennell. However, Harriet’s good qualities make her a highly sympathetic character and a human subject, so much so, that her suicide is deeply tragic (Eldridge, 1998, p. 12). Her suicide calls a British establishment, that marginalizes Harriet, makes her endure painful isolation, and eventually leads her to take her own life, into question. Her suicide removes the term “monster” from Harriet and places it on the British aristocratic characters who condemn her. Her suicide is a call to the British aristocracy to understand its “monstrous” others and to incorporate them into society not to banish them to its limits, thereby making this society richer and better. The literary representations of gender in the British fin de siècle are a much richer subject than critics have shown us. The inclusion of the monster in the conversation necessarily writes a different study from those that investigate the New Woman and gender from the perspectives of feminism and feminist activism, the suffrage movements, education and employment, art and culture, fiction, newspapers, the periodical presses, and fashion and transportation. The monster, in the novels, demonstrates that friendships between New Women in their defiance of accepted categories should be

104

E. D. MACALUSO

included in society after the example of Lucy and Mina’s love in Dracula, Lessingham’s love for Marjorie Lindon in The Beetle, and Anthony Pennell’s love and loyalty to Harriet Brandt in Marryat’s The Blood of the Vampire.

References Arata, S. (1996). Fictions of loss in the Victorian fin de siècle: Identity and empire. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Eldridge, R. T. (1998). The other vampire novel of 1897: The blood of the vampire by Florence Marryat. The New York Review of Science Fiction, 10(6), 10–12. Generani, G. (2012). The Beetle: A rhetoric betrayed. In P. Marks (Ed.), Literature and politics: Pushing the world in certain directions (pp. 35–45). Newcastle upon Tyne, UK: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. Halberstam, J. (1995). Skin shows: Gothic horror and the technology of monsters. Durham, VA: Duke University Press. Palmer, P. (2012). The Queer Uncanny: New perspectives on the gothic. Cardiff: University of Wales Press.

Index

A Alienation effect, 11 Anstruther-Thomson, Kit, 25 The Anti-Marriage League, 41 Arabi Pasha, 57, 66 Arata, Stephen, 1, 38, 58, 80, 81, 100 Ardis, Ann, 5, 8, 11, 40 Atherton, Sydney, 7, 13, 40, 42–44, 53, 55, 56, 60–62, 64, 66, 100, 102 Austen, Jane, 23 B Balcombe, Florence, 22 Barfield, Margaret E., 61 The Baroness Gobelli, 93 Barrett Browning, Elizabeth, 21, 49 Barton, Herminia, 11 Bates, Bobby, 88, 93 The Beetle, 1–11, 13, 15, 39–58, 61, 62, 64–66, 100–104 Belford, Barbara, 34 Benson, Mary, 31, 34 Besant, Annie, 37, 39, 57, 58, 99

Besant, Walter, 41, 42, 59 Bildungsroman, 23 Biracial, 8, 101 Blackwell, Samuel, 24 The Blood of the Vampire, 1–3, 6, 8–10, 14, 15, 72, 88, 95, 101, 103, 104 Bonheur, Rosa, 20, 22, 37, 42, 49, 50 Booth, William, 11, 52 Boulton and Park, 20, 21 Bradford, Mary, 14 Bradley, Katherine, 21, 42, 49, 50 Brambley, Sam, 38 Brandt, Harriet, 1, 2, 4, 8, 11, 12, 14, 15, 72, 76–79, 81–84, 86, 90–93, 100, 101, 103, 104 Brecht, Bertolt, 11 Brimont, Olga, 74, 87 Bristow, Joseph, 21 Brontë, Charlotte, 23 Burton, Antoinette, 57 Butler, Eleanor, 20 Butler, Judith, 2

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2019 E. D. Macaluso, Gender, the New Woman, and the Monster, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-30476-8

105

106

INDEX

C Caird, Mona, 37, 39, 42, 63 Carmilla, 88 Caroline, 21, 49, 93 Carpenter, Edward, 20, 39, 45 Case, Sue Ellen, 78 Champnell, Augustus, 44, 50, 53, 54, 57, 58, 62 Class, 3–5, 40, 52, 75, 77, 79, 102 Cocks, H.G., 20 Cogswell Wood, Anna, 30 Colonialism, 1–8, 11, 14, 15, 38–41, 43, 44, 46, 58, 65, 66, 100–103 Colonized, 39, 52 Conservative, 1, 3, 5–7, 11, 13, 14, 34, 38, 40, 41, 44, 45, 50, 51, 59, 60, 62, 100–103 Cook, Matt, 20, 21 Cooper, Edith, 21, 42, 49, 50 Craft, Christopher, 19, 26, 34 Crais, Clifton, 47, 73, 84 Creole, 8, 72, 79 Crew of Light, 19, 31, 32 Culture, 3, 4, 12, 21, 22, 34, 38, 40, 49, 62, 64, 65, 99, 100, 102, 103 Cushman, Charlotte, 21, 22, 49, 50 Cuvier, Georges, 73, 84 D Darwin, Charles, 71, 82, 83, 103 Davis, Octavia, 71, 82 Degeneration, 59, 74–77, 79, 82, 84 Depledge, Greta, 82 De Profundis , 46 Diana of the Crossways , 5 Dickens, Charles, 23 Dijkstra, Bram, 5, 12, 14, 24, 72 Disraeli, Benjamin, 50 Dixon, Ella Hepworth, 39, 42, 63 Doctor Phillips, 72, 86 Dominguez-Rué, Emma, 25, 27, 32, 33

Dracula, 1, 3–6, 9, 11–13, 15, 19, 20, 23, 25–28, 30–34, 81, 100, 102 Dracula, 1–3, 5, 6, 8–10, 12, 15, 19, 21, 23, 29, 32–34, 88, 102, 104 E Eastern Europe, 3 Egerton, George, 59 Egypt, 3, 7, 13, 37, 39, 43, 52, 55, 57, 58, 66, 99, 100, 103 Ehnenn, Jill, 21 Eldridge, R.T., 8, 73, 88, 94, 103 Eliot, George, 23 Ellis, Havelock, 20, 39, 45 Empire, 2, 3, 9, 10, 14, 37, 38, 41, 44, 57, 66, 99–102 Eroticism, 6, 13, 23, 27, 102 Ethnicity, 8, 95 Eugenic love, 9, 10, 71, 76 Eugenics, 9, 10, 71, 73, 91 Everyman, 4, 45, 101 F Faderman, Lillian, 13, 15, 21, 22, 30 Female friendship, 2, 6, 12, 13, 15, 20, 21, 23 The Female Malady, 61 Female marriage, 6, 20, 22, 49 Femininity, 3, 4, 37, 41, 77, 101, 102 Feminism, 11, 40, 103 Fin de siècle, 1–3, 8–12, 14, 15, 22, 24, 37–41, 46, 48–50, 53, 54, 59, 62, 63, 66, 71, 82, 90, 99, 101–103 Fleming, Henry, 38, 45 Foreign, 2, 4–13, 15, 43–45, 47–50, 52–54, 56–58, 62, 64–66, 74–77, 79–81, 100, 102, 103 Foreignness, 7, 14, 15, 40, 41, 46–48, 77, 79, 100, 102 Fulmer, Constance M., 61

INDEX

G Galton, Francis, 9, 71–73, 80, 82, 103 Gardner, Burdett, 25 Garnett, Rhys, 56 Garrett Anderson, Elizabeth, 42 Gay, 4, 7, 11, 12, 20–22, 32, 44, 46, 48, 50, 100, 103 Geals, Sarah, 21, 49 Gender, 1–5, 8–12, 14, 15, 33, 37, 40, 66, 72, 85, 99–103 Generani, Gustavo, 52, 54, 101 Gilman, Sander L., 47, 72 Girard, René, 9, 22, 27, 33 Gladstone, William E., 59, 60 Gordon, Charles George, 34, 37, 39 Grand, Sarah, 37, 39, 42, 62, 63 Greg, W.R., 41, 42 Gross indecency, 19, 44

H Haefele-Thomas, Ardel, 80, 89 Halberstam, Judith/Jack, 1, 4, 20, 27, 34, 40, 102 Hall, Radclyffe, 20, 21, 37 Hansen, Tom, 12, 24 Harker, Jonathan, 19 Harker, Mina, 1, 33 Harper, Charles, 37, 59 Harris, W.C., 13, 60 Heilmann, Ann, 5, 8, 11, 40 Heller, Tamar, 79 Holmwood, Arthur, 24, 30, 34 Holt, Robert, 1, 4, 7, 40, 44–56, 61, 62, 64, 66, 100, 101, 103 Homogenic Love and Its Place in a Free Society, 20 Homosexuality, 1, 10, 14, 15, 19, 20, 22, 38–41, 44–46, 48–50, 101 Homosexuals, 3, 4, 12, 33, 38, 41, 46, 48–50, 65, 101–103 Hurley, Kelly, 13, 15, 46, 47

107

Hurren, Elizabeth T., 45, 50, 53, 91

I Identity, 5, 7, 10, 66, 73, 76, 100 The Image Breakers , 5 Imperialism, 1, 3, 9, 38, 43 Intimate friendship, 20–25, 28, 29 Irving, Henry, 22, 32

J Jex-Blake, Sophia, 42 Johnson, Alan, 12, 25 Jusova, Iveta, 5, 8

K Kaplan, Morris B., 46 Kastan, David Scott, 50 Katz, Jonathan Ned, 47 Keynotes and Discords , 59 Kingsley, Mary, 37 Klumpke, Anna, 42, 49, 50 Krafft-Ebing, Richard von, 21, 24

L Ladies of Llangollen, 50 Late Victorian, 4–6, 22, 31, 32, 44, 79, 82, 91, 101, 102 Leache, Irene, 30 Leaves of Grass , 22 Ledger, Sally, 5, 8, 10, 40, 41, 59, 74 Lee, Vernon, 25, 102 Le Fanu, Joseph Sheridan, 88 Leicester Warren, Margaret, 25, 30 Leigh Smith, Barbara, 24 Lesbian, 2, 4–6, 8, 11, 12, 15, 20, 22–25, 29, 72, 78, 102 Lessingham, Paul, 4, 6, 7, 13, 40, 42, 44, 50, 53–58, 60–65, 100, 103, 104

108

INDEX

Levy, Amy, 42 Leycester, Edith, 25, 30 Leyton, Elinor, 8, 72, 89, 103 Liberal, 3, 6, 60 Liminal, 1, 3, 4, 11, 14, 39, 40, 99–103 Lindon, Marjorie, 1, 3, 4 Lindon, Mr., 40, 60, 62 Linton, Eliza Lynn, 37, 41, 42, 59, 102 Lloyd, Constance, 22 Lloyd, Mary, 20, 22, 42, 49 Lombroso, Cesare, 52, 80, 81, 84, 91 Lord Alfred Douglas (Bosie), 46 Lord Cromer, 43 Lord Salisbury, 51 Love, 4, 6, 10, 12, 13, 15, 20–26, 28–32, 64, 65, 92, 94, 95, 102, 104 Lyceum Theatre, 22

M Macfie, Sian, 72, 78 Major, Adrienne Antrim, 79 Malchow, H.L., 4, 19, 27, 40, 73, 91 Mantegazza, Paolo, 73 Marcus, Sharon, 6, 13, 15, 20–23, 25, 26, 30, 49, 91 Marginalization, 72, 77, 80, 87 Margree, Victoria, 13, 64 Married Women’s Property Acts, 42 Marryat, Florence, 1, 2, 5, 6, 8, 14, 72, 73, 83, 86, 88, 89, 94, 95, 99–101, 104 Marsh, Richard, 1, 2, 4–9, 13, 15, 39–51, 53, 54, 57, 58, 60–66, 99, 100, 102 Marshall, Gail, 39, 66 Maudsley, Henry, 37, 59, 74, 102 McClintock, Anne, 72, 73, 91 McLaughlan, Robert, 52 Mecke, John G., 81

Merrill, George, 20 Mesmerism, 47, 49 Micas, Nathalie, 20, 22 Michael Field, 21, 42, 49 Miller, Neil, 20, 22, 39 Miscegenation, 81 Miss Louisa Coleman, 43, 56, 100 Miss Wynward, 2, 72, 86, 88, 93, 94 Modernity, 7, 38, 42, 62, 64, 102 Monster, 1–9, 11–14, 20, 25, 30, 32, 33, 39–41, 44, 45, 50, 54, 57, 58, 65, 66, 72, 88, 94, 95, 99–103 Moorman, J.R.H., 74 Mrs. Montague, 90 Munch, Edvard, 14

N National Agricultural Labourer’s Union (NALU), 45 “The New Aspect of the Woman Question”, 63 New Liberal, 3, 5, 38, 40, 45, 53, 100 New Woman, 1–15, 19, 37–44, 46, 59, 62–66, 72, 74, 88, 99–103 Nordau, Max, 74

O Obeah, 81, 84 The Odd Women, 6, 11 Oliphant, Margaret, 37, 41, 42 On the Threshold, 5

P Palmer, Paulina, 100 Pangenesis, 71 Pankhurst, Emmeline, 42, 60 Parkes, Bessie Raynor, 24 Parliament, 3, 38, 43, 45, 60, 65 Passion, 6, 13, 22, 29, 31, 102 Pater, Walter, 37, 39

INDEX

Patriarchal, 24 Pennell, Anthony, 2, 72, 73, 80, 86, 88, 90–92, 94, 103, 104 Perverse, 2, 4–13, 15, 40, 43–45, 47, 48, 50, 52–54, 56–58, 62, 64–66, 102, 103 Perversity, 4, 7, 14, 15, 19, 27, 41, 46, 47, 100 Ponsonby, Sarah, 20 The poor, 3, 4, 7, 9, 10, 38, 39, 41, 45, 46, 50–55, 65, 86, 93, 101–103 Poor Law Act, 45 Poor Law Amendment, 45 Poverty, 1, 2, 5–11, 14, 15, 38, 40, 41, 43, 44, 53, 54, 65, 66, 100, 101, 103 Powell, Eve M. Troutt, 43, 55, 66 Power Cobbe, Frances, 20, 22, 42, 49 Prejudice, 5, 6, 8, 72–74, 78, 82–84, 87–89, 95 Primrose League, 64 Progressive, 3, 38–41, 44–46, 54, 57, 58, 62, 64–66, 99, 100 Pullen, Margaret, 72, 78, 91, 94, 101, 103 Pullen, Ralph, 8, 72, 91, 101, 103 Punch, 39

Q Quadroon, 85, 91 Queensberry, The Marquess of, 21, 37, 45, 46 Queer, 6, 13, 20, 23, 25–28, 32, 33, 47, 100, 102 Queer Britain, 9, 10

R Race, 2–5, 8, 10, 11, 40, 44, 55, 57, 59, 71, 72, 74, 84, 85, 90, 94, 100–102

109

Racism, 8, 14, 56, 57, 72, 83, 86, 88, 103 Radicals, 3, 38 Rance, Nicholas, 12, 24 Rendall, Jane, 24 Reverse colonization, 58, 80, 81, 100 Rhodes, Cecil, 37, 41, 99 Richardson, Angelique, 5, 8, 9, 11, 40, 71, 76 Romance, 25, 71, 102 S Said, Edward, 43, 73, 95 Schaffer, Talia, 1, 19, 20, 22, 32, 47 Schreiner, Olive, 39 Scully, Pamela, 47, 73, 84 Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky, 9, 22, 25, 33 Senate House, 39 Senf, Carol, 12 Sexism, 8, 9, 14, 72, 80, 83, 86, 88, 103 Sexual Inversion, 20 Sexuality, 2–8, 10, 11, 15, 19, 24, 33, 37–40, 43, 46, 48, 65, 66, 72, 81, 85, 100, 102, 103 Showalter, Elaine, 61, 72 Signorotti, Elizabeth, 12, 29 Simcox, Edith, 42, 61 Sir Edward Carson, 46 Smith-Rosenberg, Carroll, 13, 15, 21, 22 Social, 1–3, 5, 9, 10, 15, 37–41, 43, 45, 49–51, 54, 55, 63, 65, 71, 72, 75–78, 82, 83, 87, 88, 99–101 Socialists, 3, 38, 91 Society, 3–5, 8, 11, 12, 14, 15, 20, 23, 24, 37–39, 41, 45, 49, 50, 59, 61, 62, 65, 73, 74, 89, 94, 95, 101, 103, 104 Sodomy, 21, 37, 39, 44, 47 Song of Myself, 22 Sparks, Tabitha, 12

110

INDEX

Spear, Jeffrey L., 12, 29 Spencer, Herbert, 45, 73 Spencer, Kathleen, 12, 24 Stead, W.T., 59 Stepan, Nancy, 80 Stevenson, Robert Louis, 41 Stoker, Bram, 1, 2, 5, 6, 8, 12, 19–23, 26, 27, 29, 31–34, 99, 102 Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, 41, 99 Stutfield, Hugh, 59 Suffrage movements, 11, 40, 103 Sutherland, Gillian, 5, 8, 10, 39, 90 Symonds, John Addington, 39, 45 Sympathy, 1, 8, 15, 44, 45, 49, 54, 55, 88, 94 T Tess of the D’Urbervilles , 11 Townsend, Camilla, 21, 49 Traditional, 3, 37–41, 43–45, 48, 49, 53, 57–62, 65, 66, 99–101 Traditionalists, 3, 39, 64, 65 Triangulation, 6 Trinity College, 22 Tromp, Marlene, 74, 76

Vicinus, Martha, 13, 15, 20–23, 25, 28–32, 49, 78 Victorian, 2–4, 6, 22, 24, 28, 31, 34, 38, 46, 82, 91, 95, 101 Violence, 2, 4–7, 12, 13, 20, 21, 23, 32, 39–41, 43–47, 49, 50, 53, 54, 56–58, 62, 65, 66, 80–82, 102, 103 Vivisection, 82 W Wall, Geoffrey, 12 The Wandering Jew, 4 The Well of Loneliness , 20, 22 Westenra, Lucy, 1, 34 Whitman, Walt, 19, 22 Wilde, Oscar, 1, 19–22, 32, 37, 39, 44–46 Willburn, Sarah, 73, 81, 84 Williams, Raymond, 9, 14, 66 Willis, Chris, 5, 8, 11, 34, 40 Willis, Martin, 28 Winter, Alison, 43 Women, 1–5, 7–9, 11–15, 20–25, 27–34, 37, 39, 41–43, 49, 50, 55, 56, 59–64, 73, 77, 79, 81, 84, 89–91, 95, 101–103 The Woman Who Did, 11

U Unrequited love, 6 V Vagrant, 4, 45, 53–55, 101 Vampire, 5, 8, 14, 15, 24, 33, 72, 80, 81, 86, 100 Vernooy, Dawn, 13, 60

X Xenophobia, 8, 14, 56, 57, 72–74, 76–78, 80, 83, 88, 103 Z Zieger, Susan, 75, 82